Wallis on the Surge (Pt. I)

Jim Wallis of Sojourners seems to be growing increasingly nastier and strident in his political rhetoric, and in this piece I think he says some things which are really quite indefensible. He writes, for example, that:

Bush stubbornly believes that military solutions are always the best answer, and consistently chooses war over politics. But without a political solution in Iraq, no escalation of the war will succeed. Whether in Iraq, or even in the larger war on terrorism, Bush believes, as he said again last night, that we are in a great "ideological struggle" between us and them, good and evil - and that only military solutions against "them" will suffice. Both wisdom and humility (two religious virtues) suggest that political and diplomatic resolutions to conflict are ultimately required. But last night, Bush again chose the primacy of military solutions.

This is such a distortion of the President's words and actions that I have to fight the temptation to think Wallis is deliberately misrepresentating the facts.

First, what has the president ever said or done that justifies Wallis' claim that he believes military solutions are "always the best answer," and how does Wallis conclude that Bush "consistently chooses war over politics"? Wallis has to ignore the entire history of our involvement with Iraq from 1990 on in order to say such things. The fact is that Bush only chose war after Iraq continued to violate one U.N. resolution after another, after they tried to assassinate an American president, after they repeatedly fired on our aircraft in violation of the terms of the cease-fire, after they committed mass murder against both Shia and the Kurds, and after they refused to give our weapons inspectors full cooperation, and gave every impression that they were trying to hide illegal weapons.

Second, when did Bush say that "only" military solutions would succeed in Iraq? He's never said that. He's spent the last three years trying to make political solutions work in Baghdad and when they came up short, and force became necessary, Wallis accuses him of only wanting to use force. Of course politics and diplomacy must be implemented, and they have been, but this is not an either/or strategy. There has to be diplomacy and there has to be force to back it up. Otherwise, diplomacy will never work. Wallis seems to think that diplomacy and military force are mutually exclusive so that if we employ one we cannot, and must not, employ the other.

Wallis then quotes an American soldier who is reluctant to go back to Iraq as if to demonstrate that even the military has given up on the war.

"I don't want to die over there; I don't think it's worth it," said one American serviceman who was interviewed this morning about the president's new plan. He and his new wife had a new baby just five days ago, but now he has been ordered back to Iraq. He named several of his friends who have new wives and babies on the way, who will now also be sent back.

Yes. Our soldiers are giving up on the war. That's why enlistments and re-enlistments are higher than ever. That's why the one segment of our population that is most supportive of what we are doing in Iraq are military personnel and their families. That's why Bush consistently gets standing ovations when he addresses military audiences. That's why the one segment of our population that least wants us to cut and run is the military. Wallis ferrets out one or two soldiers who are a little less than gung-ho and offers them up to us as if they are representative of the military as a whole. I'm sure he could have found soldiers in every war we've ever fought who felt the same way as the serviceman he quotes above, but it means nothing.

He goes on in his article to contend that the Iraq war fails to meet the traditional criteria of a just war, and, in the process, makes some very questionable, and very disappointing, assertions. In a day or two we'll consider this part of his argument.

RLC

Boxer's Blunder

It's not often that I agree with Andrew Sullivan, but I do on the stupidity of Senator Barbara Boxer's questioning of Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice the other day. I wouldn't, though, call it "vile" as Sullivan does, it was just dumb. I can't do better than one of Sullivan's readers does in explaining why:

Reasonable counter argument? Man this is easy. OK, here we go, so all of you out there put down the bong and try to follow. Your reader wrote about the "human element" of watching your child go off to war and how that is relevant to governmental policy decisions. Fair enough. Then should any elected official have a say in public education if their children go to private school? How many of these phony Democrats who are "for the little guy" actually educate their children in the public schools they purport to believe in? Hello, Kerry, Edwards, Pelosi, Boxer, Feinstein, Clinton, et al?

Or should any of them have a say in welfare policy? How many actually are punitively subjected to the ravages of a bunch of lazy malcontents sitting around their neighborhoods while they go to work at low paying jobs that disqualify them from receiving public entitlements (but yet have to live with the crime and nonsense that goes with the neighborhoods where such conditions exist). This is fun!!! Want some more? OK. Why should any elected official get to have a say or vote on immigration and border enforcement issues if they don't reside in the border states where the destruction of open borders have made regions of the US almost unidentifiable as America anymore. This is the kind of logic I have to debate?

Be honest Andrew. Liberalism is all about feelings and intent, not actual facts and results.

We might add that according to Ms Boxer's logic no one in the administration or congress who has children who are not in the military or not in the war zone should be permitted to make any policy that might jeopardize the lives of those who are. I'm sure that if Ms Boxer had a chance to reflect upon her words she'd want to retract them for they certainly don't reflect well on the wisdom of those who voted her into office.

RLC

Free Will

There's an article by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times on the question of free will and determinism, and Joe Carter, who tips us to the piece, has an interesting discussion of it at Evangelical Outpost. Most interesting are the exchanges with some of his critical readers in the comment section. Check it out.

The question of volitional freedom is important inasmuch as we have to at least assume we are in some sense free if we wish to hold on to a belief in personal moral accountability. If all of our decisions, particularly our moral decisions, are somehow the inevitable product of forces and influences which have acted upon us from before the time we were born then we are nothing more than machines and we bear no more responsibility for those choices than a computer bears for the "choices" it appears to make.

To say that we're free is to say that at any given moment there are at least two genuinely possible futures. If, however, our choices are the product of physical necessity then there can really only be one possible future and the sense that we have a real choice is an illusion. On the other hand, the concept of a free moral choice is difficult to formulate. A free choice cannot simply be something that happens spontaneously. It must somehow be a product of our character and our beliefs, otherwise it would not really be our choice, we would not really be the responsible agent for it. It would just be a random event.

But if the choice is the product of our character and if those virtues which comprise our character have been shaped by those forces and influences that have acted upon us throughout our lives, then how do we escape the conclusion that ultimately the choice we made was, in fact, determined?

It seems that both total freedom and total determinism are incompatible with moral responsibility. Only if there is something about us, like a mind or a soul, that is non-physical and which contributes to our choosings without itself having been programmed by nature can we escape the conclusion that we are merely flesh and bone machines.

Put differently, even though it is difficult to conceptualize the kind of freedom we must have to be morally accountable for what we do, if determinism is true there really is no such thing as morality at all. That is, there is no truth value to claims that we should behave in certain ways, that certain behaviors are right and others are wrong. Words like should and ought only have meaning if there are genuine alternatives involved. Right and wrong only have meaning if there is a genuine choice. Otherwise, a man who wantonly harms another is no more guilty of a moral breach than is a Tourette's sufferer who unwillingly but invariably blurts out obscenities.

So, either morality really exists and we are indeed accountable for what we do, or there is no moral right and wrong and what we do has no moral significance. The only reason we could have for believing the former is a prior belief that there exists a personal God who has woven right and wrong into the fabric of the cosmos and who confers upon us the ability to make genuine moral choices. Even if we cannot explain how we are free, we can, based on our belief in God, maintain that we must, in some sense, be free.

On the other hand, if we are atheistic materialists who hold that there is no personal deity, that there's only matter and energy, then we have no reason whatsoever to persist in the belief that morality is any less illusory than a mirage or a hallucination. Our choices are merely chemical reactions occuring in the brain and those reactions were ineluctably foreordained by the conditions existing at the instant of the Big Bang. For the materialist right and wrong are purely arbitrary conventions based upon subjective preferences and no obligation to observe those conventions can possibly bind us. This is the theme that Dostoyevsky comes back to over and over again in his novels - "if God is dead, then everything is permitted."

If one believes in morality, moral responsibility, and free will then one should be a theist, and if one is not a theist one should, it seems to me, be a determinist and, consequently, a moral nihilist. It is a peculiarity of the contemporary theism/atheism debate that atheists, who should logically be determinists who believe that no one freely chooses what they do and that no one is therefore truly responsible for their choices, actually fault theists for choosing to believe in God.

Our conviction that we are free only makes sense, it can only be an accurate belief about the way things really are, if there is a God. To quote the rock group Rush - I will choose free will.

RLC

Iraqi Army Goes on Offense

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail updates us on the new offensive by Iraqi forces seeking to secure Baghdad:

As the United States prepares to 'surge' more troops in Iraq, about 20,000 to 30,000 American soldiers and Marines according to most press accounts, the Iraqi government announced over the weekend it was conducting its own operation to secure the city. The targets of the Iraqi led operation are said to be both Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. "Military commanders said operations against the al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in its Sadr City stronghold would be left largely to a joint force made up of U.S. soldiers and the Iraqi Special Operations Command division under Brig. Gen. Fadhil Birwari, a Kurd," the Associated Press reported. "Soldiers in the division are a mixture of Kurds and Arabs from both the Sunni and Shiite sects." Over 20,000 Iraqi Army soldiers are said to be participating in the operation.

The Iraqi Army then immediately launched a major operation in the Sunni-dominated Haifa neighborhood, where Sunni insurgents have a safe haven. Thirty insurgents were killed in the operation, including five Sudanese. These were very likely al-Qaeda. Iraqi police have begun to operate in Haifa just recently and are conducting operations with the Iraqi Army.

Today, major fighting again broke out in the Haifa neighborhood after insurgents struck Iraqi Army checkpoints. "Iraqi soldiers appealed to the U.S. military for help," reports the Associated Press. "American forces sealed off roads and joined Iraqi troops in raiding houses in pursuit of the gunmen." U.S. aircraft and helicopters were circling the neighborhood in support of the fighting on the ground. Fifty insurgents were killed in the fighting and 21 captured, Those captured included 7 foreigners, including three Syrians - and one Sudanese. Again these are al-Qaeda. An al-Qaeda cell leader was also captured in southern Baghdad over the weekend.

Read the rest at the link.

RLC

Bad News

Those of you who have been enjoying the mild winter we've been having are evidently in for a major disappointment:

The unseasonably warm winter experienced by much of the country is likely to "turn on a dime," in the words of AccuWeather.com Chief Long-Range Forecaster Joe Bastardi.

Bastardi said that the weather pattern from mid-January through mid-February has a chance to mimic the winters of 1965-66 and 1957-58, each of which ended cold and stormy after a warm start. A worst-case scenario would be if this winter plays out as did the winter of 1977-1978.

Similar to this year, 1977-1978 was a winter with a waning El Nino. After a tepid start, the second half of the winter was noted for its cold and remarkable storminess, including back-to-back-to-back blizzards in the Northeast.

"Those who think that winter 2006-2007 is going to remain mild are in for a shock," said Bastardi. "Winter is likely to come with a vengeance. A week from now, we'll start seeing truly cold air across much of the country, and we expect this change to last."

It was nice while it lasted.

RLC

In Denial

Robert Samuelson summarizes the ugly facts about the future of social security:

It's no secret that the 65-and-over population will double by 2030 (to almost 72 million, or 20 percent of total), but hardly anyone wants to face the realistic implications:

-- By comparison, other budget issues, including the notorious "earmarks,'' are trivial. In 2005, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (the main programs for the elderly) cost $1.034 trillion, twice the amount of defense spending and more than two-fifths of the total federal budget. By 2030, these programs are projected to equal about three-quarters of the present budget, if it remains constant as a share of national income.

-- Preserving present retirement benefits automatically imposes huge costs on the young -- costs that are economically unsound and socially unjust. The tax increases required by 2030 could hit 50 percent, if other spending is maintained as a share of national income. Or much of the rest of government would have to be shut or crippled. Or budget deficits would balloon to quadruple today's level.

-- Social Security and Medicare benefits must be cut to keep down overall costs. Yes, some taxes will be raised and some other spending cut. But much of the adjustment should come from increasing eligibility ages (ultimately to 70) and curbing payments to wealthier retirees. Americans live longer and are healthier. They can work longer and save more for retirement.

There's more at the link. It is a shame that when Bush proposed a solution to the looming crisis a couple of years back, the Democrats fought him hard on it and the Republicans simply waffled. Bush shrugged, and nothing got accomplished, but the day of reckoning continues to draw closer.

Now that the Democrats control both houses of congress we can be sure they'll come up with a plan to avert the crisis.

RLC

The Speech

The only problem, in my opinion, with the President's speech last night was that it came last night and not last year. Better late than never, I guess. It seems hard to argue with what he said and what proposed, but I'm sure some will carp at it anyway. The President is right. The consequences of an American failure would be catastrophic for the world and an American success in Iraq would be an enormous benefit for the entire world. Here are some key passages from the speech in case you missed it:

Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.

It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq.

The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people. On September the 11th, 2001, we saw what a refuge for extremists on the other side of the world could bring to the streets of our own cities. For the safety of our people, America must succeed in Iraq.

Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have. Our military commanders reviewed the new Iraqi plan to ensure that it addressed these mistakes. They report that it does. They also report that this plan can work.

In earlier operations, Iraqi and American forces cleared many neighborhoods of terrorists and insurgents - but when our forces moved on to other targets, the killers returned. This time, we will have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared. In earlier operations, political and sectarian interference prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into neighborhoods that are home to those fueling the sectarian violence. This time, Iraqi and American forces will have a green light to enter these neighborhoods - and Prime Minister Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated.

I have made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people - and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act. The Prime Minister understands this.

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend 10 billion dollars of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs.

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity - and stabilizing the region in the face of the extremist challenge. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

Many are concerned that the Iraqis are becoming too dependent on the United States - and therefore, our policy should focus on protecting Iraq's borders and hunting down al Qaeda. Their solution is to scale back America's efforts in Baghdad - or announce the phased withdrawal of our combat forces. We carefully considered these proposals. And we concluded that to step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear that country apart, and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale.

A couple of things jump out at the reader. First, "Mookie" al-Sadr and his merry band of thugs is no longer off-limits. This is wonderful news for everyone except the Shia death squads. Second, Iran and Syria can expect regular visits from the U.S. military. This is also heart-warming news. If we're going to send our young men and women abroad to risk their lives we have a moral obligation to do everything we can to see that they make it home in one piece. To treat Iran and Syria as insurgent sanctuaries is to fail in that obligation. It also guarantees that we'll never succeed in Iraq.

Like a football coach who makes halftime adjustments to unexpected tactics employed by his opponent, Bush is making some much needed changes to meet the challenges we're facing in Iraq. It's too bad he waited as long as he did, but now that he's making them, all Americans should join together in hoping and praying that he succeeds.

RLC

Majestic

Each of these pillars of dust and hydrogen gas are so vast that they would dwarf our sun. It is in the interiors of such enormous concentrations of hydrogen that astronomers believe stars are formed:

The photo was taken by the Hubble Space telescope.

RLC

Amazing Behavior

Dave Scot at Uncommon Descent introduces us to the Emerald Cockroach Wasp and tells us how it gets on in life. As you read this, which you really must, just for laughs try to imagine someone trying to convince you that there is a perfectly plausible, purely mechanistic explanation for how the wasp's behavior came to be:

The emerald cockroach wasp (Ampulex compressa, also known as the jewel wasp) is a parasitoid wasp of the family Ampulicidae. It is known for its reproductive behavior, which involves using a live cockroach (specificially a Periplaneta americana) as a host for its larva. A number of other venomous animals which use live food for their larvae paralyze their prey. Unlike them, Ampulex compressa initially leaves the cockroach mobile, but modifies its behaviour in a unique way.

As early as the 1940s it was published that wasps of this species sting a roach twice, which modifies the behavior of the prey. A recent study using radioactive labeling proved that the wasp stings precisely into specific ganglia. Ampulex compressa delivers an initial sting to a thoracic ganglion of a cockroach to mildly paralyze the front legs of the insect. This facilitates the second sting at a carefully chosen spot in the cockroach's head ganglia (brain), in the section that controls the escape reflex. As a result of this sting, the cockroach will now fail to produce normal escape responses.

The wasp, which is too small to carry the cockroach, then drives the victim to the wasp's den, by pulling one of the cockroach's antennae in a manner similar to a leash. Once they reach the den, the wasp lays an egg on the cockroach's abdomen and proceeds to fill in the den's entrance with pebbles, more to keep other predators out than to keep the cockroach in.

The stung cockroach, its escape reflex disabled, will simply rest in the den as the wasp's egg hatches. A hatched larva chews its way into the abdomen of the cockroach and proceeds to live as an endoparasitoid. Over a period of eight days, the wasp larva consumes the cockroach's internal organs in an order which guarantees that the cockroach will stay alive, at least until the larva enters the pupal stage and forms a cocoon inside the cockroach's body. After about four weeks, the fully-grown wasp will emerge from the cockroach's body to begin its adult life.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the preceding account.

We are confronted here with two alternatives: Either every step of this behaviour was solely the product of perhaps dozens of chance mutations at just the right place in the genome and in just the right order - and that the individuals that had those mutations bestowed upon them fortuitously survived to reproduce - or we can believe that whether mutations and natural selection were involved or not, there must have been some intentionality behind the development of this sequence of behaviors. In other words, whatever the physical processes at work in generating such an astonishing program in the brain of an insect, they were not, by themselves, sufficient to produce that program. The wasp's behavior also requires a mind to account for how it could have arisen in the first place.

Those are the two choices. And the Darwinians, who opt for the first alternative, scoff at those who think a mind must be behind this insect's behavior. Belief in a Designer, they say, is based on a fairy tale. Believing in an Architect of insect behavior is too incredible, they aver. As if the option they embrace were not.

RLC

Ten Myths About Atheism (Pt. III)

The third alleged myth in our series (See pt. I and pt. II) on Sam Harris' Ten Myths About Atheism is, he writes, the incorrect belief that Atheism is dogmatic. He goes on to explain:

Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity's needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn't have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

It's not clear to me what Harris' explanation has to do with the assertion that atheism is dogmatic, but if the reason an atheist rejects the existence of God is because he rejects the doctrine of Divine inspiration of the Bible (or Koran) then the poor fellow seems to have gotten things backwards. Believers don't base their belief in God upon their belief that the Bible is God's word, rather their belief that it's God's word is based on their belief that God exists. Belief in God's existence is prior to belief in the trustworthiness of the Bible. Even were the Bible proven to be a completely human artifact that would demonstrate nothing with regard to whether God exists.

If Harris is going to deny the existence of God he has to show that the classical reasons for believing in God are all false and this arduous feat he wisely does not attempt. The most that Harris can say, it seems to me, is that, for him, the arguments for God's existence are not compelling, and thus, although such a being as God may exist, he personally is not convinced of it.

For New Atheists like Harris, however, this is simply too tepid. What they believe is not just that God may not exist, they assert that, in fact, He does not exist, and they hold anyone who believes He does to be intellectually defective. That seems pretty dogmatic to me.

RLC

Lost Script

"The average words heard per hour are 2,150 for a professor's children and 1,250 for working-class children in homes with parents. But children of single mothers on welfare hear their mother use only 620 words per hour, according to Ms. Hymowitz. These children find it particularly difficult to thrive in a knowledge-based society. They rarely learn the art of conversation. And conversation, Thomas Aquinas once wrote, is what constitutes civilization. If the church recovers the four-chapter "script" she might once again connect marriage to child rearing; along with playing a part in shaping society."

Mike Metzger of the Clapham Institute talking about the tragedy of young American parents who have lost the connection between child-rearing and marriage.

RLC

Civil Debate

No wonder it's taking so long to get things right in Iraq. This exchange on al-Jazeera is probably being duplicated everyday in the halls of the Iraqi parliament.

HT: Allahpundit

RLC

Fighting al-Qaeda in Somalia

An AC-130 gunship was called in to put an end (hopefully) to the terrors inflicted on Americans and Africans by some very bad men. CBS News has the story. Here's part of it:

The targets included the senior al Qaeda leader in East Africa and an al Qaeda operative wanted for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa.... Those terror attacks killed more than 200 people.

The AC-130 gunship is capable of firing thousands of rounds per second, and sources say a lot of bodies were seen on the ground after the strike, but there is as yet, no confirmation of the identities.

The gunship flew from its base in Dijibouti down to the southern tip of Somalia ... where the al Qaeda operatives had fled after being chased out of the capital of Mogadishu by Ethiopian troops backed by the United States.

Once they started moving, the al Qaeda operatives became easier to track, and the U.S. military started preparing for an air strike, using unmanned aerial drones to keep them under surveillance and moving the aircraft carrier Eisenhower out of the Persian Gulf toward Somalia. But when the order was given, the mission was assigned to the AC-130 gunship operated by the U.S. Special Operations command.

If the attack got the operatives it was aimed at ... it would deal a major blow to al Qaeda in East Africa.

Michelle Malkin has background on the Americans and others killed in the attacks perpetrated by the terrorists targeted of the gunship.

RLC

Wallis on Saddam's Execution

Jim Wallis of Sojourners regrets the execution of Saddam Hussein and argues that it is wrong to resort to capital punishment. He states a number of objections which are pretty much summarized in his last two paragraphs. The first is contained in a quote from the Archbishop of Canterbury:

"I think he deserves punishment, and sharp and unequivocal punishment; I don't think that he should be at liberty, but I would say of him what I have to say about anyone who's committed even the most appalling crimes in this country; that I believe the death penalty effectively says 'there is no room for change or repentance'."

How much horror must a man inflict upon people before the Archbishop and Mr. Wallis conclude that whatever change the man undergoes is insignificant by comparison? Saddam had plenty of "room for repentance." He has been feeding people into wood chippers for decades, gassing children and cutting out tongues and torturing people to death for decades. How much time is enough?

The argument that if we only give him time enough he might repent and be saved is a peculiar one. By extension it essentially calls God unjust because He allows people to perish for eternity, and sometimes even causes their deaths, before they've accepted the gospel. It's even more peculiar when offered by someone of Calvinist proclivities who holds that God foreordains who will be lost and who will be saved before they're even born. If Saddam was elected for salvation then he will be saved no matter what the Iraqi government did to him, and if he is to be lost then he will be lost no matter hjow long he lives.

Wallis concludes his piece with this paragraph:

Saddam Hussein, like other murderers before him, was a violent and remorseless man. But by taking his life, we sink to his level. If we truly believe that all human life is created in God's image, then no matter how distorted that life may become, we do not have the right to take it. We simply should not kill to show we are against killing. It is indeed to prefer revenge over justice.

Let's take this a couple of sentences at a time. The second sentence is, to put it politely, inadequate. To put those who support the legal execution of a mass murderer on the same level as the murderer is morally ludicrous. We do not sink to his level by endorsing his execution but rather we make a profound moral statement, i.e. we tell the world that to take the life of innocent people is the very worst crime one can commit and merits the most severe penalty. It is to tell the world that we value innocent life so much that one who wantonly destroys it will be required to pay the highest price that he can pay, the forfeiture of his own life. Conversely, to refuse to exact the highest penalty from one who has butchered and terrorized innocent people is to implicitly say that the lives of his victims are not so precious that their loss justifies the death of their killer.

The third sentence is a logical confusion. How does Wallis get from being made in God's image to being insulated from ever having to forfeit one's own life? What's the connection between the two? Being made in God's image means having rationality, personality, and a sense of justice, etc. It does not mean that one's life is absolutely inviolate.

The fourth sentence simply asserts a moral preference that hangs unsupported by any reasons. By Wallis' logic we should not incarcerate kidnappers nor fine embezzlers, since we simply should not deprive persons of their freedom in order to show that we are against depriving people of their freedom, nor take money from people to show that we are against taking money from people.

In the final sentence he states that an execution is to prefer revenge over justice. This is perhaps the most incredible claim of the lot. What is it about executing a man who has murdered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that is unjust? How is it unjust to mete out to someone the same as they have done to others? The Christian obligation to be merciful dictates that we don't torture Saddam but it would certainly not be unjust to do so.

Moreover, even if Wallis is right that the Iraqis were motivated by revenge what is it about revenge that is unjust? There is nothing wrong with revenge, i.e. the desire to see someone who is responsible for an evil be made to pay for that crime. Indeed, revenge is an essential component of justice. Without it there is no motivation to punish criminals at all. The only problem with revenge, and why it is generally disapprobated, is that it is sometimes arrogated by individuals. Revenge is a perfectly acceptable motive, however, for the state and indeed Paul says as much in Romans where he tells us that vengeance is the prerogative of God who employs the state as His agent in the world.

RLC

Lefty Laugh-fest

Don Imus and Mike Barnicle yuk it up speculating about the courage/cowardice of Bush administration figures. Unfortunately, their banter is no more funny than it is tasteful.

There's something sad about people who find this sort of exchange humorous. Perhaps it lies in the fact that the attempt to get cheap laughs by viciousness and mean-spiritedness is a mark of very little people who are insecure in their own virtues. If I can be permitted an amateurish psychological speculation, I suspect that most men who mock their betters do so in order to enhance their own self-importance and worth which they subliminally hold in low esteem.

RLC

Nancy Pearcey

Byron links us to this excellent interview with Nancy Pearcey, author of Total Truth and other books. The interviewer questions her on her support for intelligent design and related matters and she gives some of the most concise and clear corrections to common misunderstandings of the topic that I've seen anywhere.

If you're at all interested in this controversy you'll want to check it out.

RLC

Should They or Shouldn't They?

This stunner was in the Times Online:

Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear "bunker-busters", according to several Israeli military sources.

The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open "tunnels" into the targets. "Mini-nukes" would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout. "As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished," said one of the sources.

The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad's assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years.

Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock. However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said.

Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action. Military analysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack.

There's much more on this rumored strike at the link. The question I'd like to pose to our readers is, should Israel go ahead with the attack if the rest of the world is content to let Iran continue to produce nuclear weapons? If not, why not?

RLC

Minimum Wage and Moral Grandstanding

There will be much talk on the news in the weeks ahead on raising the minimum wage. George Will instructs us as to why raising the minimum wage makes no sense, and why it will be raised anyway:

...raising the federal minimum wage is a bad idea whose time has come, for two reasons, the first of which is that some Democrats have a chronic and evidently incurable disease -- New Deal Nostalgia. Witness Nancy Pelosi's "100 hours'' agenda, a genuflection to FDR's 100 Days. Perhaps this nostalgia resonates with the 5 percent of Americans who remember the 1930s.

Second, the president has endorsed raising the hourly minimum from $5.15 to $7.25 by the spring of 2009. The Democratic Congress will favor that, and he may reason that vetoing this minor episode of moral grandstanding would not be worth the predictable uproar -- Washington uproar often is inversely proportional to the importance of occasion for it. Besides, there would be something disproportionate about the president vetoing this feel-good bit of legislative fluff after not vetoing the absurdly expensive 2002 farm bill, or the 2005 highway bill larded with 6,371 earmarks, or the anti-constitutional McCain-Feingold speech-rationing bill.

Democrats consider the minimum wage increase a signature issue. So, consider what it says about them:

Most of the working poor earn more than the minimum wage, and most of the 0.6 percent (479,000 in 2005) of America's wage workers earning the minimum wage are not poor. Only one in five workers earning the federal minimum live in families with household earnings below the poverty line. Sixty percent work part-time and their average household income is well over $40,000. (The average and median household incomes are $63,344 and $46,326 respectively.)

Forty percent of American workers are salaried. Of the 75.6 million paid by the hour, 1.9 million earn the federal minimum or less, and of these, more than half are under 25 and more than a quarter are between 16 and 19. Many are students or other part-time workers. Sixty percent of those earning the federal minimum or less work in restaurants and bars and are earning tips -- often untaxed, perhaps -- in addition to their wages. Two-thirds of those earning the federal minimum today will, a year from now, have been promoted and be earning 10 percent more. Raising the minimum wage predictably makes work more attractive relative to school for some teenagers, and raises the dropout rate. Two scholars report that in states that allow persons to leave school before 18, a 10 percent increase in the state minimum wage caused teenage school enrollment to drop 2 percent.

The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 1997, so 29 states with 70 percent of the nation's work force have set minimum wages of between $6.15 and $7.93 an hour. Because aging liberals, clinging to the moral clarities of their youth, also have Sixties Nostalgia, they are suspicious of states' rights. But regarding minimum wages, many have become Brandeisians, invoking Justice Louis Brandeis' thought about states being laboratories of democracy.

But wait. Ronald Blackwell, the AFL-CIO's chief economist, tells The New York Times that state minimum wage differences entice companies to shift jobs to lower-wage states. So: states' rights are bad, after all, at least concerning -- let's use liberalism's highest encomium -- diversity of economic policies.

The problem is that demand for almost everything is elastic: When the price of something goes up, demand for it goes down. Obviously were the minimum wage to jump to, say, $15 an hour, that would cause significant unemployment among persons just reaching for the bottom rung of the ladder of upward mobility. But suppose those scholars are correct who say that when the minimum wage is low and is increased slowly -- proposed legislation would take it to $7.25 in three steps -- the negative impact on employment is negligible. Still, because there are large differences among states' costs of living, and the nature of their economies, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., sensibly suggests that each state should be allowed to set a lower minimum.

But the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices. Washington, which has its hands full delivering the mail and defending the shores, should let the market do well what Washington does poorly. But that is a good idea whose time will never come again.

Moral grandstanding is a good description of what we can expect to be subjected to from our political leaders over the coming weeks on this issue.

RLC

Ronald Numbers

Steve Paulson has a very interesting interview with Ronald Numbers at Salon Books. Numbers is a historian of science who has written extensively on the rise of creationism. Among historians not involved with either group he is probably the foremost authority on the history of creationism and intelligent design.

Numbers grew up in a strict Seventh Day Adventist family and attended Adventist schools until he went to Berkely to do his graduate work. At Berkely his faith crumbled and he describes himself today as a man with no religious belief, either theistic or atheistic. He himself is an evolutionist, but he is often trashed by other evolutionists because he treats creationists and IDers with respect in his professional writings.

His story is sad on several levels but especially when he talks about the effect his work had on his relationship with his father. While discussing Numbers' book titled The Creationists there is this exchange between Paulson and Numbers:

Paulson: That [the book] must have created trouble for you in your own family of Adventists.

Numbers: It did. And it created trouble for my father, who was a minister. Some church ministers were very harsh with him. Here I was, about 30 or so. They were telling him he had no right being a minister if he couldn't control his son. So he took early retirement.

Paulson: Because of your book?

Numbers: Yes. He was thoroughly humiliated by this.

Paulson: Did he try to talk you out of the book?

Numbers: Oh yes. We had hours and hours of argument. He had a limited number of explanations for why I would be saying this about the prophetess [Ellen White, founder of the Seventh Day Adventists]. One was that I was lying. But he knew me too well, so the only explanation left for him was that somehow Satan had gained control of my mind. And what I was writing reflected the power of Satan. For a number of years, he could not bear to be seen in public with me.

Very sad. Read the rest of the interview at the link.

RLC

Future Tech

For a fascinating glimpse into what military combat might look like in the not too distant future go to Hot Air and watch the top video. It's actually a promotional video produced by Future Combat Systems which, I surmise, is a technology firm working on weapons, communications, and reconnaissance systems.

RLC

The Argument From Fine-Tuning

Joe Carter gives a fine summary of the argument for God's existence based on the fine-tuning of the cosmos. I agree with Carter that this is one of the most powerful of teh arguments for God's existence, even if it doesn't constitute a proof, sensu strictu.

I would caution, though, that the argument does not lead to the conclusion that the architect of the universe is the God of the Bible. Nevertheless, despite this technical shortcoming, the argument goes a long way in clearing away the brush that stands in the way of people accepting that the God of the Bible exists.

If we agree that the design of the universe suggests an intelligence behind the creation we might also conclude that it's reasonable to assume that that intelligence is personal, powerful, and knowledgeable since it has created personal beings and since a great deal of power and mathematical knowledge were required to create the universe. This brings us very close to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. What we cannot infer, however, is that the architect of the space-time cosmos is unqualifiedly good. The existence of suffering prevents us from making that move.

Thus the finely-tuned universe is a compelling reason to believe that there's a creator, but the question whether the creator is identical to the God that Christians have traditionally believed in cannot be settled by reference to the physical creation alone.

Even so, the argument is very powerful. Check out Carter's discussion of it at the link.

RLC

Time Has Come

Michael Ledeen believes that confrontation with Iran can no longer be avoided and, as Machiavelli instructed his Prince, that to delay only works to the advantage of our adversary:

There is no escape from the war Iran is waging against us, the war that started in 1979 and is intensifying with every passing hour. We will shortly learn more about the documents we found accompanying the high-level Iranian terrorist leader we briefly arrested in Hakim's compound in Baghdad some days ago, and what we will learn-what many key American officials have already learned-is stunning. At least to those who thought that Iran was "meddling" in Iraq, but refused to believe that it was total war, on a vast scale.

I have little sympathy for those who have avoided the obvious necessity of confronting Iran, however I do understand the concerns of military leaders, such as General Abizaid, who are doing everything in their considerable power to avoid a two-front war. But I do not think we need massive military power to bring down the mullahs, and in any event we now have a three-front war: within Iraq, and with both Iran and Syria. So General Abizaid's objection is beside the point. We are in a big war, and we cannot fight it by playing defense in Iraq.

You can read the whole piece at the link.

RLC

The Moral Argument

Joe Carter outlines three arguments for the existence of a transcendent moral lawgiver at his blog The Evangelical Outpost. The three are all variations of the same argument - that there must be an objective ground for morality if moral discourse is to make any sense. The versions Carter summarizes are those of Immanuel Kant, C.S. Lewis, and D. Elton Trueblood.

The arguments of these thinkers are not intended to serve as proofs of the existence of God, but they are certainly powerful pointers in that direction. Unless one adopts the position of moral nihilism it's very difficult to evade the force of the reasoning, and the move to adopt nihilism is, of course, a move to forfeit rationality.

Read Carter's summary and see if you don't agree that the moral experience of humans all but demands an either/or choice between nihilism and the existence of a transcendent moral authority.

RLC

Ethical Conundrum

From time to time Christian students express their conviction that the Bible gives answers to all of life's ethical problems. The next time I hear a student say that I hope I remember this story to which I was alerted by my friend Jason:

Until New Year's Day, not even her first name was known. Ashley was a faceless case study, cited in a paper by two doctors at Seattle Children's Hospital as they outlined a treatment so radical that it brought with it allegations of "eugenics", of creating a 21st-century Frankenstein's monster, of maiming a child for the sake of convenience.

The reason for the controversy is this: Three years ago, when Ashley began to display early signs of puberty, her parents instructed doctors to remove her uterus, appendix and still-forming breasts, then treat her with high doses of estrogen to stunt her growth.

In other words, Ashley was sterilized and frozen in time, for ever to remain a child. She was only 6 years old.

Ashley, the daughter of two professionals in the Seattle area, never had much hope of a normal life.

Afflicted with a severe brain impairment known as static encephalopathy, she cannot walk, talk, keep her head up in bed, or even swallow food. Her parents argued that "keeping her small" was the best way to improve the quality of her life, not to make life more convenient for them.

By remaining a child, they say, Ashley will have a better chance of avoiding everything from bed sores to pneumonia - and the removal of her uterus means that she will never have a menstrual cycle or risk developing uterine cancer.

Because Ashley was expected to have a large chest size, her parents say that removing her breast buds, including the milk glands (while keeping the nipples intact), will save her further discomfort while avoiding fibrocystic growth and breast cancer.

They also feared that large breasts could put Ashley at risk of sexual assault.

The case was approved by the hospital's ethics committee in 2004, which agreed that because Ashley could never reproduce voluntarily, she was not being subjected to forced sterilization, a form of racial cleansing promoted in the 1920s and known as eugenics (it was satirized in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby").

However, the case of Ashley X was not made public, and, as a result, no legal challenges were ever made.

Ashley's doctors, Daniel Gunther and Douglas Diekema, wrote in their paper for the October issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine that the treatment would "remove one of the major obstacles to family care and might extend the time that parents with the ability, resources and inclination to care for their child at home might be able to do so."

The paper inspired hundreds of postings on the Internet: many supportive, some disapproving but sympathetic, others furious.

"I find this offensive if not perverse," read one. "Truly a milestone in our convenience-minded society."

It was the critical comments that finally provoked Ashley's father to respond.

While remaining anonymous, he posted a remarkable 9,000-word blog entry at 11 p.m. on New Year's Day, justifying his decision.

The posting includes links to photographs of Ashley, in which the faces of other family members, including Ashley's younger sister and brother, have been blanked out.

"Some question how God might view this treatment," he wrote. "The God we know wants Ashley to have a good quality of life and wants her parents to be diligent about using every resource at their disposal (including the brains that He endowed them with) to maximize her quality of life."

Ashley's father went on to describe how her height is now expected to remain at about 4 feet 5 inches, and her weight at 75 pounds.

Without the treatment, she would have grown into a woman of average height and weight, probably about 5 feet 6 inches and 125 pounds, with a normal lifespan.

The medical profession is divided.

"I think most people, when they hear of this, would say this is just plain wrong," wrote Jeffrey Brosco of the University of Miami, in an editorial. "But it is a complicated story ... you can understand the difficulties. [But] high-dose estrogen therapy to prevent out-of-home placement simply creates a new Sophie's Choice for parents to confront.

"If we as a society want to revise the nature of the harrowing predicament that these parents face, then more funds for home-based services, not more medication, is what is called for."

George Dvorsky, a director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, countered: "If the concern has something to do with the girl's dignity being violated, then I have to protest by arguing that the girl lacks the cognitive capacity to experience any sense of indignity.

"The estrogen treatment is not what is grotesque here. Rather, it is the prospect of having a full-grown and fertile woman endowed with the mind of a baby."

So here's my question: Is what the parents are doing wrong? Is there anything in Scripture which supports a yes answer to that question?

RLC

Why?

President Bush has worked out an agreement with Mexico that would allow illegal aliens who work in the United States and who pay into our social security system to eventually collect social security benefits. This has not been voted into law as yet but one wonders why, when the social security system is in such sorry shape, we are offering to subsidize the retirement of people who broke the law not only to come here but also to obtain a phony social security number. Why is the president rewarding people for breaking the law by allowing them to put a further drain on the benefits U.S. citizens are hoping are there for their own retirement?

This report comes, by the way, on the heels of Governor Schwarzenegger's decision to grant health care insurance to every child in California whether they are citizens or not, and whether they are legal or not.

I suppose there is some reason why Bush and Schwarzenegger feel that it's the right thing to do to take money out of the pockets of people who are here legally and put it in the pockets of those who are breaking our laws, but I confess I don't see what it is. Defenders will say that it's the compassionate thing to do, but it doesn't seem compassionate to essentially take money from the social security checks of elderly people and give it to people whose only claim to it is based on a fraud.

If people through their churches and civic organizations want to help those who have come here in violation of our inmmigration laws they have every right to do that, but for the government to compel its citizenry to sacrifice for illegals makes no more sense than if they decided that we would give every poor person in Mexico free access to our social security and health care systems. Indeed, this policy would be much more compassionate since it would enable people to receive the benefits of being in America without having to undergo the arduous and dangerous trek across the desert to get here.

RLC

The Unheralded War

Every now and then we catch a glimpse of the war against Islamic terrorists that doesn't get much play in the media. Bill Roggio calls attention to our military's involvement in the war being waged by Ethiopia against the Islamic Courts forces in Somalia.

In the course of describing the latest developments in that conflict Roggio states:

The United States has publicly stated its naval forces are actively blockading the Somali coast with assets from Combined Task Force (CTF) 150. "Coalition naval forces are performing boardings on a number of vessels to deter individuals with links to al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations the use of the sea as a potential escape route," notes a CENTCOM press release. The USS Bunker Hill, a Ticonderoga class cruiser which wields the AEGIS Combat System, and the destroyer USS Ramage are engaged in the blockade.

U.S. Special Forces have been rumored to be accompanying Ethiopian and Somali forces on the ground, hunting for senior members of the Islamic Courts, including the three al-Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

The dedicated jihadi in Somalia, as elsewhere, enjoys neither ease nor length of life.

RLC

Ten Myths About Atheism (Pt. II)

With this post we continue our critique of Sam Harris' Ten Myths About Atheism with his second alleged myth. Harris claims the following is not just mythical but also false:

Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

Harris is playing a bit of a shell game here. He slides in the first two sentences from an allegation against atheism and individual atheists to the evils of fascism and communism. He tries to shift the onus away from atheism and onto the nature of political ideology. It's true that these ideologies were very religious but that's irrelevant. It's not fascism which led to the holocaust and not communism that perpetrated the Killing Fields and the crimes committed against humanity in the Soviet Union. Neither ideologies nor religions do anything. It is individual fascists and communists who committed the horrific crimes or the twentieth century and in doing so they were simply carrying to its logical conclusion the basic assumption of atheism.

They believed there was no God and that meant that there is no moral right nor wrong, no eternal consequence for what one does, no reason not to adopt the ethic of might makes right, and no reason to consider others as having dignity and worth. Since they disdained the belief that other people are made in the image of God and loved by God, they therefore concluded that those people have no more rights than do cattle in an abattoir. If one has the power and the wish to kill them there is no moral reason why one should not.

That Hitler, et al. committed the greatest crimes of the century is beyond dispute. That these men were atheists is beyond dispute. That their deeds were wholly consistent with their atheism is also beyond dispute. Thus the myth is not a myth at all. It's a historical reality.

Moreover, even if we were to grant Harris' premise that the responsible agent for the evils of the twentieth century was a kind of religion (fascism and communism), the salient point about this is that these were atheistic religions. Not all religions are bad, but those two were and it could be argued that they were bad precisely because they were, implicitly in one case and explicitly in the other, anti-theistic. Harris, though, clearly seems to think that because some religions are bad therefore they all are, but this is such obvious nonsense that one wonders how an intelligent man could hold that view.

You can read our comment on the first of Harris' ten myths here.

RLC

Post-secular Holland

Who would have thought it? It seems that there may be a religious revival taking place, in Holland of all places, and the revival is not among Holland's Muslims but amongst its Christians. Indeed, Mohammed seems to be having trouble holding on to his followers in the land of tulips:

In spite of this decline of the old religious establishment, however, the century-long wave of secularization seems to have crested, and may even have begun to recede. The Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) finds that the number of self-described Christians stopped declining as early as the beginning of the 1990s. Among the under-20s, the number has started to increase in recent years. If the CBS figures are to be believed, in 2005 a small majority of the Dutch population (52 percent) still called itself Christian. The figures are disputed, however, by another major government research body, the Social and Cultural Planning Agency (SCP).

The SCP uses a stricter definition of religiosity, allowing only those who not only describe themselves as Christians but also belong to a particular church to be counted as "real" Christians. The others, the so-called "fringe Christians," are not attached to a particular church and are excluded from the official head count. Even by the SCP's strict standards, Christians still form a 40 percent plurality among the wider population. Much like the CBS statistic, the SCP's 40 percent figure hasn't changed since the early 1990s.

From both sets of figures, it seems clear that something of a high-water mark for secularization in Holland was set in the last decade.

Islam is already finding itself in a difficult position fighting off another threat, namely that of apostasy. Traditional approaches--honor killings and fatwas--have caused outrage among Holland's general public and political class. That doesn't mean these intimidation tactics won't be effective in the short term--in a recent article in a Dutch political magazine about Islamic converts to Christianity, most sources would talk only on condition of anonymity. But in the long term, they won't work if they don't have the full force of the law behind them (as they do in most Islamic countries). Inevitably, Christian evangelists will try to develop ways of communicating with the Islamic community with a view to converting its members.

Read the whole thing. It's a very interesting article.

RLC

Evading the Questions

Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, is on the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News. The paper's editors recently had a meeting with representatives of the Dallas Muslim community which Dreher reports on here.

Dreher tried to get his interlocutors to answer a set of simple questions, but all he got in reply, according to him, were obfuscations and evasions. The Muslims simply would not deal with the questions to which Dreher, and, I expect, most Americans, would like to hear answers.

According to Dreher, the Muslim spokespersons avoided direct answers to the repeated question of whether the US should live under sharia law which mandates punishments like hand-chopping and stoning, and instead repeatedly challenged the motives of the journalists for asking those questions. They also defended having Muslim youth read the writings of radical Islamists who advocate the imposition of a world-wide Islamic caliphate and retorted to Dreher and his colleagues that the only thing wrong with this is thinking that there's something wrong with it.

The article is both interesting and important, and I urge readers to give it a perusal.

RLC

Distrusting the Times

Why don't people trust the mainstream media to present the news objectively? Well, here's an example of the sort of thing that seems to happen with alarming frequency and which causes people to shake their heads at the apparent willingness of those who present the news to waive journalistic standards when the story supports their ideological preconceptions:

The cover story on abortion in El Salvador in The New York Times Magazine on April 9 contained prominent references to an attention-grabbing fact. "A few" women, the first paragraph indicated, were serving 30-year jail terms for having had abortions. That reference included a young woman named Carmen Climaco. The article concluded with a dramatic account of how Ms. Climaco received the sentence after her pregnancy had been aborted after 18 weeks.

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco's pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the "recently born." A three-judge panel found her guilty of "aggravated homicide," a fact the article noted. But without bothering to check the court document containing the panel's findings and ruling, the article's author, Jack Hitt, a freelancer, suggested that the "truth" was different.

The issues surrounding the article raise two points worth noting, both beyond another reminder to double-check information that seems especially striking. Articles on topics as sensitive as abortion need an extra level of diligence and scrutiny - "bulletproofing," in newsroom jargon. And this case illustrates how important it is for top editors to carefully assess the complaints they receive. A response drafted by top editors for the use of the office of the publisher in replying to complaints about the Hitt story asserted that there was "no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported."

The Times had a story which, they evidently thought, would make the forces arrayed against abortion look very bad and they ran with it without bothering to check its accuracy. With how many other stories have they done the same thing?

The New York Times does deserve some credit, though. The above article was done by their ombudsman, Byron Calame, and appeared in their pages last Sunday.

Read the rest of it at the link.

RLC

Saturn

This photo of Saturn was taken with the sun directly behind the planet. What astonishing beauty.

RLC

Ten Myths About Atheism

I know it seems as though I write far too much about Messrs. Harris, Dawkins, et al. but they are influential people whose arguments should be taken seriously, even when it's difficult to do so.

Sam Harris has a piece at Edge titled 10 MYTHS - AND 10 TRUTHS - ABOUT ATHEISM about which I can't resist commenting.

Harris writes:

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.

1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness ... well ... meaningless.

Harris' reply would likely come as a surprise to many atheists in the popular culture and the most philosophical among them, including the scientists.

Consider these quotes from prominent atheists among dozens more that could be summoned:

"Life is an unpleasant interruption of nothingness." Clarence Darrow

"I am a traveller on a train with no ticket, travelling to a place where no one is waiting." Jean Paul Sartre

"Neither the existence of the individual nor that of humanity has any purpose." Bernard Rensch

"Man's [only] significance lies in the fact that he can look out on the universe and it can't look back on him." Will Durant

"The only plausible answer to the question of the meaning of life is to live, to be alive, and to leave more life." Theodosious Dobzhansky

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." Steven Weinberg

Consider, too, the sense of meaningless conveyed through the literature produced by atheists like Albert Camus in his book The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, or The Plague.

Even so, all the above is really beside the point, as is Harris' reply to the "myth." The question isn't whether atheists do or do not believe life is meaningless. Anyone can believe anything they'd like. The question is whether Harris' belief that life does have meaning is based on anything more substantial than wishful thinking. After all, if human existence in the aggregate has no meaning it's hard to see how an individual human's existence would be meaningful.

If everything we do is destined to vanish utterly, if we are all alone in the cosmos and when our sun dies nothing at all will be left, what ultimate meaning can there be in our lives or loves? There is no more meaning in human existence, individual or corporate, than there is in the life of an ant in an anthill or a bacterium floating in a swamp. We're born, we suffer, perhaps we have a flash of temporary joy here and there, and then we die. Our lives are nothing more than footprints in the sand at the edge of the surf. When we die all trace of our existence will sooner or later vanish from the earth. It will be as if we never lived, and if there's no difference between having lived and never having lived then living has no enduring meaning, purpose, or value.

Only if we survive for eternity can life be meaningful. Some people tacitly acknowledge this when they say that what we do can live on after us. This reply is an attempt to achieve a kind of immortality, but it ultimately collapses since eventually, in a godless universe, nothing anyone has ever done will remain. Harris is free to believe that love gives his life all the meaning he needs, but it sounds like he's whistling past the graveyard.

There'll be more comment on the other nine myths in the days ahead.

RLC

The State of Jihad

Bill Roggio gives us a year end round up of the status of the global war against Islamo-fascism at The Fourth Rail. There's lots of good news, but the war against the Islamists is going to take more than just a few years to complete.

RLC

Chavez Taking Over

Hugo Chavez is shutting down a television station in Venezuela which air material he deems a threat to his power:

In an address to troops, Mr Chavez said he would not tolerate media outlets working towards a coup against him. Radio Caracas Television, which is aligned with the opposition, supported a strike against Mr Chavez in 2003.

But the TV's head said there must be some mistake as its licence was not up for renewal in the near future. Marcel Granier also vowed to fight against the president's plans in Venezuela's courts and on the international stage. Mr Chavez, who was returned to power by a wide margin on 3 December, said Mr Granier was mistaken in believing "that concession is eternal".

"It runs out in March. So it's better that you go and prepare your suitcase and look around for what you're going to do in March," he said during a televised speech to soldiers at a military academy in Caracas. "There will be no new operating licence for this coupist TV channel called RCTV. The operating licence is over... So go and turn off the equipment," Mr Chavez said.

Mr Chavez said the channel was "at the service of coups against the people, against the nation, against national independence, against the dignity of the republic". The channel is among a number of private TV and radio networks that in recent years have strongly criticized Mr Chavez' government and favoured the opposition.

Many media outlets, including RCTV, supported a bungled coup in 2002 and a devastating general strike in 2003 that failed to unseat the president. The press freedom campaign group, Reporters Without Borders, said the proposed move would be a grave violation of freedom of expression in Venezuela.

RCTV is one of the country's oldest channels and began broadcasting in 1953.

This is not surprising, of course, since it is always one of the first acts of those who aspire to dictatorial power to seize control of the media or to shut it down. It'll be interesting to see how Chavez's fan club among American leftists reacts to this incipient act of tyranny.

Cindy Sheehan and Hugo Chavez: Best Buds

RLC

Trusting State

Why do some people have the feeling that our own Department of State can't be trusted? Well, perhaps one reason is that the State Department seems to have known for years that Yassir Arafat was implicated in the murders of Americans in a terrorist strike in Khartoum in 1973, but they did nothing to publicize it. They did nothing to see that the man be brought to justice. Instead, they were content to let anyone gullible enough to believe that Arafat deserved his Nobel Peace Prize to go on believing it. Captain Ed sums up:

The State Department had proof all along that Yasser Arafat not only masterminded this attack, but deliberately plotted to kill American diplomats as a means to pressure the US out of the Middle East. In other words, the PLO/Fatah/BSO conducted a terrorist attack on American interests, murdered Americans, and got away with it. They sat on this information while the US insisted on negotiating with Arafat, even though many suspected he had planned the murders all along.

The State Department should have warned successive administrations from dealing with this terrorist and instead recommended that we capture him and try him for the murders of Noel and Moore. These men worked for the State Department themselves. I guess the lesson here is that State won't lift a finger to bring assassins of diplomats to justice, a lesson that current diplomats may want to consider now.

Laer at Cheat Seeking Missiles has a personal connection to one of the victims. Read his post on the murders. Upon reading it one has cause to wonder about the judgment of former President Jimmy Carter.

RLC

Twenty Favorites For 2006

Herewith my list (by topic) of the twenty books I read (or reread) in 2006 which I enjoyed the most. I'd be interested in hearing from readers about which books they'd put on their list. If anyone sends such a list (It doesn't need to be twenty. It might be only one) I'd be happy to post it.

SOCIAL/CULTURAL

America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It by Mark Steyn - An absolute must read. Steyn argues that Europe as a cultural entity is doomed. There is no realistic way to reverse the trends that are turning Europe into Eurabia.
State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America by Pat Buchanan - Buchanan builds a powerful case against the current policy of turning a blind eye to immigration from the southern hemisphere, particularly illegal immigration. No one who reads this book will think the same way about immigration as they did before reading it.
White Guilt by Shelby Steele - Every page of this book has at least one gem of a thought about how we have come to be in the racial predicament we're in. The problem, Steele argues, is that whites are so loaded with racial guilt that they have no will to do the right thing and blacks and Hispanics are all too eager to exploit that guilt for their own purposes.
The Evolution/Creation Struggle by Michael Ruse - A sympathetic look at the conflict between two apparently irreconcilable camps. Ruse is partial to the Darwinians but is generally even-handed in his treatment of Intelligent Design advocates.

NOVELS

The Road by Cormac McCarthy - A story of the love between a father and his son as they struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. On a deeper level it seems to be a bleak description of the meaninglessness of modern life.
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown - A page turner similar to the later DaVinci Code. Especially good reading if the reader has been to Rome.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The classic story of a man named Raskolnikov who actually tries to live as a Nietzschean superman. He's a man whose values are what he decides them to be. The novel was apparently Woody Allen's inspiration for both Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - A wonderful story of an elderly man, a pastor, close to the end of his life who had married a younger woman in his congregation and had a son late in his life. The narrative is actually a journal the father is keeping as a letter to his son with the intention of having his son read it when he is older and after the father is gone. Beautifully written.

PHILOSOPHY

Warranted Christian Belief (reread) by Alvin Plantinga - A classic both in epistemology and in Christian apologetics. It devastates both liberal theology and atheistic pretensions to superior rationality.
What Can We Know (reread) by Louis Pojman - An excellent introduction to the issues and problems of epistemology.
Nature, Design and Science by Del Ratszch - An excellent work by one of the best philosophers of science. He considers the nature of science and the nature of various theories of design and argues cogently that science does not, or at least should not, exclude such theories.
Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science by Angus Menugue - A powerful critique of materialistic reductionism, the belief that everything, including mind, is reducible to matter and energy.
Who's Afraid of Post-Modernism by James Smith - Smith sympathetically examines the thought of Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault and finds that, properly understood and despite their shortcomings, there's much in these three post-modern thinkers that Christians can embrace with profit.
Abolition of Man (reread) by C.S. Lewis - Lewis' classic essay in protest of modernity's attempt to deify man which actually has resulted in his dehumanization.

SCIENCE

Privileged Planet by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards - The earth is very likely unique in the universe not only in terms of its ability to sustain life but also in terms of the opportunity the physical properties of the earth offer intelligent inhabitants to make discoveries about the universe.
Life's Solutions: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris - Conway Morris argues very persuasively that evolution repeatedly finds, or converges upon, the same solutions to biological problems and that if the tape were run again something very like the organisms we are familiar with would recur.The interesting point to be made is that it seems that the laws of chemistry and physics impose constraints that force evolution in certain directions, almost as if it had been planned that way.
The Soul of Science (reread) by Nancy Pearcy - A fine, engaging history of the development of modern science and the Christian influence on that development.

BIOGRAPHY

Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis - This is Lewis' spiritual autobiography, and I should have read it long before now.

HISTORY

Nothing Like it in the World by Stephen Ambrose - A history of the building of the transcontinental railroad. A little too heavy on the financial machinations behind this monumental project, but much of the story is otherwise fascinating.
America's Secret War by George Friedman - An enthralling account of the political and military decisions made by the Bush administration from 9/11 through the war in Afghanistan. The Bush people look better and smarter than their critics allow and worse than their supporters would hope.

In my opinion the first two books in the list are the most important, but they were all good reads.

Best wishes for a safe and rewarding 2007.

RLC

Dissenting From the Vatican

I have a great deal of respect for the Catholic church and for the ethical thinking it produces, but these statements from the Vatican on the occasion of the execution of Saddam Hussein are difficult to agree with:

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- The Vatican spokesman on Saturday denounced Saddam Hussein's execution as "tragic" and expressed worry it might fuel revenge and new violence. The execution is "tragic and reason for sadness," the Rev. Federico Lombardi said, speaking in French on Vatican Radio's French-language news program.

Why is it tragic that the world is rid of a mass murderer? Why should we be sad that a man who gassed and murdered thousands of children is gone? We should take no delight in seeing a man die but neither should we be sad that he will no longer be around to terrorize innocent people. Rev. Lombardi should reserve his sympathy for the victims of terror and oppression rather than the perpetrators.

In separate comments to the station's English program, Lombardi said that capital punishment cannot be justified "even when the person put to death is one guilty of grave crimes," and he reiterated the Catholic Church's overall opposition to the death penalty.

Why, exactly, can capital punishment not be justified? Surely God commands it in the Old Testament and nothing in the New Testament rescinds the command. It may be that as Christians we should reserve execution for the most heinous criminals, but it's hard to imagine a criminal more heinous than Saddam Hussein.

In an interview published in an Italian daily earlier in the week, the Vatican's top prelate for justice issues, Cardinal Renato Martino, said executing Saddam would mean punishing "a crime with another crime."

This is as much sophistry as it is inanity. Cardinal Martino essentially places the execution of a mass murderer after a trial by a legitimate court in the same moral category as the horrific murders of hundreds of thousands of people. If taking Saddam's life is a criminal act, one wonders, why would it not also be criminal to take his freedom? Or his property?

What makes an act criminal is that it violates both the state's legal code and the natural law. Executing Saddam does neither of these.

RLC

Is ID Testable?

Intelligent Design is often criticized for being untestable. There is no experiment, the argument goes, that we can imagine that might give results that could show ID theory to be false. GilDodgen at Uncommon Descent offers a passage from Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe who states that this is the exact opposite of the truth. ID is testable, Behe insists, it's Darwinian natural selection that cannot be falsified:

The National Academy of Sciences has objected that intelligent design is not falsifiable, and I think that's just the opposite of the truth. Intelligent design is very open to falsification. I claim, for example, that the bacterial flagellum could not be produced by natural selection; it needed to be deliberately intelligently designed. Well, all a scientist has to do to prove me wrong is to take a bacterium without a flagellum, or knock out the genes for the flagellum in a bacterium, go into his lab and grow that bug for a long time and see if it produces anything resembling a flagellum.

If that happened, intelligent design, as I understand it, would be knocked out of the water. I certainly don't expect it to happen, but it's easily falsified by a series of such experiments.

Now let's turn that around and ask, How do we falsify the contention that natural selection produced the bacterial flagellum? If that same scientist went into the lab and knocked out the bacterial flagellum genes, grew the bacterium for a long time, and nothing much happened, well, he'd say maybe we didn't start with the right bacterium, maybe we didn't wait long enough, maybe we need a bigger population, and it would be very much more difficult to falsify the Darwinian hypothesis.

I think the very opposite is true. I think intelligent design is easily testable, easily falsifiable, although it has not been falsified, and Darwinism is very resistant to being falsified. They can always claim something was not right.

Eventually it's going to sink into the minds of even the most obdurate that the intelligent design advocates' claim that intelligence is a necessary cause of specified and irreducible complexity is at least as scientific as the claim of the Darwinians that intelligence was neither necessary nor involved in the creation of biological information or the fine-tuning of the universe.

It's interesting that Judge Jones decided a year ago that ID, unlike scientific theories, was not empirically testable and therefore could not be taught in Dover School District science classes, but Darwinism, which rests on the equally untestable claim that intelligent agency had no role in the appearance and development of life, could. Maybe even Judge Jones will someday be persuaded that his judgment was ill-informed.

RLC

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

Joe Carter offers a good discussion of what is called the Kalam Cosmological argument for the existence of God promoted most notably by philosopher William Lane Craig.

As Carter stresses, an argument is not necessarily a proof. It's always possible to deny one of the premises of the argument and thus evade its force. Even so, if the premises seem reasonable to believe and the argument has a valid structure, then it is reasonable to accept the conclusion. In the case of the Kalam argument the conclusion is that there exists a transcendent, logically necessary, personal, very powerful, very intelligent creator of the universe.

The only question is whether it is reasonable to accept the premises of the Kalam argument. Read Carter's summary and see what you think.

RLC

The End

News outlets are reporting that Saddam has been executed. I watched Alan Colmes and others argue tonight that executing him was unnecessary, that he was no longer a threat to the Iraqi people, that the U.S. had him in custody and that it would be best to just move on and let him languish in prison.

This, in my opinion, is naive.

Suppose the Democrats were successful in getting the United States to withdraw from Iraq by the end of this summer. What would we have done with Saddam? He would have surely been turned over to Iraqi forces and that would have increased the chances that somehow he would be freed. Those who want to see him returned to power would have been given new hope that he might yet survive and be released to regain his seat as head of the Iraqi state, and with that hope there would have been a renewed commitment to topple the government that we left behind.

Indeed, if we pull out too soon the Iraqi government will almost certainly fall, and, depending upon who got to him first, Saddam would be either sprung from prison or shot dead in his cell. If the former, this psychopathic killer would be seen by the Arab world as invincible, almost mythic in his indestructability, chosen by Allah to lead the Arab world against their enemies, both Muslim and non-Muslim. To what horrors would that lead?

Moreover, as long as Saddam was alive many Iraqis would have been reluctant to openly support the new government for fear that he would somehow be returned to power and punish those who collaborated with the government that succeeded him.

Executing Saddam was not only an act of justice, it was an act of manifest prudence. The Iraqi government did what they had to do.

RLC

Tonight's the Night

Evidently Saddam will sometime tonight be sent to stand before God to give an account for the horrors he inflicted on so many hundreds of thousands of people during his reign of terror. Sic semper tyrannus.

RLC

George Weigel's Best Five

Catholic writer George Weigel lists for the Wall Street Journal what he considers to be the five best books for understanding Christianity. They are:

1. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church Edited by F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (Oxford University, 1997).

2. Jesus Through the Centuries by Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale University, 1985).

3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Classics, 1949, 1955, 1957).

4. The Challenge of Jesus by N.T. Wright (InterVarsity, 1999).

5. The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers, O.P. (Catholic University of America, 1995).

Weigel comments on each of his selections at the link.

Speaking of books, Touchstone offers a pretty good satire on Border's, oops, ... I mean Belial's. It opens with this:

The other day I poked my nose into a store run by one of the nation's two great booksellers: Belial's. As I rummaged through the aisles, I found myself growing testy and irritated, and that made me wonder -- why, when I used to love drowning an hour or two in a bookstore, do I hate going there now? What is it about Belial's (and his rival Beelzebub's) that makes the flesh creep?

Not all bookstore's fit Touchstone's description, of course. We like a cozy little shop in York Co. called Hearts and Minds. Try them.

By the way, I'll be posting my own twenty favorite reads for 2006 on Viewpoint early next week.

RLC

The War Against the West

A reader points out that we must be careful when we condemn the Muslim perpetrators of atrocities not to give the impression that we are condemning all Muslims or all of Islam. It's not fair, he argues, to criticize Muslims as a whole for the actions of a relative minority of extremists. He's right, of course. When we condemn Islamic terrorism we don't mean to imply that all Muslims are terrorists. On the other hand, it must be added that there is far more guilt borne by the Muslim community than just that incurred by the killers.

Mark Steyn in his excellent book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, describes the shared responsibility of Muslims by pointing out that surrounding the killers are a series of concentric rings that he describes this way:

...the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them are a larger group of cocksure young male co-religionists gleefully celebrating mass musrder, and around them a much larger group of "moderates" who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting treason against the state, and around them another mesh of religious and community leaders who serve as apologists for the inciters, and around them a network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they're the real victims, and around them a vast mass of elite opinion in the media and elsewhere too sqeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a mangerial problem that can be finessed away with a few new laws and a bit of community outreach.

It's these insulating circles...the imams, lobby groups, media, bishops, politicians - that bulk up the loser death-cult and make it a potent force.

Whatever the thickness of that outermost ring of Muslims, it is as relevant, or irrelevant, to the discussion of the war against Islamism as the general run of German people were during WWII. When someone observes that we were fighting the Germans and the Japanese in the early forties everyone knows what is meant. It doesn't mean that there weren't Germans and Japanese who deplored what their governments had done, it doesn't mean that there weren't Germans and Japanese who didn't see themselves as our enemy, rather it means that those who had power, the fascists who determined the course of events, acted on behalf of all German and Japanese citizens whether those citizens wanted them to or not. It means, too, that a citizen whose allegiance was to the states with which we were at war was presumably an enemy until he demonstrated otherwise. Moreover, many of those Germans and Japanese who deplored the war their governments pushed upon them nevertheless hoped for victory over the United States. They would have been delighted had their military won and they were despondent when they lost.

Likewise, those in the umma who have the power today act on behalf of all of Islam, especially since much of Islam acquiesces in silence to their atrocities. There are, I'm sure, Muslims in that outer ring who do not see themselves as our enemy, mostly Sufis I suspect, but their innocence doesn't negate the fact that we are at war with Islam today in the same sense that we were at war with Germany in 1943.

Just as it was the Nazis who were our specific enemy in Europe even though the war was against the nation of Germany, so today it is the Islamofascists who are our specific enemy now. Yet the foe is much broader than just those who blow up trains and behead innocent Americans. It extends to everyone, American citizen or not, who supports, in word, deed, or thought, the effort to impose Islam by force on the non-Islamic world.

Not all of those who are arrayed against us will resort to violence, of course, and thus violence should not be used against them. To be sure, against some we must fight with bullets, but against others we must fight with economic measures and against others we must fight with ideas. The important thing, though, is that we see the urgency of the conflict we are in and the necessity of fighting. For we are certainly fighting for our survival.

RLC