$180 Billion Failure

One of the criticisms of liberal solutions to our nation's problems is that 1. They're usually expensive and 2. They rarely work. Welfare is a good example, subsidizing green energy is another. A recent article at Heritage.org by Lindsey Burke and David Muhlhausen tells us about yet another. They write about Head Start, a program initiated to prepare poor kids for school so that they don't fall behind in the early grades and condemn themselves to a lifetime of underachievement.

Since its inception in the 1960s we've spent over 180 billion dollars on the program and we're discovering now the disheartening news that the children we had hoped to help are doing no better than had there been no Head Start program in the first place.

The following excerpt is taken from the opening paragraphs of the article:

In 2008, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) completed data collection for its third-grade follow-up study of Head Start, a federal preschool program designed to improve the kindergarten readiness of low-income children. Four years later, just before Christmas, the agency finally published the results of the congressionally mandated evaluation.

The report’s publication date reads October 2012, meaning the final product sat at HHS for two months before being released.

Since 1965, taxpayers have spent more than $180 billion on Head Start. Yet, over the decades, this Great Society relic has failed to improve academic outcomes for the children it was designed to help. The third-grade follow-up evaluation is the latest in a growing body of evidence that should urge policymakers to seriously consider Head Start’s future.

The timing of the release raises questions about whether HHS was trying to bury the findings in the report, which shows, among other outcomes, that by third grade, the $8 billion Head Start program had little to no impact on cognitive, social-emotional, health, or parenting practices of participants. On a few measures, access to Head Start had harmful effects on children.

The details are at the link, but here's one that's particularly worrisome given the ineffectiveness of the program:

Congress will soon vote on a supplemental aid package to Hurricane Sandy victims that includes $100 million in additional Head Start funding. The Senate Appropriations Committee notes that 265 Head Start centers will receive the funding, which equates to more than $377,000 per center.

Somebody's evidently benefiting from taxpayer contributions to the program, but it's not the children.

Fifty Most Religiously Oppressive Countries in the World

There's an interesting report from Open Door.org's World Watch List linked to at The Blaze on the 50 worst countries to live in if you're a Christian. As one might expect most of them are either Muslim or officially atheist (communist) and some are Hindu. The one notable exception, which surprised me, is Colombia, and I'm not sure what makes that country such a difficult place for Christians who wish to practice their faith. Perhaps a reader can help me out with that.

At any rate, here are a couple of graphics from the article. If you have trouble reading them they're clearer here:

The darker the country is colored the worse the level of persecution it inflicts upon religious minorities.

Here's an ordered ranking of the fifty worst:

There's a video at The Blaze which explains how the World Watch List arrived at its ranking. Whether we're Christian or not we should be thankful we live in a nation that protects the freedom to believe and practice what you want. At least it does for the time being.

Five Facts about Guns and Violence

In response to calls - some bordering on the hysterical - for more gun control, even to the extent of confiscation, we offer a few facts from a piece at Reason.com.

1. Violent crime – including violent crime using guns – has dropped massively over the past 20 years. The violent crime rate - which includes murder, rape, and beatings - is half of what it was in the early 1990s. And the violent crime rate involving the use of weapons has also declined at a similar pace.

2. Mass shootings have not increased in recent years. Despite terrifying events like Sandy Hook or last summer’s theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, mass shootings are not becoming more frequent. “There is no pattern, there is no increase,” says criminologist James Allen Fox of Northeastern University, who studies the issue. Other data shows that mass killings peaked in 1929.

3. Schools are getting safer. Across the board, schools are less dangerous than they used be. Over the past 20 years, the rate of theft per 1,000 students dropped from 101 to 18. For violent crime, the victimization rate per 1,000 students dropped from 53 to 14.

4. There Are More Guns in Circulation Than Ever Before. Over the past 20 years, virtually every state in the country has liberalized gunownership rules and many states have expanded concealed carry laws that allow more people to carry weapons in more places. There around 300 million guns in the United States and at least one gun in about 45 percent of all households. Yet the rate of gun-related crime continues to drop.

5. “Assault Weapons Bans” Are Generally Ineffective. While many people are calling for reinstating the federal ban on assault weapons – an arbitrary category of guns that has no clear definition – research shows it would have no effect on crime and violence. “Should it be renewed,” concludes a definitive study, “the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

Here's a video that accompanies the article at Reason.com:

In the wake of a tragedy like Sandy Hook it's easy to succumb to the desire to do something, even if what we do is ineffective. Even so, whatever measures we take should be dictated by the facts and not by emotion. More gun control is not going to solve a problem that is, at its core, a symptom of moral degeneration and cultural rot.

Got the Flu?

Perhaps you did your due diligence and got a flu shot this year but nevertheless came down with the bug anyway and are wondering why.

An article at The Blaze.com explains that there could be several reasons although one of them, the particular strain of virus that you came down with was not included in the vaccine, doesn't apply to this year's breakout:

[W]hy does [the flu] seem to be so virulent this year? The most popular strain identified this season is Type A influenza H3N2, which is historically associated with more serious illnesses. It is also among the strains covered by the flu vaccine.

The article goes on to give two other problems with the immunization that may apply in cases where a person got the shot this year but still got ill:

But as Cranston said “no vaccine is 100 percent effective.” One reason is the lag time between vaccination and active immunity. A person who received a flu shot but comes in contact with the virus before the vaccine becomes effective — between 10 days and two weeks — they are still susceptible to becoming ill.

[Moreover] recent studies have shown that the flu vaccine as a whole is only about 59 percent effective at preventing the illness... [T]he vaccine [also] appears to be less effective for the elderly, which is a population often highly encouraged to receive the shot in the first place.

So, the lesson seems to be get the shot early next year before you're exposed to the virus and hope that you're among the 59%.

What's a Liberal to Think?

Like the islanders in King Kong, every now and then liberals feel the need to sacrifice someone to appease the gods of racial "justice."

Remember when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in Florida last year how the media did everything it could to portray Zimmerman, who evidently was having his skull bashed in by Mr. Martin, as the Grand Kleagle of the KKK? They seemed desperate to use the incident as confirmation of their conviction that white men are racists and black men are oppressed victims, even to the point of coining the odd construction "white Hispanic" to describe Zimmerman lest anyone should miss the point.

Unfortunately, the evidence in the case, as often happens, just wouldn't permit them to get away with it, but I'm wondering what will happen in the case of a young Georgia woman, a mother of two, who shot a man whom, since he was black and she was white, some in the media will probably portray as an innocent neighbor simply seeking to borrow a cup of sugar:

The incident happened at a home on Henderson Ridge Lane in Loganville around 1 p.m. The woman was working in an upstairs office when she spotted a strange man outside a window, according to Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman. He said she took her 9-year-old twins to a crawlspace before the man broke in using a crowbar.

But the man eventually found the family.

"The perpetrator opens that door. Of course, at that time he's staring at her, her two children and a .38 revolver," Chapman told Channel 2’s Kerry Kavanaugh.

The woman then shot him five times, but he survived, Chapman said. He said the woman ran out of bullets but threatened to shoot the intruder if he moved.

"She's standing over him, and she realizes she's fired all six rounds. And the guy's telling her to quit shooting," Chapman said.

The woman ran to a neighbor's home with her children. The intruder attempted to flee in his car but crashed into a wooded area and collapsed in a nearby driveway, Chapman said.

Deputies arrested 32-year-old Atlanta resident Paul Slater in connection with the crime. Chapman said they found him on the ground saying, "Help me. I'm close to dying." Slater was taken to Gwinnett Medical Center for treatment. Chapman said Slater was shot in the face and neck.

In February, Slater was arrested on simple battery charges, according to the Gwinnett County Sheriff's Office. He has been arrested six other times in the county since 2008.

There's more at the link. This story is fraught with peril for our liberal friends. How does a good liberal decide what to think about it? A woman (a member of an oppressed class) who happens to be white (an oppressor race) shot a man (an oppressor) who happens to be black (an oppressed minority) with a gun (which she shouldn't have been permitted access to) in order to protect herself and her children (a noble act).

Perhaps the best thing to do, rather than try to untangle all these conflicting threads, is to just ignore the story entirely which is why we probably won't hear one hundredth as much about this shooting as we did about the Zimmerman/Martin affair. The media won't put her on trial, Al Sharpton won't be demanding "justice," The New Black Panthers won't put a bounty on the mother's head, and no one will be complaining about her ownership and use of a gun.

Anyway, here's an exit question for those who would like to see handguns banned. Could you say to that mother, who huddled with her terrified children in the attic listening to the intruder's steps drawing closer, "I'm glad you weren't harmed, but given the choice between protecting yourself and your children from that man and having access to a handgun, I prefer you hadn't had access to the weapon"?

That's essentially what people on the left are saying every time they say they want to keep guns out of the hands of responsible citizens.

Finding Out What's in It

An article in the New York Times should give pause to anyone who bought the sales pitch for Obamacare that it was going to "bend the cost curve down." People who work for small businesses or who buy their own insurance are, in some states, in for a real shock:

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent, and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.

In order to provide insurance coverage for a few million people who didn't have it because they couldn't afford it, congress passed a law, Obamacare, that forces millions of those who are almost in that situation themselves to pay for those who can't. Then Mr. Obama boasts that he's cutting taxes on the middle class. What a guy.

California, Ohio, and Florida all voted for Mr. Obama in November. I wonder how they're liking him now.

How Much Risk Is Too Much?

The New York Times reports that an analysis done by the state of New York has shown that drilling for natural gas using hydrofracking poses minimal risks to people and the environment, but some environmentalists are not satisfied and, despite the enormous economic benefits that would accrue to the people of the state, still oppose fracking:

The state’s Health Department found in an analysis it prepared early last year that the much-debated drilling technology known as hydrofracking could be conducted safely in New York, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times from an expert who did not believe it should be kept secret.

The analysis and other health assessments have been closely guarded by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his administration as the governor weighs whether to approve fracking. Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, has long delayed making a decision, unnerved in part by strident opposition on his party’s left. A plan to allow a limited amount of fracking in the state’s Southern Tier along the Pennsylvania border is still seen as the most likely outcome, should the drilling process receive final approval.

The eight-page analysis is a summary of previous research by the state and others, and concludes that fracking can be done safely. It delves into the potential impact of fracking on water resources, on naturally occurring radiological material found in the ground, on air emissions and on “potential socioeconomic and quality-of-life impacts.”

According to a WSJ piece quoted in Hot Air the stakes are pretty high:

According to the Manhattan Institute, lifting the fracking ban in New York could result in $11.4 billion in economic output and $1.4 billion in tax revenues, not to mention 15,000 to 18,000 new jobs.

Environmentalists, the Times piece notes, have raised some pertinent caveats to the state health department's report, but at some point the governor has to ask how low the risk of harm has to be and how serious must the potential harm to humans and the environment be to warrant continuing the ban on drilling. Some environmentalists seem to be of the opinion that any risk at all and any amount of harm are simply not worth it.

That's a position that, in this economy, seems awfully hard to defend.

Fruitflow Now Available in U.S.

Way back on December 23rd of '09 I did a post on a product called Fruitflow. Here's what I wrote about it:

Millions of people rely on aspirin to keep their blood thin to prevent heart attacks and strokes, but aspirin often causes stomach problems. It turns out that a natural blood thinner has been found in the gel that surrounds tomato seeds. In Britain a product called Fruitflow is made from an extract of this gel and has none of the side effects of aspirin.

Check it out here.

Here's the crux of the article:

10 studies -- two of which were published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition -- reported that three grams of Fruitflow were effective just three hours after consumption, making platelets smoother while leaving the rest of the blood able to clot normally in the case of injury. Regular tomato juice is subjected to multiple processing methods that degrade the gel ingredient, rendering it far less effective than its concentrated form. Plain tomatoes are also less effective because the body must slowly digest all parts of the fruit.

I closed by noting that the article doesn't say how long it will be before this product is available in the U.S.

Well, a reader named Vic has written to tell me that Fruitflow is now available in the U.S., it's marketed by Swansons and it works.

Reason and Irrationality

Andrew Seddon has an essay at the New Oxford Review in which he talks about the beliefs of Christians and atheists and makes the claim that, though atheists allege that theism is literally incredible, what the atheist believes is certainly no less so. Here's part of his essay:

While undeniable that Christianity entails a belief in the supernatural, the miraculous — God became man that first Christmas, Christ raised people from the dead, rose himself on the first Easter Sunday and ascended into heaven 40 days later — consider what atheists believe.

They believe that something came out of nothing, that reason came from irrationality, that a complex universe and natural order came out of randomness and chaos, that consciousness came from non-consciousness and that life emerged from non-life.

This is a bridge too far for the Christian for whom faith and reason tell him that for all of this to have been created from nothing is absurd; it presupposes a Creator.

Atheists believe, Seddon writes, that “a multiverse (for which there is no experimental or observational evidence) containing an inconceivably large number of universes spontaneously created itself.”

He doesn't mention, but could have, that many atheists also believe that life has meaning even though death cancels everything out; that moral duties exist, even though there's no basis for them; that reason is reliable, even though evolution only conserves traits that promote survival, not truth; that love is meaningful and that beauty is inspiring, even though both of these are simply the result of neurochemical reactions in the brain; that people are responsible for their choices even though those choices are predetermined by their genes and environment; and that human beings have worth and rights even though such valuations are completely arbitrary and rooted in nothing but the appraisal of others.

Despite holding a collection of beliefs grounded in nothing more than their subjective preferences they assure us that they are the rational people, the "brights" in Daniel Dennett's famously pompous description, and that theists are, by implication, dim-witted boobs. Yet theists recognize that none of the beliefs listed in the preceding paragraphs make any sense at all unless they're grounded in an objective, intelligent, personal, transcendent cause.

That recognition alone makes theism rationally superior to any view, like naturalistic atheism, which holds that the personal can emerge from the impersonal, that complex information can emerge from chaos, or that nothing can produce something.

Movies in 2012

I didn't get to many movies this year, but of the ones I saw I think the following were the most noteworthy. Opinions will vary on such things, of course, but here are some of mine:

The Dark Knight - The theme of good versus evil made this a special movie, but another theme that I found intriguing was the portrayal of Bane and his minions. They were, in fact, Occupy Wall Streeters with the power to fulfill their desire to destroy capitalism and the rich. That may seem a little strong, but listen to Bane's speech and ask yourself if it doesn't sound like it might have been given by any committed OWSer.

2016: Obama's America - Perhaps the most underrated but most important documentary of the last couple of years. It was underrated because, I suspect, those who write about movies were averse to its message, and it was important precisely because of its message. It argues that all of the influential people in Barack Obama's formative years were people who despised the United States and wished to make it into a Marxist/Socialist state. It was certainly unnerving to think that he's the product of such mentors.

Atlas Shrugged Pt. II - Another underrated film whose message is important. It portrays an America in which those who carry the country on their backs, the creative entrepreneurs, are taxed and regulated to the point where they simply decide to quit. In other words, these Atlases are the victims of the same sort of people who have exerted monopolistic influence on our president and who, given the opportunity, would do to America what Bane tries to do to Gotham.

Taken 2 - A sequel to the film in which Liam Neeson tracks down the kidnappers of his daughter. The family of those who ran afoul of Neeson's "special set of skills" in the first Taken seek revenge against him in the follow-up with consequences for them similar to those suffered by their brethren in the first movie. It's gratuitously violent, of course, but I'm a sucker for stories about fathers rescuing their wives and children from evil men and dispensing condign justice to said evildoers. Maybe the popularity of such films is due to the fact that so many people are frustrated that real evil rarely, if ever, receives genuine justice in this life.

Lincoln - My vote for best movie of the year. Daniel Day Lewis gives us a wonderful portrayal of Lincoln, and Steven Spielberg doesn't shy from showing the seamy side of politics and politicians. Tommy Lee Jones also turns in a superb performance as Thaddeus Stevens. If you can only see one movie in the next few months this is the one you should see.

Skyfall - It's James Bond, but not the insoucient Bond of Sean Connery and Roger Moore. Daniel Craig's Bond is more of a brooding, melancholy, almost psychopathic sort of guy. The most interesting character in the movie, I thought, was the antagonist Raoul Silva played by Javier Bardem, whom I first saw in No Country for Old Men in which he played Anton Chigurh, who was unquestionably a psychopath.

Les Miserables - Hugh Jackman was outstanding in the role of Jean Val Jean, but after a while I got a little weary of all the singing. Almost all of the dialogue was sung and although some of it was very good (Anne Hathaway's Fantine, for example) some of it was not so much (Russel Crowe's Javert, for example). The music was much better, in my opinion, in the play, and the story was better told in the 1978 made for tv version (Anthony Perkins set the standard to which all Javerts must be compared). Of course, as is always the case, nothing is as good as the book which I thought was a work of genius when I read it. One other thought: When people talk about the terrible plight of the American poor they should be urged to watch Les Mis to see what real poverty looks like. Nobody in America has to live in anything near the conditions most Europeans (and Americans, for that matter) lived in until the latter part of the 19th century when capitalist entrepreneurialism created jobs and wealth for everyone who wanted one.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - It was good, I guess, but it took too long to get into the story, and once it did it was too much like watching Lord of the Rings all over again. Moreover, LOR had a certain plausibility to it that The Hobbit lacks. Even so, I enjoyed it, for the most part, and I look forward to the next installments, although I probably won't spend the money to watch it in 3D again.

How to Win the War on Poverty

Peter Cove is a disillusioned foot soldier in the war on poverty. In a column at City Journal he tells how he came to believe that that war will never be won as long as the generals leading it are liberals. After explaining the various failures of welfare to get people out of poverty and the success of his own company, America Works, in putting people to work, Cove makes a startling proposal:

My experience with long-term welfare clients has led me to propose a radical solution: that we abolish all cash welfare, as well as food and housing assistance—except for the elderly and the physically and mentally disabled—in order to move from a dependency culture to one of work-first.

This recommendation may sound impractical at a time of high unemployment. But the work-first principle can easily be implemented even in a down economy, as America Works proved by getting jobs for more than 500 ex-convicts in Detroit—a local economy with 14 percent unemployment—in the past two years. After all, despite the economic downturn, more than 3 million jobs per year go unfilled in the United States.

The rest of his column is a rationale for this proposal. It begins with him sharing the story of his own disenchantment with the policies enacted in the War on Poverty:

Nearly half a century ago, I dropped out of graduate school and enlisted as a foot soldier in America’s War on Poverty. Today, I’m still on the front lines, working to move people out of dependency and into employment. But with an important difference: I’ve become fed up with the useless policies that I once supported, and I’m trying to change the strategy of our bogged-down army.

We know for certain that income transfers, the preferred tactic of generations of liberals, have utterly failed to end poverty. My firsthand experience with welfare clients has shown me why: being on the dole encourages dependency. Working at a real job, by contrast, is the surest way for a person to climb out of poverty.

Accordingly, the surest way for the government to fight poverty is to eliminate cash assistance almost entirely and offer jobs instead.

During his all-too-brief presidency, John F. Kennedy signaled that he wanted to reform the nation’s Depression-era welfare system by giving “a hand, not a handout” to the poor. As Charles Murray noted in his magisterial study Losing Ground, Kennedy’s small initiative, which “consisted of a few training programs and other rehabilitative efforts amounting to only $59 million in the 1963 budget, . . . represented a major departure nonetheless,” since it shifted welfare policy “away from the dole and toward escape from the dole.”

When President Lyndon Johnson expanded Kennedy’s program into the War on Poverty, he likewise wanted not to mire generations in dependency but to free them from it. “The days of the dole in this country are numbered,” Johnson promised at the signing ceremony for the War on Poverty legislation in August 1964.

Listening to his soaring rhetoric, I believed that our nation was on the cusp of one of the great peaceful revolutions of modern times: the elimination not only of welfare but also of poverty and want. After all, by the mid-1960s, America was the world’s most affluent society, and economists predicted that the economic boom and high employment rates would continue for many years to come. The “conquest of poverty,” the 1964 Economic Report of the President explained, was “well within our power.

About $11 billion a year would bring all poor families up to the $3,000 income level we have taken to be the minimum for a decent life. The majority of the nation could simply tax themselves enough to provide the necessary income supplements to their less fortunate citizens.” The following year, the government allocated even more than the report had called for—$14.7 billion—to transfer payments....

But the government’s unprecedented expenditures failed to bring about the decline in poverty that Johnson had promised. Instead, they made things worse. Neither city hall nor I comprehended that the “community action” organizations on which we lavished taxpayer dollars would entrench dependency by urging people to get on the welfare rolls.

War on Poverty funds paid for social workers, community activists, and lawyers to organize the poor, but these organizers, far from lifting poor people out of dependency, helped them sign up for more—and more expensive—welfare programs. For instance, the National Welfare Rights Organization urged single black mothers to protest the welfare system’s eligibility restrictions, and the organization’s goal was to flood the system with new clients.

Cove's article should be required reading for every citizen in the U.S. but especially for every liberal Democrat.

Books of 2012

At the start of each year I like to pause and reflect on the books I've read and the movies I've seen during the preceding twelve-month. So here's an annotated list of the books I was able to read in 2012. I don't recommend all of them, but most of them are worthwhile and some of them are very much worth the time spent with them.

1. Destruction of the Indies - Bartolome de las Casas. An account by an eyewitness of how the Spanish systematically tortured and sought to extirpate the Central American native population in the 16th century. It is, inter alia, a numbing reminder of man's capacity for cruelty, horror, and evil and all, sadly, in the name of religion.
2. Where the Conflict Really Lies - Alvin Plantinga. An argument that there's deep concord and only superficial conflict between science and theistic belief, but that the reverse is true for science and naturalism. The concord between metaphysical naturalism and science is superficial and the conflict between them is profound. This flies in the face of conventional opinion, which provides us with another reminder that conventional opinion is quite often wrong.
3. Provocations: The Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard - Charles Moore, ed. Moore collects Kierkegaard's thoughts on religious matters. There are a lot of them.
4. The Father's Tale - Michael O'Brien. A novel about a man's world-wide search for his estranged son. In places it's wonderful. In others it's a bit too preachy and tedious.
5. What We're Hearing You Say - Mike Mitchell. An incisive critique of Mormon belief written by a friend of mine who got to experience Mormonism at close range in Utah. Perhaps one reason why Mitt Romney did so poorly among blacks in the election is that traditional Mormon beliefs about blacks circulated through their communities.
6. The Mysterious Epigenome - Woodward and Gills. A fascinating introduction to developments in molecular genetics. It turns out that DNA isn't the only thing involved in making us who and what we are. There are levels of information and coding in our cells that boggle the mind.
7. The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins. A description of a world without God and thus without any reason to value human life. It's probably no coincidence that nowhere in Collins' novel is God mentioned and neither is there any consideration by the characters in the story of the morality of the world in which they live.
8. The Triumph of Christianity - Rodney Stark. A very readable history of the emergence of Christianity in the ancient world and how and why it triumphed over its competitors.
9. God's Battalions - Rodney Stark. A very readable history of the crusades which every one who teaches concerned about current relations between Muslims and the West should read. It dispels a lot of myths, including the myth that the crusades were attempts by imperialistic Europeans to plunder and conquer poor, helpless Muslims. In fact, the crusades were mostly attempts at self-defense in the face of relentless Muslim aggression and atrocities.
10. Messy Quest for Meaning - Stephen Martin. A delightful series of vignettes about life and its foibles written by a friend of mine. Not even the fact that he mentions me detracts from the wit, wisdom, and humility which grace Messy Quest's pages.
11. A Brief History of Thought - Luc Ferry. French philosopher Ferry traces the story of man's attempt to find an answer for death. Quick summary: The best answer, Ferry acknowledges, is the Christian answer, but he can't bring himself to believe it.
12. Escape from Camp 14 - Blaine Harden. The amazing story of a North Korean named Shin Dong-hyuk who was born in a North Korean prison camp, a place of awful cruelty and deprivation, and how he managed to become, at age 23, the only person known to have been both born in the camp and to have escaped from it. This 60 Minutes interview of Shin by Anderson Cooper gives a very good overview of Shin's story:
13. Unbroken - Lauren Hillenbrand. Hillenbrand recounts the story of Louie Zamperini a long distance runner in the 1930s who becomes a bomber pilot in WWII, was captured by the Japanese after a 40 + day ordeal at sea in a life raft, and was repeatedly beaten and starved for several years by his captors. The author also takes us through Zamperini's life after the war. It's a fascinating tale of human endurance, courage, and Zamperini's struggles with alcoholism when he finally returned home. Here's a 2010 piece by Fox News on Zamperini:
14. Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide - Ed Feser. A good introduction to the thought of one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived.
15. A Shot of Faith - Mitch Stokes. Stokes' book is essentially an explication of the thinking of Alvin Plantinga, with special attention paid to Plantinga's Where the Conflict Really Lies.
16. Science and Human Origins - Gauger, Axe, Luskin. A brief summary of some of the very serious problems scientists have recently encountered in their quest to explain human evolution.
17. Mind and Cosmos - Thomas Nagel. Atheist Nagel explains why Darwinian materialism is almost certainly wrong. The alternative, a supernatural intelligence, is not to Nagel's liking, however, so he's left positing some nebulous telic principle pervading the cosmos to explain how life arose. As the kids would say, whatever.
18. Philosophy of Mind - Ed Feser. A fine introduction to the philosophical study of mind and the mind/matter problem.
19. The World According to Monsanto - Marie Monique-Robin. An indictment of the Monsanto chemical company. If only a fourth of the allegations in this book are true the leadership of that corporation, at least during the last half of the twentieth century, should all be in jail. The book is better employed as a reference than as casual reading.
20. In the Beginning...We Misunderstood - Miller and Soden. An interesting explanation of the structure of the first two chapters of Genesis, where that structure came from, and what those chapters are really telling us about the creation.
21. Occupy the Economy - Richard Wolff. A critique of capitalism and an advocacy of Marxist socialism. It offers some important facts, but the argument it makes is pretty thin. Moreover, Wolff's enthusiasm for the Occupy Movement is so 2011.

Beyond Three Dimensions

Could it be that the three dimensional world in which we live is not all there is to reality? Is it possible that there are other dimensions, perhaps inhabited by other beings, which, though its all around us, we are oblivious to because we lack the ability to perceive more than three dimensions?

Such a possibility was the theme of a post I did in 2006 titled Plato's Cave for Modern Man. Check it out.

Also, check out this video which illustrates how a being possessing more dimensions than does our world would be completely incomprehensible, even though thoroughly immanent, to us:

2012: The Best of All Possible Years

Reading this editorial in The Spectator will fill you with Christmas cheer - unless you're an inveterate pessimist or a secular leftist who abhors anything smacking of either Christmas or capitalist success stories. Indeed, as I read it I had two thoughts: first, it sounds so Panglossian that it just begs for a Voltaire to skewer it, and second, I wondered whether it could be that we actually are on the cusp of the millenial kingdom. Give it a read and see what you think. Here's the lede:

It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.

To listen to politicians is to be given the opposite impression — of a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and getting worse. This, in a way, is the politicians’ job: to highlight problems and to try their best to offer solutions. But the great advances of mankind come about not from statesmen, but from ordinary people. Governments across the world appear stuck in what Michael Lind describes as an era of ‘turboparalysis’ — all motion, no progress. But outside government, progress has been nothing short of spectacular.

Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too.

The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide economic growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories.

And what about the concerns that the oil would run out? Ministers have spent years thinking of improbable new power sources. As it turns out, engineers in America have found new ways of mining fossil fuel. The amazing breakthroughs in ‘fracking’ technology mean that, in spite of the world’s escalating population — from one billion to seven billion over the last two centuries — we live in an age of energy abundance.

Advances in medicine and technology mean that people across the world are living longer. The average life expectancy in Africa reached 55 this year. Ten years ago, it was 50. The number of people dying from Aids has been in decline for the last eight years. Deaths from malaria have fallen by a fifth in half a decade.

The editorial goes on to amass more such good news. Perhaps a New Years' Eve toast to 2012 is in order tonight. The Spectator closes its essay with this:

But now, as we celebrate the arrival of Light into the world, it’s worth remembering that, in spite of all our problems, the forces of peace, progress and prosperity are prevailing.

I'll sip some champagne to that even if I'm still not quite sure I believe it.

Guns, Israel, and Chicago

Rabbi Moshe Averick shares several interesting thoughts apropos the current controversy over gun availability and draws some pertinent conclusions. Here's the first:

Anyone from the United States who visits Israel cannot help but be struck with the two following observations:

1. There are guns everywhere. That includes pistols and semi-automatic handguns worn on the hips of civilians (some carry Uzi sub-machine guns) and guards at malls and theaters, rifles slung over the shoulders of teachers and guards accompanying school children on class trips and outings, and the ever present – and from my middle-aged perspective – impossibly young-looking soldiers, both male and female, carrying M-16 and Gallil automatic assault weapons.

Armed Israelis at a beach resort

2. One feels very safe. The reason is simple: Those carrying the guns are the good guys.

On the other hand, two observations about Chicago, where I grew up and currently reside:

1. Despite the fact that Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country (Illinois has completely outlawed concealed carry), 440 school-age children were hit by gunfire here in 2012. Of these, 60 died. Just in case it is overlooked, that is triple the number of those tragically murdered in Newtown, Conn. In fact, in a very bloody 2012 Christmas eve, 7 people were shot in the free-fire zones on the South and West sides of the city.

2. I do not feel safe. The reason is simple: Those carrying the guns are the bad guys.

First obvious conclusion: When good guys have guns we feel safe. When only bad guys have guns, you end up with…well, Chicago.

So why can guns be legally ubiquitous in Israel and there's little violence as a result whereas they're illegal but nevertheless still ubiquitous in Chicago and the violence is appalling? Averick argues that it's the result of decades of liberal policies. Read the rest of his post at the link to find out why he thinks that.

Punish the Rich

Jamelle Bouie at The Washington Post explains why Democrats are adamant that we raise taxes on the rich. It's not because of the revenue such taxes would raise because there's not much revenue to be gained from it. It's because they simply want to punish the rich. Bouie doesn't use the word punish, but that's what his column implies.

Democrats, it seems, are prepared to drive the country deeper into recession, perpetrate a disaster upon the poor, and see our military eviscerated just so they can knock the rich down a couple of pegs and make themselves feel morally righteous by so-doing. But let Bouie tell it:

[A couple of days] from now, the United States will probably “go over” the “fiscal cliff,” and begin to implement a series of tax increases and spending cuts that will — over the course of the year — take a large bite out of economic growth. A deal to avoid the cliff is still possible, but unlikely; Republicans remain opposed to upper-income tax increases, regardless of size, and even if they come with cuts to entitlement spending.

On Monday, I wrote that this opposition is rooted in a fundamentally different view of how to create economic growth in a recession.

Republicans believe that federal spending is driving the debt that, in their view, is holding back the economy. Until Washington gets its “spending under control,” conservatives have all but promised to shoot down any tax increases.

It’s also worth looking at the other side. Yes, we know that Democrats view the current economic climate as demand-driven, but that doesn’t explain their insistence on upper-income tax hikes, despite the fact that — all things equal — it’s probably better to keep the tax cuts and wait for further economic growth before ending them.

The key thing to remember, however, is that Democrats — and liberals, in particular — care about economic inequality as much as they do growth. And as explained in The Post this morning, it’s this concern with inequality that has driven Democrats to rethink their approach on the Bush tax cuts.

Rhetoric aside, there’s no doubt Democrats know that — barring a hike to pre-Reagan levels — there’s not much revenue to gain from restoring upper-income taxes to Clinton-era levels. And when it comes to deficit reduction, full employment — and robust growth — is the best solution. If upper-income tax hikes serve a purpose, it’s to slow the income gains of the wealthiest Americans, who — for the past decade — have reaped the lion’s share of gains from economic growth.

I don't think it's unfair to note that there are two very influential groups among liberals. There are those who are rich and feel guilty about being rich, and there are those who are not rich and who envy and/or resent those who are. The combination of guilt and resentment is a combustible mix that's causing Democrats, particularly the president, to insist on measures that'll do nothing to cure our country's economic ills but do a lot to make them worse.

Singer's Utilitarian Ethics

Peter Wicks reviews in First Things a book by Charles C. Camosy titled Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization. Singer, you probably know, is the enfante terrible of ethicists, insisting on a remorselessly consistent application of the utilitarian calculus, particularly in the matter of abortion and infanticide. For example, as Wicks writes:

Singer not only holds that abortion is permissible at all stages of pregnancy, but also notoriously defends the view that there are circumstances in which it would be moral to kill a newborn child.

Singer arrives at this position by running a familiar anti-abortion argument in reverse. The anti-abortion argument is that because a child does not undergo any transformation in the course of being born that could plausibly be supposed to give it a right not to be killed, the unborn have such a right, since to deny this would lead to the absurd conclusion that there is nothing inherently wrong in killing the newly born.

Singer reasons in the other direction and denies that both the unborn and the newly born have a right not to be killed.

In other words, pro-lifers argue that since there's no qualitative difference between the born infant and the unborn, and since killing the born infant is a moral wrong so, too, is killing the unborn. Singer, however, argues that since there's no difference between the born infant and the unborn, and since the unborn has no right to life, neither should the infant. Wick notes that:

Singer believes newborn infants are not yet persons because they lack the rationality and self-awareness required to possess a desire to go on living. It is the thwarting of that desire, rather than the taking of life as such, that he believes accounts for the wrongness of killing in those cases in which killing is wrong.

In the most recent edition of Singer’s Practical Ethics, he writes that strict conditions should be placed on the circumstances in which infanticide is permitted, but “these restrictions should owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic wrongness of killing an infant.”

This view shocks many, including many who admire Singer for his work on our duties to animals and the world’s poor. But his position is exactly the one that his utilitarian theory implies, and the way that he arrives at that position can serve to illustrate features of the utilitarian approach to ethics that make it attractive even to those who are reluctant to accept the conclusions that it implies.

There's much more on Singer's utilitarianism at the link and I recommend reading it. Wick is correct when he adds that:

One reason utilitarian ethical thinking proves so persistently attractive even to those who are reluctant to accept the conclusions it implies is that many of us have difficulty imagining what else ethical thinking could be.

Of course, Singer is an atheist, and if he's right about there being no God then it's hard to imagine how anyone could argue that he's wrong about infanticide in particular and utilitarianism in general. The former follows from the latter, and in a godless world one ethical system is just as useful and defensible as another since they're all matters of arbitrary personal preference.

If a society spurns the notion of a transcendent moral authority which establishes right and wrong and to whom we are accountable then there's no reason to prefer utilitarianism over egoism. Utilitarianism says that we should maximize human well-being and happiness which means that when I act I should take into consideration how my act will affect the happiness of others, but, given atheism, why should I? Why should I care about the well-being of people I don't even know? Why should I not just care about my own happiness and well-being?

Moreover, once we realize that in a godless world egoism (the belief that my well-being is all that matters) is the default position there's no reason not to adopt an ethic of might-makes-right. There's certainly no reason to think that anyone who does adopt such an ethic is wrong to do so. If promoting my well-being is right then whatever I have the power to do is right to do as long as it makes me happy.

When God is banished from ethics, when the divine commands to love God and love our neighbor are deemed obsolete, then society will ultimately devolve to the ethics of the Roman Coliseum or Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games.

That's why it sounds so foolish when atheists like Singer make moral judgments about the treatment of animals or people. When an atheist asserts that X is wrong or immoral all he's saying is that he doesn't like X, but why should anyone care about what he likes? To that question the atheist can give no answer.

Christianophobia

Silently, almost beneath notice in the West, Christianity is being extirpated in much of the world. An article on a report by Ruppert Shortt published in Civitas gives some details:

The report surveys in detail the extent of Christian persecution in seven countries – Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, Burma, China and India. And it cites findings from the Freedom House think-tank report to highlight the way that Muslim-majority countries are the most hostile to Christians.

Christianity is in serious danger of being wiped out in its biblical heartlands because of Islamic oppression, according to a new report from a leading independent think-tank. But Western politicians and media largely ignore the widespread persecution of Christians in the Middle East and the wider world because they are afraid they will be accused of racism. They fail to appreciate that in the defence of the wider concept of human rights, religious freedom is the “canary in the mine”, according to the report.

The refusal of young Christians in the West to become “radicalised” and mount violent protests against the attacks on their faith also helps to explain the “blind spot” about “Christianophobia” in influential liberal Western circles.

Intolerant Muslims and atheistic communists are waging war against Christian communities throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Asia:

Mr Shortt quotes expert findings that between a half and two-thirds of Christians in the Middle East have left or been killed over the past century. The pace of this assault is now intensifying with the rise of militant Islam in countries such as Egypt, Iraq and now, with the civil war, Syria.

Across the world as a whole, some 200 million Christians (10 per cent of the total) are socially disadvantaged, harassed or actively oppressed for their beliefs.

They [Muslims]impose the greatest curbs on religious freedoms and make up 12 of the 20 countries judged to be “unfree” on the grounds of religious tolerance. Of the seven states receiving the lowest possible score, four are Muslim.

Iraq has also witnessed the decimation of its Christian community amid frequent bombings, shootings, beheadings and kidnappings, especially since the invasion of 2003. In 1990 there were between 1.2 to 1.4 million Christians in Iraq. By 2003, there were only around half a million. Today there are less than 200,000.

Christians are also under assault in non-Muslim countries. Mr Shortt points out that more Christians are imprisoned in China than in any other country in the world. It is estimated that almost 2000 members of house churches were arrested during the 12 months after May 2004 alone.

The author concludes that it took Christian societies many centuries to evolve a tradition of tolerance towards other faiths. He expresses the hope that Islam might eventually reach the same destination.

In other words, whereas Christian nations realized centuries ago that religious freedom and toleration are far more amenable to social and political well-being than sectarian violence, and, whereas this emphasis on freedom and toleration led to enlightenment, science, and technological advance, Muslims and atheistic communists prefer still to live in the dark ages of intellectual and spiritual barbarism.

There's more on the persecution Christians are facing in much of the world today at the link.

Collapse of the Pro-Choice Movement?

Jon Shields, a professor of government at Claremont College, argues in First Things that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that removed abortion from the realm of democratic judgment by the citizenry and elevated it, implausibly, to the status of a constitutional right, has actually precipitated the demise of the pro-choice movement.

Perhaps he's right, but whether he is or isn't he does make an interesting argument. Here's the crux of it:

Roe v. Wade did far more than create a constitutional right to abortion—it crippled the pro-choice and energized the pro-life movement, creating one of the largest campaigns of moral suasion in American history. Even while nationalizing abortion politics, the Supreme Court’s decision also localized and personalized the issue by pushing it almost entirely out of legislatures, giving an unexpected opening to the pro-life movement to affect the culture, and in turn the wider political debate, in ways no one expected.

Before Roe, the pro-choice movement was truly a movement: It organized letter-writing campaigns, subverted restrictive abortion laws through underground networks of clergy and doctors, and eagerly sought opportunities to debate pro-life advocates. After Roe, obviated by its near-total victory, the movement almost collapsed. It has never fully recovered its former strength and energy.

The impressive efforts of pro-life citizens suggest that Roe did not render them powerless, as both liberals and conservatives sometimes assert. Yes, Roe effectively disenfranchised pro-life citizens by denying them the right to vote over the basic contours of abortion policy. But it also decimated the pro-choice movement and cleared the way for a massive campaign of moral suasion. Much like women in the nineteenth century, pro-life activists have found ways to shape our culture and politics without the franchise.

Skeptics might reasonably question the influence of the pro-life movement, especially since abortion opinion has hardly changed since Roe was decided. That fact alone, however, may indicate the power — not the weakness — of the pro-life movement.

While the country has become far more socially liberal on a large range of questions since Roe, abortion opinion has remained a strange outlier. In fact, pro-choice sentiment stopped increasing after Roe altogether, even though it had grown dramatically in years prior. Roe represented an end to the rapid liberalization of abortion attitudes, perhaps in part because of the utter collapse of the pro-choice movement. Recent surveys find that young Americans are less pro-choice than their elders, even though they are more secular and more likely to support same-sex marriage.

Abortion rates, meanwhile, have steadily declined by nearly a third since peaking in the early 1980s. Those rates would almost certainly have been higher absent the pro-life movement’s massive campaign of moral suasion.

I, for one, hope Shields is correct, but I wonder. Abortion rates may be down by a third from their peak, but that still means that there are a million unborn babies whose lives are snuffed out every year. That doesn't sound like most people's idea of winning.

What's Needed, What's Not

Mark Twain once observed that there are thousands of people hacking at the branches of evil for every one cutting at the root. Perhaps our media and politicians, in their zeal to do something, anything to control firearms in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting are good examples of Twain's aphorism.

John Fund Sails against the media wind with another good column on the media frenzy over guns and the alleged need to control them. He makes several points about gun control which can be summarized in these four statements:

1. It isn't going to happen.
2. It wouldn't work if it did happen.
3. Most people in the media talking about "assault" weapons don't know what they're talking about.
4. A better solution would be to remove the barriers to treatment - erected by leftist groups like the ACLU in the 1970s - for people who show signs of mental illness.

In some ways the debate over gun control is like the debate over the fiscal cliff. The left is adamant that we adopt measures (taxing the rich, banning semi-automatic rifles) that don't address the problem and won't do any good. Nevertheless, their proposals are not outrageous in principle. If raising taxes on millionaires or doing away with semi-automatic rifles would solve our debt problem or prevent mass murders then I'd be for them.

But they won't, and therefore I'm not. Such measures would only succeed in further restricting our freedom which may be one reason why the left is so eager to implement them.

Diverting Killer Rocks

Astronomer Phil Plait gives a 14 minute TED Talk in which he describes the problem posed by asteroids whose orbits take them into a collision course with earth. He also discusses some current strategies for dealing with these threats if they're discovered in time.

Mr. Plait tries a bit too hard to be funny and his audience seems to have a low humor threshhold, both of which are somewhat irritating, but if you can tolerate that sort of thing, his talk is interesting:

For Christmas

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken. The story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities are purely coincidental.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. His ex-wife had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into sex-slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her now and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was a living hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on his birthday she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him. Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

The Story of St. Nicholas

Theologian James Parker offers us a brief history of the original Santa Claus (a transliteration of "Saint Nicholas") and how the myths around him grew.

Here's an excerpt:

Most people simply do not realize the rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized and sanitized contemporary version pales in comparison with the deeply Christian ethos and content of the original.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him in the fear and admonition of the Lord and taught him "sacred books" from the age of 5. He was forced to grow up quickly upon the sudden death of his parents.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he had the desire to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute with three daughters. Without marriage dowry money, the daughters would be condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later as a teenager, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine. Upon returning home he felt called to ministry and was subsequently ordained. He spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly elected him bishop, and he became known for his holiness, passion for the Gospel and zeal. He challenged the old gods and paganism at the principal temple in his district (to the god Artemis), and it was said that the evil spirits "fled howling before him."

There's more to the story. Nicholas was imprisoned under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan.

Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they refused to renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was the color of vermilion. Bishop Nicholas was also said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

Nicholas opposed Arianism, the belief that Jesus was a created being and not divine, and according to some perhaps apocryphal traditions, actually attended the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. where he got into a physical altercation with Arias himself.

Whether that's true or not, the story of St. Nicholas is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular mythology surrounding him. Read the whole thing at the link.

Microfinance on Christmas

Looking for a way to help the working poor this Christmas? Give microfinance a look. I'm partial to a group called Kiva, but there are dozens of similar organizations out there doing good work in third world countries. Let me use Kiva to illustrate how they work.

If you click on the link to Kiva it takes you to their home page. From there you select from hundreds of small entrepreneurs looking for a loan to help start or sustain a business. If you navigate around the site you'll see that you can select borrowers by country, type of business, etc.

You then click on the "Lend $25" button next to the person or group you've selected to receive your loan. That will take you to a page where you give your credit card and billing info.

You're now finished, and you've done something to actually help people help themselves.

The borrower eventually pays back the loan and the money is placed back in your account. You can reclaim it or lend it out again to someone else, adding each time to the principle if you wish. In effect, you become a no-interest bank.

Check it out. It's a wonderful gift to give someone on Christ's birthday.

Protecting the Children

President Obama last week assured us that he would do something to protect our children from future tragedies like the Sandy Hook massacre. Many politicians and pundits are nodding in agreement that we must do something to prevent our children from being victimized by the psychopaths that lurk in every neighborhood.

Yet as Michael Ramirez pointedly observes, there's another form of deadly insanity being inflicted upon our children, and the culprits are some of the same people, the president included, who are pontificating on the need to protect them.

Soon interest payments on the debt will consume almost our entire annual GDP. What are the president and his minions in congress doing about it? Talking about taxing the rich - a solution which will garner about enough revenue to run the government for a couple of days - and raising the debt ceiling so that we can borrow and spend even more money and go even further into debt.

The people in charge are running the country into the ground, consigning our children to a future of permanent hardship and joblessness, and all the while blathering about the need to "protect" them. We decided not to protect them in one way that really matters when we decided last November 6th to reelect this crowd.

Atheistic Versions of Intelligent Design

People sometimes ask who, or what, if not God, any candidate for an intelligent designer of the universe could be. The purpose of the question is to show that intelligent design (ID) is an inherently religious hypothesis because any such candidate would have to be God.

It's quite a bad argument but strong enough to convince such experts in philosophy as Judge John Jones, author of the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision a few years back.

There are several possible non-theistic candidates for the role of "universe designer," but even if there weren't, even if the God of Judeo-Christian tradition were the only possible candidate, that would not make ID a religious hypothesis. It would be a hypothesis with religious implications, certainly, but then it's hard to think of any hypothesis, scientific or metaphysical, theistic or naturalistic, that doesn't have religious implications.

Anyway, a physicist at the University of Washington proposes that the universe is intelligently designed and has suggested a way to test this idea. It follows that, if ID can be tested, it belongs in the realm of scientific inquiry. To be sure, the scientist, a physicist named Martin Savage, does not think that the designer is God, a fact which also shows that ID is not a religious theory.

The Seattle Times explains:

It is entirely plausible, says University of Washington physics professor Martin Savage, that our universe and everything in it is one huge computer simulation being run by our descendants.

You, me, this newspaper, the room you're sitting in — everything we think of as reality is actually being generated by vast, powerful supercomputers of the future. If that sounds mind-blowing, Savage and his colleagues think they've come up with a way to test whether it's true.

Their paper, "Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation," has kindled a lively international discussion about the simulation argument, which was first put forth in 2003 by University of Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom.

Bostrom, the Oxford professor, first proposed the idea that we live in a computer simulation in 2003. In a 2006 article, he said there was probably no way to know for certain if it is true.

Bostrom's idea is that at some point in the future, our descendents, or some other beings, would evolve such high levels of intelligence and technology that they would be able to construct supercomputers capable of generating simulated universes much like current computers can be programmed to generate simulated games.

He goes on to suggest that the world we find ourselves in is, in fact, a simulation produced by these future intelligent agents. One motivation for such a strange notion is that the physical properties of the universe have astonishingly precise values and the whole universe seems intentionally designed for life. This fine-tuning of the universe points insistently to intelligent engineering, but so far from being God, the engineer, according to these thinkers, is probably your great grandson, so metaphysical naturalists and other theophobes need not be alarmed.

The problem is, though, that efforts like Savage's and Bostrom's are giving up the game. It's pretty hard to maintain the pretense that ID is religious when so many atheists are advocating it.

These speculations also illustrate the lengths to which people will go to avoid the conclusion that God exists. They remind me of the 1954 quote from Nobel Prize winning biologist George Wald in Scientific American:

There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility. Spontaneous generation, that life arose from non-living matter was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others. That leaves us with the only possible conclusion that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God. I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to evolution.

An amazing admission. It confirms what G.K. Chesterton once said: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything."

Do Armed Civilians Save Lives?

Law professor Eugene Volokh considers the question posed above and discusses four instances that he's immediately aware of in which an armed civilian was able to prevent or minimize a mass murder. Volokh writes:

Backers of laws that let pretty much all law-abiding carry concealed guns in public places often argue that these laws will sometimes enable people to stop mass shootings. Opponents occasionally ask: If that’s so, what examples can one give of civilians armed with guns stopping such shootings? Sometimes, I hear people asking if even one such example can be found, or saying that they haven’t heard even one such example.

Naturally, such examples will be rare, partly because mass shootings are rare, partly because many mass shootings happen in supposedly “gun-free” zones (such as schools, universities, or private property posted with a no-guns sign) in which gun carrying isn’t allowed, and partly for other reasons. Moreover, at least some examples are contested, because it might be unclear ... whether the shooter had been planning to kill more people when he was stopped. But here are instances that I have seen, not counting killings stopped by people who were off-duty police officers (or police officers from other jurisdictions) at the time of the shooting.

You can read about his examples at the link. Meanwhile, this chart shows some interesting data from 2010. In cases in which the murder weapon was known, slayings committed with the aid of rifles, including semi-automatic weapons such as were used in the Sandy Hook massacre, were a small fraction of the murders in this country. And, it was a bit of a surprise to learn, twice as many people were murdered with fists and feet than with shotguns or semi-automatic rifles:

Atheism's Moral Compass

Polly Toynbee is the outgoing president of the British Humanist Association. In a column for The Guardian she talks about what the incoming president can expect. Toward the end she says this:

For instance, he [her successor] might take offence at the charge that without God, unbelievers have no moral compass. Hitler and Stalin were atheists, that's where it leads. We can ripost with religious atrocities, Godly genocides or the Inquisition, but that's futile. Wise atheists make no moral claims, seeing good and bad randomly spread among humanity regardless of faith. Humans do have a hardwired moral sense, every child born with an instinct for justice that makes us by nature social animals, not needing revelations from ancient texts. The idea that morality can only be frightened into us artificially, by divine edict, is degrading.

Ms Toynbee packs a great deal of confusion into just a few sentences. let's examine her claims. She writes:

For instance, he might take offence at the charge that without God, unbelievers have no moral compass. Hitler and Stalin were atheists, that's where it leads. We can ripost with religious atrocities, Godly genocides or the Inquisition, but that's futile.

When a Christian kills innocent people he is profoundly betraying the truth and the God he professes to believe in. When an atheist of the Hitler/Stalin variety slaughters innocent people he's not betraying anything. There's nothing in atheism, qua atheism, that imposes any objective moral sanction at all. If there's no God then whatever a person chooses to do is neither right nor wrong. It just is.

Wise atheists make no moral claims, seeing good and bad randomly spread among humanity regardless of faith.

It is wise of atheists to make no moral claims, primarily because the atheist has no grounds for making such claims. If there's no transcendent, personal, moral authority then good and bad simply reduce to what we like and what we don't and that varies from person to person. Moreover, since good and bad are person-relative no one can say that anything any other person does is either good or bad in a moral sense. The most they can say is that I like it or I don't like it.

Humans do have a hardwired moral sense, every child born with an instinct for justice that makes us by nature social animals, not needing revelations from ancient texts.

We are indeed hardwired for morality, we have a law written on our hearts, as Paul puts it in his letter to the Roman Christians, but the question is what is it that wired us this way? If it was simply blind impersonal forces then why should anyone feel obligated to follow the impulses that our wiring prod us toward.

Furthermore, we're also wired to be aggressive, violent, promiscuous, selfish and bigoted. If evolution has wired our behavior and desires why are these not as worthy of being followed as the impulse to charity and kindness? Why is one set of impulses more "moral" than the other? The humanist atheist is tacitly comparing both sets of behaviors to some higher standard in order to discriminate between them while at the same time denying that any higher standard actually exists.

The idea that morality can only be frightened into us artificially, by divine edict, is degrading.

Why? Is a child degraded when the parent demands a certain behavior of the child on pain of punishment? Fear can be a good teacher. But, in any case, Ms Toynbee shows an unfortunate lack of understanding of what it is that motivates, or should motivate, Christian morality. The Christian believes four propositions about God that inform his or her moral behavior:

1. God created each of us.
2. God is perfectly good and knows what is right and best for us.
3. God's love for us is so great that he gave his human life so that we could live forever.
4. God asks in return only that we love him.

Since Christians believe the first three of those propositions to be true they regard it as inconceivably ungrateful to refuse the fourth. The Christian gives himself or herself to God in love and when one loves God one seeks to live the way God desires us to live even if we're sometimes tempted to do otherwise. Moral behavior is not motivated by fear, it's motivated by love and gratitude. That makes all the difference in the world.

Subsidizing Failure

Michael Gerson calls upon President Obama in a Washington Post column to focus some attention on one of the most appalling social problems in this nation - one that gets swept under the rug by liberals and conservatives alike - the plight of black males. As Gerson tells us:

The problem has gotten worse for decades, in good economic times and bad. Others benefited from the tight labor markets of the 1990s. African American men did not. By 2004, more than half of all black men in their 20s were unemployed. And the size of this problem gets consistently underestimated, since employment figures exclude the incarcerated. A problem that seems insoluble is thus rendered invisible.

Social scientists debate which are the greatest causes of these problems, but they generally agree on the list. Declining blue-collar employment opportunities. Failing schools. Lingering racism. Absent parents (just 37 percent of black children are raised in two-parent families). The growth of an “oppositional culture” that undermines achievement. Child-support policies that unintentionally penalize honest work (up to half of black males are involved in the child-support system). An incarceration boom that has made ex-offenders less employable.

Some of these trends gather a disturbing momentum. More than 50 percent of prison inmates are parents with minor children — and those children are significantly more likely to be suspended or expelled from school. Issues of economics and values are often impossible to disentangle. “As relative rewards to mainstream legal work of less-educated young black men have declined,” argues Holzer, “so have their own attachment to the mainstream worlds of school and work and to mainstream behaviors and values more broadly.”

So why, after decades of government subsidies to the black community and numerous efforts, at great expense, to lift the poor out of poverty, is the situation growing worse? Gerson lists several factors which receive blame:

Social scientists debate which are the greatest causes of these problems, but they generally agree on the list. Declining blue-collar employment opportunities. Failing schools. Lingering racism. Absent parents (just 37 percent of black children are raised in two-parent families). The growth of an “oppositional culture” that undermines achievement. Child-support policies that unintentionally penalize honest work (up to half of black males are involved in the child-support system). An incarceration boom that has made ex-offenders less employable.

Yet none of this sounds quite right. Times were a lot harder for blacks prior to the civil rights era and yet the dysfunctions we see in the black community today did not exist on nearly the scale then that they do now. Urban schools today receive far more aid than they did during the 1930s and 40s. College, food, medical care, and housing are all much more available today than for their great grandparents. Black kids have far more opportunities to succeed today than ever before.

What's different is the welfare culture which has devastated the black family over the last sixty years. Welfare subsidies given to poor young mothers make husbands superfluous and as a result illegitimacy is the norm in poor black (and white) communities. Poverty will never be overcome when entire generations of young males are growing up with no father figure, no positive male role model in their lives to teach them self-discipline, a strong work ethic, respect for women, and love of family.

With no father available to impose behavioral standards and expectations young men gravitate to the street where all the lessons they learn - lessons about manhood, the value of women, the importance of work - are all socially and personally destructive.

When you subsidize something you simply get more of it, and family breakdown and its attendant dysfunctions is what the entitlement culture subsidizes. Little wonder we're getting more of it.

One Way to Stop School Mass Murders

My friend Matt sends along the link to this CNN news report that explains how one school is protecting its children from the psychopaths among us.

Some people are calling for placing armed guards in every school, but I don't know that that's such a good idea. Why should a school district pay people to sit around in each school in the district doing essentially nothing every day of the school year when administrators with the proper training and ready access to a weapon can provide the same protection as part of their regular duties?

The school in the CNN report allows teachers as well as administrators to carry firearms, and while I'm not sure how I feel about that, given the numerous problems that could result from guns being stolen from teachers and so on, I do feel that armed personnel in the schools will put a speedy end, one way or another, to the horrific carnage that occurs when a maniac looks for helpless, defenseless victims.

Humanism and Nihilism

Philosopher William Lane Craig once write an op-ed in the Washington Post, of all places, in which he succinctly explained the problem with naturalism, particularly the naturalist who is a secular humanist. Humanism is essentially the view that we should act so as to promote the well-being of humanity.

There are Christian humanists (indeed, all Christians should be humanists in this sense) and there are secular humanists who are atheistic or naturalistic. This variety of humanism denies any supernatural sanction for their humanism. They believe that we should care about humanity because it's just the right thing to do. This is rather silly since it's based on an obvious circularity: we should care about others because caring about others is what we should do.

Part of Craig's argument parallels almost exactly one of the major themes in my book In the Absence of God (see link at upper right of this page), and in fact, Craig even uses the same words that I use as my title. Do you think maybe he read In the Absence of God?

Anyway, here's part of his column, which, unfortunately, is no longer available online:

• The theist maintains that objective moral values are grounded in God.
• The humanist maintains that objective moral values are grounded in human beings.
• The nihilist maintains that moral values are ungrounded and therefore ultimately subjective and illusory.

The humanist is thus engaged in a struggle on two fronts: on the one side against the theists and on the other side against the nihilists. This is important because it underlines the fact that humanism is not a default position.

That is to say, even if the theist were wrong, that would not mean that the humanist is right. For if God does not exist, maybe it is the nihilist who is right. The humanist needs to defeat both the theist and the nihilist. In particular, he must show that in the absence of God, nihilism would not be true.

In fact, the inescapable conclusion of atheism is moral nihilism. In chapter 5 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, atheistic philosopher Alex Rosenberg describes the downside of the moral nihilism which he himself embraces: In a world where physics fixes all the facts, it’s hard to see how there could be room for moral facts. In a universe headed for its own heat death, there is no cosmic value to human life, your own or anyone else’s. Why bother to be good?.... First, nihilism can’t condemn Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or those who fomented the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan one. If there is no such thing as “morally forbidden,” then what Mohamed Atta did on September 11, 2001, was not morally forbidden. Of course, it was not permitted either. But still, don’t we want to have grounds to condemn these monsters? Nihilism seems to cut that ground out from under us. Second, if we admit to being nihilists, then people won’t trust us. We won’t be left alone when there is loose change around. We won’t be relied on to be sure small children stay out of trouble. Third, and worst of all, if nihilism gets any traction, society will be destroyed. We will find ourselves back in Thomas Hobbes’s famous state of nature, where “the life of man is solitary, mean, nasty, brutish and short.” Surely, we don’t want to be nihilists if we can possibly avoid it. (Or at least, we don’t want the other people around us to be nihilists.).... Yet, in the absence of God, Rosenberg admits, there's really no way to escape the conclusion that nihilism is the most plausible option: To avoid these outcomes, people have been searching for scientifically respectable justification of morality for least a century and a half. The trouble is that over the same 150 years or so, the reasons for nihilism have continued to mount. Both the failure to find an ethics that everyone can agree on and the scientific explanation of the origin and persistence of moral norms have made nihilism more and more plausible while remaining just as unappetizing. He's surely correct that if God doesn't exist then there's nothing upon which to base objective moral values. It's just that this is either unrecognized by most atheists or it's too unpalatable for them to accept. Unwilling to admit that philosopher Richard Rorty was right when he stated that "For the secular man there's no answer to the question, 'Why not be cruel?'" and unwilling to accept the existence of a transcendent moral authority as the necessary ground of all moral obligation, they remain irrationally suspended in moral mid-air.

They try to live as if there are objective moral obligations incumbent upon us all while simultaneously denying that objective moral obligations exist. They live as if there is a God while simultaneously denying that God exists.

And then they scoff at the theist for being irrational.