Media Blackout

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey has a good roundup of the articles that are being written about the media's complete lack of interest in the trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell who NightLine's Terry Moran said may be the most successful serial killer in American history.

Kermit Gosnell

The major media, however, are evidently busy on other matters and are ill-disposed to call the public's attention to the horrors that routinely occurred in Gosnell's clinic. Molly Hemingway in an excellent piece at Patheos offers a sarcastic but apt description of the media's indifference to the issues involved:

And what policies could possibly be under discussion with this Gosnell trial? Other than, you know, abortion clinic hiring practices? And enforcement of sanitary conditions? And laws on abortion practices that extend to killing live infants by beheading them? And the killing of their mothers? And state or federal oversight of clinics with records of botched abortions? And pain medication practices? And how to handle the racist practices of some clinics? And how big of a problem this is (don’t tell anyone but another clinic nearby to Gosnell was shut down this week over similar sanitation concerns)? And disposal of babies’ bodies? And discussion of whether it’s cool to snip baby’s spines after they’re born? And how often are abortion clinics inspected anyway? What are the results of inspections? When emergency rooms take in victims of botched abortions, do they report that? How did this clinic go 17 years without an inspection? Gosh, I just can’t think of a single health policy angle here. Can you?

Hemingway points out that the media is all too happy to jump on pro-life targets, but an abortionist who commits ghastly crimes is granted media silence.

Just think, in the last year, we saw the media drop any pretense of objectivity and bully the Susan G. Komen Foundation into funding Planned Parenthood. And then we had how many months of coverage focused on someone calling a birth control activist a bad name [a reference to the Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke dust-up]? And who can forget every pro-life person in the country being asked to respond to Todd Akin’s stupid remarks about rape?

Ed Morrissey adds that we were treated to far more coverage of Michael Vick's mistreatment of dogs than to Kermit Gosnell's grisly murders of live-born infants and some of their mothers as well.

Photo of the media section of the courtroom taken during the trial

Some reporters justified their inattention by pleading that this was nothing more than a local crime story, and was beneath their pay grade. Of course, the Trayvon Martin shooting was a local crime story, too, but that didn't stop the media from doing everything they could to publicize it.

Observing that reporters would have been all over this case had it presented an opportunity to embarrass a republican politician Hemingway tutors reporters on how they might frame the question to get the opinions of liberal politicians like Mr. Obama on the trial:

See, the way you get Presidents and others to talk about uninteresting little local crime stories is that you ask them to.

I offered this [example] up to Kliff [a WaPo reporter who covers health and abortion issues but who has been AWOL on this one] earlier but I’ll share it widely:

"President Obama worked against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act back in the Illinois Senate. He said he thought it was unnecessary and that he was worried it would undermine Roe. How has the Gosnell case affected his thinking on protections for children such as the ones Gosnell is accused of killing?"

Variations of that would work on any and all pro-choice politicians, particularly the ones that share Obama’s extreme views on this topic. Remember how reporters asked every pro-life individual in America (or so it seemed back in October) to respond to Todd Akin’s remarks on rape? Go ahead and ask just a few prominent pro-choice activists and pols for their take on Gosnell. And try to ask some tough questions. No, like real questions.

Both Morrissey's and Hemingway's articles are worth taking fifteen minutes to read, and they're powerful indictments of the pathetic state to which our media has fallen. Modern media personnel are not journalists, nor are they reporters. Those occupations are noble and have a certain ethical standard to which their practitioners adhere. The people in the left/liberal media today who arrogate these titles to themselves are not professionals except insofar as they get paid. They're in fact simple hacks, propagandists of the ideological left who see it as their mission not to inform the public but to promote the left/liberal agenda.

Showing the public the inhumanity to which that agenda leads by revealing what's going on in our neighborhood abortion clinic is counterproductive. It doesn't help the cause. So it gets ignored.

If you think this is a bit too critical ask yourself two questions: Had you heard of Kermit Gosnell before reading this post? Do you think that had Gosnell been shooting babies with automatic weapons instead of snipping their spines with scissors you would have heard of him before now?

Tough Times for Enviros

It's been a rough couple of weeks for those who wish to convince us that the earth is on the way to becoming an unendurable hothouse and that hydraulic fracking as a means of freeing natural gas from shale formations is fraught with all manner of environmental hazards.

The global-warming alarmists have had to suffer through a series of articles on research that shows that, even though we've been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at rates guaranteed to give Al Gore apoplexy, global temperatures have for the last ten years been flatlining. This is inexplicable on all the models climatologists rely upon to scare the bejabbers out of the rest of us with terrifying predictions of "hockey stick" temperature increases and rising sea levels:

"The idea that CO2 is the tail that wags the dog is no longer scientifically tenable," said Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com, a website devoted to countering the prevailing acceptance of man-made global warming. In recent weeks, Der Spiegel, the Telegraph and The Economist have reported the unexpected stabilizing of global surface temperatures. Even former NASA scientist and outspoken climate change activist James Hansen has acknowledged the 10-year lull.

Morano said: "In the peer-reviewed literature we're finding that hundreds of factors influence global temperature, everything from ocean cycles to the tilt of the earth's axis to water vapor, methane, cloud feedback, volcanic dust, all of these factors are coming together. They're now realizing it wasn't the simple story we've been told of your SUV is creating a dangerously warm planet."

The stabilization [of surface temperatures] suggests that computer models which predict harsh consequences of global warming may need reassessing.

As The Economist put it on March 30, "It may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy."

Indeed, no one disputes that levels of carbon dioxide are increasing globally, but CO2's impact has not been as great as many scientists had predicted.

"In the peer-reviewed literature, they've tried to explain away this lull," said Morano. "In the proceedings of the National Academy of Science a year or two ago they had a study blaming Chinese coal use for the lack of global warming. So, in an ironic twist, global warming proponents are now claiming that that coal use is saving us from dangerous global warming."

The article also includes responses by other researchers who think we're still overheating the planet, but their argument amounts to asseverations that thousands of crack scientists believe we're headed for doomsville and they can't all be wrong. Of course, if these scientists are all relying on the same incorrect assumptions about the ways in which the atmosphere behaves, assumptions which fail to account for the stagnant temperatures of the last decade, then it's not hard to imagine how they could all arrive at an incorrect conclusion.

To make things worse for the environmentalists, now comes a report on a study done at Durham University which shows that fracking, which has been blamed by environmental activists for, inter alia, contaminated water tables and earthquakes, is very unlikely to be a significant cause of either of these.

Earthquakes have been touted as one of the negative effects of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas from shale rock. In fact, last year an Ohio tremor was purported to have been caused by fracking activities.

Although some studies claim to find evidence that the process of pumping water and chemicals into the rock leads to earthquakes, a recent study is questioning just how likely it is such quakes would even be felt. The results of a study released Wednesday from Durham University found fracking is “not significant” when it comes to causing earthquakes.

“We have examined not just fracking-related occurrences but all induced earthquakes – that is, those caused by human activity – since 1929. It is worth bearing in mind that other industrial-scale processes can trigger earthquakes including mining, filling reservoirs with water and the production of oil and gas. Even one of our cleanest forms of energy, geothermal, has some form in this respect,” professor Richard Davies with the Durham Energy Institute said in a statement.

“In almost all cases, the seismic events caused by hydraulic fracturing have been undetectable other than by geoscientists. It is also low compared to other manmade triggers. Earthquakes caused by mining can range from a magnitude of 1.6 to 5.6, reservoir-filling from 2.0 to 7.9 and waste disposal from 2.0 to 5.7.”

Fracking activities, Davies said, release an amount of energy that is “equivalent to or even less than someone jumping off a ladder onto the floor.”

It's one of the beauties of science that speculation is eventually compelled to yield to data. It's a good rule to follow that when people are running about with hysterical claims that the sky is falling its best to treat the alarums with a healthy dose of skepticism until the data is all in.

Sick

When it comes to hating one's political opponents it's hard to beat the left for sheer meanness. Margaret Thatcher died yesterday at the age of 87. For those too young to remember she was the Prime Minister of England throughout the 1980s, a woman who almost single-handedly restored England to fiscal health and military formidability. She rescued her people from economic malaise, but her methods were despised by the left because she reined in the labor unions and stripped them of much of their power. Together with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul she was also credited with having broken the stranglehold the Soviet Union had over Eastern Europe, which two achievements probably account for much of the left's animus against her.

She left office 22 years ago, but such is the hatred of some on the left that they've been partying in the streets of England ever since word of her life-ending stroke became public.

There truly is something sick about people who would behave this way. Some of these people were probably children when she was Prime Minister, they probably have little personal memory of her, and yet they're filled with so much spite that they'll go to the trouble to join in a demonstration celebrating her death. One wonders what it is about leftism that so many people like this are attracted to it:

There's more video here if you have the stomach for it. Thatcher was a great woman, but even were she not it's sad that those who disagreed with her policies feel the need to rejoice in her death. It's the sort of behavior one expects from, well, savages. You can read a much more favorable opinion of her legacy here.

Dismal

A post at HotAir by Ed Morrissey casts a gimlet eye on White House claims that our economy is improving. Despite historic highs in the stock market the prospects for young people graduating from high school and college this spring are exceedingly poor. Morrissey uses data from a U.S. Census Bureau report to give us some perspective:

As President Barack Obama began his second term in January, nearly 50 million Americans were living below the income line that defines poverty, according to the bureau. That's one out of every six Americans or 16 percent. When Mr. Obama took office in 2008 the number was 13.2 percent.

Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as the modern-day food-stamp benefit is known, has soared 70% since 2008 to a record 47.8 million as of December 2012. Congressional budget analysts think participation will rise again this year and dip only slightly in coming years.

At the end of 2008, at the depth of the Great Recession and as President Obama first took office, that number was below 40 million.

Poverty is up because job creation, and thus employment, is dismal:

We have added 10 million people into poverty since Obama took office, most of whom fell into poverty after the stimulus and the technical recovery began. In comparison, we have only added 123,000 jobs over the same period ... which showed a seasonally-adjusted employment level in December 2008 of 143.369 million, compared to 143.392 million in February. The civilian participation rate in the workforce ... has dropped from 65.8 percent to 63.5 percent during that time, equaling August 2012 for the worst since September 1981.

No president has presided over an economy this bad for this long since the Great Depression of the 1930s and as long as Mr. Obama and his party refuse to allow the development of our energy wealth, continue to impose burdensome taxes and regulations on businesses, and insist on raising employers' costs by compelling them to conform to the requirements of Obamacare, there's no reason to think it'll get any better.

There's a sad irony here for graduates and African-Americans, the two groups who suffer the most in an economy that offers few jobs. These two demographic groups were the most enthusiastic supporters of the man and the party whose policies are most responsible for their bleak employment prospects.

Your Child Is Not Your Child

MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry is not shy about telling us how liberal/progressives view the family, and particularly how they feel about your quaint notion that your children are yours:

At least as far back as Plato the left has been demanding that children be seen as not belonging to their parents but to the state. They are a kind of communal property and how children should be raised and what they should be taught should be determined by the state.

Marx believed that the traditional family was a bourgeois institution that needed to be discarded. B.F. Skinner envisioned in Walden II a community in which children were taken from their parents (as Plato advised in The Republic) and raised by the community. Numerous others have expressed similar aspirations.

Such ideas are usually confined to academic circles, however, because to promote them publicly would be to to invite derision and discredit and make it difficult to achieve the political power necessary to enact them.

Nevertheless, the left's long, slow march through the institutions that commenced in the early 20th century and began to bear fruit in the 1960s - the relaxation of divorce laws, the disapprobation of parental authority, both in the home and in the now obsolete doctrine of in loco parentis in our public schools, the acceptance of alternatives to traditional marriage - has been tending inexorably toward the dissolution of the family as an essential social unit. It has been the lodestone toward which liberal policies have inclined for over a century.

The fact that a mainstream cable news network feels confident enough to air an ad like this suggests that they believe themselves on the cusp of achieving the influence necessary to talk openly about dissolving the bonds of family and achieving their goal of social atomism. Sadly, they're probably not wrong about this.

George Orwell captured perfectly the leftist vision of what the state and the family should look like in his novel 1984. If you've never read it you should.

Touchdown Run

This will make your day. A seven-year old brain cancer victim named Jack Hoffman is a big fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, and some members of the team have taken him under their wing. They even had him suit up for their spring red/white game that culminates spring practice and got him on the field for a play. Watch:

You can read more about this wonderful gesture at HotAir. There are some fine young men on that Nebraska team.

The Dream and the Nightmare

Most biologists believe that evolutionary change proceeds gradually over long periods of time, but others hold to a view called punctuated equilibrium in which species enjoy long periods of stasis and stability punctuated by brief periods of rapid evolution.

Evolution, of course, adapts organisms to the environment they're in, and in the struggle for political survival nothing promotes survival like the ability of a politician to adapt his views quickly to conform to a fluid environment. Thus, we've witnessed in the last couple of weeks an astonishing series of rapid punctuations as one politician after another claims to be "evolving" on the issue of same-sex marriage (SSM). Previously firm convictions are willy-nilly mutating, as it were, to adapt them to the prevailing social and political climate and to make their survival more likely.

Ever since President Obama concluded his long, slow "evolution," filled, one imagines, with many agonizing hours of study and meditation, toward favoring SSM (spurred along, perhaps, by Vice-President Biden's awkward admission that it was really the President's position all along), there's been a flurry of similar "evolutions" by politicians of both parties toward the now fashionable view.

I'm not a politician and haven't myself evolved much in a while and don't expect that, short of some profound mutation in my thinking on this issue, I'll evolve much any time soon, and I thought I'd explain why. A recent post on the views of a gay man by the name of Doug Mainwaring who opposes gay marriage elicited a lot of comment from readers who wondered why anyone else should care if two people who love each other marry. There are economic advantages enjoyed by married persons that are denied to same-sex couples and this doesn't seem fair. Nor does it hurt Mainwaring if someone else marries so why should he object?

I think the matter is much deeper than this and that opposition to SSM is not motivated by any animus against gays, as some readers suggested, but rather by a desire to preserve the institution of marriage.

I take it as a given that traditional marriage, though often flawed in practice, is, on balance, a very good thing for society, indeed that it's crucially necessary for a healthy society. I also believe that gay marriage, on the other hand, is very bad for marriage, and is thus very bad for society. Here's why.

Marriage has traditionally been a union of one man and one woman, but as I've been arguing on VP ever since its inception, once we say that the gender of the parties in the union no longer matters we've lost the logical basis for saying that the number of persons in the union matters. Thus, once SSM is permitted there'll be no way that courts and legislatures will be able to deny "marriage" to any combination of persons of any gender (polyamory). Any attempt to limit marriage to two people will be seen as arbitrary and groundless.

Some people reply to this argument with incredulity. They say it's "icky" to think that people would do this, but the "icky" response is naive. People, or at least some of them, will do whatever they can do. Organizations already exist to promote polyamory and once gay marriage becomes legal there'll be a push to legalize group marriage, and the arguments will be exactly the same as though made in the campaign for SSM. If those arguments were sufficiently compelling to cause us to conclude that the definition of marriage should be expanded to include gays how can we not also include polyamorists?

Other people have very unusual relationships with their pets. A woman a few years back had a chimpanzee that she treated almost as though it were human (until she brought a friend over and the chimp ripped the friend's face off). Others leave huge inheritances to their pets. Suppose these people decide they want to actually marry their animals. On what grounds do we insist that marriage be between humans only? Why deny someone who deeply loves his or her chimpanzee the joy of being married to the beast? The point is that once we've crossed the Rubicon of saying that gender doesn't matter we can no longer say that anything matters.

Actor Jeremy Irons raises an interesting question at HuffPo. Spouses, he points out, are able to bequeath their estates to each other when they die without incurring taxes on the inheritance, but if the estate were left to a son or daughter, the offspring is taxed on the gift.

Irons asks, once we've decided that two consenting men can marry each other, what's to prevent a father from marrying his son so that he can leave his estate to his son without the son being burdened by inheritance tax? Irons' question could be extended, for that matter, to either parent and their children of either sex. Laws against incest are in place to prevent in-breeding, but if in-breeding is not a live possibility what reason could we have for denying parents the right to marry their adult children in order to achieve an economic benefit?

The possibilities are doubtless much more extensive than I've outlined here. Clever lawyers will be able to think of all sorts of implications of changing the law to permit SSM. It seems to me that doing so will be enormously disruptive to society and will ramify into every corner of our life and culture, and we'll all be affected by those ramifications whether we're in a traditional marriage or not. Indeed, one consequence will almost certainly be the destruction of marriage as a meaningful institution. When marriage means almost everything it won't mean anything. All of us will be affected because all of us will have to live in a society in which families are pretty much anything people want them to be.

Ever since the 19th century those who promote totalitarian communism, like Karl Marx, and those who write dystopian novels, like George Orwell, have promoted or depicted societies in which marriage ceases to exist and individuals become little more than social atoms, compliant putty in the hands of the state. Once SSM becomes the law of the land we will have, perhaps inadvertently, taken a big step toward making the dream of Marx and the nightmare of Orwell a reality in the 21st century.

Quantum Physics and Free Will

Tom Hartsfield has a column at Real Clear Science on how modern physics, particularly quantum mechanics, bears on the free will/determinism debate. He writes:

A determinist point of view says, "If I precisely know the complete workings of a system -- i.e., the position of every particle and how the laws of the universe operate -- I can tell you exactly what it will do in all future situations." For example, by measuring the sun's gravity and the motion of solar system bodies, we can calculate whether an asteroid will hit us or how to position a satellite in a complex orbit above the Earth.

But are you prepared to accept that your mind follows these same rules? That it is a machine which can be completely predicted, like pool balls on a felt table or comets circling a star? That you don't make choices: the choices are already made by the wiring patterns in your brain, and you just carry them out like a colossally complex adding machine? This is the philosophical endgame of classical physics (i.e., Newtonian physics) taken to its logical conclusion.

Those who accept this philosophy simply apply physics to the human brain: If we could know all the molecules and cells and what they were doing, we could predict human thought perfectly. In practice, of course, this is nearly impossible, but it is philosophically possible. And chilling.

Then along came quantum mechanics. When physicists observed that behavior at the atomic level was fundamentally indeterminate, the universal validity of classical physics, as well as philosophical determinism came into question. Physicists recoiled at the idea that their science could no longer claim to predict all things with infinite precision. But, that's what quantum mechanics teaches us. We absolutely cannot know exactly how something will turn out before it happens.

John Bell, in a famous 1964 paper, forced everyone to reconsider, both scientifically and philosophically, their support for determinism. His famous theorem, Bell's inequality, is an incredibly profound statement. This relatively simple mathematical proof, when applied to experimental results, gives us a choice: We must either give up determinism or give up the existence of an objective reality explained by science and measurable by humans with instruments. So if experiments on quantum phenomena are reliable, then Bell concludes that determinism is false. Most physicists agree.

Essentially, quantum mechanics tells us that there are things which we cannot know about the future, things which are not predetermined but happen with some factor of chance or randomness. Although many things in the world may be predicted, everything is not predetermined, and our actions do not unfold mechanically in a manner predetermined since the very moment of the Big Bang. Free will is preserved.

I happen to agree with Hartsfield's conclusion, but I don't think it follows from what he has said about quantum mechanics. What QM shows is that the behavior of subatomic particles is fundamentally unpredictable (or indeterministic), but that doesn't mean that our choices are not determined. To extrapolate from the micro-realm of particles to the relatively macro-realm of neuronic chemistry and electrochemical reactions in the brain would seem to require some sort of nexus that Hartsfield doesn't provide.

At any rate, following the links in his column leads to a discussion which does have some extraordinary consequences for the way we view the world. Put simply, given the confirmed behavior of the quantum world, one of the following three beliefs we commonly hold appears to be false:

1. Our belief that the rules of traditional logic hold always and everywhere.
2. Our belief that there's an objective world independent of our observation.
3. Our belief that no information-bearing signal can travel faster than the speed of light.

If any one of these beliefs is false it turns everything upside down. The world as we experience it is often a strange place, but the world as it really is is much more bizarre than we can imagine.

Bumbles and Fumbles

Joe Klein at Time is growing impatient. I suspect that much of the rest of the liberal media is also growing impatient, and not a little nervous. They've invested an enormous amount of their own credibility and also the credibility of liberalism itself in the Obama administration. If it fails not only would millions of people suffer economically, not only would there be a failed liberal president, but the whole liberal ideal of big government would be discredited. Another concern, by no means to be minimized, is that if the first black president, unlike the first black baseball player, turns out to be a mediocrity it'll dash the hopes of all who saw in him the political version of Jackie Robinson.

So liberals are getting impatient waiting for signs of success, indications that this administration knows what it's doing and is not just a bunch of bumbling incompetents.

Klein, who was a loyal Democratic foot-soldier and cheer-leader for each of Mr. Obama's last two campaigns, is not shy about telling us that his patience is wearing thin:

Let me try to understand this: the key incentive for small businesses to support Obamacare was that they would be able to shop for the best deals in health care superstores — called exchanges. The Administration has had three years to set up these exchanges. It has failed to do so.

This is a really bad sign. There will be those who argue that it’s not the Administration’s fault. It’s the fault of the 33 states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Nonsense. Where was the contingency planning? ....

[T]he Obama Administration has announced that it won’t have the exchanges ready in time, that small businesses will be offered one choice for the time being — for a year, at least. No doubt, small-business owners will be skeptical of the Obama Administration’s belief in the efficacy of the market system to produce lower prices through competition. That was supposed to be the point of this plan.

[W]e are now seeing weekly examples of this Administration’s inability to govern. Just a few weeks ago, I reported on the failure of the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs to come up with a unified electronic health care records system. There has also been the studied inattention to the myriad ineffective job-training programs scattered through the bureaucracy. There have been the oblique and belated efforts to reform Head Start, a $7 billion program that a study conducted by its own bureaucracy — the Department of Health and Human Services — has found nearly worthless. The list is endless.

Yes, the President has faced a terrible economic crisis — and he has done well to limit the damage. He has also succeeded in avoiding disasters overseas. But, as a Democrat — as someone who believes in activist government — he has a vested interest in seeing that federal programs actually work efficiently. I don’t see much evidence that this is anywhere near the top of his priorities.

Perhaps Mr. Obama's failure to make federal programs run efficiently is due to the fact that it's in the nature of government programs administered by bureaucracies to be ineffective, costly, and wasteful, and no politician, no matter how gifted, can change that. Or perhaps it's due to the fact that Mr. Obama just isn't all that interested in devoting the time and effort it takes to get things right in Washington when it would mean fewer rounds on the golf course, fewer days vacationing in exotic climes at taxpayer expense, or fewer opportunities to schmooze with adoring celebrities.

In any case, there've been those who long predicted what Klein is just now beginning to see. We were warned, for instance, two years before it passed that Obamacare was unworkable. We were told that Mr. Obama's misbegotten green energy subsidies were little more than paybacks to his political supporters. We could see, if we cared to, that the Obama stimulus was in large part a reward to labor unions for their support, and it was evident before 2008 that Mr. Obama possessed no significant qualifications for the office to which he has since risen.

We were repeatedly told all of this, the evidence was plain for all to discern, but Mr. Obama wielded several enormous advantages. He had that which is most compelling for the young, the uninformed, and the apathetic - he had charisma and style. Moreover, he offered the electorate the opportunity to share in the making of history by voting into the White House the first black president. To voters who couldn't care less about the details of the federal deficit or the Affordable Care and Protection Act the combination of personal magnetism and racial progress that Barack Obama embodied was irresistible.

Now, however, there are signs of growing concern among liberals that perhaps they've been seduced by a very charming man who was never what they had hoped he was. Some of them are beginning to apprehend that he is not the post-racial intellectual colossus, bestriding a world that would be healed just by virtue of his very presence, that they had envisioned him to be. He's really just a guy whose primary experience and qualification was organizing people in the streets of Chicago to demand a better deal from their city government. His rise to the highest office in the land is reminiscent of the Chauncy Gardener character in the movie Being There, and some liberals are growing alarmed that they didn't realize this before now.

Klein can complain about the Obama administration's incompetence, he can worry that it's fumbling the ball, but he has no one to blame for this but people like himself who adjured the rest of us in 2008 and 2012 not to look at the man's qualifications or record but to focus instead on his potential. That was bad advice for the nation back then, and it may wind up setting the cause of liberal/progressivism back a couple of decades - at least among those who are paying the bills in this country, if not among those who are living off the bill-payers.

A Gay Man on Gay Marriage

Recent Supreme Court cases have got everyone talking once again about gay marriage, but one voice that's seldom heard in this controversy is that of gay men who oppose gay marriage. Doug Mainwaring, co-founder of the National Capital Tea Party Patriots, is one such man and his essay in Public Discourse is worth reading by anyone concerned about this issue, especially gay men.

Mainwaring writes:

I wholeheartedly support civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, but I am opposed to same-sex marriage. Because activists have made marriage, rather than civil unions, their goal, I am viewed by many as a self-loathing, traitorous gay. So be it. I prefer to think of myself as a reasoning, intellectually honest human being.

The notion of same-sex marriage is implausible, yet political correctness has made stating the obvious a risky business. Genderless marriage is not marriage at all. It is something else entirely.

Opposition to same-sex marriage is characterized in the media, at best, as clinging to “old-fashioned” religious beliefs and traditions, and at worst, as homophobia and hatred.

I’ve always been careful to avoid using religion or appeals to tradition as I’ve approached this topic. And with good reason: Neither religion nor tradition has played a significant role in forming my stance. But reason and experience certainly have.

Mainwaring goes on to share his story, the story of his realization that he was homosexual and the struggles that ensued - his marriage, divorce and remarriage to the same woman - and then he says this:

Over several years, intellectual honesty led me to some unexpected conclusions: (1) Creating a family with another man is not completely equal to creating a family with a woman, and (2) denying children parents of both genders at home is an objective evil. Kids need and yearn for both.

Here’s a very sad fact of life that never gets portrayed on Glee or Modern Family: I find that men I know who have left their wives as they’ve come out of the closet often lead diminished, and in some cases nearly bankrupt, lives—socially, familially, emotionally, and intellectually. They adjust their entire view of the world and their role within it in order to accommodate what has become the dominant aspect of their lives: their homosexuality. In doing so, they trade rich lives for one-dimensional lives. Yet this is what our post-modern world has taught us to do. I went along with it for a long while, but slowly turned back when I witnessed my life shrinking and not growing.

In our day, prejudice against gays is just a very faint shadow of what it once was. But the abolition of prejudice against gays does not necessarily mean that same-sex marriage is inevitable or optimal. There are other avenues available, none of which demands immediate, sweeping, transformational legislation or court judgments.

We are in the middle of a fierce battle that is no longer about rights. It is about a single word, “marriage.” Two men or two women together is, in truth, nothing like a man and a woman creating a life and a family together. Gay and lesbian activists, and more importantly, the progressives urging them on, seek to redefine marriage in order to achieve an ideological agenda that ultimately seeks to undefine families as nothing more than one of an array of equally desirable “social units,” and thus open the door to the increase of government’s role in our lives.

And while same-sex marriage proponents suggest that the government should perhaps just stay out of their private lives, the fact is, now that children are being engineered for gay and lesbian couples, a process that involves multiple other adults who have potential legal custody claims on these children, the potential for government’s involvement in these same-sex marriage households is staggering.

Statists see great value in slowly chipping away at the bedrock of American culture: faith and family life. The more that traditional families are weakened in our daily experience by our laws, the more that government is able to freely insert itself into our lives in an authoritarian way. And it will. Marriage is not an elastic term. It is immutable. It offers the very best for children and society. We should not adulterate nor mutilate its definition, thereby denying its riches to current and future generations.

I've only selected a few passages from all that Mainwaring has to say. There's much more in his essay. Readers will perhaps find some of his opinions hard to accept, but it's somehow refreshing to hear someone who has a foot in both communities, a man who is very sympathetic to the struggles of gay men, speak out so strongly in favor of not tinkering with the definition of marriage.

An Inconvenient Truth

Governments around the globe, including our own, have been panicked by the Al Gores of the world into spending billions of dollars to prevent what has been prophesied to be an almost certain eco-catastrophe. The earth is warming, we are warned, and the proof is irrefragable, just look at the hockey stick graph. Anyone who questions or doubts the conclusions of the climatologists who predict disaster has been labelled a public menace deserving banishment and maybe even prison.

But, like similar scares in the past which ultimately came to naught, it seems that there isn't really any significant warming occurring at all and that whatever is happening to our climate, if anything, it's by no means clear that humans have anything to do with it.

A recent article in The Economist, a journal which has been sympathetic to the global warming alarmists, makes the point:

Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models. If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

In other words, the skyrocketing temperatures predicted by Al Gore and illustrated by the alarming hockey stick graph simply aren't happening and climatologists don't have a good explanation as to why.

The top graph above shows the projected sharp, "hockey stick" rise in global temperatures that had been expected over the last decade. The bottom graph shows the actual data.

The models used to predict disaster seem to be inaccurate and several competing models show much less dire effects from atmospheric CO2. The Economist also points out that temperature fluctuations may be due to natural causes whose effects had been underestimated while the consequences of human activity have been overestimated:

the anthropogenic global-warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of two in the second half of the 20th century.” It is possible, therefore, that both the rise in temperatures in the 1990s and the flattening in the 2000s have been caused in part by natural variability.

What conclusions should we draw from this? The first is that Al Gore has made himself very rich by frightening people into believing on the basis of very ambiguous evidence that the apocalypse is nigh.

The second is that drastic government programs that would wreak havoc on national economies and industries in order to mitigate CO2 emissions are at best premature and perhaps unnecessary.

The third is that it's prudent to be open-minded but skeptical of claims of impending disaster when the evidence the claims are based upon allows several different interpretations.

It may be that human activity is creating a perilous environmental situation, but, Mr. Gore's books notwithstanding, the evidence is far from conclusive and there's certainly no warrant for panic or economically ruinous efforts to prevent something that we don't know is happening, don't know we're causing if it is happening, and don't know what its effects would be.

Being Jewish in Egypt

We live in a very diverse nation. Our ethnic, racial, religious and ideological differences create frictions, to be sure, but on balance we tend to think that those differences are a good thing. We take them for granted and learn to accommodate ourselves to the social irritations posed by those who don't do things the way we think they should be done.

We often assume that people around the globe think about differences the same way we do, but, of course, they don't. A reader sends along a link to the story of Dina Ovadia, a Jewish girl raised in Egypt who is now a member of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Her story gives us an idea of what it's like to be Jewish (or Christian) in a land of Muslim fanatics. Here's the lede to Dina's fascinating account:

This isn’t Cpl. Dina Ovadia’s first Passover in Israel. Slowly, slowly she seems to be moving away from her Egyptian past and becoming further ingrained in her Israeli present. Instead of thinking about her bittersweet childhood in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, Cpl. Ovadia fills her time with her army service and in preparing her home in Rimonim for the Passover holiday. Today it is possible to say that she is far more Dina Ovadia than she is Rolin Abdallah – the name her family gave her as a security measure for a Jew living in an Arab country. But Dina herself grew up totally unaware of her Jewish heritage.

Dina is telling her winding, unbelievable story for the umpteenth time, but her eyes still well up with tears. Ovadia, now 22, left her family home in Alexandria for the last time as a young and curious 15-year-old girl. All she wanted was to fit in. “Everyone always looked at me as though I was something different, the ugly duckling in the class. They asked me why I dressed the way I did, and why I spoke with my parents during the breaks, and why this and why that. I myself didn’t understand where it all came from. But I always had friends,” she says in impeccable Hebrew with a slight Arabic lilt. “I didn’t have a religious background in Christianity or in Islam. I never knew what I truly was. My parents didn’t keep the [Jewish] traditions and I always assumed that we were secular Christians.”

Dina’s childhood detachment from her heritage gives unique meaning to every Shabbat candle she lights now, to every Jewish holiday that she did not know. And Cpl. Ovadia’s story is the Passover story, thousands of years old, expressing itself again in the 21st century.

Dina always thought of herself as Egyptian. She never learned she was a Jew until her Egyptian neighbors found out and began harassing her family until they realized they would have to leave the land in which they had lived for generations or face ruin or death. It's the story of non-Muslims throughout the Middle East and, indeed, the story of Muslims who belong to minority sects throughout the Middle East. It's a tragedy that a religion can breed so much hate and intolerance, but it's important that Westerners understand that this is our future, too, if Islam is allowed to spread unchecked and unresisted throughout the Western world.

Bio-Computers

An article at HuffPo tells us that researchers have now been able to convert individual biological cells into micro-computers which potentially can be programmed to shut down which could be an enormous advance in cancer treatment. This is a wonderful development, but the fact that cells can be manipulated in this fashion is both amazing and a little scary. Here's the lede from the article:

Researchers at Stanford University announced this week that they've created genetic receptors that can act as a sort of "biological computer," potentially revolutionizing how diseases are treated.

In a paper published in the journal "Science" on Friday, the team described their system of genetic transistors, which can be inserted into living cells and turned on and off if certain conditions are met. The researchers hope these transistors could eventually be built into microscopic living computers. Said computers would be able to accomplish tasks like telling if a certain toxin is present inside a cell, seeing how many times a cancerous cell has divided or determining precisely how an administered drug interacts with each individual cell.

Once the transistor determines the conditions are met, it could then be used to make the cell, and many other cells around it, do a specific thing--like telling cancerous cells to destroy themselves.

"We're going to be able to put computers into any living cell you want," lead researcher at the Stanford School of Engineering Drew Endy explained to the San Jose Mercury News. "We're not going to replace the silicon computers. We're not going to replace your phone or your laptop. But we're going to get computing working in places where silicon would never work."

There's more to the article at the link, including a couple of videos that explain how these genetic receptors work. The scary part of this is what, if anything, it portends for humanity if our bodies could ever be turned into walking computers. Could we become immortal, able to ward off all the effects of aging? Would we still be human? What, indeed, would it mean to be human if every cell in our bodies is subject to outside control? Would someone be able to control the thoughts and actions of the entire human race simply by having access to the computers which control the cells?

It's astonishing to consider the kinds of questions societies may be faced with in the not too distant future, and it's disturbing to think that society is in the process of developing these Promethean technologies while at the same time spurning the only Source they could possibly have for giving them moral guidance as to how these technologies should be used.

Resurrection Day

This post originally appeared on Viewpoint on Easter 2005:

Jon Meacham of Newsweek, perhaps chastened by the criticism he received following his foray into Christian theology over Christmas, pens a much less offensive column about the Resurrection of Jesus in the current issue. He notes that the tomb of Christ was almost certainly empty that first Easter morning. If it were not, he observes, the opponents of Christ had only to produce the body to abort the religious turmoil that the sect of Christians was beginning to arouse. This they did not do, a startling historical fact, really, which leads us to the obvious conclusion that they couldn't do it. This leads us in turn to ask why not.

No naturalistic explanation of the empty tomb makes sense. The most common of these is that the disciples stole the corpse, but this hypothesis is plausible only if one assumes a priori that non-natural explanations are impossible. To believe that the disciples stole the body one must believe that a band of terrified fishermen overpowered an armed military guard, a crime for which they were never arrested or charged, stole the cadaver, and eventually underwent torture and martyrdom for preaching around the world what they knew to be a lie. People will die for a lie they believe to be true, but only men suffering from some form of dementia would die for a lie they knew to be a lie, and there's no reason to think these men were demented.

Surely, if the authorities believed the disciples had stolen the body they would have brought irresistibly persuasive techniques to bear to coerce them into divulging its whereabouts. Yet there's no indication whatsoever in the historical record that this was even attempted.

The skeptic says, as was noted above, that no matter how implausible a given naturalistic explanation may be it's still more believable than the claim that a man rose from the dead. This objection, however, rests on the assumption that there is no God, an assumption that is much easier to make than to defend. If, contrary to the skeptical view, it's possible that God exists then it's also possible that miracles occur, and if they are possible, we have to examine the evidence for an alleged instance of one, especially one as significant as the resurrection of Jesus, to determine whether it is, in fact, credible. The evidence for the historical, physical revivification of Christ, many scholars have concluded, is at least as powerful as that for any other event in antiquity.

Other attempts to avoid the conclusion that a miracle actually occurred are equally unimpressive. Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code adopts a version of the swoon theory, that after some thirty six hours without medical care, Jesus somehow recovered from his wounds - including the spear thrust - with sufficient vigor to roll away the heavy stone blocking the tomb. He accomplished this astonishing feat without being detected by the Roman guard, and subsequently appeared to the disciples and dozens, even hundreds, of others, looking so hale and hearty that they believed that he had conquered death and was the very Son of God.

Even if something so improbable could have happened, the disciples would have known that Jesus had not "risen from the dead" in any theologically significant sense. He would have eventually died (or, as Brown has it, absconded to France with his beloved Mary Magdalene), and his dead body would be proof that he was not the Messiah. This, then, brings us back to the question above: Why would people have been willing to be tortured and martyred for a man they would have known to have been a false messiah?

Skeptics scoff at miracles, but the most important miracle in the history of Christendom is one which defies any attempt to explain away. The most plausible explanation for the empty tomb, unless one holds an a priori commitment to naturalism, is that God actually did raise Jesus from the dead just as we are promised that we will be. Because death did not result in the annihilation of His being we can have the hope that neither will it result in ours.

Easter and the Modern Mind

The Christian world is preparing to celebrate what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable. It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false. Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from the circularity of basing the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible. But we can only know they're impossible if we know that all reports of miracles are unreliable.

But set that aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if molecules of hot water are added to a pot of molecules of cold water the molecules will tend to eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water is a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules on one occasion to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of hot and cold water, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, moderns have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident. They ground their belief in these things on their belief that there could be an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even highly improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the origin of life, which also seems just as highly improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Extensive time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. There's no evidence of other worlds, unfortunately, but part of the faith commitment of the modern thinker is to hold that they must exist. The modern clings to this conviction because if these things aren't so then life and the universe must have a personal, rather than a scientific, explanation and that discovery would produce a metaphysical shock to his psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos why can't they be invoked to explain "miracles" as well? If there are a near infinite series of universes, as has been proposed in order to avoid the problem posed by cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the abiogenic origin of life, the resurrection of a dead man should be no problem. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead. His real problem is with the claim that God deliberately raised this man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't say that because in order to justify such a claim they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is improbable, and that they cannot do.

If, though, one is willing to assume that there are an infinite number of universes out there in order to explain the properties of our universe, why would he have trouble accepting that there's a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead? After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

NDE Research

Recently a group of researchers carried out a study on Near Death Experience (NDE). Their theory was that if the experiences were imagined then their memories of them should be similar to memories of imagined events. What they discovered was that the memories reported by those who had an NDE were much more like memories of real events in the person's life.

Science Daily has a report on their findings of which the following is a part:

Working together, researchers at the Coma Science Group (Directed by Steven Laureys) and the University of Liège's Cognitive Psychology Research (Professor Serge Brédart and Hedwige Dehon), have looked into the memories of NDE with the hypothesis that if the memories of NDE were pure products of the imagination, their phenomenological characteristics (e.g., sensorial, self referential, emotional, etc. details) should be closer to those of imagined memories. Conversely, if the NDE are experienced in a way similar to that of reality, their characteristics would be closer to the memories of real events.

The researchers compared the responses provided by three groups of patients, each of which had survived (in a different manner) a coma, and a group of healthy volunteers. They studied the memories of NDE and the memories of real events and imagined events with the help of a questionnaire which evaluated the phenomenological characteristics of the memories.

The results were surprising. From the perspective being studied, not only were the NDEs not similar to the memories of imagined events, but the phenomenological characteristics inherent to the memories of real events (e.g. memories of sensorial details) are even more numerous in the memories of NDE than in the memories of real events.

The article struggles to put a naturalistic gloss on these results:

The brain, in conditions conducive to such phenomena occurring, is prey to chaos. Physiological and pharmacological mechanisms are completely disturbed, exacerbated or, conversely, diminished. Certain studies have put forward a physiological explanation for certain components of NDE, such as Out-of-Body Experiences, which could be explained by dysfunctions of the temporo-parietal lobe. In this context the study published in PLOS ONE suggests that these same mechanisms could also 'create' a perception - which would thus be processed by the individual as coming from the exterior - of reality. In a way their brain is lying to them, like in a hallucination.

This is possible, of course, and scientists have a responsibility to explore every plausible naturalistic explanation, but it's also possible, one would think, that the memories of the NDEs are so much like memories of real experiences because they in fact are memories of real experiences. I wonder why the article doesn't mention that.

Meditation for Good Friday

Some time ago we did a post based on a remark made by a woman named Tanya at another blog. I thought that as we approach Good Friday it might be worth running the post again, slightly edited.

Tanya's comment was provoked by an atheist at the other blog who had issued a mild rebuke to his fellow non-believers for their attempts to use the occasion of Christian holidays to deride Christian belief. In so doing, he exemplified the sort of attitude toward those with whom he disagrees that one might wish all people, atheists and Christians alike, would adopt. Unfortunately, Tanya spoiled the mellow, can't-we-all-just-get-along, mood by manifesting a petulant asperity toward, and an unfortunate ignorance of, the traditional Christian understanding of the atonement.

She wrote:

I've lived my life in a more holy way than most Christians I know. If it turns out I'm wrong, and some pissy little whiner god wants to send me away just because I didn't worship him, even though I lived a clean, decent life, he can bite me. I wouldn't want to live in that kind of "heaven" anyway. So sorry.

Tanya evidently thinks that "heaven" is, or should be, all about living a "clean, decent life". Perhaps the following tale will illustrate the shallowness of her misconception:

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who was deeply in love with a young woman. We'll call her Tanya. The prince wanted Tanya to come and live with him in the wonderful city his father, the king, had built, but Tanya wasn't interested in either the prince or the city. The city was beautiful and wondrous, to be sure, but the inhabitants weren't particularly fun to be around, and she wanted to stay out in the countryside where the wild things grow. Even though the prince wooed Tanya with every gift he could think of, it was to no avail. She wasn't smitten at all by the "pissy little whiner" prince. She obeyed the laws of the kingdom and paid her taxes and was convinced that that should be good enough.

Out beyond the countryside, however, dwelt dreadful, orc-like creatures who hated the king and wanted nothing more than to be rid of him and his heirs. One day they learned of the prince's love for Tanya and set upon a plan. They snuck into her village, kidnapped Tanya, and sent a note to the king telling him that they would be willing to exchange her for the prince, but if their offer was refused they would torture Tanya until she was dead.

The king, distraught beyond words, told the prince the horrible news.

Despite all the rejections the prince had experienced from Tanya, he still loved her deeply, and his heart broke at the thought of her peril. With tears he resolved to his father that he would do the exchange. The father wept bitterly because the prince was his only son, but he knew that his love for Tanya would not allow him to let her suffer the torment to which the ugly people would surely subject her. The prince asked only that the father try his best to persuade Tanya to live safely in the beautiful city once she was ransomed.

And so the day came for the exchange, and the prince rode bravely and proudly bestride his mount out of the beautiful city to meet the ugly creatures. As he crossed an expansive meadow toward the camp of his mortal enemy he stopped to make sure they released Tanya. He waited until she was out of the camp, fleeing toward the safety of the king's city, oblivious in her near-panic that it was the prince himself she was running past as she hurried to the safety of the city walls. He could easily turn back now that Tanya was safe, but he had given his word that he would do the exchange, and the ugly people knew he would never go back on his word.

The prince continued stoically and resolutely into their midst, giving himself for Tanya as he had promised. Surrounding his steed they set upon him, stripped him of his princely raiment, and tortured him for three days in the most excruciating manner. Not once did any sound louder than a moan pass his lips. His courage and determination to endure whatever agonies to which he was subjected were strengthened by the assurance that he was doing it for Tanya and that because of his sacrifice she was safe.

Finally, wearying of their sport, they cut off his head and threw his body onto a garbage heap.

Meanwhile, the grief-stricken king, his heart melting like ice within his breast, called Tanya into his court. He told her nothing of what his son had done, his pride in the prince not permitting him to use his son's heroic sacrifice as a bribe. Even so, he pleaded with Tanya, as he had promised the prince he would, to remain with him within the walls of the wondrous and beautiful city where she'd be safe forevermore.

Tanya considered the offer, but decided that she liked life on the outside far too much, even if it was risky, and she really didn't want to be in too close proximity to the prince, and "By the way," she asked the king, "where is that pissy little whiner son of yours anyway?"

Have a meaningful Good Friday. You, too, Tanya.

A Paperless Future?

Perhaps you're one of those techie types who doesn't like paper. One of those folks, perhaps, who touts to all who'll listen the virtues of the newest smart phones, tablets, kindles and whatever other gadgets are out there and who firmly believes that paper will soon be obsolete.

Or perhaps you're someone who prefers the old ways, who has trouble adapting to all the new-fangled bells and whistles, who enjoys holding a book and writing with pen and paper.

If you're either of those, especially if you're the latter, you'll enjoy this 39 second French television ad:

Mind, Materialism, and Free-Will

Last year Psychology Today ran a piece by a professor of psychology, psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA named Matthew Lieberman. Lieberman is a materialist who writes about the connection between a belief in free will and the belief that we have a mind. Here's part of his article:

It is impossible to take a materialistic view of the universe (i.e. the view that there is nothing but physical material in the world, atoms bouncing off one another in perfectly predictable patterns) and not come to the conclusion that free will is an illusion because your will must ultimately be caused by events in your physical brain which were caused by previous events in your brain, body, environment and so on. It makes no sense to talk about a will that is disconnected from causal chains of biological events.

Given a materialist view of the universe, it makes no sense to talk about consciousness or experience at all. We have absolutely no idea what it is about the three pounds of mush between our ears that allows it to perform this trick of being conscious. If you damage one spot in the visual cortex, a person will cease to see motion. If you damage another spot, they may lose the ability to see things in the right side of their visual field. But we have no idea why those regions cause us to have conscious experience of motion or the right side of the visual field in the first place. Knowing that an engine can’t run without a particular part is not the same as knowing why it can run because of that part.

In other words, we have no idea how consciousness can arise from mere chemical reactions in matter, but Lieberman believes that it does despite the powerful intuition that there's something more to us than just the material aspect of our nature. He even acknowledges that his belief in materialism is a "leap of faith":

I am a neuroscientist and so 99% of the time I behave like a materialist, acknowledging that the mind is real but fully dependent on the brain. But we don’t actually know this. We really don’t. We assume our sense of will is a causal result of the neurochemical processes in our brain, but this is a leap of faith.

Perhaps the brain is something like a complex radio receiver that integrates consciousness signals that float around in some form. Perhaps one part of the visual cortex is important for decoding the bandwidth that contains motion consciousness and another part of the brain is critical to decoding the bandwith that contains our will. So damage to brain regions may alter our ability to express certain kinds of conscious experience rather than being the causal source of consciousness itself.

I don’t actually believe the radio metaphor of the brain, but I think something like it could account for all of our findings. It's unfalsifiable which is a big no-no in science. But so is the materialist view — its also unfalsifiable. We simply don’t know how to reverse engineer consciousness. Saying that the complexity of the brain explains why we are conscious is just an article of faith — it doesn’t explain anything. We don’t know why our brains are associated with conscious experience and nothing else in the universe besides brains seems to be.

If we acknowledge just how much we don’t know about the conscious mind, perhaps we would be a bit more humble. We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter because if free will and consciousness are just an illusion, they are the most seamless illusions ever created. Film maker James Cameron wishes he had special effects that good. So we will go on acting like free-willing creatures no matter what. Its what we're built to do.

Reflect for a moment on how much one must deny in order to avoid the conclusion that we are something more than just a lump of protoplasm. We must deny the overwhelming sense that we make free choices and that we are responsible for those choices. We must also deny the powerful intuition that we have a conscious mind that is something other than the brain with which it is integrated. We must deny this in order to maintain belief in a metaphysical position which is not, as Leiberman points out, scientific, which is strongly counterintuitive, and which must be accepted not because there's evidence for it but purely on faith.

It's true, of course, that free will and conscious minds are illusions if materialism is correct, but how do we know materialism is correct? We don't. Materialism, as Leiberman admits, is simply a metaphysical preference, and it's embraced, in my opinion, largely because to acknowledge the existence of a mind is to acknowledge a key element in the worldview of Christian theism, a step many modern thinkers are loath to take.

That'd be their business, of course, except that so many of them - unlike Lieberman - insist on telling those who believe these powerful intuitions exist in us precisely because they correspond to reality, that they're irrational.

In order to sustain their materialism the materialist has to deny what everything in their experience is telling them is true, and then they try to persuade us that the worldview which most comfortably accommodates and explains this experience, Christian theism, is a non-rational and superstitious alternative.

It's a very peculiar position to take.

LAT to Israel: Please Drop Dead

A man named Ben Ehrenreich (son of Barbara Ehrenreich for those of you to whom that will mean something) has written a column for the Los Angeles Times in which he says essentially that there will never be peace in the Middle East as long as Israel is there. Ehrenreich states:

The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism....

This is a very odd claim. To the extent that the Middle East is ethnically and religiously diverse it's only because Israel is there. Everywhere else in the region any diversity is either driven out, killed off, or enchained in a form of servitude called dhimmi.

Rabbi Moshe Averick, a man who suffers fools grudgingly, will have none of Ehrenreich's silliness, and composes a scathing retort to Ehrenreich at Algemeiner.com. Here's part of it:

No kids, the problem is not Saudi Arabia, where practicing any religion other than Islam is punishable by death; the problem is not the murderous and tyrannical regime in Syria that has murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens (imagine what they would do to Jews!); the problem is not Jordan, where selling land to Jews is a capital crime; the problem is not Iran whose leader has vowed to inflict a nuclear Holocaust on the world; the problem is not Egypt whose fanatical Moslems assassinated the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel and is now ruled by a Moslem Brotherhood whose mantra is Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!, and the problem is certainly not the Palestinian Arabs whose only innovative contributions to mankind have been plane hijackings, murder of Olympic athletes, suicide bombers, and whose greatest hero – Yasser Arafat – is the godfather of all radical Islamic terrorism in the world.

In other words, the Arabs/Palestinians/Moslems are not expected to live up to any of the ideals of justice and morality expressed in exhortations of the prophet Jeremiah. They are permitted to routinely engage in “politics of exclusion” (try wearing a cross or Star of David necklace in Saudi Arabia) and “ethnic cleansing” (any Christians left in Bethlehem these days?).

No, the problem is Israel; the only pluralistic democracy in the middle-east, the country whose Arab population has a higher life-expectancy and per-capita income than any of the surrounding Arab states, where hospitals treat all of its citizens, be they Jew, Arab, Christian, or other; the only country in the middle-east with a truly free press and where freedom of religion and expression is guarded, where an Arab judge sits on the Israeli Supreme Court, where an Arab judge can preside over the trial of, and sentence, a former (Jewish) President of the State of Israel to a prison term for rape, and where Arabs vote and can (and do) elect Arab representatives to the Knesset who rail against the very state that confers upon them the right to be elected.

Averick continues to dismember Ehrenreich's column at the link, and it's all worth reading - especially if one is a little fuzzy on the goings-on in that part of the world - but one of Ehrenreich's paragraphs comes in for a special measure of Averick's scorn. Ehrenreich says:

If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly 1,300 Palestinians were killed.

To which Averick replies:

Is it possible that Israel’s attacks on Gaza had something to do with the fact that Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, has in its official charter an exhortation to kill Jews and destroy the State of Israel? Did it have anything to do with the fact that Palestinians fired more than 2000 rockets from Gaza into Israel in 2012? When asked about the rocket attacks, Ehrenreich replied: “Rockets? What rockets? I don’t see any rockets. Do you see any rockets?

It really is utterly incredible that any educated man would compare the situation in Israel to that of the white regime in South Africa during the days of apartheid. Everything Israel has done it has done because it is constantly being terrorized and attacked by Palestinian Muslims who hate the fact that a non-Muslim state prospers in their midst and who thus wish to destroy it. Israelis have watched their children blown to shreds by suicide bombers, they've lived in constant terror as rockets rain down on their villages, they've listened with trepidation as Palestinians, Hezbollah, and Iranians have all sworn to obliterate them from the face of the earth. Finally, to stop the rockets they launch a military attack against Hamas in the Gaza strip, but since Hamas chooses to use civilians as human shields, innocent Palestinians are inadvertently killed. What on earth is the similarity between this and the oppression of a largely powerless and helpless black population by the South African government under apartheid?

On one point Ehrenreich is correct, though. There probably never will be peace in the Middle East, but it's not because Israel is there. It's because its enemies will never stop making war against it as long as they're able and as long as Israel exists. And then, if Israel does ever cease to exist, the Arab Muslims will then turn to making war on each other. It seems it's all they know how to do.

Are All Men Created Equal?

One of the axiomatic beliefs of the average American is that we are all equal, but, of course, stated this way, the belief is obviously false. We're certainly not equal in our talents, our intellectual gifts, our physical abilities, our fortunes, or in much of anything else. So why do we say it?

What we mean is that we should all be treated equally by the law regardless of the natural inequalities that exist among us in society, but why do we think we should all be treated equally under the law? What is the basis for that assumption?

Some might say it goes back to Thomas Jefferson's claim in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," but this lapidary statement is itself based upon 1700 years of Christian tradition going back to the words of the apostle Paul in a letter he wrote to the church in Galatia in which he told the believers there that in Christ all men are equal: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28).

I was reminded of this passage while reading a piece at Patheos by Mark Shea who wrote that,

And yet, by a sort of dead inertia, our cultural elites go on talking about “equality” as though it were something you could see and measure with a scale or an electroencephalogram. No one (yet) has alerted them to the fact that they are in fact mouthing a piece of utterly mystical Christian doctrine ... rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition (and in nothing else) .... No one has pointed out to them that when we confess “all men are created equal” we mean, and can only mean, that all people are equally precious to God and are creatures made in his image.

So far, we have coasted along on custom in continuing to talk as though our culture still is founded on that mystical Christian faith in human equality. I fear, however, that sooner or later, it will occur to somebody to get rid of this mystical Christian belief in equality as they have gotten rid of so much of the rest of the Christian tradition.

Either that, or we will have to repent of getting rid of the Christian tradition. But we can't coast forever.

Once you make materialism the basis for your ethos, there is no particular reason you can’t – as the racist tools at Occam’s Razor and related sites do – say, “I don’t see anything particularly equal about human beings, and so I will embrace a blood and soil racism and treat large segments of the human race with racist contempt.” All the buttercup-twirling babble about a happy return to pre-Christian paganism at one with Nature that we’ve heard in growing chorus over the past 40 years forgets that frank and open racist tribalism is the norm, not the exception, for man in his natural fallen state. Look for a lot more of this stuff as our culture de-christianizes.

Shea is right, at least I believe he is. A society can no more reject the basis for its fundamental convictions and continue on as if nothing had changed than a gardener can sever a plant from its roots and stick it back in the ground and expect it to blossom. The norm among human societies is racism and tribalism, hatred for the other, contempt for the different-from-me.

If naturalism is true, if we are simply the product of eons of blind, impersonal, purposeless forces and chance, the idea of a brotherhood of man - with all of us living idyllically in peace and love - is the sheerest nonsense and fantasy. It denies all experience and human history. The more likely template for a world that has embraced naturalism is 1930s Europe or the world of The Hunger Games.

It's human nature to hate the other, the outsider, the weaker, the different. Ethnocentrism is inscribed in our genes. Racism is the human default position. Darwinian evolution knows nothing of racial brotherhood, it recognizes only the cold, amoral struggle for survival.

It's only the Judeo-Christian belief that the other was created by God and that God loves him as much as he loves us that has put a check on our egoistic passions and has enabled us to live harmoniously together. In much of the West, however, that belief is wilting and with it will wilt the blossom of brotherly love. As society moves further away from the conviction that we're all equally loved by the Creator and that He wants us to treat each other with dignity, respect, and kindness, the closer we will move toward the world of the blood and soil fascists and a Hobbesian war of all against all. The more of our Judeo-Christian heritage we toss out the window the more will racism thrive.

The irony is that the more the secular left succeeds in eliminating religion from society the more they will also succeed, inadvertently, in resurrecting fascism.

Letter to a Young Girl

Some years ago I had occasion to write a letter to my daughter on the subject of happiness. I subsequently posted it on Viewpoint and a reader digging through the archives read it and reminded me of it, and I thought I'd like to share it again. Here it is:

Hi Princess,

I've been thinking a lot about the talk we had the other night on what happiness is and how we obtain it, and I hope you have been, too. I wanted to say a little more about it, and I thought that since I was going to be away, I'd put it into a letter for you to read while I'm gone.

One of the things we talked about was that we can't assess whether we're happy based on our feelings because happiness isn't just a feeling. It's more of a condition or quality of our lives - sort of like beauty is a quality of a symphony. It's a state of satisfaction we gain through devotion to God, living a life of virtue (honesty, integrity, loyalty, chastity, trustworthiness, self-discipline), cultivating wholesome and loving relationships with family and friends, experiencing the pleasures of accomplishment in career, sports, school, etc., and filling our lives with beauty (nature, music, literature, art, etc.).

One thing is sure - happiness isn't found by acquiring material things like clothes and toys. It's not attained by being popular, having good looks, or being high on the social pecking order. Those things seem like they should make us happy, especially when we're young, but they don't. Ultimately they just leave us empty.

To the extent that happiness is a feeling we have to understand that a person's feelings tend to follow her actions. A lot of people allow their feelings to determine their actions - if they like someone they're friendly toward them; if they feel happy they act happy - but this is backwards.

People who do brave things, for instance, don't do them because they feel brave. Most people usually feel terrified when in a dangerous situation, but brave people don't let their feelings rule their behavior, and what they do is all the more wonderful because it's done in spite of everything in them urging them to get out of danger. If they do something brave, despite their fear, we say they have courage and we admire them for it.

Well, happiness is like courage. You should act as if you're happy even if you don't feel it. When you do act that way your feelings change and tend to track your behavior. You find yourself feeling happier than you did before even though the only thing that has changed is your attitude.

How can a person act happy without seeming phony? Well, we can act happy by displaying a positive, upbeat attitude, by being pleasant to be around, by enjoying life, and by smiling a lot. Someone who has a genuine smile (not a Paris Hilton smirk) on her face all the time is much more attractive to other people than someone whose expression always tells other people that she's just worn out or miserable.

One other thing about happiness is that it tends to elude us most when we're most intent on pursuing it. It's when we're busy doing the things I mentioned above, it's when we're busy serving and being a friend to others, that happiness is produced as a by-product. We achieve it when we're not thinking about it. It just tags along, as if it were tied by a string, with love for God, family, friends, beauty, accomplishment, a rewarding career, and so on.

Sometimes young people are worried that they don't have friends and that makes them unhappy, but often the reason they don't, paradoxically, is that they're too busy trying to convince someone to be their friend. They try too hard and they come across to others as too insecure. This is off-putting to people, and they tend to avoid the person who seems to try over-hard to be their friend. The best way to make friends, I think, is to just be pleasant, friendly, and positive. Don't be critical of people, especially your friends, and especially your guy friends, either behind their backs or to their faces. A person who never has anything bad to say about others will always have friends.

Once in a while a critical word has to be said, of course, but it'll be meaningless at best and hurtful at worst, unless it's rare and done with complete kindness. A person who is always complaining or criticizing is not pleasant to be around and will not have good, devoted friends, and will not be happy. A person who gives others the impression that her life is miserable is going to find that after a while people just don't want to hear it, and they're not going to want to be around her.

I hope this makes sense to you, honey. Maybe as you read it you can think of people you know who are examples of the things I'm talking about....

All my love,

Dad

Promote What?

I found myself in traffic the other day behind a car whose bumper stickers made for interesting reading at stop lights. The car was decorated with a half-dozen or so messages which in one way or another were critical of theistic belief. One declared, for instance, that "God = Imaginary Friend," and another informed the reader that "In the Beginning Man Created God," and so on.

As my eye meandered over the messages one incongruous slogan aroused my attention. It exhorted us to "Promote Morality." Promote morality? In a world where God is merely the creation of people who need imaginary friends why should one promote morality? In such a world what exactly is moral anyway? If there's no transcendent moral authority how can morality be anything more than a declaration of our own behavioral tastes, preferences, and prejudices? In such a world why would it be wrong to just live for oneself?

This is precisely the question that the protagonists in my novel In the Absence of God find themselves wrestling with throughout the story. Most people wish to insist that some acts are objectively wrong - not just distasteful - but wrong, but what does that mean? Why is anything wrong? Dostoyevsky says in The Brothers Karamazov that if God is dead nothing is wrong and the list of atheist philosophers who agree with him grows longer every year. Indeed, a controversy among atheist thinkers today is whether they should boldly acknowledge their amoralism or whether they should conceal it from a public which would think them all lunatics were they told the news.

So the fellow in the car ahead of me in the traffic is manifesting an anachronistic metaphysics. Like a character in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra he hasn't yet heard the momentous tidings that if the antitheistic sentiments expressed on his bumper stickers are correct then the moral sentiment he displays on the "Promote Morality" sticker is nonsense.

I know one cannot expect philosophical profundity from bumper stickers, but one might at least expect coherence.

Atheists, it seems to me, must either embrace an amoralistic nihilism or reject atheism. What they can't do is declare there's no God but that we should promote "morality" anyway. To cling to the illusion that objective moral obligation is somehow independent of an objective moral authority is, after all, to make an imaginary friend of moral obligation.

Nihilism, Explicit or Incognito?

I did say that the book has created a firestorm. Simply everyone is talking about it. Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard has one of the best-written essays on it I've seen so far, but rather than talk (yet again) about Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos I want to focus on something Ferguson says about a recent confab of atheistic materialist intellectuals at which Nagel's book was a major topic of discussion. What Ferguson observed at the meeting dovetails with one of the major themes of my own In the Absence of God.

First a bit of background. Modern atheists are of two minds about how they should present their worldview to the public. Specifically, there's debate within the skeptical community over how frank they should be in discussing the implications of atheism for both our human desire for ultimate meaning and our need for an objective basis for moral judgment. One faction insists that atheists should be up-front with the general public about the fact that, on atheism, there just is no ultimate meaning to human existence nor is there anything beyond our own tastes in which to ground moral obligation. These universal human aspirations and yearnings are simply unfulfillable illusions.

The other faction argues that admitting that would be a public relations disaster for atheism. It's better, this group maintains, to be more circumspect and oblique about the nihilistic implications of atheism lest the public perceive that atheism offers to quench our existential thirsts with glassfuls of dust. Here's Ferguson:

One notable division did arise among the participants, however. Some of the biologists thought the materialist view of the world should be taught and explained to the wider public in its true, high-octane, Crickian form. Then common, nonintellectual people might see that a purely random universe without purpose or free will or spiritual life of any kind isn’t as bad as some superstitious people—religious people—have led them to believe.

Daniel Dennett took a different view. While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a “moist robot”—a phrase Dennett took from a Dilbert comic—we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.

On this point the discussion grew testy at times. I was reminded of the debate among British censors over the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover half a century ago. “Fine for you or me,” one prosecutor is said to have remarked, “but is this the sort of thing you would leave lying about for your wife or servant to read?”

Ferguson's entire essay is worth reading, unless you've already had your fill of the intellectual brouhaha over Nagel's book, but it's even more worth contemplating the fact that adherents of the worldview Nagel criticizes in Mind and Cosmos hold to a view whose consequences are so awful that many of them are afraid that, were the view to be universally accepted, civilization would collapse. There's something fundamentally dishonest about trying to persuade people to accept a metaphysical belief whose existential consequences one is reluctant to be frank about. It also says something about the nature of the belief in question.

If it's true that you can judge the quality of a tree by the quality of its fruit then we are justified in being suspicious that any plant whose fruit is so bitter, rotten and toxic that it dare not be offered straightforwardly to the public is itself noxious and hollow.