Ruse/Dennett

On Monday we linked to an e-mail exchange between Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett, both atheistic evolutionists strongly hostile to Intelligent Design. It's worth emphasizing one paragraph of the correspondence written by Ruse to Dennett:

I think that you and Richard [Dawkins] are absolute disasters in the fight against intelligent design - we are losing this battle, not the least of which is the two new supreme court justices who are certainly going to vote to let it into classrooms - what we need is not knee-jerk atheism but serious grappling with the issues - neither of you are willing to study Christianity seriously and to engage with the ideas - it is just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil, as Richard claims - more than this, we are in a fight, and we need to make allies in the fight, not simply alienate everyone of good will.

Quite an admission, that. Coming from such an eminent authority it is guaranteed to produce outrage and shock among the faithful, and to shake the confidence of any whose confidence in naturalism is already unsteady. It will also have a salutary effect on those in the academy who might be leaning toward ID but who at present feel too much professional pressure and intimidation to risk coming out publically in its favor.

Dembski had Ruse's permission to print this exchange, but we wonder whether Ruse had Dennett's permission to give it to him. If not, there could be serious umbrage brewing among the disciples of Charles Darwin, and this, sadly, even before the warm afterglow of Darwin Day fellowship has faded away.

Gumbel and Race

Bryant Gumbel, who is an African American television personality, recently had this to say about the Winter Olympics:

So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention.

Hmm. Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose there was a meeting of, say, African American mathematicians, and some conservative white reporter doing a story on the convention made the comment:

So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest intellects, despite a paucity of whites that makes the meeting look like an NAACP convention.

What do you suppose the media reaction would be? Would the reporter be allowed to keep his job? I suggest that that reporter would probably find himself, like Larry Summers, out of a job. My point is not to suggest that Mr. Gumbel is a racist or that his comment is inappropriate. I don't know whether he's a racist, and I don't believe, actually, that there was anything wrong with what he said. My point is simply to point out the racial double standard in our society. Blacks are permitted to say almost anything about racial differences without being seriously criticized, but if whites make similar remarks it could cost them their jobs and their careers. Summers came under fire at Harvard for making perfectly reasonable remarks about gender, not about race, but the principle is the same.

This situation is not only unjust, it's absurd. All it does is exacerbate ill-feeling among white males toward minorities and women. It's time to agree that whatever is appropriate or inappropriate to say of one race or gender should be appropriate or inappropriate to say about another. Neither race nor gender should be taboo subjects, nor should any race or either gender be granted a position of privilege, preference, or deference in the public discourse.

Let's stop criticizing and destroying people because they make perfectly sensible, even if sometimes mistaken, statements just because those statements don't meet the stringent standards of our hypersensitive social thought police.

Al-Qaeda Gambles on Civil War

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail analyzes the Golden Mosque bombing and points his finger at al-Qaeda in Iraq. Interestingly, there are suspects in custody, and no doubt strenuous "interrogations" have begun to determine who's behind the attack.

The attempt to drag Iraqi's Shiites and Sunnis into a bloody civil war intensifies. The dome of the Shiite Al Askari Mosque in Samarra, or Golden Mosque, has been destroyed by a well planned and well executed commando-style raid of insurgents dressed as Iraqi police. According to CNN, "A group of men dressed like Iraqi police commandos set off explosives." It appears suspects are now in custody, "Ten people -- all dressed as Iraqi police commandos."

The likely culprit is al-Qaeda in Iraq, or groups underneath the newly created Mujahedeen Shura Council. Zarqawi has desired a sectarian war between Shiites and Sunnis since his entry into the conflict, as he clearly stated in his letter to Osama bin Laden. al-Qaeda in Iraq has gone to through great pains of late to deny this, and will very likely not take credit in such an overt attack on the Shiite faithful. Silence and uncertainly will play into their hand, and feed conspiracy theories on who committed such an act. But the nature of the target and the sophistication of such an attack undeniably points to al-Qaeda. The detained "commandos" will be thoroughly interrogated, and the FBI will likely be called in to determine the nature of the charges used to destroy the dome.

You can read the rest of Roggio's post here.

Can't We Be More Like Europe?

Liberals like John Kerry and Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Ginsberg frequently point to Europe as the model the United States should emulate in our laws and cultural attitudes. It is unclear, though, how long this Euro-infatuation will continue in light of this sort of thing:

Right-wing British historian David Irving pleaded guilty yesterday to denying the Holocaust and was sentenced to three years in prison, even after conceding that he wrongly said there were no Nazi gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Irving, handcuffed and wearing a blue suit, arrived in court carrying a copy of one of his most controversial books -- "Hitler's War," which challenges the extent of the Holocaust. "I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz," Irving told the court before his sentencing. He faced up to 10 years in prison. He also expressed sorrow "for all the innocent people who died during the second world war."

But he insisted that he never wrote a book about the Holocaust, which he called "just a fragment of my area of interest."

"In no way did I deny the killings of millions of people by the Nazis," testified Irving, who has written nearly 30 books. Irving's lawyer immediately announced that he would appeal the sentence. "I consider the verdict a little too stringent. I would say it's a bit of a message trial," Elmar Kresbach said.

Irving, 67, has been in custody since his November arrest on charges stemming from two speeches that he gave in Austria in 1989 in which he was accused of denying the Nazis' extermination of 6 million Jews. He has contended that most of those who died at concentration camps such as Auschwitz succumbed to diseases such as typhus rather than execution.

The court convicted Irving after his guilty plea under the 1992 law, which applies to "whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media."

Irving's trial came amid new debate over freedom of expression in Europe, where the printing of unflattering caricatures of the prophet Muhammad has triggered deadly protests worldwide.

Now, we have no sympathy for holocaust deniers, but we do have a lot of sympathy for a free press and the free exchange of political ideas. Apparently, European courts do not. We will wait patiently for those liberal champions of the bold maxim which proclaims a willingness to fight to the death for another man's right to say that which is despicable, to come out foursquare in defense of Mr. Irving. They'll arrive on scene, we are sure, to carry the free speech fight to its enemies just as soon as they can emerge from hiding from the Mohammedans whose death threats have made the prospect of actually having to expend one's life in the battle for journalistic freedom seem uncomfortably likely.

Journalistic Heroics at U. of Toronto

Rhymes With Right notes that the University of Toronto student newspaper, which refused to show THE CARTOONS, did not scruple to run a drawing showing Jesus kissing a middle eastern man (presumably Mohammed, but you don't know that from the picture) on the mouth in a tunnel of love.

We are awed by the newspaper staff's courage and cleverness in publishing such an incisive bit of social commentary. We are steeped in admiration for their journalistic hubris in taunting those violent Christian fanatics who are even now probably preparing to burn down the university in their outrage. We are humbled to know that such satirical geniuses walk among us, and we wonder if anyone on the staff at that paper is older than thirteen.

At any rate, we cannot improve upon Rhymes' commentary on the newspaper's decision to run this illustration, nor could any parody we can come up with do justice to the editor's ludicrous defense of that decision. Check it out for yourself.

Murder Over a Cartoon

The news brings word of more depressing incidents of Muslim hatred and viciousness, this time in Nigeria. Don't these disciples of the religion of peace know how to express indignation and anger without killing people? Are their religion and culture so reflexively violent that any insult is considered a justification for cruelty and brutality?

There are places in the United States, to be sure, where you can get killed for being from a different neighborhood, or for being a different race, or for just making eye contact with someone, but we tend to think of the wanton killers in these cases as marginally human savages. How can we think any more of people who kill over a vaguely insulting cartoon appearing in a newspaper thousands of miles away?

Here are the headlines:

Nigeria confirms that 35 persons were killed, 30 churches and five hotels were also burnt in violence the past three days.

For the third day in a row, Nigerian Muslims rampaged through the streets leaving 13 dead on Monday in Bauchi after at least 25 reported deaths in two previous days of violence.

The Red Cross put the death toll in Maiduguri and Katsina at 28, but the Christian Association of Nigeria said it had counted at least 50 dead bodies in Maiduguri alone.

There are gruesome reports of Christians being burned to death in their churches over the weekend.

And there's this:

One group threw a tire around one man, poured gas on him and set him ablaze.

A Catholic Priest and 3 children are among the dead.

Also you might check out the protest posters here and here to get a sense of what at least some Muslims in New York are thinking about your future.

The irony, lost I'm sure on the protestors, is that these messages are sponsored by an organization called the Islamic Thinkers Society. It's hard to believe that anyone who was really thinking would conclude that the murder of innocent priests and children in Nigeria is an appropriate response to the provocation of cartoonists in Denmark, but there you have it.

Representative Ron Paul...

tells it like it is. It's truly unfortunate that we don't have more congressmen like him...or even another one for that matter.

Yes, while the Arab / Jew (Israel) conflict is as old as the Biblical account of Jacob's rip off of Esau's inheritance, there is a new dynamic that has come on the scene.

The honorable representative from the state of Texas, Ron Paul, has offered a must read explanation of how America has stepped into the quagmire and, in my opinion, why every American should be ashamed and outraged. I know I am.

From the link:

Realizing the world was embarking on something new and mind boggling, elite money managers, with especially strong support from U.S. authorities, struck an agreement with OPEC to price oil in U.S. dollars exclusively for all worldwide transactions. This gave the dollar a special place among world currencies and in essence "backed" the dollar with oil. In return, the U.S. promised to protect the various oil-rich kingdoms in the Persian Gulf against threat of invasion or domestic coup. This arrangement helped ignite the radical Islamic movement among those who resented our influence in the region. The arrangement gave the dollar artificial strength, with tremendous financial benefits for the United States. It allowed us to export our monetary inflation by buying oil and other goods at a great discount as dollar influence flourished.

I strongly urge our readers to visit the link above and read the article in its entirety.

WSC

Daniel Dennett Undressed

Leon Wieseltier endears himself to millions by taking on the pompous Daniel Dennett in last Sunday's New York Times Review of Books and administering, in the course of a blistering review of Dennett's new book, a sound and condign spanking to the Tufts philosopher's nether parts. Throughout the review Wieseltier mocks Dennett's characteristic arrogance and self-congratulatory poses, observing, for example, that:

In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero. He is in the business of emancipation, and he reveres himself for it. "By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse," he declares, "and yet I persist." Giordano Bruno, with tenure at Tufts!

Wieseltier goes on to add that:

[P]eople who share Dennett's view of the world he calls "brights." Brights are not only intellectually better, they are also ethically better. Did you know that "brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest"? Dennett's own "sacred values" are "democracy, justice, life, love and truth."

It's deeply ironic, as we've had occasion to remark before, that an atheist would take any pride at all in the values he adopts. Surely someone of Dennett's exalted philosophical reputation recognizes that any values in a godless world are purely arbitrary. His embrace of democracy, justice, etc. are simply matters of his own subjective preference and are completely free of any possible objective or intrinsic moral worth. Dennett's fondness for these is no more laudatory than would his fondness for ice-cream or pizza be. They're all merely matters of personal taste.

Even so, it is in his criticisms of the book's content (The book's title is Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon) where Wieseltier inflicts the deepest wounds:

Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.

It is ironic that so many atheists who pride themselves on their rationality and trust in the deliverances of their reason fail to realize that if reason is simply a product of purposeless processes adapting us for survival there is no basis for trusting it to give us truth about those matters which cannot be somehow independently verified, like, for instance, the existence of God. Reason presumably evolved to equip us to survive in a stone age environment, not to find truth in a modern setting, and no argument that an atheist might offer on behalf of reason can possibly avoid begging the question by employing reason to try to demonstrate the trustworthiness of reason.

In a somewhat related matter, Bill Dembski somehow came into possession of this fascinating e-mail exchange which took place last Sunday between Dennett and atheistic philosopher Michael Ruse. The exchange offers a unique glimpse of the infighting beginning to swell within the Darwinian ranks over the challenge posed by ID. Scroll to the first e-mail from Ruse and work back. It's good fun.

Ruse v. Dembski

Michael Ruse, an anti-ID philosopher, and William Dembski, one of the leading intellectual lights of the ID movement, had a debate in Marietta, Georgia recently. Part of the exchange, as recounted in the Baptist Press News, went like this:

Ruse...returned to his argument that Intelligent Design presupposes the Christian God.

"Are you seriously suggesting that some grad student on Andromeda is running an experiment and we're it?" Ruse asked. "Of course you're not. You're invoking God, and that's just not acceptable in science, and not necessary."

"So the grad student on Andromeda is more acceptable than God?" Dembski quipped.

Ruse said his problem with ID theory is the unnamed designer and the refusal to answer the "God question."

"I don't think you can keep it just hanging and simply say, 'Oh well, I don't have to answer that question,'" Ruse said. "I think that's cheating."

"I've always said that naturalism, if you like, is ... an act of faith," Ruse said to an outburst of applause from the audience. "I would feel more comfortable saying it is a metaphysical commitment. I don't think metaphysical commitments are stupid."

Those who are not naturalists, Ruse claimed, have other "burning concerns" they deem more important than science. He suggested that Christians are motivated by fear of facing God after life, a concern that outweighs a commitment to science.

Ruse makes several important admissions in the above passages. He acknowledges that naturalism, and by extension, whatever is uniquely entailed by it, is an act of faith. In other words, the commitment to a mechanistic view of evolution is not a result of scientific discovery but of metaphysical preference. Why, then, is this meatphysical preference privileged in public school classrooms to the exclusion of competing views?

He also suggests that if one is committed to a Christian metaphysics then one will tend to subordinate one's science to that commitment, whereas a commitment to naturalism incites one to place science first in his life. What Ruse says here, however, is simply not true. If one is committed to naturalism (i.e. the view that nature is all there is) then one is just as likely to subordinate one's science to that metaphysical conviction as a Christian is to subordinate scientific evidence to his conviction. If the evidence one gathers in the field points to an entity beyond nature, the naturalist is faced with the choice of ignoring the evidence or rejecting naturalism. A person committed to naturalism, however, will find the latter course exceedingly difficult and will be much more inclined to reject the evidence.

In other words, the naturalist is no more likely to be governed by the results of his science than is the Christian. It's past time that naturalistic philosophers realize that their naturalism has all the fieldmarks of a religion and stop pretending that it is somehow more intellectually respectable than Christianity.

Early Retirement?

Looking forward to retirement? You better hurry before this fellow's idea catches on:

The age of retirement should be raised to 85 by 2050 because of trends in life expectancy, a US biologist has said. Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University says anti-ageing advances could raise life expectancy by a year each year over the next two decades.

That will put a strain on economies around the world if current retirement ages are maintained, he warned.

Dr. Tuljapurkar is right, of course. There's no reason to maintain economic structures designed around the demographic facts of life in the 1930s in an era in which those facts no longer obtain. We have to admit, though, that 85 sounds a bit extreme. We were expecting the retirement age to be raised to 67 - 70, at least for the near term.

Hiding the Truth

Over at Evangelical Outpost Joe Carter takes the abortion establishment to task for withholding from women all the relevant potential consequences of having the procedure done. In any other area of medicine the failure to tell women what the long term effects of their having a procedure might be would be considered malpractice but not when it comes to abortion. Pro-choicers are presumably afraid that were the potential harm of abortion procedures widely disseminated not only would women be more reluctant to have them, but it would be far easier for opponents to pass legislation curtailing or banning the practice.

Carter writes:

When most people prepare to undergo elective surgery, they expect to be fully informed of the risks involved in the procedure. But what if a doctor refused to tell you that after you recovered you would be at an elevated risk of developing suicidal behavior, depression, substance abuse, anxiety, and other mental problems? What if you were told that the justification for withholding such information was that you had a "civil right" to have the surgery and that the evidence concerning risk of mental illness "didn't matter"?

Most people would be outraged if such information had been withheld from them. Yet there is one medical procedure in which the risks are paternalistically withheld from the patient. That procedure, of course, is abortion.

In one of the largest and most comprehensive longitudinal studies ever conducted on the subject, a research team led by Professor David M. Fergusson, director of the longitudinal Christchurch Health and Development Study, found that women who had abortions were significantly more likely to experience mental health problems.

"I remain pro-choice. I am not religious. I am an atheist and a rationalist," said Fergusson in an interview on Australian radio, "The findings did surprise me, but the results appear to be very robust because they persist across a series of disorders and a series of ages. . . . Abortion is a traumatic life event; that is, it involves loss, it involves grief, it involves difficulties. And the trauma may, in fact, predispose people to having mental illness."

Although he is still accepting of abortion, Fergusson believes women and doctors should not blindly accept the unsupported claim that abortion is generally harmless or beneficial to women. In his report, Fergusson singled out the American Psychological Association (APA) for criticism over its handling of research on women's post-abortion psychological adjustment. "It borders on scandalous that one of the most common surgical procedures performed on young women is so poorly researched and evaluated," said Fergusson. "If this were Prozac or Vioxx, reports of associated harm would be taken much more seriously with more careful research and monitoring procedures."

It's awful hard to make a credible claim that the chief concern of pro-choicers is the welfare of women when the welfare of women seems to be largely irrelevant to what women are told prior to their abortion.

Sometimes We Hear It's Religious

Judge John Jones, presiding in the Dover Intelligent Design trial last Fall, deigned to settle the controversy surrounding ID by pronouncing it a religious belief and thus constitutionally unfit for public school consumption. Those who approve of the judge's decision have ever since been intoning the refrain, "Judge Jones said it, I believe it, that settles it." Unfortunately, the judge knows almost nothing of what he's talking about. In declaring ID to be a religious belief he simply parroted the approved position of the Darwinian establishment. The rationale he gives for his conclusion is paper thin, so, his proclamation notwithstanding, the controversy continues.

We might pause to marvel that so many people who believe ID is a religious theory could not even define what a religion, and a religious belief, are. We might also ask why so many people do believe ID to be "religious"? Here are some of the reasons we hear from those who agree with Judge Jones:

Sometimes we're told that ID is religious because it invokes a supernatural entity. But what does it mean to be supernatural? Is something supernatural if it is other than the natural universe? If so, what is it about being extra-cosmic that makes it a religious entity? The belief, commonly discussed in science books, that there are other universes besides our own is surely not a religious belief yet these are entities which transcend our universe. If it is not religious to believe that there are universes which reside beyond our own, why is it religious to believe that there's an intelligence which resides beyond our universe?

Sometimes we hear that ID is a religious belief because the designer must be the Christian God. What does the critic mean, however, by the term "God," and why must the Christian God be the designer? The God of traditional theism is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, eternal, necessary, omnipresent, and personal. Why must the designer who creates the universe and life possess these attributes? Why couldn't the designer be a being of considerable power and intelligence without being the omnicompetent God of Christian belief? To insist that the designer must be God, i.e. that than which nothing greater can be conceived, as Anselm famously defined him, is an inappropriate and illogical attempt by ID's opponents to force religion into a theory that is not inherently religious.

Sometimes we hear that ID is a religious belief because its advocates are frequently Christians. But if the metaphysical commitments of a theory's advocates are all that are necessary to make a theory religious why is the naturalistic Darwinian view not considered to be an atheistic belief since certainly many of its advocates are atheists? Furthermore, if the naturalistic view is indeed an atheistic hypothesis why is it permitted to be taught in our schools?

Sometimes we hear that ID is a religious belief because the entity that it posits can't be detected and has to be accepted on faith. But what is meant by saying that the designer can't be detected? Does it mean that we can't see the designer and have no direct evidence that there is one? Or does it mean that the designer is in principle undetectable? If it means the former, we should point out that there are dozens of entities which scientists study which cannot be directly observed - quarks and neutrinos, for example - but they can be studied and their existence inferred from their effects. Likewise, there is abundant evidence of design in our world from which we can infer the existence of a designer. It may be that we can't study the designer directly right now because our technology doesn't allow it, but that doesn't mean that we'll never be able to study it.

If the above claim means that the designer, being transcendent, is in principle undetectable then we might ask how that makes it different from the multiverse which is believed to transcend our world and the existence of which scientists nevertheless hold out hope of one day being able to confirm?

A century and a half ago there was very little we could learn about atoms, the cell, or the composition of the stars because we had no good way to observe these things, nor could we imagine ever being able to do so. Since then advances in technology have made them accessible to us. Perhaps a century from now technology will also enable us to observe and study the cosmic architect - that is, if it still exists.

We don't know that the designer does still exist because ID, not being a religious belief, does not identify the designer with the eternal God of traditional theism who cannot not exist. Only those who don't understand ID or who choose to misrepresent it, a group which includes almost all of its opponents, some of its advocates, and Judge Jones, do that.

Hard Truths

A moderate Muslim is given a voice in the LA Times and offers us two truths about Muslims, one of which is that there are no moderate Muslims.

Be that as it may, his essay is worth reading. The writer, Mansoor Ijaz, says, for example, that:

I am an American by birth and a Muslim by faith. For many of my American friends, I am a voice of reason in a sea of Islamist darkness, while many Muslims have called me an "Uncle Tom" for ingratiating myself with the vested interests they seek to destroy through their violence. Mostly, though, I try not to ignore the harsh realities the followers of my religion are often unwilling to face.

The first truth is that most Muslim ideologues are hypocrites. What has Osama bin Laden done for the victims of the 2004 tsunami or the shattered families who lost everything in the Pakistani earthquake last year? He did not build one school, offer one loaf of bread or pay for one vaccination. And yet he, not the devout Muslim doctors from California and Iowa who repair broken limbs and lives in the snowy peaks of Kashmir, speaks the loudest for what Muslims allegedly stand for. He has succeeded in presenting himself as the defender of Islam's poor, and the Western media has taken his jihadist message all the way to the bank.

The hypocrisy only starts there. Muslims and Arabs have done pitifully little to help improve the capacity of the Palestinian people to be good neighbors to their Israeli brethren. Take the money spent by any Middle Eastern royal family at a London hotel or Geneva resort during one month and you could build enough schools and medical clinics to take care of 1,000 Palestinian children for a year. Yet rather than educate and feed Palestinian and Muslim children so they may learn to settle differences through dialogue and debate, instead of by throwing rocks and wearing bombs, the Muslim "haves" put on a few telethons to raise paltry sums for the "have nots" to alleviate the guilt over their palatial gilded cages.

The most interesting graph, however, is this one:

In fact, the most glaring truth is that Islam's mobsters fear the West has it right: that we have perfected the very system Islam's holy scriptures urged them to learn and practice. And having failed in their mission to lead their masses, they seek any excuse to demonize those of us in the West and to try to bring us down. They know they are losing the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, for life in all its different dimensions, and so they prepare themselves, and us, for Armageddon by starting fires everywhere in a display of Islamic unity intended to galvanize the masses they cannot feed, clothe, educate or house.

Whether this is entirely true or not, it contains an excellent insight. The West, whose values were shaped by Christian influence and where Christians still seek to fulfill the mandate given by Christ to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, is really the only source of compassion and succor in the world for those who suffer. The wealthy, oil-besotted Arabs do little for those they're in the best position to help, and non-theistic Asian nations have hardly distinguished themselves by their altruism.

It is Christianity which is the hope of the world's destitute, and were that flame ever to flicker and go out, as the secularists among us fervently hope it will, the world will rapidly descend into a Hobbesian nightmare of war of every man against every man. Once Christianity no longer provides the impetus for relief to the suffering stranger, there will not be a different impetus, there will be no impetus. Those who, like the people devastated by the tsunami in 2003, will suffer with no hope of rescue or relief.

Humorless Wastelands

One of the traits that sets True Believers off from the rest of humanity is that True Believers find it impossible to laugh at themselves. Perhaps they are too insecure in what they believe, perhaps humorless people just naturally gravitate toward an ideology or a faith that takes itself so seriously that self-deprecation is considered a major fault. Whatever the reason, TBers are often a humorless lot.

Think of the political left which, with a few exceptions, is a mirthless wasteland, especially compared to the conservative right. Read the hard-left blogs and newspaper columns and you find that whatever wit they put on display is generally employed in the service of the political cheapshot. The only thing they find at all amusing are the misfortunes of their political enemies (and anyone who does not agree with them is indeed an enemy, not merely an opponent.

The Islamic world is another example of people completely bereft of the ability to laugh unless it is the humorless laughter of derision directed at those they hope to soon kill. They are especially incapable of laughing at themselves, which is too bad because they're missing out on some real fun.

Anyway, by stark contrast consider this irreverent Israeli who is conducting a contest to see who can pen the funniest anti-semitic cartoons:

Amitai Sandy (29), graphic artist and publisher of Dimona Comix Publishing, from Tel-Aviv, Israel, has followed the unfolding of the "Muhammad cartoon-gate" events in amazement, until finally he came up with the right answer to all this insanity - and so he announced today the launch of a new anti-Semitic cartoons contest - this time drawn by Jews themselves! "We'll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!" said Sandy "No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!"

The contest has been announced today on the www.boomka.org website, and the initiator accept submissions of cartoons, caricatures and short comic strips from people all over the world. The deadline is Sunday March 5, and the best works will be displayed in an Exhibition in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

Sandy is now in the process of arranging sponsorships of large organizations, and promises lucrative prizes for the winners, including of course the famous Matzo-bread baked with the blood of Christian children.

Probably most of what will be produced in a contest like this will be pretty tasteless and a lot of it won't reach the level of the genuinely funny. Nevertheless, maybe I just don't know enough Muslims, but I'm having difficulty trying to picture anyone of that faith even contemplating doing something like this.

They're much too preoccupied with raising money to fund the bounties they're putting on the heads of Danish cartoonists.

Alec Baldwin and Other Haters

The Hollywood lefties are surpassing their customary standards for lunacy in the Cheney hunting episode. Take Alec Baldwin for example. Mr. Baldwin is the compassionate liberal who once announced on the Conan O'Brien show that:

"If we were living in another country, what we, all of us together, would go down to Washington and stone (Republican Congressman) Henry Hyde to death, stone him to death, stone him to death!" said Baldwin. "Then we would go to their house and we'd kill the family, kill the children."

Now this sweet man has this to say about Dick Cheney:

"Cheney is a terrorist. He terrorizes our enemies abroad and innocent citizens here at home indiscriminately. Who ever thought Harry Whittington would be the answer to America's prayers. Finally, someone who might get that lying, thieving Cheney into a courtroom to answer some direct questions."

Imagine that. The same fellow who called for the murder of one of the most gentle men in American public life, Henry Hyde, and the slaughter of Hyde's wife and children is calling Dick Cheney a terrorist. Not only is Baldwin a morally ugly man and a hypocrite, he's also not very bright. After all, isn't terrorizing one's enemies abroad what one is supposed to do when one is at war?

Andrew Sullivan noted recently that although he gets mean, hateful e-mail from both left and right, the stuff he gets from the left is much more vicious than what he receives from the other side. He writes:

....I've experienced vitriol from both sides in my time. I will say this: the hate and viciousness directed toward me from the left in the 1990s for daring to be a gay man who was not a liberal does indeed exceed the hate and viciousness of the right for a small-c conservative who has become alarmed by the excesses and errors of the Bush administration. No right-wing group has picketed a book-signing with posters depicting my face behind the cross-hairs of a gun, as the gay left did. No one on the right has gone nuclear on my private life, as the gay left did. No one on the right has threatened to find me in P-town and split my skull open, or called me the anti-Christ, as some on the gay left have. Yes, I get homophobic hate mail from the right all the time; and many conservative blogs have blackballed or slimed or smeared me in various ways. But that's, sadly, what you get for being provocative and opinionated on the web. Bottom line: Hugh Hewitt is not as hateful as Eric Alterman, as any reader can see for themselves.

Haters are ugly people. One need only to have watched the astonishing performance of Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC's Scarborough Country in October of 2004, when O'Donnell went into a name-calling frenzy at John O'Neill of the Swift-Vets, to see that these people are teetering on the brink of insanity and the slightest nudge often pushes them right over.

They're not the sort of individuals who can be trusted with the kitchen cutlery much less the levers of power in our government.

Parallel Tragedies

At First Things' blog Richard Neuhaus notes that Gene Robinson, the man who left his wife to join his male lover and who created a stir when he was ordained a Bishop in the Anglican Church, has checked himself into alcohol rehab. Neuhaus writes:

Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion, has been in alcohol rehab since February 1. There is this in his letter to his diocese:

"Brothers and Sisters in Christ, I am writing to you from an alcohol treatment center where on February 1, with the encouragement and support of my partner, daughters and colleagues, I checked myself in to deal with my increasing dependence on alcohol."

"Over the 28 days I will be here, I will be dealing with the disease of alcoholism-which, for years, I have thought of as a failure of will or discipline on my part, rather than a disease over which my particular body simply has no control, except to stop drinking altogether."

One has the greatest empathy for people afflicted with alcoholism, but the logic is intriguing. It is not a matter of will or discipline but a disease of his particular body over which he has no control.

One might imagine a person severely afflicted with same-sex desires writing something like this: "I thought of it as a failure of will or discipline on my part, rather than a disease over which my particular body simply has no control, except to stop having sex altogether and live a chaste life."

The self-exculpating dismissal of will and discipline as irrelevant to disordered desires is always a morally dubious step. Bishop Robinson will now be a recovering alcoholic. Good. If only he were also a recovering gay.

There may be a genetic predisposition to being gay, as some believe, just as there is a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. But just as we don't accept the alcohol addiction as normal there's no reason why homosexuality should be accepted as normal. Both conditions, in different ways, ravage body and soul and wreck lives. This is not to say that everyone who is gay devastates his life through his behavior, of course, but it is to say that the chances of ruin are far greater if one is homosexual, all other things being equal, than if one is not. And this, like the ruined lives of so many good people by alcoholism, is a terrible waste and an awful tragedy.

Burning Down Their Livelihood

The Muslims, many of whom are dirt poor, are doing their best to ensure that they stay that way by torching the businesses of the only employers in town.

This isn't about depictions of Muhammed. What, after all, do the United States and KFC have to do with Danish cartoonists? This is how people react when they sense, if only inchoately, that there is no plausible argument that they can make to defend either their behavior or their beliefs. It's what people do when they lack the wit to say or do anything constructive. In their frustration and impotence they simply wax furious and break things. If there's one thing that the Muslim mob has proven itself adept at it's breaking things and killing people. It's what they do best and they're quick to hone their skills whenever they get the chance.

An Italian Reform Minister, Roberto Calderoli, has decided he's had enough of Muslim demands that the rest of the world adopt their religious views:

Calderoli, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, told Ansa news agency on Tuesday that the West had to stand up against Islamist extremists and offered to hand out T-shirts to anyone who wanted them. "I have had T-shirts made with the cartoons that have upset Islam and I will start wearing them today," Ansa quoted Calderoli as saying.

He said the T-shirts were not meant to be a provocation but added that he saw no point trying to appease extremists. "We have to put an end to this story that we can talk to these people. They only want to humiliate people. Full stop. And what are we becoming? The civilization of melted butter?" Calderoli said.

We look forward to the inevitable Muslim reprisals. Perhaps they'll start wearing T-shirts in Islamabad with pictures of the Pope wearing a missile nose-cone as a miter. Oh, wouldn't that shut up the West. Wouldn't that incense the infidels. Outraged Catholics would be flooding the streets of Rome burning down mosques and embassies, beating up Arabs and shouting pithy slogans like "Death to all Muslims," and things like that. The savage rioting would no doubt persist for days. Or at least until naptime.

Blog Stats

Here's an interesting article on blogs with some fascinating statistics:

According to blog search and indexing site Technocrati, around 75,000 new blogs are created every day. US-based Technocrati said it tracks about 1.2 million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour. Nearly 14 million bloggers are still posting three months after their blogs are created, the report found. And, at least 2.7 million bloggers update their web journals at least once a week.

"The blogosphere is more than 60 times bigger than three years ago, and is doubling in size every 5.5 months," said Technorati's Dave Sifry.

However, the report also found that about 9 per cent of new blogs are spam or machine generated. "Nine per cent of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or are attempts to create link farms or click fraud," added Sifry.

In October 2005, the number of online weblogs recorded by Technocrati was nearly 19 million.

We also note with some pride that according to the rankings at N.Z.Bear who tracks such things (but does not track Viewpoint because we apparently are a stealth blog), to be among the top 2000 blogs in the country requires about 200 hits per day which we've been averaging for several months now (actually our traffic is about 225 hits/day). Out of the tens of thousands of blogs in the U.S. we're feeling pretty good about ranking that high.

Thanks for putting us there and please remember to link us to your friends.

Cheering the Defeat of Critical Analysis

Bill Dembski notes that Darwinist bloggers are ecstatic that the Ohio State Board of Education has removed "critical analysis of evolution" from its standards and wonders whether:

[T]here is any other field of inquiry - other than evolution, that is - whose advocates become ecstatic when critical analysis of its subject is suppressed. Usually, advocates of a position are happy to entertain critical analysis because such criticism highlights the importance of their subject and facilitates its further development. Of course, there's a qualifier that needs to be added to this question: Are there any legitimate fields of inquiry that discourage critical analysis of their subject areas?

Good questions. The reaction of the anti-ID crowd to this step by the Ohio Board looks less like the response of dispassionate objective scientists and very much more like the reaction of religious enthusiasts.

Magnificent Comeback

This is wonderful news. The bald eagle is likely to be removed from the endangered species list within the year:

Seven years after the government said the fierce raptor is no longer threatened with extinction, officials finally have a plan for removing it from the endangered species list."Partly it just fell through the cracks," said Jamie Rappaport Clark, executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife, who proposed delisting the bird in 1999 while she was President Clinton's Fish and Wildlife Service director. The process has taken far longer than the typical year, partly because updated counts are required from each of the states, and some of those have rules that add red tape.

Clark called the bald eagle "a success story" for the embattled Endangered Species Act, which Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration have been pushing to reshape so that more responsibility is given to private landowners instead of the federal government.

"Across the range, you can't deny the incredible success of the return of the bald eagle," she said. "A lot of attention, energy and money was put into its recovery."

The bird has battled back from the threat of extinction because of habitat loss and the pesticide DDT.

The Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service issued draft voluntary guidelines spelling out how landowners, land managers and others should protect the bird once the 1973 law no longer safeguards it. It also proposed prohibitions on "disturbing" the bald eagle, which could include anything that would disrupt its breeding, feeding or sheltering or cause injury, death or nest abandonment.

Officials said Monday's action could lead to the bald eagle coming off the endangered species list within the next year or so.

Hall said at least 7,066 known nesting pairs now exist in the contiguous United States. The bald eagle's territory stretches over much of the North American continent. Tens of thousands more live in Alaska and Canada, where their existence never was imperiled.

However, 43 years ago, there were just 417 known nesting pairs left in the lower 48 states, mainly because of the widespread use of DDT and other pesticides that weakened the bald eagle's eggshells and reduced its birth rate. The brown-bodied bird with the distinctive white head and tail also suffered from lead poisoning - eating waterfowl pierced by a hunter's lead shot.

In 1967, under a law that preceded the Endangered Species Act, the bald eagle was declared an endangered species in the lower 48. In 1972, the Fish and Wildlife officials in 1978 listed the bald eagle as endangered in 43 states and threatened in Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin. The government hatched detailed recovery plans, with specific population and reproduction goals. Sometimes eggs were imported from Canada and installed at artificial eyries.

By 1995, the species had rebounded enough to be reclassified as threatened throughout the lower 48.

In 1970, when I first came to live near the Susquehanna River in southcentral Pennsylvania the sight of an eagle was exceedingly rare except perhaps during fall migration. Now they are nesting up and down the river and concentrating in its basin during the winter.

On a recent trip in January to the Conowingo dam in Maryland there were eight birds perched on a single power line tower and a dozen within a single binocular field of each other. They would sit until one of their number sallied forth to seize a fish and then a half dozen would give chase to try to dislodge the morsel from the talons of the bird which caught it. They swooped and soared along the river bank a mere twenty feet above our heads as we basked in the beauty of these gorgeous birds spinning their pirouettes in the clear blue sky. They are indeed magnificent creatures and engineering their comeback is an example of a task that the federal government has done very well and for which future generations of Americans will be grateful.

Republicans should not begrudge the federal government the role they play in protecting our natural heritage. As we have said before, if being conservative means anything, it means conserving what is beautiful and good, not just in our traditions and our culture but also in our national resources, including our wildlife. A genuine conservative should not tolerate the loss or erosion of a single species of plant or animal due to greed or short-term economic expediency.