The Company We Keep

Suppose Senator John McCain were discovered to be a member of, say, Westboro Baptist Church pastored by the infamous Fred Phelps who believes that America's problems are God's judgment on our tolerance of homosexuality. Should McCain's affiliation with that kind of thinking matter to people who are trying decide who is best suited to be our next president? Would the MSM be interested in the story? The answer to both questions is "of course".

Well, we're faced with a somewhat similar situation in this primary season, but it doesn't involve John McCain - it involves Barack Obama. Obama has belonged to a church in Chicago for twenty years the pastor of which, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, can fairly be described as a bigot. Wright has honored the anti-semite Louis Farrakhan with a lifetime achievement award and traveled with him to Libya. He employs in his sermons racially charged rhetoric that is certainly divisive and potentially incendiary. He has said that the United States brought the 9/11 attacks on itself through its own "terrorism," and that "the government gives [blacks] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' He says we should be singing "God damn America." (No wonder Michelle Obama says the things she does)

If a Republican belonged to such a church and contributed to its "ministry" I'm pretty sure he'd be flayed alive by the media. Nevertheless, MSNBC's Dan Abrams, for example, doesn't think anyone should judge Obama by the church to which he belongs and to which he takes his children.

To get a taste of what Obama listens to whenever he attends Reverend Wright's services go here and ask yourself these questions as you're watching: Aren't churches that engage in political partisanship supposed to lose their tax exempt status? How much of what this man says is factually correct? What if a white preacher were to give a similar sermon but talked about blacks the way Wright talks about whites? Why don't the same standards that apply to white pastors apply to their black counterparts?

Bill O'Reilly had an interesting segment on this topic on his television show:

Obama has said he doesn't agree with his pastor's views, but if so why does he contribute to the church? Why does he take his daughters to hear the man preach? Why has he been a member for twenty years? So many questions. I wonder why Hillary, or her surrogates, aren't asking them.

RLC

Damascus Road

Playwright and movie-maker David Mamet has the scales fall from his eyes and consequently finds himself converting from "brain-dead" liberalism to, well, a more mature and thoughtful view. He describes his journey from darkness into light at The Village Voice. Here are a couple of excerpts:

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind. As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f--- up?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been-rather charmingly, I thought-referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

Mamet has more on his ideological journey at the link.

The observation has been misattributed to Churchill but whoever said it nevertheless hit upon a great truth: a man who's not a liberal at 20 has no heart. If he's still a liberal at 40 he has no head. Not wishing our liberal friends over 40 to despair, we want them to know that, like Mamet, it's better to find one's head late than to never find it at all.

HT:Hot Air

RLC

Speech Nazis

Geraldine Ferarro has resigned from Hillary Clinton's campaign because she's been mugged by her fellow Democrats for daring to note the obvious: Barack Obama is where he is in the contest for president largely because of his skin color. Why anyone should think this is offensive, or even mistaken, is beyond me, but even Sean Hannity was saying yesterday afternoon that he thought it was incorrect and insensitive. What's wrong with people?

Obama has made it this far against Senator Clinton largely on the basis of overwhelming black support and the votes of white Democrats eager to vote for a credible black candidate in order to innoculate themselves against any future charge of racism. Does anyone really think that an inexperienced first-term white senator with Obama's same charisma would have attracted so many African-Americans to his side? Does anyone seriously believe that a white male candidate, other things being equal, would have gotten so much support from the MSM against Hillary Clinton?

We are a nation afraid to talk openly about race. We're cowed into refusing to say things that everyone knows to be true but which are guaranteed to gain one the opprobrium of the speech Nazis who preemptively censor all unapproved mention of race. Almost any reference to race in our society - unless accompanied by a truckload of qualifiers, demurrals, and clarifications - risks being interpreted as "racist". This is quite bizarre and a symptom, I think, of some sort of national psychosis. It's certainly not intellectually mature or honest.

Why should people pretend that race hasn't played a critical part in the presidential contest? We're certainly not skittish about observing that gender has been a prominent factor. Blacks are turning out in large numbers and Obama is taking 90% of their votes. That phenomenon has largely propelled him into contention, and to avoid seeing that requires a kind of willful contortionism at which liberals seem to be quite skilled.

Geraldine Ferarro made a perfectly reasonable observation, and she's been forced to resign because what she said offends foolish liberal conventions. We might well ask in what sense are the people who think it racist to mention the advantage Obama's color has conferred upon him "liberal" in any classical sense of the word?

RLC

If Not Him, Who?

I don't know whythis young man was refused asylum, but it would be an ugly blot on Europe, and a sign that Christian compassion has been all but extinguished on that continent, if he were forced to return to Iran:

Mehdi Kazemi, 19, traveled to Britain to study in 2005 and applied there for asylum after learning that his male lover in Iran had been executed for sodomy. After British authorities rejected Kazemi's application, he fled and applied for asylum in the Netherlands.

Upholding a ruling by the Dutch government, the Council of State said Britain is responsible for Kazemi's case because he applied for asylum there first. European Union rules say the member state where an asylum seeker first enters the bloc is responsible for processing that person's claim.

The fact that a man is gay should not earn him a death sentence any more than prostitution should be a capital crime. Unfortunately, in the Islamic state of Iran, it does. This photo is of the hanging of two teenagers in Iran who were sentenced to death simply because they were gay.

In Iran being homosexual is a worse crime than raping a woman. Why send Mehdi Khazemi back to that? If someone like this 19 year-old boy should not be given asylum, who should?

RLC

How the Mighty Have Fallen

Democrat Eliot Spitzer has resigned as Governor of New York. It's easy to feel sorry for his family which must be absolutely mortified to learn that their father and husband has spent perhaps $80,000 on prostitutes over the last six years.

It's harder, however, to feel sorry for Spitzer himself. By all accounts he was an arrogant prosecutorial bully who used his previous office as state attorney general to destroy people who hadn't really done anything wrong. He was, in other words, another Michael Nifong, the man who prosecuted the Duke lacrosse players on charges of rape even though he had every reason to know they were innocent.

Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal composes a scathing indictment of the news media's complicity in Spitzer's abuse of power. In the course of her essay she says this:

Consider the report in the wake of a 2005 op-ed in this newspaper by John Whitehead. A respected Wall Street figure, Mr. Whitehead dared to criticize Mr. Spitzer for his unscrupulously zealous pursuit of Mr. Greenberg. Mr. Spitzer later threatened Mr. Whitehead, telling him in a phone call that "You will pay the price. This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done." Some months later, after more Spitzer excesses, Mr. Whitehead had the temerity to write another op-ed describing what Mr. Spitzer had said.

Within a few days, the press was reporting (unsourced, of course) that Mr. Whitehead had defended Mr. Greenberg a few weeks after a Greenberg charity had given $25 million to the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation -- a group Mr. Whitehead chaired. So Mr. Whitehead's on-the-record views were met with an unsourced smear implying bad faith. The press ran with it anyway.

In 2005, Mr. Spitzer went on national television to suggest that Mr. Greenberg had engaged in criminal activity. It was front-page news. About six months later, on the eve of a Thanksgiving weekend, Mr. Spitzer quietly disclosed that he lacked the evidence to press criminal charges. That news was buried inside the papers.

In 2004 Attorney General Spitzer arrested 18 people on prostitution and related charges:

Spitzer proudly announced on April 8, 2004, that authorities had arrested 18 people on promoting prostitution and related charges-including money laundering and falsifying business records-in an investigation of escort services in New York.

"This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure," Spitzer said at the time. "It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring, and now its owners and operators will be held accountable."

In the 2004 probe, investigators used wiretaps and other surveillance to build their case, said Vincent Romano, who defended the man accused of running the ring. Prosecutors also charged some of the defendants with enterprise corruption-a charge carrying heavier penalties than simple prostitution. No charges were brought against the ring's customers, just those accused of working for or running the service.

"It was a big splash. They had the perp walk. He caused a lot of embarrassment to a lot of people in the case to his benefit. What he put their families through at the time, he's probably experiencing now: the level of embarrassment and ridicule," Romano said.

"He's got this overzealous, mean-spirited prosecution, but behind closed doors in another state, he's doing the identical thing that he's accusing others of doing," he added. "And the other irony of it is that you've made a career off of a wiretap, and your demise is by the same prosecutorial tool."

There's more on Spitzer's Nifong-like prosecutorial abuses at the above links. We're called to offer our compassion to the sinner, but some cases are a lot harder than others.

RLC

Anti-War Thug

Another left-wing peace activist convinces us of the rightness of his cause through the power of gentle, non-violent persuasion.

I know that there are lots of people on the left who are good, decent individuals. Unfortunately, there seem to be an awful lot like this guy, too, especially among the secular lefties. I wonder how many are willing to distance themselves from him. I hope that everybody who opposes the war would, if confronted with this guy's blog, be repulsed by it, but if they aren't it would tell us much about their own character and convictions.

RLC

Re: The Negro Project

To find out what this Glenn McCoy cartoon is about go here.

RLC

Saturday Night Live

In case you've missed these clips of Saturday Night Live's parodies of the treatment the MSM has been giving Barack Obama you can watch them below. If you've seen the actual CNN and NBC debates the parodies will make you laugh, especially the foreign policy questions at the end of the NBC debate.

RLC

Seven Questions

Dennis Prager suggests seven questions parents should ask of any prospective college or university which their child is interested in attending. Here are three of them with some of his remarks:

1. Can one obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree at your college without having read a single Shakespeare play, one Federalist Paper or one book of the Bible? If so, why attend such a college?

5. Can my child live in a same-sex dorm and are the bathrooms co-ed?

One generation ago and for all of American history, the university acted in loco parentis, in the place of the parent. You could send your daughter to college more or less assured that the college would act on behalf of her welfare as you would -- meaning, for example, that boys had to leave girls dorms by a certain hour. Now, most colleges have no boys or girls dorms and do everything they can to enable boys and girls to fraternize in each other's rooms at any hour of the night and even share bathrooms.

7. Would a typical graduate of your university be able to say anything intelligent about Josef Stalin, Louis Armstrong, Pope John XXIII or Pope John Paul II, differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, Cain and Abel, the Gulag Archipelago, Franz Josef Haydn, Pol Pot, Martin Luther, Darfur, how interest rates affect the dollar, dark matter, and "Crime and Punishment"; explain what the Korean War was about and when it was fought; identify India on a map; and know the difference between the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council?

If not, why not? How could someone be considered in any way educated and not be able to intelligently answer all or nearly all of those questions? If they don't know about such essential and basic things, what do they know? Movies? The supposed dangers of global warming? The importance of race, gender and class? The meaning of menage a trois (or "threesomes")? Great gay writers?

Read the rest at the link, and check out the readers' comments, too. Some of them are pretty interesting.

RLC

Review of <i>Expelled</i>

Film reviewer Brett McCracken was pleasantly surprised by Expelled. He feared that it would be a documentary that tried to prove that evolution was all hokum but found instead that it's a funny yet disturbing look at censorship in American universities. He writes:

Indeed, the film hits a nerve in its critique of the contemporary American academy. As a graduate student immersed in academia and all its idiosyncrasies, I can attest to the pervasive and disturbingly hypocritical sense of close-mindedness that stifles the spirit of progressive discourse. It goes beyond the scientific communities in higher education and touches many disciplines.

Quite simply: if you are not on the "right" side of the wall (whatever wall it may be), your voice is stifled, your work discredited, and your intelligence questioned. It's gone beyond political correctness and is now something altogether more militant and sinister. Sadly, the academy today is less about the sharing and discovery of truth as it is about the wielding and protecting of power.

Critics will attack this movie and claim that it is manipulative propaganda, but if Michael Moore can get an Oscar for it, why hate on Ben Stein?

Read the rest of the review at the link. Expelled is due to be released to the general public April 18th.

RLC

Thought For A Sunday

Concerning that part of devotion which relates to times and hours of prayer. Of daily early prayer in the morning. How we are to improve our forms of prayer, and how to increase the spirit of devotion.

HAVING in the foregoing chapters shown the necessity of a devout spirit, or habit of mind, in every part of our common life, in the discharge of all our business, in the use of all the gifts of God; I come now to consider that part of devotion, which relates to times and hours of prayer.

I take it for granted, that every Christian, that is in health, is up early in the morning; for it is much more reasonable to suppose a person up early, because he is a Christian, than because he is a labourer, or a tradesman, or a servant, or has business that wants him.

We naturally conceive some abhorrence of a man that is in bed when he should be at his labour or in his shop. We cannot tell how to think anything good of him, who is such a slave to drowsiness as to neglect his business for it.

Let this therefore teach us to conceive how odious we must appear in the sight of Heaven, if we are in bed, shut up in sleep and darkness, when we should be praising God; and are such slaves to drowsiness, as to neglect our devotions for it.

For if he is to be blamed as a slothful drone, that rather chooses the lazy indulgence of sleep, than to perform his proper share of worldly business; how much more is he to be reproached, that would rather lie folded up in a bed, than be raising up his heart to God in acts of praise and adoration!

Prayer is the nearest approach to God, and the highest enjoyment of Him, that we are capable of in this life.

It is the noblest exercise of the soul, the most exalted use of our best faculties, and the highest imitation of the blessed inhabitants of Heaven.

When our hearts are full of God, sending up holy desires to the throne of grace, we are then in our highest state, we are upon the utmost heights of human greatness; we are not before kings and princes, but in the presence and audience of the Lord of all the world, and can be no higher, till death is swallowed up in glory.

On the other hand, sleep is the poorest, dullest refreshment of the body, that is so far from being intended as an enjoyment, that we are forced to receive it either in a state of insensibility, or in the folly of dreams.

Sleep is such a dull, stupid state of existence, that even amongst mere animals, we despise them most which are most drowsy.

He, therefore, that chooses to enlarge the slothful indulgence of sleep, rather than be early at his devotions to God, chooses the dullest refreshment of the body, before the highest, noblest employment of the soul; he chooses that state which is a reproach to mere animals, rather than that exercise which is the glory of Angels.

You will perhaps say, though you rise late, yet you are always careful of your devotions when you are up.

It may be so. But what then? Is it well done of you to rise late, because you pray when you are up?

Is it pardonable to waste great part of the day in bed, because some time after you say your prayers?

It is as much your duty to rise to pray, as to pray when you are risen. And if you are late at your prayers, you offer to God the prayers of an idle, slothful worshipper, that rises to prayers as idle servants rise to their labour.

Farther; if you fancy that you are careful of your devotions when you are up, though it be your custom to rise late, you deceive yourself; for you cannot perform your devotions as you ought. For he that cannot deny himself this drowsy indulgence, but must pass away good part of the morning in it, is no more prepared for prayer when he is up, than he is prepared for fasting, abstinence, or any other self-denial. He may indeed more easily read over a form of prayer, than he can perform these duties; but he is no more disposed to enter into the true spirit of prayer than he is disposed to fasting. For sleep thus indulged gives a softness and idleness to all our tempers, and makes us unable to relish anything but what suits with an idle state of mind, and gratifies our natural tempers, as sleep does. So that a person who is a slave to this idleness is in the same temper when he is up; and though he is not asleep, yet he is under the effects of it; and everything that is idle, indulgent, or sensual, pleases him for the same reason that sleep pleases him; and, on the other hand, everything that requires care, or trouble, or self-denial, is hateful to him, for the same reason that he hates to rise. He that places any happiness in this morning indulgence, would be glad to have all the day made happy in the same manner; though not with sleep, yet with such enjoyments as gratify and indulge the body in the same manner as sleep does; or, at least, with such as come as near to it as they can. The remembrance of a warm bed is in his mind all the day, and he is glad when he is not one of those that sit starving in a church.

Now you do not imagine that such a one can truly mortify that body which he thus indulges: yet you might as well think this, as that he can truly perform his devotions; or live in such a drowsy state of indulgence, and yet relish the joys of a spiritual life.

For surely no one will pretend to say that he knows and feels the true happiness of prayer, who does not think it worth his while to be early at it.

It is not possible in nature for an epicure to be truly devout: he must renounce this habit of sensuality, before he can relish the happiness of devotion.

Now he that turns sleep into an idle indulgence, does as much to corrupt and disorder his soul, to make it a slave to bodily appetites, and keep it incapable of all devout and heavenly tempers, as he that turns the necessities of eating into a course of indulgence.

A person that eats and drinks too much does not feel such effects from it, as those do who live in notorious instances of gluttony and intemperance: but yet his course of indulgence, though it be not scandalous in the eyes of the world, nor such as torments his own conscience, is a great and constant hindrance to his improvement in virtue; it gives him eyes that see not, and ears that hear not; it creates a sensuality in the soul, increases the power of bodily passions, and makes him incapable of entering into the true spirit of religion.

Now this is the case of those who waste their time in sleep; it does not disorder their lives, or wound their consciences, as notorious acts of intemperance do; but, like any other more moderate course of indulgence, it silently, and by smaller degrees, wears away the spirit of religion, and sinks the soul into a state of dulness and sensuality.

If you consider devotion only as a time of so much prayer, you may perhaps perform it, though you live in this daily indulgence; but if you consider it as a state of the heart, as a lively fervour of the soul, that is deeply affected with a sense of its own misery and infirmities, and desires the Spirit of God more than all things in the world: you will find that the spirit of indulgence, and the spirit of prayer, cannot subsist together. Mortification of all kinds is the very life and soul of piety; but he that has not so small a degree of it, as to be able to be early at his prayers, can have no reason to think that he has taken up his cross, and is following Christ.

A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law 1686 - 1761

Liberal Angst

Nobody is funnier than Mark Steyn, and he's at the top of his game in this column skewering the various guilt-induced neuroses afflicting the Democratic party and the angst they're generating in the current primary. It reminds me a little of a short version of Tom Wolfe's devastating satire of '60s liberals in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.

RLC

Nanny State

Some city government officials in London just have too much time and too little to do:

A London street is experimenting with padded lampposts to protect those not paying attention from banging into them, ITN reports.

A study conducted by 118 118, a phone directory service, found that one in 10 people has been hurt while focusing on their cell phone instead of where they were walking, ITN reports.

The test lampposts will be given a trial run in London's East End on Brick Lane. If the trial is successful it will be rolled out in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

Maybe next they'll put up signs reminding pedestrians to wash behind their ears. A photo of one of the padded lampposts can be found here.

RLC

Giving Them Our Cloak Also

Last month we noted the remarks of Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams whose unfortunate suggestion it was that Britain should allow Muslims to arbitrate certain civil matters according to their own law. Despite being met with a chilly reception in those precincts in the West were dhimmi status has yet to penetrate, some asked what's the harm. If the Muslims wish to beat their wives or own several of them to beat, so what? It's the Christian thing to do to let the Muslims have their way.

David Yerushalmi at First Things offers a dissenting opinion:

So what's the fuss all about? The fuss is about the elephant in the room, or, better yet, the wolf in sheep's clothing that some Americans fail to acknowledge. Put simply, not all foreign or religious laws are equal. Most foreign laws, be they sourced in secular legal codes or religious ones, are not predicated on a doctrine of world domination and holy war. But what if a legal system is founded upon the goal of conquering the world through holy war when persuasion and subjugation are not immediately successful?

In other words, should a society lend legitimacy to a legal system whose raison d'�tre is the destruction of that society? Moreover, how should a society treat a legal system that obligates its faithful to use violent jihad to accomplish its goals?

The chorus of objectors at this point is predictable: Who says that Shari'a's goal is world hegemony and its method violent jihad? The answer of course rests with the Shari'a authorities who have addressed this question over the past 1,200 years. Granted, there have been some lone voices (notably certain Sufi scholars) that have sought to temper this rather violent doctrine, but one need only pick up any treatise of the Shari'a authorities, including the great Andalusian philosopher and jurist Ibn Rushd, known to the Western world as Averro�s and lauded as the model of moderation during Islam's Golden Era, to learn that the Muslim nation is obligated to engage in kinetic warfare against polytheists and other manifestations of apostasy. For the record, Shari'a authorities consider a secular constitution that does not abide by Islamic law as a form of polytheism.

And, sadly, one need not rely on ancient medieval Shari'a authorities to know that Osama bin Laden bases his war against the infidel on more than dusty fatwas or even the radical political writings of the twentieth-century Islamists such as Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi or Sayyid Qutb.

For example, Dow Jones & Company, the owner of the Wall Street Journal, employs Mufti Taqi Usmani, a world-renowned Shari'a authority. Sitting as one of the most esteemed members of the Dow Jones Shari'a Advisory Board, Usmani informs Dow Jones which companies are Shari'a-compliant for admission into the Dow Jones Islamic Index. This index is then licensed by mutual funds to determine which companies are permissible investments for their Shari'a-compliant portfolios.

It should surprise no one that Usmani has ruled in line with Shari'a's 1,200 years of jurisprudence that violent jihad against the infidels in the West is an ongoing obligation. In fact, he has dedicated an entire chapter to the subject in his book Islam and Modernism. [C]hapter 11 sets out Usmani's legal ruling explicitly rejecting the notion that violent jihad is no longer obligatory for Muslims in the West.

In this chapter, Usmani carefully explains that the goal of jihad is not "freedom of religion" but the absolute "domination" of the non-Muslim by the Muslim. The Muslim's freedom to practice his religion in the West does not excuse the Muslim from his obligation to engage in violent Jihad against the non-Muslim West.

Thus, the problem with the "live and let live" approach is that there is at least one creed that will use every means available, including violence, to destroy every other. A civil society that is not prepared to make distinctions between anti-Western theo-political legal codes and innocuous religious ones could eventually find itself engaged in a battle for its very existence.

Precisely. We must remind our friends from time to time that just because Muslims are religious doesn't mean they're Amish.

RLC

Pew Survey

The Wall Street Journal has some thoughts on the recent Pew Survey of Religion in America. A couple of highlights:

A new survey of the American religious landscape, out this week from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, confirms the dynamism of American religious experience. Its results stand in contrast to Europe, where Christian observance has slowly withered under the Continent's now moribund state-sanctioned churches.

Some 60% of Americans say religion is "very important" to them. That's compared with 12% for the French and 25% for the Italians. The study describes a "competitive religious marketplace" in which 84% of Americans claim one of hundreds of religious affiliations -- from Pentecostalism and Judaism to Islam and Mormonism.

Religions that demand the most of people are growing the fastest. The mainline Protestant churches -- with their less exclusionary views of salvation, looser rules for sexual conduct and sermons about social justice -- have lost membership, especially since the early 1990s. The more traditional evangelical churches keep growing.

People need something to believe in, and if they don't have it their lives become arid and meaningless. Secularism offers nothing to fill the void left by the loss of religious faith and many liberal churches are virtually secular in the extent to which any real religious conviction has been scrubbed from their worship service.

The lesson of the survey seems to be that if people are offered a muscular faith they'll respond to it, but a tepid faith that amounts to little more than weekly fellowship offers nothing more than what most people could find at the corner tavern. Why should anyone find that compelling or attractive?

There's more on the Pew findings at the link.

RLC

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

I'm no golfer so I shouldn't pass judgment, but this poor woman's shot makes it appear as though she's not much of a golfer either. Even so, what are the chances?

The hapless bird appears to be a ring-billed gull of which there are zillions. I guess that makes it a dead ringer.

HT: Telic Thoughts

RLC

The Silence

Ingmar Bergman is famous for his films addressing man's (and his own) estrangement from God. The Seventh Seal, for example, raises questions about God's goodness in the face of death and evil, Winter Light depicts a clergyman's loss of faith due in large measure to his sterile service to a God who does not speak, and The Silence is a bleak, stark examination of modern secular man's alienation from himself and others, the utter emptiness of his life, and, most of all, his total loneliness. All three films, but especially the last, drive home the same simple Sartrean message in quiet, somber voice: In a world without God man is forlorn - he is in despair.

For Bergman, raised in a Lutheran parsonage by devout parents, God doesn't exist, but His non-existence is not something the film-maker celebrates. Rather it's a cause of great disquiet and anguish. Every scene in The Silence stresses our alienation and isolation from each other. We are aliens in a foreign country, we don't speak the same language, we don't share the same purposes, we harbor bitterness and resentments, and, as a result, we are miserable, alone, and emotionally barren. In the absence of God our lives, in Bergman's telling, are boring, empty, tedious and bleak. They are a darkness relieved only by momentary sparks of joyless and tawdry pleasure.

These films are not for children (This is especially true of The Silence which is sexually explicit), but they are most assuredly for thinking adults, especially Christians and agnostics, and for the same reason: They tease out in artful metaphor the existential predicament of contemporary man without God and reveal the fraudulence of modern materialism's charming but treacherous promise to lead us to earthly contentment. Bergman's films confront the viewer with the uncomfortable truth that where materialism actually leads is straight into an abyss of hopelessness and meaninglessness.

Sadly, although Bergman was able to brilliantly diagnose the human condition and translate it onto the screen, he was unable, as far as I know, to bring himself to accept the only remedy for that condition that works. Bergman died last year at the age of 89.

RLC

Canadian Brownshirts

Liberal fascism expresses itself in many ways. One is to intimidate and coerce their opponents into silence by threatening them with lawsuits as is happening in Canada. The publisher of the Mohammed cartoons, Ezra Levant, is being hounded by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, as is conservative columnist Mark Steyn and many others. Canada doesn't have the equivalent of our First Amendment so unpopular or politically incorrect speech is much riskier there than here, at least for now. Connie Fournier writes:

The conservative internet ... is under attack [in Canada]. The Canadian Human Rights Commission has already been used on many occasions to shut down websites and to place lifetime speech bans on webmasters who have been hauled before its tribunals. The human rights commission attacks on Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn have made a lot of people aware of the danger of allowing these government bodies to regulate the speech of Canadians, and the internet has been abuzz with stories of bureaucratic abuse. The fight for free speech has begun.

As you might expect, these commissions and those who support them are not prepared to go down without a fight. In recent days, defamation notices have begun to arrive at the doors of the bloggers and website owners who have dared to comment on former human rights investigator and EGALE member, Richard Warman, or his staunchest defender, former Liberal war room strategist, Warren Kinsella.

The defamation suits that are being filed by this pair threaten to put a chill on the conservative blogosphere. The fact that site owners are being sued over posts that have been made by their members is already making webmasters wonder if allowing free speech on their websites is worth the risk to their homes or their savings.

The people bringing these suits don't wear brown shirts and don't sport swastika tattoos, but they've adopted the same tactics as those in the 1930s who did: Intimidation and denial of free expression. History always repeats itself.

RLC

Crumbling Paradigm

Suzan Mazur at Scoop reports on an upcoming conference convened to discuss the current ferment in evolutionary biology. It turns out that behind the scenes a lot of biologists are growing increasingly disenchanted with Darwin's theory of natural selection because it doesn't have the explanatory power that it was thought to have a few decades ago.

Here are some excerpts from Mazur's article:

What it amounts to is a gathering of 16 biologists and philosophers of rock star stature - let's call them "the Altenberg 16" - who recognize that the theory of evolution which most practicing biologists accept and which is taught in classrooms today, is inadequate in explaining our existence. It's pre the discovery of DNA, lacks a theory for body form and does not accomodate "other" new phenomena.

A wave of scientists now questions natural selection's relevance, though few will publicly admit it. And with such a fundamental struggle underway, the hurling of slurs such as "looney Marxist hangover", "philosopher" (a scientist who can't get grants anymore), "crackpot", is hardly surprising.

When I asked esteemed Harvard evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin in a phone conversation what role natural selection plays in evolution, he said, "Natural selection occurs."

Philosopher Jerry Fodor essentially argues that biologists increasingly see the central story of Darwin as wrong in a way that can't be repaired.

When I called Fodor to discuss his article, he joked that he was now in the Witness Protection Program because he'd been so besieged following its publication ...."all I'm wanting to argue is that whatever the story turns out to be, it's not going to be the selectionist story".

Fodor also told me that "you can't put this stuff in the press because it's an attack on the theory of natural selection" and besides "99.99% of the population have no idea what the theory of natural selection is".

Not all the participants at the conference agree with the sentiments expresswed above, but there is clearly an upheaval taking place among evolutionary thinkers. Scientists don't go looking to replace a paradigm unless there is a sense that the old paradigm is no longer fruitful.

Neither should anyone think that the participants are slouching toward Intelligent design, even though ID proponents have for almost twenty years (and creationists for even longer) been pointing out that Darwinism is an inadequate explanation for biological complexity. The "Altenberg 16" are all metaphysical materialists and any theory with which they supplant Darwinism will be perforce a materialist theory, which is too bad. It just means that in a few years they'll have to have another conference.

HT: Evolution News and Views.

RLC

First Spouse

We're hearing much vaporous rhetoric this election season concerning the "change" we need to make in our politics. Most of the rhetoric is coming from the Democrats, and one wonders exactly what sort of change they have in mind, but one change is becoming increasingly obvious. If either of the Democrat candidates wins the presidency there will be a stark transformation in the nature of the person who fills the role of first spouse.

If a Democrat prevails in November we'll go from the classy Laura Bush to either the decidedly unclassy Bill Clinton or the virago Michelle Obama. Ms Obama, in case you haven't heard, has followed her announcement that she is now, for the first time in her adult life, proud of her country with the tactless insult that America is "just a downright mean" country. Somehow one gets the feeling that Ms Obama doesn't much like being an American. Neither she nor Mr. Clinton will bring to the White House the quiet grace and elegance Mrs. Bush did. She'll be sorely missed.

RLC