Hurting Those Who Love Them

We all have friends and/or family, or know someone who does (or maybe it's ourselves), who believe that it's wrong for the administration to deport those who are in the country illegally but who've not committed any crime while being here.

With certain qualifiers, I'm partly sympathetic to this view, but what I have no sympathy for are those who, because of deep disagreement over this issue, have divorced themselves from family and friends and who will henceforth have nothing to do with the people they formerly claimed to have loved.

One person wrote on social media that separating himself from his family over this issue was a matter of human decency. This is very sad, especially since it suggests that these folks' self-righteousness outweighs their love for those from whom they've estranged themselves and whom they've often deeply hurt in the process.

Imagine a fellow named John who lives in a nice house with a wife and several children. John makes a comfortable living and is politically active on behalf of liberal causes.

John is always careful to lock his doors when he leaves the house or his car because he doesn't want to have his possessions stolen, but one day he forgets to do so. Coming home early before his wife was home from work and his kids were out of school he's shocked to find a rather bedraggled-looking family of complete strangers sitting in his living room.

When he asks them what they're doing in his house, they tell him that the front door was open and they needed a place to stay, so they came in. They also tell John that they left their old neighborhood because it wasn't very nice, there were drugs and gangs, his place was much nicer, he had a well-stocked refrigerator, and they wanted to stay there.

They promise him they'd mow his grass and clean the house, and that since he had an extra bedroom, they assumed it'd be alright with John, since he had old Biden/Harris stickers on his door, if they made themselves at home.

John tells them that he sympathized with their plight, but that they couldn't stay; they'd have to leave; he'd even give them a meal and some cash to help them on their way. Nevertheless, they were insistent about moving in.

Finally, John takes out his phone and calls the police, who come and escort the family back to their old neighborhood.

Was John wrong to refuse to allow these poor people to remain in his house? Did his practice of locking his doors and his refusal to allow the intruders to stay make him a moral reprobate? Does he lack human decency? Doesn't he have the right to decide whom he'll invite into his home and whom he will exclude?

How many of those who've estranged themselves from friends and family because their former loved ones react the same as John did would themselves fault John? How many of them leave the doors to their houses and cars unlocked? How many of them would decline to evict people who tried to move into their houses uninvited?

Yet locking one's doors is analogous to building a wall on our border of our national "house," and calling the police to evict the intruders who were in his house illegally is analogous to deporting immigrants who are in our national home illegally. Our nation is our home writ large.

If you think I'm wrong about this, tell me what the significant difference is between John's situation and that which we find ourselves in after four years of a reckless border policy.

Abandoning Dawkins, Embracing Christ

An article at PJ Media by Mark Tapscott summarizes a 16-minute video in which a millennial named Josh Timonen recounts how he returned to the Christianity of his childhood.

Timonen's testimony was especially interesting to me because beginning in 2006 he had been a collaborator with evolutionary biologist and committed atheist Richard Dawkins on some of Dawkins' projects.

Tapscott writes:

Timonen initially created Dawkins' website, then steadily became an indispensable resource for the then-high riding English evolutionary biologist and author of "The God Delusion," who was in high demand for speaking engagements, particularly on college campuses and at influential conferences across the U.S. and Europe.

Timonen was riding high, but "during this time, there were definitely glimpses of emptiness in all of this, glimpses of people who were definitely not satisfied with their life." An experience at an atheist conference where Dawkins and fellow atheist advocate Sam Harris were speaking began opening Timonen's eyes.

Harris happened to mention something remotely positive about spirituality and the crowd rebelled, making it clear they didn't want to hear anything remotely good about anything in the way of spirituality, or suggestion that there might be an afterlife.

That intolerance made a deep impression on Timonen. "He was saying the most lukewarm thing about spirituality, but everybody just shut him down. It bothered me that no one was open to that and that there was such an attachment to a physicalist, materialist worldview.

"The materialist world-view means I'm only going to accept things that are within the natural world and I'm going to exclude anything spiritual or that I cannot explain with natural law. I think the atheist world-view has a lot to do with control. It's about controlling the walls of your sandbox, to say that 'if I keep everything within these walls of sand, then I am safe. I can understand it, I can explain it and that's it."

Not long after, Timonen's wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter, who came prematurely, and was not given much chance of living. Timonen recalled thinking that this child was the most important thing in his life, and yet, as an atheist, he had to believe his daughter was just another human who, like him, would simply live and then die a meaningless death.

"The atheist world-view can easily discount the value of a single human, and I remember wrestling with that and thinking 'but this is everything,' and it just felt wrong. It was a moment of realizing that the world-view was not connecting" with reality, he explained.

Then in 2020, Josh and his wife and daughter moved to Portland, Ore., where they witnessed the riots that exploded there and elsewhere in the wake of the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd. Neighborhoods Timonen had come to know and love were left in flames.

A few of the rioters were being arrested, but then they would be released without consequences the next day. Timonen was amazed when some of his young friends and business associates defended the rioters, claiming it was a "good cause." But what is a "good cause" in an atheistic worldview, he wondered, if there is nothing after death?

"Those kids rioting had no moral compass. That got me thinking a lot about that moral compass, where is it coming from. I thought I aligned with these people who were defending the riots, but I didn't, I thought, wait a minute, I thought we were the good guys. And I remember clearly thinking 'why are you defending what is clearly violence and destruction and desecrating our city"?

Timonen explains that he was also shocked during the COVID pandemic by how big institutions such as the government, the drugmakers and the medical profession, as well as individual Americans, sought to control people, to "police each other" with social distancing and mask-wearing mandates.

"That really shocked me and it felt like there was a wave of evil that had come over everyone. I think of it like an ocean wave where the individual particles are all being pushed in the same way. I also noticed that there was this upswell of Satanic imagery in the world," Timonen said.

"So you would see evil obviously rising on all these different fronts and at the same time people are celebrating Satanism, claiming that it's all just in good fun. Is this not just a coincidence, this working together, how many coincidence am I going to allow before I say maybe there is something else at work here," he explained.

That's when Timonen ceased being an atheist, because he realized the supernatural had to be acknowledged and considered. He and his family moved to Texas, where they found a culture vibrantly open to and publicly celebrating Christianity in a thousand informal ways.

One thing led to another: They began homeschooling their daughter, and they checked out a church. "We saw the fruit, we saw there was a difference, that people treated each other better, there was more respect. And I think it all goes back to the idea of the soul," he said.

Timonen also saw that a lot of the resistance to the tyranny of the COVID pandemic came from churches and the people attending them. Those people have "the firm foundation that Jesus spoke of. If you don't have that firm foundation, the world has a much easier time of it in pushing you around," Timonen realized.

So Timonen and his wife began a thorough reevaluation of their understanding of Jesus and Christianity. They dug into questions such as: Can the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life be trusted? Did Jesus really exist? Can we trust what people said about His life?

"And then you have to wrestle with is He who He said He is," Timonen said. He dove into "Cold-Case Christianity" by J. Warner Wallace and "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel. He became convinced the death and resurrection of Jesus could not be denied or rationalized away.

Today, the Timonens are active followers of Christ.

You can watch Timonen explain all this here. I wonder what Dawkins is thinking after at least two of his closer associates, Timonen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have both abandoned for Christianity the atheism that Dawkins has devoted his life to promoting.

Should Pastors Leave Politics Alone?

The IRS declared on Monday that church pastors henceforth would be free to discuss politics from the pulpit without jeopardizing the church's tax exemption.

Cal Thomas views this relaxation of what was called the Johnson rule after then-Senator and future president Lyndon Johnson with a bit of caution. First, though, he explains the Johnson rule:

The root of the ban extends back to 1954. Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) was running for re-election and faced a primary challenge from a wealthy rancher and oilman. A nonprofit conservative group published materials that recommended voters support Johnson's challenger.

In what many believed to be retribution, Johnson introduced an amendment to Section 501 (c)(3) of the IRS Code, prohibiting organizations that are tax-exempt from trying to influence political campaigns.

Many took this as an attempt to muzzle preachers.

The measure was rarely, if ever enforced. Many Black and white liberal preachers invited mostly Democratic candidates to their services close to elections, giving them tacit, if not outright, endorsements. Their tax-exempt status was never canceled.

Thomas proceeds to explain why the new freedom to broach politics from the pulpit is fraught with pitfalls:

On one level this is a freedom of speech issue, but not all freedoms are necessarily worth exercising. The larger question is: who benefits the most and least from the IRS ruling? Some politicians will benefit, but churches that see this as an opportunity to jump into the political waters will be harmed as they will dilute their primary mission.

Besides, many churches have members who hold different political views. For the pastor to engage in partisan politics runs the risk of having some of them leave. I would.

There has always been a presumption among those advocating for more political involvement by churches that members are ignorant about politics and can't form their own opinions without instructions from their preacher. Organizations - liberal, but mostly conservative - have raised a lot of money promoting a fusion between church and state.

I don't attend church services to hear about politics. Neither do I wish to hear theological pronouncements from politicians, many of whom misquote Scripture, or take it out of context to fit their political agendas.

....Politicians and preachers should mostly stay in their own lanes. Where Scripture speaks clearly to a contemporary issue, including marriage, gender, abortion and the wisdom found in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, I'm ready to listen. But don't let me hear who the pastor prefers in the next election. I am not without information and neither is anyone else if they take the time to do research.

Here, though, lies a difficulty. Thomas is right to urge pastors to refrain from endorsing candidates, but no pastor should refrain from preaching on issues that touch on morality or on social policy that affects the church. Yet, in doing so an implicit endorsement of one or another candidate will be unavoidable.

Social issues are inextricably knotted up with politics and to explicitly preach on the former is to tacitly preach on the latter. This has always been the case as a reading of the Gospels and the book of Acts makes clear. If a pastor takes a strong stand against abortion or in favor of open borders, he's tacitly taking a strong stand against the Democrats in the first case and against the Republicans in the second.

Toward the end of his column Thomas says, "One of the reasons cited for the decline in church attendance in America is that many, especially young people, believe churches are already too political and identified with the Republican Party."

This is doubtless true, and it should serve as a warning to pastors to not assume that everyone in their audience is going to be sympathetic to their opinions, but that applies to almost any topic that a preacher might sermonize on whether moral, theological, or political. A pastor who preaches on abortion, climate change, gay marriage, or the role of women in the church, for instance, is just as likely to antagonize members of his congregation as a pastor who endorses a political candidate from the pulpit.

Pastors have a difficult job. They need to walk a tightrope, avoiding needless offense on the one hand while being faithful to Scripture on the other. It's often not an easy task, and a pastor who ventures out on the tightrope is an intrepid soul, indeed.

Moreover, the members of his or her congregation should have the maturity to be able to disagree with their pastor with grace and love, and not take offense just because they heard something from the pulpit that conflicts with their own moral, theological, or political convictions.

We need wisdom in the pulpit and grace in the pews.

How Trump Might Address the Illegal Alien Problem

I first wrote this post back in 2010 and have reposted it several times since then, most recently last April. I've made a few minor changes and thought that, given the current controversy surrounding illegal immigration, it might be worthwhile to offer it again:

There are said to be 11 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S., most of whom were let into the country by the feckless Biden/ Mayorkis open border policy. President Trump campaigned on deporting them all back to their home countries, an ambition which would seem to be impossible to achieve, especially humanely, given the numbers of people that would have to be moved.

I'd like to offer a few suggestions as to how the Trump administration might proceed in a way that I believe finds the best balance between both justice and compassion.

The issue is contentious, to be sure, but I think the American people would be willing to accept a two-stage measure which looks something like this:

The first stage would guarantee that a border wall be completed where feasible and the entire border secured. This is the sine qua non of any serious immigration reform [1]. There's no point in painting the house while the ceiling is still leaking.

Once our borders are impervious to all but the most dauntless and determined, and once this has been duly certified by a trustworthy authority or commission, then the situation of those already here could be addressed, but not until.

After certification, any subsequent plan for what to do with those already in the country illegally could be crafted to avoid the worst elements of amnesty and yet demonstrate compassion for people desperate to make a decent living.

To that end, once the border is secure, I believe Congress would find public support for legislation that allows illegals to stay in the country indefinitely as "guest workers" with no penalty if the following provisos were also adopted and enforced:

1) Illegal aliens who've lived and worked here for a length of time to be decided upon by Congress would be required to apply for a government identification card, similar to the "green card", which would entitle them to guest worker status. After a reasonable grace period anyone without proper ID would be subject to deportation. This would be a one-time opportunity so that aliens entering the country illegally in the future would be unable to legally acquire a card.

2) No one who had entered the country illegally would at any time be eligible for citizenship (unless they leave the country and reapply through proper channels). Nor would they be entitled to the benefits of citizens. They would not be eligible to vote, or to receive food stamps, unemployment compensation, subsidized housing, AFDC, earned income tax credits, social security, Medicare, etc. Nor would they be counted on the census.

They would have limited access to taxpayer largesse, although churches and other private charitable organizations would be free to render whatever assistance they wish. Whatever taxes immigrant workers pay would be part of the price of living and working here.

3) Their children, born on our soil, would no longer be granted automatic citizenship (This might require amending the 14th amendment of the Constitution), though they could attend public schools. Moreover, these children would become eligible for citizenship at age eighteen provided they graduate from high school, earn a GED, or serve in the military.

4) There would be no "chain" immigration. Those who entered illegally would not be permitted to bring their families here. If they wish to see their loved ones they should return home.

5) Any felonious criminal activity, past or present, would be sufficient cause for immediate deportation [2], as would multiple misdemeanors or any serious or multiple infractions of the motor vehicle code. Immigrants who illegally entered more recently would also be subject to deportation.

6) There would be no penalty for businesses which employ guest workers, and workers would be free to seek employment anywhere they can find it. Neither the workers nor their employers would have to live in fear of ICE.

This is just an outline, of course, and there would be many details to be worked out, but what it proposes would be both simpler and fairer than either mass deportation or amnesty. Those who have followed the rules for citizenship wouldn't be leap-frogged by those who didn't, and illegals who have proper ID would benefit by being able to work without fear of being caught.

The long-term cost to taxpayers of illegal immigration would be considerably reduced, trouble-makers among the immigrant population would be deported, and American businesses would not be responsible for background investigations of job applicants.

It would also provide incentive for American youngsters to get an education and acquire skills so they don't have to compete for jobs with unskilled immigrants willing to work for lower wages. The one group that would "lose" would be the politicians who wish to pad their party's voter rolls by counting illegal aliens on the census and/or awarding them citizenship. They'd be out of luck.

Of course, this proposal won't satisfy those who insist that we send all illegals packing, nor will it please those who think the requirements for letting them stay are too stringent, but it seems to be a simple, practical, just, and humane solution to the problem.

To be sure, it entails a kind of amnesty, but it doesn't reward illegals with the benefits of citizenship as would amnesty, and it conditions allowing immigrants to remain in the U.S. upon stanching the flow of illegals across the border and also upon immigrants keeping themselves out of trouble while they're here.

If, however, these conditions for being allowed to work in this country prove to be too onerous, if illegal immigrants conclude they could do better elsewhere, they would, of course, be free to leave.

[1] The border has been effectively secured since Mr. Trump took office, and the recently passed BBB will make a secured border more permanent.
[2] This process is currently underway.

Identity Politics Is a Primal Scream

R.R.Reno at First Things (subscription required) once wrote a brief review of Mary Eberstadt's book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. In the book she makes a very interesting point about today's "identity politics."

Here are some excerpts from Reno's review:

Many diagnose identity politics as a consequence of “cultural Marxism,” an invasion of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. Mary Eberstadt takes a more sympathetic and persuasive view. In her latest book, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, she interprets today’s feverish insistence on race, sex, and sexual orientation as so many desperate attempts by atomized, disoriented people to figure out their places in the world.

“The Great Scattering,” the weakening and fracturing of family life by the sexual revolution, brings disorientation. It has deprived two generations of the “natural habitat of the human animal,” the stable context in which we see ourselves as sons and daughters carrying forward an intact family legacy. As a consequence, the profound question Who am I? becomes more and more difficult to answer.

We’re left with the “clamor over identity.” Our current fixation on issues of race and sex is incoherent, but it is an authentic primal scream born of the need to belong.

Primal Screams continues Eberstadt’s analysis of the cultural revolutions that came to a head during the 1960s, especially the sexual revolution and its disintegration of the family. Her 2014 book, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, demonstrated the connection between the decline in family stability and decreased religiosity.

Taken together, these trends strip away the strong, identity-defining institutions that formerly provided people with a stable, multifaceted sense of self. Today, with neither a Father in heaven nor a father at home, young people cast about for sources of belonging, turning to the ersatz paternity of identity politics, a view that unites people around DNA, sexual practices, and shared grievances.

For thousands of years people in the West felt themselves anchored by family, faith and place. Few worried about such arcane abstractions as identity. They didn't launch themselves on psychological journeys to "find themselves." They didn't ask, "Who am I?"

Then faith began its collapse in the West in the mid-19th century and family collapse followed a century later. Modern mobility has exacerbated the sense of unmooring by enabling many to leave the place of their birth and childhood. Thus, many today are uprooted from place, from faith, and from family and consequently feel alienated, lost, and identityless.

Reno continues:

And it’s not just children without fathers. We are witnessing a sharp increase in the percentage of adults who have no children, or only one. The bonds linking generations and siblings have weakened. Cast into the world alone—often as a consequence of contraceptive technologies and our own choices—we nevertheless seek a collective identity. Feminism is one coping strategy, Eberstadt argues; androgyny and the blurring of male-female differences is another.

“Whom do I love? is another way of answering Who am I?” writes Eberstadt....The Great Scattering has loosened the bonds of love. This was not the intention of the sexual revolution, perhaps, but it has been its effect. We now live in a love-impoverished culture, which means we have a difficult time knowing who we are.

As Eberstadt observes,

Anyone who has ever heard a coyote in the desert, separated at night from its pack, knows the sound. The otherwise unexplained hysteria of today’s identity politics is nothing more, or less, than just that: the collective human howl of our time, sent up by inescapably communal creatures trying desperately to identify their own.

Back in the 1960s existentialist philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre and his mistress Simone de Beauvoir argued that there's no fixed human nature, no way we have to be, that we are what we make of ourselves, we are what we feel ourselves to be.

Combine that thinking with the loss of belief in God and two generations later we have countless numbers of young people who are conflicted about their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, and much else.

It's no wonder they're asking the question, "Who am I?"

The New Atheism Grown Old

Ben Sixsmith at ARC declares the decease of what for the last couple of decades has been called the "New Atheism" and undertakes a postmortem which he concludes with a few especially interesting remarks. He opines, for example that:

I think the New Atheists receive both too much and too little credit. Consider a recent tweet sent out by Bret Weinstein, a biologist associated with the Intellectual Dark Web:

Some of history’s darkest chapters involved brutal coercion of people because they didn’t accept that “Jesus is the son of God.” Assuming Christians have outgrown that inclination, they’d be wise to quit broadcasting this exclusionary claim. Seems obvious. What am I missing?

He was missing an awful lot, actually. He was missing the fact that, by this logic, atheists should “quit broadcasting” the “exclusionary claim” that there is no God, given the “brutal coercion of people” in the Reign of Terror, the Russian Revolution, the Red Terror in Spain, the Cultural Revolution, and so on.

But he was also missing the fact that if Christians stopped maintaining that Jesus is the son of God, they would not be Christians.

He also adds this perspicuous observation:

The greatest enemies of religious believers are not, then, atheists who reject the idea of God’s existence, but apatheists who don’t consider the subject relevant.

He's surely right about that, especially since those among the New Atheists who have assayed to offer arguments against the reasonableness of belief in God in general and Christian belief in particular have never failed to fail miserably. Sixsmith makes the same point:

To be sure, New Atheists could be very, very bad at arguing that God does not exist. There was, for example, Lawrence Krauss writing a book about how something can come from nothing while attributing material qualities to ["nothing"]. There was Richard Dawkins trying to refute the famous “Five Ways” of Aquinas without even attempting to understand [Aquinas's] terms. (“Whereof one cannot speak,” groaned Wittgenstein, “Thereof one must remain silent.”)

There was Christopher Hitchens striding into philosophy like an elephant onto an ice skating rink and saying that the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator.

Why is the question unanswerable? People have certainly tried to answer it. Answers readily came centuries prior to Hitchens himself, actually. Hitchens is free to take issue with Aquinas’ distinction between contingent and necessary existence if he wants, but he’s not free to suggest that no answers have been offered.

How does the concept of the “necessary being,” for example, fail? Hitchens offers no sign of knowing what it is, because that “unanswerable” is not a logical conclusion but a rhetorical sledgehammer swung at the reader’s skull.

He adds that the New Atheists can make better arguments, and he's correct, although it's hard to find among philosophical anti-theistic arguments one that hasn't been met with a convincing counterargument:

I know atheists can make better arguments. But the New Atheists never felt obliged to, because they were so confident in their own rationality that they never learned about the ideas they were mocking. If challenged on their philosophical ignorance ... they were liable to observe that the average Christian does not have the theological sophistication of [a theistic philosopher].

But so what? That's like declaring Darwinism to be refuted because the average man on the street who accepts it can't give an explanation of it as sophisticated as a college biology professor could.

Sixsmith concludes with this:

Still, for all their errors, the New Atheists were right that certain matters raise questions that demand a serious attempt to resolve. Does God exist? Does life have objective significance or does it not? Is there an objective moral code or is there not? Is there an afterlife?

These are not questions we as individuals or societies can sidestep. A principled inquiry into these kinds of things may catch fewer eyes than a tribally-sorted debate about, say, gender differences or free speech on Youtube. But this is no failing for the people who insist on having the argument anyway. Richard Dawkins may be wrong about many things, but he was right about that.

The President's Win Streak

President Trump continues his win streak. On Thursday Congress passed his signature piece of economic legislation, which should catalyze significant economic growth, fix Biden's immigration mess, and strengthen the military. Plus, it avoids a massive tax increase which would've otherwise kicked in this year.

Jim Geraghty has more on Mr. Trump's week at National Review:

I haven’t loved every detail of how Trump has treated NATO, but there’s no getting around the fact that the recent announcement that (almost) every member of the alliance is going to get military spending up to 5 percent of GDP represents A) a giant win for American interests, B) a major deterrent to further Russian military aggression on the European continent, and C) a stronger alliance in the years to come.

Trump has strong-armed our NATO allies into becoming stronger and more unified by making it clear that if our European allies and Canada didn’t pull their weight, he wasn’t interested in remaining in the alliance. We may not always like the methods, but it’s difficult to argue with the results.

[S]ince Trump took office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested more than 38,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions and 2,711 alleged multinational gang members. As of the end of April, about 65,682 illegal immigrants have been removed from the country, with 1,329 accused or convicted of sex offenses, 498 accused or convicted of murder, 9,639 accused of assaults, 6,398 accused or convicted of DWIs or DUIs, and 1,479 accused or convicted of weapon offenses.

It's not clear how many illegals have self-deported but the New York Post published an estimate of close to one million. The article also estimated that there are about 15.4 illegals in the country, most of whom entered during the Biden/Mayorkis open border era.

Geraghty continues:

Since January, the Trump administration has also “destroyed” any inflation rate above 3 percent. The traditional midsummer spike in gas prices is, if not destroyed, then significantly mitigated compared to recent years.

After a calamitous stretch in spring, the stock markets have rebounded. The day Trump took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 43,487.83, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed at 19,630.20, and the S&P 500 closed at 5,996.66. Last night, the DJIA closed at 44,484.42, the Nasdaq closed at 20,393.13, and the S&P 500 closed at 6,227.42 — record highs for the latter two. Compared to January 20, that’s modest growth; compared to the low points of spring, that’s a phenomenal comeback.

There's much more that the White House can point to with satisfaction from the week just ending. Inter alia, Trump seems to have gained the support of the Qataris in settling the war in Gaza, antisemitic universities are on defense, job numbers are up, and Democrats are reduced to nominating communists to run for office.

Not a bad week for the president.