Let Him Speak

Unlike a lot of folks, evidently, I don't have a problem with Columbia University inviting Iranian president Ahmadinejad to speak on campus this week.

I think it will be an excellent way to spark discussion among people across this nation as to exactly who Ahmadinejad is and what he is trying to do. I'm afraid that most Americans have no idea of the extent of Iran's horrific machinations in the Middle East, and if it takes the controversy around Ahmadinejad's appearance to educate them then the invitation is a good thing.

My concern is not with the invitation, rather it's that this pyschopath Ahmadinejad who's responsible for the deaths and maimings of hundreds of American soldiers, who is seeking to build nuclear and chemical weapons with which to destroy Israel, who presides over a nation which supports terrorism around the globe and which savagely executes gays, women and children who transgress their barbaric laws at home, will be treated with more fawning deference and respect by the Colombia faculty and students than would, say, Ann Coulter.

I say let him speak, but I hope tens of thousands of people turn out to protest not his appearance, but his existence.

RLC

Why We Shouldn't Leave

There's a discussion going on over at Politics, Sex and Religion around a column I wrote for the newspaper on why it would be a mistake to leave Iraq at this stage of the mission. Check it out and join the discussion.

RLC

Hillary's Religious Faith

Mother Jones features an article on the nature of Sen. Clinton's religious faith. Reading this it's hard to think that Mrs. Clinton's faith is not genuine, although there are stories about her tenure with Bill that certainly raise doubts. Even so, none of us is perfect. Here are some excerpts:

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. "A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation," says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. "I don't....there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer."

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.

It'll be interesting, if Sen. Clinton wins the presidency in 2008, to see whether she receives the kind of media criticism for depending upon divine guidance as has George Bush.

At any rate, there's much more in the story that reveals fascinating details about the people who have influenced her religious development and how that development has played itself out in some of her political positions.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Inference to the Best Explanation (Part VI)

This is the sixth installment in the series which seeks to argue that belief in God is more reasonable, more compatible with our experience of the world and of ourselves, than is atheism. We consider here three more observations about our human condition that support this conclusion.

13. Human beings have a deep longing for justice, a longing for which there's no fulfillment if death is the end of our existence. We yearn to see good rewarded and evil punished. Our hearts break when evil appears to triumph over good, but it's the common human experience that many good people live lives filled with terrible fear, pain and grief, and then they die. Meanwhile, many who were the cause of that suffering come to the end of their lives peacefully and content after many years of pleasure. In a world without God everybody comes to the same end, everyone vanishes, and there's no reward or punishment, just nothingness. In the world of the atheist, it doesn't matter whether you're Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler and there's no hope that justice will ever be done.

14. Human beings crave a meaning to our existence. We can't bear living a life we know to be pointless and insignificant, but death nullifies everything and renders it all nugatory. In the absence of God there's no fixed purpose or value to anything we do. Some day the earth will burn up in a solar explosion, and there'll be not a trace that humans once existed. What will all of our striving matter then? All our efforts are like the furious running of a gerbil in his wheel. Our lives are just a footprint in the sand at the edge of a space-time surf. Eventually all vestige of our lives will be washed away as though we were never here, and the greatest acts of heroism, charity, and scientific discovery will mean absolutely nothing.

If the atheist is correct, if our existence is simply a temporary fluke of nature, a cosmic accident, then we have no reason to think that anything we do matters at all. If, on the other hand, we have been created by God we may assume that He had some purpose for making us. We may not know what that purpose is, but we have a basis for hoping that there is one. Indeed, if there is a God then what we do is not ephemeral, it's eternal, and that makes all the difference.

15. In a Godless world there is no soul and therefore no self other than the physical body. Since our body is in constant flux we are continuously creating a new self, moment by moment, year by year. There is nothing which perdures through time which makes me the same person I think I was ten years ago. There is no permanent "I," only a kaleidoscopic, fragmented bundle of patterns, impressions, memories, none of which has any real significance in determining who we really are.

As T.S. Eliot put it, "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger." Our sense that we are a self strongly suggests, however, that there's more to us than just our physical being. Yet unless there is a God the physical is all there is.

Go here and follow the links to find previous posts in this series.

RLC

Science Literacy

We talked about this rather humorous and startling video some time ago, but it's worth bringing back. Fifty six percent of French people polled on this game show said that the sun revolved around the earth. Now France, of course, is a very secular nation in which evolution is taught in school and over 80% of the people believe it to be scientific fact. Yet a majority of the viewers of this show hold a pre-Copernican belief about the solar system.

The next time you hear someone trot out the old canard that if we allow evolution to be challenged in our schools it'll be the death of science literacy, point them to this video as anecdotal evidence that evolutionary belief and science literacy have very little to do with each other.

RLC

Near Miss IED

Here's video, taken by military personnel, of an uncomfortably close near-miss of an IED. It's pretty sobering. Viewpoint understands, but does not endorse, the soldier's verbal reflex.

RLC

What Were They Thinking?

It's difficult to understand how any Senator could vote against this Sense of the Senate Resolution but 24 Democrats and 1 Independent found it within themselves to do so and several of them, including Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, chose not to vote at all:

It is the sense of the Senate-

(1) to reaffirm its support for all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces, including General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq;

(2) to strongly condemn any effort to attack the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all the members of the United States Armed Forces; and

(3) to specifically repudiate the unwarranted personal attack on General Petraeus by the liberal activist group Moveon.org.

The Senate voted unanimously to confirm General Petraeus and to send him to Iraq to bring stability to the region. By all accounts he's handling that mission honorably, but when he came home to report to Congress on what he sees happening there Hillary Clinton essentially called him a liar and MoveOn.org accused him of treason.

No one has presented any evidence that Petraeus has done anything dishonorable yet his character and reputation are besmirched and smeared by people who simply can't bring themselves to entertain the possibility that things are not as bad in Iraq as they believe them to be.

For the full text of the resolution and a list of the twenty five senators who voted against it go here.

With this vote twenty five senators have by implication chosen to attack the reputation and character of a good man serving his country rather than repudiate MoveOn.org's disgraceful ad. Why would they do that?

RLC

Have the Taliban Admitted Defeat?

Strategy Page argues that the Taliban have acknowledged defeat in Afghanistan, at least for the time being:

The Taliban has offered to begin negotiating with the Afghan government. In Afghan parlance, that's the Taliban way of saying they are defeated and want to discuss peace terms. Over the past few months, Taliban attacks have become increasingly desperate and bloody. But most of the dead have been Taliban. The only "successful" attacks have been those using suicide bombers, and these kill mostly Afghan civilians.

The Taliban were able to build up a war chest in the last few years, allowing them to hired thousands of unemployed young men. But casualties have been high, with over a third of these hired gunmen getting killed, wounded or captured. In the last two weeks, over 200 Taliban gunmen have been killed in battles with Afghan and foreign troops. But the biggest source of problems has been the stupid things they do. Recently, a Taliban group kidnapped a dozen deminers (people who disarm and remove land mines).

This sort of thing is very unpopular with Afghans, as even the Taliban (officially, anyway) recognize the deminers as immune from attack. The millions of mines and explosives still in the ground don't discriminate between Taliban or non-Taliban. The deminers are arguably more important to the Taliban, who often sneak around at night in out-of-the-way places.

The Taliban also make themselves unpopular by attacking food relief convoys. One recent attack saw 13 Taliban and two police killed in such an unsuccessful attack. The Taliban want to shut down humanitarian and reconstruction projects, and thus force Afghans to support the Taliban in order to get any help at all. Most Afghans resent this sort of intimidation.

I'm not sure we should put too much hope in this acknowledgement of their tactical difficulties. It's true that the Taliban have suffered grievous losses, losing ten men to every policeman or soldier they've killed, but they will continue to be a threat to the Afghan people as long as they have safe havens in Pakistan and as long as there's a large pool of poor, uneducated young men for them to draw upon for cannon fodder.

RLC

Faith By Any Other Name

This video of Richard Dawkins is very revealing albeit not in any way that Dawkins intended. The famous Darwinian materialist is asked whether he can think of an example of a genetic mutation which actually increases the amount of information in the genome. He ponders the question for what seems like an hour, but which is actually eleven seconds, and finally gives an answer which is completely irrelevant to the question.

In other words, Dawkins' inability to think of an example of a beneficial mutation that actually makes the genetic material more complex than it was before the mutation suggests that not even prominent evolutionists can offer evidence that mutation is a driving engine of evolutionary progress.

The belief that genetic mutation has led to the myriad living forms and structures we see today is simply an act of faith in a process for which not even Dawkins can adduce evidence.

It's ironic that faith in natural processes can be taught in school, but faith in supernatural intervention cannot. One wonders what rationale there can possibly be for that dichotomy.

RLC

More WMD in the Middle East

According to The Jerusalem Post Syria is working with Iran to develop chemical weapons:

Proof of cooperation between Iran and Syria in the development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was brought to light Monday in a Jane's Magazine report that dozens of Iranian engineers and 15 Syrian officers were killed in a July 23 accident in Syria.

According to the report...the joint Syrian-Iranian team was attempting to mount a chemical warhead on a scud missile when the explosion occurred, spreading lethal chemical agents, including sarin nerve gas and VX gas.

The factory was created specifically for the purposes of altering ballistic missiles to carry chemical payloads, the magazine report claimed.

If the belief that Iraq had WMD was enough motivation for the Senate to vote to grant Bush the authority to overthrow Saddam, will proof that Syria and Iran have them be enough for the Senate to vote to grant Bush the authority to topple Assad and Ahmadinejad? Will it motivate the Senate to support any measures designed to bring an end to these regimes?

Here's a question for anti-war people: Should Bush just do nothing about the spread of WMD in Syria and Iran and leave the problem to his successor, or should he order the CIA to instigate a coup? Or, should he seek to cut off the flow of oil from Iran? What should the President do about WMD in Iran?

Those who oppose war in principle have been given a free ride on this question by the media. Very few anti-war folks have ventured to even comment on Iran except to deplore what they perceive to be administration saber-rattling and talk vaguely of negotiations. They need to be put on record as to exactly what they think Bush should do about this problem so that after he does it we don't have the kind of second-guessing and recriminations we've had with Iraq.

RLC

Why We Must Control Immigration

This clip presents perhaps the most important nine minutes and thirty five seconds of education on immigration you'll ever get. It's a must watch video for anyone who cares at all about their future and that of their children. Please watch it all the way to the end and if anyone knows who the speaker is, please let me know.

Thanks to my friend Dick Francis for passing it along.

RLC

Inference to the Best Explanation (Part V)

In Part V of Inference to the Best Explanation (See I, II, III, and IV) we continue our consideration of sixteen facts about our existential circumstance which cannot easily be explained if there is no God, but which harmonize with a theistic worldview. Today we'll look at three closely related human characteristics beginning with number ten in the series:

10. We profess a belief in human dignity but modern atheism tells us that we are little more than machines made of flesh - sacks of blood, bone and excrement. There is no soul, there is nothing about us that makes us much different than any other mammal. We are more intelligent, of course, but that only makes the difference between us and a cow about the same as the difference between a cow and a trout. In the absence of God there's no reason why someone who has the power should not use it to manipulate and exploit the rest of us like the farmer exploits his cattle for his own purposes, slaughtering them when he can profit from so doing. The universe tells us we're nothing but "dust in the wind" and there's no dignity in that.

If, however, we are made by God and personally and specifically loved by Him then we have a basis for believing that we are more than a machine. We have a ground for human dignity that is simply unavailable on the assumption of atheism.

11. Related to the previous fact is the further truth that we have a belief in human worth. If all we are, however, is an ephemeral pattern of atoms, a flesh and bone mechanism, then in what does our worth as human beings consist? We have value only insofar as others, particularly those who wield power, arbitrarily choose to value us. If atheism is true there is no inherent value in being human. Only if theism is true and we are valued by the Creator of the universe can human beings have any objective worth at all. There is no other non-arbitrary ground for it.

12. Similarly, we have a belief that human beings have certain fundamental rights. Unfortunately, if there is no God there's nothing at all upon which to base those rights save our own prejudices and predilections. As Thomas Jefferson acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence, we have the right to life and liberty only because we are children of the Creator of the universe who has invested those rights in us and in whose eyes we are precious. If there is no Creator then there are no human rights, just arbitrary rules, mere words on paper, which some people agree to follow but which could easily be revoked.

When atheists talk about human rights someone might ask them where those rights come from. Who confers them? Who guarantees them? If it is not God then it must be the state but if so, our rights are not inalienable. If the state decides what rights we shall have then the state can determine that we have no rights at all. The fact is that if atheism is true human rights are no more substantial or real than the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

We'll continue the argument tomorrow.

RLC

Amnesty Redux

The Senate is going to vote this week on an amendment to a defense appropriations bill called the "DREAM Act" (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act). Having had an attempt to grant amnesty to illegal aliens defeated two months ago, the amnesty advocates are making a back-door run at it again by hitching their legislation to a defense spending bill.

DREAM would, among other things, grant amnesty to any alien who entered the country illegally when under the age of 16 and who has subsequently graduated from high school. It would also grant in-state college tuition benefits to illegal aliens.

Meanwhile, Congress is trying to get SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program) reauthorized, and a lot of people are pushing for it. However, in addition to providing health insurance coverage to all "poor" American "children" (the bill re-labels "children" as anyone under 25, and "low income" as up to 400% above the poverty level, or $82,600 for a family of four) the updated version would also extend coverage to the children of illegal aliens by eliminating the requirement that they present proof of citizenship.

In other words, American taxpayers are going to be required to subsidize both the education and the health care of another country's citizens.

You might say that we are a rich and generous nation. Why not help those who are less fortunate? We should, but we as individuals should determine the extent and nature of the help we provide.

Suppose your neighbor who is not as well off as you comes to you one day and tells you that his children have been experiencing some medical difficulties of late and that as soon as these are resolved he's decided to enroll them in a private school. You sympathize with him about the health problems and wish him well with his kids' new school until he tells you that he expects you to help with both the health care and the tuition costs. I suspect that your sympathy and well-wishing would diminish pretty quickly.

You may, out of the goodness of your heart, want to help him, but few of us want to be told that we must pay his bills.

You can read more about DREAM at Michelle's place. If you oppose it call your senator and tell him/her. Michelle has the number.

RLC

Had It Coming

As usual, Michelle Malkin has everything you could possibly want to know, including video, about the student who got tasered by security officers at a John Kerry speech. One thing is clear from the videos of this incident: This wasn't a suppression of free speech issue. The guy was tasered for butting in line, refusing to yield the microphone, refusing to obey the officers, resisting arrest, disturbing the peace, and being a jackass. Good reasons all.

RLC

No Way

What happens in this video is very hard to believe, yet it's far more probable, believe it or not, than that a living cell could be produced by chance. Just saying.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Defending the Weak

You'll recall that in the climactic episode of The Lord of the Rings there was a walled city in which perhaps thousands of people, including many women, children, and elderly took shelter from inhuman savages who had laid seige to their fortress. The attackers thirsted for the blood of the hapless inhabitants and were eager to utterly destroy them and their city.

Those who huddled in terror within feared they would be horribly raped, tortured, and killed in the most gruesome fashion, but they took hope from the fact that they were protected by a phalanx of great warriors who had come from distant lands to defend the city from the savages who howled their threats from beyond the walls. The warriors were very brave and highly skilled in the art of war, but they faced enormous difficulties and what seemed to be overwhelming odds.

So, one night they decided that protecting those who shivered in fear in their hiding places really wasn't worth the cost and they considered leaving. "But what of the poor women and children in the fortress?" some asked. "Aren't they depending on us? Haven't we promised we'd protect them? Won't they be slaughtered if we abandon them?"

The reply came down from their superiors that "these people should be able by now to fend for themselves, and if they can't that's their problem, not ours." Thus the mighty army rode out that night under cover of darkness, fleeing to safety, and the people inside the fortress wept bitterly as the savage beasts swept in and brutally murdered them all.

Actually, that last part didn't happen in the movie, but only because the warriors in the story weren't listening to Harry Reid and MoveOn.org.

RLC

Another Taliban Murderer Eliminated

The Taliban leader responsible for the kidnapping of South Korean missionaries a couple of months ago has been killed in Afghanistan. He's the fifth Taliban involved in the kidnappings and murder of two of the Koreans to have been dispatched to his 72 virgins in recent weeks. So far this year that miserable land has been disinfected of over 4000 Taliban.

I recommend Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner to anyone who would like insight into the kind of people the Taliban and their allies in al Qaida are. Hosseini's novel, and, I'm told, his follow-up (A Thousand Splendid Suns) stunningly portray the Taliban's brutal human degeneracy prior to their defeat by American forces six years ago. The reader comes away from the book convinced that the elimination of these creatures from Afghanistan, and, indeed, the face of the entire globe, should be seen as a moral imperative by civilized people everywhere.

RLC

Inference to the Best Explanation (Part IV)

With this post we continue our series titled Inference to the Best Explanation. This installment follows Part I, Part II, and Part III.

The remainder of the argument (points 7 through 16) is based on certain facts about the human condition and might be called an Existential Argument for the existence of God.

7. Number seven stresses our deep longing for answers to life's most profound questions. As human beings we want answers to the deepest, most perplexing questions raised by our existence, but in the world as the atheist sees it there are no answers, there's no assurance about anything that matters, except that we'll eventually die. We shout the "why" questions of human existence at the vast void of the cosmos - Why am I here? Why do we suffer? Why do we want from life what we cannot have? - but in a Godless universe there's no reply, only silence. The cosmos is indifferent to our desire for answers. We are alone, forlorn, as Sartre put it, and our quest for answers is absurd.

If God exists, however, then it's possible that each of those questions has an answer, and if there are answers then the fact that we have those questions and desire the answers makes sense. We may not know what the answer is, but we have a reasonable hope that our questions aren't futile or meaningless and that there is a reason why they gnaw at us.

8. We are burdened with a deep sense that we are obligated to act morally. As human beings we strive to ground morality in something more solid than our own subjective preferences, but if there is no God there is nothing else upon which to base them. In a purely material world morality is whatever feels right to the individual.

This is not to say that the non-theist cannot live a life similar in quality to that of a theist. She can of course, but what she cannot say is that what she does is morally good or right. There simply is no moral good unless there is an objective, transcendent standard of goodness, and the existence of such a standard is precisely what the non-theist denies.

Apart from this standard all moral judgments are merely expressions of personal preference, and no one's preference is any more authoritative than anyone else's. This leads ineluctably toward a might makes right egoism, either on the level of the individual or the level of the state. Whatever those who have power do is not morally right or wrong, even if they commit torture or genocide, it just is.

In the absence of God morality is either subjective, and thus arbitrary and personal, or it doesn't exist at all, and our sense, indeed our conviction, that it does is simply an illusion. If God exists, however, then our conviction that objective moral value and obligation also exist makes sense.

9. Related to the preceding point, we experience feelings of guilt, and have a sense that guilt is not just an illusion, but without an objective standard of morality before which we stand convicted there can be no real guilt. Human beings are no more guilty in a moral sense than is a cat which has caught and tortured a bird. The feeling of guilt is merely an evolutionary epiphenomenon which arose to suit us for life in the Stone Age and which, like an appendix, we no longer need. Indeed, it's a vestige of our past that we should suppress since it bears no relation to any actual state of affairs.

On the other hand, if there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good Creator of the universe, then our sense we are indeed guilty has an explanation. We feel guilt because we have transgressed the moral law instituted by the Creator before whom we stand and to whom we must give an account.

It is this Creator who imposes upon us moral obligation. Take away God and there's no moral law, there's no moral obligation, there's no transgression, and there's no moral guilt. As Dostoyevsky put it, if God is dead then everything is permitted.

We'll consider a couple more aspects to this argument in Part V tomorrow.

RLC

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand fans will enjoy this New York Times article on the woman and her influence. Rand was a powerful voice on behalf of individual greatness and achievement. Her books championed entrepreneurship and capitalism while heaping withering scorn upon the collectivist philosophy that plagued the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, Rand was herself a deeply troubled woman who led a tumultuous personal life. She also believed her views could only be rationally held by men and women who were atheistic in their fundamental worldview, a position which seems to me to be only partly true.

Even so, her books are still popular long after their original appearance back in the forties and fifties, and Atlas Shrugged has been one of the best-selling novels of all time in the United States. The Times article offers some good insights into Rand and her work.

RLC

A Clarification

My friend Byron has helped me to see that I should have expressed myself a little more clearly in the first paragraph of the post immediately below this one.

The reason I wrote that the claim that the war in Iraq has been a wonderful recruiting tool for terrorists is absurd is not because the war hasn't brought an increase in the number of terrorists. It doubtless has. The reason I think the claim is absurd is because when anti-war people make this claim the implication is that had we not gone to war in Iraq there would not be as many terrorists world-wide as there are.

Now there's certainly no absurdity in believing that this is so, but as long as there are good arguments to the contrary it is an overreach to say that it is so - as though it were a demonstrable fact when it clearly is not.

Are there good arguments to the contrary? I think one could plausibly maintain that the greatest recruiting tool for terrorists would be signs of American weakness and vacillation. Had we refrained from invading Iraq it's quite possible that many young Muslims would have been emboldened to join the ranks of what the imams would be assuring them is an army destined by Allah to destroy the infidel West. They would have been convinced, conceivably, that Allah had delivered the irresolute Americans into their hands and they would be eager to join the side of the victors.

This is certainly plausible and no one can know that this would not have been the way things would have worked out had we not invaded. Thus it's absurd to imply that the war has made things worse than they would have been had we not invaded. It is to claim a kind of knowledge that no one has or could have.

That was my point in the preceding post, but I'm afraid I didn't make it as clearly as I should have.

RLC