Trendspotting

A few days ago a young man walked into a high school in Finland and opened fire, killing several students. What motivated the attack? It turns out that the killer, who called himself the natural selector, was a zealous Darwinian. The following is from his website:

Today the process of natural selection is totally misguided. It has reversed. Human race has been devolving very long time for now. Retarded and stupid , weak-minded people are reproducing more and faster than the intelligent, strong-minded people. Laws protect the retarded majority which selects the leaders of society. Modern human race has not only betrayed its ancestors, but the future generations too. Homo Sapiens, HAH! It is more like a Homo Idioticus to me! When I look at people I see every day in society, school and everywhere... I can't say I belong to same race as the lousy, miserable, arrogant, selfish human race! No! I have evolved one step above!

Humans are just a species among other animals and world does not exist only for humans. Death and killing is not a tragedy, it happens in nature all the time between all species. Not all human lives are important or worth saving. Only superior (intelligent, self-aware, strong-minded) individuals should survive while inferior (stupid, retarded, weak-minded masses) should perish.

The lawyer who represented families of the Columbine High School victims says this about the Columbine killers:

As the attorney for the families of six of the students killed at Columbine, I read through every single page of Eric Harris' jounals; I listened to all of the audio tapes and watched the videotapes, including the infamous "basement tapes." There cannot be the slightest doubt that Harris was a worshiper of Darwin and saw himself as acting on Darwinian principles. For example, he wrote: "YOU KNOW WHAT I LOVE??? Natural SELECTION! It's the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms . . . but it's all natural! YES!"

Elsewhere he wrote: "NATURAL SELECTION. Kill the retards." I could multiply examples, but you get the picture.

Yes, we do. Ideas have consequences. When people believe that they're animals like any other and that morality is an illusion created by our genes to get us to cooperate, who should be surprised that acts of nihilistic mayhem follow?

Materialistic Darwinism drains the human soul of all meaning and purpose. It empties us of all moral value and human worth. And then its votaries, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, perversely accuse Christianity, the only belief system which actually offers a basis for exalting human beings, of being a bane upon the earth. How long will these people be allowed to get away with such fatuousness?

RLC

The Bottom Billion

There are a lot of people who wish to be able to do something to help the world's poor, but have no idea how best to do it. Indeed, a lot of the poverty aid we send abroad either never gets to the intended recipients (In some African states only one cent out of every aid dollar gets to the people who need it) or actually hurts the people it is intended to help.

The problems of the world's poorest people are almost intractable and cannot be solved simply by throwing money their way. Oxford's Paul Collier explains the difficulties in a book that is both depressing and hopeful. It's titled The Bottom Billion and in it Collier notes that there are roughly five billion people in the world. Approximately one billion are living in relative comfort and affluence. About three billion of the remainder are moving in the direction of increasing prosperity (an unprecedented historical achievement), but one billion, the inhabitants of about two dozen nations concentrated mostly in Africa, but including places like Haiti, Afghanistan, and Burma, remain mired in poverty and failure. Not only is their standard of living not rising relative to the other four billion, it's not rising in absolute terms either. In fact, in many of these countries it's declining.

Collier explains why this is with analytical and dispassionate professionalism and suggests what can be done to change it. Reading him one is struck with a confidence that one is reading a man who knows what he's talking about.

The problems he describes are so ingrained that no solution can be guaranteed to work, but there are some things that have a chance.

The first thing, though, is that we have to recognize that the bottom billion live in countries afflicted by one or more of four poverty traps that are like deep wells from which it is nearly impossible to escape. These are the conflict trap (war), the landlocked with bad neighbors trap, the poor governance trap, and the natural resource trap (having an abundance of a single valuable resource like diamonds or oil). This last seems counter-intuitive but Collier explains why being blessed with a valuable resource is often more of a curse than a blessing to the development prospects of the country.

Most of the book is spent explaining how these four traps keep the bottom billion in abject poverty. In the last few chapters he offers some suggestions as to what rich countries can do to meliorate their predicament. His prescription includes elements likely to displease both liberals and conservatives, but Collier is not an ideologue. He's a pragmatist who is not shy about criticizing the "headless hearts" who seek to assuage their pity for the poor by just doing something without really understanding what the problems are.

He argues that if we're serious about helping the poor in many of these failed states we have to be prepared, among other things, to use military force, a suggestion bound to cause fainting spells in liberal salons across Europe and North America. Nor is he shy about challenging those conservatives who think that we should either leave the poor alone or teach them capitalism. He argues (not very persuasively, I'm afraid) that we just can't do the former and (much more persuasively) that the latter is much too simplistic.

I recommend this book to anyone concerned about the problems of the world's poorest people and especially to students doing international studies or who are thinking about doing mission work in places like Africa.

You can order it at our favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds.

RLC

Puzzling Strategery

Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post is a consistently lucid foreign policy thinker who has written a critique of U.S. Middle East policy that one hopes is required reading at the State Department and the White House. If she's right, and she certainly makes a lot of sense, this administration has lost its way in how it addresses the problems posed by both our putative allies as well as our enemies.

The fact that Iran is undeterred in its quest to build nuclear weapons, that Saudi Arabia has jacked the price of oil to $100 a barrel, that Hezbollah and Hamas are as virulent as ever, that the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and that Pakistan is on the brink of collapse, all suggest that an all carrot no stick diplomacy isn't working very well. Indeed, the only thing going well in the Middle East right now is, remarkably enough, Iraq, but unless the issues in play in Pakistan, Iran and Syria are resolved, even that success, bought at such a high price, is at risk.

Read Glick's analysis at the link.

RLC

Wealth Undergoes a Global Shift

The Washington Post has an excellent article on the effects rising oil prices are having around the globe. There are winners and losers, but the winners are not necessarily the people who inhabit the oil-exporting countries. The residents of Chad for example see little of the wealth their oil has generated. Most of the oil revenue is going to buy weapons. Other winners are nations we wish weren't winning - Venezuela, Iran, Russia. One winner, perhaps surprisingly, is Alaska.

Losers include almost all third world oil importers plus China, South Korea, Japan, etc.

One country the article doesn't mention is Mexico which has a lot of oil. Evidently the revenues they're accruing from this blessing are not finding their way down to the poorest Mexicans, otherwise why would they risk the ordeal of a border crossing to come here to do stoop labor for a few dollars a day? Apparently, the Mexican government is getting rich while their poor throw themselves on the mercies of the American taxpayer.

Anyway, check out the Post article. It's an education.

RLC

New Oil Find

Here's interesting news: Brazil has discovered a major oil field lying just offshore. It has the potential to be as big as the reserves in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Now if only our Congress would allow us to drill offshore and in Alaska we'd be awash in oil. As it is some analysts are predicting $4.00 a gallon gasoline within a couple of months.

If this prediction should come to pass don't blame the oil companies, blame a Congress which has blocked new drilling, made refineries prohibitively expensive to build and pretty much regulated nuclear power to the point where no one wants to build new power plants. If Congress had wanted to make us dependent on foreign oil they couldn't have devised a more effective way of guaranteeing that we would be.

RLC

Thought for a Sunday

E.W. Bullinger provides an interesting commentary of the letters of apostle Paul in his The Church Epistles - Romans to Thessalonians and offers some fascinating insights.

In the beginning of the book, he discusses the organization and structure of the epistles and explains how the seven books can be grouped into two sets of three and four. Romans, Ephesians and Thessalonians making the set of three, and then Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, and Colossians making the set of four. At first I was going to attempt to provide my own interpretation but I quickly came to see that it would be more expedient simply to use his words. He goes on to explain that Romans stands first, containing the A, B, Cs of Christian education...

Until its great lesson is learnt we know nothing. If we are wrong here, we must be wrong altogether. The Spirit has placed it first because it lies at the threshold of church-teaching.

...

The doctrinal portion, consisting of the first eight chapters, shows what God has done with "sins" and with "sin," and how the saved sinner has died with Christ, and is risen with Christ = made a son and heir of God in Him.

This is where Ephesians starts from! It begins not with man, but with God. It approaches its great subject, not from man's necessities, but from God's purposes. It is occupied not so much with what the saved sinner is made in Christ, but with what Chris is made to be unto him. It is God's point of view rather than man's.

In Romans we have the Gospel: in Ephesians the Mystery.

In Romans the saved sinner is shown as dead and risen whit Christ: in Ephesians as seated in the heavenlies in Christ; while in Thessalonians he is seen for ever in glory with Christ.

Romans takes up the sinner in his lowest depths of degradation: and Thessalonians leaves him on "the thrown of glory for ever with the Lord": while, midway between, Ephesians views us now by faith as already seated with Him there. Our feet have been taken out of the mire and clay (Romans 1); they are now set upon the rock (Eph. 1) and presently we shall be upon the throne 1 Thess. 4).

...

Viewed together, they form the A, B Cs of the Christian faith, as distinct from all else in the whole Bible - nothing like it is found elsewhere. All the rest is written for us, for our learning. But this is all about us. The course of instruction is complete, and it is perfect. It commences at the lowest point and leaves us at the highest.

Looking at the second set of four books we find that they are in pairs - Corinthians and Galatians follows Romans because they exhibit departure from its special teaching. The second pair - Philippians and Colossians follow Ephesians because they exhibit departure from its special teaching.

So that we have the whole course of church teaching; the complete curriculum of Christian education, set before us as a whole, positively and negatively.

In the three (Rom., Eph., and Thess.), we have "doctrine" and "instruction". In the four (Cor., Gal., Phil., and Col.) we have "reproof" and "correction". Here is seen how "profitable" these Epistles are for the perfection (i.e., the complete education) of "the man of God", fitting him out for every duty and every emergency.

But there is a further correspondence between these four Epistles.

The first of each pair, (Cor. and Phi.) exhibits practical departure, while the second of each pair (Gal. and Col.) exhibits doctrinal departure. That is to say, in Corinthians we have practical failure as to the teaching of Romans, while in Philippians we have a failure to exhibit in practical life the teaching of Ephesians as to the unity of the members of Christ's Body.

On the other hand, in Galatians we have doctrinal failure as to the teaching of Romans. This is why Gal. and Rom. are so much alike, as everyone knows; though, all that most can see in this likeness is that they were "written about the same time"! The real difference is that what is stated as "doctrine" in Romans is repeated as "correction" in Galatians.

So in Colossians we have doctrinal failure as to the teaching of Ephesian truth. In Ephesians, Christ is revealed and set forth as "the head of the Body". In Col. we have the doctrinal evils which come from "not holding the Head" (Col. 2:19)

Given this, we have an outline "structure" as follows:

A ROMANS. "Doctrine and Instruction." The Gospel of God: never hidden, but "promised afore". God's justification of Jew and Gentile individually - dead and risen with Christ (1-8). Their relation dispensationally (9-11). The subjective foundation of the mystery.

B CORINTHIANS. "Reproof". Practical failure to exhibit the teaching of Romans through not seeing their standing as having died and risen with Christ. "Leaven" in practice (1 Cor. 5:6)

C GALATIANS. "Correction." Doctrinal failure as to the teaching of Romans. Beginning with the truth of the new nature ("spirit"), they were "soon removed" (1:6), and sought to be made perfect in the old nature ("flesh") (3:3). "Leaven" in doctrine (5:9).

A EPHESIANS. "Doctrine and Instruction." The Mystery of God, always hidden, never before revealed. Jew and Gentiles collectively made "one new man" in Christ. Seated in the heavenlies with Christ.

B PHILIPPIANS. "Reproof." Practical failure to exhibit the teaching of Ephesians in manifesting "the mind of Christ" as members of the one Body.

C COLOSSIANS. "Correction." Doctrinal failure as to the teaching of Ephesians. Wrong doctrines which come from "not holding the Head" (2:9), and not seeing their completeness and perfection in Christ (2:8-10).

A THESSALONIANS. "Doctrine and Instruction." Not only "dead and risen with Christ" (as in Romans), not only seated in the heavenlies with Christ (as in Ephesians); but "caught up to meet the Lord in the air, so to be for ever with the Lord". In Rom., justified in Christ; in Eph., sanctified in Christ; in Thess., glorified with Christ. No "reproof". No "correction". All praise and thanksgiving. A typical Church.

The rest of the book provides a commentary on the seven Epistles and expands considerably on the structure and content above.

What a fascinating individual Bullinger must have been to have been able to glean such insights from his study. I am continually amazed as I read his work. I haven't finished The Church Epistles - Romans to Thessalonians yet but I already know that, like some of his other work, I'll read it again a second or third time. This is definitely a must-read volume that anyone who is serious about the Bible will want to have in their library. I suspect the folks at Hearts and Minds Books would be happy to get a copy to you.

Totally Uninspiring

Dinesh D'Souza talks about his recent debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens at his web site. Among other interesting morsels he offers this:

One of the most interesting questions in the debate was posed to Hitchens by a man from Tonga. Before the Christians came to Tonga, he said, the place was a mess. Even cannibalism was widespread. The Christians stopped this practice and brought to Tonga the notion that each person has a soul and God loves everyone equally. The man from Tonga asked Hitchens, "So what do you have to offer us?" Hitchens was taken aback, and responded with a learned disquisition on cannibalism in various cultures. But he clearly missed the intellectual and moral force of the man's question. The man was asking why the Tongans, who had gained so much from Christianity, should reject it in favor of atheism.

In my response, I noted that when the missionaries came to India, they sometimes converted people by force. Even so, many Indians rushed on their own to embrace the faith of the foreigners. And why? Because they were born into the low caste of the Hindus. As long as they remained Hindus, there was no escape; even their descendants were condemned to the lowest rungs of humanity. By fleeing into the arms of the missionaries, the low-caste Hindus found themselves welcomed as Christian brothers. They discovered the ideal of equal dignity in the eyes of God.

If we look at the history of Western civilization, we find that Christianity has illuminated the greatest achievements of the culture. Read the new atheist books and make a list of the institutions and values that Hitchens and Dawkins and the others cherish the most. They value the idea of the individual, and the right to dissent, and science as an autonomous enterprise, and representative democracy, and human rights, and equal rights for women and racial minorities, and the movement to end slavery, and compassion as a social virtue. But when you examine history you find that all of these values came into the world because of Christianity. If Christianity did not exist, these values would not exist in the form they do now. So there is indeed something great about Christianity, and the honest atheist should be willing to admit this.

By contrast, does it make any sense to say, as Hitchens does in his book's subtitle, that "religion poisons everything"? Religion didn't poison Dante or Milton or Donne or Michelangelo or Raphael or Titian or Bach! Religon didn't poison those unnamed architectural geniuses who built the great Gothic cathedrals. Religion didn't poison the American founders who were for the most part not Deist but Christian. Religion didn't poison the anti-slavery campaigns of William Lloyd Garrison or William Wilberforce, or the civil rights activism of the Reverend Martin Luther King. The real question to ask is, what does atheism offer humanity? In Tonga, as in America, the answer appears to be: Nothing.

Indeed. Atheism offers nothing to society except perhaps "gangsta" rap and art that consists of crucifixes immersed in urine. Atheism has inspired no charities, no hospitals, no feats of moral greatness, no great art or music. It inspires nothing because it is essentially nihilistic. It denies the existence of meaning, purpose, and hope in the world. It tells us that human beings are nothing but cattle, that we have no dignity or worth, that morality is an illusion. All of this leads to ugliness and despair. It's certainly not very inspiring.

On the other hand, it does inspire one question: Why, given the bleakness and sterility of the atheistic worldview, does anyone embrace it? I suspect that at least part of the answer for at least some atheists is that the denial of God enables one to reject certain moral constraints placed upon our sexuality. A recurrent theme in the biographies and writings of atheists from Bertrand Russell to Michael Onfray is the sexual liberation they desire and which atheism facilitates.

Like a man in the grip of homosexual lust who is willing to risk contracting HIV if only he can gratify his need in some anonymous bathhouse encounter, some are willing to embrace a meaningless, hopeless existence as long as they can have sexual pleasure. It's the same sort of bargain Dr. Faustus made with Mephistophilis and which proved his undoing. It's a bargain that has been destroying lives ever since the dawn of civilization.

RLC

Re: Boys Adrift

We've received a lot of feedback on the post Boys Adrift, most of it from young women, interestingly, but some from young men. Most of the people who responded to that post said they knew people who fit exactly the description of the guy who experiences "Failure to Launch." Some of the responders asked what the author suggests parents can do about it. I urge anyone interested in the problem to read Sax's prognosis and prescriptions. It's one of the most important books published in the last couple of decades, in my opinion, and anyone who is a parent, teacher, or who works in any capacity with young men or hopes to someday be one of these should definitely spend time with it.

It's titled Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax and it can be ordered by phone or e-mail at Hearts and Minds Bookstore. It'd make a great Christmas gift.

RLC

Brotherhood

Michael Yon took this photo in Baghdad of Muslims helping Christians replace a cross atop St. John's Church. It's a nice story which you can read here. The second paragraph is especially encouraging.

RLC

Choosing Free Will

This interesting article, passed along by a student, suggests that moral behavior is a function of the brain and that if we alter the brain we will disrupt the normal moral decision-making process.

This is no doubt true, but we shouldn't think that this proves determinism to be true. It doesn't follow that because some choices for some people are not free that therefore no choices for anyone are free.

A healthy brain may well work with the mind to produce choices that are not necessitated by prior states of affairs. In other words, in a normally functioning mind/brain system we have the freedom needed to be held morally responsible for our decisions. The future is not predetermined by the past nor by our present brain states. There is right now more than one possible path into the future that we can choose.

The determinist disagrees with this, but he has a difficult time explaining why. After all, he has to admit that ultimately his disagreement is the inevitable product of all the influences that have acted upon him throughout his life, and he has no way of knowing whether the "truth" of determinism is one of those influences or not.

RLC

Globalization Is Good For You

From time to time we hear laments in the media about the flow of jobs out of the country and the deteriorating economic position of the American middle class. Much of the blame is placed on globalization (when they get done blaming Bush), but this article by Daniel Griswold in the New York Post argues that the conventional complaints about globalization are little more than myths. Griswold points out, for instance, that:

Like so many assumptions about trade, the belief that more global competition has somehow lowered the living standards of the average American worker and family is just a myth. The critics have it all wrong: The middle class isn't disappearing - it's moving up.

The Census reports that the share of U.S. households earning $35,000 to $75,000 a year (in '06 dollars) - roughly, the middle class - has indeed shrunk slightly over the last decade, from 34 percent to 33 percent. But so, too, has the share earning less than $35,000 - from 40 percent to 37 percent.

It's the share of households earning more than $75,000 that's jumped - from 26 percent to 30 percent.

Trade has helped America transform itself into a middle-class service economy. Yes, the country's lost a net 3.3 million manufacturing jobs in the past decade - but it's added a net 11.6 million jobs in service and other sectors where average wages are higher than in manufacturing. Most of these new jobs are in better-paying categories, like professional and business services, finance and education and health services.

Critics of trade repeat as a mantra that real wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. But the data on real wages exclude benefits - which have been rising as a share of worker compensation. Those data also rely on a cost-of-living index that has systematically overstated inflation and thus understated real income gains.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average real hourly compensation earned by Americans has actually grown by 22 percent during the past decade - even as trade and other measures of globalization have grown rapidly.

There's more in the article to shine a ray of optimism into the gloominess you might be feeling today as the Dow continues its dispiriting free-fall.

RLC

On Scientific Theories

The conventional wisdom has long been that intelligent design is a religious, not a scientific, hypothesis and when Judge Jones' oracular ruling in the Dover trial reinforced the conventional view everyone nodded their heads in unthinking agreement. Dave Scott over at Uncommon Descent argues persuasively that this is simply wrong. He explains succinctly why it is that ID bears the chief qualification of any theory that aspires to be scientific - it's falsifiable.

Scott writes:

Karl Popper famously stated that a hypothesis is scientific if it can be falsified. He used swans as an example. He stated a hypothesis:

All swans are white.

Popper said that it can never be proven that all swans are white because there is always the possibility that a black swan exists somewhere but has not yet been observed. He stated that the hypothesis is still scientific because it can be falsified - the observation of a single black swan will falsify it.

The biological ID hypothesis can be stated as:

All complex biological systems are generated by intelligent agents.

We already know, or may reasonably presume, that complex biological systems can be generated by intelligent agents. There's a whole discipline called "Genetic Engineering" devoted to it. What we don't know is whether any non-intelligent means can generate complex biological systems. A single observation of a complex biological system generated by a non-intelligent cause will falsify the biological ID hypothesis.

[The bacterium] P.falciparum replicating billions of trillions of times in the past few decades represents the largest search to date for a "black swan". This is orders of magnitude more replications than took place in the evolution of reptiles to mammals wherein there are many exceedingly complex biological systems that separate them. If P.falciparum had been seen generating any complex biological systems such as those that distinguish mammals from reptiles then it would have falsified the ID hypothesis. None were observed. This doesn't prove ID but it certainly lends strong support to it. All perfectly scientific.

It might be argued, however, by those who deny the claim that ID is science that had P. falciparum produced complex systems that it would have at best only falsified certain versions of ID. Many ID theorists believe that design was front-loaded into the cosmos so that the Designer produced a semi-deterministic process that would gradually unfold the varieties of living things we see today. Someone who holds this view, if confronted by empirical evidence of complex systems produced during the trillions of falciparum replications, could technically claim that the bacterium is simply playing out the program that had been downloaded into the universe (or into life) at its origin.

Thus, the critic might argue, ID is not falsifiable even if it appears that natural processes are producing the complex systems that ID alleges natural processes cannot produce. Therefore, ID is not a truly scientific theory.

Even so, whatever the technical refuges available to the IDer might be, discovering an actively evolving complex system in P.falciparum would deal a devastating psychological blow to intelligent design and would make it very difficult for anyone advocating it to get traction in the intellectual community. For this reason I agree with Scott that ID is in principle psychologically falsifiable if not technically so.

Moreover, it is at least as falsifiable as is the Darwinian claim that natural forces and processes are responsible for the great diversity of life we see in the world around us. What set of observations could be reasonably expected to prove that claim false?

Thus if that claim is considered to be within the domain of science there's no justification, other than metaphysical prejudice, for excluding the claim that natural processes are inadequate to account for specified complexity in the biosphere.

RLC

National Security Experts

Michael Ramirez comments on how Congress might handle a terrorist nuclear threat:

RLC

The Day the Music Died

Mark Steyn, who seems to know everything about music, commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Alan Bloom's classic work the Closing of the American Mind with a paen to Bloom's chapter on the music culture in the U.S.

If you liked Bloom's book - I won't believe you if you tell me you've never read it - and/or you're a student of music and/or music history, you'll be delighted by Steyn's essay which he opens with this:

We are all rockers now. National Review publishes its own chart of the Fifty Greatest Conservative Rock Songs, notwithstanding that most of the honorees are horrified to find themselves on such a hit parade. The National Review countdown of the All-Time Hot 100 Conservative Gangsta Rap Tracks can't be far away. Even right-wingers want to get with the beat and no-one wants to look like the wallflower who can't get a chick to dance with him. To argue against rock and roll is now as quaintly irrelevant as arguing for the divine right of kings. It was twen- ty years ago today, sang the Beatles forty years ago today, that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. Well, it was twenty years ago today-1987-that Professor Bloom taught us the band had nothing to say.

Read the rest. It's very good.

RLC

The Fence Works

One of the claims made by open borders advocates on both sides of the border is that a fence would not keep people from illegally crossing from Mexico into the United States. I always wondered how they knew that and why, if they did know it, they would so strongly oppose the fence since, according to them, it wouldn't stop illegals from pouring across our frontier anyway.

Their assertion always seemed at best counterintuitive and at worst disingenuous. Now we can add to it's list of shortcomings the fact that it appears to be empirically false. Just ask the people on both sides of the border who live near the section of fence that has been erected.

If you watch the video at the link note the statement of the third guy interviewed: People should be free to go where they want. I wonder if he keeps the doors of his home open to anyone who wants to wander in and out.

RLC

Defining Torture Down

The matter of torture has raised its ugly visage once again last week, this time in the hearings for President Bush's nomination for the post of Attorney General, Michael Mukasey. Mukasey was asked whether waterboarding was torture, in response to which he wiggled and waggled and never answered the question, an evasion which cast momentary doubt upon his confirmation.

What Mukasey should have said is that the question the Senators asked really can't be properly answered until Congress has legislatively established a meaningful definition of torture. Everyone is "against torture" in the abstract, of course, but few can say with any precision what torture is and under what circumstances, if any, it should ever be permitted.

The United Nations Convention on Torture, which is frequently cited as authoritative and to which we are a signatory, is so vaguely worded as to be not much help. Article 1 says:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind...

The difficulty is the phrase "severe pain or suffering." What constitutes "severe"? What metric do we use to assess mental pain to determine whether it is severe? What is severe for one person may be easily tolerated by another.

Another problematic construction is the phrase "intimidating or coercing." Anyone who is a prisoner and held under armed guard is going to be ipso facto intimidated and coerced. It would appear that, taken literally, the Conventions rule out holding prisoners.

Article 16 of the document states that in addition to torture all acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article 1 are also to be forbidden.

But this is no help either. What is inhuman and/or degrading is highly subjective. It is degrading to be yelled at or to be shackled or even detained by another, for heaven's sake. The U.N. Conventions, if taken seriously, make an interrogator who raises his voice to a prisoner subject to being charged with a war crime. This is ludicrous, of course, which is why no one takes the U.N. Conventions seriously. They define torture so broadly that almost anything the military does with detainees could be construed as falling afoul of the guidelines.

As matters stand torture is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. What is needed is for the Congress of the United States to do what President Bush has urged it to do and conduct a debate on these matters and produce more lucid guidelines as to what will be permitted to our interrogators and what will not.

Until then, questions like the one asked of Mukasey will remain pretty much meaningless.

RLC

A Conversion in Progress

Antony Flew, the world famous atheist philosopher who began having doubts back in the 1980s about the ability of atheism to explain certain facts about the world and who subsequently became a theist (though not a Christian), has written a book describing the thinking that led him to abandon atheism and embrace theism.

The volume is titled There Is a God and in it Flew, the son of devout Christian parents - his father was a Methodist preacher - recounts how he abandoned his parents' faith at about the age of fifteen, largely under the influence of the problem posed by the unfolding Nazi evil in the 1930s, and how he went on to become one of the most prominent philosophical atheists of the twentieth century. He was committed throughout his career to the principle that one should follow the evidence wherever it leads, and he could never see the evidence he was able to observe leading anywhere but to atheism.

This began slowly to change, though, in the 1980s. Throughout his career he had been in contact with some brilliant Christian thinkers - he knew C.S. Lewis - but by the late 80s the number of outstanding Christian philosophers had multiplied and their work was undermining several of Flew's chief philosophical arguments.

Following hard upon this state of affairs were the developments in cosmology which had been accruing for the past decade. Three questions in particular kept popping up and pointing Flew away from his atheistic assumptions: Where did the laws of nature come from? How did the cosmos come to be so finely tuned for life? And how did complex life arise out of nonliving matter?

Gradually, Flew was led by the evidence to the conclusion that there is indeed a divine mind behind the universe. He had no Damascus road experience, no moment of conversion, just a gradual realization that theism is true.

He is not a Christian and still finds the idea of an afterlife difficult to accept, but he's very open to Christian belief and even includes in his book an appendix written by renowned theologian N.T. Wright, with whom he has been in dialogue, in which Wright lays out the case for the resurrection of Jesus, a case that Flew finds impressive. He concludes with this assessment of Wright's argument: "It is absolutely wonderful, absolutely radical, and very powerful."

It will be interesting as the life of this great thinker draws closer to its end if there are not yet one or two further surprises forthcoming.

There Is a God can be ordered at Hearts and Minds bookstore.

RLC

Top 100

The Daily Telegraph of England unveils its list of the 100 most influential conservatives and 100 most influential liberals in America. Like most such lists there's much to quibble with.

For instance, the list of conservatives belies a real failure to understand American conservatism. They have Rudy Giuliani ranked #1, but Giuliani isn't really much of a conservative, and he's certainly not influential. General Petreaus is #2, but I doubt that he has ever publicly stated a political position, and despite his excellent service to our country, he's hardly influential in the realm of conservative ideology. Matt Drudge at #3 deserves to be somewhere on the list, perhaps, as does Newt Gingrich at #4 but certainly neither belongs in the top five. Drudge is best known for his news website, not his political views and although Gingrich is influential his influence is mostly confined to the more cerebral conservatives. The most influential conservative in America actually doesn't appear on the list until #5. You can go to the link to find out who that is.

In my opinion the most influential liberal doesn't show up until #9 on the liberal list. I certainly don't think the number one choice, Bill Clinton, is really all that influential or even all that liberal.

Another reason to not like the list is that Viewpoint doesn't appear anywhere on it. What's up with that?

RLC

1984 in 2007

This will make your jugular bulge. The University of Delaware has been requiring students to attend mandatory reeducation and consciousness raising sessions with the Resident Assistants in their housing units. The group FIRE has the details in this press release from last week:

The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university's own materials as a "treatment" for students' incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware's residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students' rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech.

"The University of Delaware's residence life education program is a grave intrusion into students' private beliefs," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "The university has decided that it is not enough to expose its students to the values it considers important; instead, it must coerce its students into accepting those values as their own. At a public university like Delaware, this is both unconscionable and unconstitutional."

The university's views are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to "sustainability" door decorations. Students living in the university's eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a "diversity facilitation training" session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that "[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality."

The university suggests that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive personal questions such as "When did you discover your sexual identity?" Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA's "worst" one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having "diversity shoved down her throat."

According to the program's materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university's residence halls to achieve certain "competencies" that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of "citizenship." These competencies include: "Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society," "Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression," and "Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality."

At various points in the program, students are also pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university's ideology, regardless of their personal beliefs. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations, committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%, taking action by advocating for an "oppressed" social group, and taking action by advocating for a "sustainable world."

In the Office of Residence Life's internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing language of ideological reeducation. In documents relating to the assessment of student learning, for example, the residence hall lesson plans are referred to as "treatments."

This Orwellian brain-washing is precisely what totalitarians have done everywhere they've had the power. Now it's being done by the lefties at Delaware. I'll be sure to scratch that school off the list of possible destinations for my college-bound child. I think I'll also send them a DVD of The Lives of Others. It's a movie the apparatchiks at Delaware should find inspiring.

UPDATE: The chairman of the University politburo, Patrick Harker, sensing the PR disaster that this program has turned into, has ordered it be terminated. Good decision, comrade.

RLC

Looking Grim

The situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate. Pakistan military personnel fighting the Taliban in the northwest (Waziristan) are surrendering or being captured and beheaded in droves. President Pervez Musharraf has declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution. The Supreme Court has been disbanded. Thousands have been arrested and thousands more are marching in the streets in protest.

Why should we care? We should care because Pakistan has nuclear weapons and the Islamists fighting against the government want them. If they get them we will almost certainly be a target. We should also care because Musharraf has been a fairly steady ally in the war on terror. Should he fall, Pakistan, with its 160 million Muslims, may be lost to us.

Bill Roggio and Breitbart have further details.

The only silver lining here is that Musharraf may be getting desperate enough to take serious measures against the Taliban, and may even invite us to help him. This would go a long toward easing Taliban pressure on Afghanistan.

RLC