Top Ten Science Breakthroughs

Wired lists the top ten scientific advances of 2007. Number one, of course, was the development of stem cells from skin cells, but number two was an observation of chimps making spears to hunt small animals. This was deemed more important, oddly enough, than the discovery of a technique that can turn any blood type to type O - a technique which has enormous implications for medicine - a potential cure for Rhett's syndrome which afflicts one female in every 10,000, the discovery of a new lightweight composite of incredible strength, and a breakthrough that will enable Intel to make microprocessors about a third smaller than they are currently made. All of these have enormous implications for human health and quality of life.

So why are the chimpanzee spear-makers deemed so important? Just guessing, but I suspect it's because some people at Wired, as elsewhere, are desperate to show that humans and chimps are closely related so that the unwashed won't get any notions about the uniqueness of human beings. The more similar we are to the simians the less likely we are to be in any way "special" and the easier it is to accept other aspects of the Darwinian hocus-pocus.

Maybe not, but I fail to see any other explanation for why spear-making among chimps would be ranked higher in importance than breakthroughs that actually have implications for human well-being.

RLC

Socrates and Fred!

As we enter the first primary of the season, today's Iowa caucuses, I thought it appropriate to comment on a frequently heard criticism of one of the GOP candidates, Fred Thompson. The complaint is that Thompson doesn't seem to really want to be president badly enough, he doesn't have the fire in his belly, he's not willing to get out and pretend like he genuinely cares about the opinions of the old guy in the diner or the twelve year old at the school-yard rally. Actually this vice, Thompson's alleged indifference to his success as a candidate, should be regarded by the American public as a virtue, especially since it seems like most of the other candidates want too much to be president and are too willing to debase themselves in order to acquire the power and fame the office affords.

Plato, in his great work of political philosophy titled Republic puts these words into the mouth of Socrates:

"[M]oney and honour [i.e. public praise] have no attraction for them; good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing and so to get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves out of the public revenues to get the name of thieves. And not being ambitious they do not care about honour. Wherefore necessity must be laid upon them, and they must be induced to serve from the fear of punishment. And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable. Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help--not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves, but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good. For there is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of good men, then to avoid office would be as much an object of contention as to obtain office is at present .... the State in which rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are the most eager, the worst."

There is indeed something unseemly about lusting for the power to govern others. A candidate who yearns to be president gives us good prima facie reason to withhold our vote from him or her. A qualified, conscientious candidate who could otherwise either take the job or leave it, I think, has exactly the kind of attitude toward governance that we should admire in our politicians.

RLC

Liberal Scorn

Here's Marty Peretz, publisher of The New Republic magazine, trying to show off his scientific sophistication by doing what liberals love to do which is make fun of the rubes who believe in things like the uniqueness of human beings:

Who is the most repellent Republican?.... I must say that Romney strikes me as the smarmiest. But it seems to me that it's Huckabee, although he does have a certain charm, the charm of the primitive. My minimum condition for and from a plausible president is that he accept that men and women are descended from apes and monkeys. Huckabee surely doesn't. But, then, I'm not sure that George Bush does either.

Perhaps no single paragraph in the political literature of the last half-century does a better job of illustrating all at once the arrogance, pomposity, superciliousness, scorn, contempt and sense of superiority many liberals hold for their fellow man. It also reveals Peretz's own ignorance of the matter upon which he chooses to pontificate.

It turns out that Peretz's minimum standard would disqualify any Darwinian who knew what he was talking about, which Peretz obviously does not. No informed Darwinian, no matter how fervent a believer he may be in the theory of evolution, believes that man descended from apes and monkeys. Evolutionary theory teaches instead that apes, monkeys and man all descended from the same common ancestor. The simians are our cousins, according to the theory, not our ancestors.

Somebody please inform Mr. Peretz of this before he ridicules somebody else for not believing what nobody else but him believes either.

RLC

Junkie Quiz

Joe Carter has a quiz for all the political junkies out there who'd like to have their knowledge of the various candidates' (GOP) positions tested. Check it out and see how many you get right. Carter is working for the Huckabee campaign but that is irrelevant to the quiz except insofar as it may have colored the questions he chose to ask.

RLC

Movies in 2007

Greg Veltman of Comment magazine discusses his favorite films of 2007. I only saw four that are on his list, but I agree that each of them are well worth watching. The four are Amazing Grace, Blood Diamond, The Lives of Others, and Ratatouille.

Here's a list, in no particular order, of the films I watched (or watched again) this past year. Some of these, depending on taste and interest, are highly recommended. Some are entertaining but not particularly memorable. Others were not worth the time. Those with a single asterisk I thought offered a message or technical effects that made them stand out. The double asterisk indicates that, for me, the movie was exceptional:

• Cinema Paradiso*
• Legends of the Fall
• Maria Full of Grace*
• Blood Diamond**
• Beyond the Gates*
• The Talented Mr. Ripley
• Human Stain
• Lives of Others**
• 300*
• Dune
• Bourne Identity*
• Bourne Supremacy
• Emperor's Club
• A Beautiful Mind**
• Salvador*
• Failure to Launch
• 13Tzameti
• The Pianist**
• Stalingrad*
• Ratatouille**
• Pirates of the Caribbean*
• Gangs of New York*
• Nowhere in Africa
• Algiers
• The Great Raid*
• Wyatt Earp
• Amazing Grace**
• Casino Royale*
• No Man's Land*
• Tears of the Sun*
• Kingdom of Heaven*
• Die Hard: With A Vengeance
• Russia House
• Bang Rajan
• I, Robot
• David Copperfield*
• The Last King of Scotland
• Apocalypto*
• Troy*
• Hunt For Red October*
• Babette's Feast
• Jackal
• Training Day*
• Sum of All Fears
• Lucky Number Slevin
• Das Boot**
• City of God*

On the recommendation of friends I tried to watch Damon/Affleck's Good Will Hunting, but found it so gratuitously vulgar that I couldn't make it past the first ten minutes.

RLC

Books in 2007

The New York Times has published its list of the top ten books for 2007. I confess that I haven't read any of them.

For what it's worth, here's a list of the books I did read this year. I found most of them well worth the time and recommend them to anyone interested in the topics they're written about. The ones marked with an asterisk were especially good reads:

• For the Glory of God: Rodney Stark (Christian History)*
• The Victory of Reason: Rodney Stark (Christian History)
• From Darwin to Hitler: Richard Weikert (History of Ideas)*
• The Edge of Evolution: Michael Behe (Biology - Evolution/Intelligent Design)*
• A History of Christianity: Paul Johnson (Christian History)*
• Erasmus and the Age of Reformation: Johan Huizinga (Biography)
• Deliver Us from Evil: Ravi Zacharias (Social/Religious Commentary)
• Can We Trust the Gospels: Mark Roberts (Theology) Nature, Design and Science (Reread): Del Ratszch (Philosophy of Science)*
• When God Says War Is Right: Darrell Cole (Ethics - Just War Theory)
• Epicenter: Joel Rosenberg (Dispensational Eschatology)
• David Copperfield: Charles Dickens (Classic Literature)*
• Atheist Manifesto: Michael Onfray (Sociology of Religion)
• The Kite Runner: Khaled Hosseini (Novel about Afghanistan under the Taliban)*
• The Spiritual Brain: Mario Beauregard & Denyse O'Leary (Philosophy of Mind/ Psychology)
• Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe: Simon Singh (Cosmology)*
• Boys Adrift: Leonard Sax (Sociology)*
• There Is a God: Antony Flew (Biography/ Philosophy of Religion)
• The Bottom Billion: Paul Collier (Analysis of Global Poverty)*
• Heroic Conservatism: Michael Gerson (Political Ideology/Memoir)*
• My Grandfather's Son: Clarence Thomas (Autobiography)*

RLC

Intellectual Progress

Ramirez notes that we've come a long way in 235 years:

RLC

Poverty in America

Byron sends along this sobering essay by Bart Campolo about his work for justice among the poor. It reminds us in this season of good will that we have a moral obligation to help - in whatever way we feel most competent - those who are in need.

Unfortunately, any long term solution to the plight of America's disadvantaged is going to involve more than providing goods and services and other forms of temporary relief to destitute people. Somehow, the culture into which these individuals are born has to be changed. A culture that breeds babies without fathers, which breeds dependency on government or on the benevolence of people like Campolo, which breeds a lack of discipline and a disdain for education and learning, which fosters a terrible work ethic, which fails to place a premium on family, which glorifies the "gangsta" lifestyle, which nurtures a dependency upon drugs and alcohol, which normalizes promiscuous sex and gratuitous violence, is a culture which dooms the people trapped in it to generational poverty.

I wish someone knew how to get the urban poor out of that culture. Unfortunately, anyone who calls for tearing down the prison walls within which our poor are stuck, especially if that person is white, is often dismissed as a racist, an elitist, a cultural chauvinist, an insensitive boor who's guilty of blaming the victim, etc. Consequently, nothing much gets done beyond the tut-tutting that occurs in the wake of a disaster like Katrina or publication of the latest homicide statistics out of Philadelphia.

I sure don't know what all the answers are, but I'm convinced that the first step toward winning the "war" on poverty is a loud, sustained national condemnation of the deracinated, dysfunctional culture which, like the muck in a swamp, makes it hard for these people to lift themselves out of the mire and into the middle class. It'd be worth suffering the obloquy of the race-hustlers and other small minds who will be quick to condemn anyone who spoke in such accents if doing so eventually broke the shackles that chain so many in the miseries of poverty.

RLC

'Twas a Very Good Year

Lawrence Kudlow writes that President Bush has had a very good year in 2007:

The troop surge in Iraq is succeeding. America remains safe from terrorist attacks. And the Goldilocks economy is outperforming all expectations.

At his year-end news conference, Mr. Bush said with optimism that the economy is fundamentally sound, despite the housing downturn and the subprime credit crunch. The very next day, that optimism was reinforced with news of the best consumer spending in two years. The prophets of recessionary doom, such as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, Republican adviser Martin Feldstein, ex-Democratic Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, and bond-maven Bill Gross have been proven wrong once again.

Calendar year 2007 looks set to produce 3 percent growth in real gross domestic product, nearly 3 percent growth in consumer spending, and more than 3 percent growth in after-tax inflation-adjusted incomes.

Meanwhile, headline inflation (including food and energy) will have run at 21/2 percent, with only 2 percent core inflation.

Jobs are rising more than 100,000 monthly and the stock market is set to turn in a respectable year despite enormous headwinds. Low tax rates, modest inflation, and declining interest rates continue to boost Goldilocks, which is still the greatest story never told.

Mr. Bush's optimism is well-earned, in Congress too. He has stopped a lot of bad legislation on higher taxing and spending. He won on S-CHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program) and the alternative minimum tax. He mostly prevailed on domestic spending. And he got much of what he wanted on war funding without any pullout dates.

On the other hand, Ambrose Evans Pritchard foresees catastrophe looming on the near horizon. I haven't talked to him recently about this, but I know what my brother Bill would say: Invest in precious metals.

RLC

Nasty, Brutish and Short

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto causes us to wonder anew why Islamic countries seem unable to advance beyond what passed for civilized behavior in the 6th century and why Western nations have.

Perhaps the reason is that the Christian worldview which shaped the West has fostered, albeit unevenly, a culture of technological, economic, and moral progress. Christian nations have been concerned with advancing the condition of the people who live in them, and, perhaps more to the point, Christianity has taught that we are to love our enemies, forgive those who offend us and tolerate those who disagree with us.

Islam has never been much concerned with progress, which Muslims often see as a path leading to apostasy. Nor have they been overly concerned with love and tolerance. Instead, Islam has throughout its history placed religious purity above all else, and in its radical modern mutation, at least, stresses not love, but hatred of one's enemies. A religion or ideology based on hatred will never advance nor progress. Its votaries are too busy settling scores and ridding themselves of heretics to be concerned with science and other progressive pursuits. For such people war, so far from being a necessary evil as it is often seen in the West, becomes a way of life. War and death in the cause of jihad become the whole point of earthly existence. In such a culture no progress is possible. It calls to mind the masterful cadences of Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan:

"Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

If it weren't for the fact that many Muslims, at least in the Arab world, happen to be living on top of vast deposits of oil, which they by themselves could neither extract, refine, or ship to market, they'd still be subsisting just as their ancestors did a thousand years ago, living in tents and merrily slaughtering each other whenever the opportunity arises.

RLC

The Right Word

There are a number of adjectives which come to mind to describe the kind of people who kill themselves in order to kill others - deranged, cruel, evil, vicious, sick, scum - but what they most emphatically are not is cowards. Anyone who is prepared to die to accomplish his purpose, no matter how twisted and malevolent that purpose may be, is not a coward. Why President Bush insists upon calling them that, most recently in his remarks on Benazir Bhutto's murder, is beyond me.

Perhaps he's just taunting the terrorists, but if so, it would make more sense to use some other pejorative. There are plenty of them available which would accurately describe these vermin without having to use one that doesn't describe them at all.

RLC

Huckabee Hints at Pardon

Mike Huckabee has a knack for co-opting issues guaranteed to endear him to social conservatives even though many fiscal and secular conservatives are very much put off by him. His latest example of this is to suggest that he would pardon Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two border agents serving 10 to 12 years for shooting a drug smuggler in the buttocks and trying to conceal that they had violated some rules of engagement. Let's hope Huckabee's being sincere.

It is one of the most disgraceful legacies of George Bush's tenure that he has failed to pardon these men and anyone who says he'll do what Bush has refused to do is going to score big with conservatives. Perhaps they should have been suspended without pay. Perhaps they should have been fired, but they don't deserve to be doing twelve years in jail where one of them has already been severely beaten by inmates. Bush, to his shame, has commuted the sentence of Scooter Libby but refuses to get involved with Ramos and Compean.

Huckabee doesn't always say the right thing, in fact, he frequently says the wrong thing, but his Christmas ad and the hint of a pardon for Ramos and Compean show a certain political adroitness that keeps him in the race.

RLC

Qualifications

Ramirez gives us his take on Dr. Clinton's experience in governing:

RLC

The New Reactionaries

Progressives, like Senator Clinton, are calling for change in November. Progressives are by definition always calling for change. Yet every time a change is proposed it is primarily progressives, oddly enough, who oppose it.

School choice, welfare reform, social security reform, tort reform, tax reform, deposing a tyrant in Iraq, banning partial birth abortion, teaching alternatives to Darwinism in our schools, increasing domestic oil production, using nuclear power rather than coal and oil, and on it goes - at every turn the "progressives" have argued for maintaining the status quo over the proposed change.

Progressives, it turns out, are the new reactionaries.

RLC

Most Electable?

Of all the candidates in the race for president which one seems at this stage to be the most electable? The question isn't asking which one would be the best for the country, or which one we are endorsing, but which one would be likely to garner the most votes.

The answer would be someone who would have appeal among both Republicans and Democrats. In my opinion, right now, that person is Mike Huckabee. Here's why: Huck appeals to a large segment of the Republican party because of his unabashed traditional values and religious views. He also appeals to a lot of liberals among Democrats who like his fiscal populism and concern for the poor. In a race between Huckabee and either Clinton or Obama, Huckabee would get all the Republican votes - the conservatives having nowhere else to go - and a sizable number of "Blue Dog" and liberal Democrat votes. Indeed, Huck seems to be a 1950s liberal in the "Scoop" Jackson mold. If he were around 40-50 years ago he'd have been a standard issue Democrat.

A lot can happen between now and the effective end of the primaries in February and the Huckaboom could easily turn into a Huckabust. There are lots of reasons for being concerned about Huckabee's record, as conservatives like George Will and the good people at National Review Online keep reminding us. But right now he looks like a vote-getter.

Ohio's Governor Ted Strickland serves as an example of Huckabee's cross party appeal.

RLC

Shameless Promises and Incoherent Predictions

During the 2004 campaign vice-presidential candidate John Edwards claimed that if his running mate were elected president people like Christopher Reeves, a quadriplegic, would soon be walking. It was the crassest sort of pandering and Edwards sounded so fatuous one may have been forgiven for thinking that no presidential candidate would ever make such a stupidly shameless promise again.

Well, one should never underestimate a politician's appetite for shamelessness. Now comes a promise from Hillary Clinton that:

...just electing her President will cut the price of oil. When the world hears her commitment at her inauguration about ending American dependence on foreign fuel, Clinton says, oil-pumping countries will lower prices to stifle America's incentive to develop alternative energy.

"I predict to you, the oil-producing countries will drop the price of oil," Clinton said, speaking at the Manchester YWCA. "They will once again assume, once the cost pressure is off, Americans and our political process will recede."

If that last incoherent sentence is an accurate quote then Senator Clinton apparently had too much Christmas eggnog. Perhaps high octane eggnog also explains the absurd promise. In any event, in the chilling event that she actually gets to give the next inaugural speech, the eyes of the world will surely be transfixed on the per barrel price of oil as it plummets like the apple in Times Square on New Years' Eve. Oh, happy day. Vote Democratic and the Millenium will be upon us.

RLC

Judge Jones and the Demarcation Problem

This month marks the two year anniversary of the famous Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of education trial presided over by the distinguished philosopher of science Judge John Jones. We might observe the occasion with a brief reflection on the most salient of the questions the Judge sought to settle.

This is the question of whether ID is or is not "science." This question is a specific instance of the larger question, called by philosophers the "Demarcation Problem," of what distinguishes genuine science from non-science. It's odd that the former chairman of the Pennsylvania liquor control board felt qualified to take this matter up and even odder that the defense did not instruct the court that most philosophers of science believe the problem has no answer. There simply are no characteristics of science which are both necessary, in the sense that any science must possess them, and also sufficient to warrant calling any discipline which does possess them a science.

Thus the Judge presumed to stroll where almost every contemporary philosopher of science fears to tread and boldly proclaims to have discerned what none of them has been able to discern after spending entire careers studying the matter. Judge Jones ruled that ID is indeed not science, implying that he, from the vantage of his lofty perch, can see clearly the distinguishing characteristics of science that no one else who studies these things has been able to espy.

The classic paper on the futility of doing precisely what Judge Jones nevertheless deigned to do was written in 1983 by Larry Laudan. I wonder if the Judge ever read it.

RLC

A Christmas Story

The following is a parable we've run previously, but its message is important enough that it's worth repeating:

A man named Michael, a father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, had been a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force in the military and his duties drew him away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a critically important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew from childhood to young adulthood pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judy had left him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her. But there was not a day that went by when he did not think of them and wish that he could be with them.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he had not been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Apparently, Jennifer had run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. Judy had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her now and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was a living hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced to submit to almost unimaginable degradation.

Finally, her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in her life she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys who she originally left with might be. He set out not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each day that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she hardly knew what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter lying on the filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was alert enough to comprehend what was happening and as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway she realized that her father really had come for her.

As she passed into the hall a step ahead of Michael the third abductor appeared in front of her with a gun. Michael quickly stepped between them and told Jennifer to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled through the room, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, her father lay bleeding and bruised, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had acted? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice of her father?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of Michael even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the anniversary of his birthday she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him. Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers. His love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

Bill and I wish all our readers at Viewpoint a wonderful and meaningful Christmas.

RLC

The Most Important Thing

This story has created a bit of a stir and even had Rush Limbaugh in a dither the other day, but it's hard to see what Dr. Williams says about the Christmas narrative that's obviously wrong or unorthodox:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, dismissed the Christmas story of the Three Wise Men yesterday as nothing but "legend".

There was scant evidence for the Magi, and none at all that there were three of them, or that they were kings, he said. All the evidence that existed was in Matthew's Gospel. The Archbishop said: "Matthew's Gospel doesn't tell us there were three of them, doesn't tell us they were kings, doesn't tell us where they came from. It says they are astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire, that's all we're really told." Anything else was legend. "It works quite well as legend," the Archbishop said.

Further, there was no evidence that there were any oxen or asses in the stable. The chances of any snow falling around the stable in Bethlehem were "very unlikely". And as for the star rising and then standing still: the Archbishop pointed out that stars just don't behave like that.

Although he believed in it himself, he advised that new Christians need not fear that they had to leap over the "hurdle" of belief in the Virgin Birth before they could be "signed up". For good measure, he added, Jesus was probably not born in December at all. "Christmas was when it was because it fitted well with the winter festival."

None of this is news to anyone who has spent any time studying the accounts of Jesus' birth, of course. Much of our traditional picture of the first Christmas is a result of later accretions. The only thing the prelate says that might be controversial among Christians is that people shouldn't be deterred from accepting the lordship of Christ because they have doubts about the possibility of the virgin birth.

Nevertheless, I think he's right about this. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, it's far more important that we enter into a proper relationship with God now than that we wait until all our doubts are resolved and all our questions are answered. There's nothing unChristian in reciting the words of Thomas as we submit our lives to God: "Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief."

This is not to minimize the theological importance of the virgin birth, but merely to say that the Archbishop is correct not to make that doctrine the sine qua non of being reconciled to Christ. It's important for our understanding of who Christ actually was that theologians get the matter right, but for the average Christian layman paramount importance rests simply in one's surrender to Christ. I think that reading the Archbishop's words in context makes it clear that this is what he was trying to say, and Rush can relax.

RLC

Hillary Claus

Friday we talked about Huckabee's Christmas greeting. Hillary's effort below offers an interesting contrast. In her's there's no mention of the reason for Christmas, no hint of the spiritual significance of the season, only the implied promise of something for everyone, a chicken in every pot, free gifts from Santa Clinton. Her ad follows the standard liberal trends toward secularization and desacralization of Christmas:

No wonder there's a "Huckaboom" among those who want Christmas to mean something more than just crass commercialism and cynical, tawdry attempts to bribe voters with promises of plunder from the public purse.

Jonah Goldberg writes about the two ads at NRO and recalls a nugget from a book by P.J. O'Roarke:

It's a profound commentary on the state of our political culture that Huckabee's ad is the controversial one. Huckabee promises nothing, Hillary everything.

The contrast between the Candidate of God and the Candidate of Goodies should remind everyone of P. J. O'Rourke's timeless book Parliament of Whores.

"I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat," wrote the indispensable O'Rourke.

"God" he explained, is "a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of the disadvantaged. ... God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God's heavenly country club."

P. J. continues: "Santa Claus is another matter. ... He's nonthreatening. He's always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who's been naughty and who's been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without the thought of a quid pro quo."

"Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one," O'Rourke concluded. "There is no such thing as Santa Claus."

P.S. Fred Thompson serves up a greeting that is unassuming, poignant, and, unlike Hillary's, focusses on the sacrifice others are making rather than on what others will get if they vote for him:

RLC