Loser Letter #5

Mary Eberstadt, alias A. F. Christian, laments all the "total craptacular hoser traitor enemy combatant Loser-lover guys" who are leaving the ranks of the Brights to join the Dulls in Loser Letter #5 at National Review Online.

RLC

Microscopic Clutch

The bacterial flagellum continues to give strict Darwinians migraines. Scientists have recently discovered that the flagellum's rotation is stopped by a protein assembly that acts just like the clutch in an automobile transmission.

"We think it's pretty cool that evolving bacteria and human engineers arrived at a similar solution to the same problem," said IU Bloomington biologist Daniel Kearns, who led the project. "How do you temporarily stop a motor once it gets going?"

Indeed. The whole flagellar assembly is a miniature outboard motor and the filament is disengaged from the motor by a clutch assembly such as intelligent engineers have designed for cars. Yet we are to believe that random genetic mutations occurring relatively quickly in geological time acted in tandem with natural selection to produce this astonishing machine completely without any guidance or intention.

Which came first, you may wonder, the flagellar motor or the clutch assembly? What good would each do the organism if the other didn't exist? If it does no good how was it conserved? If they evolved together how did such a marvel happen unless guided by an intelligent agent?

Never mind. It's impertinent to ask such questions. Just believe what the wise Darwinists tell you and don't be difficult.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 7 (part II)

Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is a rambling, weakly argued polemic against God and religion in which no canard is considered too lame to be trotted out in service to the cause. In the second half of chapter 7, for instance, Dawkins reconstructs the obligatory sad history of religious oppression, conflict and bloodshed. He strongly implies that but for the baleful influence of religion all would be peace and light in the world.

As so often in his book, though, Professor Dawkins tells us only part of the tale, and a small part at that. Let's talk a little bit about what he leaves out, starting in 1915: First there was the Russian revolution (9 million dead), then the Ukrainian famine (15 million), the Nazi holocaust (6 million), the rape of Nanking (300,000) the war in Korea (2.8 million), the cultural revolution in China (40 million), post-war Vietnam (430,000), the Cambodian killing fields (1.6 million), the Rwandan genocide (750,000) These slaughters accounted for the deaths of about 80 million people, none of them had anything to do with religion, but most of them were perpetrated by devotees of an ideology that was explicitly or implicitly atheistic. In other words, the record of slaughter in the name of atheism and by atheists dwarfs that committed in the name of God. Moreover, if we consider not religion in general but only the Christian church the bloodshed which can be layed to the account of Christianity over the last four centuries is vanishingly small, especially compared to the crimes of state atheism.

Dawkins maintains that religion is a significant force for evil because religion, being a human enterprise, is subject to many of the flaws that humans possess, but he fails to recognize that it is the human element of religion that is the problem, not religion itself.

Because there is a widespread consensus about what's right and what's wrong, and this consensus has nothing to do with religion, he concludes that religion is unnecessary for morality. As an alternative to the Biblical commandments he offers a list of ethical rules that reflect what he calls the "moral zeitgeist." Some of the platitudes he serves up are: Always seek to learn something new; live life with joy and wonder; in all things strive to cause no harm. To each of these, however, the question needs to be put, "why?" What obligates anyone to observe Dawkins' rules? They're nothing more than banal expressions of his own preferences about how he'd like to see people live. Observing them or flouting them is neither right nor wrong.

Dawkins naively believes that the moral zeitgeist is moving us forward and that we're making moral progress. Notwithstanding the absurdity of such a claim in light of the statistics given above for the 20th century (which represent, by the way, only a fraction of that century's horrors), it is remarkable for what it reveals about his utter obliviousness to the fact that he has no grounds for calling an evolving moral consensus either progress or regress. It just is.

He assures us that the "zeitgeist," pushed along as it is by people like ethicist Peter Singer, is moving us toward a post-specieist condition where animals will have rights similar to those of human persons. This, Dawkins' enthuses, would be a "natural extrapolation of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women." What Dawkins chooses not to tell his readers is that Singer is the world's most outspoken proponent of legalizing infanticide, which is a "natural extrapolation" from a Darwinian worldview and an example of the progressive direction in which the zeitgeist is moving.

"The manifest progression of the zeitgeist is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good," Dawkins proclaims. In other words, as long as we can agree to follow certain precepts and platitudes who needs God? This is so naive that it seems almost an indignity to respond to it. One of his ethical rules is "Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or species" (Interestingly, he does not prohibit discrimination based upon religion). But why should we not discriminate on the basis of sex or race? Why is such behavior wrong? Why is it wrong to harm another person? Dawkins doesn't tell us because he can't tell us. The Darwinian ethic is might makes right and under such a principle prohibitions against discrimination are ludicrous. Discrimination, or anything else, can only be wrong if we are somehow obligated to treat others with dignity and respect and we can only be so obligated if there is a God.

A big problem for anyone seeking to show that atheists are good folk is the record of oppressors like Hitler and Stalin so Dawkins devotes several pages to explaining how these men and others like them were not influenced to do what they did by their atheism. Their atheism was one thing, their deeds were another. This is a laughable defense given that he was loath to make the same concession to the historical crimes committed by Christians. But even if we allow him the point it's still irrelevant. The question is not whether these men were consciously acting on their atheistic beliefs when they committed their crimes, but rather whether what these men did was in any way inconsistent with an atheistic worldview. The answer to that is no. If atheism is true nothing Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao did is wrong.

Dawkins is offended that anyone would think that an atheist, qua atheist, would commit such atrocities as were recorded by Stalin and Hitler. "Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?" He asks. Again this question muddies the water. Dawkins needs rather to answer the deeper question of why atheistic Marxists felt impelled to slay thousands of clergy and to attempt to wipe out Christianity in almost every country in which they seized power in the 20th century. If atheism is merely the absence of a belief why is it so hostile to believers? Why is it not simply indifferent? The reason is because atheism is indeed an absolutist belief system and it sees Christianity as its most vigorous rival.

Richard Dawkins does not believe in miracles but he should. The fact that a book as poorly argued as The God Delusion has become a best-seller and is making him wealthy is perhaps the most amazing miracle of our young century.

RLC

Kerryesque

Congress has been trying to come up with a FISA bill that will be free of some of the short-comings of its predecessor legislation. The House has now overwhelmingly passed a bill that includes retroactive immunity to telecom companies that may otherwise be liable to lawsuits for helping the government eavesdrop on suspected terrorists.

The left is upset that the immunity provision was included. This puts Senator Obama in a sticky wicket since he supported the bill when it was in the House, but now that his base is aroused and angry he has reversed course and promises now to filibuster the bill that he previously supported.

In other words, as with public financing of his campaign, Obama was in favor of it before he was against it. The senator is sounding like a clone of John Kerry.

Ed Morrissey chronicles Senator Obama's political peregrinations on this issue at Hot Air.

RLC

Man from Nowhere

Michael Gerson spotlights the emptiness of Senator Obama's rhetoric about being "post-partisan" and willing to take political risks to reach across the aisle to work with members of the other party:

Jake Tapper of ABC News asked ... Barack Obama: "Have you ever worked across the aisle in such a way that entailed a political risk for yourself?" Obama's response is worth quoting in full: "Well, look, when I was doing ethics reform legislation, for example, that wasn't popular with Democrats or Republicans. So any time that you actually try to get something done in Washington, it entails some political risks. But I think the basic principle which you pointed out is that I have consistently said, when it comes to solving problems, like nuclear proliferation or reducing the influence of lobbyists in Washington, that I don't approach this from a partisan or ideological perspective."

For a candidate running as a centrist reformer, this is pretty weak tea. Ethics reform and nuclear proliferation are important issues, but they have hardly put Obama in the liberal doghouse. When I recently asked two U.S. senators who are personally favorable to Obama to name a legislative issue on which Obama has vocally bucked his own party, neither could cite a single instance.

Gerson goes on to contrast Obama's blank record of offending his fellow Democrats in order to work with Republicans to the maddeningly frequent instances of John McCain's hobnobbing with the Democrats. He finishes with this:

It is an odd thing when a presidential candidate bases his campaign on a manifest weakness. Rudy Giuliani ran on a platform of foreign policy experience while lacking it completely. Obama promises post-partisanship while doing little to demonstrate it in the Senate. And the independent voters so eagerly courted in this election may eventually ask about Obama the odd but appropriate question: What dogs has this man bitten?

Indeed, what indications are there that Obama has ever displayed any of the political talents and virtues his supporters believe he will bring to the White House? The Senator has come out of nowhere with nothing to commend him except beguiling speeches about hope and unity. He has no record of accomplishment and has never administrated anything much less a great nation. Yet for reasons that appear utterly non-rational, millions of people are prepared to put him in the White House. It's a little unnerving.

RLC

Three Things

A recent column by Dennis Prager got me thinking about how our country has changed since I was a boy. To see what I mean try this:

Name three things, other than racial discrimination and those advances that depend on technology, that are better about American society and culture today than they were fifty years ago.

I can't either.

Read Prager's column to see the sorts of things he thinks we've lost.

RLC

Of Principles and Polygraphs

The luster is quickly fading from the Obama mystique. The man who has spent his political career campaigning on the promise of reform turns out to be just as opportunistic, at least when it comes to campaign financing, as anyone else.

As soon as it became apparent that his principled opposition to private financing of campaigns was working to his disadvantage he abandoned his principled opposition.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Even Newsweek, a magazine which will almost certainly endorse Obama in November, calls his move "lame."

Liberal columnist Mark Shields is disillusioned to the point of essentially calling Obama a liar. He complains that Obama would be unable to pass a polygraph test.

RLC

Addressing the Energy Problem

The high price of energy is due largely, but not entirely, to the fact that supply is not keeping up with demand. The Democrats have proposed a number of measures to reduce demand (conservation, moving toward alternative sources of energy), a number of measures that would reduce supply even further (taxing oil companies, nationalizing oil refineries and companies - see, for instance, here), and some which just seem both bizarre and desperate (suing OPEC).

Barack Obama speaks for most Democrats when he acknowledges that he's actually in favor of high energy prices (See his response at the 2:30 mark of this interview), he just wishes the prices would have risen more gradually. The left wants high energy prices in hopes they'll encourage the development of energy alternatives, but Obama advocates in the CNBC interview that to mitigate the impact of high fuel costs the government give people a check to help them pay their energy bills. It's hard to understand how high prices will encourage conservation and alternative energy sources if people are going to be given money to offset the higher prices.

The Republican solution to our energy crisis is to increase supply until we can develop alternatives to petroleum. This means building more refineries, building more nuclear plants, and drilling for the oil that lies both off our shores and within our borders.

What a pickle we're in: The Republicans have the better ideas but they lack leadership, including, sadly, in the White House (see Michelle Malkin's piece on this here). The Democrats have strong leadership but they lack good ideas. Would that we could have the best of both parties.

Maybe that's a reason to vote for McCain - he's essentially a Democrat who has come to see the need to drill offshore (but, oddly, not in ANWR) and wants to build more nuclear power plants. Now that's a unity candidate.

RLC

Mythologizing

Ben Johnson at FrontPage Mag summarizes the Left's narrative of the last eight years under George Bush:

"President Select" George W. Bush stole the 2000 election after his daddy's Supreme Court justices stopped the Florida election boards from counting all the votes. When he got into office, he did not make terrorism a top priority but immediately began dividing the nation along political lines. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the entire country came together in unity to get those who perpetrated this atrocity, and we stayed united as we fought al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. But soon Bush and his neocon allies took our eye off the ball and used the attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq based on lies. Administration officials pressured CIA analysts, twisted intelligence, and insisted Saddam Hussein was an "imminent threat" who had sponsored 9/11. Bush lied that Saddam had WMD stockpiles and invented a story about him trying to buy nuclear material in Niger. But there were never any WMDs; Iraq had no ties to terrorists at all, much less al-Qaeda; and our presence in Iraq is drawing these terrorists to Iraq. (The CIA did not misinform him, because it is an instrument of ruling class hegemony and probably puts manganese into the crack it sells in black neighborhoods, when it's not blowing up levees in New Orleans.) The administration's perpetual campaign mode had them slur anyone who got in their way, questioning the patriotism of anyone who opposed the war and revealing Valerie Plame's identity when Ambassador Joseph Wilson told the truth about them. Bush even declassified sensitive information in the NIE to punish his political enemies. Ultimately, a jury convicted Scooter Libby of fixing Iraq intel to get us into war. Our soldiers - who are too poor and uneducated to help getting stuck in Iraq - are caught in the middle of a civil war. Even though the American people overwhelming want an immediate withdrawal from Iraq and voted for it in 2006, the cowardly Democrats keep passing funding bills and ignoring the will of the people. The Surge has failed, and our best option is to redeploy within six months, even if genocide follows.

Johnson argues that every single assertion in this narrative is either misleading or false. For anyone confused about why this country seems so politically divided today it might be salutary to take a few minutes to read his essay.

RLC

Haditha

Of the eight Marines who were charged with committing an atrocity in the Iraqi town of Haditha, seven have been exonerated or had the charges dismissed. One remains to be tried. I haven't seen much about this in the MSM, a large portion of which was ready to march these young men to the gallows two years ago. You might also remember the execrable words of Congressman John Murtha who publicly pronounced the Marines guilty of murder: "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

HT: Ramirez

Michelle Malkin documents not only Murtha's slanders but also those of Keith Olbermann, The New York Times, and The Nation magazine, all of whom tried to turn Haditha into an Iraqi version of My Lai which was a genuine atrocity from the Vietnam war.

We shall await an apology from these people for their willingness to publicly and repeatedly assume the worst of our young men, but I doubt very much whether any of them would even consider an apology. They ruin reputations and lives for a living, why start apologizing for it now?

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 7 (part I)

We continue our critical journey through Richard Dawkins' best-selling case for atheism, The God Delusion, with a look today at chapter 7. Here Dawkins sets two tasks for himself. The first is to discredit the Bible, particularly the Old Testament (O.T.), and the second is to offer an alternative ethical narrative, what he calls the "moral zeitgeist," to that of the Bible. None of what he says in this chapter has anything to do with the question of God's existence, but it may nevertheless be of interest to Christians.

It has to be understood that Dawkins' arguments are often logically flimsy, and his facts and interpretations are often suspect. TGD is so poorly argued, in fact, that it would not be worth the time it takes to read it were it not that it has sold so many copies and had such a powerful impact on audiences around the world.

One part of his argument in chapter 7 seems to be that it is inconceivable that any God as great as theists imagine him would care about the paltry sins of tiny human beings on our speck of a planet. "We humans," he writes, "give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our pokey little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance."

But of course our sins are of cosmic significance, and so are we, since the creator of the cosmos chose to atone for those sins by offering himself on the cross. Dawkins, almost child-like, seems to equate significance with relative size. Since we're so tiny compared to the universe, he reasons, it's absurd to think that a creator God would care about us. His reasoning reminds me of a scene in the classic film The Third Man where a criminal named Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, takes his antagonist to the top of a Ferris wheel. From that vantage the people all look so small and their lives seem so insignificant. From that perspective it was easy for Lime to justify the crimes he committed against them. His victims were little more than ants. Dawkins apparently holds the Harry Lime view of humanity. We're so small that a God, if he existed, couldn't possibly care about us.

The Oxford professor goes on to examine the Old Testament stories and wonders why Christians would think that the people who are featured in them, people like Abraham, are moral exemplars. I know of no one, though, who has ever said that they were. The stories we read in the O.T. are instructive precisely because they teach us about the failings and faults common to humanity and how we are lost without God, not because they hold up the often sordid behavior of the characters as a model for the rest of us to emulate.

His basic point in the chapter, he tells us on p.279, is that because the O.T. characters are so depraved we can conclude that wherever modern moral ideas come from they don't come from the Bible. This, of course, is as silly as it can be. How does it follow from the fact that the Bible tells us about human sinfulness that therefore there are no moral principles to be found within its pages? Here are three principles that jump off almost every page of the Old Testament: Love God, do justice, and show compassion to the weak and poor. Dawkins apparently thinks that because these principles are often not followed that therefore they're not there.

Not only does Dawkins actually make the startling assertion that the Bible gives us no such principles, he also says that he doesn't think there's an atheist in the world who would do the sort of thing that religious people (Taliban Muslims) did in Afghanistan when they destroyed ancient Buddhist shrines and other sites of historical and religious value. Only religious people would be so philistine as to commit such an atrocity, he avers. Perhaps he was suffering a brain-freeze when he wrote this and had forgotten the crimes of the communists, committed in the name of state atheism, against Christian churches and clergy all through the twentieth century.

He wonders, too, who God was trying to impress by dying on the cross. Presumably, Dawkins sneers, he was trying to impress himself. This jejune comment reveals the utter shallowness of Dawkins' theological thought. If the crucifixion was intended to impress anyone it was intended to impress us. It was the greatest demonstration of love in the history of the world. The creator of the universe became one of us, not only to atone for our sin, but to give us a glimpse of how much he cherishes us. It's wonderful enough that a man would die for his friends who love him, but God died as well for those who, like Richard Dawkins, despise him. He wanted, among other things, to impress his beloved with the immensity of his love and what better way to do it than through such an unimaginable act of self-abnegation and sacrifice? Perhaps someone might send Dawkins a copy of Tale of Two Cities to help him understand how love can motivate such deeds.

Professor Dawkins vouchsafes to us the further revelation that Jesus never intended for his teaching to be given to anyone other than Jews (p.292) and that it was Paul who thought up the innovation of taking the gospel to the gentiles. He quotes with approval another writer who asserts that Jesus would be spinning in his grave if he knew that Paul had taken his message of love and forgiveness to the 'pigs' (gentiles). Regrettably he does not try to explain how this idea squares with the last couple of verses in Matthew's gospel where Jesus directs his disciples to take the gospel to the whole world, baptizing them and teaching them all that he has commanded. Nor is this claim easily reconciled with the parable of the Good Samaritan, the point of which is that we are enjoined to show compassion to everyone with whom we come in contact.

There is so much in chapter 7, as in the book as a whole, of which to be critical that it's difficult to limit oneself to spotlighting these few samples of Dawkinsian reasoning. Moreover, his reasoning is often so bad, so sophomoric, that one feels it is almost unsporting to deconstruct it. Even so, we'll plod on and look at some more of chapter 7 next time.

RLC

Ten Reasons for High Energy Costs

William Tate at the American Thinker offers his top ten reasons why we're suffering high gasoline prices and why the Democrats are largely to blame for each of them. Here are numbers ten through seven:

10) ANWR: If Bill Clinton had signed into law the Republican Congress's 1995 bill to allow drilling of ANWR instead of vetoing it, ANWR could be producing a million barrels of (non-Opec) oil a day--5% of the nation's consumption. Although speaking in another context, even Democrat Senator Charles Schumer, no proponent of ANWR drilling, admits that "one million barrels per day," would cause the price of gasoline to fall "50 cents a gallon almost immediately," according to a recent George Will column.

9) Coastal Drilling (i.e., not in my backyard) Democrats have consistently fought efforts to drill off the U.S. coast, as evidenced by Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's preotestation against a failed 2005 bill: "Not only does this legislation dismantle the bi-partisan ban on offshore drilling, but it provides a financial incentive for states to do so."

A financial incentive? With [other countries] now slant drilling for oil just 50 miles off the Florida coast, wouldn't that have been a good thing?

8) Insistence on alternative fuels: One of the first acts of the new Democrat-controlled congress in 2007 was an energy bill that "calls for a huge increase in the use of ethanol as a motor fuel and requires new appliance efficiency standards." By focusing on alternative fuels such as ethanol, and not more drilling, Democrats have added to the cost of food, worsening starvation problems around the word and increasing inflationary pressures in the U.S., including prices at the pump.

7) Nuclear power: Even the French, who sometimes seem to lack the backbone to stand up for anything other than soft cheese, faced down their environmentalists over the need for nuclear power. France now generates 79% of its electricity from nuclear plants, mitigating the need for imported oil. The French have so much cheap energy that France has become the world's largest exporter of electric power. They have plans in place to build more reactors, including an experimental fusion reactor.

Read the other six at the link and every time you fill your tank or pay your home heating bill remind yourself that while these solutions remain unimplemented Congress spends much of its time and your tax dollars feverishly searching for a reason to impeach George Bush or to indict someone in his administration.

RLC

New Cancer Treatment

There's news from England of yet another encouraging treatment for some forms of cancer. This treatment involves selecting the few immune cells in the patient's body which fight cancer and cloning them so that billions of them can be injected back into the patient:

A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed.

The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure. After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.

Doctors took cells from the man's own defence system that were found to attack the cancer cells best, cloned them and injected back into his body, in a process known as "immunotherapy". After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.

The work raises hopes that this approach could not only offer a more effective treatment for skin cancer, or melanoma, which kills around 2,000 people in Britain alone, but be applied to other cancers too.

It's wonderful to think that perhaps within the lifetimes of many who are reading this a death from cancer will be as unusual as a death from small pox or polio.

RLC

The Loser Letters #4

"Former Christian" Mary Eberstadt continues her efforts to get her new atheist friends to see that their tactics for converting Christians aren't working very well in this the fourth installment of her "Loser Letters." Why, she wonders, do the "Dulls" have all the great art.

Eberstadt's letters deserve to become classics.

RLC

Hard and Easy Problems

Michael Egnor treats us to a fine explanation of the problems conscious experience poses for a materialist view of the brain. How matter can give rise to the actual sensation of blueness, for example, is a mystery that baffles neuroscientists and which is an embarrassment to those who hold that all of our "mental" experience can be ultimately explained in terms of nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain (i.e. materialism).

Egnor closes his essay with this summary:

The origin of subjective experience is the fundamental question-the hard problem-in understanding the mind. Yet there is nothing in the material world that intrinsically refers to or explains subjective experience. There is nothing in third-person ontogeny from which one would infer first-person ontogeny. No theory in physics or chemistry invokes the emergence of first-person experience. A detailed scientific understanding of the physics and chemistry of the brain-from molecular structure to neurochemistry to electrophysiology to neuroanatomy-would not at any point provide a scientific explanation of why we are subjects and not just objects.

The hard problem of consciousness is the most important problem in understanding the mind, and thus far materialism has provided no insight. It is unclear how it even could provide insight. Nothing about the scientific characterization of matter-and nothing about materialism-explains the emergence of subjective experience. The principal materialist response to this catastrophe for materialist ideology has been to deny the relevance of subjective experience to our understanding of the mind. Yet the retreat to science and the denial of the relevance of philosophy is no refuge. Science is natural philosophy.

You really should read the whole thing, but if you go to the link you should keep in mind that I think he accidentally transposes the words mind and brain in the first sentence. I believe he means to say that materialists hold that the mind is completely caused by the brain.

RLC

The Ryan Plan

Jason forwards us an article by Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute that restores, a little bit, one's hope that some members of Congress are at least thinking about the problems this country is facing and coming up with workable solutions. This program for Republicans is the brainchild of Rep. Paul Ryan (R, WI). I say it's a program for Republicans because under their current leadership I can't imagine too many Democrats going along with it:

There are many reasons for the Republican Party's troubles, including an unpopular war, a sputtering economy, and a long string of corruption scandals. But perhaps most important, the party no longer seems to stand for its core commitment to limited government.

Enter Paul Ryan. Late last month, the five-term Wisconsin congressman introduced a comprehensive blueprint for reforming taxes, entitlements, retirement and health care. If Republicans are looking for a road out of the political wilderness, they should pay attention.

Health Care: Ryan would reform our employment-based insurance system by replacing the current tax exclusion for employer-provided insurance with a refundable tax credit of $2,500 for individuals, and $5,000 for families. This would encourage employers to take the money they currently spend providing health insurance and give it directly to workers, who could then use it to purchase competitive, personally owned insurance plans. That would be insurance that met their needs, not those of their bosses, and people wouldn't lose it if they lost their jobs.

Ryan would also allow workers to shop for insurance across state lines. That would mean residents of states like New Jersey and New York, where regulation has made insurance too expensive for many people, could buy their insurance in states where it costs less. And increased competition would help bring insurance costs down for all of us.

Medicare: Rep. Ryan recognizes that the skyrocketing cost of Medicare is threatening to bury our children and grandchildren under a mountain of debt. He would modernize the program, giving seniors more freedom to get the type of coverage that fits their needs, while bringing costs under control. He would give every senior an annual payment of up to $9,500 that they could use to purchase health insurance. The payments would be inflation protected and adjusted for income, with low-income seniors receiving greater support. Seniors would be able to save some of their funds in a Medical Savings Account.

Social Security: Like Medicare, Social Security is hurtling toward insolvency. Rep. Ryan would preserve the program unchanged for current recipients and workers older than age 55, but he would allow younger workers to invest part of their Social Security taxes privately through personal accounts. Unlike the present system, workers would own the funds in their accounts, and when they died, they could pass any remaining funds on to their heirs.

Taxes: Rep. Ryan would radically simplify today's hopelessly complex, cumbersome and bureaucratic tax code. He would give filers a choice: They could pay their taxes under existing law, or they could choose a new simplified code, with just two tax rates (10 percent on the first $100,000 for joint filers; $50,000 for individuals, and 25 percent above that).

His plan would offer virtually no deductions or exemptions, except for an increased standard personal deduction and exemption of up to $39,000 for a family of four. He would also replace our current anti-competitive corporate income tax - the world's second-highest, at 35 percent - with an 8.5 percent business consumption tax (essentially a value-added tax), and eliminate taxes on capital gains and dividends. Although not everyone agrees with this particular approach to business taxation, Rep. Ryan understands that we must bring our corporate taxes in line with those of our competitors if we want to increase economic growth and create more jobs.

Our current level of government spending is unsustainable. According to the Congressional Budget Office, unless we act now, government will consume 40 percent of our national Gross Domestic Product by 2050. That would require a doubling of the tax burden just to keep up.

If a conservative candidate for president were to promote something like Congressman Ryan's proposal he might win in November and drag along the rest of the Republican ticket with him. Sadly, there aren't any conservatives running in November.

RLC

Winter Light

Tobias Wolff at The New Yorker writes a good piece on the Ingmar Bergman film Winter Light in which Bergman tells the story of a Lutheran pastor whose faith is slipping away, largely because he has substituted the form of religion for its substance. Wolff expresses many of the thoughts I have every time I watch the movie. I recommend both the article and the film, especially as a caution to anyone considering the ministry for all the wrong reasons.

RLC

An Ad Only Keith Olbermann Could Love

Move On.org, the same organization that brought us the General Betray Us ads, crosses new frontiers of political mendacity and shamelessness with this spot:

Let's count the ways in which this ad seeks to deceive the viewer:

1. Even if McCain is elected in November he can only serve for at most eight years which would make Alex about eight years old when McCain leaves office. Unless we are truly desperate for soldiers it's doubtful that his little self will be much in demand at that point.

2. McCain's 100 year statement is taken completely out of context. What he said was that it would be okay with him if we stayed in Iraq for 100 years as long as American troops were no longer at risk. In other words, he was talking about a deployment such as we have had in Japan and Germany since WWII. MoveOn knows this, but truth-telling is not high, sad to say, on their to-do list.

3. Even if Alex were to turn 18 in the next couple of years his mommy seems not to realize that there is no draft. MoveOn.org doesn't seem capable of grasping the fundamental difference between a volunteer army and a conscripted force, so let's make it as simple for them as we can: If Alex wants to go into the military when he turns 18 it'll be his choice.

This ad is so transparently disingenuous that intelligent and fair-minded voters should recoil from it in disgust. Unfortunately, MoveOn isn't pitching it to intelligent and fair-minded voters.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 6

Author Richard Dawkins concerns himself in chapter 6 of The God Delusion (TGD) with an attempt to explain the relationship between God and morality and to argue that God is not necessary for good behavior. Richard Dawkins initiates the discussion with this question:

Isn't goodness incompatible with the theory of the selfish gene (the view that all of our behavior is determined by our genes to increase the chances that our genes will be perpetuated into the next generation)? The question could be asked more relevantly of atheism in general, but Dawkins replies to his query by claiming that evolution gives a much better explanation for morality than does the God Hypothesis.

Before we consider his answer we might pause for a moment to note something he says which I find intriguing. He argues that acts of altruism in animals are demonstrations of one individual's superiority over another:

The dominant bird is saying the equivalent of, "Look how superior I am to you, I can afford to give you food." Or "Look how superior I am, I can afford to make myself vulnerable top hawks by sitting on a high branch, acting as a sentinel to warn the rest of the flock feeding on the ground." ....And when a subordinate [bird] attempts to offer food to a dominant individual, the apparent generosity is violently rebuffed.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I've long thought it an interesting quirk of human nature that many people resent favors done them by others. Rather than see the favor as a kindness people sometimes react to it as though it were a personal insult (Think of the ingratitude many Iraqis feel for American sacrifices on behalf of their freedom, for instance). Perhaps the ingratitude is due to the fact that at some subliminal level the beneficiary of the favor realizes that he is being implicitly told that he is inferior, and no one likes to be told that.

At any rate, Dawkins' point in chapter 6 is that we don't need God to be moral. The urge to be kind, for instance, is a product of our evolutionary history and we'd have that inclination whether God told us to be kind or not. There's much in his reasoning on this matter of which we can be critical.

The problem is not how to explain "moral" behavior. People can certainly do "good" things whether God exists or not. The problem is trying to account for moral obligation. How are we obligated to do something just because evolution has inclined us to do it? Why should we be kind if there's nothing in it for us or if cruelty will benefit us in some way? Why is it wrong to be cruel? What does it mean to say that something is "wrong" anyway? How do we justify the belief that moral good and bad have any non-arbitrary meaning apart from an objective transcendent moral authority?

Evolution has bestowed upon us other tendencies besides an inclination to kindness (which, by the way, not all humans appear to possess) which we do not consider good. How do we decide which of these tendencies are good and which are bad? Evolution has given us a tendency to be aggressive, to be selfish toward non-kin, to be sexually promiscuous, etc. Is yielding to these inclinations wrong? If so, why?

Dawkins comes very close here to committing the genetic fallacy, the error that says that because we are a certain way that therefore we should be that way. He also informs us that he is himself a consequentialist, one who bases rightness on the results of the act, but who do those results have to benefit in order to be right? Other people? Himself? How does he decide which it is to be, and why would it be wrong to just care about the benefits of one's actions for oneself?

Dawkins cites studies which show that there's little difference in the way atheists and believers make moral judgments and concludes from this that "we do not need God in order to be good." This is quite an unusual conclusion to draw from these studies. All they show, if they show anything at all, is that atheists have moral convictions that are completely unsupported by their deepest beliefs. Their atheism gives them no basis for thinking anything is right or wrong but they believe there is right and wrong anyway. What the studies Dawkins cites suggest is that most atheists inconsistent, since every atheist who makes a moral judgment is acting as if his atheism were not true.

Dawkins goes on to allege that the Christian tries to be good only to seek God's favor. He concurs with Michael Shermer that "If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder,' you reveal yourself to be an immoral person."

This misunderstands the Christian motivation for the moral life. It's not fear of punishment and hope of reward that motivates Christians to do good deeds, when they do them, but rather love and gratitude to the God who has done so much for us. We do not seek God's love by being good. We are good, to the extent we are, because God loves us.

To say that anyone who rapes or murders is immoral, as Shermer and Dawkins do, begs the question. It assumes that the word "immorality" actually means something significant. For Dawkins an immoral act is merely an act which he doesn't like. If there is no God it can't be any more than this. To say that something is immoral is to say nothing more than that he wishes people wouldn't do it. Notwithstanding his wishes, the person who does do such things is no more "wrong" than a cat is wrong to torment a mouse.

In a classic illustration of the fallacy called Division Dawkins makes the ridiculous claim that rioters in Montreal during a police strike in the 1960s were mostly religious people because most Canadians are religious people. Perhaps we can forgive Dawkins this bit of asininity if it weren't that he comes right back on the next page and makes the same sophomoric argument again, this time by quoting a section from a book by fellow atheist Sam Harris.

Harris seeks to disprove the belief that religion leads to better behavior by observing that most of the crime in the U.S. occurs in our cities and most of the cities with the highest crime rates are in states which tend to vote Republican and are therefore most likely to be populated by Christian conservatives. I am not making this up. This is Harris' argument, and Dawkins signs on to it. What Harris and Dawkins are apparently unaware of is that even in Republican states the cities are overwhelmingly Democratic and secular. Instead of employing such a juvenile argument perhaps Harris should have just visited a prison and taken a poll of the inmates and asked them how many were devout, church-going believers who prayed daily at the time they committed their crimes. I wonder what the results would show.

It's hard to believe that otherwise intelligent people would make such embarrassingly dumb arguments, but when your task is to try to give a defense of morality without God you have to go with the best you can even if that means taking a chance on an argument that would be laughed at by middle schoolers.

The fundamental moral problem for the atheist, a problem which Dawkins never really addresses, is this: What is there which obligates us to behave in one way rather than another? What makes kindness better than cruelty? Why should I not just live for myself? Why should I care about others? What's wrong with selfishness? It's really no surprise that Dawkins doesn't address these questions. Indeed, the surprise would have been if he had, because for the atheist there just is no answer to them.

It's fitting to close with a quote from Dawkins' hero, Charles Darwin. Darwin writes in his Autobiography these words:

"One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life...only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best."

In the absence of God, all we have to guide us are our feelings and no one's feelings are any more authoritative than anyone else's. Unfortunately, the fact that for the atheist one's own subjective feelings are no more morally superior than anyone else's doesn't prevent Mr. Dawkins from repeatedly making moral judgments of others throughout his book and especially in the next chapter.

RLC

Bush Didn't Lie

James Kirchick, an assistant editor at the liberal New Republic, writes in the liberal LA Times that those who continue to push the meme that Bush lied us into Iraq are themselves being dishonest. Viewpoint has been saying much the same thing since 2003. It's simply disreputable to accuse Bush of having lied to precipitate a war with Iraq. It was disreputable in 2003 because there was insufficient evidence of a lie, and it's even more disreputable now because there's a lot of evidence that he did not lie.

Moreover, by discrediting the President his critics have succeeded in ratcheting up the threshold of provocation necessary to compel us to use military force to the point where it would be almost impossible, politically or psychologically, to employ force today on some new front. More timorous presidents than George Bush will be very reluctant to resort to military means even when it's clear that terrorist nations like Iran are implacably determined to produce nuclear weapons which they all but promise to use, either themselves or through terrorist surrogates.

Those who have so bitterly defamed the President's integrity over the last five years have made the future far less safe for our children and they've done it by despoiling the reputation of the one man who acted to prevent that from happening. To the extent that they slandered George Bush out of malice as well as a thirst for political power they deserve historical ignominy. If there is justice in the world their names will forever be uttered with contempt.

Kirchick's LA Times column is a fine piece of writing and a fresh breeze of honesty coming from a man who normally stands in political opposition to Republican policies.

RLC