Ten Books Before You Die

AOL has a list of Ten Books to Read Before You Die. I don't know how they came up with the list but here it is:

1. Gone With the Wind
   
2. Lord of the Rings (that's actually three books)
   
3. Harry Potter (that's actually seven books)
   
4. The Stand (a 1978 Stephen King novel)
   
5. The DaVinci Code (!?)
   
6. To Kill a Mockingbird
   
7. Angels and Demons (!?)
   
8. Atlas Shrugged
   
9. Catcher in the Rye (Count me as one who never could see what all the swooning was about over this book)
   
10. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    

I never read The Stand nor The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy so I have no comment about them. I mostly enjoyed Dan Brown's two books (#5 and 7), despite having to swallow a character parachuting safely out of a plane with an umbrella or something, but I would hardly say they're books one should read before they die.

I do tell my students from time to time that there are three books they should read before they graduate, however:

1. Les Miserables (unabridged, of course)
   
2. The Brothers Karamazov
   
3. Tale of Two Cities
   

How any of these could be left off the above list is beyond me unless the authors of the list just think they're too hard for the average reader.

RLC

Cosmopolitans and Populists

Byron sends along a link to a talk by Michael Lindsey at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in which he explores contemporary evangelical Christianity and its discontents. It's a fascinating lecture and the response by David Kirkpatrick is equally interesting. There is also a panel of questioners comprised of some jounalistic heavyweights who ask some great questions. If you're interested in the sociology of modern protestant Christianity you'll find this transcript riveting. Here are some highlights from Lindsey's talk:

The difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists is how they respond to secular society. A fundamentalist comes into contact with secular society and his or her natural inclination is to pull back, to withdraw, to maintain the integrity of his or her faith. It's something that's borne out of religious conviction. Evangelicals, on the other hand, encounter secular society and their natural inclination is to engage it because they're wanting to win it over.

[T]he real divide, in my opinion, in evangelicalism is not between the left and the right; it's not between the young and the old. It is between a group that I call the "cosmopolitan" evangelicals and "populist" evangelicals. And these are very, very significant divisions.

You see, populist evangelicals are what we often think [of as] evangelicals. These are the folks who are culture warriors, who say that they want to take back the country for their faith. They see themselves as embattled against secular society. They are very much concerned that they are in a minority position, and they've got to somehow use very strong-arm tactics to win the day.

So populist evangelicalism is alive and strong, especially in the evangelical subculture: the music, the publishing, the entertainment segment of the evangelical subculture. But there is a whole other segment. The people who I interviewed, by and large, fit more this cosmopolitan outlook. They are less interested in taking back the country for their faith. They really are more interested in their faith being seen as authentic, reasonable, and winsome. So they still have an evangelistic impulse, but their whole modus operandi looks quite different. Because of that they have different ultimate goals of what they are actually trying to achieve. They want to have a seat at the table. They want to be seen as legitimate. They are concerned about what The New York Times or TIME magazine thinks about evangelicals because they [the cosmopolitan evangelicals] are concerned about cultural elites. They want legitimacy. Legitimacy is actually more important to them than necessarily taking back the country. And so that cosmopolitan-populist divide I find to be quite significant.

Here's an interesting tidbit: Twenty years ago, the Campus Crusade for Christ chapter at Yale University, one of the leading evangelical campus ministries, was 100 percent white. Today it's 90 percent Asian-American.

Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, is an outspoken theistic evolutionist. And that's significant because the close identification of evangelicals with either traditional creationism or intelligent design is actually going to be giving way, I think, to a whole new generation of theistic evolutionists.

Note: I think he's mistaken here as well. Theistic evolution is coming to be seen more and more as theologically and philosophically incoherent. The future of this issue, in my opinion, lies with a form of intelligent design known as "front-loading." (See The Design Matrix).

[I]n the United States, cultural capital is revealed by having an omnivorous approach to cultural artifacts. You have to be cultural omnivores. So you not only have to like the opera and the symphony; you also have to like jazz and hip hop. You have to be omnivorous in your cultural tastes. And you think about it; that's exactly the case for political figures. You have to be able to have a very interesting conversation with nuclear physicists at 12 o'clock and at 2 o'clock be bowling with the folks down the street. You have to be able to walk in these two arenas, and [Mike]Huckabee actually can do that. So in the very moment that he's talking about how he believes in creationism about science, he also says, the book I'm reading right now that's very interesting on religion and science is Francis Collins' book, The Language of God.

I think there are some issues that people assume will be huge elements that I think are going to go away: same-sex unions, for example. I think the train has left the station. I don't think evangelicals 20 years from now will be raising concerns about it. I think same-sex unions will be across the country in 20 years. And I don't think evangelicals will raise a very big stink because this is one of the issues where you do see very significant generational divides. Older evangelicals are very opposed to it; younger evangelicals are not. And in this way, it mirrors the rest of the country.

Note: I hope Lindsey's wrong about this. Marriage has for two thousand years been seen as a union of one man and one woman. If we decide that the gender of the individuals entering into marriage no longer matters then there will be no logical impediment to concluding that the number of individuals no longer matters either. Once we've crossed this Rubicon there will be no basis other than the arbitrary preference of judges and legislators for restricting marital rights on any grounds whatsoever. There will be no logical reason for imposing any restrictions on kinship, or even the species, of the participants and marriage and family will have ceased to be a sacred committment and will have collapsed into a farcical carnival.

There are some theologically literate cosmopolitan evangelicals, people who are able to articulate how their faith matters and drives them to particular positions, but the interesting thing about that is that almost all of them come from the Reformed tradition. The rise of Presbyterian theology has been very interesting to observe. Abraham Kuyper has been one of the figures that is oftentimes cited among the people I interviewed. But on the whole, most of the evangelical leaders that I interviewed -- most of the folks who are in powerful positions who are evangelicals, they are like most of their fellow churchgoers. They are like most Americans: they don't know what they believe or why. They cannot articulate basic theological ideas. There have been a number of folks who have written books about how America is becoming a theocracy as evangelicals have come into powerful positions. One of the interesting notes they talk about is how evangelical ideas about the apocalypse or eschatology are driving American foreign policy. You know, that would be interesting, except most of the people I interviewed do not know the difference between premillenialist and postmillenialist theology. They can't articulate that.

There's much more from Lindsey and the other participants at the link. It's interesting stuff.

RLC

The Fat Lady's Singing

Marie Colvin of the Times Online writes that it's all but over for al Qaeda in Iraq:

American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.

After being forced from its strongholds in the west and centre of Iraq in the past two years, Al-Qaeda's dwindling band of fighters has made a defiant "last stand" in the northern city of Mosul.

A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.

Operation Lion's Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans' 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects.

The group has been reduced to hit-and-run attacks, including one that killed two off-duty policemen yesterday, and sporadic bombings aimed at killing large numbers of officials and civilians.

Last Friday I joined the 2nd Iraqi Division as it supported local police in a house-to-house search for one such bomb after intelligence pointed to a large explosion today.

American and Iraqi leaders believe that while it would be premature to write off Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni group has lost control of its last urban base in Mosul and its remnants have been largely driven into the countryside to the south.

Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, who has also led a crackdown on the Shi'ite Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad in recent months, claimed yesterday that his government had "defeated" terrorism.

If Iraq is off the table by November what issue will dominate the election? And why haven't we been hearing about this development in Iraq from our own media? Or is that a silly question?

HT: Eric Allie

RLC

<i>The God Delusion</i> Posts

My brother Bill, who handles all the technical duties here at Viewpoint, has collated the series on The God Delusion and put them in the Hall of Fame on the left of this page. That'll make the posts much more accessible for those who might want to refer to them in the future.

RLC

Re-enlisting

Here's a video of our troops, over a thousand of them, massing in one of Saddam's former palaces in Baghdad to re-enlist on the 4th of July:

Contrary to what the media have been telling us, they don't seem to be suffering overmuch from low morale nor do they appear particularly dispirited, but then perhaps the camera is too far removed to tell. Reports from the ceremony tell us that neither Alex nor his mommy made it to the event.

RLC

Jesse Helms

National Review Online has a couple of articles on former Senator Jesse Helms who passed away on Friday at the age of 86. Helms was much maligned by the left (even in death), and much misunderstood by them as well, but he was a powerful voice for freedom in the United States Senate.

This interview from a couple of years ago is helpful in illuminating the man's thought and personality, and John Fund writes a warts-and-all appraisal of Helms at Wall Street Journal.

RLC

Shifting Sand

Political context is important in understanding Senator Obama's position on Iraq. The speech (see video below) in September was delivered when he was in quest of the Democratic nomination for President and vying with Senator Clinton for the anti-war vote by declaring that he would end the war as soon as logistically possible. The impression he gave in this speech was that he would begin as soon as he was in office to bring the troops home. He later gave a deadline of 16 months to have all combat troops out of Iraq. His anti-war supporters clearly thought that Obama would end the war in Iraq regardless of the consequences for the Iraqi people and that's the main reason for his enthusiastic support from the left.

Now he has the nomination and he seems to have abandoned the idea that the troops will come home ASAP. Instead he will refine his position depending upon what the military commanders in Iraq tell him, i.e. if they think the troops should stay there for five more years well, then, they very well might stay there five more years.

Link: sevenload.com

I imagine that the anti-war left is feeling a certain degree of betrayal right now. Perhaps they'll continue to support the Senator because they assume he's just saying what he has to say in order to get elected. In other words, they'll support him if they think he's lying, which presumably they're willing to tolerate as long as he's lying to centrist voters and not to them.

Exit Question: What is the difference between Obama's "refined" position on Iraq and McCain's position? Will anyone in the media ask him?

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

Drill Here, Drill Now

If you think we should be extracting oil from domestic supplies to reduce dependence on foreign oil you might wish to sign a petition to that effect at Newt Gingrich's American Solutions.

Although I strongly favor increasing our domestic production there are some caveats and we need to consider and some concessions from the oil companies we need to demand:

• It will take some time to get the wells and rigs built to access the oil. The benefit from drilling will not necessarily be immediate.
• The amount of oil we can bring to market will still be limited by our refinery capacity.
• Part of the price the oil companies must be expected to pay is that domestic oil be sold on domestic markets. To open up ANWR so that Exxon can sell oil to India makes no sense.
• Domestic oil must be seen as a stopgap, not a long term solution.
• Oil companies should be required to purchase a negotiated number of square miles to our national park or wildlife refuge system for every square mile of public land they use for drilling.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 10

In the concluding chapter of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins ventures an explanation for how religions came to be. The short of it is that he thinks they may be an outgrowth of the childhood trait of having an invisible friend. He has no evidence of this to offer us, of course, so he moves on to other matters on which he can favor us with his silly speculations.

For example he castigates people who believe in eternal life for what he sees as the inconsistency of grieving at the death of a loved one. If religious people really believed in heaven why shouldn't they rejoice at the loved one's good fortune, he asks? Aside from the fact that grief is an emotion we feel because we are suffering a loss, not because our loved one is experiencing gain, Dawkins doesn't seem to realize that he has just spent pages deploring Islamists for acting completely consistently with their belief in eternal life when they sacrifice themselves in their suicide bombings. He is appalled that people believe in an eternal reward and act in accord with that belief and then we turn the page to find him scoffing at people who believe in an eternal reward and act in ways he thinks to be at odds with that belief. Dawkins' greatest consistency in TGD is his inconsistency.

He rules out miracles because they are so highly improbable, and then in the very next paragraph he tells us that evolution, which seems highly improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time. But if time and the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable why doesn't that work for miracles as well? To apply Dawkinsian reasoning, in all the zillions of universes of the Many Worlds landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the Many worlds Hypotheisis be able to explain the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

He argues that the fact that there is no afterlife should make this life all the more precious, but what it really does is make this life utterly meaningless. Death is the big eraser. It negates everything we've ever done. It renders everything pointless and absurd. Dawkins avers that his life is meaningful because he fills it with a "systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world," but for what end? When he dies whatever knowledge he has acquired will do him no good. He is like a man on his death bed trying to master a new language. It gives him something to do, like working crossword puzzles, but what does it really matter?

The Christian, on the other hand, views death from this side of it as a tragedy, a terrible evil, but from the other side as little more than an unpleasant interruption of one's ongoing life. All that we do in this life matters forever. There's a purpose in learning the language even late in one's life because it'll be something which will be useful and give one pleasure on the other side of death. There's a purpose in scientific study because what we learn here and now will be useful in eternity. But if death is the end then there's no purpose in anything and all that matters now is avoiding pain and experiencing pleasure.

The terrible irony is that Dawkins could be doing the science he loves and to which he is devoted, or something like it, forever. Tragically, though, he chooses to empty his love of real significance by despising the God which is the only ground of the truth and knowledge he longs to attain.

The God Delusion has been acclaimed by atheists around the world, but in fact they should be hoping to see the book pass quickly into oblivion. It will do more to set back their cause among intelligent readers than anything Christians could do. If this is the best that the atheist can muster as an argument against God, the seeker might rightly reason, then perhaps the case against God is not nearly as strong as he had thought. Indeed, TGD is a book which might be read and discussed by every Christian who wrestles with doubt. A thoughtful reading will allay the doubts and persuade the doubter that the case against God is, at bottom, pretty anemic.

RLC

Oops

Clarice Feldman at The American Thinker notes that a blogger has found a serious error in Anthony Kennedy's opinion in (Patrick) Kennedy vs. Louisiana. This was the decision handed down last week that negated a Louisiana law that made raping a child punishable by death. A 5-4 majority ruled that, in Justice Kennedy's words, capital punishment in cases where no one dies violates our society's "evolving standards."

This is factually and demonstrably incorrect, according to Feldman. In 2006 Congress, the voice of the people, voted to make rape of a child committed by military personnel a capital offense. Apparently no one on the Court was aware of this fact, and it completely undermines the rationale for Kennedy's opinion.

Feldman argues that there are now grounds for Louisiana to request that SCOTUS reconsider their decision. They have until July 21st to file for a rehearing.

Justice Kennedy is going to look pretty foolish if the decision is allowed to stand. How can he argue that capital punishment is in conflict with society's "evolving standards" when the body that is constitutionally established to reflect the will of the people declared just two years ago that the death penalty in child rape cases is appropriate?

RLC

Loser Letter #7

Mary Eberstadt's seventh Loser Letter offers some much needed advice to the Brights about how to deal with the issue of abortion, an issue they don't handle well at all.

RLC

Fourth of July Meditation

Today we celebrate our independence as a nation. Two hundred and thirty two years ago enough people in the leadership of the thirteen colonies believed that freedom to control one's own life and destiny was a sufficiently high value that it was worth risking their lives and patrimony to obtain. Not everyone agreed that we needed to be free from English oppression and one of the saddest stories of the American revolution is how it divided communities and turned family members against each other.

Today our freedom is still not secure. As in 1776 the challenge comes from both within our community and without our borders. The external threat, from totalitarian atheism and totalitarian Islamism, is perhaps more evident to some than the internal threat. Nevertheless the internal threat may be the most acute. From within our midst we face the challenge of those who believe that individual freedom is on balance a bad thing because people use freedom in ways that may be harmful to the purposes of the larger society.

The challenge of government has always been to find the proper balance between individual freedom and our wider obligation to our fellow citizens. Indeed it is this quest for balance that has sparked the political conflicts which rage in our daily newspapers and even from time to time on Viewpoint.

Some there are who say that individual freedom must be maximized as long as it harms no one else. These are the Libertarians. Others say that individual freedom must be eliminated in favor of our obligation to improve society. These are the left-wing totalitarian fascists. Most people are somewhere in between, but despite the fact that the majority does not lie at either extreme, there is a very real concern today that those who would hack away at personal liberty are in the ascendant.

There are those, for example, who wish to censor any criticism of any view which they themselves hold. One who is skeptical of global warming, Darwinian materialism, gay marriage, and the good will of resident Muslims may find himself out of work and/or in court not just in Europe or Canada but also in the United States of America. "Bad thought" can itself become criminal which is the basic premise behind "hate crime" legislation.

There are those, primarily on the left, who would take away the freedom to voice whatever opinions one wishes in public, they would take away the freedom to express and practice religious beliefs that have been extant in this country for two hundred years, they would take away the right to keep and bear arms, and the right to run your business the way you wish, to pay employees what you wish, to hire whom you please and fire whom you please and to require your employees to dress in ways you deem appropriate. The left holds that individuals should not be free to create their own business or industry but that these enterprises should be owned, or at least controlled, by the state.

The left believes that law and policy should be made by the courts, not the Congress, because Congress is beholden to the people and the people just don't know what's in their best interest. Thus lawmaking becomes an exercise in futility when the left is in power because a law which the people want but of which the left disapproves will be snuffed out by the courts which are frequently sympathetic to the leftist point of view. Congress in the hands of the left becomes little more than a tool for preventing the wrong people from getting on the bench and for making the lives of executive branch officials of whom they disapprove miserable. For the left the Bill of Rights is not a wonderful guarantor of our freedoms and a bulwark against an oppressive state, rather it's only value is as a tool to be used to undermine the traditions and will of the majority. Otherwise, it's an impediment to creating their vision of an ideal society.

To be sure, the right would curtail certain freedoms as well. In their view, the right of free speech should not give people a right to use obscenity in public and publish pornography. They think the right to do with one's body what one wishes ends where the welfare of others begins. They believe that the right to do in one's home what one pleases doesn't confer a right to let a dog bark all night or to play the stereo at full volume. They believe that a criminal's rights to due process do not outweigh the rights of citizens to be safe on their streets, and they don't believe freedom of religion applies to just anything someone wants to call his religion.

So where is the fulcrum along this spectrum of views? On this day when we celebrate the unique American experiment in liberty we might do well to reflect on what principles help guide us in deciding how we balance liberty and responsibility. Where do we place the pivot between individual freedom and our obligation to society, and why do we put it just there? Do we lean toward freedom or do we lean toward statism?

RLC

Obamisms

Ed Morrissey argues that Obama has abandoned the one position that is responsible for his having attained the Democratic nomination - his promise to pull out of Iraq within 16 months of taking office. Morrissey makes a good, if subtle, case that Obama has executed a deft switcheroo, but his argument isn't likely to resonate with many voters except those who are actually paying attention.

Then comes word via Drudge that Obama has renounced one of the most important precepts in the pro-choice catechism, the right to an abortion on the basis of a risk to the mental health of the mother. No one has hewn to all the pro-choice tenets more reliably than has Senator Obama over the short course of his career, but that was then and this is now:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says "mental distress" should not qualify as a health exception for late term-abortions, a key distinction not embraced by many supporters of abortion rights.

In an interview this week with "Relevant," a Christian magazine, Obama said prohibitions on late-term abortions must contain "a strict, well defined exception for the health of the mother."

Obama then added: "Now, I don't think that 'mental distress' qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term."

Can this man be trusted to stand by any position he took before he was a candidate for the presidency? Can he be counted upon to mean anything he says or are we back to the days of the Clintons after all? Perhaps we were premature to think that Clintonian confabulation and obfuscation were behind us once Hillary was out of the race.

Perhaps others have made the suggestion, but, if not, Viewpoint suggests that henceforth a political flip-flop, prevarication, or taking two mutually exclusive positions at the same time be called after the man who seems to do it all so effortlessly. We shall call it an Obamism.

RLC

What's Clark Doing?

By now everyone has probably heard of Wesley Clark's dismissal of John McCain's war record as a qualification for the presidency. In case you missed it, however, here's what the retired general and military advisor to Barack Obama said on Sunday's Face the Nation:

"[McCain] has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility," Clark said.

When asked by host Bob Schieffer how he came to describe McCain as "untested and untried," Clark said it was "because in the matters of national security policy-making, it's a matter of understanding risk. It's a matter of gauging your opponents and it's a matter of being held accountable. John McCain's never done any of that in his official positions," adding, "He hasn't made the calls."

When Schieffer noted that Obama has not had wartime experiences, Clark said: "Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."

Of course, Clark knows McCain's appeal is not that he was a fighter pilot but that he courageously withstood Vietnamese torture and refused to accept their offer of release unless all the other prisoners had been released as well. Clark knows that Obama has nothing comparable in his biography, so he utters a shameless inanity about how being shot down isn't a qualification for the presidency.

Others have pointed out that even though Obama has called the remarks "inartful" (a term that has found frequent employment of late in his campaign) he doesn't actually repudiate them. It's also been pointed out that people representing any campaign are thoroughly briefed by high-ranking staff before appearing on the Sunday shows so it would be surprising if Clark's remarks came as a surprise to the Obama camp. The campaign at least appears to be trying to discredit McCain on the one point on which he has a huge advantage over Obama, but they can't afford to have Obama do it himself.

All this has been much discussed in the last couple of days, but I think there's something else here that I haven't heard mentioned. Clark knows that his comments make no sense if he's comparing McCain to Obama who has no experience of any kind that qualifies him for the presidency. Even if he's right that being a pilot does not qualify one for the oval office (although he thought John Kerry's service as a swift boat pilot qualified him), this was not really about McCain and Obama. This was about Wesley Clark and his qualifications to be president. Clark was trying, in not so subtle accents, to plant in the minds of the CBS audience that, compared to his own military accomplishments, McCain's are minimal. Clark, I suspect, was trying to shine the spotlight on his own experience as head of NATO which he believes makes him eminently suited to serve, if not as president, then as Obama's running mate.

It was clumsy and distasteful, and it blew up in his face, but that's the only explanation that makes sense to me of what he said on Sunday.

Consider his comments last March when he was still backing Hillary:

"Everybody admires John McCain's service as a fighter pilot, his courage as a prisoner of war. There's no issue there. He's a great man and an honorable man. But having served as a fighter pilot - and I know my experience as a company commander in Vietnam - that doesn't prepare you to be commander in chief in terms of dealing with the national strategic issues that are involved. It may give you a feeling for what the troops are going through in the process, but it doesn't give you the experience first hand of the national strategic issues."

But being a commander in Vietnam and of NATO forces in Europe does, or at least that's the between-the-lines message Clark wants to drive home.

Sadly, the more Clark tries to promote himself the more he makes himself look self-serving and small.

RLC

Taking a Bite Out of Crime

A customer at a Miami area Subway Sandwich Shop shot and killed an armed thug and shot his accomplice in the chest as they tried to push him into a restroom while robbing the store. The wounded thug's grandmother (no mention of any parents) said that the man was wrong to have shot her grandson and that he had no business taking the law into his own hands.

Well, I don't want to be hard on a grandmother, but really. Does she think that the young men (ages 22 and 21) were pushing the customer into a restroom at gunpoint because he looked to them like he needed to relieve himself? Does she think the man should have requested timeout while he called the police?

The fact is that it's tragic that a boy lost his life and that his friend may die also, but if you're going to rob a store at gunpoint you have to be willing to assume a certain amount of risk.

The man's name is John Lovell, he's a 71 year-old retired U.S. Marine, and we need more like him.

RLC

Co-opting the Religious Right

One of the many efforts for which President Bush received a lot of criticism from his opponents was his faith-based initiative which was set up to provide the same funding to religious groups involved in social work as was available to secular organizations. Bush's effort drew a lot of flak from the left and a lot of indifference from the right, including people in the White House, according to several of the Christians who were originally involved in the implementation of the program.

Now Jason sends me an article that is going to place both conservative supporters of federal funding for faith-based organizations and liberal opponents in a quandary. It turns out that Barack Obama wants to expand the program and elevate it to a position of prominence that it never achieved under the current administration:

Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans that would expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and - in a move sure to cause controversy - support their ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Obama was unveiling his approach to getting religious charities more involved in government anti-poverty programs during a tour and remarks Tuesday at Eastside Community Ministry in Zanesville, Ohio. The arm of Central Presbyterian Church operates a food bank, provides clothes, has a youth ministry and provides other services in its impoverished community.

"The challenges we face today, from putting people back to work to improving our schools, from saving our planet to combating HIV/AIDS to ending genocide, are simply too big for government to solve alone," Obama was to say, according to a prepared text of his remarks obtained by The Associated Press. "We need all hands on deck."

How sincere an Obama administration, loaded down with lefty secularists, would be in implementing his vision is open to question, but think of all the problems Obama's plan causes for many of his supporters who will be very reluctant to criticize him for it even as they grind their teeth in dismay. Think, too, of how this throws sand in the shorts of Evangelicals who oppose Obama for a host of reasons but who now sounds as much like one of them as they do:

"In time, I came to see faith as being both a personal commitment to Christ and a commitment to my community; that while I could sit in church and pray all I want, I wouldn't be fulfilling God's will unless I went out and did the Lord's work," Obama says in a speech to be given this week.

As for me, even if this is not just a political ploy to make Obama more attractive to the religious right(and given his penchant for saying whatever his audience wants to hear, who knows?), I'm a little skeptical that he'll be able to bring those Democrats who vigorously opposed Bush's plan on board. I think David Kuo, a conservative Christian who was deputy director of Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives until 2003 and later became a critic of Bush's commitment to the cause, has it right:

"It would be a very, very, very interesting thing," said Kuo, who is not an Obama adviser or supporter but was contacted by the campaign to review the new plan. Kuo called Obama's approach smart, impressive and well thought-out but took a wait-and-see attitude about whether it would deliver.

"When it comes to promises to help the poor, promises are easy," said Kuo, who wrote a 2006 book describing his frustration at what he called Bush's lackluster enthusiasm for the program. "The question is commitment."

How committed will be the Democrats, who tenaciously fought Bush on faith-based funding, to making it succeed under Obama? Even so, it's a brilliant political move for the Senator to endorse such program, and also one that, if he's not just blowing smoke in their faces, Christians should welcome.

RLC

Learning Language

The study of language acquisition, how we learn languages, must be a fascinating pursuit. Among the many questions researchers are probing are questions about bilingual acquisition: How do babies realize they're in a bilingual environment? What clues aid them in discovering this? How is discrimination between languages produced in infants?

If you're interested in this topic you might go to this article at Science Daily where you'll find a number of links to stories that address research in language acquisition and how children in bilingual homes recognize that they're hearing two different languages.

Whatever researchers eventually discover about these questions it's important to remember that it's all a result of random mutations in our DNA that somehow produced this astonishing capability in our brains. Having read my Dawkins I am assured that if I put on a blindfold and randomly struck keys on the keyboard in front of me I could, if I did it long enough, wind up converting these very words you're reading into Longfellow's Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

It's logically possible, no matter how improbable, that a series of accidental gene mutations just by chance produced the ability to learn multiple languages simultaneously. And since it's possible, the Darwinian logic goes, therefore it happened.

Now recite that to yourself as long as it takes to get yourself to believe it.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 9

To fully appreciate the ironies of chapter 9 of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion one has to understand that Dawkins reaches back to 1858 to find a story of how Church authorities in Italy seized an 8 year old child, Edgardo Mortara, from his Jewish parents and raised him as a Roman Catholic. The boy had been baptized by an illiterate house girl when he was gravely ill and for the Italian Inquisition that was good enough to make him a Catholic.

It is a very sad story, but Dawkins concludes, bizarrely, that such tragedies could easily happen in today's religious climate. In a sense he's right but not in the way he intends. If this tragedy could be so easily repeated today why does he have to go back 150 years to find an example of it?

But never mind. He's trying to discredit the Church by showing how it perpetrated terrible injustices on families in the 19th century. He neglects to tell his readers that the state atheisms of the 20th century did far worse and inflicted their horrors on millions of families throughout the world. There have been a myriad of tragic accounts of Communist authorities in the 20th century taking children from "unfit" parents, particularly Christian parents, and raising them in state schools, but Dawkins is blind to the crimes committed in the name of atheism. Or maybe he doesn't think taking children from Christian parents is all that bad an idea.

He calls such abductions as happened to the Jewish boy in 19th century Italy a form of child abuse and deplores it, but then he likens that abduction to teaching children about God and instilling in them the precepts of the parents' Christianity. He says:

I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.

So, teaching children traditional Christian doctrine is a form of child abuse, and what do humane societies do to parents who are abusing their children? They take them from them, of course, just like Edgardo Mortara was taken away from his parents by the Church. In other words, the logic of Dawkins' belief that religious instruction is a form of child abuse puts him squarely in the company of the Italian Inquisition of the 19th century. Oddly, Dawkins fails to see the irony.

I said above that Dawkins was right that children today could easily be taken from their parents, but not by Church authorities. The contemporary fascists who seek to control what children are taught are the Richard Dawkins' of the world. Consider these words of a colleague of Dawkins which he quotes with approval:

Children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

Yes, this is a revolting passage, redolent of the totalitarian mindset of the Nazi and Communist fascisms of the 1930s. If you teach your children that Jesus loves them you are just as cruel as if you knocked their teeth out. Both the man who wrote this and Dawkins who quotes it are beyond parody.

Who decides what constitutes "nonsense"? No doubt this will be the task of the secular, liberal Darwinians in the academy. Who better qualified to recognize nonsense than people who write books like The God Delusion and who implicitly endorse inflicting the same cruelties on families for which they had just condemned the Italian Church?

Where does Dawkins' kind of thinking end? If parents are to be prohibited from passing on religious beliefs to their children what about moral beliefs which the cogniscenti deem substandard? What about political beliefs or any metaphysical beliefs such as opposition to Darwinism that offend the refined intellects of the arbiters of truth and reason? Who would enforce these contemptible rules in Dawkins' Brave New World? The God Delusion, amongst its many shortcomings, has this singular virtue: It gives the reader a pellucid glimpse into the workings and aspirations of the liberal mind. Their dream is to have total control over all that people think and do. People like Richard Dawkins are a genuine threat to human freedom. In Jonah Goldberg's felicitous image, they constitute smiley face fascism.

Then there is this bit of silliness:

Our society ... has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them ....Please, please raise your consciousness about this and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening....

Richard needs to stay on his meds when he writes. To call a child a "Christian child" is simply an economical way of saying that the child is born to Christian parents and has been baptized in a Christian church. It doesn't mean that the child has made a conscious decision to be a Christian, but even if it did, so what? Most people reassess their religious beliefs as they mature and decide whether they want to retain them or not. It's hard to understand why Dawkins gets himself in such a swivet over it.

He wants parents to refrain from exerting any religious influence on a child, but I wonder if he was punctilious in not allowing his materialist beliefs to influence his own daughter. I doubt it. I also wonder what he would have done had his daughter one day told him that she wanted to be baptized and that she thought her old man's Darwinism was as daft as his atheism. I wouldn't be surprised if Dawkins "raised the roof" but not for the reason he urges us to do it.

There is one more chapter to The God Delusion. We'll examine it in a day or so. Meanwhile, don't let your children out of your sight around these people.

RLC

The Liberal Mind

San Francisco is a sanctuary city. This means it does not cooperate with federal authorities when processing illegals caught committing crimes. This is especially true with juveniles. So what do they do with the influx of Honduran "juveniles" who are caught selling heroin and cocaine?

Read it sitting down:

Rather than have the drug offenders deported, [juvenile probation officials] have recommended that Juvenile Court judges and commissioners approve city-paid flights home to Honduras for the offenders with the aim of reuniting them with their families.

The practice ... does nothing to prevent offenders from coming back, while federal deportation legally bars them from ever returning. Federal officials say U.S. law prohibits helping an illegal immigrant to cross the border, even if it is to return home.

Those who are arrested routinely say they are minors, but police suspect that many are actually adults, living communally in Oakland and other cities at the behest of drug traffickers who claim to be their relatives.

Nonetheless, city authorities have typically accepted the suspects' stories and handled the cases in Juvenile Court, where proceedings are often shielded from public scrutiny.

"Some of them have been arrested four or five times," Capt. Tim Hettrich, until recently the head of the narcotics unit, said. "That is one of the big problems with being a city of sanctuary."

He scoffed at San Francisco's strategy of returning the offenders to their home country. "They probably get the round trip and the next day, they will be right back here," Hettrich said.

Joseph Russoniello, the U.S. attorney in charge of the San Francisco area, said he was "flabbergasted that the taxpayers' money was being spent for the purpose of ferrying detainees home. You have to have a perfect storm of dumb moves to have it happen."

William Siffermann, chief of San Francisco's Juvenile Probation Department, said .... the city's stance is that it does not have to report illegal immigrant minors to the federal government, even if they are found in Juvenile Court to have committed a crime.

Siffermann stressed that the city ships out juvenile offenders to their home countries only after all other rehabilitative efforts have failed, including probation, foster care and juvenile detention.

The strategy is appropriate, Siffermann said, because deporting young offenders would doom them from ever becoming productive residents of the United States. "It might prevent them from obtaining citizenship," he said, denying them a chance to "take a different course."

A recent count showed 22 of the 125 minors in custody at juvenile hall were immigrants and had no legal guardians in the United States, Siffermann said.

So the people of San Francisco pay for the arrest, processing, detention, probation, and flights back to Honduras for criminals who may not even be juveniles, so that nothing goes on their record that would keep them from someday becoming citizens of the U.S.

Isn't this precisely who we want as citizens of this country, people who came here illegally to sell crack cocaine to destroy the lives of those who use their merchandise?

Here's an idea. Let's deport Sifferman to Honduras.

RLC

Richard Dawkins, Call Your Office

The LA Times has a story about how Christianity in China is growing by leaps and bounds. Here are some excerpts:

Christianity -- repressed, marginalized and, in many cases, illegal in China for more than half a century -- is sweeping the country, swamping churches and posing a sensitive challenge to the officially atheist ruling Communist Party.

By some estimates, Christian churches in China, most of them underground, have roughly 70 million members, about as many as the party itself. A growing number of those Christians are in fact party members.

Christianity is thriving in part because it offers a moral framework to citizens adrift in an age of Wild West capitalism that has not only exacted a heavy toll in corruption and pollution but also harmed the global image of products labeled "Made in China."

Some Chinese Christians say their faith is actually a boon for the party, because it shores up the economic foundation that is central to sustaining communist rule.

For decades, most of China's Christians worshiped in secret churches, known as "house churches," that shunned attention for fear of arrest on charges such as "disturbing public order."

But in a sign of Christianity's growing prominence, in scores of interviews for a joint project of the Tribune and PBS' "Frontline/World," clerical leaders and worshipers from coastal boomtowns to inland villages publicly detailed their religious lives for the first time. They voiced the belief that the time has come to proclaim their place in Chinese society as the world focuses on China and its hosting of the 2008 Olympics in August.

The growing popularity of the religion is being led not by missionaries but by evangelical citizens at home. Where Christianity once was confined largely to poor villages, it's now spreading into urban centers, often with tacit approval from the regime. It reaches into the most influential corners of Chinese life: Intellectuals disillusioned by the 1989 crackdown on dissidents at Tiananmen Square are placing their loyalty in faith, not politics; tycoons fed up with corruption are seeking an ethical code; and party members are daring to argue that their religion does not put them at odds with the government.

This rise, driven by evangelical Protestants, reflects a wider spiritual awakening in China. As communism fades into today's free-market reality, many Chinese describe a "crisis of faith" and seek solace from mystical Taoist sects, Bahai temples and Christian megachurches.

Today, the government counts 21 million Catholics and Protestants -- a 50% increase in less than 10 years -- though the underground population is far larger. The World Christian Database's estimate of 70 million Christians amounts to 5% of the population, second only to Buddhists.

At a time when Christianity in Western Europe is dwindling, China's believers are redrawing the world's religious map with a growing community that already exceeds all the Christians in Italy.

Let's not dwell on the Times' squeamishness about saying exactly what it is the Chinese Christians are placing their trust in (it's not "faith" or "megachurches" - it's Christ). What is happening in China is truly remarkable, and it's not just China. There are reports from all over the world, especially the southern hemisphere, of a resurgent Christianity. People are realizing that the tenets of secular atheism are like dust in the mouth of those who need to slake their spiritual thirst, and they're turning by the millions, apparently, to the one source of water that can wash the dust away. How long will it be before the northern hemisphere takes notice?

RLC