The Conservative Ethos

The following is a slightly edited version of a talk I was invited to give this morning at a local church on the topic of political conservatism:

As Richard Neuhaus likes to say, the first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing.

Having said that, the second thing I want to say is that there are basically two disparate political ideologies or worldviews in our politics - conservatism and liberalism, and that sincere, honest and thoughtful Christians are found in both camps. Christians who are conservative and liberal agree on the importance of peace, of helping the poor, of protecting nature, of valuing life, of improving education, of doing justice.

Indeed, the commands in Scripture distill to these two: Love God and love others. In the Old Testament love for others is usually discussed in the context of doing justice. In the New Testament the emphasis is on showing compassion. So as Christians who seek to achieve the ends we all agree upon, we are constrained by love for God to be compassionate and just toward our fellow man.

But, though we agree on the ends, and we agree that we should be compassionate and just, that's where agreement ends. Some very significant differences center around how we can best achieve the ends we all desire, and here the differences between us are often so great that one sometimes despairs that agreement could ever be reached.

I believe (but won't argue) that whether we see the world through conservative lenses or liberal is a function of our personality, our upbringing, our life experience and that since these things can't be changed, it's very difficult, though certainly not impossible, for people to change their ideology.

Because it's so hard to change minds, both sides resort to power politics. The only way to get what we think is best is to acquire the political power to impose our will on the rest of the nation.

One might wish that as Christians, informed by a Biblical vision of the world and of justice, we would pretty much agree on how to achieve the ends we mentioned above. Unfortunately, it's not that easy.

Consider an example: We all agree that the government needs money to do the things necessary to maintain a large population and to help those who need it. So, what's the best way to get the money? Is it to raise taxes or cut them? What does the Bible say? Well, the Bible is pretty much silent on the matter.

Should we raise taxes or should we cut them to fund needed programs? We should do whichever works provided it is compassionate and just, and deciding that is not always easy. Liberals say we should raise taxes, conservatives say we should cut them. Liberals say if the government needs more money you go to where the money is and take it. Conservatives believe that by cutting taxes on families and businesses people have more money to spend, they buy more, business prospers, hires more employees and pays them better salaries. The more people you have working and the more money they make, the more they pay in taxes and thus revenues actually go up. If, on the other hand, you raise taxes, conservatives argue, then the consumer has less to spend, business makes less money, they cut workers and reduce benefits which results in fewer people paying less tax in the long run.

So, what is the conservative philosophy of government? Different people would answer the question differently, but generally conservatives believe that in the three primary spheres of government responsibility - economic, social, and foreign policy - the government is best which governs least.

The economy does best when taxes and regulations on business are kept as low as possible. On foreign policy there are two schools of thought among conservatives: "Paleo" cons tend to be isolationists, "neo" cons tend to believe that we have a moral obligation to liberate people from oppression to the extent we can. That used to be the liberal position, by the way, but it no longer is. Domestically, as a general rule, conservatives hold that the less accountable a government entity is to the people the less it should interfere with their lives.

There's nothing in Scripture that mandates conservatism or liberalism, but the conservative ethos is certainly compatible with Paul's injunction in I Thess. 5:21 to "Examine all things carefully and hold fast to that which is good."

Well, we are on the cusp of an election and most conservatives are deeply concerned that democrats will wind up controlling both houses of congress and the White House. Why is this such a serious concern for them? Why do they think it so important to defeat the Democrats?

The Democrat party, in its current incarnation, stands for a number of things which conservatives believe to be fundamentally unjust. Remember, when we vote on Tuesday we're not just voting for Obama or McCain, we're voting for the entire party.

Whoever wins is going to surround himself with people from his party. In the case of the Democrats that means people who wish to make some fundamental changes that conservatives think would be gravely harmful.

Conservatives may be wrong about this (though I don't think they are). It may be that the Democrats do not intend to do what conservatives think they'll do or it may be that the changes will not be as harmful as conservatives think they will be.

I'm not going to argue that the perceptions I'll mention are accurate renditions of Democratic aims. Nor do I wish to argue that they would be harmful. I merely point out that this is how conservatives see Democrat intentions and that they believe them to be harmful.

So - most conservatives would agree that the Democrat party hopes to do the following:

• Remove all restrictions on abortion, including partial birth abortion.
• Alter the meaning of marriage so that it's no longer the union of one man and one woman.
• Appoint judges and Supreme Court Justices whose decisions will be based on political fashion rather than on the text of the constitution.
• Effect a redistribution of wealth from the middle and upper classes to the underclass.
• Treat terrorism as a police matter rather than as a global war on Western civilization.
• Pile onto American business onerous regulations and taxes that will make it impossible to compete in the global market and which will result in higher unemployment and higher costs. (Minimum wage, capital gains, health insurance)
• Continue the accelerating secularization of our society.
• Open our borders to anyone who wants to take up residence in our country and give illegal aliens the right to a driver's license, health care, and welfare.
• Nationalize health care.
• Deny to parents any choice in where they send their children to school.
• Push fuel costs back up so as to force us to conserve and develop alternative energy sources.
• Quell freedom of speech, particularly when it is conservative or religious, through vehicles like the Fairness Doctrine.
• Downgrade our military preparedness and end the program that would enable us to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles.
• Take away the right to own or buy most types of guns or to acquire a license to carry them on one's person.
• Strip union workers of the right to a secret ballot in union elections.

One or two of these may come to pass under a McCain presidency, to be sure, but conservatives believe that it's almost certain that all, or most of them, will come to pass if the Democrats control both the White House and the Congress.

If these measures sound good to you then you should pull the lever for Democrats on November 4th. If, on the other hand, you don't think this is the sort of change that America needs then you should resist the seductive lure of Hope and Change and vote for McCain.

RLC

Bad Moon Rising

Who knows if this cri de coeur is genuine, but whether it really comes from inside the Obama campaign or not, the analysis is interesting. If it was, in fact, written by an Obama staffer, as it purports to be, then it's fascinating and highly significant. Here are the opening paragraphs:

After a long and careful consideration of all the implications and possible consequences of my actions today, I have decided to go through with this in the hope that our country can indeed be guided into the right direction. First, a little personal background... I am a female grad student in my 20's, and a registered Democrat. During the primaries, I was a campaign worker for the Clinton candidacy. I believed in her and still do, staying all the way to the bitter end. And believe me, it was bitter. The snippets you've heard from various media outlets only grazed the surface. There was no love between the Clinton and Obama campaigns, and these feelings extended all the way to the top. Hillary was no dope though, and knew that any endorsement of Obama must appear to be a full-fledged one. She did this out of political survival. As a part of his overall effort to extend an olive branch to the Clinton camp and her supporters, Obama took on a few Hillary staff members into his campaign. I was one such worker. Though I was still bitterly loyal to Hillary, I still held out hope that he would choose her as VP. In fact, there was a consensus among us transplants that in the end, he HAD to choose her. It was the only logical choice. I also was committed to the Democratic cause and without much of a second thought, transferred my allegiance to Senator Obama.

I'm going to let you in on a few secrets here, and this is not because I enjoy the gossip or the attention directed my way. I'm doing this because I doubt [many] of you know the true weaknesses of Obama. Another reason for my doing this is that I [have] lost faith in this campaign, and feel that this choice has been forced on many people in this country. Put simply, you are being manipulated. That was and is our job - to manipulate you (the electorate) and the media (we already had them months ago). Our goal is to create chaos with the other side, not hope. I've come to the realization (as the campaign already has) that if this comes to the issues, Barack Obama doesn't have a chance. His only chance is to foster disorganization, chaos, despair, and a sense of inevitability among the Republicans. It has worked up until now. Joe the Plumber has put the focus on the issues again, and this scares us more than anything. Being in a position to know these things, I will rate what the Obama campaign already knows are their weak links from the most important on down.

The post gets more interesting as it goes on so read it all at the link. There's a similar report making the rounds from another anonymous Democrat who looks at the situation in Pennsylvania and draws a gloomy conclusion. That report can be found at American Thinker. Unfortunately, there's an accompanying video that shows McCain supporters responding in very unflattering fashion to the provocations of some Obama demonstrators. One wishes that voters on both sides would comport themselves with a little more dignity and class.

RLC

Invasion of Privacy

As soon as private citizen Joe Wurzelbacher posed a question to Barack Obama that caused Obama to say something impolitic, Wurzelbacher became the object of a state intrusion into his private records by Ohio government employees who also happen to be Obama backers. The invasion of his privacy was okayed by the director of Ohio's Job and Family Services Division, Helen Jones-Kelley, a donor to the Obama campaign, and whose underlings rummaged through files trying to discover whether Joe the Plumber could be found to have been cheating on taxes, child support or welfare payments.

The fruits of their searches were then turned over to the media so that Joe could be properly humiliated before the entire nation, all because he had the audacity to ask a question that Obama handled poorly.

It's frightening that public employees have no reservation about using their access to personal records for partisan purposes and will reveal confidential information about private citizens if it's politically useful to do so. This is an abuse of power, and it makes us wonder what such people will do when they have the IRS, the attorney general and the secret service at their disposal.

Michelle Malkin has details on this travesty and the media indifference to it in her syndicated column which can be read here.

RLC

It's Possible

John Podhoretz at Commentary elaborates on ten reason why McCain might win on Tuesday. He's not saying he will win, only that an Obama victory is by no means a certainty. Here are reasons 8 through 10:

8) What happened with the Joe the Plumber story is that Obama has now been effectively outed as a liberal, not a moderate; and because liberalism is still less popular than conservatism, that's not the best place for Obama to be.

9) The fire lit under Obama's young supporters in the winter was largely due to Iraq and his opposition to the war. The stunning decline in violence and the departure of Iraq from the front page has put out the fire, to the extent that, like the young woman who made a sexy video calling herself Obama Girl and then didn't vote in the New York primary because she went to get a manicure, they might not want to stand on line on Tuesday.

10) Hispanic voters, who are always underpolled, know and appreciate McCain from his stance on immigration and will vote for him in larger numbers than anyone anticipates.

Podhoretz's first six reasons can be read at the link. It may be grasping at straws, but Obama does appear worried, the polls are tightening, and Pennsylvania seems to be in play. If strongly blue Pennsylvania is close then red states that earlier appeared to be tilting toward Obama will probably remain Republican. If so, McCain could pull it out on Tuesday.

Poor Erica Jong.

RLC

Erica <i>Agonistes</i>

The self important never seem to realize that they're a walking parody of themselves. Here, for example, are excerpts from an interview given by Erica Jong to an Italian newspaper describing her angst over the possibility that "The Messiah" (Louis Farrakhan's description) might lose next Tuesday:

"The record shows that voting machines in America are rigged."

"My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can't cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves."

"My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium."

"After having stolen the last two elections, the Republican Mafia..."

"If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it's not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets."

"Bush has transformed America into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters, to the Patriot Act."

Like someone hallucinating from a terrible fever, Ms Jong's agonies appear to have placed such stress on her cognitive faculties that she's seeing bogeymen everywhere.

The Bush/Cheney paranoia is par for the left, but I'm always amazed that "liberals" have so little compunction about insulting and demeaning an entire racial group and that the media lets them get away with it. What does it say, after all, about Ms Jong's assumptions about blacks that she speaks with such apodictic certainty of a resort to violence if Obama loses? Apparently Ms Jong believes, as does a sizable portion of the American left, that not only should we expect such behavior from African Americans but that we cannot expect better from them.

Such thoughts as these, if spoken by, say, Rush Limbaugh, would be trumpeted all across the country as proof of the insidious racism of the right, but when a member of the liberal literati delivers herself of such sentiments, her ideological confreres simply nod in solemn agreement. Even more amazing is the fact that black spokespersons, many of whom are hyper-quick to discern even the most minute racial slight or slander, don't seem to be insulted by such remarks. Very curious.

RLC

Don't Worry, Be Happy

The Guardian informs us of this development in the British culture wars:

The atheist bus campaign launches today. Because of your enthusiastic response to the idea of a reassuring God-free advert being used to counter religious advertising, the slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" could now become an ad campaign on London buses - and leading secularists have jumped on board to help us raise the money.

The British Humanist Association will be administering all donations to the campaign, and Professor Richard Dawkins, bestselling author of The God Delusion, has generously agreed to match all contributions up to a maximum of �5,500, giving us a total of �11,000 if we raise the full amount. This will be enough to fund two sets of atheist adverts on 30 London buses for four weeks.

As Richard Dawkins says: "This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think - and thinking is anathema to religion."

Well, if Professor Dawkins expects us to think perhaps we could follow the example of the renowned thinker Blaise Pascal and begin by asking if a thinking man wouldn't wish to see appended to the words "There's Probably No God" the question "but why on earth would you want to bet on it?"

In any event, like so much of what Dawkins says, the claim that thinking is anathema to religion is simply nonsense, at least if the religion under examination is Christianity. Most of the greatest thinkers in the history of human civilization were religious as are many of the finest thinkers doing philosophy today. If we would like an example of what ideas people propound when they refuse to think it's hard to imagine a better case than Dawkins' own book The God Delusion (See Hall of Fame in left margin of this page).

The slogan on the bus tells us to accept the probable non-existence of God, to enjoy our lives and not worry. Such an odd juxtaposition of thoughts. It's a bit like saying we're all doomed to a meaningless, pointless existence so let's enjoy ourselves and not think about it. It's precisely those who don't think who alone could enjoy life despite its horrors and absurdities, despite the monumental mass of human suffering. Anyone who thinks, would, if they really thought seriously about the emptiness of human existence in a world without God, be driven to despair.

Here is the assessment of a man known for thinking, an atheist like Dawkins: "I was thinking...that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Jean Paul Sartre from Nausea.

But don't worry. We all escape the nausea eventually. We all die. Enjoy.

RLC

Don't Judge Him

By Ramirez.

RLC

Battle for the Mind

Michael Egnor at Evolution News and Views composes a post in which he offers up a nice summary of various materialist views of the mind. He closes with this:

The mind is a catastrophe for materialism. Materialism doesn't explain the mind, and it probably can't explain the mind. Materialism flounders on the hard problem of consciousness - the problem of understanding how it is that we are subjects and not just objects. Now a number of scientists and other academics are challenging this repellent materialist nonsense. There's no scientific or even logical justification for the inference that the mind is merely the brain, without remainder, and the philosophical and sociological implications of the materialist view of the mind are abhorrent. Now there's a reality-based push-back to materialist superstition, and the materialists have an insurrection on their hands.

The question of whether we have a mind that is a qualitatively different "substance" than matter has, like almost all philosophical problems, enormous implications. If material stuff is all that makes up the world, our bodies, and our brains then it becomes much more difficult to hold onto a number of beliefs that many people hold dear.

If, for example, materialism is true it's harder to believe that there is a God, a life after death, human dignity, free will, and moral responsibility, just to mention a few. Indeed, most materialists don't believe in any of these things. Fortunately, it's very unlikely that materialism is true. Egnor's summary does a nice job in a relatively few paragraphs of showing us why.

RLC

Last Lecture

I recently read Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. It's a poignant book written by a Carnegie Mellon Computer Science professor who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given just a few months to live. In the book Pausch talks about his life and some very simple lessons he's learned that he passes along to his children and to the rest of us.

The chapters are brief but Pausch packs a lot into them. My three favorites, I think, are the chapters on Thank You Notes, Gratitude and Apologies. Anyone who has teenage children will find what Pausch has to offer here worth passing on to their kids.

For example on apologies he says this:

Apologies are not pass/fail. I always told my students: When giving an apology, any performance lower than an A really doesn't cut it. Half-hearted or insincere apologies are often worse than not apologizing at all because recipients find them insulting. If you've done something wrong in your dealings with another person, it's as if there's an infection in your relationship. A good apology is like an antibiotic; a bad apology is like rubbing salt in the wound.

He goes on to give examples of two classic bad apologies:

1. "I'm sorry you feel hurt by what I've done." (This is an attempt at an emotional salve but it's obvious you don't want to put any medicine in the wound.)

2. "I apologize for what I did, but you also need to apologize to me for what you've done." (That's not giving an apology. That's asking for one.)

And then he offers this:

Proper apologies have three parts:

1. What I did was wrong.

2. I feel badly that I hurt you.

3. How do I make this better.

Good stuff. If you've ever gotten a huffy "Well, I'm sorrrrry" from a teenager when you were hoping for a sincere apology then you'll immediately see the value of Pausch's little homily.

RLC

Without God (VII)

Another aspect of the human condition which is much easier to understand given theism rather than atheism is that we are burdened with a deep sense of moral obligation. As human beings we strive to ground morality in something more solid than our own subjective preferences, but if there is no God there is nothing else upon which to base it. In a purely material world morality is nothing more than whatever feels right to the individual.

This is not to say that the non-theist cannot live a life similar in quality to that of a theist. She can of course, but what she cannot say is that what she does is morally good or right. There simply is no moral good unless there is an objective, transcendent standard of goodness, and the existence of such a standard is precisely what non-theists deny. Consider these two quotes from some well-known atheists:

"In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. The way our biology forces its codes is by making us think that there is an objective higher code, to which we are all subject." E.O. Wilson

"Life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind indifference." Richard Dawkins

For the atheist moral judgments can be little more than expressions of personal preference, and no one's preference is any more authoritative than anyone else's. This leads ineluctably toward a might makes right egoism, either on the level of the individual or the level of the state. Whatever those who control power do is not morally right or wrong - even if they commit torture or genocide - it just is.

Moreover, unless there is a transcendent moral authority there is nothing whatsoever which obligates us to act in one way rather than another. What could possibly obligate me, in a moral sense, to act in the interest of the collective rather than in what I perceive to be my own interest? Given naturalism, there is nothing which obligates us to care for the poor, nothing which makes kindness better than cruelty, nothing, indeed, to tell us why the holocaust was wrong.

Given atheism, morality is either subjective, and thus arbitrary and personal, or it doesn't exist at all, and our sense, our conviction that it does is simply self-deception. If God exists, however, then, and only then, does our intuition that objective moral value and obligation also exist make sense.

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

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

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

RLC

Decapitating Al Qaeda

Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal provides some background on the recent American Special Forces raid into Syria that eliminated much of al Qaeda's leadership in the region. His report opens with this:

Al Qaeda leader Abu Ghadiya was killed in yesterday's strike inside Syria, a senior US military intelligence official told The Long War Journal. But US special operations forces also inflicted a major blow to al Qaeda's foreign fighter network based in Syria. The entire senior leadership of Ghadiya's network was also killed in the raid, the official stated.

Ghadiya was the leader of al Qaeda extensive network that funnels foreign fighters, weapons, and cash from Syria into Iraq along the entire length of the Syrian border. Ghadiya was first identified as the target of the raid inside Syria late last night here at The Long War Journal. The Associated Press reported Ghadiya was killed in the raid earlier today.

Several US helicopters entered the town of town of Sukkariya near Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, just five miles from the Iraqi border. US commandos from the hunter-killer teams of Task Force 88 assaulted the buildings sheltering Ghadiya and his staff.

The Syrian government has protested the attack, describing it as an act of "criminal and terrorist aggression" carried out by the US. The Syrian government claimed eight civilians, including women and children, were killed in the strike. But a journalist from The Associated Press who attended the funeral said that only the bodies of seven men were displayed.

The US official said there were more killed in the raid than is being reported. "There are more than public numbers [in the Syrian press] are saying, those reported killed were the Syrian locals that worked with al Qaeda," the official told The Long War Journal. "There were non-Syrian al Qaeda operatives killed as well."

Those killed include Ghadiya's brother and two cousins. "They also were part of the senior leadership," the official stated. "They're dead. We've decapitated the network." Others killed during the raid were not identified.

The strike is thought to have a major impact on al Qaeda's operations inside Syria. Al Qaeda's ability to control the vast group of local "Syrian coordinators" who directly help al Qaeda recruits and operatives enter Iraq has been "crippled."

There's more at the link.

RLC

Either For Us Or Against Us

Megyn Kelley is quickly turning into a cult hero of the right. She's nothing if not feisty. I like how the Obama spokesman apparently thinks that the best way to deal with concerns about Obama's desire to take from those who work and produce and give to those who don't is to blast FOX News. FOX must be out to do harm to the Democratic candidate, he apparently thinks, because they ask uncomfortable questions. For Team Obama you're either for them or against them. Nice.

This could be called the Joe-the-Plumber tactic: If people ask questions that tend to put the beloved candidate in a bad light, a recommended response is to obfuscate the matter by criticizing and/or talking over the person asking the questions.

RLC

A Plot to Kill Obama

Two moral and intellectual mutants have been arrested in what has been labeled by the press a plot to assassinate Barack Obama. Actually, reading the story, the threat to Obama does not seem to have been very serious. A more sickening element of their intent was to attack an all-black school and kill children. Their designs on Obama sound like an afterthought that they didn't have planned out and didn't expect to be able to pull off in any event.

Nevertheless, the attack on the school students would have been relatively easy and is as frightening as it is loathsome. These two deserve to be put away for many, many years.

Having said that there's something else about this story that bears mentioning because it's very likely to be misrepresented by the media. The two men involved, Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., are identified by the police as neo-nazis. This fact will probably trigger howls of righteous indignation in certain precincts about the sickness and violence that reside on the political right in this country, but such accusations, if they materialize, would be a mistake.

Nazi fascism is widely, and incorrectly, believed to be a right-wing phenomenon resting at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from communism. Notwithstanding the pervasiveness of this belief it is false. As Jonah Goldberg instructs us in his excellent study of fascism titled Liberal Fascism, communism and fascism, so far from being polar opposites, are in fact fraternal twins. They're both forms of socialism. They're both ideologies of the left.

The main difference between them is that communism tends to be an international version of socialism whereas fascism is more nationalistic and militaristic. Fascists are also usually content to allow business to remain in private hands provided that owners and managers use their enterprises to promote the ends of the state.

Perhaps the best way to picture ideological relationships is to visualize a line or a spectrum. At the far right of the spectrum is libertarianism, the view that individuals should be as free of government interference as possible. Toward the center lies conservatism which shares the libertarian desire for individual freedom but which assigns a more significant role for government than libertarians do. As we cross the center of the spectrum and move leftward we find socialism or statism, the view that government should own or control all important elements of the economy and society. Statists believe that the rights of the individual should be subordinated to the welfare of the collective. The individual lives to serve the state.

Socialism comes in two forms, democratic and totalitarian. Many moderate liberals are democratic socialists, but it's among the totalitarian socialists that we find communists and fascists, and it's here that many of those in the modern left find their ideological home. They don't usually call themselves communists or fascists, of course, preferring instead to identify themselves as progressives or leftists, but their sympathies with the goals and methods of the totalitarians make the label they apply to themselves moot.

Some of those sympathies include a predilection for totalitarian government, economic socialism and egalitarianism, anti-Christian secularism, tribalism or identity politics, and subordination of the family and individual to the state. More can be found on this topic on a postfrom last spring which discussed Goldberg's book. RLC

The Evolution of Richard Dawkins

Melanie Phillips attends an Oxford debate between the mathematician John Lennox and atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins and discerns some subtle shifts in Dawkins' thinking.

Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion, the popularity of which seems to be inversely proportional to the cogency of its arguments (See the review in the Hall of Fame on the left margin of this page). In Delusion and elsewhere Dawkins insists that there is no god of any kind and flogs philosopher Antony Flew for abandoning a life-long atheism in favor of a kind of almost Christian deism (I know, that's an oxymoron. Yet in his debate with Lennox he remarks that a strong case can be made for precisely the position Flew has adopted. Are Dawkins' views evolving?

The topic of the debate was "Has Science Buried God?" and Dawkins, realizing perhaps, the hopelessness of being able to successfully defend that thesis shifts the debate instead to the foolishness of believing that Jesus was divine. What this has to do with the debate topic is unclear, but when you're trying to defend the indefensible you grasp at whatever ploy or diversion that comes to hand, I suppose.

Anyway, Phillips' column offers an interesting take on Dawkins' position in the debate.

RLC

What the Dems Hope to Do

A month or so ago I wrote that in the upcoming election voters have to keep in mind one very important fact. We're voting not just for the next president. We're voting for that president's party. A vote for Obama is a vote for Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and a host of other very liberal and far-left Democrats. It's a vote to assist the Democrats in achieving their goals of a socialized, secularized United States.

Specifically, the Democrats and their presidential candidate aspire to do the following (based on what the Democrats have tried to do in the past and what Senator Obama has voted for in the past and said he would do in the future):

• Remove all restrictions on abortion including partial birth abortion
• Alter the meaning of marriage so that it's no longer the union of one man and one woman
• Appoint judges and Supreme Court Justices whose decisions will be based on liberal political fashion rather than on the text of the constitution
• Effect a massive redistribution of wealth from the middle and upper classes to the underclass
• Treat terrorism as a police matter rather than as a global war on western civilization
• Pile onto American business onerous regulations and taxes that will make it impossible to compete in the global market and which will result in higher unemployment and higher costs
• Continue the accelerating secularization of our society
• Open our borders to anyone who wants to take up residence in our country and give illegal aliens the right to a driver's license, health care, and welfare
• Nationalize health care
• Deny parents the choice of where they send their children to school
• Push fuel costs back up so as to force us to conserve and develop alternative energy sources
• Quell freedom of speech, particularly when it is conservative or religious, through vehicles like the Fairness Doctrine
• Downgrade our military preparedness
• Take away the right to own or buy most types of guns or to carry them on one's person
• Strip union workers of the right to a secret ballot in union elections

One or two of these may come to pass under a McCain presidency, of course, but it's almost certain that all, or most of them, will come to pass if the Democrats control both the White House and the Congress. If these measures sound good to you then you should pull the lever for Democrats on November 4th. If , however, you don't think this is what America needs then you should resist the seductions of Hope and Change and vote for McCain. There are other alternatives, of course, for the person who doesn't want to see the above items come to pass but who cannot bring him or herself to vote for McCain, but a vote for any one of those alternatives amounts to a vote for Obama.

RLC

Dancing with the Devil

This is rich. A Marxist terrorist anarchist wearing a Maoist red star on his shirt is pestered by a reporter and invokes property rights (!) to get the reporter to leave him alone. He then calls the police (!), the same public servants he conspired with other Weathermen to murder in the 1970s, to escort him to his car. When it comes to hypocrisy the secular lefties are far and away the champs:

Ayers was annoyed that a reporter would use such tactics to hound him. Maybe it would have been more appropriate if the reporter just set his house on fire like the Weathermen did to a judge and his family.

A lot of people don't know who the Weathermen were and what they did. Here's a video clip that might help with the history (Caution: brief obscenity):

These are the people with whom Barack and Michelle Obama associated until he ran for the U.S. Senate. Imagine if John McCain had associated with people who bombed abortion clinics and the homes of abortionists. Surely, the media would consider that a disqualifier for high public office, and it would be.

RLC

A Child's Horror

Steve Beard at NRO Online reviews Justin Dillon's documentary on child slavery and human trafficking titled Call+Response, and the statistics that emerge in the review and the film give us renewed insight into the depth of human degradation and depravity:

There are 27 million people held in slavery around the world.

Approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders each year. That does not include the millions trafficked within their own countries. "Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors," states the report. "Human traffickers prey on the vulnerable. Their targets are often children and young women, and their ploys are creative and ruthless, designed to trick, coerce, and win the confidence of potential victims. Very often these ruses involve promises of a better life through employment, educational opportunities, or marriage."

"We're not talking about good or bad business practices or working conditions," former ambassador John Miller testifies in the film. "We're talking about slavery. We're talking about the loss of freedom and the threats of force or the actual use of violence to deprive people of freedom."

As a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador against Trafficking and Slavery, British actress Julia Ormond visits places around the globe suspected of benefiting from slave labor and interviewing those who've been set free. "This is about people being held often at gunpoint, being chained, being electrocuted, being drugged, being thrown out of windows, having their families threatened that they'll kill them," she says in the film.

In researching his book Not For Sale, professor David Batstone - featured in Call + Response - traveled to Cambodia, Thailand, Peru, India, Uganda, South Africa, and Eastern Europe to investigate modern-day slavery. His findings are breathtaking. "Girls and boys, women and men of all ages are forced to toil in the rug looms of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa," he writes. "Go behind the fa�ade in any major town or city in the world today and you are likely to find a thriving commerce in human beings."

Indeed, the most difficult imagery in the film is footage of children being exploited in brothels and brick kilns, and on battlefields. The blank stares and soulless facial responses betray an inability to smile - even on the part of some of the rescued children.

Reverend Jeremiah Wright proclaims America to be a fundamentally flawed nation because civil and human rights have, in his view, not advanced to where they should be. Michelle Obama declares that America is a "mean" nation. These people must have very little idea of what the rest of the world outside their neighborhoods is like or they'd never say such foolish things. The United States, like most of the first world, at least for now, is an island of high civilization, a relative utopia, surrounded by a sea of third world degeneracy and barbarism.

I don't know whether Call+Response is available in your area, but while you're waiting for it a couple of other films that'll give you a powerful sense of what it's like to be a child in some parts of the globe are Blood Diamond and Innocent Voices. If you choose to watch Blood Diamond note the parallels between Solomon Vandy and his son to Jesus' parable describing his determination to save the Lost Sheep. The parallels are probably unintentional, but they're there nonetheless.

RLC

Without God (VI)

The previous posts in the series titled Without God have looked at how well the atheistic and theistic worldviews fit with certain physical and psychological facts about the world and about human beings. Most of the remaining posts in the series will look at how well these two competing worldviews harmonize with some of what we might call "existential facts" of human life.

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

The atheist must advise us to simply acquiesce to the awful disconnect between our deep need for answers and the impossibility of ever satisfying that need. In the words of biologist Jaques Monod, "Man knows that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity out of which he emerged only by chance."

If, on the other hand, God exists then we're not alone in the cosmos, and it's possible that each of those questions indeed has an answer. Moreover, if there are answers then the fact that we have those questions and desire their answers makes sense. We may not know what the answers are, but we can cling to a reasonable hope that our questions aren't futile or meaningless and that there's a reason why they gnaw at us. The questions are signs or indicators that there's something rational and meaningful about the universe. It's not just a terrifying and impersonal void, but is rather a beautiful, ornate cathedral engineered and constructed by God to house a world on which the creatures he loves can exist.

The theist, and only the theist, is in a position to counsel hope and to rejoice that the mysteries of existence are not forever inscrutable, but are there to serve as clues to point us toward the ultimate answer, God Himself.

RLC

Voting Partnership

Have you heard people say during this election cycle that they're not enthusiastic about either presidential candidate and are really not interested in just voting for the "lesser of two evils"? These folks often say that they'd much prefer to vote their conscience by pulling the lever for a third party nominee but are reluctant to do so because it would help the "greater of the two evils" get elected.

In other words, think of someone who will vote for John McCain only because he fears the thought of a far-leftist like Barack Obama in the White House, but who really would rather vote for, say, the Libertarian Bob Barr. Or think of someone who was wild about Hillary Clinton but who will reluctantly vote for Obama whom she believes to be completely unqualified because she doesn't want a pro-lifer like McCain picking Supreme Court Justices.

Well, my friend Byron passes along a link to a group that offers a simple solution (simple in theory, at least) to this problem. Check it out. Their idea would allow people to vote for a third party candidate (or a write in) without feeling like they're implictly aiding one major candidate or the other by withholding a vote from their rival.

RLC

Hopefulness

Yesterday I posted a piece on Rush Limbaugh in which I lamented the ethos of consumption which is such a prominent part of his daily program. Then, at the behest of my friend Byron, I read an essay by Andy Crouch titled "Why I Am Hopeful" which made a similar point but applied the lesson more generally.

For example, Crouch writes this:

I am not hopeful because I have confidence in whoever will be elected president in 15 days. I have grave concerns, as a Christian and as a citizen, about both candidates and will in all likelihood vote for neither. I am not hopeful because I think we are well prepared for what is ahead of us. We are not. We are a terrifyingly unserious people, our heads buzzing with trivia and noise. This is more true, if anything, of American Christians than the rest of our country. The stark contrast between what I experience among Christians anywhere else in the world-and not just the "Third World," because Canada and Germany and Britain and Singapore come to mind as quickly as Uganda and India-and American Christians is astonishing. We are preoccupied with fads intellectual, theological, technological, and sartorial. Vanishingly few of us have any serious discipline of silence, solitude, study, and fasting. We have, in the short run, very little to offer our culture, because we live in the short run.

I am not hopeful because I think life is going to get easier in America. I am hopeful because I think it is going to get harder, and in a very good way. And I am hopeful because I think this means my children and grandchildren will live in a deeply and truly better world than I would have thought possible a few years ago.

I want to differentiate this hope from a kind of declinism among some of my "progressive" Christian friends, who frankly seem to salivate over the prospect that our capitalist culture may be teetering on the brink of collapse. I don't share their sense of satisfaction, and I don't share their analysis. At the analytical level, I believe liberal democracy and free markets are resilient and beneficial systems of human governance (granted that they are also, as Churchill said, the least bad of the alternatives). They have powerful self-correcting capacities. There is a reason that the American stock market has fallen the least of all the major world exchanges in the past few weeks. We have an impressively transparent economic system that, while certainly not preventing corruption and greed, does reveal it and punish it sooner than any comparable system, and frequently, though not always, rewards effort and innovation more effectively. Our political system is less robust, to be kind, but outside the depressing morass of electoral politics there are public servants of incredible intelligence and character-among whom I would certainly include Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and Sheila Bair, along with many of the prospective leaders in an Obama administration. Precisely at times of crisis, as we've seen, the idiocy of politics can still be overcome by credible leadership from civil servants like these. I am deeply proud to live in a country where someone as fantastically wealthy as Paulson spends his days, nights, and weekends doing the largely thankless task of public service. Our markets and our system of government, for all their flaws, are an amazing renewable resource handed on to us by our forebears.

And this is why I can't share the sense of satisfaction I sense in some of my "prophetic" friends. I believe the first step in culture making is not creating (let alone condemning, critiquing, or consuming) but cultivating: keeping what is already good in culture, good. American Christians, on the right and the left, have been painfully bad at cultivating. We want to jump to "transformation" and "impact" (words generally used on the right) or to "resistance" and "revolution" (favored words of the left). We often seem incapable of seeing ourselves first as gardeners: people whose first cultural calling is to keep good what is, by the common grace of God, already good. A gardener does not pull out weeds because she hates weeds; she pulls out weeds because she loves the garden, and because (hopefully) there are more vegetables or flowers in it than weeds. This kind of love of the garden-loving our broken, beautiful cultures for what they are at their best-is the precondition, I am coming to believe, for any serious cultural creativity or influence. When weeds infest the garden, the gardener does not take the opportunity to decry the corruption of the garden as a whole. She gets patiently, discerningly, to work keeping the garden good.

Good stuff. So, why is he hopeful? You'll have to go to the link and read the rest of the essay to learn that.

RLC