Why Isn't the Media Interested?

David Klinghoffer wonders, with more than a little justification, why the major media is so uninterested in the David Coppedge story we wrote about a couple days ago here. After summarizing the tale of blatant religious discrimination against Coppedge, Klinghoffer writes:

[H]ere we have government and government-contracted agencies, NASA and JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), denying constitutional rights to a citizen, punishing and humiliating him for exercising his right to free speech. Yet the story as of yet has merited no significant attention from any prominent local or national news source. Why not? Well, obviously because this isn't a story that fits the larger narrative as favored in prestige circles like those of the media. In that favored narrative, it's always Darwinists, never Darwin doubters, who fall afoul of censors, persecuted by powerful forces in academia arrayed against orthodox evolutionary theory. Yeah, you know those powerful forces. They're over there, in a shoebox under the bed.

Fictionalized to begin with, this story was first told fifty years ago in Inherit the Wind. In the social demographic that champions it, it hasn't been looked at critically since. Thus, as readers of ENV know well, you can have a string of genuine and grievous cases of discrimination and suppression directed at Darwin doubters in research and teaching positions -- Sternberg, Gonzalez, Crocker, Marks, Minnich, Dembski, now Coppedge, along with other suppressed scientists yet to be named and still others too worried about reprisals to let themselves be identified -- and this entirely escapes liberal media attention. It's like a dog whistle. The favored narrative sets an audible frequency range beyond which, blast away as long and as "loud" as you like, a dog's owner simply can't hear anything even as the dog himself comes running.

On the other hand, if a story can be squeezed, molded, and manipulated so that an editor or news gatherer is reminded of the Scopes trial as depicted in Inherit the Wind, then yes -- that does merit attention. Thus when Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke resigned from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, after the BioLogos Foundation trumpeted a video interview with him on "Why the Church Must Accept Evolution," that won Professor Waltke a phone call from Diane Sawyer with ABC News. Waltke had not been forced out for endorsing evolution -- he had not been forced out at all -- and indeed he hit the ground running (at age 79) with a teaching offer from another seminary. But there was an imagined scent of Scopes about the matter and so, despite the fact you can be sure no one on Diane Sawyer's producing staff previously had any clue who Bruce Waltke or the Reformed Theological Seminary is, it merited attention from ABC World News. (To his credit, Waltke declined to be interviewed by Sawyer and sought to clarify his views on Darwinism.)

The media, of course, are just being what they are. To borrow Klinghoffer's metaphor they're simply deaf to the dog whistle of discrimination coming from the Darwinian left. They hold stereotypical views about who intelligent design advocates are and what they believe, and they lack the wit or motivation to question their own stereotypes.

Exit exercise: Raise your hand if you think Coppedge would have been demoted by the JPL had he been a Muslim (See below). Me neither.

RLC

Selective Courage

The bold, brash, intrepid souls at Comedy Central frequently, I'm told, exhibit their fearlessness for all to see by mocking Christianity on shows like South Park. Of course, it takes no courage at all to mock Christianity because there's no price to pay for it. Christians don't issue fatwas. They don't threaten murder. They simply pray for those who go out of their way to offend them.

So to get an accurate gauge on CC's courage we need to look at what they do when faced with genuinely dangerous people, like, say, angry Muslims. Well, it seems the steel spines at Comedy Central suddenly turn to wet pasta when members of the religion of peace give them the evil eye.

It's still okay, apparently, to satirize Jews, Christians, tea-partiers, and anyone else who'll turn the other cheek, but the cringing execs at Comedy Central would not dream of being so insensitive as to offend the religious sensibilities of our Islamic brethren whose religion must by all means be treated with utmost respect.

Hot Air reports:

Comedy Central bleeped out all references to the Prophet Muhammad in Wednesday night's episode of the animated show "South Park."

In addition to bleeping the words "Prophet Muhammad," the show also covered the character with a large block labeled "Censored."

Abu Talhah al Amrikee, the author of the post [on the Muslim website threatening the creators of the show], told Foxnews.com he wrote the entry to "raise awareness." He said the grisly photograph of [Theo] van Gogh [a Dutch filmmaker who spoke out against Islam and wound up being murdered by a Muslim] was meant to "explain the severity" of what Parker and Stone [South Park's creators] did by mocking Muhammad.

"It's not a threat, but it really is a likely outcome," al Amrikee said, referring to the possibility that Parker and Stone could be murdered for mocking Muhammad. "They're going to be basically on a list in the back of the minds of a large number of Muslims. It's just the reality."

What a bunch of poltroons those Comedy Central folks are - brave, courageous, and bold against gentle Protestants and Catholics and quivering blobs of jelly in the face of murderous Muslims. If they lack the guts to mock Islam then they should have the decency not to mock any other faith.

By the way, those of a certain age will recall a time when it seemed like every other day liberals in this country were self-righteously proclaiming their willingness to fight to the death for the right of people to say things with which the liberals themselves disagreed. They apparently never thought, however, they might be called upon to actually do that. It's certainly rare to hear a liberal declare such devotion to the principle of free speech today. Perhaps it's because, like good dhimmis, they're too focused on groveling before their Muslim masters.

RLC

The Real Enemies

Who does the president consider the real enemies of our nation to be? To answer that perhaps we should look at whom he directs his harshest rhetoric and at whom he appears most antagonistic.

Lisa Benson and Ramirez think they've discerned the answer to the question:

RLC

Small Minds, Closed Minds

Why is it, if Darwinians are so confident that they have truth on their side, that they feel the need to censor, stifle, demote and fire anyone who disagrees with them? What are they so afraid of?

The movie Expelled documents how the spirit of free enquiry and free speech has been trampled by academic Darwinists, and there are numerous examples of it beyond those discussed in the film. Guillermo Gonzalez, a much published astronomer at the University of Idaho, was denied tenure a year or so ago, largely through the efforts of an atheist colleague, because he co-authored the book The Privileged Planet which argues that the earth is uniquely, and perhaps, deliberately situated for the study of the heavens. Richard Sternberg of the Smithsonian was punished because the journal he edited ran a paper that argued on behalf of intelligent design.

The most recent casualty of the Darwinian thought police is David Coppedge, a project leader at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Coppedge has been demoted for nothing more, apparently, than offering to share some intelligent design DVDs with co-workers.

Philosopher Jay Richards comments:

It's hard even to figure out what David Coppedge is supposed to have done wrong. There were no complaints against him by people to whom he had lent these documentaries. He wasn't proselytizing. He wasn't even, so far as I can tell, actually doing anything naughty that he had been told not to do. It's not like he had been told not to lend out copies of the documentaries and had continued to do so (even though such an order would itself have been outrageous). Can you imagine any other legal subject on which such an action would be treated as anything other than unjust discrimination?

To read more on this travesty go to Evolution News and Views and scroll down.

When people know that their side of an argument is persuasive they rely on their argument in open debate to win the hearts and minds of their audience. On the other hand, when they know that their case is weak and unpersuasive they often resort to just shutting up the other side whenever they can. It's interesting that so many Darwinians feel they have to follow the latter course.

RLC

The Piety Gene

Michael Shermer surveys the ubiquity of religious belief around the world and concludes that it must all be a result of evolution:

Of course, genes do not determine whether one chooses Judaism, Catholicism, Islam or any other religion. Rather, belief in supernatural agents (God, angels, demons) and commitment to certain religious practices (church attendance, prayer, rituals) appears to reflect genetically based cognitive processes (inferring the existence of invisible agents) and personality traits (respect for authority, traditionalism).

Why did we inherit this tendency? Long, long ago, in a Paleolithic environment far, far away from the modern world, humans evolved to find meaningful causal patterns in nature to make sense of the world, and infuse many of those patterns with intentional agency, some of which became animistic spirits and powerful gods. I call these two processes patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data) and agenticity (the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention and agency).

Yes, well, the clunky neologisms aside, one wonders: If religious belief is the norm, and if it is the product of our genes, does that not imply that those who don't have a religious belief are genetic mutants and deviants? Just asking.

RLC

The Head of the Snake

Apparently, after years of false reports of the deaths of these two thugs, it seems the good guys finally caught up with them.

Here are some highlights from the report in The Long War Journal:

Iraq's Prime Minister and the US military confirmed that al Qaeda in Iraq's top two leaders have been killed during a raid in a remote region in the western province of Anbar.

"Abu Ayyub al Masri, Abu Omar al Baghdadi and a number of other al Qaeda leaders in Iraq were killed during a security operation in al Thar Thar region in Anbar," Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki told reporters at a press conference in Baghdad, according to Voices of Iraq.

"A series of Iraqi led joint operations conducted over the last week resulted in the Iraqi Forces with US support executing a nighttime raid on the AQI [al Qaeda in Iraq] leaders' safehouse," the press release stated. "The joint security team identified both AQI members, and the terrorists were killed after engaging the security team. Additionally, Masri's assistant along with the son of al-Baghdadi who were also involved in terrorist activities were killed."

During the operation, one US soldier was killed in a helicopter crash, and 16 al Qaeda associates were detained.

The deaths of al Masri and Baghdadi are a major blow to al Qaeda in Iraq, as the terror group has suffered major losses in its leadership network over the past four months. Since January, the US has picked apart the top leaders of al Qaeda's northern network. Among those killed or captured are the last two emirs, or leaders, of the northern Iraq network, the last two emirs of Mosul, the top facilitator operating in the Iraq-Syria border areas, and other senior members of the network.

The NYT reports that among the documents seized at the scene were communications from Osama bin Laden. That's a bit surprising given that we've been told over and over again by the left that al Qaeda is not really involved in Iraq and that we should get out of Iraq and hunt al Qaeda down elsewhere.

RLC

The Euthyphro Dilemma (Pt. II)

Yesterday we took a look at the challenge posed by the Euthyphro dilemma to those who believe that God's existence is a necessary condition for any meaningful, non-subjective, non-arbitrary ethics. We began by considering the second horn of the dilemma which we stated as follows:

Is an act morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

In this post I'd like to reflect on the first of the two horns: Is good simply whatever God commands? Would cruelty be good if God commanded it?

If we stipulate that God is omnibenevolent and that good is that which conduces to human happiness then the latter question seems to me to be an incoherent act description.

The question of God commanding cruelty presupposes a state of affairs in which a being whose essence it is to always do that which ultimately conduces to human well-being and happiness nevertheless commands us to do something which produces gratuitous suffering and pain. There seems to be a logical conflict in that.

In other words, if goodness is as we've defined it, and if God is good, then it's logically impossible for cruelty to be part of his nature or for him to command cruelty or anything else which would conflict with ultimate human well-being and happiness. It would require of God that he issue a command that is in opposition to his own nature. It's like asking whether there is something which a being which knows everything doesn't know.

So, the answer to the question of whether God commands us to love because love is good or whether love is good because God commands it, seems to me to be "neither." God commands us to love because it is his desire to have the world conformed to his own essential nature which is love.

RLC

The Euthyphro Dilemma (Pt. I)

Many freshman philosophy students find themselves confronted with the Euthyphro dilemma, a question often posed to convince us that God's existence is superfluous for our moral lives. The dilemma gets its name from the fact that it first appears in Plato's dialogue titled The Euthyphro and has popped up frequently in the philosophical literature ever since.

I'd like to share some thoughts on it over the course of two posts with the caveat that much of what I say is not original with me and that whatever might be original I offer with the humble recognition that it could well be nonsense.

With that caution in mind let's look at the dilemma. It's often put in the form of the following question:

Is something morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

The question seeks to offer theists, at least those who hold to a divine command theory of ethics, two unpalatable choices. If the theist chooses the first option then presumably had God commanded us to be cruel, cruelty would be morally good, a state of affairs which seems at the very least counterintuitive.

If the second alternative is chosen then good seems to be independent of God, existing apart from God, and rendering God unnecessary for the existence of good or "right."

I think, though, that the choices with which the dilemma confronts us are unable to carry the weight placed upon their shoulders. To see why let's start with a definition for "moral good."

Let's stipulate that moral good is that which conduces to human happiness and well-being.

It may be argued that we don't need God to know what conduces to human well-being and thus we can know what is good without having to believe in God. This may be true, but it misses the point.

First, our problem is not with recognizing good so much as it is explaining why God is still necessary for good to exist. Just because we can recognize good without believing in God doesn't mean that God is not necessary for there to be good. What is good is contingent upon the kind of beings we are, and the way we are is contingent upon God. We have the nature we do because God created us this way. Thus, what conduces to our well-being is a function of God's design.

We can no more say that God is irrelevant to our well-being than we could say that just because we know that clean oil is conducive to our car's well-being that therefore the engineers who designed the car are irrelevant to our knowing that we should change the oil periodically. Oil is "good" for the car because that's how the engineers made the car.

Secondly, even if belief in God is not necessary for one to know or recognize what conduces to well-being it is nevertheless necessary that there be a God in order for us to think we have a non-arbitrary duty to care about the well-being of others. If there is no God there is no moral obligation to concern ourselves with the good of others or to do anything else, for that matter. We may want to help others flourish, of course, but the belief that we should is completely arbitrary. If we didn't care about others, or even if we worked against the good of others, we wouldn't be committing some grievous moral offense. Just because something is good doesn't mean we ought to do it, at least not unless we are assuming that we ought always to do what conduces to other people's happiness and well-being. But why should we assume such a thing? Where does this premise come from? Why should I not just promote my own well-being and let others fend for themselves? Without God there's no real answer to these questions.

Thus, God's existence is crucial, not so that we can recognize good, perhaps, but rather as a ground for both the existence of good and for our duty to do good to others.

So, let's return to the dilemma. Consider again the second horn. Does God command, say, kindness because kindness is good? Is the good of kindness independent of God? Does it exist apart from God?

I don't think so. Goodness is an essential element of God's being. Goodness is no more separable from God than a triangle is separable from the property of having just three angles. Goodness is ontologically dependent upon God's existence much as sunlight is ontologically dependent upon the sun. If there were no sun, sunlight would not exist. If there were no God then moral goodness as a quality of our actions would not exist. Actions which lead to human well-being would have no moral value any more than a cat nursing her young has moral value even though her act conduces to their well-being. We would not consider the cat evil if it refused to nurse its young, nor, if there is no God, would we be able to judge a man objectively evil if he practiced cruelty.

God commands love because he has made us to be the sort of beings which flourish, generally, when nurtured in love, and he has made us this way because it is his essential nature to be loving. Love is not one thing and God another. God is love.

But what of the first horn of the dilemma? What if instead of loving God were hateful and cruel? Would hate and cruelty then be good? We'll consider those questions next time.

RLC

Racist Tea-Partiers

If you read the New York Times or watch MSNBC you're probably quite convinced that the tea-party folks are total racists. Well, this video confirms it, if any further confirmation were needed. It features interviews with a number of tea-partiers holding forth on racial matters, and if you don't see and hear the bigotry dripping from their snarling redneck lips then you need to tune into Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC or read Frank Rich at the New York Times to get a racial sensitivity tune-up:

Oops, wrong video.

RLC

Nerdiness

Bradford passes along a link to one of the best, most insightful essays on middle and high school social hierarchies I've come across. It's very much worth taking the time to read, especially if you're young or have children who are approaching their middle school years.

Written by a self-described nerd it first appeared in 2003 and is titled Why Nerds Are Unpopular. The author, Paul Graham, is funny and dead-on in his analysis of both the society that young people create in their schools as well as the problems in the schools themselves. Here's his lede:

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

Graham goes on to claim, inter many alia, that too many schools exist simply as a place to put kids so that adults can be about their daily work, and that educating those kids is not much of a priority. I think he's right. I taught in a pretty good high school for thirty five years, and even in that institution education was near the bottom of the priority list.

No administrator would ever dream of actually admitting this to anyone, of course, but it was implicitly obvious in the fact that any and every other activity a student was involved in took precedence over what the student did in class. Whenever there was a conflict between some extra-curricular activity and the classroom, the student was dismissed from the classroom to participate in the other activity. Sports, student council, pointless field trips, play rehearsals - the list was almost endless - all trumped education. The tacit message the school sent students was that learning was what they were to do only when there wasn't anything that was more fun available for them.

As I was reading Graham's lament about how nerds just aren't interested in the popularity struggles which consume so many adolescents I was reminded of a girl I overheard a number of years ago who insisted that it was "very important to be popular because if you're not people won't like you." Maybe that's the sort of inanity nerds just want no part of.

But enough. Go to the link and read Graham. Savor the whole essay. If you consider yourself a nerd you'll love it, and if you don't you'll learn something.

RLC

No Plan B

This revelation in the New York Times should be a shocker, but it's not:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran's steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama's national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.

Officials familiar with the memo's contents would describe only portions dealing with strategy and policy, and not sections that apparently dealt with secret operations against Iran, or how to deal with Persian Gulf allies.

I doubt anyone is surprised that this administration has no plan in the event that Iran develops nuclear weapons. The fact that both Bush and Obama have been unwilling to do anything serious to prevent the Iranians from achieving a nuclear arsenal plainly suggests that the United States is prepared to accept a nuclear Iran as a fait accompli.

Once Iran gets such weapons it will be only a matter of time before Turkey, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia insist on having their own nukes. It will also be only a matter of time until Iran slips a weapon or two into the hands of Islamic terrorists for use in either Israel or the U.S.

If President Obama fails to do anything efficacious to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons to unstable Islamic nations, it could be, perhaps, the most catastrophic foreign policy failure in history.

RLC

Rage Against the Machine

Leftist terrorist groups are evidently experiencing a rebirth of sorts in Europe. Most of the terror organizations of the 1970s had died out, but lately, fueled by poor job prospects in socialist economies, the number of disaffected and radicalized young people has been increasing.

Paradoxically, these malcontents often insist on creating a more thoroughly socialist economic structure - socialism is the problem so the cure must be more of it - and an arrant secularization of society. The latter is also odd since European leftists are often allied with radical Islamists who are intent on bringing the whole world under the banner of Islam, and who, if they ever succeed, would immediately kill atheists like those lefties who champion the Islamists' various causes.

Strategy Page tells us that:

The widespread use of violence by Islamic terrorists has masked the revival of leftist terrorist groups in the West. Some of them are older groups trying to make a comeback. Three years ago, Italian police arrested fifteen members of the 1970s era "Red Brigades," and charged them with plotting the murder of people who did not agree with their revolutionary goals. The Red Brigades were part of an wave of small, violent, leftist revolutionary groups that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, and were largely gone by the 1990s. Actually, the groups never died out completely, but, except in Greece and Latin America, they were much less violent after the Cold War ended.

The Soviet Union had provided some support for these groups, but mostly they were sustained by disaffected middle class kids out to change the world. A new generation of disaffected, politically motivated murderers are now signing up. Many Western leftists still see the United States as the enemy of the people, and capitalism as something that must be destroyed at all costs. In an odd confluence, many of these leftists are marching (literally) shoulder to shoulder with Islamic radicals. This despite the fact that the two groups (one anti-religious, and the other very pro one religion) are natural enemies.

More enthusiastic adoption of socialist, and anti-capitalist policies in Western Europe over the last century has led to a high unemployment rate for people coming out of school, and this has made radical politics a more attractive proposition to some. But compared to the poverty and desperation in the Islamic world, the Western terrorists have a far smaller recruiting pool. But like the Islamic terrorists, the Western groups share the same basic myth. That is, if the world would only unite under a benevolent despotism, everything would be better. Like the Islamic radicals, the Western terrorists find it more comfortable to blame foreigners for their trouble. In this case, the big bad is the United States....

It is a noteworthy fact about our existential situation that there are millions of people around the globe whose lives are so empty that they are reduced to a nihilistic desire to just tear down everything, kill everyone who opposes them, and establish ..... what? An Islamic or Marxist paradise? When in history has such a paradise ever existed? When has a state founded on the blood of its predecessors ever been more just or prosperous than the polity it succeeded?

RLC

Reclaiming the Culture

In 1951 H. Richard Niebuhr wrote his classic Christ and Culture in which he argued that the faithful have throughout history adopted five different answers to the question of how Christians should stand in relation to the larger culture. These he discusses under the headings of Christ against culture, Christ in culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture, and Christ transforming culture.

Andrew Klavan,in a brief essay titled Celebrating the Good Stuff at City Journal, raises somewhat similar questions with regard to conservative attitudes to culture. Klavan argues that conservatives need to set aside their objections to so much of the anomic, progressivist, anti-family, anti-American, anti-Christian themes that pollute the popular culture and set about the task of transforming it into a more accurate reflection of what life in America really is.

Here's Klavan:

For years now, some of us conservatives have been struggling to take back American popular culture. Sick of movies, television shows, music, and literature disfigured by a lockstep conformity to leftist ideology, we've sought to wrestle the arts out of the grip of an alienated and small-minded elite and give it back to artists in moral synch with most Americans. The idea, as far as I'm concerned, is not to reshape the pop-culture landscape into one of sentimental patriotism and faith or limit artists to the creation of squeaky-clean family entertainment.

I merely want to see more art that represents the moral universe as it is: that shows a world, for instance, in which freedom is better than slavery and therefore America is better than, say, Saudi Arabia; a world in which military courage in defense of what's right is worthy of honor, and therefore a U.S. soldier fighting an Islamofascist is a hero, not an abuser; a world in which faith can be uplifting and not corrupting; in which women and men are different and therefore might be justly treated differently; in which ideas and behaviors can be judged on their own merits whether the people involved with them are white or brown or black.

For the past 40 years, too much of our culture has been dedicated to propagandizing us, to normalizing and elevating moral relativism, atheism, and brainless multiculturalism. The deep philosophical corruption that now permeates our government and the Obama administration's assault on American traditions and values could never have happened if we hadn't lost the culture first; they will never fully end until we take the culture back.

Here's what I consider the punchline of his piece:

But we can't win back the arts unless we love them. Too many conservatives boast of their philistinism. "I haven't seen a movie in years," they brag, as if that were some sort of achievement. Too many others seek to clip the wings of artistic imagination, demanding that artists turn away from anything disturbing or violent or sexual, which is to say from much of life itself.

Klavan is right. Whether one is a Christian or a conservative (or both), it is simply a self-defeating tactic to shun the popular culture on the grounds that it's too sordid. It is sordid, of course, but that's the milieu in which our fellow citizens live and move and have their being, and unless we are conversant with its major lineaments we make ourselves irrelevant to our fellows. We may as well be invisible ghosts for all that people will heed our concerns if we cannot relate to them in terms they understand. That means standing with them in the midst of the media in which they form their beliefs and opinions.

Of course, not everyone can be so immersed in pop culture that they can discuss knowledgably every musical group, tv show, movie, novel, piece of art, etc. but we can all know more than we do, and to ignore the cultural environment in which we live our daily lives is to cede it to those who would use it for purposes we might find distressing. It is to forfeit to the "other side" perhaps the most powerful tool available to society for shaping the hearts and minds of our successors.

The other side, liberals and/or secularists, have been pretty much dictating the cultural climate and norms for at least three generations. Why should we be content to let that continue?

RLC

Everything

I'm told this video has been around for a while, but a student just passed it on to me this week. It packs a lot of meaning into five minutes.

The group is called Lifehouse.

RLC

Sudden Conversion

Robin is a psychotherapist in Berkeley, California who is a converted leftist. In this piece she describes the suddenness of her awakening:

There are moments when life crashes down on you like a thunderbolt. And ready or not, you change.

There's a before and an after. One moment, you're one way. And then, in the blink of an eye, you're different.

An instant before my parents died, I still felt like a child, though I was knee-deep in middle age. But when they passed, three weeks apart, suddenly I grew up...just like that.

While that experience was seismic, it doesn't compare to my sea change upon Obama's ascension. One minute I was a leftist, despising this country and all it stood for.

And then, abruptly and astonishingly, I became a conservative.

Read the rest at the link.

RLC

Intelligent Design and Theistic Evolution

Those looking for a concise discussion of the differences between Theistic Evolution (TE) and Intelligent Design (ID) will find a post by Thomas Cudworth at Uncommon Descent helpful. Cudworth expands upon a piece by Karl Giberson at Biologos (a TE website) which calls upon both sides to explore the things they have in common and to use these as a way of turning down the heat of the rhetoric between them.

Cudworth picks up on Giberson's suggestion and pens a helpful exploration of those commonalities. He writes, for instance that:

TE is the belief that God guided or at least planned evolution; ID is the belief that design in nature is detectable. TE as such says nothing either way about the detectability of design, and ID as such says nothing either way about the occurrence or non-occurrence of evolution. Therefore, neither group needs, on definitional grounds, to deny the core belief of the other. It is only those ID people who insist on rejecting evolution on principle, and only those TE people who insist that God's design must not be detectable, that have no common ground. But in between, there is an overlap zone, which I think that neither TEs nor ID people have fully explored, because of reckless past charges on both sides which have generated great mutual distrust. I think we should be exploring this overlap zone, and I therefore welcome Dr. Giberson's non-dogmatic approach.

The whole piece is worth a read by anyone interested in this issue. The same is true of Giberson's post at Biologos.

RLC

Double Whammy

Shawn Tulley, a senior editor at Fortune magazine, narrates the following tale:

A week ago, a good friend -- let's call him Anthony -- related a remarkable story about shopping for health insurance in two states, New York and Arizona.

For Anthony and millions of other consumers, New York represents the ultimate nightmare for finding affordable coverage, pairing outrageously high prices with a tiny roster of offerings. By contrast, Anthony found fabulous bargains and a rich variety of policies in Arizona's desert sun.

So it would be wonderful for folks like Anthony if the historic health-care reform law scuttled the rules that created the disaster in New York, and made America's insurance markets a lot more like Arizona's. But amazingly, the bill imposes a New York-style regime on the rest of the nation, then makes a gigantic bet that the results won't mimic those of the Empire State.

What's wrong with New York's system, you ask, that Obamacare will be imposing on the rest of the nation in 2014? Tulley explains:

Two regulations enormously inflate prices in New York (and, incidentally, rates aren't much lower in Albany or Syracuse than in Manhattan), especially for young, healthy folks such as Anthony -- just the kind of people who must buy in for the insurance pools to succeed.

The first regulation is Guaranteed Issue. In New York, and several other states including Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, carriers must accept all customers regardless of their medical condition. It would be illegal in New York to offer the deal Anthony got in Arizona -- a lower rate in exchange for lowering your cholesterol.

The second premium-swelling rule is Community Rating. In New York, all customers pay the same rate regardless of either their age or medical status. As a result, someone Anthony's age or younger pays an identical premium for the same policy as a 64-year-old customer, although they actually cost a fraction as much in medical claims. So older patients effectively get a big subsidy, and the young pay far more then their actual cost.

It gets worse. Because of guaranteed issue, patients know they can enroll in a plan anytime they get cancer or diabetes, so they have little incentive to sign up when they're healthy. Community rating assures that they can re-enroll at premiums far lower than the actual costs of the tests and procedures they require. Hence, the pools of the insured in states like New York and Vermont consist of an extremely high proportion of sick people.

The article goes on to explain why these kinds of regulations are distorting the economic incentives for both the buyer and the seller of insurance. Let us rejoice in the fact that this is the system we'll all be living under now that Obamacare is the law of the land.

RLC

Badgering Barney

Via Hot Air, Jason Mattera goes after Massachussetts congressman Barney Frank. Mattera, who has written a book titled Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation, really is irrepressible, but as Hot Air notes, at least Frank kept the conversation going, even if he did distort some of the facts.

A little background before you watch: About twenty years ago Frank's romantic partner was arrested for running a homosexual prostitution ring out of the apartment he shared with Frank. Frank claimed to have no knowledge of his partner's activities and was exonerated. Subsequently he developed a relationship with an employee of Fannie Mae, the agency Frank's committee was tasked with overseeing. Mattera alludes to these relationships in his "interview" with Frank.

The fist bump was a nice touch.

RLC

Co-Option

Well, I'm not sure, given the etymology of "tea-bagger" (this is a family blog so don't ask me if you don't know) that I agree with the tactic portrayed in the video, but I guess one way to defuse an insult is to co-opt the term. This is what police back in the sixties did with the pejorative "pig," and what homosexuals have done with "gay" and "queer," so I guess the thinking is that it's one way to blunt some of the derision directed at the tea-party movement:

Personally, I'd rather they not go this route. The more their opponents refer to them as "tea-baggers" the sleazier their opponents appear in the public eye. The epithet does more to diminish and discredit the people who use it than it does the people at whom it's directed.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Antony Flew (1923-2010)

Philosopher Antony Flew was perhaps the most prominent and accomplished atheistic thinker of the latter half of the twentieth century. He subsequently went on to roil the academic world when in 2004 it became public that he had renounced atheism and embraced a sort of non-Christian theism. His 2007 book There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind attributed his journey from atheism to theism to his being convinced that there was no naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. Throughout his career he insisted that one should always go where ever the evidence leads and it had led him to the existence of a Creator. His former colleagues among the atheist community reacted to his conversion with a mixture of astonishment and opprobrium, but Flew was not deterred.

In an interview given in October of 2007 he explained his move this way:

There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself - which is far more complex than the physical Universe - can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins' comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a "lucky chance." If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a Voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion...

Antony Flew died April 8th at the age of 87. The Telegraph UK has an informative obituary, and Denise O'Leary at Uncommon Descent lists a number of links to pieces she's written on Flew over the last couple of years.

RLC