Another Blow to Mr. Obama's Image

It's being reported that New York Times columnist David Brooks has acknowledged that he was told a year ago by the President, off-record, that he, the President, knew that the idea of shovel-ready projects was a crock. In other words, even though Mr. Obama knew there were no such jobs he still pushed the $800 billion stimulus bill, a bill that has caused our debt to skyrocket, on the grounds that we needed to fund these projects in order to get America back to work.

Some commentators are wondering why Brooks is just revealing this now. If he knew all along that Obama didn't really believe what he was telling the American people why didn't he tell us back when it mattered? Since the President revealed this to him off the record, however, Brooks probably felt that he had no right to report it. In any event, Brooks isn't the issue here. What's at issue is President Obama's integrity, and that seems to be hovering around "minimal" on the honesty meter.

A Parable of a Distant Sun

David Hart's fine essay on atheism and morality at First Things moves me to relate a parable:

Once a race of men, men like us, dwelt on a beautiful planet which orbited a distant star. The star bathed the planet in heat and light sustaining lush forests, beautiful lakes and oceans, and crystal blue skies. Agriculture flourished and food was abundant.

One day, though, the planet's intellectuals gathered together to complain amongst themselves about their sun. It was too hot and oppressive, they bemoaned. There were sometimes droughts in which people died of thirst and the crops withered. People exposed to the sun suffered from cancers of the skin and other maladies that were cited as evidence of the sun's capricious cruelty.

Resentments grew. Then, at a time oddly enough called the age of enlightenment, the intellectuals sought ways to kill the sun. They didn't need it, they cried. It was a burden on their existence. They wanted to liberate themselves from the tyranny it imposed. There was enough energy stored in the wood, coal and oil to drive their civilization for thousands of years.

In their feeble attempts to slay the sun they threw stones at it. They shot arrows at it. Meanwhile, the common folk just shook their heads at this foolishness and conformed their lives to the sun's nature and courses, but the intellectuals were resolved to succeed in their quest to snuff the sun out.

Then, one day, the sun began to gutter. It's light suddenly dimmed to a reddish glow, and the planet was shrouded in darkness. "We have killed it," the intellectuals exulted. "It is a marvelous thing we have done. Now we are free to show what human ingenuity and reason can accomplish as we use our wits to build a glorious civilization without having to sweat under the scorching fires of a sun.

At first everyone put their shoulders to the work of collecting firewood and coal, but soon it became clear that something was terribly wrong. The planet was growing colder, the oceans were freezing, the vegetation was dying. The beauty of the planet was disappearing and the globe was turning into a rocky, barren, frozen wasteland.

Civilization was driven underground. Food became scarce. There was not enough light to grow crops in the subterranean greenhouses. Children shivered in the cold. The intellectuals insisted that everyone was better off that men could create their own light if only they tried harder. They demanded that the people redouble their efforts to mine the stored energy, but it was plain that it was running out. The sun had all but abandoned them and with every day it became clearer that the people could not long survive on what energy was left.

Then the people began to cry out, "Who told us we could kill the sun and be liberated from it's oppressive heat?" "Who told us we no longer needed the sun to live as men?" The intellectuals, so haughty and arrogant before, now hid in their underground caves in fear of the people's wrath. Their own fires were flickering and sputtering and would soon burn out. The once gorgeous planet and the glorious civilization it sustained would soon be a dead, lifeless, frozen husk.

The moral of the parable: Modern man is like the men living on a planet whose sun has gone out. He has "slain" the source of the energy which gave rise to his rich civilization. He has slain the source of his moral light and vitality, and he's trying to survive on the leftover capital bestowed by that once mighty star. Someday, though, all of that will be used up as well. Then his civilization will die of spiritual inanition.

Re: The Chilean Miners

In a recent post we lamented the fact that the real heroes in the rescue of the Chilean miners were being largely ignored while the miners themselves were being celebrated and smothered with gifts, endorsements and other emoluments.

Micah writes to let us know of a couple of stories that do, in fact, give some credit where credit is due.

They can be found here and here. They're pretty interesting, and I hope you'll take the time to check them out.

It seems to me that in this incident we've gotten things exactly backward. If we want our talented young people to aspire to careers like engineering in which they use their minds to make life better for all of us then we should be directing our gifts and praise toward the wonderful thing those professionals have accomplished in this rescue. If we're going to be showering rewards on people let it be primarily upon those responsible for the rescue and only secondarily on the men whose main achievement, though certainly not insignificant, was to endure patiently until they were rescued.

God and Evolution

The other day we mentioned a book by philosopher Jay Richards titled God and Evolution which seeks to explain the differences between intelligent design, theistic evolution, creationism, and Darwinism. It also promises to illustrate why traditional theism is incompatible with Darwinian evolution.

Richards and several other contributors to the volume discuss it in this promo:

Thanks to Evolution News and Views for the video.

Is That the Best You've Got?

Presidential advisor David Axelrod demonstrates that he could hold his own in a debate with any sixth grader if ever he had to. The White House, as you've probably heard by now, has been smearing the Chamber of Commerce, a coalition of mostly small businesses, for allegedly using foreign money to fund campaign ads.

Bob Schieffer, himself an Obama sympathizer and host of Face the Nation, last Sunday asked Axelrod if he had any evidence to support these charges. Axelrod's answer, a real stunner, was essentially, "Do you have any evidence that the CC is not using foreign money, Bob?"

Not only is Axelrod's reply monumentally dumb, it's also malicious.

Suppose you hear someone allege that a friend of yours is cheating on his spouse. The appropriate reaction would be to demand that the accuser produce the evidence his allegations are true. If the accuser replied to your demand by asking whether you have any evidence that the husband is not unfaithful I'm pretty sure you would dismiss the accuser, scornfully and rightfully, as a boneheaded slanderer.

Axelrod asks why the CC won't release the names of their donors, but there are two good reasons for not doing so. First, they're under no legal obligation to disclose their contributors' names, but second and more importantly, once those donors are identified they would be subject to the sort of harrassment and intimidation the thugs at SEIU and ACORN are so good at, and Axelrod knows it. It would be completely irresponsible of the CC to release their donor list.

What Axelrod and others in the administration (VP Biden, has also made this allegation about the CC) are doing is the sort of tactic that the Obama circle learned from their radical guru Saul Alinsky. Do whatever you can to smear and discredit your opponent. The end of winning justifies whatever means are necessary to achieve it. It's pretty tawdry stuff.

By the way, Schieffer's question at the 3:25 mark of the video is lapidary. Look for it to show up on signs and ads everywhere.

The Chilean Miners

I am certainly delighted that the Chilean miners are safely home, but I have to say that I'm a little disgusted with the media coverage of the ordeal. The media, or at least that part of it that I've seen, is treating the rescued men like heroes and transforming them into celebrities when in fact they're not the real heroes in this narrative at all. Sure, they endured their difficulties while trapped in the mine with a grace and stoicism that is admirable, but the people who should be celebrated, the real heroes, are the people whose ingenuity and determination got them out.

Of these people we've heard next to nothing. The miners have been swamped with job offers, book deals, movie contracts, and gifts of all kinds. Have the engineers who masterminded this rescue been offered such rewards? These men of genius (forgive me if that sounds a bit too Randian) planned and executed an astonishing rescue, and then in anonymity they probably drove home to their families, turned on the television and watched the Chilean equivalent of the baseball playoffs. No one knows their names and the media doesn't seem to care who they are. Instead, the men who simply survived are feted as though they're the ones who did something extraordinary, when in fact they'd all be dead today if it weren't for the brilliance of the engineers and others whom the media seems to have ignored.

It's another example of how much of the media trivializes, diminishes, or otherwise gets wrong just about every story it covers. They simply seem to lack the ability to discern importance.

What Then?

Now he tells us. After repeatedly trying to justify spending almost a trillion dollars of "stimulus," much of which, we were told, was allocated to "shovel-ready jobs," the President now acknowledges that he didn't realize there are no such jobs:

Mr. Obama reflects on his presidency, admitting that he let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend Democrat,” realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” and perhaps should have “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” in the stimulus.

Great. What else is the President going to learn after the damage has been done? That global warming is largely a fraud? That raising taxes and increasing regulations on business is no way to stimulate an economy? That bowing to people is no way to win their respect? That taking money from those who earn it and giving it to those who don't doesn't make anyone less poor?

Perhaps he'll also learn that the reason he appears to be "the same old tax-and-spend Democrat" is because he is the same old tax-and-spend Democrat. How else could he have expected to appear?

There really is a problem in this White House. Either the President was deliberately lying when he promised that "shovel-ready jobs" would be created by the $800 billion stimulus or he really didn't know that there's no such thing. If it's the former then he's malicious. If it's the latter he's incompetent. In either case he's unsuited for the office he holds.

There's a scene in the movie A Serious Man in which an adolescent Jewish boy visits an elderly rabbi for counsel. The rabbi poses a question to the boy by slowly and incongruously reciting a line from an old Jefferson Airplane song:

"When the truth...is found ... to be lies ... and all the hope ... within you dies ... What then?"

It was an amusing scene in the movie, but I think a lot of Obama supporters are feeling the despair in this very question today, and they're not finding it so amusing. An electoral tsunami appears to be building on the horizon and is threatening to wash Mr. Obama's party into political oblivion. They're going to pay an awful price for his on-the-job training.

The Guilty Parties

David Brooks, writing for the New York Times, puts his finger on the reason why so many states have such a bleak economic future - their public employees unions and the Democratic Party that has been bought and paid for by those unions. Here's the heart of Brooks' column:

New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.

New York City has to strain to finance its schools but must support 10,000 former cops who have retired before age 50.

California can’t afford new water projects, but state cops often receive 90 percent of their salaries when they retire at 50. The average corrections officer there makes $70,000 a year in base salary and $100,000 with overtime (California spends more on its prison system than on its schools).

States across the nation will be paralyzed for the rest of our lives because they face unfunded pension obligations that, if counted accurately, amount to $2 trillion — or $87,000 per plan participant.

All in all, governments can’t promote future prosperity because they are strangling on their own self-indulgence.

Brooks concludes with this indictment:

This situation, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, has been the Democratic Party’s epic failure. The party believes in the positive uses of government. But if you want the country to share that belief, you have to provide a government that is nimble, tough-minded and effective. That means occasionally standing up to the excessive demands of public employee unions. Instead of standing up to those demands, the party has become captured by the unions. Liberal activism has become paralyzed by its own special interests.

Brooks' article is informative but if you're looking for an exhaustive treatment of the problem read the paper by political scientist Daniel DiSalvo to which Brooks links.

Here's a summary: Your chances of enjoying as high a standard of living as your parents did are severely curtailed by the fact that your state pays its retired employees benefits that are about as hefty as those employees paychecks were when they were working. In order to meet these obligations you and your future employer, if you ever have one, will have to be heavily taxed and you will thus have less money to live on than your parents did.

This state of affairs came about because state legislatures are often controlled by liberal Democrats who count public workers as part of their political base and who've been very compliant in acceding to their legislative wishes.

So, there you have yet another good reason to vote for the Democrats' opponents on the first Tuesday in November.

Are God and Darwin Compatible?

Is Darwinism compatible with orthodox belief in God? Philosopher of science Jay Richards has released a new book in which he discusses the reasons why the answer to this question is "no."

I haven't seen the book, but I'm sure that the main reason why the two are incompatible has nothing to do with evolution as such and has everything to do with the metaphysical view called materialism. One can be an orthodox theist and still believe that God employed and directed an evolutionary process in order to produce living things, but Darwinism doesn't allow for such a belief. Darwinism insists that there were no forces but natural forces, no direction, no guidance, no intelligence involved in the evolution of life's diversity.

In other words, the Darwinian view is that there's no need for a superintending mind to front-load the evolutionary development of life or to direct it at any point along the way. God is superfluous. Nature can, and did, do it all, according to the Darwinian.

Thus, a theist can be an evolutionist, but it's hard to see how a theist could be a Darwinian evolutionist.

Richards' book looks like it would be very useful in helping laypeople to understand why this is so.

Good Campaign Ad

Would that we'd see more campaign ads like this one. No sneering, sinister, disembodied voice offering half-truths and innuendo. No slamming one's opponent for things that have no bearing on his/her suitability for office. Just a simple, straightforward challenge to debate the issues.

"Melissa" is Melissa Bean, the Democrat incumbent in the Illinois 8th District.

Actually, Mr. Walsh has probably won the "debate" already since an ad like this is going to be seen by far more people than a debate would. If Ms Bean continues to evade a debate that in itself is going to turn off a lot of voters who are already fed up with politicians who have forgotten to whom they're supposed to be answerable.

Liu Xiaobo

The Nobel Peace Prize committee, after inexplicably squandering its prize on Al Gore and Barack Obama, has this year bestowed its Peace Prize on someone who actually merits it. The recipient is the Chinese freedom advocate and political prisoner Liu Xiabo. City Journal says that:

Liu Xiaobo is only one among many so-called Chinese dissidents, but he happens to be the most articulate and the most unbending. He has been offered many opportunities to leave China and live comfortably on some American campus. Liu, however, knows that the good fight must go on, and he has no desire to lose contact with his fellow Chinese citizens or squander his legitimacy by going into exile. Moreover, Liu has articulated most explicitly what many Chinese want: a normal life in a normal country. What Liu calls “normal” is genuine democracy and free markets, not the corrupt Chinese version of those concepts.

The Chinese apparently have a very attenuated sense of irony. Outraged that one of their political dissidents should be given international honor they've now retaliated by confining Liu's wife to house arrest.

You can read about Liu's fight for human rights here. The bio will also give you a pretty good idea why you should not allow yourself to think that China is on the way to being anything like a free and open country.

Brave souls like Liu and so many others whose names we'll never know struggle in anonymity to bring a flicker of the light of freedom into the nightmarish darkness of oppressive regimes like those in China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and much of Africa. Most of these people will never be recognized in this life, but they are heroes and saints all the same. What Gore and Obama ever did to be ranked among them is something I'll never understand.

Naive

I received several emails taking exception to my claim that people who are different are less likely to be "bullied" in a Christian school than a secular school. One of the more forceful objections included this explanation:

[T]he article states later that this would be much less likely to happen at a Christian school than a secular school. I am sorry to say that I have been in both settings and this is entirely and utterly false. As a Christian I would greatly appreciate if Christian schools, like [my college] and my Christian high school fought against things like intolerance of homosexuals while acknowledging they are in the wrong. Unfortunately, this is just the opposite at a Christian school and it is naïve to think otherwise. [My college] is a place for hatred of homosexual students, almost to the point where there is no way these students can come out of the closet to receive the proper help they need.

In my high school and many other Christian high schools within my area, the small minority of homosexual students were treated so poorly on our school grounds that I felt ashamed to call my fellow students Christians as they mistreated these individuals. Conversely, in the time I spent at a public high school, gay students were treated with respect and not necessarily liked, but no students were harassed in the ways I have seen in Christian settings.

The bottom line is that I have seen far too many hypocritical Christians in my life to say that gays are safer or treated better in a Christian setting than a public school setting. While I agree that there are many things to be improved about the public school system, the harassment of homosexuals is really not one of the issues. This case was a rare exception of an intolerant bigot doing something harmful to a college roommate that caused his death. As Christians we need to look ourselves in the mirror and do what we can to act more CHRIST-LIKE every day of our lives, and that includes treating homosexuals with the respect they deserve.

If this writer is correct it is very disappointing, but is he correct? Is it naive to think that people who deviate from the norm are treated with more respect in Christian environments than in secular settings? I hope not, but I invite others to share their opinion. If the experience shared above is typical then, it seems to me, Christian schools have a lot of work to do to teach their students what it means to be a Christian.

I know anecdotes don't prove anything, but I'll share one anyway. I have attended and taught at both secular and Christian colleges over the last 45 years. It was common in the secular schools to walk into a lavatory and find anti-homosexual graffiti on the walls, but I can't recall ever seeing that in the Christian colleges at which I've taught (In fact, I can't recall seeing much graffiti at all in these schools). What does that mean? Maybe nothing, or maybe it just means that the custodial crews are more efficient in cleaning the lavatories in the Christian schools, but it also might be a reflection of the different atmospheres toward one's fellow human beings in the two types of schools.

One thing I think I can say about this, though, is that if Christians torment someone for being homosexual they're violating the principles laid down by the Christ whom they claim to follow and upon which they claim to base their lives. However, if secular students bully a gay kid those students aren't violating any principle of secularism. There's no principle that one can derive from a secular or atheistic worldview that could provide any reason to think that demeaning people who are different from and weaker than oneself is wrong. All that's being violated is an arbitrary code of conduct that reflects the tastes and predilections of the administration of the school.

Honeybee Collapse

For years scientists have been mystified and agriculturalists have been alarmed by honeybee die-offs. The collapse of the population of these essential crop pollinators in North America, estimated at about 20% of the bees, has variously been blamed on a mite, on pesticides, and on cell-phone radiation.

Now, it seems, scientists have finally discovered the real cause - a virus working synergistically with a fungus in the gut of the bees. Neither the virus nor the fungus are harmful by themselves but together they're apparently lethal.

You can read about this discovery here.

Can You Be Happy in a Vat?

David Sosa has an interesting column at The Stone in which he writes this:

In 1974, Robert Nozick, a precocious young philosopher at Harvard, scooped “The Matrix”:

"Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? [...] Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think that it’s all actually happening [...] Would you plug in?"

Nozick’s thought experiment — or the movie, for that matter — points to an interesting hypothesis: Happiness is not a state of mind.

“What is happiness?” is one of those strange questions philosophers ask, and it’s hard to answer. Philosophy, as a discipline, doesn’t agree about it. Philosophers are a contentious, disagreeable lot by nature and training. But the question’s hard because of a problematic prejudice about what kind of thing happiness is.

Sosa concludes that hooking oneself to the machine would not make one happy and that he doesn't think it should be done. For my part, I don't think he makes a persuasive case, but read his argument at the link and see what you think.

In my opinion, refusing to be connected to the machine only makes sense given a theistic worldview which includes immortality. If there's no life after death then I can see no reason why one shouldn't allow oneself whatever pleasures, no matter how existentially empty, one can glean from the time we are here. In a world in which materialism and naturalism are true, connecting to the machine makes perfect sense. At least to me.

Re: The Culture of Death

A reader responds to our post on The Culture of Death with an account of her own experience:

Maybe someone should break both of Virginia Ironside's legs and then hold a pillow over her head and see how she likes it. I'm thinking she wouldn't be in favor. This is a situation that pregnant women today are frequently facing. If the child is found to have a disability, it is recommended that the mother terminate the pregnancy. It is such a ridiculous notion.

I was born with Spina Bifida, a birth defect of the spinal cord. My form of Spina Bifida was closed, so the doctors didn't discover it until I couldn't walk normally at age two. However, had my case been the norm, it would have been discovered during an ultrasound, and my mother would have been given the option to abort me. There would have been no explanation of how it is possible for someone to live a long productive life with Spina Bifida.

I think of the story of Gretchen Voss' abortion. This woman chose to abort her child because she thought the child would suffer. Suffering is a fact of life. I've met so many people with the exact same diagnosis that are not only living happy lives, they're walking. By aborting her child, Voss denied him the right to live. Sure, the child may have suffered, but he may not have, too. Even in that suffering, most children with Spina Bifida are the happiest children you'll ever meet. They love living life because they see it in such a different way than everyone else, especially when it comes to walking.

I "suffer" with extreme back and leg pain on a daily basis (even just sitting in class in difficult). I struggle some days to get out of bed, to stand up, to walk, but I am more grateful for it than almost anything else. It reminds me that I'm living. I've never once stopped and asked "why me?" This so-called "suffering" doesn't make me regret life; it makes me a stronger person who thrives in life.

If we continue to do this, to kill babies that we believe will be born into "suffering," will we not just be continuing Hitler's work? Hitler wanted the ideal race, the survival of the fittest. If it was wrong for Hitler, it is just as wrong for us. These babies deserve a chance at life. To take that away is not merciful, it is inhumane.

Here's a question about what Virginia Ironside said on the video at the link: If it would have been legal for a mother to have had the baby ripped apart moments before it was born, as it is according to our current laws, why is it wrong for a mother to kill it by asphyxiation moments after it's born? And if it shouldn't be illegal to kill it moments after birth why not, if the child's suffering is the reason for ending its life, when it's three years old? Or twelve? Do you see the slippery slope we've put ourselves on? Ms Ironside is coldly but rationally working out the logic of legalizing abortion on demand.

Making Friends in the Middle East

A very bright and well-informed student writes to suggest that America's foreign policy vis a vis the Muslim world is wrong-headed, and he offers an alternative:

There is a way for the middle east to become prosperous and friendly to the U.S. These steps include not bombing civilians (which have become too frequent due to drone strikes), becoming a neutral party (which it is obviously not) in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and not supporting military dictators in the region (like the U.S. did with Saddam Hussein and Musharraf). If we didn't look out for our own interests overseas and rather focused on building a truly free and independent middle east we could see large improvements in the region.

Here's my reply:

I don't think this is true. Those Muslims around the world who hate us will hate us no matter what we do. We liberated the Kuwaiti Muslims from Saddam, but still millions of Muslims hate us. We rescued the Kurds from Saddam (albeit clumsily and late) and saved the Bosnian Muslims from genocide, but still millions of Muslims hate us. We liberated 25 million Iraqi Muslims from Saddam's tyranny and 25 million Afghan Muslims from Taliban tyranny, and still millions of Muslims hate us. We are the main hope of Iranian Muslims who look to us to somehow rescue them from the tyranny of the mullahs and ayatollahs, but still millions of Muslims hate us. We gave hundreds of millions of dollars to help Muslims in the Indian Ocean basin recover from a calamitous tidal wave, we send doctors and teachers and relief workers all through the Muslim world to bring relief to suffering Muslims, we spend millions to spare African Muslims from starvation and the scourge of AIDs, and still millions of Muslims hate us.

They do not hate us because we have done too little to help Muslims. Nor do they hate us because civilians have died in the wars we've fought in the Middle East (After all, far more civilians have died at the hands of their fellow Muslims who intentionally murdered them than have died by the inadvertent bombing of innocent civilians by Americans). They hate us for two reasons in particular:

First, we are all that stands between them and the destruction of Israel, and second, we ourselves are not a Muslim nation and they see our culture and our freedoms as a threat to their values and religion. The radicals among the world's Muslims dream of a world-wide caliphate and they are prepared to kill anyone - Christian, Jew, or Muslim - who prevents them from realizing their dream.

Banned in Berkeley

There's not much that's frowned upon in the far left-wing precincts of Berkeley, California, but "Robin of Berkeley," a former secular lefty herself, suggests that there is one thing that will earn you the contempt of that fair city's enlightened citizens - a profession of belief in God. According to Robin, God is not just dead in this city named for a pious Irish prelate and philosopher, He's openly despised. She goes on to conclude that this contempt for God has had consequences that should surprise no one. Here's the heart of her column:

"God is dead," according to the existentialist Nietzsche. He might as well have been talking about Berkeley, California.

Think I'm exaggerating? Take a trip out west and spend a few days on Telegraph Avenue. Then wander over to the downtown area, Shattuck and University. If you're really the daredevil, do so after dark, when the mean streets look positively Kafkaesque.

When I say God is dead in Berkeley, I don't mean just that parts of the city look like a hellhole. I'm referring to the militant anti-God vibe.....

While it's perfectly acceptable in Berkeley to live openly as a bisexual, transgendered, or crossdresser, don't dare divulge a love for God. If you do so, expect public disapproval, even contempt.

And yet, why don't residents see the obvious: that's there's a connection between abandoning God and the un-Godliness of Berkeley's streets? The streets are filthy and uncivil; the crime rate spirals out of control. Because if God and His followers are chased out of town, what is left?

The radicals would argue that without a pesky, oppressive God, people are liberated. With no repressive authority spoiling the fun, the world becomes idyllic. But when you obscure the sunshine, only darkness remains. Seal the windows, close the blinds, and what do you have? People alone in a pitch-black world, with nothing to shield or soothe them.

And the estrangement is palpable not just in Berkeley, although the alienated are concentrated here. The militant atheists are saturating the media, the schools, the entire culture with its witch's brew. The Left, as always, is at the helm. Obama covers up crosses at Notre Dame University; he deletes the Creator from the Declaration.

Obama and the Left want our country untethered from the steadfast grip of God. Spiritually impoverished, lost in space, the masses will cling to the teat of the government. Bereft of the Divine, they're shackled to the Gospel of Obama.

There are inevitable, and disastrous, consequences for slamming the door on God. See for yourself. Come walk the streets of Berkeley, or the nearby cities: San Francisco, Oakland, or Richmond. Look deeply into people's eyes and behold the anger, the desperation...or see nothing at all.

Because when a city, or a nation, buries God, what is left is an excruciating, unfathomable void. And in the ever-widening chasm, dark forces -- the evil squatters -- take up residency.

Pretty powerful indictment coming from a former member of the atheistic left.

Does Evil (Still) Exist?

Ron Rosenbaum raises some good questions about the ontological status of evil and the free-will/ determinism debate in an article in this month's First Things.

His column begins with this:

At the close of the final 2010 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship seminar series in Cambridge this June, after writer Rob Stein’s informative discussion of “Conscience,” as everyone began packing up, one of the moderators, Sir Brian Heap, turned to me and asked (presumably because I’d once written a book entitled Explaining Hitler): “Did Hitler have a conscience, Ron?” Having spent a decade examining that very issue, which was at the heart of my book, I was able to reply, crisply and cogently: “Um, well, I’m not sure . . . I mean, it all depends.” Yes, it all depends. It all depends on how you define conscience, and how you define conscience depends on how you define evil, the cancer for which conscience is the soul’s MRI.

Evil has gotten a bad name lately. It always was a name for some sort of badness, yes; but lately the word sounds antiquated, the product of a less-sophisticated age. Evil belongs to an old, superstitious world of black and white, and we all know now that everything is gray, right? It belongs to a world of blame in which the Enlightenment tells us that “to understand all is to forgive all”—no blame, just explanation. There are some who argue it’s an unnecessary word: Having no ontological reality, no necessary use, it’s merely a semantic trap, a dead end.

After a century that saw the slaughter of more than a hundred million souls, we seem to be insisting on one more casualty: the word evil. Perhaps because by eliminating its accusatory presence and substituting genetic, organic, or psychogenic determinism, we escape the accusatory finger it points at the nature of human nature. Things go wrong with our genes, or our amygdalas, or our parenting, but these are aberrations, glitches. The thing itself, the human soul, is basically good; the hundred million dead, the product of unfortunate but explicable defects, not the nature of the beast.

But there are losses to the glossing-over process that has made the concept of conscious evil so unfashionable. If we could rescue free-will evil from the various determinisms that have been substituted for it, we could also set free will—the freely made choice to do good or evil—free again. Doing so would reestablish the possibilities of freely chosen courage and nobility, of altruism and self-sacrifice, rather than reducing them to some evolutionary biology survival stratagem. We diminish and marginalize the idea of evil because we don’t want to face the accusatory consequences that the free choice of evil—a choice contrary to conscience—entails.

Further on in the piece Rosenbaum poses this perplexing moral question: "Can someone be evil if he thinks he’s doing good, no matter how deranged his thought process? It has troubled everyone from Plato to Augustine and their heirs, but it remains a genuine problem—because most people we think of as doing great evil think of themselves as doing the right thing."

Chew on that one for a moment and then click on the link to the essay. There's lots there to make you think.

Tough Ad

Wow:

I wonder how much play this ad is getting across the country. It's amusing that in Pennsylvania, where I live, the Democratic candidate for governor is running ads critical of the "politicians in Harrisburg," but Harrisburg is pretty much controlled by Democrats. Another Democrat candidate for the federal legislature is explicitly identifying himself as a conservative. How many Democrats are identifying themselves as liberals, or even as Democrats? Why do they feel they have to deceive the voters in order to win? Why are they willing to deceive the voters in order to win?

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

The Culture of Death

The video below illustrates how people start to think when the society in which they live loses its belief that human persons are made in the image of God. Once we abandon the sense that we participate somehow in the transcendent, when we lose the sense that human beings are a little lower than the angels and begin to believe that we're not much different than cattle, we find ourselves on a fast track toward a culture of death.

The speaker in this video is a British advice columnist named Virginia Ironside. The clip picks up just as she has opined that, "If a baby’s going to be born severely disabled or totally unwanted, surely an abortion is the act of a loving mother." She then adds: "If I were the mother of a suffering child – I mean a deeply suffering child – I would be the first to want to put a pillow over its face… If it was a child I really loved, who was in agony, I think any good mother would."

Watch it to get a sense of how the progressives on the left think:

What's particularly chilling to me about this clip is not just that Ms Ironside is willing to murder her child to end the child's suffering, but the complete lack of anguish that she seems to feel at the prospect. She's apparently no more conflicted about smothering her suffering child to death than she would be about changing the unfortunate tyke's nappy.

Once people begin to think as this woman does, once they can contemplate murdering a child with even less emotion than most people would show in contemplating euthanizing an injured kitten, society is on the road back to Auschwitz.

Here's another example of how we are being assaulted with sickening images of death and how we are becoming desensitized to the idea of putting to death those who resist the fashionable left-wing solutions to environmental and other problems. I don't recommend you do it, but if you have a strong stomach you might go here and watch the video made to "encourage" people to participate in the effort to reduce their carbon footprint. How much deeper into the sewer of depravity and dehumanization can we sink before people demand that we reverse course?