Obama's Long Fall

Joseph Curl cites a new Quinnipiac poll in support of his claim that President Obama is the worst president of our lifetime. I don't think polls are a good measure of such things, though. After all, the second worst president in the poll was George W. Bush who was ranked worse than both Carter and Nixon, which is absurd. Whether the current president is the worst or not - I think a strong case can be made on the basis of evidence unrelated to polls that he is - he has certainly made himself unpopular with everyone but liberal Democrats who stick with him, I believe, only because he's their guy on the left. Many liberals are embarrassed by the utter ineptness he has displayed throughout his term, but Obama's ideology is their ideology and they're not going to throw him overboard as long as he remains the symbol of modern progressivism.

Yet the policies of this administration have been disastrous. A piece at the Daily Beast lays the Iraq debacle largely at the feet of a dithering White House, and the tragedy on our southern border has been allowed to explode with little sign that the President has any desire to stop it.

Meanwhile, over the last six years the nation has grown to despise a mendacious IRS, an obtrusive NSA, an incompetent State Department which bungled Benghazi, a worse than incompetent HHS which bungled the Obamacare rollout, a corrupt Veterans Affairs Department, and a Department of Justice whose sole mission seems to be to cover the President's derriere.

All of this corruption and incompetence is tolerated, if not encouraged, by the President. He has obstructed every attempt to hold any of the malefactors accountable and has presided over six years of continuous scandal and economic malaise. He has rewarded his corporate and union cronies with taxpayer bailouts and supports, he has done nothing to get the economy firing on all cylinders, and is either deliberately trying to diminish the stature of this country on the world stage, in which case he is malevolent, or is simply a poseur who prefers to be out on the golf course or jetting around the world to solving the country's problems.

Like I said, polls should be treated with skepticism, but they seem to be unanimous nonetheless in showing that it's only a remnant of Americans who have any lingering confidence in Mr. Obama's ability, his intelligence, or his integrity.

Why Liberals Can't Govern

John Hawkins at Townhall.com explains the reasons behind what has become increasingly obvious to even the most myopic observers - that liberals are terrible at governing. He gives six reasons and his elaborations on those reasons are important. Here's part of what he writes:

When you think poor governance, you think liberalism. Barack Obama could fairly be called the worst President in history and one of his biggest competitors for that crown is Jimmy Carter, whose name primarily brings to mind the words "malaise," "hostage crisis," and "liberal peanut farmer." Lyndon Johnson? Other than the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which more Republicans voted for percentage-wise than Democrats, his presidency was a complete disaster.

Of course, liberal incompetence isn't just confined to the White House. Who botched the hurricane preparation for New Orleans so badly that tens of thousands of people were stuck in a city built inside of a geological soup bowl when Hurricane Katrina rolled in? Liberals. Who bankrupted Detroit? Liberals. Why are states like Illinois, Michigan, and California on track to default on their debts in the next few years? Liberals.

Hawkins goes on to give six reasons why the record of liberal administrations in our nations cities, states, and federal government is so poor. His reasons are these:

1. Their political alliances require a lot of corruption.
2. Their close-mindedness keeps them from getting feedback.
3. They don't care if their policies work.
4. Their strategy is centered around amassing government power.
5. They don't like America very much.
6. They believe the ends justify the means.

Hawkins defends each of these allegations at the link. I think a couple of other points could be made on this. For example, another reason, in addition to those Hawkins discusses, that liberalism makes for a poor governing ideology is that to be a liberal is to be in favor of change for the sake of change. Thus, even if a circumstance is as good as it can humanly be, it's never good enough if it's not perfect and it needs therefore to be changed. Changing an optimal situation, however, always makes it worse than it was.

Another problem is that for liberals the answer to every problem is for the state to create a right, a tax, a law, to impose a regulation, or to spend money. When the state does everything for people the people grow dependent upon it and demand that it do even more. They lose their initiative, their sense of self-reliance and personal responsibility. They grow passive and indolent. A disaster strikes New Orleans and the citizens wait for the state to rescue them and to rebuild their community. A similar disaster strikes a town in the mid-west and the people don't wait for the state to help, they rebuild it themselves.

Indeed, one of the worst indictments of liberalism, in my opinion, is that it punishes initiative, ambition, and hard work and rewards lassitude and self-indulgence. That's no way to produce a vibrant society.

The Last Good American Atheist

Sean Salai S.J. writes movingly of the evolution of Christopher Hitchens from an independent-minded political journalist of the first order to an alcohol-fueled, full-time atheist. Salai begins his remembrance this way:

I asked the middle-aged man across from me, “Who was the last good American president?” It was the year 2000. As a 19-year old college journalist studying history and political science, I was eager to know my drinking partner’s response to this question. He had just finished railing against Presidents Clinton, Reagan and Bush '41. At this point, I was wondering if he liked any U.S. president at all.

To my surprise, I didn’t have long to wait for an answer. Without hesitation, Christopher Hitchens leaned across the table, looked me in the eye, and quipped with boozy conviction: “Eisenhower.” Then he sipped his whiskey, took a drag from his cigarette, and exhaled through his nose as he stared me in the eye, waiting for my reaction amidst the frivolity of our dingy student hangout.

Amused, I asked: Why Eisenhower?

“Because he was the last president who didn’t take a dump on the Constitution,” Hitchens shot back, taking another drag.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about Hitchens, the British-born journalist who died at 62 on Dec. 15, 2011. He had a knack for punctuating discussions with playful one-liners. Some of his witticisms still come to mind whenever I go to a bookstore and see his books on atheism perched—ironically enough—on the religion and philosophy shelf.

When I shared that drink with him in March 2000, the self-described “conservative Marxist” had come to Wabash College in Indiana to debate Ronald Reagan’s legacy with the conservative Catholic political pundit Dinesh D’Souza. It was Reagan Appreciation Week at Wabash, where the student news magazine I edited had paid for these two men to cross swords. Hitchens is on my mind partly because, 10 years ago this summer, he wrote an article for Slate.com on the Wabash debate that remains posted online here [linked in the original].

At the time I saw him debate D'Souza, Hitchens was still a razor-sharp political writer for The Nation magazine, not the village atheist he later became. He was different in those days, more fun and less bitter. I, the future Jesuit, was not even Catholic when I met him.

Today I marvel at how God brought us together for that conversation after the debate. In my memory, the Hitchens who wrote leftist essays for The Nation 14 years ago was different from the Hitchens who made a public career out of atheism while dying from esophageal cancer. Sometimes I wonder whether they were even the same person.

There's more at the link. If you liked Hitchens, or if you didn't, you'll find Salai's essay interesting.

The Declaration of Independence

Today being Independence Day in these United States I thought it might be instructive to revisit The Declaration of Independence with the aim of ascertaining what the Mother Country was doing that motivated the Founders to put their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor all on the line by breaking free of British oppression. The document was written largely by Thomas Jefferson who borrowed some of his phraseology from the British philosopher John Locke.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Note that the Founders believed that our equality is a gift from God and that our fundamental rights come from God. Neither of these come from the state. The role of the state is to insure that the equality and rights that God grants are secured by the laws it enacts. If God does not exist then human equality and human rights are fictions.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

These paragraphs are a close paraphrase of passages in Locke's Second Treatise on Government and reflect the influence of Locke on Jefferson.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Revolution is both a right and a duty when the government abuses its proper role, when it usurps power to which it is not entitled. This is what King George III was guilty of in the minds of the colonial Americans. Jefferson enumerates the long train of abuses and usurpations. Some items on the list may have a contemporary ring to them:

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
• He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

The King refused to pass laws that the people wanted and refused to enforce laws he didn't like.

• He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
• He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
• He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
• He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

The King unleashed a pestilential bureaucracy upon the colonies which essentially made it impossible for businesses to thrive.

• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
• For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
• For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
• For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
• For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

The King used his sovereign power to overrule the will of the colonies and to prevent them from passing laws and adopting measures they deemed proper and necessary.

• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
• He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
• He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
• He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
• He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

Jefferson then concludes with this:

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

(57 Signers)

Why Isn't the Universe God?

It's often argued that the universe must have had a cause and that this fact is more probable with the belief that naturalism is false and theism is true. The naturalist objects that if everything has a cause then God must have had a cause. This objection is philosophically naive for several reasons, but Ed Feser at First Things explains one of them in a review of a book by atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss. Feser writes:

A critic might reasonably question the arguments for a divine first cause of the cosmos. But to ask “What caused God?” misses the whole reason classical philosophers thought his existence necessary in the first place. So when physicist Lawrence Krauss begins his new book by suggesting that to ask “Who created the creator?” suffices to dispatch traditional philosophical theology, we know it isn’t going to end well.

In general, classical philosophical theology argues for the existence of a first cause of the world, a cause that does not merely happen not to have a cause of its own but that (unlike everything else that exists) in principle does not require one. Nothing else can provide an ultimate explanation of the world.

For Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, for example, things in the world can change only if there is something that changes or actualizes everything else without the need (or indeed even the possibility) of its being actualized itself, precisely because it is already “pure actuality.” Change requires an unchangeable changer or unmovable mover.

For Neoplatonists, everything made up of parts can be explained only by reference to something that combines the parts. Accordingly, the ultimate explanation of things must be utterly simple and therefore without the need or even the possibility of being assembled into being by something else. Plotinus called this “the One.” For Leibniz, the existence of anything that is in any way contingent can be explained only by its origin in an absolutely necessary being.

But Krauss simply can’t see the “difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one.” The difference, as the reader of Aristotle or Aquinas knows, is that the universe changes while the unmoved mover does not, or, as the Neoplatonist can tell you, that the universe is made up of parts while its source is absolutely one; or, as Leibniz could tell you, that the universe is contingent and God absolutely necessary. There is thus a principled reason for regarding God rather than the universe as the terminus of explanation.

Leibniz's point is that the universe is itself contingent and the sum of all contingent entities. That is, the universe's continued existence is dependent upon something beyond itself which must not be contingent since, if it were, it would be part of the universe. Thus, that upon which the universe depends must have necessary being, meaning that whatever it is, it depends on nothing else for its existence. It's uncreated, uncaused, and self-existent.

There's more of Feser's critique of Krauss' book at the link. His review, like reviews by philosophers of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and similar works by other atheistic scientists, shows the value of philosophers in the marketplace of ideas. We might say, paraphrasing Einstein, that science without philosophy is blind. Certainly a lot of scientists are intellectually handicapped by their failure to understand the philosophical implications of what they write about, particularly when they write about God.

Poetry Feeds the Soul

A friend and I were discussing over lunch the other day the incredible literary quality of letters written by Civil War soldiers. The writers were often young men in their teens or early twenties and, as my friend said, reading them is like reading Shakespeare. Not every young man in the middle of the 19th century could write like this, of course, and doubtless many of them were illiterate, but the point is that so many of them could and so few today could.

There's no gainsaying that we've lost something of value when we lost the ability, and the inclination, to write so eloquently. A man or woman who writes with elegance is an artist, a poet. A culture in which ordinary people are artists or poets of this sort is deeply enriched thereby.

Perhaps one reason we so rarely see contemporary writing of this sort is because we no longer think this way and the reason we no longer think this way is, in part, because we've abandoned poetry in our schools. Suzanne Fields elaborates on this in a recent column. She writes:

The other day a teacher of a ninth-grade English class at an elite private school in the nation’s capital asked students who had transferred from public schools to list the poets they had studied. Several hands shot up, eager to tell. When one of them said “Langston Hughes,” the hands quickly went down. Langston Hughes, a distinguished black poet well worth reading, was nevertheless the only poet they knew.

Gone from their classrooms were the old staples, Samuel Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Walt Whitman’s “My Captain, My Captain.” These poems once were essential parts of a child’s poetic repertoire, learned before high school. Many public school students are cheated now by the politically correct, deprived of a sense of the sweep of poetry power that once made up the common cultural heritage.

Kids don’t get to dance with the daffodils, grow thirsty with “water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink,” and read “quoth the raven evermore.” They never know the playful fun of teasing someone with big feet as having “longfellows.”

Help may be on the way. Last week, James Billington, the librarian of Congress, named Charles Wright as the new poet laureate of the United States, a man who thinks poetry leads to thoughtful reflection, a scarce commodity indeed in contemporary Washington. Mr. Wright, a soft-spoken Southerner who keeps a lock of Robert E. Lee’s hair on his desk, is apolitical in a political world. He finds “the true purpose of poetry to be a contemplation of the divine — however you find it, or don’t find it.”

Such refreshing insights could usher in a new appreciation of language, reviving an interest in the importance of the precise word in the right place at the right time for those addicted to the idiomatic shortcuts of texting. This is particularly good news for conservatives, since the use of precise language conserves what’s left of the best in a debased media culture where talk drives out the written word.

There's more to her excellent column. Please read the whole thing. She closes with this thought:

“Without poetry, there’s just talk,” Mr. Wright, the new poet laureate, tells The Paris Review. “Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts music in our ears. It moves us to contemplation.” Are we listening?

To the extent that students are no longer required to read and memorize great poetry (and other literature, for that matter) we impoverish them and us. It's as if we deliberately have extinguished a big part of our individual and collective soul.

Just Weigh the Fish

Philosopher Robert Pasnau pens an entertaining column at The Stone about the low esteem in which philosophy is held in some academic precincts. Here's his lede:

Morale these days has fallen pretty low along the corridors of philosophy departments. From one side, we get the mockery of the scientists. Freeman Dyson calls philosophy today “a toothless relic of past glories.” According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, majoring in philosophy “can really mess you up.” Stephen Hawking declares that “philosophy is dead.” From another side, we have to cope with the apostasy of our own leading figures. John Searle describes the field as being in “terrible shape.” Peter Unger says that philosophers are “under the impression that they’re saying something new and interesting about how it is about the world, when in fact this is all an illusion.” What’s going on? Has philosophy gone horribly amiss? Or are there broader cultural factors at work, perhaps something to do with a general decline in respect for the humanities?

Philosophers have always been the subject of ridicule, both from within and without. René Descartes thought the entire discipline — up until his arrival, at least — had failed to make any important progress. A century later, David Hume wanted to take most of what philosophers had written and “commit it to the flames.” Such scorn goes all the way back to the origins of the subject. Thales, who many consider the first Western philosopher, was reputed to have been so distracted while out on his evening walk that he once fell into a well. Falling to the bottom of a well is presumably no laughing matter, even when it happens to a philosopher. But the Thracian servant girl who discovered him is said to have reacted not with concern but scorn; she ridiculed him for being so oblivious.

Thales, as it happens, was a founding figure not just for philosophy but also for science. Indeed, the usual reason given for his fall is not that he was ogling the girl (as some readers today might suspect of a philosopher) but that he was studying the stars.

For the next 2,000 years, the sciences were assumed to be a part of philosophy — indeed, what the philosopher mainly did was to pursue science. And that is precisely what they were mocked for: always pursuing and never attaining. Pietro Pomponazzi, a Renaissance philosopher, cautioned his students that their field would be the greatest of careers but for two things. One, of course, was that philosophy did not pay. The other was that it constantly failed to achieve results, and so rather than being a serious discipline, it was more like “playing with toys.” Several centuries later, Charles II is said to have himself toyed with the philosophers, asking them to explain why a fish weighs more after it has died. Upon receiving various ingenious answers, he pointed out that in fact a dead fish does not weigh anything more.

One aspect of philosophy that makes it unpopular with some academics is that it tends to impose boundaries on them. It seeks to draw lines of demarcation separating science from non-science, right from wrong, beautiful from non-beautiful, knowledge from non-knowledge, justice from injustice, truth from falsity, meaningfulness from nonsense. This is a problem because practitioners in other disciplines don't like non-practitioners calling them out for transgressing boundaries set by the non-practitioners. In any event there's much more from Pasnau at the link.

Please Stop Helping

Jason Riley pleads with white liberals in a column at the New York Post to stop trying to help African Americans. In his view, liberal solutions seem rarely to work and almost always make matters worse. They've certainly made matters worse for American blacks as Riley points out. Here are some excerpts:

The civil-rights struggles of the mid-20th century were liberalism at its best. The efforts culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed racial discrimination in employment and education and ensured the ability of blacks to register and vote.

But what about the social policy and thinking that arose from the ruins of Jim Crow? Good intentions aside, which efforts have facilitated black advancement, and which efforts have impeded it?

While gains have been made, significant racial disparities persist in some areas and black retrogression has occurred in others.

The black-white poverty gap has widened over the last decade and the poverty rate among blacks is no longer declining. The black-white disparity in incarceration rates today is larger than it was in 1960.

And the black unemployment rate has, on average, been twice as high as the white rate for five decades. In fact, black America has long been stuck in a severe recession. Between 1963 and 2012, annual black unemployment averaged 11.6%, while the average annual national unemployment rate during recessions over the same period was only 6.7%.

Confronted with these statistics, liberals continue to push for the same “solutions” that clearly haven’t worked before.

Earlier this year, President Obama announced yet another federal initiative aimed at helping blacks. He called for more preschool education, even though studies — like the one on Head Start released by his admin­istration in 2012 — have found “no significant impacts” in educa­tion from such programs.

Obama said that he wants to increase reading proficiency and graduation rates for minority students, yet he opposes school voucher programs that are doing both. And he called for more of the same job-training programs that liberal politicians have been pushing for decades despite scant evidence of their effectiveness.

Obama was doing exactly what liberals have been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. And the president is conditioning the next generation of blacks to do the same. This is a dodge. Those legacies are not holding down blacks half as much as the legacy of efforts to help them “overcome.” The left’s sentimental support has turned underprivileged blacks into playthings for liberal intellectuals and politicians who care more about clearing their conscience or winning votes than advo­cating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to get ahead.

[Martin Luther] King’s successors, living in an era when public policy bends over backward to accommodate blacks, nevertheless insist that blacks cannot be held responsible for their plight so long as someone somewhere in white America is still using the N-word.

Liberalism has also succeeded, tragically, in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Today there is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying mindset that permeates black culture.

White liberals think they are helping blacks by romanticizing miscreants. And black liberals are all too happy to hustle guilty whites. The result, manifest in everything from black studies programs to black media to black politics, is an obsession with racial slights real or imagined.

There's more at the link. One of the deficiencies of liberalism is that it tends to minimize the role of faith in our cultural and social life, it also minimizes the importance of strong two-parent families, and it makes excuses for personal failure which create the mindset that one's failures are not one's own fault.

Consequently, the policies that liberals promote are often corrosive to faith, families, and personal responsibility. This erosion hurts everyone, but, as Charles Murray explains in his important book Coming Apart, they hurt the poor far more than they hurt the better off. Liberal policies and attitudes have the unintended consequence of keeping the poor in poverty and impoverishing many who weren't poor to start with.

Being a Woman in a Muslim Land

Gabriel Said Reynolds, a professor at Notre Dame, gives us the details of Meriam Ibrahim's ordeal at the hands of Muslim fundamentalists. It's good that he does because it's hard to find anything about this in the mainstream media:

In August 2013 the Sudanese authorities arrested Meriam Ibrahim, daughter of a Sudanese Muslim man and an Ethiopian Christian woman, after a Muslim relative informed them of her marriage to Daniel Wani, a Catholic from South Sudan and an American citizen.

The authorities considered Meriam to be a Muslim because of her Muslim father, even though she had lived her whole life as a Christian. And as Islamic law forbids a Muslim woman from marrying a non-Muslim man (although it permits a Muslim man to marry a non-Muslim woman), her marriage was not a marriage at all in Sudan, where matters of personal and family law are controlled by religious courts. She was therefore guilty of zina, or fornication.

If fornication was the pretext for Meriam’s arrest, prosecutors decided to charge her as well with a still more serious crime: irtidad, or apostasy. According to Islamic law, Muslims cannot change their religion. When Maher Al-Gohari attempted to change his religious affiliation in Egypt in 2009 after he was baptized and received into the Coptic Church, his request was rejected. From the perspective of Islamic law, individuals such as Meriam or al-Gohari who are born Muslims can never legally enter into another religious community. Their rejection of Islam, however, amounts to apostasy: a crime against God and the Prophet Muhammad which is punishable by death.

With this logic Meriam Ibrahim was convicted of both fornication and apostasy. On May 15, 2014 she was sentenced to one hundred lashes for fornication, and death by hanging for apostasy. That Meriam’s Muslim father had left her Christian mother in Meriam’s infancy, and that Meriam never practiced Islam, had no legal importance in the case.

Meriam Ibrahim and husband

Reynolds, who teaches Islamic studies and theology at Notre Dame, notes that this is not some cultural aberration. This is the law in many Islamic countries. As British Prime Minister David Cameron said, it's barbaric to whip a woman simply for being in a marriage that Islam doesn't recognize and to execute her for leaving a faith she was never a part of. He might have added that it's also barbaric to have subjected her to the conditions she endured while in prison:

What made the case of Meriam Ibrahim particularly dramatic, and tragic, is that she was the mother of a young boy named Martin, and pregnant with a young girl (to be named Maya) at the time of her arrest. Since Martin was considered to be a Muslim, he could not remain with his Christian father but rather lived in (a bug-infested) prison cell with his “Muslim” mother (seen in pictures from jail with an Islamic headscarf). Moreover, Meriam was not admitted to a hospital to give birth but rather delivered Maya in that cell while she was shackled to the floor. When she was convicted, the religious court ruled that Meriam would be allowed to live for two more years in order to nurse her daughter. When Maya was weaned Meriam was to be hanged.

International pressure (particularly from the European Union) exerted on Sudan led to Meriam’s release on June 23. As her life would certainly be threatened by religious vigilantes (or even by her own relatives) in Sudan, she and her husband and children immediately sought to leave the country. They were not allowed to depart for reasons which are still unclear. In light of the involvement of diplomatic forces in the case it seems likely that she will eventually be allowed to leave, but it is still possible that some new legal action will be brought against her.

In fact, the latest is that she was rearrested and re-released, but not allowed to leave the country. Fearing for their lives, she and her family have taken refuge in the American embassy in Khartoum since her brother and many Muslim clerics want to kill her, and the government seems determined to get her to renounce her Christianity. Reynolds concludes with this:

We all can learn from the example of Meriam Ibrahim. After her conviction in May, Meriam was given three days to embrace Islam and save her life. This would have been an easy choice to make, but Meriam refused, declaring: “I am a Christian and I will remain a Christian.” Those who wonder whether heroic—and saintly—courage still exists can look to her.

Ibrahim is indeed a heroic figure. To stand fast against such enormous stupidity and terror takes tremendous courage.

It's not clear, on the other hand, what the Obama administration has done on her behalf, but it is clear that it has done nothing publicly. Perhaps if Ibrahim had said she had a lesbian partner whom she wished to marry, or if she had desired to abort her baby there would've been more sympathy for her in the White House.

In any case, the next time someone whines about a Republican "war on women" and how oppressive it is for women in America please enlighten this person about what a real war on women and real oppression look like. Tell him or her the story of Meriam Ibrahim.

Open Primaries

Amidst all the commentary I've seen on the recent runoff election in Mississippi in which the septuagenarian incumbent Republican senator Thad Cochran staved off a powerful challenge from a Tea Party endorsed candidate named Chris McDaniel I haven't seen any discussion of the thing about the election that most distresses me.

There's been oodles of commentary about all the millions of dollars poured into the race by the Republican "establishment" to push the wheezing Cochran over the finish line, and there's also been much written about the sleazy, dishonest ads this money paid for and the tens of thousands of African Americans who were bamboozled by those sleazy ads into voting for Cochran, providing him the margin by which he won.

What I haven't seen, though, and would very much like to see, is some discussion of why on earth any state or party has open primaries in which members of Party A get to pick, or at least strongly influence the selection of, the candidates Party B will run in the general election.

I asked a political scientist friend of mine in the wake of the Mississippi primary what the rationale was behind open primaries, and he told me that it's done so that more people can get involved in the process. I was dumbfounded. I know I'm not a very smart guy, but I don't understand why Republicans should be invited to choose the Democrats' candidate or vice versa. Nor do I see how that's much different than giving Russians a vote in our presidential election (Hmmm. Now that's got me wondering ....).

Anyway, Mississippi primaries allow cross-over voting so that anyone can vote in any primary contest the voter wishes to participate in, and Cochran relied on thousands of votes from black Democrats to give him his victory. Had he not had these votes he would've lost.

Some argue that in a congressional district that's overwhelmingly, say, Republican, Democrats and Independents are effectively disenfranchised because their party's candidate doesn't stand a chance. They should be allowed, the thinking goes, to participate in the Republican party's primary so that they can have some influence. That, we're told, is what democracy is all about.

That, not to put too fine a point on it, is insane. If independents feel disenfranchised then the obvious remedy for their angst is to join a party. If one chooses not to be a member then one doesn't get to have a say in the party's business. It's the price one pays for the aura of sophistication with which one surrounds oneself when one chooses to be an independent.

If one's party has no chance to win and one wishes one's vote to matter then the recourse is to join the other party and try to pull them in the desired direction, but the argument that Party A should let members of Party B decide their ballot so that more people can be involved in the process is arrant twattle.

If a state has an open primary such that anyone can vote in either party's race then what's the point of belonging to a party, anyway? The only advantage there is to putting up with the incessant appeals for donations and the irritating robocall advertisements is that one gets to vote in one's party's primary. That's it. But if anyone can vote in any primary there's no reason why anyone should belong to any party at all. It would serve both parties right if in every state which has an open primary every voter simply re-registered as an independent.

Turning the Jihadis

Strategy Page has an interesting piece on an aspect of the war on terror we rarely hear about, the program to "turn" captured jihadis and use them as informants. This is extremely dangerous work and a number of those who have agreed to work as informants for the U.S. have been discovered and killed.

While the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison recidivism rate (over 25 percent) regularly makes the news you rarely (and for good reason) hear about those freed from Guantanamo who have been “turned” (into informants against their terrorist colleagues). Getting Guantanamo prisoners to talk is a well-known activity there. Less well known are efforts to convince some of these hard-core terrorists to switch sides.

Even before September 11, 2001, counter-intelligence experts had discovered that it was very difficult to get agents into Islamic terrorist organizations. Since then, it's become easier. But the process is difficult, and very dangerous for those who agree to go undercover in these terrorist organizations. So far, Islamic terrorists and the public know a few dozen.

Two of the most prominent double agents came from Guantanamo. There was Abdul Rahman, an Afghan, who was released, returned to terrorism in Pakistan and was found out as a double agent and killed by his terrorist associates. Another Islamic terrorist, a Saudi Arabian (Jabir Jubran Al Fayfi), was one of more than a hundred Saudi inmates released from Guantanamo in 2006-2007. He returned to Saudi Arabia where he went through a mandatory rehabilitation course. There he was apparently recruited by Saudi intelligence. Once out of rehab Fayfi went to Yemen and joined the al Qaeda organization. He made it back to Saudi Arabia in 2010 with all sorts of useful information. This included news of the printer toner cartridge plot that was disrupted (and failed) at the end of October 2010. It’s still unclear of Fayfi was a double agent or just someone who turned after being arrested again.

Indications are that there are apparently a lot more (perhaps hundreds) such agents out there. Most of these you will have to wait a long time to find out about. Even the details of the recruiting process are top secret, in order to protect the agents recruited, and make it more difficult for the wrong people (potential double agents) to be hired. But the process tends to work best on those who have become disillusioned with Islamic radicalism. There are a lot of these men, but most simply walk away.

Others wish to fight against the cause they lost faith in. All the Americans had to do was get hip to the cultural buttons, and learn how to push them. Apparently the Israelis helped with this, as the Israelis have long run extensive informant networks in Arab populations. The Israelis have a thick playbook, and the U.S. apparently got them to share. Some NATO nations (especially the French) have useful experience to add to this. Several NATO nations are known to regularly turn Islamic terrorists and use them as informants.

There's more at the link. One hopes that a lot of these released prisoners are, in fact, spying for the West. Given the reluctance of the White House to recognize that we are in a thousand year war against Muslim extremism, a war that will continue as long as the most radical forms of Islam do not rule the world, we need all the help we can get.

Obama's Foreign Policy

James Oliphant at National Journal assesses the President's foreign policy achievements and finds them pretty thin.

[Sending 300 military advisors to Iraq] is a tacit acknowledgment that many of the assumptions that Obama and his foreign policy team made about the world have proven to be incorrect:

• That without the leverage of U.S. military power in the country, Iraqi leaders would pursue political change that wouldn't leave Sunnis alienated and antagonized and that its security forces could counter internal threats.
• That Afghanistan would be stable enough for the U.S. to end that war and depart with confidence the government can keep the nation on a stable path.
• That the U.S. could pursue a "reset" with Vladimir Putin's Russia—but then watched his troops take Crimea and threaten the rest of Ukraine.
• That the civil war in Syria could somehow be contained within its borders—and could reach a resolution without American intervention.

Oliphant might've add to this list the assumption that Iran could be talked into giving up its pursuit of nuclear weapons and the assumption that the Palestinians are willing to live in peace with their Israeli neighbors if only the right administration were to initiate talks.

In short, none of the assumptions with which this administration arrived in Washington has been confirmed by experience, and the reason is simple. Much of the world respects just one thing, and it's not good intentions or smooth talk. The world respects what it fears and it fears the use of force. Mr. Obama's foreign policy has been a failure because none of our adversaries fears that he would actually use military force beyond the use of a few predator drone strikes off in the mountains somewhere.

Diplomacy can only work when the other side thinks there's something to lose by not cooperating. When there's no fear that there's something to lose then there's no incentive to make concessions. Mr. Obama inspires neither fear nor respect in the world's capitals.

He has, in fact, managed to create the worst of all possible frameworks in which to craft a foreign policy. Our enemies don't fear us and our friends don't trust us. Given that as the basis for our efforts in the world, it's not likely that the President will enjoy much success in his attempts to bend other nations to his will.

Oliphant's article suggests that it was Mr. Obama's hubris and disdain for Washington's foreign policy establishment that led to our current precarious predicament. No doubt he's right. Mr. Obama came to the presidency talking as if he truly believed that with his election the U.S. finally had a president who understood the way the world worked and who would be able to convince the lions to lay down with the lambs. All we had to do was show people that we were a kinder, gentler nation, to quote George Bush the elder, and everyone would come together and peace and love would reign. It would be a new Age of Aquarius.

It was delusional, and it was delusional to think that a man who had never accomplished anything other than get himself elected to office could make the world swoon the way he made teenage girls swoon when he gave speeches. Yet not only did he believe it, he managed to convince a sizable segment of the American electorate to believe it, too. Meanwhile, our friends wrung their hands and our enemies were jubilant. Alas.

What Good Does This Do?

The Presbyterian Church USA has voted to divest itself of shares in three American companies that sell products to Israel which uses them in ways the PCUSA folk find morally offensive. The three companies are Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola. Their products have been employed in ways the PCUSA delegates believe oppress the Palestinian people on the West Bank:

On Friday, a group of church elders and ministers voted 310-303 to pull financial investments from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions -- a total of about $21 million, according to reports.

"It's so disgraceful," [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu said in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" news program. "Most Americans understand that Israel is a beacon of civilization and moderation."

He said that while much of the Middle East was "riveted by religious hatred, by savagery of unimaginable proportions," Israel is "the one democracy that upholds basic human rights, that guards the rights of all minorities, that protects Christians." Netanyahu advised the Presbyterians to "fly to the Middle East, come and see Israel for the embattled democracy that it is, and then take a bus tour, go to Libya, go to Syria, go to Iraq, and see the difference."

"I would give them two pieces of advice -- one is make sure it's an armor-plated bus, and second, don't say that you're Christian."

In a statement ahead of the vote, Presbyterian Church USA had said it was considering divestment in Caterpillar because the company provides bulldozers "used in the destruction of Palestinian homes" to make way for Israeli settlements. Hewlett-Packard, it said, "provides electronic systems at checkpoints, logistics and communications systems to support the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, and has business relationships with illegal settlements in the West Bank." And Motorola Solutions "provides military communications and surveillance systems in the illegal Israeli settlements."

At least it was a close vote.

Forget that PCUSA would probably not dream of divesting itself of holdings in companies that do business with the Palestinians whose constant attempts at terrorism are the reason why the Israelis buy what Caterpillar and the others manufacture in the first place. Forget that Israel is in a struggle with Palestinian groups for the very survival of its people and its state and is nevertheless the most humane, civilized, liberal entity in the Middle East, and among the most humane in the world, conferring on Palestinians rights that Palestinians would never grant to Israelis. Set all that aside and ponder this question:

What's the point of trying to punish the Israelis by putting American workers' jobs at risk? By pulling their money out of these companies, they're doing, presumably what they wish everyone would do, and if everyone did it the companies would go out of business. The Presbyterians may as well have voted to tell the Israelis that they'll show how angry they are at them by making it more likely that Americans get laid off.

I guess that makes sense to somebody, but that somebody will have to explain it to me. Until then it certainly looks like this was either very poorly thought out or that the PCUSA simply wants to indulge in sanctimonious moral posturing.

Bring Back the Special Prosecutor?

Carl Cannon explains why both political parties are understandably chary of special prosecutors, but also why the current IRS scandal seems to demand one anyway. President Obama insists that "there's not a smidgeon of corruption" at the IRS, but anyone who has not been subject to a prefrontal lobotomy finds the president's claim literally incredible.

If the IRS were trying to hide evidence of malfeasance what would they do differently than plead the fifth amendment at congressional hearings, refuse to cooperate at every step, and then claim that computer hard drives of a half dozen people whose correspondence would enable investigators to get to the bottom of the matter coincidentally crashed during just the time period in question with the hard drives having subsequently been destroyed.

If the IRS in general, and Lois Lerner in particular, had nothing to hide they surely wouldn't be doing everything they could to give the appearance that they do.

Cannon writes this:

The anniversary of the Watergate burglary arrived this week, along with the disquieting revelation that it’s not just disgraced former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner who’s taking the Fifth. Her email is clamming up, too.

More than a year into the controversy over the tax agency’s targeting of conservative non-profit groups, IRS officials casually told congressional investigators last week that a 2011 computer crash caused thousands of sought-after Lerner emails to disappear. So, can the mess at the IRS now objectively be called an Obama administration scandal?

White House officials don’t concede the point. “You’ve never heard of a computer crashing before?” presidential spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters. “The far-fetched skepticism expressed by some Republican members of Congress,” he added, “I think is not at all surprising and not particularly believable.”

That's the White House's position - to criticize the Republicans for not believing that six or seven computers all crashed at the same time and the very emails the Republicans requested were lost. It's like faulting the Republicans because they refuse to be idiots.

Cannon continues:

With its unprecedented abuse of executive power, no modern scandal was ever like Watergate, but this was a passable imitation of Richard Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler, who said two days after five suspects were arrested in the Watergate break-in that “certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is.”

President Obama himself hasn’t been above channeling Nixon, either. When the story first broke that the IRS was targeting groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names, he told reporters aboard Air Force One that these machinations were all the work of a few rogue agents in an Ohio IRS office -- “two Dilberts in Cincinnati” was the president’s phrase.

After it turned out that the Washington office was actually calling the shots, Obama didn’t change his story. Yes, some “bone-headed decisions” were made, he told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly -- but it didn’t entail “even a smidgen of corruption.”

If that's true, why are they stonewalling Congress? This is not a minor peccadillo on the part of the IRS. This is an abuse of power that's worse than any in the history of our government. It's the illegal use of the taxing agency of the government to punish an array of citizens for their political views by denying them tax exemptions that similar organizations on the left are granted. It's the attempt to actually prosecute some conservatives in a court of law for no reason other than that they oppose the President's policies.

Cannon goes on to explain how the special prosecutor's role was abused in the past to the discomfiture of both Republicans and Democrats and why the law was allowed to expire:

One way to get those missing emails would be with a federal inspector general complete with subpoena powers. Another -- and God help me for saying this -- would be a special prosecutor.

Watergate begat the independent counsel system, enacted by law as a post-Watergate reform by a Congress burned by the memory of the “Saturday Night Massacre” -- Nixon’s firing of one attorney general after another until he found someone willing to sack special prosecutor Archibald Cox. It was only a temporary victory for the beleaguered president, but it convinced most Americans -- and not just Democrats -- that the Justice Department couldn’t be trusted to investigate executive branch wrongdoing. Problems with the new reform arose from the start, however. Theoretically, special prosecutors were subject to judicial oversight, but in practice they were on their own....

For years, Republicans complained that congressional Democrats were abusing the law by demanding independent counsels for Republicans in the executive branch who thwarted their policy goals. Every Republican had their favorite horror story. One of the most egregious involved Lawrence Walsh. His zealous Iran-contra probe produced an October surprise -- the indictment of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and sliming of GOP presidential candidate George H.W. Bush a week before the 1992 presidential election.

For the better part of two decades these GOP complaints fell on deaf ears. All that changed when Bill Clinton was elected president, and congressional Republicans began using the independent counsel statute -- with its absurdly low standard of proof for triggering a special prosecutor -- against administration officials. Initially, Attorney General Janet Reno defended the statute, but as the 1990s rolled by Democrats began compiling their own list of fanatical special prosecutors....

There's more at the link. Despite the long list of prosecutorial excesses and abuses Cannon recites, the IRS scandal is so serious and so intractable, given administration stonewalling, that he adds this:

Eventually, the law was allowed to lapse during the Clinton administration. Many of us thought this was a good thing. Now, many executive branch observers are second-guessing themselves.

The current scandal has featured lying to Congress and stonewalling, and now missing evidence. The very fact that it appears to involve the Internal Revenue Service infuriates Republicans, as it should. Once upon a time, liberals were outraged by this sort of behavior, too -- one in particular.

In closing, Cannon reminds us that one of the articles of impeachment that was to have been brought against President Nixon in July of 1974 was that the president had “in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens [caused] income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner," and that the president had been guilty of “withholding relevant and material evidence or information from lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States.”

One of the House Judiciary Committee staff attorneys who helped prepare those articles was Hillary Rodham Clinton. “It’s important to get back to very professional inquiries that can’t be accused of politicizing things,” Clinton said in a recent interview. “Let’s try and find out what the facts are.”

Yes, let's. It'd be a lot easier, however, if Democrats didn't feel the need to defend bureaucrats who are obviously hiding the truth from the American people and to obstruct in whatever ways they can the efforts to find out exactly what that truth is.

Delivering the Mail

Ann Gauger, a biologist at Evolution News and Views has a brief but fascinating piece on the cellular "postal system." She points out that cells need a directed delivery system to make sure that proteins are distributed to the locations in the cell where they're needed. This transportation system is very complex and features at least three types of molecular motors that carry cargo throughout the cell. One of these motors, kinesin, is described in this short video:

Different "cargos" have different destinations. Gauger explains:

Some cargos go to the growing front end of a migrating cell. Others must travel the length of a neuron's long axon to get to their destination. And some have to be exported outside the cell. As an example, epithelial cells have three distinct surfaces, top, bottom, and sides. Each surface needs a different set of molecules delivered to it. Without this differentiation, tissues and organs made of epithelial sheets could not form or function properly. In embryos, special "determinants," either protein or RNA, have to be delivered to the right location in the developing egg or embryo. Once again, without these determinants the body plan of the nascent embryo is disturbed.

These facts raise some inevitable and extremely provocative questions:

How is all this coordinated? How does the cell know where to deliver its products? What is the address system? Where precisely is the map that matches all these addresses?

The cell acts as though it's an automated distribution system, but how is this system programmed? What part of the cell does the programming? It doesn't seem to be DNA since DNA codes for proteins, that is, DNA codes for hardware, not software.

This system is present in most if not all eukaryotes. In fact, it appears to date back to the first eukaryotes. Let's consider how this system might have come about. All parts are necessary for it to work. To return to our metaphor, if the postman just started transporting things at random, what benefit would that be? Yet address molecules are of no use without a postman, or without paths to travel on. Thus directed transport requires a complicated set of interacting parts, each of which is essential.

Without these motors and their interacting proteins, migrating cells wouldn't have the materials they need to move forward. Axons would die from lack of mitochondria and/or they would send signals very inefficiently. Epithelial cells would have their bottoms and tops confused. And embryos? A mess.

Oh, and I haven't mentioned that both kinesin and dynein (another transporter molecule) are essential for chromosome movement and spindle formation during cell division.

In other words, this distribution system must have evolved before cells developed the ability to reproduce, which means that this highly complex system evolved before there was evolution. Gauger concludes with this:

Amazing. Hard to sort out how it happened, isn't it?

Yes, it is. It's especially hard to sort it out if one is committed to a naturalistic explanation (i.e. an explanation in which only material, physical causal factors are allowed) for how it all came about. The naturalist account of the origin of such systems reminds me of the Queen in this exchange with Alice in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass:

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things.

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Carroll would have a lot of fun with today's Darwinian naturalism.

Where Atheism Leads

Last November I wrote a post titled Atheism and Nihilism in which I quoted a commenter on another blog who outlined the nihilistic implications which he believed followed from his atheism. He said this:

I’m a nihilist because it shows reality. If there is no higher power, then everything humanity holds dear was constructed by humanity and therefore not real.

There is:

• No objective, absolute, inherent meaning in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent purpose in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent value in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent morality in life or the universe. No good, no evil, no right, no wrong
• No objective, absolute, inherent truth in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent knowledge in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent logic in life or the universe

There's more:

• We are the cobbled together Frankensteins of billions of years of trial and error
• We have no free-will, mind, consciousness, rationality or reason. They are illusions and [the notions of] personhood, identity and humanity are not real.
• The emotions we express are just chemicals in our brain. The very things we seek in life like happiness, peace, contentment, joy are just chemicals reducing us to nothing more than chemical addicts.
• We are no more important than other animals. A dog is a rat is a pig is a boy.
• There is no afterlife. Once we die, we fade from existence and all our memories, experiences, knowledge etc goes with it. In time, we are forgotten.
• All the things we do in life are just for survival. Learning, loving, seeking, being positive, eating, relating, having fun are created for the sake of ignoring the real reason we are here and that’s to live as long as we can.
• There is no help coming to save humanity as a species or as individuals. We are all alone and on our own. If you can’t survive, you die.

Following the appearance of these remarks on Viewpoint a reader wrote to express his own agreement with what this commenter said:

I agree very closely with what this person commented. I am an atheist, and many people have called me a nihilist. I would also consider myself a nihilist in many aspects. Life cannot have any meaning. Humans exist only for the purposes they give to their own lives. If there is no higher power above us, morals must also be illusions created in the mind. Morals only exist because they help to achieve the most benefit. When people create the idea of morals, it changes their behavior and helps them to make decisions that they believe will benefit themselves. I don't understand why people want to believe things can be right or wrong outside of the mind.

I cannot understand why people believe humans are more important than any other animal. What could make us any more special than a more primitive animal? We have just become more advanced through evolution, but we are not special. Humans just happen to have evolved more through the process of evolution, which does not make us special. Any other animal could have evolved more, but by chance we happened to evolve more than the other animals.

I live a life filled with the love of knowledge, but I don't believe knowledge means anything to me. I desire to acquire knowledge. I want a thorough, organized understanding of my environment, but I understand that this desire is only the result of the desire to make the most beneficial decisions in life. If I know more about how the universe operates, I can make decisions that will bring me the most benefit. All people make decisions that they believe will benefit themselves and I want to have more knowledge so I can make better decisions and achieve the most benefit. Although I can never know if my understanding is accurate, I believe I can search and try to find an accurate understanding.

Nihilism is not a mentally healthy way to think, but it is what I believe to be accurate. I will never give up my nihilism, although it has been problematic for me. My nihilism sent me to therapy and eventually to the hospital, but the struggle was worth the pain as it was the only way I could believe I could be finding an accurate understanding of my reality.

I replied to this reader with this:

I sympathize with you...in the ordeal you've undergone, and I hope you're able to overcome the problems you wrestle with.

You say that it's your nihilistic mindset that's the source of your mental health problems and that you'll never give it up because you believe it's true. I think you're right to want to commit yourself to what's true, even if the consequences are not good, but, as you're aware, your nihilism is an inference from your atheism, and I'm convinced that atheism is false.

I don't know what has persuaded you that it's true, but I urge you to keep an open mind and to honestly continue to investigate the matter. It would be a tragedy if you spent your whole life living with what you describe as a mentally unhealthy way to think if, in fact, it's all unnecessary because it's all based on a false assumption about God.

This reader's sad letter and the earlier thoughts by the anonymous commenter that precipitated it reminded me of the words of Kirilov in Dostoyevsky's novel The Possessed. Kirilov, an atheist, says "I don't know how an atheist can know there is no God and not kill himself on the spot." Kirilov himself committed suicide. In light of the above I can understand why. Atheism may be true, but if so, God help us.

God and Cosmology Pt. II

Yesterday I mentioned the interview by Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting of atheist philosopher Tim Maudlin who made the claim that neither the earth nor mankind occupy a "privileged place" in the cosmos.

I explained yesterday the sense in which I thought mankind could very well enjoy such a status. There's a video soon to be released based on the work of biochemist Michael Denton which draws a similar conclusion based on different arguments.

Others have written about why the earth itself occupies a "privileged" position. Interested readers can check out the book Privileged Planet by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards. Philosopher Robin Collins has made similar arguments as well.

Here's more of Gary Gutting's interview with Prof. Maudlin:

Maudlin: Theism, as religious people typically hold it, does not merely state that some entity created the universe, but that the universe was created specifically with humans in mind as the most important part of creation. If we have any understanding at all of how an intelligent agent capable of creating the material universe would act if it had such an intention, we would say it would not create the huge structure we see, most of it completely irrelevant for life on Earth, with the Earth in such a seemingly random location, and with humans appearing only after a long and rather random course of evolution.

As I argued yesterday, if God chose to create the universe in the fashion cosmologists think it was created then the "huge structure" of the universe was a by-product of creating a world which contained the elements necessary to produce and sustain human life. These elements were created in the cores of stars which had to run through their life cycles and ultimately explode, dispersing their material throughout space. Those life cycles take billions of years, during which time the universe was expanding to it's present size.

But beyond that, Maudlin presumes to know why, and therefore how, God would have created the world had he wanted to create a habitat for humans. He elsewhere says we know very little about the cosmos, but he here assumes he knows enough to say how the universe should be structured if indeed it were created for humans. How does he know that the vastness of space wasn't created simply for the pleasure of the creator, just as people plant gardens or paint pictures that no one else will ever see simply because it gives them pleasure to create such beauty?

Anyway, here's more of the interview:

Gutting: I’d like to hear your thoughts on a recent effort to find scientific support for religious views. Some theists have appealed to scientific cosmology to argue that there’s a “fine-tuning” of physical constants that shows that the universe is designed to support living beings and, in particular, humans. It’s said, for example, that if the ratio of the mass of the neutron to the mass of the proton were just slightly different, there couldn’t be sufficient structure to allow for the existence of organisms like us.

Maudlin: At this point, our physical theories contain quite a large number of “constants of nature,” of which we have no deeper account. There seem to be more of them than most physicists are comfortable with, and we don’t know for sure whether these “constants” are really constant rather than variable. This gives rise to questions about “fine-tuning” of these constants....One thing is for sure: If there were some deity who desired that we know of its existence, there would be simple, clear ways to convey that information. I would say that any theistic argument that starts with the constants of nature cannot end with a deity who is interested in us knowing of its existence.

This is a remarkably presumptuous and inadequate reply. Maudlin claims that if God wished to make his existence known he could do so unambiguously. But because, if he exists, he doesn't make his existence unambiguously known to us he must therefore not really be interested in whether or not we know he exists. The unspoken corollary is that therefore whether we believe in his existence or not is not a matter of any real importance or concern to God.

The reason this is presumptuous is that in order to make the argument you have to presume to know an awful lot about what God is thinking and why he does what he does. Maudlin seems to believe that the theist's conception of God is a sort of giant version of Maudlin himself, and that God would think and act just as Maudlin himself would were he God.

For my part, I suspect that God has so ordered things that those who don't wish for God to exist will fail to see evidence that those who do want God to be there will see as clear indications that he exists. In other words, people tend to see in the "fine-tuning" of the universe, the amazing complexity of living cells, and their own personal existential yearnings either no evidence or strong evidence for God depending upon what they want in their heart to be true. Those who are determined not to see a divine Mind behind the origin and structure of the cosmos, won't. Those who are open to the existence of such a Mind, might.

God and Cosmology

Gary Gutting interviews philosopher Tim Maudlin for the New York Times' Opinionator. I'm reluctant to disagree with such an accomplished scholar but I fear that some of what Maudlin says is just nonsense. Here's an example:

Gary Gutting: Could you begin by noting aspects of recent scientific cosmology that are particularly relevant to theological questions?

Tim Maudlin: That depends on the given theological account. The biblical account of the origin of the cosmos in Genesis, for example, posits that a god created the physical universe particularly with human beings in mind, and so unsurprisingly placed the Earth at the center of creation.

Modern cosmological knowledge has refuted such an account. We are living in the golden age of cosmology: More has been discovered about the large-scale structure and history of the visible cosmos in the last 20 years than in the whole of prior human history. We now have precise knowledge of the distribution of galaxies and know that ours is nowhere near the center of the universe, just as we know that our planetary system has no privileged place among the billions of such systems in our galaxy and that Earth is not even at the center of our planetary system. We also know that the Big Bang, the beginning of our universe, occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, whereas Earth didn’t even exist until about 10 billion years later.

No one looking at the vast extent of the universe and the completely random location of homo sapiens within it (in both space and time) could seriously maintain that the whole thing was intentionally created for us. This realization began with Galileo, and has only intensified ever since.

So, those ignorant pre-scientific theists thought the earth was at the center of the universe and we know today that it's not, but do we? It all depends on what one means by "center," does it not? It's true the earth is not at the spatial center because there is no spatial center. The fact that the ancients thought there was was due to the common sense view, easily confirmed by the senses and held by almost everyone prior to 1543 when Copernicus published his theory of a geocentric universe, that everything revolved around the earth.

Nevertheless, it's not a mistake to assert that man really is, in some sense, at the center, and that the earth really is privileged. Assume for the sake of discussion that the consensus cosmological view is correct, and that God chose to create the universe just as cosmologists describe with a cosmic explosion of space/time and energy about 14 billion years ago. Then about 5 billion years ago the earth formed, giving rise to mankind about 200,000 years ago (the actual numbers are not important here). If so, the universe would have to go through all those billions of years of stellar birth and death in order for the elements necessary for life to be formed and dispersed through space.

In other words, it took billions of years to produce the elements of life. Man could not have arisen much sooner than he did, and during those billons of years the universe has been expanding, ultimately attaining it's current enormous size.

If all this is stipulated then in order for man to exist at all the universe would have to be at least as old as it is and thus would have to be as vast as it is. If God did all this then all of creation exists solely so that man could exist, in which case man is indeed the center or focal point of the universe.

Some have objected to the idea that man is the reason for the universe's existence by citing how insignificantly small we are on a cosmic scale, but why base significance on size? Our significance lies in the fact that we are purposely created by God, who made the whole universe so that we could be here, and on the fact that God loves us.

To say that the vast sweep of space and time makes it absurd to think that man and earth are in some sense privileged is to commit the mistake of looking at the cosmos solely from the human standpoint, but surely it's an act of intellectual arrogance to think that the human point of view is the only appropriate view to take. In fact, what Maudlin does by assuming that man's point of view is the only meaningful one is to privilege man in the very attempt to deny that man is privileged.

If we look at space and time from the Creator's viewpoint the whole cosmos might be little more than the contents of a kind of divine petri dish or, as I sometimes prefer to think of it, a projection of God's thought. For a being which possesses the attributes of God enormous stretches of space and time are as nothing at all.

The Holocaust Washington Ignores

All over the world, anywhere there are Muslims living in proximity to Christians, Christians are being murdered. Indeed, anyone who is not a Muslim, or not a Muslim of the proper sect, as we're seeing in Iraq, is living in fear as you read this.

Paul Marshall, who has done as much as anyone to make sure the world knows about the slaughter being carried out against Christian believers in the Middle East and elsewhere, perpetrated almost exclusively by Islamists, has a must-read article in the Weekly Standard detailing the horrors. There's another important piece at The Daily Mail with photos of the atrocity committed by Muslims who murdered 48 mostly Christian men in Kenya over the weekend.

Here are some excerpts from Marshall's essay:

For at least three reasons, the contemporary persecution of Christians demands attention: It is occurring on a massive scale, it is underreported, and in many parts of the world it is rapidly growing.

A few cases do get press coverage—the desperate plight of Meriam Ibrahim, for instance, who gave birth in a Sudanese prison just the other day. She was raised a Christian, but after officials learned that her long-absent father was a Muslim, she was sentenced to death for apostasy—for leaving Islam. And since in Sudan a Muslim woman may not be married to a Christian, her marriage to her American husband was declared void, and she was convicted of adultery and sentenced to 100 lashes to be administered before her execution. These punishments will be dropped if she renounces her Christian faith, which she steadfastly refuses to do.

Another case receiving attention is North Korea’s sentencing of a South Korean missionary, Kim Jong-uk, to life with hard labor. On May 30, he was convicted of espionage and trying to start a church. North Korea also still holds Kenneth Bae, an American sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor on charges of trying to use religion to overthrow the political system.

The Chinese government’s demolition of the 3,000-member Sanjiang church in Wenzhou on April 28 was newsworthy partly because of the church’s size, but also because Sanjiang was not an “underground” church but an official, approved, government-registered “Three-Self” church. Some 20 other official churches in the area have had all or parts of their buildings removed or demolished, and hundreds more are threatened with destruction.

And, most notorious, the abduction into slavery of hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria on April 14 by the al Qaeda-linked Boko Haram led news cycles and tweets for a time, though the religious dimensions of the story were often played down. While the kidnapped girls include Muslims (Boko Haram regards them as apostates because of their Western education), most are Christians, seized in a predominantly Christian area and now subjected to forced conversion.

These events get media attention because they are particularly poignant, or dramatic, or involve foreigners, but our media miss countless other stories. Since the kidnappings, Boko Haram has killed—not kidnapped, killed—hundreds of people, many in the predominantly Christian Gwoza area of Borno State, destroyed 36 churches, and kidnapped at least 8 more girls. On June 1, it attacked a Christian area in neighboring Adamawa state, killing 48 people. In Sudan, a second woman, Faiza Abdalla, has been arrested on suspicion of converting to Christianity, and on April 8 a court terminated her marriage to a Catholic. Iran is imprisoning and torturing pastors from the rapidly growing house church movement, including an American citizen, Pastor Saeed Abedini.

Vietnam has imprisoned over 60 Christian leaders. Eritrea holds more than 1,000 Christians in conditions so inhumane that prisoners die or are permanently crippled. In Somalia, in an ignored religious genocide, Al-Shabaab systematically hunts Christians and kills those it finds.

Traditionally, the United States has been regarded as the country that advocates religious freedom for all, often to the disdain of other Westerners. In recent years, however, that has changed. Now America is quieter, while others speak up.

British prime minister David Cameron said recently that “our religion is now the most persecuted religion around the world” and “We should stand up against persecution of Christians and other religious groups wherever and whenever we can, and should be unashamed in doing so.” German chancellor Angela Merkel has repeatedly stressed that Christians are the world’s most widely persecuted religious group. Probably most outspoken of all is Vladimir Putin; no doubt this reflects geopolitical calculation, but the fact remains that he is stressing the matter.

In the United States, meanwhile, the position of U.S. ambassador-at-large for religious freedom is vacant, as it has been for over half of President Barack Obama’s tenure. Even when the position has been filled, in the last decade it has usually been marginalized. President Obama gave a great speech on religious freedom at the National Prayer Breakfast, but little action followed.

The United States has marginalized the issue in other ways, too.

After the massacre of 25 Copts by the Egyptian military on October 9, 2011, the White House lamented the “tragic loss of life among demonstrators and security forces” (emphasis added) and called for “restraint on all sides.” As my colleague Sam Tadros commented, “I call upon the security forces to refrain from killing Christians, and upon Christians to refrain from dying.”

On Easter morning in 2012, a church in Kaduna, Nigeria, was the target of a Boko Haram suicide car bombing that killed 39 and wounded dozens. (The previous Christmas, Boko Haram had bombed St. Theresa’s Catholic Church outside the capital, Abuja, killing 44 worshipers, and also attacked churches in the towns of Jos, Kano, Gadaka, and Damaturu.) There was no official comment from the Obama administration about the Kaduna massacre on Christians’ holiest day. Instead, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a press release celebrating the Romani people and demanding that Europe become more inclusive of them.

At the beginning of the State Department’s annual report on international religious freedom for 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry stated, “While Christians were a leading target of societal discrimination, abuse, and violence in some parts of the world, members of other religions, particularly Muslims, suffered as well.” The assertion is incontrovertible, yet the wording elides the truth: Christians are not just “a leading target,” they are the leading target. American officials seem so scared of being accused of selectively defending Christians that they consistently overcompensate and minimize what is happening.

Although the persecution of Christians is widespread—Nigeria is where most are actually being killed, North Korea is the most repressive, China represses the largest number—the Pledge of Solidarity focuses on the Middle East and specifically on Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. These are countries where the situation has deteriorated rapidly to the point where Christian communities—along with smaller religious minorities such as Mandeans, Yezidis, Baha’is, and Ahmadis—now face “an existential threat to their presence in the lands where Christianity has its roots.”

In the last decade, half of Iraq’s Christians have fled the country, and many others have fled to the Kurdish region. In three days last August, Egypt’s Coptic Christians experienced the worst single attack against their churches in 700 years—with 40 churches utterly destroyed and over 100 other sites severely damaged. Tens of thousands of Copts are estimated to have fled their homeland. Syria’s Christians, like all Syrians, are caught in the middle of a brutal war, but, according to the pledge, they “are also victims of beheadings, summary executions, kidnappings, and forcible conversions, in deliberate efforts to suppress or eradicate their religious faith.” Still missing is any large-scale mobilization of free people on behalf of persecuted Christians around the world.

Meanwhile, like Nero who fiddled while Rome burned, President Obama spent much of the weekend in Palm Springs playing golf. Again.

There's much more by Marshall at the link. Radical Islamists are engaged in a war of extirpation of any and all who see the world differently from the way they see it. Their war is savage, barbaric, and based on an invincible ignorance. The feebler the opposition to it the sooner it will reach our shores just as it did in 2001. We need political leadership in Washington that will not be silent in the face of this global holocaust. We apparently don't have it.

How the West Won

I recently finished Rodney Stark's excellent new book titled How the West Won. Like all his books HWW is history that reads like a novel. He argues in the book that all of the progress we've enjoyed in the world since the medieval period has had it's genesis in the West.

His theory, convincingly defended, to my mind, is that progress only occurred in areas with high levels of personal liberty, low taxation, and strong property rights. To the extent these were absent, as they have been in most parts of the world throughout history, progress died in the crib, as it were. He also argues that the crucial soil for progress was a Judeo-Christian worldview in which the universe was seen as an orderly, law-governed, rational product of a personal God. Where this belief was absent, as it was everywhere but Europe, science and technology, medicine and learning, never developed.

Along the way Stark punctures a host of myths that have become almost axiomatic on the left but which are at complete variance with the historical facts. He makes a strong case for the claim that capitalism and even colonialism have been blessings, that the fall of Rome was one of the single most beneficial events in world history, that the "Dark Ages" never happened, that the crusades were not at all the rapacious ventures by murderous Christians of gentle, pastoral Muslims we've been told they were, that historical climate change had many salubrious effects on Western progress, that there was no scientific "revolution" but rather a continual and accelerating unfolding of scientific discovery that began at least as far back as the 13th century and probably earlier.

I urge anyone interested in history to get a copy. Stark includes a lot that he covered in earlier works, but much of it is new and what isn't new bears repeating anyway.

An example of something that's both myth-busting and new was Stark's discussion of the work of Robert D. Woodberry. Woodberry's research makes it clear that much, if not most, of the progress made around the world is due to the work of Western missionaries who labored a century or more ago.

Here's what Stark writes about the role missionaries played in making life better for millions:

Perhaps the most bizarre of all the charges leveled against Christian missionaries (along with colonialists in general) is that they imposed "modernity" on much of the non-Western world. It has long been the received wisdom among anthropologists and other cultural relativists that by bringing Western technology and learning to "native peoples," the missionaries corrupted their cultures, which were as valid as those of the West....But to embrace the fundamental message of cultural imperialism requires that one be comfortable with such crimes against women as foot-binding, female circumcision, the custom of Sati (which caused women to be burned to death, tied to their husbands' funeral pyres), and the stoning to death of rape victims on the grounds of their adultery.

It also requires one to agree that tyranny is every bit as desirable as democracy, and that slavery should be tolerated if it accords with local customs. Similarly, one must classify high-infant mortality rates, toothlessness in early adulthood, and the castration of young boys as valid parts of local cultures, to be cherished along with illiteracy. For it was especially on these aspects of non-Western cultures that modernity was "imposed," both by missionaries and other colonialists.

Moreover, missionaries undertook many aggressive actions to defend local peoples against undue exploitation by colonial officials. In the mid-1700s, for example, the Jesuits tried to protect the Indians in Latin America from European efforts to enslave them; Portuguese and Spanish colonial officials brutally ejected the Jesuits for interfering. Protestant missionaries frequently became involved in bitter conflicts with commercial and colonial leaders in support of local populations, particularly in India and Africa....

A remarkable new study by Robert D. Woodberry has demonstrated conclusively that Protestant missionaries can take most of the credit for the rise and spread of stable democracies in the non-Western world. That is, the greater the number of Protestant missionaries per ten thousand local population in 1923, the higher the probability that by now a nation has achieved a stable democracy. The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other pertinent control variables, including gross domestic product and whether or not a nation was a British colony.

Woodberry not only identified this missionary effect but also gained important insights into why it occurred. Missionaries, he showed, contributed to the rise of stable democracies because they sponsored mass education, local printing and newspapers, and local voluntary organizations, including those having a nationalist and anticolonial orientation.

These results so surprised social scientists that perhaps no study ever has been subjected to such intensive prepublication vetting....

Protestant missionaries did more than advance democracy in non-Western societies. The schools they started even sent some students off to study in Britain and America. It is amazing how many leaders of successful anticolonial movements in British colonies received university degrees in England - among them Mahatma Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya....

Less recognized are the lasting benefits of the missionary commitment to medicine and health. American and British Protestant missionaries made incredible investments in medical facilities in non-Western nations. As of 1910 they had established 111 medical schools, more than 1,000 dispensaries, and 576 hospitals. To sustain these massive efforts, the missionaries recruited and trained local doctors and nurses, who soon greatly outnumbered the Western missionaries....

[Woodberry's] study showed that the higher the number of Protestant missionaries per one thousand population in a nation in 1923, the lower that nation's infant mortality rate in 2000 - an effect more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP per capita. Similarly, the 1923 missionary rate was strongly positively correlated with a nation's life expectancy in 2000.

These missionaries battled every kind of pestilence, hardship, and deprivation. They were often murdered or died from disease, all in an effort to make life better for people living in miserable circumstances, while leftist academics sit in their comfortable, air-conditioned offices, never having made anything better for anyone, blithely and foolishly condemning those who did for being "superstitious" and "cultural imperialists" who imposed their values on idyllic societies that would be better off if left alone.

Some might call these academics intellectually arrogant or even stupid, but if nothing else it's certainly a display of moral blindness.

Woodberry's paper can be read in pdf here.