Swimming in the Shallow Water

Vice-president Dick Cheney delivered a right hook to the chin of John Edwards last night by shining a light on the North Carolinian's abysmal record of attendance in the Senate. His recitation of Edwards' lackluster senate career was devastating. We sat there wondering how America can vote for a guy who's been collecting a paycheck and benefits for almost six years while doing next to nothing to earn it. How, we wondered, can anyone defend such an egregious abuse of tax-payer trust?

All we had to do to find an answer to that question was be one of the dozen or so viewers who watched Keith Olberman on MSNBC tonight. Did Olberman hammer Edwards for failing to fulfill his obligation to do the people's business? Of course not. He spent a large part of his show castigating Cheney for having forgotten that he'd ever met Edwards' before last night's debate. Olberman seemed outraged that Cheney would say this. Cheney must be lying, he hinted. We know they met, we have it on video, Olberman scoffed. True enough but so what? It's possible that there's not a person in this great country of Dick Cheney's age and background who remembers every meeting of every individual in his life, but Olberman couldn't get over his glee in having caught Cheney in a whopper.

Worse, Olberman, having demonstrated a remarkable proclivity for diving into the shallow end of the pool, found himself unable to make his way into deeper waters. He could manage no outrage at all over the fact that Edwards has been essentially AWOL from the Senate since almost the day he was sworn in. The senator's absenteeism is surely what matters, not whether Cheney's memory was correct, yet to such as Keith Olberman, Cheney's lapse negated his entire critique of his opponent's pathetic attendance record. Olberman never once tried to challenge the vice-president on the substance of his allegations. Instead he latched onto an irrelevant mistake and treated it as if it were a felony. No wonder nobody watches.

<i>Sola Scriptura</i> In a Po-Mo World

David Wayne at Jollyblogger challenges his readers with the question "Does the doctrine of 'sola scriptura' have a place in the post-modern world?" The doctrine of sola scriptura (Literally, scripture only) arose out of the Protestant Reformation and affirms that the Bible is the word of God and is our ultimate authority in all matters of faith and practice.

The question seems to imply that if we can't conform our theological views to current cultural fashion we might be impelled to discard our theology. For someone who accepts the principle of sola scriptura, this probably seems backwards. It might perhaps better be asked whether post-modernity can find any place to dwell within a scriptural worldview.

Whichever way we frame it, however, the question must be answered in the negative. Whatever one thinks about the Bible, it seems pretty clear that the post-modern mindset is quite incompatible with sola scriptura.

The Bible makes claims to truth. It asserts in the strongest possible way that there is an objective universal truth about God, about man's condition, about morality, and about man's destiny. It tells us of Jesus' assertion that he is the way, the truth, and the life and it insists that Jesus' claim is objectively true.

Post-moderns, however, would find this claim incomprehensible and would tend to ignore it just as they would ignore all exclusive claims and all claims about any absolute truth. Post-modernity seeks to relativize or pragmatize truth, not absolutize it.

In a post-modern culture scripture would be removed from the lofty perch upon which it was ensconced by the Reformers and reduced to the status of secular literature. It could not be permitted to occupy the exalted chair of final arbiter of matters of faith and belief for these would be determined by the consensus in the existential communities in which people find themselves.

Thus one community's truth would not necessarily correspond to that of another and the same would be the case for individuals within the community. Communities of faith might choose to continue to accept the traditional theological significance of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but their decision to do so stands on a cloud. It's purely an emotional choice which is grounded in nothing but an arbitrary preference.

Should the church acquiesce to the post-modern view the whole notion of doctrine would soon be subjectivized and relativized until "truth" morphed into whatever gives the individual or the community a sense of well-being and hope. Truth would be that which grips the imagination of those in the relevant faith community and whatever they agree upon as having some "purchase" upon their commitments.

Faith would be based on nothing more substantial than emotional experience. It would forfeit any objective ground in the scripture, because scripture would be interpreted to mean whatever the reader felt most deeply that it meant. The significance of scripture would be intensely personal. What it means to me would be my truth, it would be true for me. Questions like whether Jesus was in fact divine or did indeed rise from dead would be moot. If you believe he did, then he did, if someone else believes he didn't, then he didn't. Each of us would be an island possessing our own private truth, and there would be no point in asking whether Jesus really was divine or really did rise from the dead. If you believe it strongly then the answer's yes. If you don't the answer's no.

Moreover, even the notion that the Bible is the word of God would come in for revision in the light of deconstructive unmasking of the authors' hidden agendas. Such an analysis would surely conclude that the texts are obvious attempts by the writers to empower males, or some such thing, and that the Church perpetuates this gender oppression by foisting upon the community the myth that these writings were really the very words of God.

The doctrine of sola scriptura, that the Bible alone is the final authority in matters of faith and practice, is antithetical to the post-modern idea that there is no final authority in such matters except the self or the community. The doctrine implicitly denies human autonomy while post-modernity explicitly affirms it.

Post-modernity is not unreceptive to everything about Christian belief, but it is incompatible with the doctrine that the Bible is the ultimate authority in our lives. If we choose to conform to the world then we will have to abandon the Reformation view of the Bible, and if we wish to be conformed to the Bible we will have to reject much about the post-modern view of the world. Perhaps this is just another illustration of what it means to be in the world but not of it.

The God That Failed

Sigmund Freud captures the disillusionment of those who in the early years of the twentieth century embraced the liberal view of man as inherently good, a Promethean shaper of a glorious future, an Olympian god:

"A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met in its path but also shattered our pride in the achievements of civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes for a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we regarded as changeless."

Sigmund Freud --On Transience

Those earlier humanists who thought man to be the closest thing to divinity in the cosmos were devastated by the horrors of WWI. The same thing happened when the full extent of the holocaust became known after WWII, and it happened again when the crimes of totalitarian communism were exposed in the second half of the last century. Yet the project of deifying man is resurrected every generation. The liberal, humanistic faith that man can be his own deity, that he doesn't need a transcendent God, that he can create heaven on earth all by himself, is as irrepressible as it is manifestly false.

Telling it Like it Isn't

Jim Skillen at the Center for Peace and Justice has a piece on the election wherein he makes these remarks:

Do you want to know what kind of president George Bush will be during the next four years? Look at his record; read reality; and then ask how well his words square with that record and reality.

For Senator Kerry one should take a different approach. He has no presidential deeds to evaluate. Listen carefully to his words, his promises, his proposals. If the promises remain general and vague; if the tax-and-spending proposals don't quite add up; if the security and foreign affairs strategies don't seem likely to yield more safety and international justice over the next decade; if he relies as much on Bush-bashing as Bush relies on Kerry-bashing, then assume that Kerry will be that kind of president.

Mr. Skillen's advice needs a little clarification. First, it's simply misleading to say that Kerry has no presidential deeds to evaluate as if there were no relevant record at all upon which a voter can base a decision on Mr. Kerry. He has spent almost twenty years in the Senate and, on those occasions when he has shown up, has cast votes. There is plenty of record there for voters to contemplate. Mr. Skillen doesn't mention it because unless those who take the trouble to discover how the Senator has voted over the years are pro-abortion, pacifist socialists Kerry's record is likely to alienate most of them, including, one hopes, not a few of Skillen's own readers.

The biggest untold story in this campaign, in fact, is Senator Kerry's senatorial record. The media aren't going to publicize it, of course, because they know it would swing the election to Bush, and the Republicans, for some unfathomable reason, haven't made much of an issue of it either except to cite the Senators chronic tergiversations on Iraq.

The second point on which Mr. Skillen allows his ideological preference to cloud his judgment is when he suggests that Mr. Bush has "relied on Kerry-bashing". It's not clear whether he means to imply that Bush himself has engaged in this behavior, or whether he means to suggest that Bush is relying on others to do the bashing. The latter interpretation is more charitable toward Skillen because it merely makes him look silly, but it is less plausible than the former.

If Skillen is indeed stating that it remains to be seen whether Kerry will rely on others to do the bashing of the president, then we must conclude that Mr. Skillen must have been sequestered in a cave for the last two years during which time Kerry's surrogates have been flaying Bush with the most odious charges and allegations imaginable.

Assuming he hasn't been on a two year retreat somewhere, Skillen must mean that Bush himself has been taking cheap shots at Kerry and that we should watch to see if Kerry responds in kind. If so, Skillens' claim is simply false. Bush has publically said nothing about Kerry except as it pertains to his record throughout this campaign. He has been extraordinarily gracious to his opponent in praising his dubious military record and has refused to attack Kerry personally. Perhaps Mr. Skillen can offer us a counterexample or two, but it's doubtful. Unless he can, however, his assertion above that Bush has engaged in some ignoble political chicanery slanders a man whose conduct in this campaign should serve as a model for politicians everywhere, and Skillens' insinuation to the contrary, therefore, is itself a disreputable cheap shot.

Thanks to Derek Melleby via Byron Borger for the Skillen article.

Is the Global Test Galaxy Wide?

Having been roundly criticized, Senator Kerry attempts to clear up his reference to the need for a "global test" which any foreign policy initiative would evidently have to pass in his administration:

"The test I was talking about is a test of legitimacy - not just in the globe, but elsewhere. If you do things that are illegitimate in the eyes of other people, it's very hard to get them to share the burden and risk with you. I will never cede America's security to any institution or any other country. No one gets a veto over our security. No one."

"Elsewhere"?! Is Bush now going to be hammered by the left because his coalition didn't include Martians?

Cult of Death

Wretchard at Belmont Club quotes from an article in the London Times that discusses Muslims living in London:

Mobile phones are being used by young Muslims living in Britain to watch videos of hostages being beheaded by militants in Iraq. With their color screens and access to the internet, the latest generation of mobile phones are being used to download the videos after they are posted on Islamist websites. The videos can then be sent to other mobiles.

One militant has saved every available video of hostages being killed in Iraq. An Algerian in his thirties who has lived in London for almost ten years, he is a follower of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the cleric whose extradition is sought by the US ... said "for us the jihad is alive in our hands as we watch American infidels get their heads chopped off ... within a few minutes of the Americans dying last week I was watching them on my phone"

Wretchard cites this anecdote to highlight the futility of abandoning the war on terror, or turning it into a police action, as Senator Kerry proposes. These people are cruel, vicious, sick, and consumed with hatred for the West. They will not be stopped by a police investigation.

The article, however, summons another observation to mind. Muslim terrorists are sometimes said to be little different from, say, the Irish terrorists in Belfast. Both are motivated by religion, in one case Islam, in the other Christianity, and both use terror and murder as weapons to achieve religiously inspired aims.

The assumption is that religion of any kind can lead to horrors, but the comparison of the jihadis to the IRA is inapt. The Irish of the IRA or Sein Fein are not devout, pious men. Their religion is merely a social bond which gives them group identity. They don't invoke their devotion to Jesus Christ as their justification for their murders. They are thugs who use religion as an identifier like L.A. street gangs use race or the colors of their jackets.

The jihadis, on the other hand, are extremely devout, offering their crimes as a sacrifice to Allah and imploring his blessing upon their savagery. In their mind their viciousness and bloodthirstiness pleases God and gains them his favor. Everything they do they do in the name of Allah.

Another difference between the Irish terrorists and the Muslims is that the Irish could not take their Christianity seriously and still remain terrorists. The jihadis take their Islam very seriously, and because they do, they are murderers.

Their religion condones their depravity. What, then, are we to make of a belief system which encourages so many of its most fervent adherents to revel in death and butchery and others to remain passive and mute while such atrocities are carried out in the name of their faith?

There is a deep pathology associated with any religion which teaches that the unbeliever should have his head severed and that God will not only approve but reward the deed. There is a deep pathology in a religion which condones and encourages such hatred and which produces young men who delight so much in such horrific behavior that they collect videos of it.

Until Muslims do more than they are presently doing to demonstrate that the Islam we're seeing and reading about is not the genuine faith, until they begin to convince us that their version of God is not really just a gross perversion of the God of Christianity, we have every reason to insist that there be no room in the civilized world for what certainly appears to be a primitive, hate-drenched cult of death.

American Muslims have much work to do. We want to believe the best of them. We're listening.

Teacher! Leave Those Kids Alone!

Here's a weird story out of New Jersey. It seems that a middle school teacher got in trouble with parents and administrators for having a picture of the president on her wall, but declining to talk about politics with her students who questioned her about it. See here for the details. The story itself makes no one look particularly good, least of all the administrators and the parents who sound like a bunch of bigots. Here's part of it:

Parents e-mailed an assistant principal accusing Pillai-Diaz (the teacher) of suppressing free speech because the teacher refused to talk to pupils about why the color photo (of George and Laura Bush) hung in the room.

"Students said, 'You like George Bush? He's killed people,' " Pillai-Diaz said. "As a rule I don't talk about my politics in the classroom."

According to Pillai-Diaz, Assistant Principal Mark Daniels said he had no problem with the photo, which hung next to posters of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. But Daniels told the teacher she should address questions that arose because of the photo.

"He wasn't giving me the power to direct conversation in my classroom," said Pillai-Diaz, who regarded the picture just as an image of the current president.

Thursday, at back-to-school night, the controversy exploded after a parent asked why the picture was up, Pillai-Diaz said.

"The way she asked was a political assault," the teacher said.

Then the parents started their own debate about the picture, and one mother stormed out of the classroom, Pillai-Diaz said.

Friday morning, the teacher, who is in her sixth year of teaching and her first in South Brunswick, was called into the assistant principal's office. Daniels told her to remove the picture, Pillai-Diaz said.

"He said, 'If you care about your job, you'll take the picture down,' " she said.

Pillai-Diaz told the assistant principal to take the picture down himself. Then she sought Principal Jim Warfel, who gave her an upbraiding.

"He said, 'You've caused more disruption, hatred and anger than anyone I've ever known,' " she said.

The teacher said the principal told her to "get out," so she left and headed to the South Brunswick Police Department.

An officer accompanied Pillai-Diaz back to the school because she said she feared for her safety when she went to collect her belongings, police said.

Once Pillai-Diaz felt safe at the school the officer left, police said.

In the school, Pillai-Diaz had a two-hour meeting with Superintendent Gary McCartney and a representative from the teachers' union. Both parties told the teacher she would lose any fight she would try to start about the picture, Pillai-Diaz said.

Viewpoint has no idea what all is going on here, but it sounds like teachers in this school cannot post pictures of the president of the United States in their classrooms unless they are prepared to talk politics, whether such a discussion is relevant to the lesson or not.

It's not hard to imagine what the principals would have done had she actually been talking politics and the parents complained about that, especially if she were defending George Bush against students' criticism.

Don't these people have enough problems without making an issue out of this? Don't these parents understand that it is completely appropriate to honor the president? Don't the administrators understand that it's their job to defend their teachers from unreasonable parental criticism? Doesn't the teacher understand that when students initiate a question about Bush's policies she's missing a good opportunity to provide valuable education if she declines to answer it?

Unless there's more to this story than meets the eye, which there probably is, the parents here look stupid, the administrators look pusillanimous, and the teacher looks paranoid, maybe for good reason.

Thanks to JoanneJacobs.com for the tip.

If Not There, Where?

Senator Kerry and his fellow Democrats have claimed on several occasions that, because of Bush's failures in Iraq, terrorists are now streaming into that country. Well, if we weren't there where would the terrorists be, and what would they be doing there? The fact that terrorists are flooding Iraq is a good thing. It means that they're not going to places where they can easily attack our children, a favorite target of the Islamic "warriors". Instead, they're going to a place where they have to confront our troops and it would seem that even the dimmest eyes would see that that's a far more desirable state of affairs than the alternative.

They Work Harder

Education blogger Joanne Jacobs has a story that is repeated every year in almost every school around the country which has Asian immigrants in its student body:

On News Gorilla, Ed Susman, former city editor of the Hartford (Conn.) Times, writes about handing out American flags to newly arrived immigrants. It was a community service thing and a nice photo for the paper. One day, he gave a flag to the first group of Vietnamese refugees.

No one spoke a word of English, but I managed to communicate with the 12-year-old daughter who spoke some French and I hadn't forgotten all my French from high school days.

Flash forward about 4-5 years, during the last days of the Times, and this young Asian woman shows up at my desk. In flawless English she thanked me for the flag so many years past. She was now graduating high school, had a scholarship to some school I would never have even applied to and was either valedictorian or salutatorian or something major in her high school class.

He asked why Asian students outperform native-born students. The girl said that after the flag picture appeared, a school official came to the door and told her mother to register the four children for school. Her mother explained she could afford only to register the two boys. She was told there would be no fees; education is free.

The girl told me that after the school official left, her mother gathered her children around her and said, "It is true that the streets are paved with gold in this country. They give away education. If any of you ever misses a day of class I will beat you so hard you will never sit down again." The girl said that grades less than a B were similarly punishable. All the girl's siblings were at the head of their classes.

An English teacher in San Jose once told me that all her best students were Vietnamese. This was a few years after the refugee influx. I said, "How can that be? They all speak English as a second language. How can they be the best in English."

"They work harder," the teacher said.

It's not necessarily that Asian kids are inherently brighter than kids in other ethnic groups (although they may be). Their academic success is correlated to the expectations of their families. If a family doesn't value education the children from that household are going to perform well below their potential no matter how much money the state spends on them and no matter how good their teachers are.

Must We Tolerate Islam?

David Foster, writing for the Claremont Institute, has an outstanding piece on whether, and under what conditions, Muslims have a right to practice their religion in a country founded on the principles of tolerance and freedom of religion. The reflexive response is to assert that freedom of religion, if it means anything at all, means that all citizens have the right to believe and practice whichever religion they choose, but Foster presents a persuasive argument, based on the writings of John Locke and George Washington, that this is simply not the case. Here are a couple of excerpts:

In order to merit toleration, then, believers must support a particular kind of society-the kind that protects religious freedom. If the basis of such a society is the distinction between church and state, then any religion that denied this distinction would have no legitimate claim to be tolerated. If some branch of Islam does not support that distinction, it is essentially hostile to the kind of open society we value and cannot be tolerated. If it does support that distinction, it deserves toleration. The most important means we have to know the truth is through the speech of its adherents: they must tell us plainly and publicly where they stand.

As Locke put it, those "who attribute unto the Faithful, Religious and Orthodox, that is, in plain terms, unto themselves, any peculiar Privilege of Power above other Mortals, in Civil Concernments...have no right to be tolerated by the Magistrate; as neither those that will not own and teach the Duty of tolerating All men in matters of meer Religion." Such men cannot be tolerated because their claim of special privileges or their (related) refusal to teach toleration shows that they are ready upon any "occasion to seize the Government, and possess themselves of the Estates and Fortunes of their Fellow-Subjects; [they] only ask leave to be tolerated by the Magistrate so long until they find themselves strong enough to effect it." We ought not tolerate the intolerant because it makes no sense to tolerate someone so that he can prepare to subjugate you.

But how can we address this problem without adopting dictatorial methods and losing the very freedoms we would protect? According to Locke, the answer is quite simple: tolerate any religious group whose leaders are known for teaching toleration and for disavowing special privileges for the orthodox (i.e., themselves). To take an example from our time, it is not enough for a cleric to say, as many do, that "Islam is a religion of peace." That may be true, but when radical Muslims say this they almost always mean that there will be peace only after the whole world is converted to Islam; and in that peace Muslims will have privileges denied to non-Muslims (this is the concept of dhimmitude). "Islam is a religion of peace" - if that is all that is said - is exactly the sort of ambiguous phrase that Locke warns can be a sign that the speaker must not be tolerated.

But to deserve toleration, all the clerics need to do is to become known for teaching their followers that the meaning of this phrase is that Islam is a religion that accepts the distinction of Mosque and state, and that it advocates good-will to all men, whether they are good Muslims (the orthodox), dissenters, or non-Muslims. In short, any clergyman deserves toleration who is known for teaching his own followers that they have a duty of tolerating all men in matters of religion.

In the past lovers of liberty in the West had to listen carefully to what various Christian sects were saying about religion and politics. That is still important. But in the modern world, most Christian churches have reconciled themselves with toleration and contort themselves to be ecumenical, and it is what some Islamic clerics are saying that most demands our vigilance. That, at least, is what toleration requires.

The real question is not so much whether Muslims in the West are willing to accept and teach the duties of toleration - if the wider society expects it, they will probably comply - but whether the West itself still understands and has the will to defend its own principles.

Islam, Foster argues, only has a right to be tolerated to the extent that it genuinely supports tolerance itself. If its goal is to establish an Islamic state by whatever means necessary and subsequently impose second class citizenship on unbelievers, then it forfeits its right to constitutional protection.

This essay should be read by everyone with an interest in political philosophy or simply in the appropriate response to the Islamic threat to Western civilization. Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

Good News From Iraq #11

The 11th installment of Arthur Chrenkoff's Good News From Iraq is on-line. Despite the lamentations emanting from the Democrat left there continues to be much to be encouraged about. As Chrenkoff says in concluding his report:

The obstacles are considerable, challenges huge, but day by day the Iraqi people, assisted by the Coalition and people of good will from around the world, are slowly forging ahead with the task of reconstructing their country - and more importantly - reconstructing themselves.

Complementing Chrenkoff's report are a couple of other items from the blogosphere. A post by Omar at Iraq The Model underscores the apparent willingness of Iraqis to fight to rid themselves of the pestilence in their midst.

Meanwhile the campaign to clean up the nests of insurgents in the Sunni triangle is underway. See here for a discussion and, of course, don't miss Wretchard's analysis at Belmont Club. It's excellent.

Chrenkoff's updates (He also does them for Afghanistan) are must reading for anyone who finds the constant metronomic negativity of the media and the Kerry campaign to be dispiriting. This is not to say that there are not very serious problems in Iraq. There are, but by focussing only on the problems the media give the impression that the situation there is chaotic and hopeless. Since they have abrogated their obligation to give us both sides of the story, in hopes of persuading Americans to reject President Bush in November, people like Chrenkoff are performing a very valuable, even essential, service.

Did Kerry Cheat?

Drudge has video of Senator Kerry flagrantly violating the rules of last Thursday's debate which explicitly prohibited the use of any notes, etc. The rules stated that "No props, notes, charts, diagrams, or other writings or other tangible things may be brought into the debate by either candidate.... Each candidate must submit to the staff of the Commission prior to the debate all such paper and any pens or pencils with which a candidate may wish to take notes during the debate, and the staff or commission will place such paper, pens and pencils on the podium..." Go to the video and see for yourself.

Whether these smuggled notes, if they were notes, helped Kerry or not is really beside the point. The question is, if he was in fact cheating, as it certainly appears that he is, what does it say about the Senator that he can't be trusted to do what he agreed to do in the negotiations for this event? If he feels compelled to cheat in a venue like this what kind of a man is he?

Those Ignorant Christians

Novelist Philip Roth, in speaking of president Bush, says that "born-again Christianity is the ignorant man's version of the intellectual life."

Let us pause a moment to pity the poor benighted believer bereft of the pleasures and satisfactions of Roth's intellectual life. The Christian serious about his faith will likely never know the joys of ending one's life slowly in chaos and dissolution as so many intellectuals have, or quickly with a bullet to the brain as have others. Instead he's destined by fate to plod through life finding his happiness in the company of family and in the toil of work. He'll never have a great idea like, say, socialism, and he'll never know the immense satisfaction that accompanies the publication of smutty novels.

He must resign himself to the paltry fulfillments of being a hero to his children and an inspiration to his co-workers and friends. When he dies there'll be no lengthy obituary in the New York Times with an enviable list of literary accomplishments, just a notice in the local paper that he was loved and admired by all who knew him. No one will ever say of him that he was a fine artist or thinker, they'll never be able to say that he spent his life creating things that no one has any use for. They'll have to be content with saying something insignificant about him like "he was a good man who spent his life trying to make other people's lives better." It really is too bad that those ignorant Christians will never know how great it is to be an intellectual like Phillip Roth.

On Belief In Miracles

On 9/21 Viewpoint posted an interview with Chuck Colson in which he said that one reason he believed the accounts of the Resurrection of Christ as recorded in the New Testament was that had Jesus not literally risen from the dead, his followers would not have been willing to suffer and die for a cause they knew to be based upon a lie.

If there was no Resurrection a lot of people would have known that the claim to the contrary was untrue and would have seen no point in perpetuating such an obvious error when it became clear that those who were involved in promoting it would be persecuted, imprisoned and executed.

What motive could the disciples of Jesus possibly have had for trying to promote the completely "unbelievable" assertion that a man had risen from the dead? What about that claim would have encouraged these men to bear up under deprivation, torture and death if it were not true? What was in it for them? As C.S. Lewis points out, men will often die for what they believe to be the truth, but only lunatics will die for what they know to be a lie. Just like the men involved in the Watergate cover-up that Colson alludes to, the followers of Jesus, were they really trying to foist a religious fraud upon people, would eventually have looked to their own self-interest and admitted to the authorities what had actually happened.

Any explanation or "debunking" of the miracle of Christ's Resurrection has to contend with the stark fact that this, however, is not what happened. The historical record produces no one who confesses to having participated in a hoax, even though they could have saved their lives by doing so.

Skeptics, however, have another means of justifying their refusal to accept the historicity of the Resurrection that avoids having to confront arguments like Colson's altogether. They argue that the nature of a miracle is such that no amount of evidence for one could ever overcome a presumption of the regularity of nature's laws. In other words, miracles are so much in conflict with the way we understand the world to work that the evidence that an exception to the laws of nature had really occurred would have to be exceptionally detailed and well-documented for us to accept it.

W.K. Clifford wrote that "It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence," and the evidence that a miracle had occurred is always going to be insufficient because, as David Hume put it, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. An account of a man rising from the dead is so extraordinary that no evidence, short of personally witnessing the event oneself, could ever be sufficient to justify one's belief that it occurred. Thus, no one is ever justified in believing that a true miracle, i.e. a supernatural intervention, actually happened.

This is certainly a nifty argument since it avoids the uncomfortable problem of having to counter the large body of evidence that a miracle really did occur in the case of Christ's Resurrection. However strong that evidence might be, the skeptic avers, such an event is so alien to our experience that a natural explanation, no matter how unlikely, is still more probable than that a man was raised from the dead.

There are problems, however with the skeptic's claim:

The first difficulty is that Clifford's maxim is self-refuting. There is no evidence that supports the assertion that we are always wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence. Why, then, should we believe it? Why are we not within our epistemic rights to believe something on the best evidence available?

A second difficulty is that there is no way to determine what should count as "sufficient evidence" for believing in a miracle anyway. Why is the skeptic justified in setting the standard of plausibility so high that it effectively eliminates the possibility of ever justifying belief in a miracle? Can we not agree that an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence without agreeing that in the case of a miracle the evidence must be so extraordinary as to be impossible ever to attain?

Indeed, what counts as "extraordinary" is going to differ from person to person. How do we determine when the evidence has satisfied our notion of "extraordinary"? Someone who is hostile to the idea of supernatural interventions in the world is going to set the bar for satisfaction far higher than someone who is open to them.

To cite the American philosopher William James, "To preach skepticism as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for [a miracle] be found, is tantamount to telling us, when in the presence of the [claim that a miracle has occurred] that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser than to yield to our hope that it may be true." Better to err on the side of fear than of hope, the skeptic argues, but, as James counters, what proof is there that being wrong through hope is so much worse than being wrong through fear? The skeptic's position is that it's better to miss out on a truth than to fall prey to an error, but why should anyone agree with that? Where is the evidence that justifies our believing such a principle?

The skeptic makes the conditions for one's believing that a miracle has occurred so stringent that such belief is impossible to justify. But the only way we can know that belief is impossible to justify is if we know a priori that it is not possible for a miracle to have occurred. However, miracles can only be impossible if supernatural intervention is impossible, and supernatural intervention is impossible only if there is no God.

In other words, natural explanations are more probable than supernatural ones only if we know a priori that either there is no God or that God never interjects himself into history. Since we don't know either of those, we have no justification for assuming, prior to any consideration of the evidence, that any natural explanation is more likely to be true than one which relies on supernatural agency.

If God exists then it is possible that miracles occur and we should look at the alleged evidence for any instance of one and evaluate it on its own terms. If the possibility of a miracle is held open, then, to borrow from James once more, any rule of thinking that would prevent us from recognizing a miracle, if it really happened, is an irrational rule.

As numerous scholars have made clear, the historical evidence that Jesus literally came back to life after having died is quite compelling unless one has already decided that such an event can't possibly be true. If one's worldview doesn't allow for the possibility of a miraculous event, well, then, one will never be persuaded by the evidence that a miracle has occurred. To paraphrase Pascal, however, there's enough evidence that one did occur to convince anyone who is not already dead set against it.

Subliminal Voting

Apparently Diebald has released a sample of the ballots to be used in battleground states like Florida this November. It looks like those rascally Republicans are up to some dirty tricks.

Kerry v. Kerry

John Kerry debates himself at GOP.com. The site has a video clip of Kerry's inconsistencies titled Top Ten Iraqi Flip-Flops From First Debate and it presents Kerry disagreeing with a number of things he himself said in last night's debate. I'm not sure that all of the disagreements can technically be called flip-flops, but they certainly seem to be confusions.

CBS Breaking New Ground

The Holy Observer has a shocking story. Apparently CBS and Dan Rather have in their possession documents which they claim disprove the Resurrection of Christ. The article contains photos of the actual documents which are apparently fragments of a diary kept by the disciple named Thomas.

This might be just what Rather needs to rescue his career from the ignominy surrounding his recent debacle over the fraudulent National Guard papers.

Another Take On Outsourcing

Economist Daniel Drezner has an op-ed in The New York Times that'll be of interest to those readers who are concerned about job losses due to outsourcing. He looks at the numbers and concludes that it's a non-issue. Here are some excerpts:

The Government Accountability Office has issued its first review of the data, and one undeniable conclusion to be drawn from it is that outsourcing is not quite the job-destroying tsunami it's been made out to be. Of the 1.5 million jobs lost last year in "mass layoffs'' - that is, when 50 or more workers are let go at once - less than 1 percent were attributed to overseas relocation; that was a decline from the previous year. In 2002, only about 4 percent of the money directly invested by American companies overseas went to the developing countries that are most likely to account for outsourced jobs - and most of that money was concentrated in manufacturing.

The data did show that from 1997 to 2002, annual imports of business, technical and professional services increased by $16.3 billion. However, during that same half-decade, exports of those services increased by $20.5 billion a year. In 2002 alone, the United States ran a $27 billion trade surplus in business services, the sector in which jobs are most likely to be outsourced. The G.A.O. correctly stressed that it is impossible to compute exactly how many jobs are lost because of outsourcing, but unless its figures are off by several orders of magnitude, there's no crisis here.

Technological innovation is responsible for a far greater number of lost jobs than outsourcing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that in the first quarter of this year 4,633 workers were laid off because of offshoring. In the same period Kodak, for example, announced layoffs of 15,000 workers because the growth of digital photography reduced demand for film. Few Americans suggest technological innovation be stifled for the sake of preserving old jobs.

Go here to read the whole column.

What To Do About Iran?

Whether George Bush is relected president in November or not he's going to have a very difficult decision on his hands, a decision which evidently must be made before the New Year. Iran will, in a few months by some estimates, begin construction of nuclear weapons. Once they start they must be assumed to be prepared to use them as soon as they can because every day they delay they risk losing them to an Israeli or American attack (It is just fantasy to think that perhaps Europe would have the will to do something to prevent a nuclear-armed Islamist state).

Iran has fifteen sites working on the production of fissile uranium. Those sites are presumably hardened to withstand a bomb drop. Do we try nonetheless to destroy them with conventional ordinance? Do we insert troops? Do we have the manpower available to take out these sites if bombing doesn't work? How will the Iranians respond if we attack? What will they do if we let them produce nuclear weapons? Can we afford to wait and find out? Belmont Club has an interesting discussion of some of the relevant questions.

A Thought On the Debate

Quick debate analysis: Those who are impressed by style will say that Kerry won. He was smooth and articulate. Those who look for substance will say that Bush pretty much dominated. Kerry sounded and looked good, but if one listened to what he was saying there simply was nothing there.

His most puzzling statement, in our opinion, was his claim that Bush made a terrible mistake in going into Iraq and is mismanaging the post-war badly but that he believes we now have to fight to win and that's exactly what he'll do.

The reason this is puzzling is that the first part of this statement is exactly what people said about Vietnam, but Kerry's response then was not to demand that we fight the war properly but that we get out immediately. "How", he asked at the 1971 senate hearings, "do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Now he's saying that instead of cutting our losses and leaving, as he insisted we do in Vietnam, he would stay and fight to win in Iraq. Given his history why should anyone believe him?

Perhaps he would reply that Vietnam was different. He might argue that there are national interests at stake in Iraq that weren't at stake in Vietnam. If so, however, how does he justify his repeated claim, made again last night, that he fought as a young man to defend our country in Vietnam. If there were no national interests at stake in Vietnam then whatever he was doing over there he certainly wasn't fighting to defend the United States.

Kerry said that he hasn't wavered about anything in this campaign, but he certainly is trying to have this both ways.

Watching the Beauty Contest

Assessing the kind of president a man would be on the basis of a debate performance is like judging the kind of wife and mother a woman would be on the basis of a beauty contest. Whatever charms she dazzles us with in her swimsuit are really quite irrelevant to the judgment we have to make, and it would only be a callow young man, in thrall to his hormones, who would think otherwise.

The audience will sit on tenterhooks tonight waiting for one or the other speaker to make some trivial "gaffe" and then seize upon it as a reason to vote for the other guy. It's a ludicrous exercise. It debases our democracy and insults the intelligence of its citizens. In their promos for the debate the networks have been replaying what they consider to be the highlights, the salient moments, of past debates. They wax nostalgic over Nixon's heavy beard, Kennedy's attractiveness, Reagan's "there you go again" and his witticism about Mondale's "youth and inexperience," Bentson's ad hominem attack against Quayle, Bush '41's glance at his watch, Gore's oafish sighing and striding across the stage to try to stare down Bush, Jr., and so on.

These are the things people remember from past debates, but with the exception of Gore's buffoonery, perhaps, none of these events tells us what kind of leader a man would be. They may tell us whether the man is likeable or not, but there's no demonstrated connection between likeability and presidential ability. Both Clinton and Reagan were likeable, but you can find plenty of people who would argue that Clinton was a terrible president and probably just as many could be found to argue that Reagan was.

Aside from being an exercise in media auto-eroticism the debates do little more than satisfy the public's desire to turn everything into a spectacle or a game. Who will "win" the debate? It doesn't matter. The winner is whoever is most attractive to the audience. Viewers will not score these debates as if they were really forensics competitions, or as if they were genuine attempts to get at some deep political truth. Indeed, it wouldn't matter if they did because they're not going to vote for the guy who is the technical winner anyway unless he happens coincidentally to be the most articulate, or the best looking, or the most charming, or the wittiest, or the most relaxed guy on the stage.

Ninety five percent of the people watching the debates have already decided for whom they will vote, and they will not be swayed by anything that is said by Kerry or Bush. The other five percent, in an ideal world, should be dissuaded from voting at all. If they haven't decided by now what could they possibly be waiting for? Whatever it is, it can't be substantive because anything of importance that we're going to learn about these two gentlemen has been out there in the public arena for months or years. They can only be waiting for some superficial word or gesture that would rationalize a vote for one of the contenders. If that's the purpose of having these debates, however, to give a handful of people who couldn't care less about their responsibilities as citizens some trivial reason to cast their vote for one or the other candidate, then we're wasting our time.

Even so, I guess I'll watch it. Sometimes even a beauty contest can be interesting.

Fighting the Global War On Terror

Mark Helprin of the Claremont Institute offers some excellent advice on what the U.S. needs to do to prevail in the war on terror. In an extensive analysis of what it will take to win this struggle Helprin claims that:

Neither the party in power nor the opposition has awakened to what must be done or what may happen if it is not. Neither party, nor the Left, nor the Right, nor the civilian defense establishment, nor the highest ranking military, nor the Congress, nor the people themselves, has been willing, in a war not of our own making, adequately to prepare for war, to declare war, rigorously to define the enemy, to decide upon disciplined and intelligent war aims, to subjugate the economy to the common defense, or even to endorse the most elemental responsibilities of government, such as controlling the borders of and entry to our sovereign territory.

Later in the piece he says this:

[T]he borders must be controlled absolutely, as is the right of every sovereign nation. It is hardly impossible and would demand no more than adding to the Border Patrol a paramilitary force of roughly 30,000, equipped with vehicles, helicopters, unmanned aerial drones, fences, and sensors. Crowded and slow entry points should be expanded to provide quick and thorough inspection by traditional methods and inspection to the limits of technological advance where traditional methods are impossible, as in searching the interstices of vehicles, or packed cargo containers, for nuclear or chemical warfare material. The sea frontiers can be secured if we undertake to supplement the Coast Guard with a few dozen high endurance cutters, 100 coastal patrol vessels, 50 long-range reconnaissance aircraft, 100 helicopters, and the appropriate additional personnel; and if the navy, by expansion of its anti-submarine assets, fixed and afloat, guarantees against submarine infiltration.

Helprin has much more to say on the matter of what we should be doing in the GWOT and how we should be doing it. His suggestions are certainly thoughtful and merit full consideration. Let's hope the Bush administration is listening.

First Things

The August/September First Things contains much that is excellent, but three articles are particularly good. The first, by Stephen Barr, is entitled here.

Two other pieces are also very much worth your attention. In Capital Punishment: The Case For Justice the inestimable Jay Budzizewski makes a powerful argument for the inherent justice of the death penalty. Some excerpts:

So weighty is the duty of justice that it raises the question whether mercy is permissible at all. By definition, mercy is punishing the criminal less than he deserves, and it does not seem clear at first why not going far enough is any better than going too far. We say that both cowardice and rashness miss the mark of courage, and that both stinginess and prodigality miss the mark of generosity; why do we not say that both mercy and harshness miss the mark of justice? Making matters yet more difficult, the argument to abolish capital punishment is an argument to categorically extend clemency to all those whose crimes are of the sort that would be requitable by death.

The questions we must address are therefore three: Is it ever permissible for public authority to give the wrongdoer less than he deserves? If it is permissible, then when is it permissible? Is it permissible to grant such mercy categorically?

The balance of the article is a fascinating and erudite attempt to answer those questions.

The equally distinguished Robert Bork makes a case for providing marriage with constitutional shelter in The Necessary Amendment. Judge Bork opens his essay with these words:

Within the next two or three years, the Supreme Court will almost certainly climax a series of state court rulings by creating a national constitutional right to homosexual marriage. The Court's ongoing campaign to normalize homosexuality-creating for homosexuals constitutional rights to special voting status and to engage in sodomy-leaves little doubt that the Court has set its course for a right to marry. This is but one of a series of cultural debacles forced upon us by judges following no law but their own predilections. This one, however, will be nuclear. As an example of judicial incontinence, it will rival Roe v. Wade, and will deal a severe and quite possibly fatal blow to two already badly damaged but indispensable institutions-marriage and the rule of law in constitutional interpretation.

The only real hope of heading off the judicial drive to constitutionalize homosexual marriage is in the adoption of an amendment to the Constitution.

He makes a good case. Conservatives are in a bit of a bind on this issue because they tend to be loath to tinker with the constitution. On the other hand they value tradition and perhaps no tradition is more highly esteemed than the tradition of marriage. How then can this valuable tradition be protected from complete dissolution without amending the constitution. It appears that legislative remedies are inadequate as they can easily be overturned by a single unsympathetic judge who deems any restriction of the marriage laws to be an unconstitutional infringement on the right of individuals to marry whomever they wish. That leaves conservatives like Bork with only two options: Either acquiesce to the Zeitgeist and watch homosexual marriage become a constitutional entitlement or amend the constitution now to define marriage as exclusively the union of one man and one woman.

Some ask why we should care if marriage is extended to homosexuals. How, we are asked, are we effected by an expansion of civil rights to include all citizens? A local radio talk show host said the other day that homosexual marriage doesn't affect him in the slightest and the rest of us should keep our religious views to ourselves.

In other words, if we think homosexual marriage is a good thing we should promote it in the public square, but if we think it is a bad thing then we should keep quiet about it. According to this gentleman, the only reasons one could possibly have for thinking that gay marriage is "bad" are religious reasons. Aside from the reply that the only reasons one could have for thinking that anything is bad in the moral sense are religious, one might also point out that whether one is religious or not, if he wishes to preserve heterosexual marriage and the family as we know it, changing our understanding of marriage makes the task several orders of magnitude more difficult.

As Viewpoint has argued before, once we change the definition of marriage from one man and one woman to include two men or two women we no longer have any non-arbitrary basis whatsoever for restricting marriage to just two people, or even to people. Proponents of gay marriage tend to scoff at this concern but to scoff is not to refute. If there are no rational grounds for limiting marriage to two people or to require that the blissful union involve only people it will be a mere matter of time before these conventions are challenged in the courts and when they are they'll be unsustainable. Marriage will come to mean whatever we want it to and at that point it will cease to mean much of anything at all. At that point marriage will be effectively dead.

If we agree with Bork that marriage is worth preserving then it seems that he's also correct that a constitutional amendment is, like some forms of surgery, an unpleasant but absolutely necessary measure to preserve the health of our society.

Winners Are Optimists

David Petraeus on Iraq's progress is an effective counter to the doom and gloom of the Kerryites. Petraeus is the commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq and, among many other things, he says this:

[T]here are reasons for optimism. Today approximately 164,000 Iraqi police and soldiers (of which about 100,000 are trained and equipped) and an additional 74,000 facility protection forces are performing a wide variety of security missions. Equipment is being delivered. Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being reestablished.

Within the next 60 days, six more regular army and six additional Intervention Force battalions will become operational. Nine more regular army battalions will complete training in January, in time to help with security missions during the Iraqi elections at the end of that month.

Iraqi National Guard battalions have also been active in recent months. Some 40 of the 45 existing battalions - generally all except those in the Fallujah-Ramadi area - are conducting operations on a daily basis, most alongside coalition forces, but many independently. Progress has also been made in police training. In the past week alone, some 1,100 graduated from the basic policing course and five specialty courses. By early spring, nine academies in Iraq and one in Jordan will be graduating a total of 5,000 police each month from the eight-week course, which stresses patrolling and investigative skills, substantive and procedural legal knowledge, and proper use of force and weaponry, as well as pride in the profession and adherence to the police code of conduct.

There will be more tough times, frustration and disappointment along the way. It is likely that insurgent attacks will escalate as Iraq's elections approach. Iraq's security forces are, however, developing steadily and they are in the fight. Momentum has gathered in recent months. With strong Iraqi leaders out front and with continued coalition - and now NATO - support, this trend will continue. It will not be easy, but few worthwhile things are.

There are a couple of thoughts which come to mind when reading this article. First, it seems evident that time is on the side of the coalition. The longer things go, the more trained forces the Iraqis will be able to deploy against the terrorists in Fallujah and elsewhere and the less of a threat they will be. The worst thing we can do at this point is to pull out.

Second, no great thing has ever been accomplished by those who are always looking for reasons to justify their belief that it can't be done. Great deeds require men with vision and a positive spirit. They require leaders with a "can-do" mentality, men who see the goal and have the stamina, strength, and courage to pull the rest of us with them to that objective. Winners are optimists. They are cheerful and confident in the rightness of what they are about.

Senator Kerry offers us nothing but retreat, criticism, defeatism, and the politics of pessimism. According to him everything we're doing is wrong. We are, he asseverates, fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong way. Such an attitude certainly does not inspire our troops to strive for successful completion of their mission. It only discourages, disheartens, and demoralizes the people who hear him. His gloomy negativism makes him the wrong man to serve as our commander-in-chief in these momentous times.

The Politics of Paranoia

Massachussetts Senator Ted Kennedy has repeatedly made the claim that we are becoming less and less safe from terror attacks on our homeland. We keep hearing this assertion from all sorts of people in the opposition party but the question one wishes someone would ask the senator and anyone else who makes this fatuous claim is: How do you know that what you're telling us is, in fact, true? What is the metric by which Senator Kennedy can descry an increasing probability of a terror strike in the U.S.? Is it that he, like so many others in his party, believes that any assertion critical of the President, no matter how incredible or outrageous, is self-validating?

Of course, claims like these are low risk/high yield investments because there's no way they can be falsified. If there is a terror strike Kennedy and his votaries will shriek and howl about how they warned us that it was coming, and if there is no attack, well, they will assure us, it's on its way, and Bush is doing nothing to stop it. Either way, there's no price to pay for their reckless dishonesty. Indeed, it's possible that by continually shouting to the world that we are in a pitiful state of unpreparedness, the senator and his allies may well be emboldening the Islamists to attempt an attack that they might not otherwise have risked.

At any rate, these sorts of unsupported allegations are rhetorical parries directed at morons. The Democrats have decided that they will say, and perhaps do, whatever they think an intellectually uncritical public will accept. They're putting out so many baseless charges about the administration's "secret plans" to do dastardly harm to virtually every constituency the Dems can think of that the Republicans are finding it impossible to refute them all. There are "secret plans" to deprive African-Americans of their right to vote, to draft young people, to strip away social security from old people, just to name a few, and now Kerry reveals to us the administration's "secret plan" to take away subsidies from Wisconsin dairy farmers.

Perhaps we'll soon be hearing that Dick Cheney "secretly" had Halliburton pilots fly the planes into the WTT on 9/11 in order to boost the administration's poll numbers. One wonders in astonishment how Senator Kerry has come to be privy to the inner machinations of the Republican party. How does he uncover all these "secret plans"? Maybe Bush should have made Kerry head of the CIA when George Tenent resigned.

Of course, incessant assurances of "secret plans" to hurt this or that group of people is the politics of paranoia, and it's quite contemptible. The Democrat party, however, has long ago ceased to care how much it debases the American political process or how foul their allegations are against their opponents. For the left there are no moral constraints as most people understand them. For them the highest good is to win and regain power. Anything which achieves this goal is morally justified. The end of securing power warrants the application of whatever means are necessary.

If the voting public rewards their conduct with victory in November it will ensure that these tactics become standard fare in our elections, and in the long term it will have a severely corrosive effect on our democracy. These people don't deserve to win for a number of reasons, but the fact that they find such slimy tactics so agreeable to their character is surely foremost among them.

What is a Conservative?

In this election season it's not uncommon to hear the ideological labels "conservative" and "liberal" used to describe either an individual or a particular policy position. Since a lot of people may be unclear as to what these terms mean we thought it might be useful to offer a thumbnail sketch on what it is people are referring to when they use the word "conservative". Perhaps later we'll do something similar for the term "liberal".

There are at least four fields or arenas where the labels conservative and liberal are applied: Foreign policy, economics, social policy, and religion. Many people are conservative in some of these and liberal in others. Few people are uniformly one or the other so it behooves us to know, when someone is identified as a conservative, exactly what area of life he is considered to be conservative in.

It also should be pointed out that the ideological spectrum has shifted to the left over the past 100 years so that what is conservative today would in some cases have been considered liberal in the 19th century. Thus, to add to our confusion, people who are considered modern conservatives are sometimes said to be classical liberals. That is, they embrace the values of political and individual liberty advanced by liberals of the 18th and 19th century.

So what does one who calls himself a conservative believe? The foundational principle of conservatism is individual freedom. Conservatives tend to be in favor of small, decentralized government, low taxes and spending, and minimal governmental interference in our economic and personal lives. They believe that excessively high taxes are not only a violation of one's right to keep his own property but are also economically counterproductive.

Conservatives maintain that high taxes are counterproductive for this reason: The more money people have in their pockets the more they will save and spend and both of these activities are good for the economy. The more money people save the more money that is available for businesses and home and automobile buyers to borrow and therefore the lower interest rates will be. The more money people spend, the more money businesses earn and the more jobs that are created. The higher the earnings business enjoys, and the more people who are employed, the more taxes that are paid. Thus lowering taxes actually increases the tax revenues taken in by the government.

High taxes, on the other hand, have the opposite effect. They depress spending and saving and reduce the rate of job creation. This increases poverty and accomplishes nothing good except to allow people who resent the wealthy to feel good about taking their money.

The conservative emphasis on individual freedom and small, unintrusive government underlies their support for giving parents the right to send their children to whichever schools they wish. It also accounts for the conservatives' desire to privatize social security. They want the people who earn the money to have the freedom to decide for themselves how they will provide for their senior years, and they oppose what they see as a government sponsored pyramid scheme that passes the obligation to pay for social security benefits onto future generations.

Conservatives also tend to see human nature as inherently sinful or flawed. They believe that, although society should maximize individual freedom, it needs to balance liberty with the need to maintain a healthy moral environment for families to thrive in. Society needs to erect fences around human appetite to keep people from shedding the tenuous moral leashes which enable us to live together in community. Thus conservatives prize free speech, but believe that some speech, like anything taken too far, or too broadly interpreted, can be harmful to society. Thus the right to freedom of expression needs to be balanced by the right to raise one's children in a psychologically and morally healthy culture.

Conservatives, furthermore, tend to advocate a strong military which should be employed only in defense of our national interest. Many conservatives opposed the peace-keeping missions in Bosnia and Haiti in the nineties because they could see no national interest at stake. Many also opposed the war in Iraq, though not the war in Afghanistan, for the same reason.

This is one of the differences between "paleo" conservatives and "neo" conservatives. "Neo-cons" are much more willing to use American power in defense of those who cannot defend themselves. Paleo-cons would argue that we have no national interest in Sudan, for example, so we should do nothing more than use diplomatic and economic levers to effect change there. Neo-cons would argue that we should not stand by and allow people to be slaughtered if we can prevent it. We should do whatever we can to help those people, and if that includes the application of military force then we should not shrink from such a measure. "Paleos" tend to be militarily isolationist while "neos" tend to be more willing to intervene around the world on behalf of the poor and oppressed.

Conservatives also maintain that human rights need to be grounded in the transcendent, i.e. God. If there is no transcendent source of our rights then there are no rights at all. There are just arbitrary words on paper (See here for a fuller treatment of this topic). For this reason, it is less common to find atheists in conservative ranks than it is to find them among liberals who tend to see human rights as somehow inherent in persons.

Conservatives tend to hold, or at least support, traditional values and religious beliefs and oppose major structural change when undertaken just to accommodate current cultural, social or political fashion. They will, therefore, tend to oppose gay marriage, easy divorce, abortion on demand, and attempts to purge the public square of religious influence (for example, removing God from the pledge of allegiance).

They also tend to be strict constructionists with respect to interpretation of the constitution. The constitution, in their view, is not a document which can be stretched to mean whatever a handful of justices think it should mean. Conservatives believe that the constitution should be interpreted in the light of the intentions of those who wrote it. This leads them to oppose some gun control laws, which they see as an infringement of the second ammendment and to oppose the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which overturned the laws prohibiting abortion in every state in the union and for which they can find no constitutional warrant.

Conservatives are strong believers in personal accountability and consequently tend to favor tough enforcement of laws and serious punishment for serious crime. Their belief in personal responsibility combined with their conviction that government should be decentralized and unobtrusive leads them to be skeptical of the efficacy of many government welfare programs. Their objection to these has been primarily that historically they provide relief to people but require no accountability from the recipient and don't really help people in the long run. Indefinite relief with no accountability or reciprocation nurtures vices which tend to perpetuate the very poverty government wishes to eliminate.

It's probably fair to classify President Bush as a conservative or neo-conservative. He certainly fits this identification with respect to his positions on national defense, the constitution, and religion. He's somewhere in the middle of the ideological spectrum economically, favoring low taxes but indulging in high government spending, a combination that earns him criticism from both conservatives, who are aghast at the high spending, and liberals, who deplore low tax rates, especially if they apply to the wealthy.

On social issues Bush tends to be conservative in his stance on life issues like abortion and stem cell research, as well as on protecting marriage. He receives a lot of criticism for his immigration policy, but it's not clear that the criticism is ideologically grounded. He favors maximum opportunities for people to come to this country, but so do many conservatives and liberals. Both camps are split on this issue for quite different reasons.

There is doubtless much more that could be said about conservatism, and we invite readers to contribute their thoughts on the topic to our Feedback Forum.

PC Lunacy at UNC

Joanne Jacobs reports on a Washington Times story that administrators at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are trying to close down a Christian fraternity on the grounds the student group is violating the university's anti-discrimination policy because it excludes non-Christians and self-professed homosexuals from membership, the Times reports.

So, in order to continue to exist Christian organizations must allow atheists to join which would, in effect, cause them to cease to exist. In their desire to avoid discriminating against anyone the august administrators at UNC are demanding that Christian fraternities commit organizational suicide. Will they next be banning organizations that oppose abortion if they don't allow pro-choicers to join? Does UNC insist that Muslim organizations allow Jews to join? Why not insist that the basketball team allow midgets to participate? May men join the women's groups on campus? Did these administrators actually make it to college themselves or are they the product of an affirmative action plan to hire the mentally disadvantaged?

Apologies

Profuse apologies to the tens of thousands of readers and potential readers who were denied access to Viewpoint this weekend. Apparently the phone company in North Carolina upon which our server depends chose this weekend to shut down service for some sort of maintenance and we were unable to operate as a result.

Kerry on the Economy, Allawi

NRO's Bruce Bartlett has a critique of Kerry's economic plan. The quick summary is that there isn't one, at least not one that makes any sense. Bartlett writes:

Last week, Kerry made an effort to present a coherent economic plan. In a Wall Street Journal article entitled, "My Economic Policy," he made his case. It has four key elements: create good jobs, cut middle class taxes and health costs, restore America's competitive edge, and cut the deficit and restore economic confidence.

He then analyzes each of these four proposals and concludes that they are little more than political rhetoric. His promise to create jobs, for example, is based on ending outsourcing, but it's not clear that the advantages of this would outweigh the disadvantages:

Kerry's proposal to create jobs involves reducing outsourcing by closing a tax provision that he believes encourages U.S. companies to invest abroad. The $12 billion per year that this would raise would be used to reduce the corporate tax rate slightly. He would also reinstate a failed tax credit for new jobs and crack down on imports from China and elsewhere.

Economy.com, a respected independent forecasting service, looked at these tax provisions and concluded that their net impact on job creation would be "very modest." On the other hand, Kerry's implied protectionism could be very damaging to economic growth. Renowned Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati calls Kerry's trade policy "muddled and maddening" and "the voodoo economics of our time."

He closes his column with these words:

In the end, all John Kerry has is the charge that everything George W. Bush has done on the economy has been wrong. This may be enough for hard-core Democrats and Bush-haters. But anyone who is remotely open-minded is going to have a hard time believing that Kerry will do better. He would have helped himself by proposing something bolder and more interesting. You can't beat something with nothing.

The critique of the other three points is helpful, as well. It seems that Kerry's problem is that once he gets past criticizing Bush for everything he can think of he has really nothing to offer in his place. All he gives us are vague platitudes about how he'd do better.

Given the lack of a solid counter to Bush on the economy and other issues, he's decided to attack Bush on the war in Iraq where he hopes that he can still get some traction by heightening fears that Iraq is descending into chaos. This is why he was so quick to criticize Allawi's speech yesterday. Allawi claimed that the situation in Iraq is much better than the media portrays it, and Kerry couldn't let that notion take root in the public mind. Thus, in a rather unseemly act of disrespect for a man who is working hard to bring freedom and democracy to his people in the face of a very good chance of being murdered every day, Kerry, who didn't even show enough courtesy to attend the session to which Allawi spoke, essentially accused him of fabricating his story.

This strikes us as a sign of desperation. Why couldn't Kerry have been gracious enough to at least offer Allawi his support and good wishes and wait until he was back home before he attacked the man's claims? For the Kerry campaign there's nothing good happening in Iraq and anyone who says there is, is lying. Allawi is a genuine hero, even if he doesn't have a wall full of dubious citations, and all Kerry can do is criticize him, challenge his credibility, and embarrass him when he visits this country to thank us for what we've done for the Iraqi people. It's sad and pathetic.

A Trio of Lies

Someone who repeatedly and willfully says, or endorses, contemptible things is in danger of becoming a contemptible human being. This is the danger John Kerry treads precariously close to in this campaign. Desperate to cut into Bush's lead in the polls the Democrats have decided to resort to the politics of fear and loathing, but in order to make it work they have to shed whatever integrity they had and try hard to sell the public the Big Lie. In the present case, three big lies, one each directed at Blacks, young people, and the elderly - three groups the Democrats cynically believe they can easily bamboozle.

The first lie is that Bush and the Republicans are going to suppress the African-American vote. There are currently ads on television claiming precisely this, but whenever a spokesperson has been asked for the evidence that this allegation is true, he can only answer with irrelevancies about mythical disenfranchised voters in Florida in 2000. No such voters are identified, however, because the claim that there were such is an urban legend. There's not a shred of evidence that the Republicans have done anything in the past, or the present, to prevent minority voters from exercising their right to vote, but facts don't matter to those who seek to create a climate of fear and resentment.

The second deception is that if re-elected the Bush administration is going to reinstitute the draft. It would take an act of Congress to reinstate the draft, and it's hard to imagine any politician pushing for such legislation in the current climate. When spokespersons are asked what they base this allegation upon they cite their belief that we are undermanned in Iraq. This is an example of liberal logic: We need more troops (maybe) so the Republicans must be going to reinstate the draft. They also cite two bills which have been languishing in committee and which call for young people to serve a period of national service, but these have nothing to do with a draft. See here for more on why this charge against Bush is implausible at best.

The third falsehood is that Bush's plan to privatize social security means that he intends to cut off benefits to the elderly. This is a patent and willful misrepresentation on the part of the Democrats of the president's plan. Bush's proposal leaves current recipients alone and the Dems know this, but they try to scare the old folks anyway. It is a despicable, if not unsurprising, tactic. After all, we shouldn't wonder that the campaign of a man who deliberately slandered his fellow veterans in order to advance his own reputation in 1971 would hold truth in such low esteem.

Interview With an Iraqi Soccer Player

Hugh Hewitt posts this interview by an Iraqi blogger with an Iraqi Olympic soccer team goalie. You'll recall that some of his teammates distinguished themselves last month by making some anti-American remarks that were notable for their abject stupidity. This fellow has a different take, but you won't see his opinions on the evening news. Here's the interview:

Yesterday I was in Al Hurriya Olympic Swimming Pool together with my friends. While we were there, the Iraqi soccer team alternates entered the place with the goalkeepers' coach, Ahmed Jasim. I met one of the players, Akram Sabeeh, the goalkeeper and talked for a few minutes, then I asked some questions and told him that I'd publish his words on the internet and he agreed, so I gladly began my questions:

A: What do you feel when you play now? Do you think there's a difference from those days during the ex-regime?

Akram: look, I was seriously afraid when I was playing, they were really horrible days under Uday, I was afraid to do anything that might be misunderstood and the result would be the jail. Now, I feel free when I play soccer, I feel that I'm playing to improve myself and never afraid of anyone.

A: So you feel that you are free now?

Akram: Of course free.

A: Have you ever been jailed?

Akram: Yes, for 10 days.

A: What for?

Akram: Because I shouted at the referee!

A: Isn't it a humiliating act to be jailed for this reason?

Akram: Yes, but Uday was enjoying doing so, I might be lucky to be jailed only, other players were being beaten severely, tortured and many other brutal acts, you've heard about that?

A:Yes...let's forget what was Uday doing... what about the economical status?

Akram: My salary was 20$ and now it is 200$.

A: Wonderful...multiplied by 10.

Akram: Yes, I can think in my future now!

A: So what was wrong with other Olympic players, they were so upset when they were shown on the TV after each game, they kept repeating: occupation, targeting the cities..etc, they blamed on the Americans for that, what do you think?

Akram: Well..they were saying this cause they were watching what was going on in AlNajaf and previously in Fallujah, they felt that the families were being killed everyday. A: And do you believe that?

Akram: We are watching all of that on the channels.

A: Have you ever watched some good news regarding Iraq on those channels?

Akram: Frankly...Never!

A: So those channels intentionally collect the bad news and exaggerate most of them and play with our emotions to achieve their goal, and they've succeeded in that with some people..if they are honest they had better look at the good changes also.

Akram: Yes, you are right, we cry and get angry as we watch those channels!

Well, I could ignore all those questions, and ask him directly showing some bored and upset facial expressions: 'DO YOU ACCEPT...what's going on in your country now? Chaos, explosions, bombing the cities...what do you think..isn't it miserable?' !! I could make all the conversation full of hatred and pessimistic views!

I mean, you have to hear the question of the reporter and the manner of asking the players before you judge the players' opinions....Those journalists ask according to what they want to hear or according to what is needed from them.

The reporters should be honest and fair in dealing with the people in Iraq, it's a temporary critical period, and they have to help and support the Iraqis to stand against terrorism and build their country. Unfortunately, there are few of them.

This interview was passed on to Hewitt by a Marine who included his own thoughts and frustrations with the negativism of a media which, in Viewpoint's opinion, seems more and more to be actually hoping for a failure in Iraq. The Marine's e-mail is worth reading.

RLC

Celsius 41.11

Go here to see the trailer and tv ad for the newly released movie Celsius 41.11, the answer to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

The Question of God

Last night PBS ran part two of its two-part presentation of The Question of God (See here for a discussion of part one). The show is based upon an excellent book of the same title by Armand Nicholi of Harvard. In his book Nicholi compares and contrasts the worldviews of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis and shows how their fundamental assumptions about God led these men to much different answers to several of life's most profound questions.

Unfortunately, the PBS presentation was disappointing. The dramatization of his life made much of C.S. Lewis' faith in God but said next to nothing about the arguments he offers in his writings to undergird his belief. A viewer might well have come away from the show with the impression that, for Lewis, faith was exclusively a Kierkegaardian leap, a completely existential exercise in subjectivity, with no rational component.

Not only was a solid explication of Lewis' apologetic lacking in the portrayal of the Oxford don, but the roundtable discussions that interspersed the dramatization of both Freud's and Lewis' lives seemed to reinforce the impression that theism is bereft of any rational justification, that it's purely a matter of Freudian wish-fulfillment. The secularists, as they did last week, seemed to have reason and all the best arguments on their side, and the believers were left sputtering about their feelings and lamenting that they can't explain the difficulties that arise in their belief system, but that one just has to trust and have faith.

One man in the group admitted that he can't reconcile his conception of a good God with the existence of suffering, and Michael Shermer, an atheist, observed that he's just a step from atheism and invited him to try it. The Christian had no reply.

I don't know whether the believers around the table actually had no effective rejoinders or whether their best responses were edited out, but certainly there are plausible answers to the questions that were raised in this segment. To take just one, the program addressed the nature and origin of the moral law. What is it that tells us what's right and where does it come from?

The Christians in the seminar maintained that morality comes from God, but the atheists weren't buying that. They questioned why God is necessary for moral behavior. We can come to the same conclusions about how we ought to behave as the theist, they asserted, so why do we need God? People didn't decide to abolish slavery because God told them it was wrong, rather they abolished slavery because a consensus formed around the proposition that freedom is good and that it should be extended to all men. Human beings can be good whether they believe in God or not. We can live by the Golden Rule even if we're not Christians. And so on.

This is all true enough, which is why the Christians had a hard time responding to it, I suppose, but it's all irrelevant. To see why, consider this hypothetical conversation between a theist and an atheist:

Theist: Why would it be wrong for me to hurt someone?

Atheist: It's wrong because society couldn't function if everyone went about harming each other.

T: Maybe, maybe not, but at best that's an argument for not universalizing the behavior. The question is why would it be wrong for me to harm another individual? My act isn't going to have a significant influence on the rest of society.

A: It's wrong because you wouldn't want people to hurt you.

T: That's true, but that's not a reason why I shouldn't hurt someone else. If I can do it and get away with it why would that be wrong? What makes a might-makes-right ethic morally wrong?

A: People won't like you very much if you behaved that way.

T: Why should I care whether I'm liked or not? Is right just a matter of doing whatever makes you popular? Besides aren't you now tacitly admitting that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with hurting others. The only thing that makes it wrong, according to what you've said, is that it may not be in my best interests. But if it were in my best interests to harm another, you'd have no basis for saying that my act is wrong.

In other words, the problem isn't that the atheist can't adopt the same values as the believer. Of course he can. The problem is that the adoption of those values is completely arbitrary, as are the values themselves. Someone who lived by radically different values would be doing nothing "wrong" because right and wrong cannot exist as anything other than social conventions. I might adopt a value of human kindness because that appeals to me. Someone else might value cruelty because that appeals to him. Which of us does the atheist say is right?

This problem is implicit in the above discussion of slavery. Slavery was ended because people decided that freedom was good and should be extended to all men, but what if they hadn't so decided? Would they have been wrong to continue to enslave Africans if the consensus had been that slavery was acceptable? And why should freedom be extended to all men? Where does that belief come from? Are right and wrong simply a matter of whatever society decides? If so, then if society decides to kill off all its minorities, like the Nazis tried to do, that would not be wrong.

Shermer says that the Golden Rule is a product of evolution, not of God. Very well, but then why should anyone follow it? Why should a product of blind, impersonal forces which shaped us for life in the stone age be in any way binding upon us today? Besides, lots of things are products of evolution, but we don't advocate submitting to them. We have an evolutionary penchant for aggressiveness and violence, for sexual promiscuity, avarice, and selfishness. Why should we suppress these inclinations but adopt the Golden Rule? Isn't that just an arbitrary choice? What criteria or standard are we holding these various evolutionary proclivities up to in order to arrive at the conclusion that one of them is superior to the others?

The point is that unless there is a transcendent moral authority there is no morality. There are just behaviors that people like and dislike. People can agree to adopt a certain set of behaviors and arbitrarily choose to value them, but that doesn't make someone who dissents from the consensus immoral. Nor does it mean that if society had adopted different values they would have been wrong. Moral right and wrong are empty, meaningless concepts unless there is a God.

What Are We Waiting For?

President Bush has always taken hits from the left for his management of the post-war in Iraq, but now he's getting more heat from his own party. The neo-cons are rightly upset that several cities in the Sunni triangle have been allowed to fester and become havens for insurgents and terrorists. Word is that foreign fighters, emboldened by our reluctance to crush al Sadr in Najaf, are streaming into Fallujah and Samarra and a couple of other cities in the Sunni stronghold. The question that even Bush's supporters are asking is, why are we allowing this to happen? Our troops say they can take Fallujah in three, maybe four days, if they are given the go-ahead, so why aren't they?

There are two possible answers to this question, one of which is completely unacceptable. If the troops are being restrained by the administration because the suits don't want to give the impression of chaos and large numbers of casualties until after the election, then they don't deserve to be re-elected. If they're playing politics with this war then they've forfeited their right to our support (although it certainly doesn't follow that Kerry has done anything to merit it).

If, however, the administration is following a recommendation made by the commanders in the field then I think we need to be supportive. After all, if the commanders had recommended holding off on an attack and the administration overruled them for political reasons and ordered our troops into Fallujah and elsewhere, that would be as reprehensible as the scenario traced in the preceding paragraph.

If our military thinks it best, for whatever reason, to delay taking down these cities then we should defer to their judgment. Indeed, if that's the reason we're tolerating the current difficult situation I think the administration is to be commended for letting the military make those decisions, especially as the pressure mounts on the White House to do something.

One reason that has been floated as to why there seems to be so little aggressive activity is that our generals have decided that when we go in they want Iraqi troops in the mix. This is undoubtedly a wise long-term decision since it will give the Iraqis a sense of ownership as well as garner more support among the Iraqi residents of the cities we assault. It appears that the next wave of Iraqi trainees will not complete their training until sometime next month at which time Fallujah will come in for serious house-cleaning.

So, we'll see. If an assault does come in October the President's critics will scream about the "timing" of an attack coming so close to the election, but let them. Despite the fact that people are dying in Iraq because of the delay, the long term benefit of waiting until the Iraqis are ready to contribute could be a much more stable Iraq in the future. Let's hope that terrorists and others continue to flood into these cities over the next couple of weeks. It'll make those environments that much more target-rich.

This Week's Dreyfus

This week's Dreyfus award, named for Inspector Jacques Clouseau's superior officer in the Pink Panther movies, Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom), who was driven mad by jealousy and hatred of the totally inept Clouseau (Peter Sellars) who bumbled his way to sleuthing success and fame. Last week the award went to Robert Kuttner for a column he wrote for the Boston Globe.

This week's prize is awarded jointly to two men, one of whom is clearly unbalanced and the other of whom was driven to professional suicide by his looney attempt to politically assassinate his own Inspector Clouseau (George Bush). This week's winners are William Burkett and Dan Rather. See here for more on Mr. Rather's strange career.

Each winner will receive a Dreyfus doll which is clothed in a white strait-jacket and which twitches uncontrollably.