Francis Crick, R.I.P.

Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helicoid structure of the DNA molecule, has passed away at the age of 88. Mark Steyn graces us with an excellent obituary.

Crick was an atheistic Darwinian who was most interested in taking his naturalistic assumptions to their logical conclusions, though like most such thinkers, he stops well short of going all the way.

For instance, Steyn quotes him as writing in his last major work, The Astonishing Hypothesis, "that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: 'You're nothing but a pack of neurons.'"

In other words, the human being is for Crick nothing more than a clump of chemicals, mud and blood, a muscle and bone machine. If Crick is right about this, however, it has the most distressing and devastating consequences for our view of human existence. As Viewpoint has argued on previous occasions, every major yearning of the human heart is hopelessly unfulfillable if all we are is a pack of neurons. Life and the world are completely absurd, there's no meaning or purpose to human love, striving, or suffering. There's no ground for moral judgment, no real justice, no basis for human dignity or rights. There is only, for most people who've ever lived, the prospect of pain, conflict, alienation, and finally annihilation with perhaps a few fleeting moments of joy arising briefly like the ephemeral light of a firefly in an otherwise uniformly dark and bleak night.

The worldview of such as Francis Crick leads anyone who is serious about its logical consequences into the abyss of nihilism and despair. Anything else is just whistling past the graveyard. It is an odd thing about atheism that few people are able to live consistently with its fundamental convictions that we are an accident of blind, impersonal forces and that this life is the only life there is.

Progress in Iraq

Senator Kerry claims that Iraq is in chaos, that the president is botching it so badly that Kerry has no idea what he will find when he takes office in January. He may, he claims, find that Iraq is another Lebanon, and so on. Yet everything we read coming out of that country, except what we read in the MSM, suggests that the Senator simply doesn't know what he's talking about. This is understandable, of course, since he never attends the meetings of the Intelligence Committee he serves on, but it's not excusable.

There is much news from Iraq which indicates that things are going much better there than the Senator would have us believe. One such story at National Review Online concerns the quality of Iraqi troops which are daily growing more competent, more effective and more numerous. Consider these excerpts:

The enthusiasm of U.S. Marine captains Thomas "Tad" Douglas and David Nevers can hardly be contained. Their voices, alternately crackling over a weak satellite-phone connection, are heartening as they describe the successes they are witnessing in Iraq. The insurgency is losing ground. Iraqi civilians, feeling less afraid than in previous months, are increasingly coming forward with solid information about the bad guys. And a new Iraqi special-operations force is taking the lead in wiping out guerilla strongholds, south of Baghdad.

From their operating base in Kalsu...Douglas tells National Review Online, "The Iraqis are performing well-above my expectations. Their strengths are their aggressiveness and mobility, and we are enhancing those strengths."

"This is an emerging force, and yet they are taking the lead in our operations against the insurgents," says Nevers. "We conducted an operation a month ago in which this force did most of the planning and then physically led the way. The operation was very successful, and it consequently set the stage for what we are doing right now."

Asked if those on the team are more-formidable fighters than the best Iraqi troops faced by U.S. forces during the spring 2003 invasion, Nevers is quick to respond, "Yes, and they are far better than the Iraqis we were contending with in April 2004 [during the brutal fighting in and around Fallujah and Ramadi]."

Speaking of Iraq, there is another helpful article on the conditions in Fallujah in the Washington Post (free registration may be required). Evidently, the American tactic of wearing down the insurgents in that city is paying dividends by setting the various groups against each other, and the foreigners are feeling both the heat and the fear.

Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials.

Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses.

U.S. and Iraqi authorities together have insisted that if Fallujah is to avoid an all-out assault aimed at regaining control of the city, foreign fighters must be ejected. Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.

"He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near," Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said.

One of the foreign guerrillas killed by local fighters was Abu Abdallah Suri, a Syrian and a prominent member of Zarqawi's group. Suri's body was discovered Sunday. He was shot in the head and chest while being chased by a carload of tribesmen, according to a security guard who said he witnessed the killing.

One way or another Fallujah will be pacified by the end of November as will be Ramadi and Sadr City. Elections will be held and foreign corporations, eager to get a chunk of Iraq's oil wealth, will stream into the country to further hasten reconstruction. This will drive the left in this country to near hysteria, not only because George Bush will be largely vindicated and given the credit, and the judgment and motives of the left will be indicted, but also because once Iraq is stabilized, the attention of the world, i.e. the U.S., will perforce turn toward Iran's nuclear program. If Iraq begins to settle as November draws to a close, look for the left to employ every play in their playbook in a desperate attempt to preempt military action against Iran should it be deemed necessary.

Moreover, if Bush is re-elected in a couple of weeks look for the French, Germans, and Russians to join the coalition against Iran. They will seek to redeem themselves after their disgraceful behavior in Iraq, where they accepted bribes from Saddam in exchange for thwarting the American demarche. Unless, of course, they're also accepting bribes from the mullahs in Tehran.

Swift Vets Are Back

Transcripts of two new Swift Boat Veterans ads, set to run during Monday Night Football, can be found here. The second of the two sounds like it will be very powerful. Thanks to Kerry Spot for the tip.

Mr. Bush's Liabilities

Many people have wondered why President Bush doesn't defend his record more vigorously in the debates and attack Kerry's record, which is eminently vulnerable, more incisively. The answer, perhaps, is that Mr. Bush suffers from three rhetorical liabilities. First, he seems to assume that everybody already knows all the facts. He himself is immersed in matters of policy all day long, and it's easy for such a man to think that what's obvious to him is obvious to everybody. Perhaps he doesn't realize the depth of political ignorance and indifference that resides just outside the beltway. When, for example, he accuses John Kerry of being a "liberal", probably three quarters of citizens of voting age have no idea what he means.

Second, he's just not a quick thinker on his feet. His mind doesn't seem to work well when he's under the pressure of having to come up with gaffe-free answers in front of the whole nation. He no doubt works much better in intimate, relaxed settings where he can be himself, has time to consider options and think through problems.

Third, he's not particularly eloquent so that when he does know what he wants to say he has trouble putting it into words and using the appropriate inflections and gestures to drive the words home.

All of these liabilities work to his detriment in a debate setting, and it's quite surprising that his team didn't insist on the same sort of format that was used in the Cheney/Edwards debate which would have put him more at ease. It's also surprising that they didn't insist that he be allowed to use notes which would've made his task much less onerous.

None of this, mind you, should be taken as in any way a reflection upon his intelligence. Brilliant men have suffered the same sorts of disabilities, and absolute dolts can appear eloquent and articulate in public. Everyone is different in this respect. One reason why Viewpoint opposes Presidential debates is that they give the impression that the skills needed to do well in such events are somehow necessary qualifications for the presidency. That is not the case and never has been, and we do our nation a disservice by placing so much emphasis on the minutiae of these events.

Left-Wing Loopiness

Among the many reasons why the nation seems so divided this election season is the fact that the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic party (about 90% of politically active Democrats) seems to have taken leave of their senses. Their febrile minds conjure up all manner of nightmarish fantasies that they are quite certain are accurate accounts of Bush administration plots and machinations, and out of their paranoia and hallucinogenic condition arises the most spiteful and vile rhetoric. Or they express their distaste so ineptly that it just sounds dumb. Either way most sane folk are put off by it and wish to have nothing to do with them.

Slate.com provides us with a fine illustration of the mental state of the contemporary left. They interviewed thirty one novelists to see who these writers will be voting for in November. As one might expect from such a group, twenty four responded that they will be voting for Kerry and four favor the President (three chose other options). More interesting than who they support, however, are their reasons for their selection. Here's a sample from the twenty four Kerry supporters:

Dan Chaon

He [Bush] seems truly, frighteningly dangerous and completely without scruples. I'm alarmed by his administration's attacks on civil liberties, by the deliberate lies that brought us into a poorly planned war, by the gleeful disregard for the environment, by the social policies - the tax cuts, which so nakedly benefit the very few to the detriment of almost everybody else; the ugly, merciless No Child Left Behind educational policy; the reckless budget deficit .... I have found myself recoiling from the newspaper, and I dread where another four years of his administration would lead us. I find myself particularly repelled by Bush's professed "Christianity," even as his administration repudiates every value that Christ represents. He's probably not the Antichrist, but he comes as close as I've seen in my lifetime.

Amy Tan

I'm voting for Kerry, because I have a brain and so does he.

Rick Moody

The Bush presidency is the most corrupt in modern history. Under the cynical disguise of evangelical Christian moralizing (and don't even get me started on Bush's moronic theology), Bush conducted (and continues to conduct) a fire sale, in which he auctioned off the entire nation to the highest corporate bidder, piece by piece.

Jonathan Franzen

He's [Bush] the candidate whose defeat Osama Bin Laden (if he's alive) is praying for. I trust him not to pour additional gasoline on the fires that Bush has set overseas. Also, since he's [Kerry] a Democrat, I trust him to exercise a modicum of fiscal sanity and to show a little compassion for the unlucky. Also, his wife is hot hot hot.

Jane Smiley

Would George Bush steal the election if he thought he could get away with it? The evidence is that he has (disenfranchising black voters in Florida in 2000) and wants to again (attempting the same trick already this year). That such a man, an amoral prevaricator and ruthless opportunist, actually has supporters in his bid to wreck American democracy appalls me. I think that the coming election will result in a constitutional crisis of unprecedented danger. I consider a vote for Bush a vote for tyranny.

David Amsden

A cousin of mine spent a year fighting with the Army in Iraq. He was a harder man when he returned, tweaked, difficult to relate to. His stories were crushing - did you know that there are giant spiders that creep up on sleeping soliders at night? That this is the sort of thing that causes nightmares....For all his swaggering bravado, the guy has no real backbone, no confidence in anything but his squinty little grin, which is frightening.

Well, we could go on, but why bother. After all, the level of ignorance, falsehood, anti-Christian bigotry, and plain stupidity in this brief sample of responses is just too depressing to warrant prolonging the exercise.

Despite the intellectual perversities, eccentricities, and loopiness on display here, there are a few bright lights of rationality shining amidst the liberal gloom. These are mostly provided, however, by those novelists who are supporting Bush. Click on the link above to read their statements.

George Bush Should Receive a Nobel Prize

Scott Norvell has a fine piece here on the election in Afghanistan. He writes from Kabul:

It was a regrettably typical comment from an American reporter in this part of the world. "At least it's news," he said of the Afghan election scuffle over the weekend. "Otherwise, this is just a success story."

God forbid it be a success story.

But that's what it was here, no matter how hard the international media tried to spin it. There were no car bombs raining body parts all over the polling stations. There were no last-minute assassinations. There were no drive-by shootings. The best they could come up with for "news" was grumbling from hopelessly trailing opposition candidates about washable ink and threats of a boycott. The media's disappointment was palpable.

When Kabul came out of its election-time shell on Monday, the picture was instead one of a city reveling in the chaos of commerce. Real estate prices are rising, and the din of new construction is pervasive. Foreign investment is up. There are three times as many private cars on the streets as five years ago, and women can go shopping without getting whipped by thugs from the Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue for baring sockless ankles beneath their burqas. It is a chaos to which Afghans have been accustomed for centuries, one they are happy to have back.

This is a Nobel prize caliber accomplishment. In fact, it surpasses in magnitude virtually anything any previous recipients of that award have achieved. What other world leader has done so much for so many of the world's oppressed in just four years? Maybe FDR in WWII (although it's questionable), surely Reagan, but it took him eight years, and even then it wasn't until after his presidency that his policies toward the communists brought about the collapse of their tyranny.

What other world leader has done as much for women's rights in such a brief period of time as has George Bush? Twenty five million women in Afghanistan and Iraq can vote for the first time ever. In Afghanistan they can go to school and hold elective office for the first time. This is monumental, but it leaves our feminists unimpressed. After all, Bush still opposes the right of a woman to kill her unborn child.

Bush's accomplishment of freeing fifty million people in Afghanistan and Iraq is probably unique in world history, but the odds that Bush will be awarded the Nobel are probably about the same as they were for Ronald Reagan. Doubtless the enlightened eminences who decide upon the recipients, if they don't select some mentally unstable virago who rants about white scientists developing AIDs in order to wipe out the black race, will choose someone who campaigned hard to prevent what Bush has achieved. Maybe Jacques Chirac, now that he's no longer receiving bribes from Saddam, can use the cash.

If You Don't Like it...

The Democrats are in a massive snit over the decision by Sinclair Broadcasting Corp. to preempt regular programming to air a film based on the book Stolen Valor which takes a very close look at the character of the Senator who would be president. The film is seen by the left, who ought to know one when they see it, as an attack piece.They're outraged that a broadcasting conglomerate would use the public airwaves to promote a partisan assault on their candidate.

One wonders where all this anger and indignation from the left were when CBS and Dan Rather were using 60 Minutes to slander George Bush with fraudulent memos.

One commentator on MSNBC said that this new film is not like Fahrenheit 9/11 because people had to buy a ticket to see that and this is coming into homes free courtesy of the public airwaves. Of course, Fahrenheit 9/11 was shown for free to students in taxpayer subsidized universities all across the country, but that's different. That was a hit piece on George Bush. Those should be subsidized. Unlike Michael Moore's movie, this film is factually accurate, however, and may seriously hurt John Kerry, so it's an obvious abuse of the public trust that must be stopped.

Anyway, what is it that the liberals always tell people who complain about the sleaze and junk network television serves up on a daily basis? "Hey, if you don't like it, don't watch it."

The <i>Leap of Faith</i>Ticket

John Kerry has evidently made a last minute switch of running mates exchanging John Edwards for faith-healer Benny Hinn. At least that's the word out of the midwest today where the Democratic vice-presidential candidate had these promises for an Iowa audience:

"We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases... When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

If the race stays close look for the vice-presidential candidate, whoever he is, to be promising voters eternal life if Kerry's elected.

No word from Iowa yet as to how many listeners were "slain in the Spirit" at the event.

Spiking Steyn

Mark Steyn is always worth reading. He's bright, funny, and an outstanding writer. He recently wrote a column for his paper, The Telegraph in England, which the editors declined to run. They evidently felt that Steyn was a little too insensitive in discussing the reaction of some British government officials and the family of Ken Bigley in the wake of his abduction and murder by Islamic terrorists in Iraq. Viewpoint wonders, however, if the refusal to publish the column doesn't say more about The Telegraph's editors than it does about Steyn. Be that as it may, he subsequently posted his column online with a brief explanation. Go here to read it. It's very good.

The World Kerry Would Create

Senator Kerry has been receiving a drubbing in the New Media for his gaffe in yesterday's New York Times to the effect that he wants to see terrorism reduced to the level of a nuisance. The statement was at best stupid and Power Line does a fine job of explaining why it is so egregious. Even so, I don't think that that is the worst thing he says in the interview. Elsewhere in the article he's quoted as saying that:

September 11 "didn't change me much at all," rather it "sort of accelerated, confirmed in me, the urgency of doing the things I thought we needed to be doing....We need to engage more directly and more respectfully with Islam, with the state of Islam, with religious leaders, mullahs, imams, clerics, in a way that proves this is not a clash with the British and the Americans and the old forces they remember from the colonial days. And that's all about your diplomacy....A new presidency with the right moves, the right language, the right outreach, the right initiatives, can dramatically alter the world's perception of us very, very quickly."

This statement reveals a shocking lack of understanding of our enemy. Kerry sees terrorism as a problem of diplomacy, of economics. This is incredibly naive and almost guarantees worse strikes against our country than we experienced on 9/11. The jihadis are not trying to kill us because we have inept diplomats. Nor are they trying to destroy us because they resent our exploitation of their oil. They are trying to murder us because they see us as enemies of God who must be converted or exterminated. In their eyes we are infidels who are guilty of two major crimes.

The first is that we serve as a guarantor of Israel's continued existence. The only diplomatic strategy we could adopt which would (temporarily) appease the Islamists would be to pull out of the Middle East completely. Not only would we have to abandon Iraq and our bases elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, but we would also have to abandon any and all commitments to Israel's security. Nothing short of this will mollify the terrorists, and this will only assuage their hatred in the short term.

The second crime of which we are guilty is that we are, in their eyes, spreading a corrupt, decadent culture throughout the Muslim world. It's not just our sexual permissiveness that upsets them, it's the freedom we have to believe and say what we wish, it's the equality we give to women, it's the idea that church and state should not be entangled. Each of these is abhorrent to Muslims and their religion, or their interpretation of it, calls upon them to wage tireless, unceasing jihad against the corrupting influences of the West which threaten to undermine the Faith.

As long as we're strong, however, their efforts are unlikely to prosper so they must defeat us by destroying our economic power base. They must conquer us by wearing us down, by striking at our homeland in order to dispirit us. As long as we're a politico-cultural presence in the world they will strive relentlessly to bring us low, and terror is the only means they have at their disposal to accomplish this. They certainly are not prepared to wage a war of ideas nor can they persuade us through diplomacy to commit cultural suicide. Thus for Kerry to suggest that better diplomacy will reduce or eliminate terrorism reveals an alarming naivete on his part. The Islamic hatred for the West does not lend itself to diplomatic ameliorations.

What diplomacy would accomplish, however, is an illusory lessening of conflict. The jihadis would doubtless give the impression that they were succumbing to whatever inducements or bribes a Kerry administration held out to them. They would attempt to lull us to sleep with assurances that now that the cowboy Bush is out of office it is possible to discuss our differences reasonably. Tensions would ease. Americans, always willing to delude ourselves, would become complacent.

To show our good faith, and to keep negotiations moving along, a Kerry administration would likely relax our prosecution of the war against Muslim terrorists abroad. With the reduction of military operations would come a simultaneous relaxation of vigilance which would almost surely result in making our borders even less secure than they are now. It would be just a matter of time before a WMD was smuggled into the U.S. and detonated in one of our cities. The resulting death and chaos would be unprecedented.

The terrorists would then announce through their media outlets to a stunned nation that there are similar weapons planted in other cities throughout the United States and that unless we meet their demands, i.e. get out of the Middle East and abandon Israel, they will begin to set the others off as well. They don't have to really have the weapons, they only have to have had the first one, and have used it, and the ensuing panic would be seismic in scale. No administration which refused to accede to these demands would survive. The result would be a paralyzed, panic-stricken America, and this would be catastrophic for the entire globe.

With a United States helpless to impose its will, war would almost certainly break out between Arabs and Jews, between China and Taiwan, and on the Korean peninsula. It would probably also erupt between India and Pakistan and Iran and Iraq. In each of these cases it would no doubt be nuclear. Tribal warfare in Africa would rage unnoticed against the global conflagration that would result from a United States crippled by a terror strike such as we've envisioned. Civil strife would plague our cities as well, especially in locales with Muslim populations.

This is the world John Kerry's thinking and approach could very likely create. It is the most plausible consequence of believing that the war on Islamic terror can be fought by diplomats and deal-making.

Paladins of Pessimism

Below the media radar screen the struggle in Iraq continues and is clearly moving in the coalition's favor. Heretofore, there were two main groups of resistance, Muqtada al Sadr's Mehdi Army in Najaf and Sadr City, and al Zarqawi's thugs in Samarra, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle. As Strategy Page reports, however, al Sadr is just about finished, Samarra has been pacified, and time is running out for the insurgents in Fallujah.

Elections are on track for Iraq just as they were in Afghanistan, the Iraqi economy is taking off, schools and businesses are bustling, and all the Democrats can say is that the liberation of 25 million Iraqis is a disaster, a colossal mistake. Even as the Democrats sing their woeful dirges the insurgents find themselves caught in the coils of a python, and as more Iraqi troops and police come on line the squeeze is only going to get tighter.

In light of all this, the real colossal mistake would be to elect the twin paladins of pessimism, John Kerry and John Edwards, to determine the direction of the war on terror for the next four years.

Senator Kerry on the Supreme Court

In the debate in St. Louis last Friday evening John Kerry said, "Now, here's what I believe. I don't believe we need a good conservative judge, and I don't believe we need a good liberal judge. I don't believe we need a good judge of that kind of definition on either side."

He then followed his claim to be uninterested in whether a judge is liberal or conservative by conjuring an image of a liberal jurist: "The future of things that matter to you - in terms of civil rights, what kind of Justice Department you'll have, whether we'll enforce the law. Will we have equal opportunity? Will women's rights be protected? Will we have equal pay for women, which is going backwards? Will a woman's right to choose be protected? These are constitutional rights, and I want to make sure we have judges who interpret the Constitution of the United States according to the law."

Last May the Senator spoke these words: "I believe that a woman's right to choose is a constitutional right, I will not appoint anyone to the Supreme Court who will undo that right."

In other words, Kerry will not, contrary to what he said Friday night, appoint a conservative justice to the Supreme Court who disagrees with him on whether there is anything in the constitution guaranteeing a woman the right to terminate a pregnancy. If this is Senator Kerry's position, so be it, but it is simply disingenuous of him to suggest that ideology doesn't matter, as if he were only interested in finding the best qualified person for the job. He isn't. By his own admission, if the best qualified person has a strict constructionist view of the constitution he would have no chance of serving on a Kerry court.

Whichever man is elected president on November 2nd will probably have the opportunity to profoundly restructure our highest judicial Court. Justice John Paul Stevens, a liberal appointed by President Ford, is 84. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a conservative first appointed by President Nixon and then elevated to chief justice by President Reagan, just turned 80. Sandra Day O'Connor, a Reagan appointee who often votes with the liberals, is 74. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee who anchors the court's left, is 71. At 56, Clarence Thomas, a conservative, is the only justice under 65.

It's possible that the next president will have the opportunity to make four appointments to the Bench. That's why this election is so important in the eyes of so many. The next president will not only decide the future of the war on terror but the direction of law in this country for the next fifty to a hundred years. The choice is between a man who would appoint people to the Court who believe that we should interpret the constitution in light of what its authors intended (Bush), and a man who believes that the constitution should be interpreted to conform to current political and social fashion (Kerry). Senator Kerry's claim that a judge's ideology doesn't matter to him is nonsense.

Thanks to Captain's Quarters for some of the above.

Conservatives and Liberals

A friend passes on this little illustration of the difference between conservatives and liberals with respect to the problems of unemployment and poverty:

A conservative and a liberal were walking down the street when they came to a homeless person. The conservative gave the homeless person his business card and told him to come to his office for a job. He then took twenty dollars out of his pocket and gave it to the homeless person.

The liberal was very impressed, and when they came to another homeless person, he decided to help. He walked over to the homeless person and gave him directions to the welfare office. He then reached into the conservative's pocket and took out twenty dollars. He kept $15 for administrative processing fees and gave the homeless person five.

Now you understand the difference between conservatives and liberals.

It'll be difficult, as we watch the debate Wednesday night, to keep from imagining John Kerry with his hand in the pockets of America.

Rev. Jackson, Call Your Office!

Uh Oh. A friend passes word that yet another ballot has been rigged by the Republicans in order to suppress the Kerry vote. No doubt this will be an issue in the next debate. Go here and try to cast a vote for Kerry to see what we're talking about.

You have to hand it to the Republicans. When it comes to dirty tricks all the attempts by the Democrats to hide who they are, to deny the vote to servicemen and servicewomen, to deceive the public about what the Republicans will do if re-elected, and to register new voters in excess of the populations of some voting districts, all seem amateurish in comparison to stunts like this.

The Price of Gasoline

Gasoline prices will probably soon become an issue in the presidential campaign and perhaps they should, but Viewpoint cautions against falling for the claim that they're higher now than ever before in our history. That would be true if the price is considered in constant dollars, but if the price is adjusted for inflation we find that a dollar buys much more gasoline today than it did in 1980. Brother Bill, who is the brains behind this blog, sends along a link to this graph to buttress the point.

Animals and Humanism

Peter Singer is a professor of philosophy at Princeton University who is has famously made a case for legalizing infanticide and who is also well-known for his advocacy of animal rights. In the recent issue of Free Inquiry, the organ of the Council for Secular Humanism, Singer chides his fellow humanists for their overall failure to shed the prejudice of speciesism which, he claims, has been inherited from Christian forebears.

He writes that Christians believe that "God gave human beings dominion over the natural world, and God doesn't care how we treat it....Nature itself is of no intrinsic value," in the Christian view, "and the destruction of plants and animals cannot be sinful." This, of course, is the sheerest flapdoodle, but more on that later.

Singer chastises humanists for holding to the Christian idea that humans are at the center of the moral universe and for thinking that values are grounded in the welfare of humans rather than in the "welfare of all beings capable of having a welfare at all." There is, Singer asserts, "no non-religious reason why the pains and pleasures of non-human animals should not be given equal [moral] weight with the similar pains and pleasures of human beings."

As an atheistic Darwinian, this is a very peculiar argument for the Princeton professor to make. It may be that there's no non-religious reason for not treating animals as the moral equal of humans, but the salient point is that there's no non-religious reason why one should do it. Searching the article for reasons why he believes humanists are wrong to exploit animals, the only thing one finds is his claim that they should reject this sort of behavior because it's based upon Christian dogma and, the implication is, anything Christian is ipso facto wrong.

Singer is in an awkward position here. He wants to make the case that exploitation of animals is immoral, but as a Darwinian he has no basis for making such a claim. What grounds does Darwinian survival of the fittest give us for condemning the mistreatment of animals? The only ethic one can derive from evolution is that one should look out for one's own interests. The principles of evolution are silent, as they must be, about the means employed to insure one's survival. If human survival is accomplished through behaviors that involve cruelty to other creatures, evolution affords us no basis for passing judgment. Darwinian evolution, to the extent that it endorses any ethic over any other, simply endorses the view that might makes right.

Singer's complaint against the mistreatment of animals distills to this: He likes animals and it makes him sad to see them treated badly, and he wishes others would feel the way he does. As an atheist that's the most he can say. To suggest that others are immoral if they don't feel the way he does is silly. Indeed, an animal abuser could reply that it is Singer who is immoral for not believing that animals should be killed for sport and pleasure, and his argument would be no less compelling than Singer's.

One of the oddities of what people like Singer are trying to do is that in seeking to convince people that they should discard every vestige of religious dogma, they make it clear that they themselves wish to retain the concept of moral judgment. Yet moral judgment is incoherent apart from religious assumptions, specifically the assumption that there exists a personal God.

It needs to be stressed that the only basis we have for saying that it is wrong to treat animals unkindly is the Christian doctrine that animals, and nature in general, belong to God who has given us stewardship over them. He grants us the right to derive pleasure from them in various ways, but he expects us to treat them with respect and care and to avoid inflicting gratuitous pain and harm. We have, therefore, an obligation, a moral obligation, to be diligent in our care of his creation.

We're in the position of the babysitter who has been told to feel free to help herself to the refrigerator, but such a privilege does not entitle her to go on a destructive rampage throughout the house. Take away the belief that God exists and has made us stewards over his creation, however, and adopt instead the view that all of life is just an amazing fluke in a vast, empty cosmos, and the notion that there exists some imperative to treat animals, or other humans for that matter, in any particular way becomes ludicrous.

Say What?

There's much blustering and harrumphing going on in the blogosphere over the ABC memo from ABCNews political director Mark Halperin that fell into the hands of Matt Drudge on Friday, but, truth to tell, I'm not sure what to make of it. The easy interpretation is that it's just another illustration of how the MSM see themselves as the propaganda arm of the Kerry campaign, and perhaps that's the correct way to read it. It's just that the memo is so enigmatic, obscure, and unintelligible that whatever Halperin was trying to tell his troops at ABC it's doubtful that any of them could decipher it. Here's the last paragraph:

It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.

I've received better writing from barely literate high school students. In fact, one account has it that Drudge got the memo from a staffer who asked him to read it so he could tell him what it says (Just kidding).

Perhaps they simply speak in code at ABC so that when Halperin states that We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that maybe they just assume he's giving them the green light to stick it to Bush whenever they see the opportunity. Maybe, but, heck, why do they need a cryptic memo to know to do that? They're liberal media creatures, for heaven's sake. Savaging Republicans is part of their genetic endowment. It's what they do.

Perhaps, like a coach at halftime trying to rally a team which has played listlessly in the first half, Halperin feels the need to prod his staffers on to a more vigorous performance of their duties. Perhaps he's striving, in his semi-coherent way, to inspire them to feats of political partisanship of which they otherwise could not have imagined themselves capable. Whatever. It would have been easier to discern what he was trying to accomplish if the guy knew how to write.

Jacques Derrida, RIP

Peter Schramm at No Left Turns relays word that the famous French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida has passed away. Derrida was famous for his work on textual deconstruction which reduced literature, in the minds of many, to nothing but a series of expressions of self-interest. Schramm offers this obituary:

The Parisian Heidegerrian Jacques Derrida has died. I'm tempted to deconstruct this, but I'll just leave it as a postcard since my intention wouldn't control the reading of the text. It would be the metaphysical illusion. Deconstruction is justice, Derrida said. I say Derrida isn't even a trace; and that's the truth.

An Australian Augur?

In Australia Prime Minister John Howard, a dependable ally of ours in Iraq and in the war on terror has been re-elected to office, defeating an opponent who sounded a lot like Senator Kerry in his promises to pull Australia's troops out of Iraq and concentrate them on the "real" war on terror closer to home.

This is by itself good news, of course, but it may be even better than it appears. Reports up until election day had the race very close, John Kerry's sister, who lives in Australia, campaigned vigorously against Howard, and yet he seems to have won a 53% to 48% plurality. There might be a lesson here for our election which seems to have some things in common with Australia's. Just because the polls show the race getting tight doesn't mean that it really is.

The Debate

It's impossible to say how many viewers were willing to have their vote decided by anything that happened on the stage last night, and, of those who were, we can't know how many will make their decision based upon what was said rather than upon the image that the candidates projected. In our post-modern world, unfortunately, people are persuaded more by style than by substance, more by how one says what they say rather than by what they say. A smooth, eloquent delivery covers a multitude of sins against logic and coherence.

Consequently, for the fashionably po-mo John Kerry is very appealing, but for the remnant of modern thinkers who believe that character counts and that substance should trump style, George Bush would've been awarded the laurel last evening and should be granted it on election day as well. Hugh Hewitt tells us why:

In the past eight days, John Kerry has:

*announced to a national audience that American actions in defense of national security must pass a "global test";

*announced that he would sell nuclear fuel to Iran;

*could not answer, and badly filibustered a question on what he would do if Iran continued to push towards nuclear weapons acquisition;

*denounced as unilateralism the conation that George Bush put together to overthrow Iraq, and called for unilateral appeasement of North Korea;

*compared Iraq to Lebanon, but insisted a summit could entice other countries to join the effort in Iraq, even after the French and the Germans announced they would not do so even if Kerry was elected;

*twice identified the most pressing proliferation problem as the American effort to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons capable of destroying deep bunkers, thus equating the United States with rogue states like North Korea and Iran and proclaiming hostility to modernization of the American arsenal - vintage Kerry defense thinking;

*announced plan after plan for which no details exist;

*"absolutely" pledged not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $200,000 annually, a pledge that even his most ardent admirers know is either a bald lie or a repudiation of most of his spending plans;

*ignored the creation of 1.9 million jobs over the past 13 months and ignored the economic consequences of the Clinton recession and 9/11 attacks while attacking Bush's tax cuts;

*while calling attention to his Catholic status, defended his vote against banning partial birth abortion, called for taxpayer support for abortion, argued that "parental notification" was connected to dads raping daughters and defended the wholesale harvesting of frozen embryos for research purposes --four positions completely opposite of Catholic Church teaching and far outside the American consensus opinion on abortion;

*actually said "John Edwards and I are for tort reform," and told the American people that lawsuits against doctors are 1% of the health care problem;

*defensively denied being "wishy washy," a "flip flopper," and a "liberal," while complaining about being branded such by the president;

*embraced the Kyoto Treaty and called for its resuscitation with amendments;

*told America that General Shinseki had been fired by Bush and that the firing had a "chilling" effect on all generals, and one day later said Shinseki had been "retired" --not fired-- and left off the "chilling effect" argument --a record one day flip flop;

*saw his running mate get woodshedded and his campaign try to reverse that blow by arguing that the Vice President should have remembered meeting Edwards;

*heard his wife assert that American troops were fighting for oil and many other stunning things;

*watched as Bush did not make a single memorable error in two debates while effectively underscoring Kerry's "global test" pratfall, focusing on Kerry's did-nothing time-serving two decades in the Senate, wrestle the ISG report to its appropriate place in the discussion of the Iraq War, persuade by repeated argument (which the Vice President also helped along) that coalitions can not be led or maintain by derision or democracies built by indecision;

*watched as Bush effectively and accurately branded KerryCare as an expanded form of HillaryCare;

*watched as Bush simply and devastatingly branded Kerry as not credible on taxes, spending and most important of all, defending the United States.

Against all of this and more, Kerry backers point to his debating skills in round one and George W. Bush's expressions from the first debate. If this was a good eight days for Kerry, then November 11, 1864 was a fine day for Atlanta. In fact this stretch has been a disaster for Kerry as all the set-up work Bush-Cheney had performed for eight months came home in eight days as Kerry cooperated in his unmasking as a candidate far from the country's center of political gravity on nearly every issue, comfortable only in ambiguity and a champion of every one of the left's pet domestic causes from partial birth abortion and taxpayer funded abortions to Kyoto and federal delivery of health care.

The relentless focus on his hard left posturing on foreign affairs through 20 years in the Senate hasn't even begun yet. Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke wondered aloud last night why the president didn't make use of Kerry's 1991 vote against the first Gulf War, and I wonder when we will hear about Kerry's mini-Munich in Managua in April 1985 or his nuclear freeze pedigree and opposition to many of the major weapon programs on which our military now relies, but there is still three and a half weeks and one more debate left in which these and other points have opportunity to surface.

The clock has almost run out on Kerry, and his little gust of momentum - called a hurricane by his backers because they hadn't felt a breeze for months - is spent.

We're not as sanguine about all this as Hewitt is because, as mentioned above, too many people who will go to the polls on November 2nd don't really care about facts or argument. They'll cast their vote on the basis of "presence" or physical attractiveness or verbal eloquence, all criteria which are absurdly irrelevant to picking a president but by which Kerry will score high. Even so, Viewpoint certainly hopes that Hewitt is right.

What If Clinton Led OIF?

The irrationality of the Bush haters induces an episode of cathartic venting by Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online. A couple of excerpts:

Bush "lied" because he believed the same intelligence John Kerry believed. Bush "lied" even though John Edwards called the threat from Iraq "imminent" - something Bush never did. No one bothers to ask how it could be possible that Bush lied. How could he have known there were no WMDs? No one bothers to wonder why Tony Blair isn't a liar. Indeed, no one bothers to ask whether the Great Diplomat and Alliance Builder believes our oldest and truest allies Great Britain and Australia are lead by equally contemptible liars. Of course, they can't be liars - they are merely part of the coalition of the bribed. In John Kerry's world, it's a defense to say your oldest friends aren't dishonest, they're merely whores.

Oh, one more thing no one asks. How could Bush think he could pull this thing off? I mean, knowing as he did that there were no WMDs in Iraq, how could he invade the country and think no one would notice? And if he's capable of lying to send Americans to their deaths for some nebulous petro-oedipal conspiracy no intelligent person has bothered to make even credible, why on earth didn't he just plant some WMDs on the victim after the fact? If you're willing to kill Americans for a lie, surely you'd be willing to plant some anthrax to keep your job.

And speaking of the victim, if it's in fact true that Bush offered no rationale for the war other than WMDs, why shouldn't we simply let Saddam out of his cage and put him back in office? We can even use some of the extra money from the Oil-for-Food program to compensate him for the damage to his palaces and prisons. Heck, if John Edwards weren't busy, he could represent him.

If Bill Clinton or Al Gore had conducted this war, you would be weeping joyously about Iraqi children going to school and women registering to vote. If this war had been successful rather than hard, John Kerry would be boasting today about how he supported it - much as he did every time it looked like the polls were moving in that direction. You may have forgotten Kerry's anti-Dean gloating when Saddam was captured, but many of us haven't. He would be saying the lack of WMDs are irrelevant and that Bush's lies were mistakes. And that's the point. I don't care if you hate George W. Bush; it's not like I love the guy. And I don't care if you opposed the war from day one. What disgusts me are those people who say toppling Saddam and fighting the terror war on their turf rather than ours is a mistake, not because these are bad ideas, but merely because your vanity cannot tolerate the notion that George W. Bush is right or that George W. Bush's rightness might cost John Kerry the election.

Indeed. If Clinton were still president and had led the war against Iraq there would be not a peep of protest from the Democrats. They would, in fact, be right now praising this undertaking as one of the greatest causes in the history of Western civilization (which it is). They would be shaming any naysayers for their reluctance to have America bring to completion an historic mission of liberation. They would be castigating their opponents for not caring sufficiently about the horrible oppression of millions of Iraqis who simply yearn to be free of fear, torture, and murder. They would be decrying the implicit sexism of the critics who are content to see women ground down under the boot of Islamic machismo. They would be condemning the greedy selfishness of a people who have so much but who are loath to spend a relatively small portion of their abundance to help the desperate millions in Iraq get up on their feet.

This is why so much of the Democratic criticism of the President is so difficult to abide. It's so manifestly hypocritical, self-serving, and unprincipled.

Mistaken, Deluded, or Lying

Hugh Hewitt has the facts concerning Senator Kerry's repeated claim that General Shinseki was fired because he criticized the decision not to put more troops in Iraq. The truth is he wasn't fired. He retired after serving a full term and his retirement was announced months before the invasion of Iraq.

When someone says what is false they are either mistaken, deluded, or lying. The claim that Shinseki was fired has been made too often, and rebutted too often, for it to be a mistake.

Senator Kerry keeps repeating this falsehood because it makes the White House look like it punishes dissenters and wouldn't listen to advice from military men about how to plan for the invasion. Kerry's campaign could be forgiven for having made a false claim once, maybe even twice, but to continue to mislead the American people and to persist in slandering the President when they know that what they're saying is false is unconscionable.

Strange Folks

It should give John Kerry supporters, as well as the rest of us, some measure of pause to consider that a large segment of Kerry's supporters are voting for him because either they believe he's lying or they hope that he is. Something like 30% of the Democrat party is fervently anti-war. This is the overriding issue for them and they want us to get out of Iraq now. Even so, Kerry has vowed to stay and win it. Yet this 30% is solidly in his camp. There can be only one reason for this discrepancy and that is that they don't believe the Senator really means what he says.

After all, everything he's ever done in his public life suggests that he doesn't mean it. He first broke upon the national stage by insisting that the United States summarily withdraw from Vietnam because it was the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time and there were no national interests at stake. Since then he has consistently sought to thwart efforts to use military force abroad. To think that he would now be genuinely transformed into an advocate for "staying the course" in a war he believes is misbegotten and pointless is to think that he has somehow undergone an ideological transformation that would be nothing short of miraculous.

Moreover, there is another sizable chunk of Democratic voters who are viscerally opposed to an unfettered right to bear arms. It is perhaps one of the top three issues for them in determining their vote. Kerry flaunts his support of such a right and yet the anti-gun folks are out campaigning for him. Why? Is it because they don't think he's telling the truth about his love for the 2nd ammendment?

It is certainly one of the oddities of this election season that the Democrats have mustered such an animosity toward President Bush because, as they claim to see it, he lied to the American people, while, at the same time, a large number of them are going to vote for Senator Kerry precisely because they believe, or are hoping, that he really is lying to the American people.

Strange folks, these liberals.

Where Things Stand

Jay Cost has some great analysis of recent polls which show the race tightening. The news is not all as bad for Bush supporters as it might seem. Kerry Spot posts the following excerpts from Cost:

The first moral of the story is to try to be sanguine about these polls. It is important to remember that last Thursday was the low-point for Dubya and the high-point for Kerry. Even now, Dubya still has a lead. The way to look at this is week is that, given the public's reaction to his performance last Thursday, the president has really dodged a bullet.

The second moral of the story is to remember that polling is, at best, ill-suited for presidential politics. We political junkies are desperate for some kind of certainty, and so we cling to these polls. But the bottom line is that there is no certainty in these polls. Once again, to obtain any kind of certainty, you would have to conduct the same poll at least thirty times and average the results. And you would have to do it before there are any possibilities of substantial changes in the electorate (e.g. you would have to do thirty identical polls in between the two debates). That would give you an indication of where the race stands. That would give you certainty.

The campaigns probably do something like this. Thus, if you want to know where the race really stands, take a look at where they are campaigning. Kerry is spending time in Wisconsin and Colorado. Bush is spending time in Maine, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Interestingly, nobody is spending time in Florida, New Mexico, West Virginia, Minnesota, Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri.

My guess is that the Bushies are reasonably confidant that they will hold all the states they held in 2000 except New Hampshire, Colorado and Ohio without much effort (which Kerry thinks he can pick up). But, on the other hand, he can hold Florida and likely pick up Iowa and probably Wisconsin (which Kerry is worried that he will lose), and possibly one EV from Maine.

Suppose all of this breaks against Bush. Suppose he loses PA, OH, CO, NH, WI, ME. He holds FL and picks up IA. That would put the final EV count at 254. We should call that Dubya's floor. There are lots and lots of different things Dubya could do here to get to 270. It would be pretty easy. A hold in OH. A pick-up of PA. A pick up of NH (4 EV's) and WI (11 EV's) and ME (1 EV). A pick-up of WI (11 EV's) and a hold of CO (9 EV's).

On the other hand, Kerry's floor is 229. Kerry has to do a lot more than Dubya to get to 270. This is where the real race is, people. It is not in that AP-IPSOS poll!

In other words, a solid performance tonight by Bush might make victory irretrievable for the Democrats even with one debate left.

For the Philosophically Inclined

The philosophically-minded and intellectually curious will want to check out and bookmark MeaningofLife.tv, which offers an archive of video clips of interviews of many of the foremost thinkers in the U.S., Britain, and Canada on a wide range of philosophical and scientific subjects. The interviews are conducted by Robert Wright who uses brief clips (two or three minutes) to explore a wide diversity of ideas, and each set of topic includes the thoughts of several prominent thinkers. Topics include Free Will, the Anthropic Principle, Quantum Wierdness, the possiblity of goodness without God, the nature of Consciousness, and many others. Good stuff.

Kicking Against the Goads

A friend passes on an article in Front Page Mag on the political conversion, sort of, of Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is an erstwhile advocate of all the causes of the far left, but 9/11 was something of a Damascus road experience for him. The scales fell from his eyes and, like a lot of former leftists who have experienced a political epiphany, he suddenly realized that the left-wing criticism of the U.S., though perhaps still valid in some respects, was woefully mistaken in those areas of greatest importance. He also came to see that in many ways the left was phony and unprincipled. One wonders why it took something as dramatic as 9/11 for such an intelligent man to see that, but nevertheless, it did.

Hitchens is very much of a moralist and is also an outspoken atheist. Indeed, he calls to mind the character that Orwell describes as "an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him." Hitchens even wrote a book the whole point of which was to discredit, of all people, Mother Teresa. He has not moved away from these positions and writes regular essays for militantly atheistic publications like Free Inquiry.

We mention this because it will be interesting to see how comfortable he feels in the company of neo-cons, many of whom are devout. It will also be interesting to see whether he has a second enlightenment and comes to the realization that his strong sense of moral outrage is incompatible with his equally strong belief in the irrelevance of God.

Anyway, the article is an interesting read even if the reader is not familiar with Hitchens, and it's fascinating if he/she is.

The Grand Equivocator

Captain's Quarters has a couple of important pieces. The first goes into some detail about how Saddam had bribed Jacques Chirac to get him to oppose us at the U.N. It's incredible that having suffered the betrayal of our putative allies in the U.N. who chose avarice over loyalty, that Senator Kerry still criticizes President Bush for not letting these people in on Iraqi reconstruction contracts. What's equally difficult to believe, or would be if we hadn't had prior experience of Kerry's ability to simultaneously advance two mutually exclusive criticisms of Bush, is that he condemns the president for "allowing" American business to be outsourced to other countries, while at the same time condemning him for not outsourcing American business in Iraq.

The second is a sad recitation of recent examples of Democrats vandalizing and threatening Republican campaign facilities and workers. This is the party of liberalism, but it's pretty hard to distinguish these tactics from those of the European fascists in the 1930s.

Combine these sordid episodes with the Dems strategy of assuring the public that there will be a draft if Bush is reelected, telling the black community that the Republicans are trying to suppress their vote, and scaring old people about alleged Republican plans to take their social security away from them and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Democratic strategy to win in November consists largely of lying, cheating, and thuggery.

Not Enough Troops?

Much has been made of the claim by Paul Bremer and others that we didn't have enough troops in Baghdad to suppress the looting and violence that followed hard upon the liberation of that city. The lack of troops has been seized upon by the president's opponents as evidence that he mishandled the post war and didn't have an effective plan to control the country. For those who want a much more trenchant analysis, however, Wretchard at Belmont Club has a must-read essay.

Wretchard reminds us of two important facts. First, Bremer claimed that there weren't enough troops available at the time he got there shortly after Baghdad fell, but he believes that the number of troops deployed there now is adequate.

Second, the shortfall was not because of poor planning but rather because the troops that had been planned for were rendered unavailable by the last minute decision by Turkey to refuse permission to the 4th Infantry Division to use their soil as a staging area for an invasion of Iraq. This caused a delay in their deployment that seriously hampered attempts to bring the looting under immediate control. Read the details, they're quite interesting.

The Ultimate Kerry Ad

A friend sends me this link to the ultimate campaign ad for Senator Kerry. It's a hoot.

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.