The Coming Conservative Crack-Up

Mark Steyn writes a very funny piece on the perennial prognostications of a "conservative crack-up". Here's an excerpt:

Then there's the 59 striped-pants colossi of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan State Department who've sent a letter to the Senate calling on them to reject John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador. According to the Associated Press report, the signatories include:

"Princeton Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration."

Princeton Lyman? Monteagle Stearns? Spurgeon Keeny Jr.? If Norman Lear's shows had wacky characters like that, they'd still be in syndication. It's a good rule of thumb that anything 59 economists, bureaucrats or diplomats are prepared to sign an open letter objecting to is by definition a good thing. But that goes double when the 59 panjandrums lined up against you are Princeton Monteagle Jr., President Nixon's ambassador to the Spurgeon Islands; Spurgeon Monkfish III, President Ford's ambassador to the Lyman Islands; Dartmouth Monticello IV, President Johnson's personal emissary to His Serene Highness the Monteagle of Keeny; Columbia Long-Playing-Album, the first diplomat to be named by President Carter to the State Department's Name Control Agency; and Vasser Peachy-Keeny, the first woman to be named Vasser Peachy-Keeny. One sees their point, of course: Let a fellow called "John" Bolton become ambassador and next thing you know Earl and Bud will want the gig.

Even Sen. John Danforth, who should know better, got in on the act, taking half a page in the New York Times to give the Full Monteagle to the "religious right." Blog maestro Andrew Sullivan decided that America was witnessing a "conservative crack-up" over Terri Schiavo and the embrace of her cause by extreme right wing fundamentalist theocrat zealots like, er, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. Sullivan was last predicting a "conservative crack-up" during the impeachment era, on the grounds (if I recall correctly) that Republican moralizing would dramatically cut into Strom Thurmond's share of the gay vote. In the '90s, the Weekly Standard ran innumerable special editions devoted to the subject: Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up 2; Conservative Crack-Up -- The Musical; Abbott And Costello Meet The Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up On Elm Street; Four Weddings And A Conservative Crack-Up; Rod Stewart Sings Timeless Favorites From The Great Conservative Crack-Up, etc.

Read the whole thing. It's a hoot.

Saudis Take on al-Qaida

There are unconfirmed reports of a major battle raging in Saudi Arabia between government troops and al Qaida mujahideen in the town of Al-Raas.

There's a bit more information on the battle at the link.

Atheists Convene

A CNSNews report tells us of a gathering of about one hundred atheists from California to Connecticut in Philadelphia over Easter weekend to discuss issues of interest to those who call themselves "Godless Americans" and to plan activities to advance their cause. Several items in the report caught our eye. One was a sentence that noted that:

While the 31st National Convention of American Atheists had no official theme, one topic that came up often during the event was the future of "nonbelievers," as well as what's ahead for atheism itself.

The future of nonbelievers is indeed an interesting theological question about which the New Testament has some disquieting things to say, but we suspect that that's not what those who raised the topic at the conference had in mind. If the conference attendees were concerned about the future of atheism in this world, perhaps they might have gleaned some insight from the fact that their nationwide convocation could have been held around the kitchen table.

The news account also mentioned this observation from Boston University anthropologist David Eller:

Because having a "belief" enables a person to claim something is true with no evidence to support it, Eller said he'd like to strike the word from our language altogether. "I have no beliefs," he noted.

Presumably, then, the professor lacks a belief that he has no beliefs, an odd piece of thinking for a university Ph.D. Or maybe not.

Because he works in an academic environment, Eller said he is comfortable "living from the neck up" and acknowledged that atheism "appeals only to the rational few," while religion is a "whole-body experience" that "holds onto people's hearts even as they lose their minds."

Apparently, the exalted rationality of professor Eller has yet to lead him to the realization that if materialism is true then he really has no basis for trusting his reason to lead him to truth. But never mind. There are few sensations more gratifying to an academic than the satisfaction of knowing that one is intellectually superior to one's fellows. We should avert our eyes from professor Eller's unseemly arrogance, acknowledging that the pleasure he derives from flaunting his superior rational gifts doubtless makes the practice of it irresistible for him.

Colson Critiques the Darwinian Hegemony

Chuck Colson weighs in on the Intelligent Design/Darwinism debate with an essay in Christianity Today. He notes that:

Sure, there's evidence that evolution takes place within a species-but the fossil record has not yielded evidence of one species becoming another, as Darwin confidently predicted. This lack of evidence has not gone unnoticed by sociologist Rodney Stark. Stark calls himself neither an evolutionist nor an advocate of Intelligent Design; instead, he says, he is merely a scholar pursuing the evidence where it leads. In For the Glory of God (Princeton University Press, 2003), Stark offers startling evidence that Darwinists have covered up mounting flaws in their theory.

He concludes that the battle over evolution is hardly a case of "heroic" scientists fighting off the persecution of religious fanatics. Instead, from the start, evolution "has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator-an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work."

Committed Darwinists continue this strategy today. For example, nine years ago biochemist Michael Behe published Darwin's Black Box (Free Press, 1996). Behe argued that complex structures like proteins cannot be assembled piecemeal, with gradual improvement of function. Instead, like a mousetrap, all the parts-catch, spring, hammer, and so forth-must be assembled simultaneously, or the protein doesn't work.

Behe's thesis faced a challenge from the nation's leading expert on cell structure, Dr. Russell Doolittle at the University of California-San Diego. Doolittle cited a study on bloodletting in the journal Cell that supposedly disproved Behe's argument. Behe immediately read the article-and found that the study proved just the opposite: It supported his theory. Behe confronted Doolittle, who privately acknowledged that he was wrong-but declined to make a public retraction.

So who's really rolling back the Enlightenment? Those who invite us to follow the evidence wherever it leads-or those demanding that we ignore it? The folks who want both evolution and Intelligent Design taught in school, with all their strengths and weaknesses-or those who attempt to silence any opposition?

Darwinians act like medieval clerics whose religion is under attack. The best way to preserve it is to insulate it against scrutiny. They "must not let a divine foot in the door", as Richard Lewontin famously put it. Their worst nightmare is not that natural selection will be unable to withstand careful examination as a mechanism of change, but rather that the metaphysical underpinnings of Darwinism, the dogma, for instance, that natural processes are by themselves sufficient to explain the origin and diversification of life, will dissolve in a trice once they are immersed in the acids of free inquiry.

The Darwinians are not defending their science. Indeed, it is not their science that is in question. It is the philosophical assumptions of atheistic materialism that are woven into their science that they strive to defend, and they know that, if they allow students to examine the philosophical alternatives, materialism will suffer in the comparison. No one wants to see his religion discredited, especially when, like the Darwinians, they've invested their entire professional lives in its credibility, and so they fight like desperate zealots to prevent our public schools from exposing young people to the challenges that Intelligent Design presents. Don't question, just believe is the Darwinian mantra, a mantra suitable for fundamentalist mullahs and others who fear the consequences of free and open inquiry.

Check out the rest of what Colson says at the Christianity Today site.

What the Polls Show about Schiavo

In the days leading up to the death of Terri Schiavo some commentators made much of polls which showed that those who believed that the feeding tubes should never have been removed were grossly out of step with the consensus in America. As a sociological matter the polls were not without interest, but as a means of providing moral guidance they were irrelevant. Right and wrong are not matters to be settled by consulting popular opinion polls.

Even so, it turns out that those who supported Terri's parents in their wish to keep her alive were not at variance with popular opinion after all, a fact which goes some distance toward restoring our confidence in the moral wisdom of the American people.

A Zogby poll asks this question:

"If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should they not be denied food and water?"

A whopping 79 percent said the patient should not have food and water taken away while just 9 percent said yes.

When asked directly about Terri's case and told that her estranged husband Michael "has had a girlfriend for 10 years and has two children with her" 56 percent of Americans believed guardianship should have been turned over to Terri's parents while 37 percent disagreed.

Another question asked:

"When there is conflicting evidence on whether or not a patient would want to be on a feeding tube, should elected officials order that a feeding tube be removed or should they order that it remain in place?"

Some 18 percent said the feeding tube should be removed and 42 percent said it should remain in place.

There's more on the results of the Zogby poll at the link.

Atheism's Existential Predicament

The following is a slightly revised version of a post which appeared on Viewpoint last summer titled In the Absence of God. Since we've picked up new readers since then it might be worthwhile to post it again.

A couple of days ago Viewpoint posted a piece titled The Devil's Chaplain about Richard Dawkins, the well-known British biologist and anti-theist. Dawkins, we pointed out, finds it difficult, if not impossible, to live consistently with his atheism, denying the existence of God but living his political life as if there really were a transcendent moral law-giver.

I once heard someone say that the only real difference between a theist and an atheist is that the theist gets up and goes to church on Sunday whereas the atheist sleeps in. The remark was meant to be taken only half-seriously, but the tongue-in-cheek delivery masked an attitude that is not uncommon among atheists. The feeling is that the benefits of theism are either bogus (e.g. eternal life) or that they (e.g. morality) can be had by the atheist without all the strictures of religious dogma. The Dawkins piece shows, I think, that this is deeply mistaken.

Whether there is a God or not is not a trivial question. Nor is it like asking whether there is a tenth planet at the edge of the solar system, a matter which makes no practical difference in our lives. The question of God's existence has the most far-reaching ramifications, not just for eternity, but for this life here and now, of any question we could possibly encounter in life. It makes an immeasurable difference whether God exists or not. To understand why, consider the implications of assuming that he does not exist.

First, let's stipulate that the world is, to borrow a term from the existentialist vernacular, absurd. That is to say that the world as it is is incompatible with man as he is. Both the theist and atheist can agree on this. Each of us is a complex bundle of yearnings and needs all of which must go unfulfilled and unsatisfied in a world without God. It is only if there is a God that the problem posed by the world's absurdity can ultimately be resolved.

Consider a baker's dozen reasons why this is true:

1) As human beings we long to ground morality in something more solid than our own subjective preferences, but in the absence of God there is nothing else. Morality is whatever feels right to the individual. This leads to a might makes right egoism, either on the level of the individual or at the level of the state. In either case, whatever the individual does is not morally right or wrong; it just is. Likewise, whatever the state does is not morally right or wrong, even if it commits torture or genocide, it just is. In other words, in the absence of God morality is either arbitrary and subjective, or it doesn't exist at all.

2) As human beings we seek to base our notion of human rights in something beyond our own prejudices, but in the absence of God there is nothing to sustain those rights. We have the right to life and liberty because we are children of the creator of the universe who has invested those rights in us. If there is no creator then there are no human rights, just arbitrary rules some people agree to follow but which could easily be revoked since they're merely words on paper.

3) As human beings we have a deep longing for justice. We yearn to see good rewarded and evil punished. Our hearts break when evil appears to triumph over good, but it's the common human experience that many good people live lives of terrible fear, pain and grief, and then they die. Meanwhile, many who were the cause of that suffering die peacefully and content after a long life of pleasure. In the absence of God there is no ultimate justice. Everybody dies in the end, and there's no reward or punishment, just nothingness.

4) As human beings we strongly desire union with our loved ones. The more we love someone the more closely we wish to be united with that person on every level of our being. Yet we are alienated, separated from them. No matter how close we are, we can never achieve that complete oneness we desire. The other is always "other". This alienation holds not only in our relationships with other people but also in our love for the earth and the realm of nature. In nature we are always an outsider. We are foreign, alien, no matter how much we might long for it to be otherwise. In the absence of God, it will always be thus until the day of our death.

5) As human beings we want answers to life's deepest, most perplexing questions, but in the absence of God there are no answers, there's no certainty about anything that matters, except that we'll eventually die. We shout the "why" questions of human existence at the vast void of the cosmos - why am I here, why do we suffer, why do we want from life what we cannot have - but there's no reply, only silence.

6) As human beings we crave meaning and purpose for our lives. We can't bear living a life we know to be pointless and insignificant, but death nullifies everything and renders it nugatory. In the absence of God there is no purpose or value to anything we do. Some day the earth will burn up in a solar explosion and there'll be not a trace that humans once existed. What will all of our striving matter then? Everything we do is just a footprint in the sand at the edge of the surf of space-time. Eventually all trace of our lives will be washed away as though we were never here.

7) As human beings we long for peace, but throughout the history of mankind there's been nothing but conflict - conflict between individuals and conflict between nations. When the Berlin wall fell some thought conflict was at an end. There would be no more war, hot or cold. Few foresaw the rise of Islamo-fascism and the beginning of the modern struggle to convert the entire world to Islam. This struggle will last until either radical Islam dies out or Christianity, and every Christian, is dead. In the absence of God there is little basis for hope that someday there will be a lasting peace in the world.

8) As human beings we need a sense of dignity, but modern science tells us that we are little more than flesh and bone machines. There is no soul, there is nothing about us that makes us much different than any other mammal. We are more intelligent, of course, but that only makes the difference between us and a cow about the same as the difference between a cow and a trout. In the absence of God there's no reason why someone who has the power should not use it to manipulate and exploit us like the farmer exploits his cattle for his own purposes, slaughtering them when he can profit from so doing. The universe tells us we're nothing but "dust in the wind" and there's no dignity in that.

9) As human beings we yearn to live and yet we know we're going to die. In the absence of God, the fate of each of us is annihilation. There's no basis for hope that loved ones we've lost still somehow exist or that we'll ever see them again. There's no consolation for the bereaved, no salve for grief. Many face this bravely, of course, but, if they're reflective, their bravery must serve to mask an inner despair.

10) As human beings we all strive for happiness. In the absence of God it's perhaps the only thing about life that makes it endurable. Yet happiness is elusive. The world is full of misery. Even if our own lives are free of the afflictions which plague most of those who've ever been born on this planet, we're confronted with the irony that we can only be happy ourselves if we cease to care about others. It is at best unseemly, in the shadow of the awful anguish, pain, grief, tragedy, and other misfortunes which routinely occur in our communities, to declare that "even so, I'm happy". To care about others is to identify with them in their suffering, and it's hard to imagine how an empathetic person can be happy in a world of so much sorrow and distress. The paradox is that, in the absence of God, the only person who can achieve happiness is the person who can shut out the cries of his neighbor and turn inward upon himself.

11) We experience feelings of guilt, but in the absence of an objective standard of morality before which we stand convicted there is no actual guilt. The feeling of guilt then is something we should suppress since it bears no relation to any actual state of affairs.

12) In the absence of God our sense that we have genuine choices and are responsible for those choices is problematic. In a godless world we are just a collection of physical particles, and ultimately physical particles have no freedom, they simply move according to physical laws. There is no free will, there is only an inexorable determinism. At any given moment there is only one possible future.

13) In the absence of God there is no soul and therefore no self other than the physical body. Since our body is in constant flux we are continuously creating a new self, moment by moment year by year. There is nothing which perdures through time which makes me the same person I think I was ten years ago. There is no permanent I. There is only a kaleidoscopic bundle of patterns, impressions, memories, none of which has any real significance in determining who we really are.

If the theist is correct, however, then all of this changes. We can find happiness in knowing that the tragic condition of the world and of our lives is only temporary, that death is not the end and that a beautiful future lies ahead. If God exists then we can assume that He made us for a reason, that there is, therefore, a purpose to existence and that we have dignity and inalienable rights as human beings because we are made in the image of God and loved by Him. If God exists then there is a transcendent moral authority which will ultimately mete out justice and who provides us in this life an objective standard upon which to base moral judgment. We feel guilt because we are actually guilty. We feel free because we are. We have an identity that endures because that identity exists in the mind of God. If God exists there is a basis for hope.

The atheist, if he's consistent with his assumption that there is no God, finds himself in a world which is completely at odds in almost every important way with the structure of his own psyche. He finds himself inexplicably out of synch with his world. He is alone, forlorn, abandoned in an empty, unfeeling universe that offers no solace nor hope that there might be meaning, morality, justice, dignity, peace, and solutions to the riddles of existence. The atheist lives without hope that any of the most profound yearnings of our hearts and minds can ever be fulfilled. How, then, do we come to have them? Why would natural selection evolve us in such a way as to be so metaphysically and psychologically incompatible with the world?

The simplest explanation is that we experience the phenomena we've mentioned, these yearnings and feelings, because they, in fact, conform to some existential reality, some possibility of satisfaction. But they can only be satisfied if there truly is a God.

It's possible of course, that the atheist is correct, that this is just the way things are, and we should simply make the best of a very bad situation. It's possible, but surely the atheist should hope that he's mistaken. It's incomprehensible that some, like philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, actually hope that there is no God. This is tantamount to hoping, bizarrely enough, that life really is a meaningless, senseless, absurd joke. Nagel says in his book The Last Word:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Nagel's ability to see his motivations clearly is uncommon, but his honesty and insight are little compensation for the profound sadness one feels at what he finds in his own heart. How anyone can actually want the universe to be the sort of place where meaning, morality, justice and all the rest are vain illusions, is very difficult to understand.

Beating the Terror Plague

The Strategy Page brings more glad tidings from the Iraqi security front:

April 1, 2005: Another major Shia religious festival, which lasted from 29-31 March, ended without incident. The government made a major effort to provide security for the large gatherings of Shia Arabs attending religious ceremonies. Sunni Arab terrorists, especially al Qaeda, consider these ceremonies a major insult to Sunni religious beliefs.

The government deployed a security effort on the same level as the one rolled out for the January elections. Coalition troops deployed mostly as back up and quick reaction forces. Al Qaeda tried to use suicide car bombers, but none of them got through to large assemblies of Shia Arabs. In one incident, a car bomb went off and killed five people, which was the most any of the attacks were able to do.

Another reason the attacks were not successful was that, in the days before March 29th, police arrested hundreds of Sunni Arabs and foreigners suspected of being terrorists. Many were, and this is because an increasing number of Sunni Arab religious leaders have changed their minds about armed resistance to democracy, and coalition forces. This has made it easier for Sunni Arabs to pass on information to the police.

The Sunni religious leaders have done the math and concluded that they were backing the losing side. Some have made deals with the government, to provide information, or pro-government sermons, in return for favorable treatment (money, access to jobs for their followers, reconstruction projects). But most have simply stopped preaching violence, or cut back on the intensity of their calls for violence against Kurds, Sunni Arabs and infidels (non-Moslems). Many Sunni Arab clerics have also noted that most of their followers are not in favor of terror attacks that kill Iraqis, no matter what their religion or ethnicity.

The terrorists have largely given up attacking American troops. The level of such attacks is about half what it was a year ago. The reason is that the attackers are much more likely to fail, and get killed, when they attack American troops. It's much easier, and safer, to attack Iraqi civilians, or even Iraqi police and troops. But the Iraqi government forces are becoming more lethal as well, and Iraqi government forces usually have American troops backing them up.

The impact of all this has been striking. The overall level of terrorist violence has fallen by about half in the last month. Terrorist attacks that target Iraqis has been very unpopular in Iraq, and caused even many Sunni Arabs to turn against al Qaeda and Sunni Arab terrorist organizations. But at the street level, most Iraqis are more concerned with criminal gangs (who commit far more violence against Iraqis than terrorists) and corruption (which is encountered daily, while you might go weeks without even hearing about a terror attack in your neighborhood.)

Pretty soon we'll begin to notice that there are no reports at all on the evening news about Iraq. Once there's no longer anything bad to report then the whole topic of Iraq will just drop off their radar screen.

Why Iran Is Important

This soon-to-appear television ad on Iran's terrorist designs will pretty much spoil your day. You can go here for an extended version, but it won't make you feel any better.

Thanks to Regime Change Iran for the tip.

Political Violence

The Left did a lot of hand-wringing during the two-week long judicial murder of Terri Schiavo about the possibility of "right-wing violence" (see here, for example). Yet almost all of the actual violence of the last couple of weeks has been perpetrated by Leftists against conservatives, and there's been nary a peep of censure from the hand-wringers about it.

Richard Perle, William Kristol, Ann Coulter, and Pat Buchanan have all been assaulted as they spoke on various campuses around the country. The attacks have not been physically serious, they involved shoes and pies being thrown at them, which says something for the level of argument to which the Left has been reduced, but imagine the outcry if, say, Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy had been attacked in like manner by conservative students while trying to give a speech. The MSM would be apoplectic over goose-stepping brown-shirts on college campuses seeking to stifle free speech.

As it is, the attacks do not come from the Right, so the media chooses not to rouse itself from its torpor.

Democracy in America

Listening to Michael Schiavo's lawyer George Felos expatiate on Terri Schiavo's last hours and the scrupulous attention to judicial punctilio which, in Felos' telling of it, led up to them, I was reminded of a passage from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Tocqueville, writing about the legislative extirpation of the Creek and Cherokee Indians in the 1830's, says this:

"...[T]he conduct of the United States...toward the natives was inspired by the most chaste affection for legal formalities....The Spaniards, by unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, did not succeed in exterminating the Indian race and could not even prevent them from sharing their rights; the...Americans have attained both these results with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, and philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity."

Tocqueville could have been writing, mutatis mutandis, about the judicial extirpation of Terri Schiavo.

RLC

The Origins Debate

The Discovery Institute lists a number of recent essays, gleaned from newspapers around the country, that address the current controversy between Intelligent Design theorists and Darwinian evolutionists. It's good reading for anyone interested in the debate.

Good Trend

Despite the fact that some of the terror attacks in Iraq are horrendous, the trend of those attacks is down. According to the Department of Defense:

The number of terrorist incidents in Iraq have dropped to the lowest level since March 2004....There are between 40 and 60 incidents each day in the country, sharply down from the terrorist effort in the week of the Iraqi elections in January. Even this doesn't tell the whole story. Of those incidents, roughly half have no effect. This means terrorists launch an attack, but no lives are lost, nor is any property damaged.

This could change overnight, of course, but it is good news nonetheless.

Time For Apologies

If, as news reports have it, Intelligence agencies were feeding policy makers bad information about Iraq, and policy makers like the president made decisions based on that information, and then it turns out that the information was incorrect, how is it that the policy makers are called liars?

Yet this is exactly what those who feel comfortable with the promiscuous use of such epithets repeatedly called George Bush throughout 2003 and 2004. It was an insulting slander then, and the odiousness of it is made even more apparent now with the release of the findings of the Presidential panel commissioned last year to study why we were led to believe there were WMD in Iraq.

The panel was co-chaired by retired Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican, and former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia and it concluded that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most prewar assessments about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Moreover, Robb and Silberman agreed that they had found no evidence that senior administration officials had sought to change the prewar intelligence in Iraq, possibly for political gain. Robb said investigators examined every allegation "to see if there was any occasion where a member of the administration or anyone else had asked an analyst or anyone else associated with the intelligence community to change a position they were taking or whether they felt there was any undue influence. And we found absolutely no instance."

There are lots of people who today owe George Bush a profound apology. Such acts of graciousness, however, presuppose a modicum of decency and honesty on the part of people who have shown themselves, over the last two years, to be singularly bereft of such virtues, so we won't be holding our breath.

Secularists Prefer Death: Dowd

It's ironic that observers like Maureen Dowd associate the attempts to spare Terri Schiavo's life with Christian fundamentalism. Ms Dowd insinuates, though she doesn't intend to, that only Christians would think it barbaric and heinous to starve and dehydrate an innocent woman until her organs cease to function. Dowd evidently wants us to believe that sophisticated secularists such as herself consider slowly dessicating someone to be perfectly acceptable as long as the victim is in such a state that she can't raise an objection to it. The tacit admission here is astonishing: Christianity is a philosophy of life, secular materialism is a philosophy of death.

Indeed, we suspect that at least some of the media and judicial support for Michael Schiavo over the last month derives from the fact that most of the chief advocates of keeping Terri alive have been Christians. As irrational as it may be, it is altogether possible that hatred for Christianity (and for Republicans who have also been prominent in this struggle) has driven some people to the position of defending a judicial homicide just to avoid being on the same side of the issue as the Christians and conservatives they despise.

In point of fact, it isn't only the "religious right" or devout Jews like Senator Leiberman who took up the fight for Terri Schiavo. A smattering of atheists, deists, agnostics, and denizens of the religious left also joined in decrying this horrific perversion of justice. Ralph Nader, Nat Hentoff, and Jesse Jackson have all condemned the decision to pull the feeding and water tubes from Terri Schiavo, and none of these men are very often identified with the religious right.

Deroy Murdock explains why defending Terri's right to life should not have been an exclusively religious cause in an article which could be read with profit by anyone who also wants insight into why so many people are suspicious of Terri's husband, Michael.

Chrenkoff's 24th

When next you hear someone opine that America should get out of Iraq at once, ask them if they've been reading Arthur Chrenkoff's series of posts titled Good News From Iraq. Of course, the answer will be that they have not, for if they had they wouldn't be uttering such fatuities.

Chrenkoff's 24th installment is now up and the posts keep getting longer and longer as the news from Iraq keeps getting better and better.

There is so much good happening there that Iraq bids fair to become not only the political, but also the economic, envy of the Middle East. It will be increasingly difficult for the tyrants in neighboring states to keep their citizens down on the farm once the transformation that's taking place in Iraq begins to sink in elsewhere, and the citizenry begins to ask why they can't have some of the freedoms and advantages that they see their Iraqi neighbors enjoying.

Freedom is on the march. Tell your liberal friends it ill-becomes them to be so glum about it.

Flying Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Thank goodness the likes of Paul Krugman stand sentry at the gates of society to warn us of the approaching horde of Vandals and Visigoths who threaten all manner of rapine and mayhem. Krugman sounds the tocsin in this New York Times column:

Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself.

Interpretation: The extremists (guess who they are) are a threat to democracy and should not be tolerated.

We can see this failing clearly in other countries. In the Netherlands, for example, a culture of tolerance led the nation to ignore the growing influence of Islamic extremists until they turned murderous. But it's also true of the United States, where dangerous extremists belong to the majority religion and the majority ethnic group, and wield great political influence.

Interpretation: The dangerous extremists are white, conservative Christians (bet you knew that).

Before he saw the polls, Tom DeLay declared that "one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America." Now he and his party, shocked by the public's negative reaction to their meddling, want to move on. But we shouldn't let them. The Schiavo case is, indeed, a chance to highlight what's going on in America.

Interpretation: Let's tell America that Christians have been trying to save Terri Schiavo's life and liberal Democrats have been trying to have her tortured to death. That'll be a sure-fire winner in the 2008 elections.

One thing that's going on is a climate of fear for those who try to enforce laws that religious extremists oppose. Randall Terry, a spokesman for Terri Schiavo's parents, hasn't killed anyone, but one of his former close associates in the anti-abortion movement is serving time for murdering a doctor. George Greer, the judge in the Schiavo case, needs armed bodyguards.

Interpretation: The spokesperson for the Schindler family knows someone who committed murder, therefore Judge Greer needs bodyguards. Everybody knows how violent those Christians are.

Another thing that's going on is the rise of politicians willing to violate the spirit of the law, if not yet the letter, to cater to the religious right. Everyone knows about the attempt to circumvent the courts through "Terri's law." But there has been little national exposure for a Miami Herald report that Jeb Bush sent state law enforcement agents to seize Terri Schiavo from the hospice - a plan called off when local police said they would enforce the judge's order that she remain there.

Interpretation: Unelected political appointees are sovereign in Mr. Krugman's United States, and the representatives of the people have no business exercising their constitutional prerogatives over them.

It should be pointed out, in this connection, that Gov. Bush sent his agents to rescue Ms. Schiavo because there was a lack of clarity as to who, exactly, had jurisdiction in the matter. When the local police said they would enforce the judge's odious order, the Governor pulled back. Where's the dire threat to democracy here? It's purely in the fevered recesses of Mr. Krugman's paranoid mind.

And the future seems all too likely to bring more intimidation in the name of God and more political intervention that undermines the rule of law. The religious right is already having a big impact on education: 31 percent of teachers surveyed by the National Science Teachers Association feel pressured to present creationism-related material in the classroom.

Interpretation: Parents and school boards are trying to take some control over what their children are taught. Democracy is imperiled! The sky is falling!

But medical care is the cutting edge of extremism. Yesterday The Washington Post reported on the growing number of pharmacists who, on religious grounds, refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or morning-after pills. These pharmacists talk of personal belief; but the effect is to undermine laws that make these drugs available. And let me make a prediction: soon, wherever the religious right is strong, many pharmacists will be pressured into denying women legal drugs.

And it won't stop there. There is a nationwide trend toward "conscience" or "refusal" legislation. Laws in Illinois and Mississippi already allow doctors and other health providers to deny virtually any procedure to any patient. Again, think of how such laws expose doctors to pressure and intimidation.

Interpretation: No medical professional should have the right on religious grounds to deny a woman an abortion if she wants one. If a woman presents herself as a patient for an abortion, a doctor should be obligated, under pain of having his license revoked, to perform it even if he or she thinks a murder is being committed. Now that's "pressure and intimidation."

But the big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster, so that the courts can be packed with judges less committed to upholding the law than Mr. Greer.

Interpretation: The senate, in keeping with the constitution, intends to change a procedural rule which has been abused by a minority of senators in order to prevent the full senate from voting on the president's judicial nominees. Mr. Krugman's idea of religious extremism is the conviction that in a democracy the majority should get to pick the judges as it had for two hundred years until the last congress. That is indeed extremism of the most insidious kind.

We can't count on restraint from people like Mr. DeLay, who believes that he's on a mission to bring a "biblical worldview" to American politics, and that God brought him a brain-damaged patient to help him with that mission.

What we need - and we aren't seeing - is a firm stand by moderates against religious extremism. Some people ask, with justification, Where are the Democrats? But an even better question is, Where are the doctors fiercely defending their professional integrity? I think the American Medical Association disapproves of politicians who second-guess medical diagnoses based on video images - but the association's statement on the Schiavo case is so timid that it's hard to be sure.

Interpretation: Mr. Krugman implies that those best positioned to thwart people motivated by religious conviction are the Democrats. This is evidently because he thinks that Democrats have no religious convictions themselves. This is a stunning admission which will not be welcomed by beleaguered Democrats in red states.

The closest parallel I can think of to current American politics is Israel. There was a time, not that long ago, when moderate Israelis downplayed the rise of religious extremists. But no more: extremists have already killed one prime minister, and everyone realizes that Ariel Sharon is at risk.

The United States is pretty much just like Israel where religious extremists have killed a prime minister and threaten another. Yes sir, the U.S. is just like that. It was, after all, religious extremists who killed JFK and tried to kill Ford and Reagan, or maybe not, but if it wasn't, it could've been. We'll just bet that Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, was a Christian. After all, he was named after a book in the New Testament. And besides, white, conservative Christians have the highest crime and political assassination rates of any demographic group in the world. You can look it up.

America isn't yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here.

Yes, indeedy. It doesn't happen here, but it darn well could. Just let doctors refuse to perform abortions, return majority rule to the senate, and let people fight to save a woman from being starved and dehydrated and the next thing you know the religious nuts will be assassinating our presidents.

Instead of mocking Mr. Krugman perhaps we should show a little compassion for a man clearly in the advanced stages of psychosis. Let's hope he's getting treatment.

Breakthrough in the Death Penalty Debate

There are those who say that Terri Schiavo is not being killed, rather the state of Florida is simply letting her die by not feeding her. Of course, if a mother chose not to feed her infant we wouldn't call it "just letting" the child die, we'd call it murder.

Nevertheless, perhaps the argument has more merit than it might at first appear. It certainly suggests a novel solution to the vexing debate in this country over capital punishment.

With the reasoning of those who favor "letting Terri die" in mind Viewpoint proposes that we abolish the death penalty altogether. We recommend that every electric chair and gas chamber around the country be immediately dismantled and that we, as a nation, foreswear ever executing another murderer.

The only penalty we should impose upon them is to confine them to their cells...and withhold food and water until they die.

Moral Imbecility

Belmont Club tips us to a survey done by the BBC which asks readers to answer the question "What are your hopes for Iraq's parliament?"

Replies came from all over the world. Many were supportive of American efforts there, some were critical, and some were like that of Nina from Toronto:

I hate to say this to Iraqis, but I pray for chaos and civil war: it's the only way to stop Bush's policies and show that peace can never come through force. If Iraq gets peace, Bush wins credibility. It cannot be allowed to happen. Nina, Toronto, Canada

Nina pretty much shines the light on the dark places where the Left's priorities are concealed. She's willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands, maybe millions of Iraqis, just to keep Bush from looking good. She's so committed to the idea that peace can't come through the use of force that she'd rather see millions suffer than have her belief be proven wrong.

One tragic irony offered by people like this (there are several) is that they are moral imbeciles who are convinced that they're morally superior to anyone who sees things differently than they do. Sadly, there may be many more like Nina out there who secretly hope for failure in Iraq for the same reasons she does, but who realize that it would sound terrible for them to say it.

What ugly, twisted, hate-filled lives they must live.

Hentoff on Judicial Murder

The Democrats and others on the Left have been repeating the vacuity that Republicans have been using the Terri Schiavo case for political gain. The charge is moronic on its face but especially so now that Jesse Jackson has gone to Pinellas Park in solidarity with Terri's family and such right-wing Republican journals as The Village Voice are excoriating the judicial murder of Terri Schiavo.

Nat Hentoff, who no one will ever mistake for a Republican, unloads both barrels at those who have brought Terri Schiavo to the brink of death.

The whole tragic affair hinges on Michael Schiavo's testimony that Terri told him once that she wouldn't want to be kept alive if she were in a persistent vegetative state. There is no corroboration, however, that Terri ever said this, only the memory of her husband who recalled it seven years after she suffered her brain injury. But even if she had said it, it's not clear that she's actually in a PVS, and even if she is, it's not clear that she would want to die the way the state of Florida is killing her.

There is absolutely no good reason, no good argument, for doing what is being done to Terri Schiavo. None. The judge in this case is either an incompetent buffoon or a moral pygmy. The husband is utterly contemptible. The MSM has been irresponsible and disingenuous, as is its wont. Polls which show large pluralities of Americans siding with Michael Schiavo are going to soon begin showing those numbers swinging the other way as more people learn how Terri Schiavo's tragic situation unfolded.

If they don't, then we are no better than Sodom and Gomorrah.

And The Beat Goes On

It was the late Murray N. Rothbard who said "fiat currency by any other name smells just as sour". He may very well have been talking about the Euro.

The Euro was conceived as a new and "different" currency that would ultimately compete with and perhaps replace the US dollar in its role as a world reserve currency primarily because it was "backed", although not redeemable, by the 30% gold holding of the ECU whose singular mandate was currency stability.

Well, it looks like that mandate has caved to political pressure and now that...

"EU member states have agreed to relax constraints their budgets are subject to under the Stability and Growth Pact which underpins the euro".

the euro is no better than the worthless dollar and destined to suffer the same fate.

See this link for the full story.

So it appears that the ECU, too, succumbs to Mr. Rothbard's proclamation and the Euro is on track to follow the way of the US dollar into unlimited inflation. Note that nothing is said regarding the 30% gold "backing" which ultimately will have to be reduced as the Euro is inflated into oblivion.

The take home message is that all of the individuals who acquired Euros, in the belief that they would represent a stable currency, have been defrauded by the ECU since now the ECU will produce as many Euros as necessary to accommodate economic growth, diluting the value of each individual Euro. Is anyone really surprised?

As the article from the link above points out, this is good for gold advocates because the price of gold will undoubtedly rise against all currencies as, once again, there is no alternative unit of measure that represents true wealth.

How You Likin' Them Now, Teddy?

ABC News reports that:

Iraqi soldiers, backed by US helicopters, are reported to have seized 131 suspects in a dawn raid on insurgents planning attacks on the holy city of Kerbala.

The Defence Ministry says troops also retrieved tons of explosives. The Defence Minister, Hazim al-Shaalan, described it as a very successful operation based on intensive surveillance.

Several suspected militants were reported killed in the operation, which began late on Friday and culminated in the dawn raid just outside Kerbala, about 100 kilometres south-west of Baghdad.

Officials say say those arrested included foreigners using fake Iraqi identification papers. Three tons of TNT explosive, hundreds of rocket-propelled grenade launchers and at least three prepared car bombs were also found.

Earlier this week Iraqi police commandos said they killed 85 militants in a raid on a suspected insurgent training camp near Baghdad, hailing it as a breakthrough against the insurgency.

Somebody ask Ted Kennedy and his portside colleagues how they're liking the Iraqi security forces now. It was just a few short months ago, we recall, that there were no words disdainful enough to capture the contempt the Dems sought to heap upon the Iraqi effort to police themselves. There were too few troops and police, we were advised, and what there were of them, the stalwart warriors of Capitol Hill scoffed, turned tail and ran at the first sign of danger. We would be bogged down protecting people who wouldn't fight for themselves for years to come, they whined.

Our military cautioned us to be patient. They told us that training takes time, and that the Iraqis were brave and talented and that eventually they were going to prove it. Now they are. We'll wait patiently while the Democrats cobble together an admission that they were wrong, again.

The Twilight of the Insurgency

Three stories mentioned by Arthur Chrenkoff's article in the WSJ of Iraqi civilians taking up the fight against terrorists themselves are more evidence that the insurgency is doomed. When insurgents lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the people they cannot win. The terrorists in Iraq lost this battle when they turned from the militarily suicidal practice of targeting Americans to the politically suicidal practice of targeting Iraqis.

Here's an excerpt from the first account:

Just before noon today, a carpenter named Dhia saw a troop of masked gunmen with grenades coming towards his shop and decided he had had enough.

As the gunmen emerged from their cars, Dhia and his young relatives shouldered their own AK-47's and opened fire, police and witnesses said. In the fierce gun battle that followed, three of the insurgents were killed, and the rest fled just after the police arrived. Two of Dhia's young nephews and a bystander were injured, the police said.

"We attacked them before they attacked us," Dhia, 35, his face still contorted with rage and excitement, said in a brief exchange at his shop a few hours after the battle. He did not give his last name. "We killed three of those who call themselves the mujahedeen. I am waiting for the rest of them to come and we will show them."

Two other fairly recent examples can be found here and here.

Another sign of failure for an insurgency is when it ceases to be indigenous and is forced to rely on alien forces. The presence of so many foreigners among the dead is an indication that popular support among Iraqis for the terrorist effort is waning. Indeed, when the bulk of the adversary is foreign it really is no longer an insurgency, and perhaps it's time for the media to stop referring to it as such. No doubt a lot of the Iraqis who are left among the opposition are thinking that it's time to get out or to cut a deal.

Steyn On Schiavo

Mark Steyn is always worth reading. He is especially so in this column on Terri Schiavo. His article is a bracing splash of common sense and needs to be read by everyone who thinks that Terri Schiavo ought to die.

Powerful Stuff

There is a remarkable piece by the Albanian ambassador to the U.S., Fatos Tarifa, in the March 27th edition of the Washington Times. Tarifa writes:

The announcement several days ago Albania -- a small country with limited resources -- was sending an additional 50 well-trained troops to Iraq came as a surprise to some observers. But it really should not have surprised anyone.

Albania was one of only four countries to send combat troops during the operation "Iraqi Freedom." Albania is probably the most pro-American country on Earth. It showed its support of the United States early, when it initially sent 70 commandos to join the Coalition of the Willing's effort to bring peace, stability and free elections to Iraq. These new troops bring to a total of 120 Albanian soldiers serving in Iraq.

From a country with only 3.5 million people, the troops -- the flower of Albania's youth -- represent the best Albania has to offer. Why does Albania do this when it could have avoided President Bush's call for support, or when it could have dropped out as others have done when the going got tough? The answer is not difficult to find. If you believe in freedom, you believe in fighting for it. If you believe in fighting for freedom, you believe in America.

Unlike people in other countries in Europe and elsewhere, the Albanian people have not forgotten what it is like to live under tyranny and repression. The Albanians for more than 40 years were held in thrall by the repressive forces of the communists, living like prisoners without rights in their own country. It was to the United States that freedom-loving Albanians looked for inspiration during those dark years, and the Americans have not let us down.

"We Albanians are a nation of freedom fighters who know something about living under oppression," Albanian Prime Minister Fatos Nano wrote in a letter to President Bush. "That is why we wholeheartedly support the American-led effort to free the people of Iraq. And though we are a small country with a small military, we are proud to stand side by side with our allies in the fight to end the reign of terror in Baghdad."

Europe is a small place and it is hard not to run into history there. It is also hard to avoid the historic contributions of the United States in the defense of freedom and liberty on the Continent. There are cemeteries throughout Europe -- in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg -- containing the remains of American soldiers who died in battle to free Europe in two world wars.

Although it is not fashionable to talk about it, the face of Europe would indeed be much different today were it not for the Americans who died storming the Normandy beaches. Were it not for the Americans, there is a good chance there would be no France, nor a United Kingdom nor a Belgium, as we know them today. Were it not for the United States it also is very possible no Balkan countries would be free.

Upon committing Albania to the Coalition of the Willing, Prime Minister Nano urged his fellow European leaders to visit Normandy "to see for themselves what the United States has been willing to undertake in the name of freedom. We should all visit Normandy. We should pay homage to those brave Americans who stormed ashore at Omaha Beach and gave their lives for the freedom of others. The wonder of it is that the Americans are willing to do it again," Mr. Nano said.

And of course, it was the U.S.-led effort of NATO to rein in Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic and his ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo that proved to the world that, in the name of freedom, the United States was willing to fight for the freedom of the oppressed, regardless of religious belief.

So it is with Iraq. The importance of the American-led effort to liberate Iraq and establish a democratic government for the first time in this country's history cannot be underestimated. It is not the first time the United States has faced suicide bombers trapped in a cult of death. The Japanese kamikazes sought to do to the Americans toward the end of World War II what the terrorists are attempting in Iraq today. The kamikazes failed then, the terrorists will fail now. Japan became a democracy and so will Iraq.

Tarifa brings his essay to a moving conclusion:

The difference between the United States and the Islamic terrorists is this: The terrorists export death. The Americans export freedom.

The surprise is not in Albania's decision to send more troops to fight for freedom in Iraq. The surprise would have been if Albania did not.

These are powerful words. Who, in 1970, at the height of the cold war between America and totalitarian communism, would ever have thought an Albanian spokesman would be writing columns like this? Who, we might ask, is writing columns like this today about, say, France?

Biting Off More Than You Can Chew

You might recall the news reports of an MP unit that was ambushed in Iraq last week and how they handled the fight. The After Action Report is here and it makes very interesting reading. It describes the engagement in considerable detail and concludes with this:

Those seven Americans (with three wounded) killed in total 24 heavily armed enemy, wounded 6 (two later died), and captured one unwounded, who feigned injury to escape the fight. They seized 22 AK-47s, 6x RPG launchers w/ 16 rockets, 13x RPK machineguns, 3x PKM machineguns, 40 hand grenades, 123 fully loaded 30-rd AK magazines, 52 empty mags, and 10 belts of 2500 rounds of PK ammo.

After reading the whole thing there's little wonder the insurgents have turned their attention to marketplace crowds and elementary schools.

That's Rich

Frank Rich of the NYT offers up a buffet of anti-Christian delicacies for the Christophobes among us to savor. Rich applies the broadest of brushes, painting both the deserving and undeserving as hypocrites and frauds. He's an equal opportunity slanderer. You don't have to be really guilty of any moral fault to fall prey to his self-righteous inquisitorial judgments, you need only be a Christian trying to do what you believe to be right.

For Rich, being a Christian is prima facie dispositive of guilt, and he's far from alone. Thursday night on Scarborough Country lawyer Jeffrey Feiger dismissed the testimony of a doctor in the Terri Schiavo matter ostensibly because the man was a Christian.

The Left despises Christians, although it doesn't scruple to exploit them if the believers take positions of which the Left approves. As soon as someone takes a stand for life, or traditional sexual standards, or traditional marriage, however, or as soon as someone expresses doubts about Darwinian orthodoxy, the Left's big guns are quickly brought to bear on the hapless soul who is subjected to a barrage of vituperation and contempt. For Rich, to take a stand against the tide of our culture is to prove oneself to be an "extremist", a "fundamentalist", a jihadist, the American equivalent of the "Taliban", a "bullying mob", a theocrat, and, of course, a hypocrite and a fraud.

The Left demands tolerance of everything and anything, no matter how degenerate or dysfunctional, except conservatives, Republicans, and Christians. Combine them all in one person and it becomes a burden too great for even great-souled liberals like Frank Rich to bear.

Resurrection Day

Jon Meacham of Newsweek, perhaps chastened by the criticism he received following his foray into Christian theology over Christmas, pens a much less offensive column about the Resurrection of Jesus in the current issue. He notes that the tomb of Christ was almost certainly empty that first Easter morning. If it were not, he observes, the opponents of Christ had only to produce the body to abort the religious turmoil that the sect of Christians was beginning to arouse. This they did not do, a startling historical fact, really, which leads us to the obvious conclusion that they couldn't do it. This leads us in turn to ask why not.

No naturalistic explanation of the empty tomb makes sense. The most common of these is that the disciples stole the corpse, but this hypothesis is credible only if one assumes a priori that non-natural explanations are impossible. To believe that the disciples stole the body one must believe that a band of terrified fishermen overpowered an armed military guard, a crime for which they were never arrested or charged, stole the cadaver, and eventually underwent torture and martyrdom for preaching around the world what they knew to be a lie. People will die for a lie they believe to be true, but only men suffering from some form of dementia would die for a lie they knew to be a lie, and there's no reason to think these men were demented.

Surely, if the authorities believed the disciples had stolen the body they would have brought irresistibly persuasive techniques to bear to coerce them into divulging its whereabouts. Yet there's no indication whatsoever that this was even attempted.

The skeptic says, as was noted above, that no matter how implausible a given naturalistic explanation may be it is still more believable than the claim that a man rose from the dead. This objection, however, rests on the assumption that there is no God, an assumption that is much easier to make than to defend. If, contrary to the skeptical view, it is possible that God exists then miracles are indeed also possible, and if they are possible, we have to examine the evidence for an alleged instance of one, especially one as significant as the resurrection of Jesus, to determine whether it is, in fact, credible. The evidence for the historical, physical revivification of Christ, many scholars have concluded, is at least as powerful as that for any other event in antiquity.

Other attempts to avoid the conclusion that a miracle actually occurred are equally unimpressive. Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code adopts a version of the swoon theory, that after some thirty six hours without medical care, Jesus somehow recovered from his wounds, including the spear thrust, with sufficient vigor to roll away the heavy stone blocking the tomb. He accomplished this astonishing feat without being detected by the Roman guard, and subsequently appeared to the disciples and dozens, even hundreds, of others, looking so hale and hearty that they believed that he had conquered death and was the very Son of God.

Even if something like this could have happened, the disciples would have known that Jesus had not "risen from the dead" in any theologically significant sense. He would have eventually died (or, as Brown has it, absconded to France with his beloved Mary Magdalene), and his dead body would be proof that he was not the Messiah. This, then, brings us back to the question above: Why would so many have been willing to be tortured and martyred for a man they would have realized was a false messiah?

Skeptics scoff at miracles, but the most important miracle in the history of Christendom is one which defies any attempt to explain away. The most plausible explanation for the empty tomb, unless one holds an a priori commitment to atheism, is that God actually did raise Jesus from the dead just as we are promised that we will be. Because death did not result in the annihilation of His being we have the hope that neither will it result in ours.

This is the wonderful significance of the event Christians celebrate every Easter. Happy Resurrection Day.

How the Jews Saved Civilization

Kathryn Lopez of NRO interviews David Klinghoffer about his new book Why the Jews Rejected Jesus. It's a fascinating interview. A couple of excerpts:

Klinghoffer: I...hope that my book will remind believing Christians of the most important thing we have in common: a belief that there is such a thing as religious truth in the first place. That idea is under attack from the secular left. In this sense, my book is a battle cry on behalf of both Jews and Christians.

NRO: How can the whole of Western Civilization rest on the [Jewish] rejection of Jesus (as Klinghoffer claims in his book)?

Klinghoffer: The earliest Christian church was initially hobbled by insisting that new converts adhere to Jewish law - keep kosher, be circumcised, etc. For an adult man to be circumcised was a bummer, let me tell you. The decision was made, however - at a church council in Jerusalem in 49 - to jettison Jewish law as a requirement for new Christians. This was done at the apostle Paul's insistence, and he explains in Acts that since the Jews were rejecting his presentation of Jesus as savior and messiah, the Christian message would now be taken to the gentiles. Dispensing with Jewish practices like circumcision made this possible. Had the Jews not rejected Paul's preaching about Jesus, the church likely would have held on to those laws. Had it done so, the church would have remained hobbled, and could hardly have become the world-bestriding institution it is today. Jewish Christianity would have remained a sect in Judaism, and probably would have died out along with other such sects in 70 when the Temple was destroyed by Rome and the Jews scattered. In that case, there would be no Christian civilization, and, among other things, no America as we know it - a country whose founding was deeply influenced by Christian faith. There is a possibility that we would all be Muslims.

NRO: Besides maybe converting us, what would you like the Christian reader to get from your book?

Klinghoffer: I don't want to convert you, Kathryn, and I know I couldn't do so no matter how I tried. People believe what we believe for reasons that transcend argument. We believe because we have a certain kind of relationship with God, a certain spiritual experience. The arguments come later. What I want to do for the Christian reader is satisfy your curiosity. Jews, especially those who like me work and socialize with committed and conservative Christians, are asked why we don't share their faith in Jesus. Or Christians wants to ask, but stop themselves. The question is meant sincerely and seriously. It deserves an answer.

Klinghoffer: If you look at the top 20 political issues today, as I will in [my next] book, it turns out there's much stronger support in the Bible from the conservative side in almost every case. The reason has to do with the question of whether people are morally accountable for their actions. The conservative view assumes we are free and responsible, which liberals don't. That same assumption undergirds the Bible everywhere. How else could God issue us commandments?

Klinghoffer is a Jew who doesn't resent being surrounded by expressions of Christian devotion and indeed believes that the best for Judaism is a healthy, vibrant Christian orthodoxy. As you might expect, he's not fond of Abe Foxman or the Anti-Defamation League.

Mendacious Mullahs

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent overview by Carla Anne Robbins of the reasons for U.S. concern over Iran's nuclear weapons program. It is a history of Iran's deception and dissimulation that the world needs to be made aware of.

The Meaning of Good Friday

I sit at my computer on this Good Friday listening to Bach's St. Matthew's Passion and Henryk Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs looking forward to this evening when I have a "date" with my daughter to watch Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, and I wonder. I wonder if I, or anyone, can possibly understand the significance of Good Friday. Can I ever comprehend what it means that God, the creator of worlds, would care enough about me to endure what He did, so that I could have the hope that death does not have the final word about human life.

My existence, the existence of each of us, is astonishing enough. That mere matter could be so arranged as to generate a consciousness, a self-awareness, a rational mind, is, when one thinks about it, a truly amazing thing. That this consciousness might survive death in another reality, another world, is even more astounding. For some it's too astounding to be credible.

And yet if it's true...if it's in fact true that our eternal survival is a gift from God, purchased by Jesus Christ at a cost we may never be able to fully appreciate, it is a breath-taking, ineffable truth.

Some people think the Christian narrative is simply the apotheosis of an ancient myth, that a truly sophisticated, omniscient God would have found some way other than a primitive blood sacrifice to usher us into eternal joy. I don't know if there were other means at God's disposal or not, but it seems to me that the way the Bible tells us He chose is perfect for what He wanted to accomplish.

In the Christian account, God made us as an object of His love. He desires to live in a love relationship with us, but for whatever reason we often want no part of such a relationship. It's too confining, it involves too much self-abnegation, it entails too much of a constraint on our Dionysian appetites, it's too much of an affront to our pride, reason and dignity. Confident in our independence, we don't need God. In our autonomy we distort God's purposes and design plan for human life in order to suit and pursue our own selfish ends.

Nevertheless, God would not be dissuaded or put off. He persists in His relentless attempts to show us that all of our rationalizations for demanding our Promethean emancipation are just so many childish and foolish masks we put on to conceal the fact that we just don't want Him in our lives. He chooses to woo us to Himself not with threats or fear but with love. He chooses to demonstrate in an extraordinarily vivid way that His love for us is deeper than we could ever imagine.

To this end he does something totally unexpected and supererogatory. He becomes a man like one of us, shares in our humanity, our sufferings and joys, and ultimately endures the pain and terror of crucifixion. His life and death is the price that He is willing to pay, for reasons that we cannot understand this side of eternity, to secure eternal life and to make it available to everyone. He didn't have to do it, He could have left us alone to destroy ourselves and our planet, to fade into the cosmic oblivion that rejection of our Creator would have warranted. But because He did do it, He shows us not only that He is not simply some abstract deity, too transcendent to matter, but that He is personal, immanent, and that His love is not just a theoretical exercise, it has consequences which can change a life now and forever.

Charles Dickens captures something of the Divine love in the climax of his Tale of Two Cities when he has Sydney Carton, moved by his deep love for Lucie, smuggle himself into prison to take the place of Charles Darnay, the man Lucie really loves, knowing full well that his love is ultimately going to bring him to the guillotine. Carton substitutes himself for Charles and goes to the death to which Charles was sentenced in an expression of almost superhuman love.

Out of the depths of His love, God substituted Himself for us, enduring torture and humiliation at the hands of His own creation, and going to a death so that we could live. He asks of us in return only our love.

We are in the position of a man clinging by his fingers to the edge of a cliff and slowly, inexorably losing his grip. The abyss of nihilism, of meaninglessness, emptiness and death, lies far below, but because of the cross there's a chance to be rescued. God stands above the struggling man, kneeling down and holding out His hand, urging the man to seize it. It's up to the man about to die, it's up to us, to accept the rescue that God offers. God has done all He can to persuade us, but He won't force us to grasp His hand. He won't override our will. He allows us to make the final decision whether to live or die.

That, at any rate, is the best I can do to explain my own wholly inadequate understanding of the Christian story and the meaning of Good Friday.

Rather-fication

Michelle Malkin offers further evidence, if any were needed, that the MSM in this country is either incompetent or dishonest or both. She looks at the recent ABC poll that shows large numbers of people supporting Michael Schiavo's wish to kill his wife and asks if maybe the poll question wasn't a smidgeon disingenuous:

However you feel about the Terri Schiavo case, one fact is indisputable: The mainstream media (MSM) coverage of the matter has been abysmal. On a fundamental matter of life and death, the MSM heavyweights have proven themselves utterly incapable of reporting fairly. Take a widely publicized ABC News poll released on Monday that supposedly showed strong public opposition to any Washington intervention in Terri's case. Here is how the spinmasters framed the main poll question:

"As you may know, a woman in Florida named Terri Schiavo suffered brain damage and has been on life support for 15 years. Doctors say she has no consciousness and her condition is irreversible. Her parents and her husband disagree on whether or not she should be kept on life support. In cases like this who do you think should have final say, (the parents) or (the spouse)?"

A follow-up question asked:

"If you were in this condition, would you want to be kept alive, or not?"

The problem is that, contrary to what ABC News told those polled, Terri Schiavo is not on "life support" and has never been on "life support." The loaded phrase evokes images of a comatose patient being artificially sustained by myriad machines and pumps and wires. Terri was on a feeding tube. A feeding tube is not a ventilator. Terri can breathe just fine on her own. And as many of her medical caretakers and parents have argued, if given proper rehabilitation, Terri could learn to chew and swallow on her own as well. She is disabled, not dead.

But ABC News did not see fit to inform either the poll takers or its viewers of the truth. Instead, it misled them -- and the result was a poll response that produced -- voila! -- "broad public disapproval" for any government intervention to spare Terri from slowly starving to death. Blogger Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters noted: "Either ABC is completely incompetent in conducting research, or they have attempted to fool their viewers and readership with false polling that essentially lies about the case in question. Since when does ABC conduct push polling for euthanasia?"

Imagine how the poll results might have turned out if ABC News had made clear to participants that Terri is not terminally ill. Not in excruciating pain. Capable of saying "Mommy" and "Help me." And of "getting the feeling she's falling" or getting "excited," in her husband's own testimony, when her head is not held properly.

Imagine how the poll results might have turned out if ABC News had informed participants that in a sworn affidavit, registered nurse Carla Sauer Iyer, who worked at the Palm Garden of Largo Convalescent Center in Largo, Fla., while Terri Schiavo was a patient there, testified: "Throughout my time at Palm Gardens, Michael Schiavo was focused on Terri's death. Michael would say 'When is she going to die?' 'Has she died yet?' and 'When is that bitch gonna die?'" Now, if you were in this situation, would you want to be kept alive, or not?

Not to pick on ABC News, but, well, let's. In an attempt to embarrass Rep. Dave Weldon (R.-Fla.) who noted that withdrawing food and water from someone like Schiavo was extremely rare, ABC's Jake Tapper last week featured this counter-quote from Prof. Bill Allen, of the University of Florida College of Medicine:

"Feeding tubes have been removed in the United States for many years, and it's been a common practice. This has happened in many cases, probably a hundred thousand times in this country."

"A hundred thousand times"? There have been a hundred thousand cases of non-terminally ill, non-brain dead individuals slowly starved and forced to die in this country? Tapper demanded no proof from his professor. Instead, he dismissed lawmakers as ignoramuses contradicted by "experts," cited the biased ABC News poll cited above, and tossed it back to Jennings with this slam: "Terri Schiavo and her family deserved better than the way Congress worked this week."

Meanwhile, contradicting the experience of every starved child in Africa and abandoned street animal at your SPCA shelter, the New York Times informs us: "Experts Say Ending Feeding Can Lead to a Gentle Death."

Little wonder that people hold the major news outlets in such low esteem. So many of them seem to have accepted Rather-fication.

Just Wondering

This is going to sound to some as though I've taken leave of my senses, perhaps, but I feel it needs to be said. In fact, I'm a little surprised that I haven't heard anyone else say it.

How many men, listening to the facts surrounding the tragic case of Terri Schiavo, have not wondered what they would do if they were the father of a girl whose husband was doing to her what Michael Schiavo is doing to Terri? Suppose a man is convinced that it was an act of physical violence at the hands of her husband that put his daughter into this terrible condition. Suppose the father is convinced that in the years following, the husband has treated his daughter callously and cruelly, exploiting her condition for financial gain and then abandoning her to start another family. Suppose the husband refuses to relinquish custodial authority over the daughter so that he can retain the right to insist that she be killed. Suppose the father loves his daughter deeply and both father and mother are distraught at what has been, and is being, done to her. Suppose, finally, that the courts side with the husband and refuse to save the life of this man's precious "little girl" opting instead to let the husband kill her through a long slow process of starvation and dehydration. I don't know that all of these suppositions actually obtain in the Schiavo case, but suppose they did.

I don't wish to sound overly Clint Eastwoodian, but how many men have had the thought cross their mind in recent days that if their daughter were in such straits the contemptible husband would have long ago been given an ultimatum: If she dies, he dies.

The threat alone might effect a better circumstance for the suffering woman, but, on the other hand, perhaps the husband would be unmoved. In that event, I wonder how many fathers could stand by and watch another man who has no love whatsoever for their daughter, who only wishes her to be gone, coldly starve her to death. How many men would stand by helplessly watching their little girl's life ebb away knowing she could be saved if her killer's life were taken? What are the moral implications of such an act? If it would be wrong, precisely why would it be wrong?

Surely it is not an option open to a Christian, but then why isn't it? A Christian might enjoin us to ask what would Jesus do, but that's a poor guide in the present situation. Jesus would probably heal the woman. The father can't. A Christian might say that violence is not a legitimate option, but that's only true if one is a pacifist. What is the salient difference, given all our suppositions, between what is happening to the daughter in this instance and the case of a man using deadly force to protect his family?

Perhaps it could be argued that eliminating the odious son-in-law, so far from being an act of unjustifiable violence, would be, in fact, an expression of deep self-sacrificial love. At the cost of spending the rest of one's life in jail, or maybe even incurring the death penalty, one could insure by one's action that custody of the impaired woman would revert to the family who could then give her proper care and possible rehabilitation.

There's an outside chance that a jury wouldn't even convict a father who so acted to save his daughter's life, if it were the only recourse left to him. Jury nullification saved O.J., it might well work in favor of a man willing to sacrifice his freedom and risk execution in order to see his daughter's life saved. Indeed, we should ask ourselves whether, if we were on the jury, we honestly think we could vote to convict in such a case.

Just wondering if this solution ever occured to anyone else.

Women's Champion

Which is a better measure of a president's commitment to the rights and status of women, guaranteeing them the unfettered right to kill their unborn children or liberating 25 million women from tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq and appointing women to positions of power and influence in government?

As long as liberal democrats think the answer is the former they'll continue to see their support among women erode until all that's left in their camp are a few embittered members of NOW and a motley collection of radical professors.

Atheism and Christian Salvation

Christianity Today has a piece by Alistair McGrath which he excerpts from his book The Twilight of Atheism. McGrath argues that atheism reached its zenith sometime before WWII and has been in decline ever since. The reason for its appeal is disapproval of the moral temper of Christianity, but Christians have done a much better job of representing Christ to the world in the last sixty years than atheists have in presenting a plausible alternative. McGrath says:

The failure of atheism to capture the public imagination in the West reflects its failure to articulate a compelling, imaginative vision of a godless future that is capable of exciting people and making them want to gather together to celebrate and proclaim it.

Listen to John Updike: "Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position." I have to confess that I now share his catatonic sense of utter tedium when I reread some of the atheist works I once found fascinating as a teenager. They now seem simplistic, failing to engage with the complexities of human experience, and seriously out of tune with our postmodern culture.

The battle, however, is far from won:

The moral passion of atheism, especially when set alongside the laziness and complacency of European state churches in the 18th century, cannot be dismissed.

In the end, debates about whether God's existence can be proved remain marginal. The central issue is moral and imaginative. The most fundamental criticisms directed against Christianity have to do with the moral character of its God. They often focus on the issue of eternal punishment.

"Eternal punishment must be eternal cruelty," said secular humanist orator Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), "and I do not see how any man, unless he has the brain of an idiot, or the heart of a wild beast, can believe in eternal punishment."

We cannot assert eternal damnation and expect Western culture to nod approvingly. This culture is not predisposed to reject Christian doctrines as a matter of principle; rather, it is surprised by what seems a massive retreat from society's fundamental notions of decency and evenhandedness. Atheism arises mainly through a profound sense that religious ideas and values are at least inferior to, and possibly irreconcilable with, the best moral standards and ideals of human culture.

In other words, Western culture finds implausible and repugnant the conviction, widely held among evangelicals, that no matter how much in love with God a person might be, if he or she has not accepted Christ as Lord, God rejects them, and they are eternally damned. McGrath, in fact, believes this doctrine to be the major reason why people who become atheists abandon theism.

I'm not sure he's right about this. I think that most people who reject theism simply don't want there to be a God even remotely like the God of the Bible and wouldn't embrace Him regardless of what the Church taught about salvation.

Even so, McGrath is doubtless correct that there are many who find Christian exclusivism morally incomprehensible if not repellant and reject the Gospel because of it. It is on behalf of these that the Church, in our view, should revisit its thinking on this very important issue. If the doctrine is clearly and unambiguously taught by scripture then so be it, but if scripture admits of other ways of thinking about what it means to be saved and what it means to be lost, then it would be a worthwhile project to reconsider some of the arguments, some of the exegesis, and some of the theology involved in deciding exactly what God's plan of redemption involves.

Scripture may be inerrant, but our understanding of it surely is not.

Here We Go Again

ABC has run a story that claimed that Republicans were using the Schiavo tragedy to further their political agenda, and they adduced as evidence an alleged "talking points memo" that they claimed had been circulating among Republicans in congress. The memo was said to have contained claims as to how the issue would benefit Republicans and hurt Democrats.

Well, a lot of questions have been raised about the origin of this document and PowerLine has been right on top of it. It looks suspicious. Check them out to get brought up to speed on what may turn out to be yet another black eye for media trustworthiness.

Rendition

There's a not so quiet groundswell building in the blogosphere, just beneath the MSM radar, concerning the practice of rendition or returning suspected terrorists and sympathizers to their country of origin for interrogation. There are certain advantages to this practice, but there are numerous legitimate concerns as well. There have also been tragic mistakes and abuses.

For insight into why rendition is done see Michael Ignatius' column in the WaPo. There is much to dislike about Ignatius' piece, but he does explain the rationale for rendition fairly.

For a tragic illustration of the potential for abuse of rendition and why many are calling for restricting it or eliminating it see here.

We imagine that we'll be hearing a lot more about this issue in the weeks and months ahead.

Flying By the Seat of Their Pants

There's a revealing special airing on HBO on March 31st that will be of "must see" interest to any Air America fans out there. Drudge has the inside scoop on the documentary.

American Justice

A story in The Guardian points out that Jeff Weise, the 16 year-old who went on a killing spree in his Red Lake, Minnesota high school was, according to those who knew him from his posts on a Nazi web site, fairly mature given his age.

"We knew [Weise] briefly through 34 posts he made on the forum. He expressed himself well and was clearly highly intelligent and contemplative, especially for one so young," the site's administrator said in statement posted today on Nazi.org.

Perhaps he is as mature as many twenty year olds. But even though he killed wantonly and cruelly his crime did not rise to the level of a capital offense.

One of his victims was 14 and four were aged 15. At least three were girls. A student, Sondra Hegstrom, heard shooting from an adjoining classroom, she told the local newspaper, The Pioneer.

"You could hear a girl saying, 'No, Jeff. Quit! Quit! Leave me alone. Why are you doing this?' Boom, boom, boom, and then no more screaming," she said.

Horrific, but nevertheless, due to the wisdom of Anthony Kennedy and four fellow Supreme Court justices, if Weise hadn't taken his own life he would never have had to worry that it would be taken from him. Killers under 18 are not mature enough to be fully responsible for their actions Justice Kennedy opines in Simmons.

What Weise did would not have warranted punishing him with death. No matter how many fourteen year-olds he would have murdered, the loss of their lives is not sufficient to justify the taking of his. Their loss just isn't significant enough to merit the imposition of the severest punishment. Weise's life has more value in the eyes of the law than do the lives of his victims.

Meanwhile in Florida, other judges deem it perfectly appropriate to let a woman starve to death just because her husband, whom there is reason to believe may be directly responsible for her condition, wants her dead.

What a country.

The Logic of Choosing Life

Cheat Seeking Missiles sums up Terri Schiavo's case pretty well:

The logic of this case is so simple, and so defies the howls of the Left, that it's a wonder they're letting themselves be cast as ghouls of death. It all comes down to this:

If Terri is in as bad a shape as her husband says she is, she doesn't know and wouldn't care whether she is alive or not, so why not let her parents care for her if they want to?

And if she is not in as bad a shape as her husband says she is, why in the world would you kill her instead of transferring responsibility for her care to people who love her and will support her?

Good question. Here's another: Why are liberals so determined to have this woman killed?

More Upbeat News From Iraq

A friend passes on this list of things we probably didn't know about Iraq gleaned, it says here, from the Department of Defense website:

Forty seven countries have re-established their embassies in Iraq.

The Iraqi government employs 1.2 million Iraqi people.

Thirty one hundred schools have been renovated, 364 schools are under rehabilitation, 263 schools are now under construction and 38 new schools have been built in Iraq.

Iraq's higher educational structure consists of 20 Universities, 46 Institutes or colleges and 4 research centers.

Twenty five Iraq students departed for the United States in January 2004 for the re-established Fulbright program.

The Iraqi Navy is operational. They have five 100-foot patrol craft, 34 smaller vessels and a naval infantry regiment.

Iraq's Air Force consists of three operation squadrons, 9 reconnaissance and 3 US C-130 transport aircraft which operate day and night, and will soon add 16 UH-1 helicopters and 4 bell jet rangers.

Iraq has a counter-terrorist unit and a Commando Battalion.

The Iraqi Police Service has over 55,000 fully trained and equipped police officers.

There are 5 Police Academies in Iraq that produce over 3500 new officers each 8 weeks.

There are more than 1100 building projects going on in Iraq. They include 364 schools, 67 public clinics, 15 hospitals, 83 railroad stations, 22 oil facilities, 93 water facilities and 69 electrical facilities.

Ninety six percent of Iraqi children under the age of 5 have received the first 2 series of polio vaccinations.

Over 4.3 million Iraqi children were enrolled in primary school by mid October.

There are 1,192,000 cell phone subscribers in Iraq and phone use has gone up 158%.

Iraq has an independent media that consist of 75 radio stations, 180 newspapers and 10 television stations.

The Baghdad Stock Exchange opened in June of 2004.

Two candidates in the Iraqi presidential election had a recent televised debate recently.

If this is the first you've heard about these achievements you might ask your local MSM news outlet why they so assiduously publicize every car bombing in Iraq but never seem to get around to letting us know this sort of information.

Interpreting Media Casualty Reports

Instapundit links us to a note from Arthur Chrenkoff about how to read the casualty reports coming out of Iraq. It turns out that we must read beyond the headline. If we do we learn that over half of the reported casualties are insurgents. Chrenkoff writes:

Aren't you glad that you read more than the headline

"45 killed in insurgent attacks" or indeed the opening paragraph

"At least 45 people have been killed in insurgent attacks across Iraq as Washington defended its decision to go to war on the second anniversary of the US-led invasion." of this Agence France-Presse story. Because when you get to the second paragraph, you read:

"Twenty-four Iraqi insurgents were killed and six coalition soldiers wounded in a firefight in a Baghdad suburb overnight, the US military said."

That is, more than half of the people killed in insurgent attacks were the insurgents themselves. Actually, when you read on, you discover that another five insurgents died in two separate attacks, which means that the number is really 29 out of 45.

It's tragic that 15 Iraqis and one American have also died yesterday, but there is a very important implication flowing from all this: terrorism and insurgency rely for their effectiveness and survival on the ability to inflict mass casualties, preferably in a spectacular fashion, while sustaining minimal losses themselves. The arithmetic in Iraq, and everywhere else, is simple: there are hell of a lot more ordinary Iraqis (including Iraqi security forces) out there than there are terrorists. Hence, terrorists cannot afford to be dying at the same, or greater, rate than their target population.

But they are, of course, which is why the insurgency may well be dying.