Mugged by la Rèalitè

The Weekly Standard has a riveting account by Olivier Guitta of a recent celebration of cultural diversity in Paris. It is the sort of celebration Europe is likely to see much more of in the years ahead:

FREDERIC ENCEL, PROFESSOR OF international relations at the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris and a man not known for crying wolf, recently stated that France is becoming a new Lebanon. The implication, far-fetched though it may seem, was that civil upheaval might be no more than a few years off, sparked by growing ethnic and religious polarization. In recent weeks, a series of events has underlined this ominous trend.

On March 8, tens of thousands of high school students marched through central Paris to protest education reforms announced by the government. Repeatedly, peaceful demonstrators were attacked by bands of black and Arab youths--about 1,000 in all, according to police estimates. The eyewitness accounts of victims, teachers, and most interestingly the attackers themselves gathered by the left-wing daily Le Monde confirm the motivation: racism.

Some of the attackers openly expressed their hatred of "little French people." One 18-year-old named Heikel, a dual citizen of France and Tunisia, was proud of his actions. He explained that he had joined in just to "beat people up," especially "little Frenchmen who look like victims." He added with a satisfied smile that he had "a pleasant memory" of repeatedly kicking a student, already defenseless on the ground.

Another attacker explained the violence by saying that "little whites" don't know how to fight and "are afraid because they are cowards." Rachid, an Arab attacker, added that even an Arab can be considered a "little white" if he "has a French mindset." The general sentiment was a desire to take revenge on whites."

Sometimes petty theft appeared to be the initial motivation. One or two bullies would approach a student and ask for money or a cell phone. Even if the victim complied right away, they would start beating him or her. A striking account was provided by Luc Colpart, a history and geography teacher and member of the far-left union SUD. Colpart said the scenes of violence were so disturbing that he could not sleep for days. He saw students being beaten or pulled by the hair. He stressed that assailants who stole cell phones smashed them in front of their victims: "It was a game. Hatred and fun."

Colpart, who is active in anti-racist causes, confirmed that "these were racial assaults," and the attackers used "far-right slurs, violent and racist." One black student he saw come to the defense of a fellow student under attack by three blacks was called "a white sellout" by the assailants. Some scores of victims were taken to hospitals. Those who were interviewed confirmed that they had been caught up in an "anti-white" rampage and that the cops did nothing to protect them.

By coincidence, last week the French government's human rights commission delivered to Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin its 2004 report on racism and anti-Semitism in France. The report underscores a worrisome pattern of retreat into separate ethnic communities. And the evidence of hostility is sobering: The number of violent acts and threats nearly doubled, from 833 in 2003 to a record 1,565 in 2004. Of these, 62 percent were directed against Jews, who make up just 1 percent of France's population.

There's much more about this ugly episode and related matters at the link.

Such incidents as this are the consequence of pretending that we can all get along, despite our differences, if we're just sufficiently tolerant of the things which divide us. We delude ourselves into thinking that we can avoid Balkanization of Western societies if we just don't offend those who are different by chauvinistically celebrating the things that should unite us.

Unfortunately, a nation with too little confidence in the rightness of its values to insist that those who would dwell within its borders adopt those values will ultimately find itself unable to hold its disparate ethnic and religious factions together. It will eventually become an object of contempt in the eyes of those who see themselves as having no stake in that nation's history, traditions, or principles.

There's a profound lesson here for the United States.

The Mystery of Consciousness

The Philosopher's Magazine recently passed along this quote from Thomas Huxley:

How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp, or any other ultimate fact of nature.

Indeed, and neuroscientists still marvel that something as astonishing as consciousness could be somehow generated by brute matter and could have evolved through purely mechanistic processes acting blindly and by chance.

How this could be so no one has as yet been able to say. Consciousness is a mystery, like life and gravity. It's hard enough to define it, it's devilishly difficult to understand it, and it seems impossible to explain it. How material substance can give rise to what philosophers refer to as the qualia of experience, sensation and awareness, is a bafflement.

Someday it might all be figured out, but we wonder whether it will ever be explicable in purely materialistic terms. We'll be greatly surprised if it is.

More On Social Security

From the inimitable Richard Russell...

On Tuesday President Bush visited the office of the Federal Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The Prez passed by a cabinet that contained the $1.7 trillion in Treasury securities that make up the so-called Social Security Trust Fund.

Later, in a speech at a nearby university, Mr. Bush announced, "There is no trust fund, just I.O.U.'s, that I saw first hand."

Yeah, Mr. President, we knew that. The government has spent all of the so-called Social Security trust fund, and in its place they have left a load of I.O.U.'s. But listen, Mr. President, the dollar itself is an I.O.U. In the good old days when the U.S. was solvent, a dollar was an I.O.U. which said the Treasury owed you one dollar's worth of gold. Today the dollar is a piece of paper that says a dollar owes you "nothing."

You don't believe it. Then try turning in your dollar to the Treasury and see what you get for it. What you'll get is another dollar with the slogan, "in God we trust." Hey, I already trust God. What I'm worried about is trusting my government.

What's wrong with that picture?

You and me have paid into Social Security all of our working lives only to have those dollars taken by our politicians spent on other programs that fulfilled their fancy. Now we hear that those dollars have been replaced by I.O.U.s of the federal government which means they will tax a future generation to make good on the debt. In other words, all that you and I have paid to Social Security has gone somewhere else. Our politicians have ripped us off. And the next generation will have to make good for it. Where is the outrage?

As long as people continue to support the present two-party system that is hell-bent on leading the American individual to a standard of living far below what currently exists, we will continue to have more of the same. Beyond a few issues, their isn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties.

I have maintained for years that the two party system in this country is like a highway. The republicans are in the right (cruising) lane and the democrats are in the left (passing) lane. While the democrats may reach the destination before the republicans, the outcome will ultimately be the same. It doesn't really matter which lane you choose, the highway leads, inevitably, to an impoverished American society that will embrace total socialism with open arms.

To Your Health

Fox News has a couple of reports on nutrition that might be of interest.

The first is that researchers have found that pomegranate juice not only appears to prevent hardening of the arteries by reducing blood vessel damage, but the antioxidant-rich juice may also reverse the progression of this disease. So where can we get the stuff?

Another report discusses what are referred to as Superfoods. Salmon, trout and albacore tuna may reduce the risk of heart disease. So may olive oil, almonds, walnuts, Cheerios and Boca Burgers. See the article for more details.

Viewpoint is optimistic that researchers will soon discover that chocolate, potato chips, oreo cookies, and mayonnaise promote weight loss and lower cholesterol. In fact, I'm assuming that this is so and am celebrating the good news by just now eating the ears off of one of my daughter's chocolate Easter bunnies. I feel healthier already.

The Infamous Memo

PowerLine has what appears to be the full story on the infamous "talking points" memo to which Democrats are so fond of adverting and in which Republicans seem to be urged to exploit the Schiavo tragedy for political profit. It turns out that, contrary to what the Washington Post and ABC reported, the memo was not authored by Republican leaders and officials, but was the work of an aide to Republican senator Mel Martinez who has been serving in office for all of three months. Martinez is hardly a Republican heavyweight, much less is his aide, who, it turns out, has resigned. Nor was the memo distributed to other senators as the Post implied.

In other words, an obscure assistant exercised very poor judgment, and the Democrats and their media amplifiers seized upon it to tarnish the reputations of the Republican leadership by falsely accusing them of churlish behavior. They didn't know the truth, nor did they care about the truth, they simply saw an opportunity to exploit the Schiavo tragedy for their political profit (by lying about Republican officials' alleged insensitivity to Terri Schiavo's circumstances), and they grabbed it.

The details are at PowerLine.

Lock and Load

This article suggests that the Florida legislature is about to pass a measure guaranteed to raise the level of uncertainty, and anxiety, among its sizable population of thugs, criminals, and other miscreants:

MIAMI (AFP) - Florida's legislature has approved a bill that would give residents the right to open fire against anyone they perceive as a threat in public, instead of having to try to avoid a conflict as under prevailing law.

Outraged opponents say the law will encourage Floridians to open fire first and ask questions later, fostering a sort of statewide Wild West shootout mentality. Supporters argue that criminals will think twice if they believe they are likely to be promptly shot when they assault someone.

Republican Governor Jeb Bush, who has said he plans to sign the bill, says it is "a good, commonsense, anti-crime issue."

Current state law allows residents to "shoot to kill if their property, such as their home or car, is invaded by an unknown assailant." But it also states that if a resident is confronted or threatened in a public place, he or she must first try to avoid the confrontation or flee before taking any violent step in self defense against an assailant.

The bill, supported by the influential National Rifle Association, was approved by both houses of the Republican-run legislature on Tuesday.

Viewpoint agrees with Governor Bush. There was a time when I thought we needed more gun control, but that was long ago when I was young and dumber. As I examined the arguments for taking guns out of the hands of citizens I realized that they just didn't make much sense. They were emotional rather than rational. Gun crimes are rarely committed by those who are licensed to carry concealed weapons, but those who perpetrate violent crime would hardly scruple to observe laws which prohibited them from possessing, and using, guns. All that gun control would accomplish would be to assure criminals that their intended victims would not pose any threat to them.

The Florida bill takes the right of self-defense one step further and seems eminently sensible. Why should the burden fall upon the victim to avoid a criminal attack? Why should the streets be conceded to the brutes? Why must citizens cringe, cower, and flee the threats of thugs? Why should laws be such that they emasculate the law-abiding and empower the wicked?

Violent crime is a serious threat to civilization. A few intrepid acts of self-defense with a suitable weapon, preferably one whose caliber begins with a four, would have a salutary effect on Florida's recidivism rate and provide a powerful object lesson for those predators contemplating similar assaults on innocent life or property.

The law might also go a long way toward restoring civility to our public intercourse. Bullies and other obnoxious louts might be much more reluctant to appear threatening to others if they think their demeanor might win them a view down the barrel of a semi-automatic. Such an experience can be as chastening as it is thrilling, and there are a lot of people out there who might benefit from a little chastening.

Attack on Abu Ghraib

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail analyzes the significance of the recent attack on Abu Ghraib prison. After discussing the insurgents' evident change in tactics Roggio writes:

Al Qaeda obviously believes it will gain some psychological advantage in attacking American and Iraqi bases, but it may want to weigh the psychological effects on their own troops after repeated failures. The assault on the prison was a military failure. Al Qaeda in Iraq states ten of the attackers were killed in the raid. They also claim to have breached the walls and overtaken a guard tower, but the US military disputes this account. The US military estimates the attacking force suffered over fifty casualties out of an estimated sixty attackers. Continued military defeats and high casualty rates will sap the will of al Qaeda's cannon fodder over time.

If al Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorists want to engage in large scale assaults on US and Iraqi forces, this is their choice. But it will be a bad one. Every large scale engagement against American forces has been a miserable failure for the terrorists, as they cannot match the firepower or flexibility of American forces. Blackfive recently documented the success of an outmanned and outgunned MP convoy escort in routing a numerically superior ambushing force. Phil, a soldier currently serving in Iraq, reports on the effectiveness of an Iraqi unit repelling an assault on their base. The recent assault on a terrorist training camp also highlights the military superiority of Iraqi and Coalition forces. The increased use of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) to provide intelligence on insurgent activities as well as the rapid reaction of air and ground assets when contact is made makes for a tactical nightmare for terrorists attempting to attack in large numbers.

Wretchard at Belmont Club adds some additional thoughts. He quotes one commentator as noting that:

Al Qaeda claimed the raid was a success, but a few more victories like this and their insurgency will be over.

Both Roggio and Wretchard are worth reading in full.

Jim Wallis: Unpartisan Liberal

As liberal democrats (I know. It's a tautology.) cast about for an authentic religious voice with which to persuade the red state voters that they're not all militant secularists eager to destroy everything that evangelical Christians hold dear, they have brought Jim Wallis of Sojourner's magazine to the nation's attention.

As a result he's been the topic of conversation recently in blogs and in journals like the The Weekly Standard. He's also been making appearances on television, most recently on Tim Russert's Face the Nation a week ago.

Jim Wallis presents himself as a man of neither the left nor the right but as one who desires simply to follow the scriptures. Yet, to listen to him speak he sounds for all the world as if he's a liberal first and a Christian second. Consider, for example, his responses on Face the Nation:

MR. RUSSERT: Reverend Jim Wallis, how do you see the Democrats, the Republicans, both of which you have written about, in terms of faith and spirituality and religion, approaching the Schiavo case?

JIM WALLIS: Well, first of all, our hearts go out this morning to Terri Schiavo and the family. It appears she's near the end of her life, and so deep compassion for the family, and all of us care so much about this.

Having dispensed with the necessary amenities, Wallis quickly heads for the fertile political territory Russert's question brought into view, and seeks to score political points by decrying the scoring of political points:

In principle we should always err on the side of life...that's the safer moral course, but we also should worry about the politicizing of any case, and I'm alarmed by memos that talk about firing up the base or defeating the Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida. That's way out of bounds for a case like this.

I think the conversation about life is a good conversation. But then let's talk, as the Catholics do, about a consistent ethic of life. Today a silent tsunami will take the lives of 30,000 children because of hunger. Lives are lost in Iraq. On death row innocent people are executed. The bishops this week launched a new campaign against the death penalty. I think a consistent ethic of life is a good moral guide for politics and it cuts both ways, cuts Republican and Democratic. Religion should be able to critique left and right, not be ideologically predictable or loyally partisan.

Let's not talk about Schiavo, Wallis seems to be urging, since the Republicans were largely on the proper side of that one. Let's talk instead about those issues where we can be tacitly critical of Republicans even as we claim that as Christians we are not ideologically predictable(!), and let's at the same time disavow any intention of trying to score political points off the Schiavo tragedy.

Russert the reminded his audience that during the 2000 campaign candidate Bush was asked to name the political philosopher or thinker he most identifies with and why, to which he responded: "Christ, because he changed my heart."

When asked to elaborate, Bush replied: "Well, if they don't know, it's going to be hard to explain. When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me."

Russert then asked Wallis: "Can you imagine a Democrat responding in the same way?" Given a wonderful opportunity to amplify to a national secular audience George Bush's words about the importance and life-changing effect of a Christian commitment, Wallis quick-kicked, apparently unable to muster much enthusiasm for discussing the implications of Christian conversion on national television if it would make Bush look good:

REV. WALLIS: Well, there's no reason why [Democrats] shouldn't [answer the same way]. The part of that [Bush's answer] that I don't like was when he said, "And if people don't understand that, I'm sorry." As you know, I believe in bringing religious values into the public square. Where would we be if the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. kept his faith to himself? But, you know, religion must be disciplined by democracy. We have to argue on the basis of the common good, not say, "I'm religious, you won't understand, but I'm going to be talking Jesus."

Not only does Wallis misrepresent Bush's perfectly sensible concern that secular listeners might fail to understand the life-transforming power of the gospel if they haven't experienced it themselves, the rest of Wallis' answer is almost indecipherable:

Jesus talked about blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemy. He talked about the poor over and over and over again. So I want to see the words of Jesus be part of our discourse. But we're a pluralist society now....so how do you argue on the basis of what's best for the common good to convince a very pluralistic nation that what we think is good for all of us, not just the Christians?

He seems to be saying that he doesn't want to talk about how Christ can change peoples' lives, he doesn't want to talk about a personal encounter with Christ, he prefers instead to talk about the corporate political obligations Christianity imposes upon one, and those obligations are evidently to adopt left-liberal social and foreign policies.

So much for being ideologically unpredictable and non-partisan.

Wallis may not mean this, but he certainly seems to imply that the value of employing the language of evangelical Christianity is that it can be used as a code to put the denizens of Jesus Land more at ease and make them more amenable to the left's political project. The value of God talk, Wallis seems to aver, is that it befuddles the unsophisticated into thinking that liberal democrats are really at one with the folks in the pew. It's a way of winning their trust, of deceiving them, actually, so that they won't be so resistant to liberal political candidates and ideology.

Maybe this is unfair to Wallis, maybe he was just clumsy in expressing himself on Russert's show. I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but a visit to the other sites linked above does nothing to reassure one that clumsiness is a satisfactory explanation for Wallis' apparent political partisanship.

Alvin Plantinga

The Washington Times has a story on Alvin Plantinga, one of the most influential of contemporary philosophers and author of what will no doubt come to be regarded a classic work in epistemology and philosophy of religion titled Warranted Christian Belief.

Plantinga, who at 72 still teaches at Notre Dame, has also written a number of other important books and papers and has perhaps done more to change the religious complexion of philosophy departments in American universities than any other living philosopher.

A discipline which was dominated a generation ago by secular materialists is today home to an increasing number of Christians and other theists (see here). It has been a remarkable transformation and Plantinga's influence has been in large measure responsible for it.

China's Plans for Surprise Attack

The Chinese strategy for launching a surprise attack on Taiwan is discussed at The Strategy Page. Some analysts think it's just a matter of time.

The Chinese probably aren't too concerned about our reaction since our economies are so interdependent they probably calculate (correctly) that if they can launch a successful assault on Taiwan before we have a chance to get a carrier battle group to the region that they will have a fait accompli over which we will not be willing to wage all out war.

There will follow grave diplomatic harrumphing, of course, but eventually the imperatives of commerce will cool tempers, and we will grudgingly accept the Chinese takeover (and subsequent executions) of the Taiwanese.

No doubt the biggest concern of the Chinese is whether they would be able to overwhelm Taiwan's defenses swiftly enough to preclude American involvement. This may be quite difficult to accomplish, for reasons discussed at Strategy Page.

It's interesting reading.

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.