Justice for Hasan Akbar

Here's an update on the case of Hasan Akbar, the soldier who in the early days of OIF killed two of his fellow soldiers and wounded fourteen in Kuwait:

FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) - An Army sergeant was convicted Thursday by a military jury of premeditated murder and attempted murder in a grenade and rifle attack that killed two of his comrades and wounded 14 others in Kuwait during the opening days of the Iraq war.

Hasan Akbar, 34, now faces a possible death penalty, which the same 15-member jury will consider at a hearing that begins Monday.

Prosecutors say Akbar told investigators he launched the attack because he was concerned U.S. troops would kill fellow Muslims in Iraq. They said he coolly carried out the attack to achieve "maximum carnage" on his comrades in the 101st Airborne Division.

The verdict came after only 2 1/2 hours of deliberations following seven days of testimony in the court-martial - the first time since the Vietnam era that an American has been prosecuted on charges of murdering a fellow soldier during wartime.

There's more on the story at the link.

Liberal Legerdemain

It's always fun to watch the liberal media in action in much the same way that it's fun to watch a card cheat pull off his amazing sleight of hand in the service of his skulduggery.

PowerLine has a fine analysis by Dafydd ab Hugh of the recent ABC report of Henry Hyde's comments about the Clinton impeachment in which Hyde is charged in the headline with saying something he clearly doesn't say. The headline reads (or did read, since it has since been modified) that Clinton impeachment was retaliation for Nixon, says retiring congressman.

Here's Dafydd's commentary on what Hyde actually said:

A transcript of a video report that appeared on an ABC affiliate makes a rather startling claim. Upon careful parsing, however, there appears to be an awful lot of gravy for so little pot roast. Here is the screaming headline:

Clinton impeachment was retaliation for Nixon, says retiring congressman by Andy Shaw.

By the time we get [to the story], an element of doubt has begun to creep in:

Republican Congressman Henry Hyde made some surprising comments Thursday on the impeachment hearings of President Bill Clinton. He now says Republicans may have gone after Clinton to retaliate for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.

Note how "was retaliation" has transubstantiated into "may have" been retaliation. Doubt and certainty are locked in an epic battle for all time (like the two guys in the Star Trek episode). But reading a bit further, doubt starts to get the upper hand:

The veteran DuPage County congressman acknowledged that Republicans went after Clinton in part to enact revenge against the Democrats for impeaching President Richard Nixon 25 years earlier.

In part? How much part? One part principle to three parts revenge? Or one part revenge to four parts sloe gin? And at last, if we persevere long enough, we finally come to the actual words that Hammerin' Hank Hyde actually used to Mr. Shaw:

Andy Shaw asked Hyde if the Clinton proceedings were payback for Nixon's impeachment.

"I can't say it wasn't, but I also thought that the Republican party should stand for something, and if we walked away from this, no matter how difficult, we could be accused of shirking our duty, our responsibility," said Hyde.

Well! It's certainly hard to imagine a stronger indictment of Republican perfidy than that! The sudden upthrust of principle after all renders utterly absurd the next paragraph... which makes it quite plain that Mr. Shaw began with his conclusion and worked backwards to his evidence, then forgot to work forward again and bring his snarky commentary into line with the best quote he could get out of old Henry:

Hyde's comments reflect what Democrats have been saying for years about the Clinton impeachment. It will be interesting to see what happens when Hyde's comments hit the national media.

Yes siree... for years and years Democrats have insisted, against an army of naysayers, that the Republican Party should stand for something and shouldn't walk away from its responsibility to impeach Bill Clinton. By golly, I think the Dems deserve a round of applause and perhaps a lump of sugar for finally proving their case!

No sermon would be complete without its homily; no symphony would seem finished without a grace note. Shaw understands the requirements of his chosen profession, so he finishes out with the following:

Hyde's style will be missed in Washington, as well as his sense of civility, even though a lot of people will not miss his rigid ideology.

PowerLine adds this observation:

Somehow I have a feeling the "rigid ideology" at work here is Andy Shaw's. Turns out he was the one that introduced the concept of "payback" for Nixon's impeachment--a mere 25 years earlier--and Hyde responded politely, while making the point that the impeachment issue was one of principle. What a scoop!

As we mentioned above, the media lefties are a real caution. They never let the facts get in the way of their prejudices nor of a good column. Having discovered that which eluded the alchemists of old, they have the uncanny ability to transmute the base metal of "I can't say that it wasn't" into the precious journalistic gold of a scandalous admission. These media David Copperfields can make juicy stories appear right out of thin air. Their skillful prestidigitation is enough to take one's breath away. You can't help but admire it.

CFN Offers Lousy Trade (Pt. III)

This is the third in our series of posts on the Center For Naturalism's (CFN) statement of beliefs as found on their web site. The previous two posts can be read here and here.

CFN makes a number of assertions which seem problematic. Let's begin with this one:

[B]ecause it discounts the existence of the soul and survival after death, naturalism increases the value we place on this, our only life, and the world we inhabit now. Such values support an environmental ethic of wise use, sustainability, and population control that will keep the earth habitable for future generations of all creatures.

The problem with this is that the metaphysical view called naturalism renders all values arbitrary. The naturalist, who believes that this life is all there is, can offer no reason why one shouldn't be a nihilist and reject all values. Nor can they offer a reason why one shouldn't embrace egoism and place one's own selfish interests and pleasures above all else. Why would either be wrong? Why not try to get as much from the earth while we can and let future generations fend for themselves? What is it about naturalism that impels us to care about our descendents? If death is final, there is no reason whatsoever why anyone should care what happens to the world after one's own demise. The only way a naturalist could gainsay this would be by referring to some objective standard of morality, but such standards do not exist if naturalism is true.

CFN also states that:

Because naturalism doubts the existence of ultimate purposes either inherent in nature or imposed by a creator, values derive from human desires and preferences, not discoverable absolutes. To the extent that there is a shared human nature, values are common across cultures, but to the extent cultures differ, so will values. There is no finally correct way to behave, nor are there finally justifiable goals, but only the desires and intentions that currently constitute us, all of which may change as human nature and cultures change. Although values do not have a foundation outside ourselves, we cannot escape having them, since they constitute us as motivated creatures.

We can't help having values just like we can't help having preferences in flavors or colors or music, but it doesn't follow that these preferences are in any way morally significant or binding on ourselves or others. All values in a naturalistic world are ultimately arbitrary and subjective. There is no right or wrong, there are only differences in how people feel about certain behaviors. CFN acknowledges here that naturalism is incompatible with any non-arbitrary morality. It, in fact, offers no basis for any morality whatsoever.

They go on to claim that:

A naturalistic understanding of the causes of criminality helps undercut retributive attitudes favoring the death penalty and punitive prison conditions, while building support for alternative sentencing and policies that address the conditions which generate crime and recidivism. Realizing that but for the luck of circumstances, any of us could be standing in the criminal's shoes, generates compassion for offenders as well as for victims.

However, consideration of the criminal's crime often generates deep contempt and a desire for retribution. Why is the feeling of compassion to be preferred to the feeling of contempt or hatred? Why does CFN arbitrarily favor mercy over retribution? In a naturalistic world there is no basis for choosing between them. If one man prefers compassion and another prefers retribution, neither is right and neither is wrong. For CFN to assume that one is good and the other evil is totally unwarranted on the basis of CFN's assumptions about the world. The folks at CFN are here simply revealing that they would like to turn their subjective preferences into universal social policy.

CFN tries hard to mask the unremitting bleakness of a naturalistic worldview by wrapping it in pretty paper, but the attempt is doomed to fail as soon as one starts to examine the package closely. Naturalism will never be able to supplant Christianity because Christianity is the source of all that makes life meaningful, beautiful, and endurable (See here).

Naturalism would take this source away and offer nothing in its place except a barren and sterile nihilism. Some trade.

Modern Barbarians

The religion of peace recently held a conclave in Tehran. Here's part of the report of the proceedings:

More than 400 men, women, and children gathered at a meeting in Tehran on Wednesday to pledge their commitment to carry out suicide bomb attacks against both Israelis and Americans in Iraq. "Some 440 volunteers, most of them women, signed up today," said Mohammad Ali Samadi, spokesperson for the Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement.

Ah, yes. The word woman in fundamentalist Islam is evidently just another word for having nothing left to lose. Where are the macho Iranian men? Aren't they eager to give their all for Allah? How many Iranian mullahs, we wonder, are prepared and eager to make the same sacrifice they are enjoining upon their women and children? The mullahs' message to the faithful is let's you and him fight.

The ceremony... included the showcase of video footage depicting Israeli soldiers being killed in suicide attacks....

It is apparently totally appropriate in Islam to encourage children to watch such gruesome images and to urge them on to murders of their own. In this country that would be child abuse. Of course, it should be considered child abuse in Iran as well, except that they're so blinded by their religious fanaticism and hatred that all they care about, their only goal in life, is to kill people who don't share their religion. We would do well to keep in mind that these people are striving mightily to build the ultimate suicide bomb.

Each of the group's 400-plus new recruits -- some of whom donned headbands with the inscription 'there is no God but Allah' -- were confronted with a difficult choice: to train for suicide attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq; to train for suicide attacks against Israelis; or to assassinate British author Salman Rushdie, the author forced into hiding after the late Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Muslims to kill him.

One wonders which of those options was most attractive to the attendees. Our hearts and prayers go out to Mr. Rushdie who once asked, "What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." For his freedom of expression Rushdie has spent the last fifteen years, and may spend the rest of his life, hiding from those who think the best way to deal with distasteful opinions is to kill the person who voices them.

Once more now with conviction, repeat after me: All cultures are equally "valid". No cultural narrative is superior to any other. All cultural norms are relative.

Mysterious Corpses

The media have provided only sketchy explanations of the mysterious discovery of dozens of bodies found floating recently in the Tigris river in Iraq.

California Yankee tries to make sense of the reports and in the process tells us a couple of things we didn't know:

First there were reports that as many as 200 people were being held hostage in the mixed Sunni-Shia village of Madain. Iraqi government security forces backed by US troops arrived in strength on Monday. They encountered no resistance and found no trace of hostages or hostage-takers. There followed articles that the hostage reports may have been exaggerated.

Yesterday there were reports that 50 bodies had been pulled from the river. This of course was thought to confirm the original hostage story. The BBC reports that the story is even more complicated. The 50 plus bodies didn't show up all at once:

They said they had started to appear in the al-Suwayra stretch of the Tigris nearly two months earlier, on 27 February. On the first three days, 27 bodies were retrieved, while during and after the supposed hostage crisis only six corpses were pulled from the river. But in the 26 days between 26 March and 20 April, there was a steady flow of cadavers. A total of 33 were retrieved during that period, an average of just over one a day.

The police statistics said that of 60 bodies 56 were men, two women and two children. Fifty-three had died of gunshot wounds, five had their throats cut and two were beheaded. Only seven of the corpses were identified by relatives. So the identity of the bulk of the victims is still not clear. It's not known whether the victims are all Shia Muslims, abducted and murdered by Sunni militants. The killing may not have been one-sided. We may never know.

It sounds as though these unfortunates may have been victims of a war that's being waged within the war. They may well be victims of clan and tribal retributions for offenses which perhaps have little or nothing to do with the larger struggle in Iraq.

From John Hathaway

Ya gotta luv this guy...

From the link.

It is against such a backdrop that the euro price of gold should surpass the trading range of the past two years. A breakout in euros will serve notice to the market that gold is not a subset of the weak dollar play. Once it has crossed this threshold, gold will begin to attract capital from assets parked in all currencies and asset classes including commodities and high yield credits, the two most recent investment bubbles. The bull market in gold, which commenced in August of 1999, will shed its stealth mode. Its pace will quicken and become difficult to ignore. We stand at the end of the beginning of the first leg in a multi year bull market in the metal. The significant accumulation that has occurred during the past five years will not yield easily to the sharply higher prices that lie ahead, because those price gains will be spurred by financial market developments that make gold's appeal quite obvious, even to its detractors.

Kudos to John Ruiz Dempsey

It's about time somebody takes a stand against a system designed to impoverish and enslave the citizens of a country. Obviously someone is sick and tired and isn't going to take it anymore.

Visit this link for details.

Stifling Intellectual Inquiry

Richard Neuhaus has an excellent little essay on the Intelligent Design/ Darwinism debate in the April issue of First Things. Here are a couple of paragraphs of an article that should be read in its entirety:

That evolution is a theory is a fact, unless somebody has changed the definition of theory without notifying the makers of dictionaries. The "search for knowledge" and "the pursuit of science," one might suggest, will suffer grievously if we no longer respect the distinction between theory and fact.

To argue that skepticism about the theory of evolution is inadmissible if it is motivated by religion is simply a form of antireligious bigotry. It is a fact that many devout Christians, many of whom are engaged in the relevant sciences, subscribe to the theory of evolution. It is also a fact that some scientists who reject religion also reject evolution, or think the theory highly dubious. That is the way it is with theories.

To simply equate evolutionary theory with science is a form of dogmatism that has no place in the pursuit of truth. The problems with that approach are multiplied by the fact that there are such starkly conflicting versions of what is meant by evolution. The resistance to the theory is almost inevitable when it is propounded, as it often is, in an atheistic and materialistic form.

Atheism and materialism are not science but ideologies that most people of all times and places, not just "red state" Americans, deem to be false. Proponents of "intelligent design" and other approaches, who are frequently well-certified scientists, contend that their theories possess greater explanatory power.

Some school boards have very modestly suggested that students should know that evolution is not the only theory about the origin and development of life. What they want students to know is an indisputable fact. There are other theories supported by very reputable scientists, including theories of evolution other than the established version to which students are now bullied into giving their assent.

On any question, the rational and scientific course is to take into account all pertinent evidence and explanatory proposals. We can know that the quasi-religious establishment of a narrow evolutionary theory as dogma is in deep trouble when its defenders demand that alternative ideas must not be discussed or even mentioned in the classroom. Students, school boards, and thoughtful citizens are in fully justified rebellion against this attempted stifling of intellectual inquiry.

On the matter of taking into account all pertinent evidence and explanatory proposals one often hears the objection that if we are going to be fair in introducing alternative explanations into the classroom we will have to give time to a menagerie of ideas from pantheistic to animistic creation stories and everything in between. This is, of course, a transparently disingenuous attempt to justify continuing the monopoly enjoyed by the materialistic explanation.

The fact is there are not an indefinite number of alternative explanations which would have to be accommodated. There are precisely two genuine options in this debate. Life either arose by purely mindless, mechanistic processes, or it's appearance involved some degree of intelligent input. These two disjuncts exhaust all the possibilities. Nothing else need be discussed.

Nor is it correct to assert that one of these alternatives is a scientific hypothesis and the other is religious. They are both metaphysical explanations. Neither of them is ultimately provable or disprovable by any empirical test. If one is to be excluded they should both be excluded, if one is to be presented in public school classrooms they should both be presented in public school classrooms. There is no reason why the materialist theory should be privileged over it's competitor.

This is all that most people who are trying to get Intelligent Design acknowledged in high school biology classes are asking. They wish to see students genuinely challenged to think through the two contrasting theories and be allowed to decide for themselves which one best accounts for the evidence. Do living things show indications of having been intentionally designed or do they instead appear to have resulted from mindless, purposeless physical laws plus serendipity?

The guardians of the entrenched materialist orthodoxy know very well which possibility will have the greatest intellectual and philosophical allure for students, and that's precisely why they are so determined to prevent the comparison.

Recognizing Stroke

A friend passed this along and I thought it was worth sharing with our readers:

Susie is recuperating at an incredible pace for someone with a massive stroke all because Sherry saw Susie stumble which prompted her to ask Susie to perform the critical three tasks listed below.

This literally saved Susie's life. Suzie was unable to do any of the three so Sherry called 911. Even though Suzie had normal blood pressure readings and did not appear outwardly to be having a stroke, as she could converse to some extent with the Paramedics, they took her to the hospital right away.

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms. Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking the person to perform three simple tasks:

1. Ask the individual to SMILE.

2. Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.

3. Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE.

If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, call 911 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

After discovering that a group of non-medical volunteers could identify facial weakness, arm weakness and speech problems, researchers urged the general public to learn the three tasks.

They presented their conclusions at the American Stroke Association's annual meeting last February. Widespread use of this test could result in prompt diagnosis and treatment of the stroke and prevent brain damage.

The chances are good that someone we know, or we ourselves, will someday suffer a stroke. Recognizing the symptoms could make all the difference in the extent to which the victim recovers.

Yet Another Travesty

The consumer price index for last month was .6%. The CPI is a measure of inflation of the U.S. dollar. In other words, it means that on an annualized basis, we are losing 7.2% purchasing power of every dollar we earn.

I could rant with megabytes of tirade about this but in order to save bandwidth I have opted for a quote from one who articulated this travesty more succinctly than I ever could...

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does no exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'

Ayn Rand

And who will declare our account overdrawn? The rest of the world who has been accepting U.S. dollars that we print at our leisure in exchange for their goods and services.

Ok, so at this rate a dollar next year is going to buy 7.2% less goods and services than it would today or, to look at it another way, it will cost $1.08 to purchase the same goods and services next year as a dollar would buy today. And that's if the rate of inflation doesn't rise further! What is one to do? As Ayn Rand said above, the destroyers seize gold...and so should you. I've posted this link before to Dr. Alan Greenspan's now infamous dissertation and it seems more relevant today than ever.

Govern yourselves accordingly.

The Relativization of Truth

David Klinghoffer, writing at NRO, laments that no Jewish leader is articulating the pernicious evils of relativism like Joseph Ratzinger did in his homily the other day prior to being elected pope:

On Monday, as the cardinals were about to enter upon the awesome task of choosing a new pope, Ratzinger delivered a sermon that sounded a striking call to resist relativism and secularism....Ratzinger powerfully insists that there is...truth and that his church is in possession of it.

His words, which will become famous, are worth contemplating: "Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."

It's one of the melancholy facts about Jewish life in modern America that the closest thing we have to a leading moral authority, representing us as Jews to the world, is not a rabbi or any spiritual exemplar. Rather, ... it is most likely to be someone from one of the anti-defamation organizations, most likely Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League.

As Foxman himself has said, "It is pure arrogance for any one religion to assume that they hold 'the truth.'" Presumably this would apply to Judaism too.

Alas, the ADL's viewpoint is all too commonly encountered in our community, as I have been reminded from the very recent personal experience of publishing a book that argues for the truth of Judaism. Although my book, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, a history of the Jewish-Christian debate about Jesus, can be seen as a critique of Christianity, I've found that in speaking to mixed groups of Jews and Christians, it is often the Jews who take umbrage at being told their religion is true while the Christians genially accept that is entirely appropriate for a Jew to argue in this way.

What's going on? Only that Christians, including traditional Catholics like Joseph Ratzinger, perhaps more than many Jews today, appreciate the deepest assumption that our two religions share: the assumption that there is a truth out there, a singular truth, to be found and embraced.

The belief that there "is a truth out there" is a decidedly un-postmodern notion. In the po-mo world truth has been relativized to one's cultural and social circumstances so that what is true for people in one cultural setting is not necessarily true for people in another. Perhaps the greatest danger of this is that if it applies to cultures it also applies to individuals. In other words, once we abandon the idea of "truth out there", i.e. objective truth, truth becomes intimately personal. It becomes a matter of whatever is true for me, whatever has purchase on my commitments.

When truth, particularly moral truth, has been subjectivized no one's truth is any better than anyone else's because there is no longer a standard to which we can compare them. When no one's moral truth is better than any one else's everyone's morality is equally "valid". At that point we have moral paralysis. All moral disputes reduce to matters of personal taste or preference. Nobody's wrong if everybody's right. If that is so, however, then none of us can say that the holocaust was evil, or that rape, or child molestation, or chattel slavery are evil. The most we can say about those horrors is that we don't like them.

When morality is subjectivized there is no reason why we should care about society, or virtue, or the well-being of others. There is no reason why we shouldn't adopt a thoroughgoing egoism, an ethic of putting our own interests first all the time. And if egoism is a legitimate way to live one's life then so too is the philosophy of might makes right. If I can impose my will on another to achieve my interests there is no moral reason why I should not do so even if my doing so brings harm to the other person.

In other words, the relativization of truth leads to a moral hell, a war of every man against every man, a world where we can trust others only to do what's in their own interests. That's the world we'll create if secularism ever prevails completely in this country. Indeed, it's the world we find today in much of our social experience. Pope Benedict XVI obviously sees this. It's a shame that more religious leaders in more Christian and Jewish churches and synagogues don't.

We Didn't Start the Fire

The Washington Post has an article in which senator Ted Kennedy and his Democratic colleagues explain why judge Janice Rogers Brown is unsuited for the federal judiciary:

Kennedy and others recited the most controversial of Brown's and Owen's statements and rulings. For instance, Brown said in an April 2000 speech, "where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. . . . The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining, and virtue contemptible."

You might think that judge Brown, an African American woman, shares a lot of common philosophical ground with Alexis de Tocqueville and other luminaries in the pantheon of great thinkers in political theory, and that such an individual would be an asset on the federal bench. Such a presumption, however, would put you at odds with Senator Kennedy and his cronies who have probably never heard of Tocqueville, much less read him, and who fervently wish to deny her the opportunity to serve precisely because she says things like this.

This is small-mindedness of the first magnitude. Because this judge believes that big government saps local initiative, a belief which one would think is empirically obvious to all but the most obtuse observers, the liberals are outraged. In their indignation that anyone would have the temerity to challenge the benefits of governmental micro-management they plan to filibuster her nomination, which will force the Republicans to change the rules in the senate to stop the filibuster and allow for a vote on her nomination on the senate floor. This in turn will provoke the Democrats, they've assured us, to shut down the nation's business.

Democrats are so obsessed with defeating George Bush's agenda that they're willing to sacrifice the welfare of the nation to accomplish it. This may turn out, however, to be an act of political self-immolation. If the Republicans do the right thing, stick to their principles, and stand resolutely behind the President's nominees, the Democrats' irrationality may ignite a blazing auto de fe which will reduce them to minority status for a generation. If so, it'll be fun to watch. No doubt they'll fuel the pyre themselves with never-opened volumes of Democracy In America.

Addressing Blasphemy

Little Green Footballs directs us to this story out of Pakistan:

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani man accused of desecrating the Koran was shot dead Wednesday after being chased by an angry crowd.

Ashiq Nabi, in his thirties, was accused of being disrespectful to Islam's holy book and had been in hiding since Monday, a senior police official said.

"Today, a mob spotted him and shot him dead," said Mazahar ul Haq, police chief of Nowshera town, about 100 km (62 miles) west of the capital, Islamabad.

Blasphemy, including desecrating the Koran, is a capital offence in deeply Islamic Pakistan and carries the death sentence, but convictions have always been turned down by high courts because of a lack of evidence.

Witnesses said the man was chased through fields and climbed a tree to get away from an angry crowd of up to 500 men. When he refused to come down, someone shot him dead, they said.

Human rights activists want the blasphemy law to be struck off the books saying it is often abused by people to settle personal disputes or religious rivalry.

Indeed. While we all pause a moment to celebrate multicultural diversity perhaps someone can explain to us again the moral equivalence of all cultures.

Sider and Osteen

Christianity Today has an interview with Ron Sider that should be required reading for everyone who identifies him or herself as an evangelical Christian. Sider has for thirty years or more been calling Christians to live lives consistent with the Gospel, to eschew the materialistic excess of our culture, to care for the poor, and to share in each other's sufferings. The CT interview is well worth reading.

By contrast, I'm currently reading Joel Osteen's best-seller Your Best Life Now, and although I don't question Osteen's sincerity, and I certainly don't question his success (He's taken a church from 7000 members to close to 30,000 in about six years, if that's a measure of success), I really wonder whether his concept of God's will for our lives is accurate. According to Osteen God wants us to be materially successful and wealthy and He yearns to shower us with miracles great and small. Osteen believes that being aware of "God's favor" confers some special status on us that gives the believer who is conscious of it a sort of immunity to troubles which afflict those who fail to claim God's favor. Osteen seems to claim a special skill at divining the mind of God, insisting several times on every page that he knows what God wants, thinks, wishes, wills, and is going to do for those who claim His favor.

I have a difficult time accepting all of this. I don't know that God particularly wants us to be wealthy so much as that we be faithful. There's no Biblical precedent for thinking that wealth should come with one's status as a child of God, but there is Biblical warrant for expecting that persecution and other afflictions will beset us.

Nor do I think God summons up supernatural interventions to secure for us a parking space at the mall, as Osteen informs us God did for him. How must Osteen's claim that God answered his prayer for a parking space sound to a mother who has prayed her eyes out for a dying child to be made well only to have God not grant the request? Miracles are not trivial events dispensed by God like candy thrown from the divine carriage to poor waifs in the street. They are momentous and purposeful, at least those recorded in the New Testament are, and we have no reason to think that God works miracles more promiscuously today than He did then.

Osteen is surely correct in urging us to maintain a positive outlook on life, but his theology would be alien to people like Dietrich Bonhoffer who wrote The Cost of Discipleship, his portrayal of the Christian life seems coarsely materialistic, and he makes God, whether intentionally or not, into a cosmic Santa Claus.

Ron Sider seems to us a much more authentic voice on the matter of how Christians should live their lives. We recommend him to our readers.

Killing Innocents

Richard John Neuhaus asks good questions about whether it is ever right to take innocent life in a piece called Speaking About the Unspeakable in the March issue of First Things. After spending a few paragraphs on the topic of torture (See our commentary here), he writes:

There is a related development that has also not received the attention it would seem to deserve. It is a generally accepted moral maxim that it is always wrong to deliberately take innocent human life. Yet after September 11 it is the policy of our government to shoot down hijacked airplanes, thus killing the innocent passengers, if there is reason to believe that, as in the case of the World Trade Center, the hijackers intend to use the plane as a weapon. One can, of course, stretch the rule of "double effect"-the distinction between what is directly willed and what is only indirectly willed-but it is a stretch that teeters on the edge of simplistic intentionalism.

Father Neuhaus is calling, in this brief essay, for more attention to be paid to these matters by Christian ethicists and moral theologians, and his plea is certainly timely, as we noted in our comments on his post on torture.

The moral agony involved in the scenario Fr. Neuhaus offers for our consideration is perhaps mitigated somewhat by the fact that the passengers on the plane will likely die in any event. The question is whether they will be killed by crashing into a skyscraper at the hands of the terrorists or by crashing into the earth at the hands of an Air Force pilot. It is a choice fraught with anguish, certainly, but if there is reason to believe that the hijackers will murder even more people, and the only way to stop them is to shoot down the airliner, then it seems that shooting it down is the morally right thing to do. Even so, the morally right thing, in a case like this, seems almost heinous.

A more vexing question, though, is whether it is ever right to deliberately target innocent civilians in a time of war. It is vexing because the occasion for it arises with much greater frequency than does the occasion for shooting down hijacked airliners and the temptation to do it must be very strong on at least some of those occasions. Although targeting civilians violates just war theory, it has been done by virtually every nation ever to fight a war in modern times, including the United States.

The moral dubiousness of the Hiroshima bombing, to take but one example, does not derive from our use of a nuclear weapon, but rather from the fact that we deliberately targeted the civilian population for death. More people died from our use of conventional ordinance in the incendiary raid on Tokyo than died from our use of a fission bomb at Hiroshima, but both raids targeted civilians, and that's what makes them morally problematic. Had we dropped the bomb on the Japanese fleet out at sea or on massed troops on Iwo Jima, there would have been little reason to question the decision (In hindsight, of course, we can see that using the weapon crossed a threshold that might have been better left uncrossed), but if there was adequate justification for the wholesale incineration of civilians in Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, I for one don't know what it was.

There may be situations in war in which intentionally killing non-combatants may be for some reason necessary (although I can't think offhand what such circumstances would be), but we should never allow ourselves to return to the WWII mind-set which permitted us to kill innocent children and women with so little distress in our own souls. President Truman is said to have stated that he never gave the use of the bomb a second thought once the decision to use it was made. If that is so, it's a very difficult thing to understand, and very troubling.

Christians have written much about just war theory, but, as Fr. Neuhaus suggests, perhaps there is a need for them to write much more.

Looking For the Big Win

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail has more on the battle at Camp Gannon that we cited in a post a couple of days ago. Here's an excerpt:

Marines responded to the attack by deploying their "Rapid Reaction" force and calling in air assets; "The unit summoned F-18 fighter jets and Cobra helicopter gunships; the Cobras fired machine guns and Hellfire missiles at what an after-action report described as vehicles transporting weapons." Al Qaeda cannot maintain the initiative against such flexibility and firepower, and were forced to break contact, suffering heavy casualties while failing to achieve their objective. It is no wonder the communiqu�s issued by al Qaeda provided little details on the assault, as there is very little to tout.

According to the Washington Post, "19 insurgents were killed and 15 were wounded during 24 hours of fighting." The size of the assault force is estimated between 40 to 100 fighters (the high number likely representing the support teams), putting the casualty figures at anywhere from 34 to 85%. These are stunningly high numbers.

Al Qaeda devoted significant resources to this assault, and the massing of force at the company level requires time, training, effort and material. The fire truck used in the assault was known to have been missing for months; this vehicle was husbanded for a significant attack. These resources were sacrificed as Camp Gannon has strategic significance to the insurgency.

The fact that the insurgents are using frontal attacks in relatively large numbers suggests that they believe they must gain a significant battlefield victory to reverse the psychological flow of momentum which has favored the Iraqi security forces and the coalition troops since the January 30th election.

Their hope, apparently, is that a major defeat of the Americans will re-energize their sagging morale and make them look again like heroes and winners in the eyes of a populace which they have badly alienated by their indiscriminate murders. As long as the insurgents were killing Americans the citizenry viewed them either positively or with indifference, but as the civilian casualties of their suicide bombs piled up, the Iraqi people have grown very hostile toward them, especially since so many of the insurgents are now foreigners.

A big win would help them, but they'll have to do much better than their last several efforts.

Environmental Health

Earth Day approaches (Friday) and much of the news about the environment is good. Wetland acreage has been increasing over the last decade, as has forested land. Indeed, forests in the U.S. grew by almost 10 million acres in the 1990's.

The arctic is warmer than it was in 1970, as anyone who has seen the receding glaciers in Alaska might surmise, but it is colder than it was in 1930. Also air quality continues to improve with pollution levels at their lowest since monitoring began in the 1950's.

This is all very encouraging, but we'd feel much better if rampant development and immigration were brought under control in this country and if habitat erosion in the southern hemisphere were reversed. Even so the environmental picture in the U.S., at least, is much brighter than it was in the 1970's.

Go here for a fuller report.

Diane Knippers, 53

Diane Knippers, one of Time magazine's 25 most influential evangelicals, died this past Monday of cancer at the age of 53. There is more on her passing here.

Smells Like Liberal Thuggery

The Weekly Standard has a fine piece by Jeffrey Bell on the Tom DeLay contretemps to which is attached the pungent aroma of partisan politics. Some highlights of Bell's piece:

The truth is that Tom DeLay is a special target because he is the first legislative power broker to be an authentic Red State conservative. He is an unhyphenated Reaganite: militantly pro-life and pro-values on social issues, a pro-growth tax cutter on economic issues, and an unapologetic, spread-American-values interventionist abroad. In the years since the GOP's congressional realignment victory of 1994, no other GOP leader in either the House or Senate fully fits this description.

Since the 2000 election and the accompanying Red State/Blue State polarization, Red State conservatives have grown in strength in tandem with the alternative Red State media: talk and Christian radio, conservative bloggers, Fox News, and all the rest who have put older, Blue State media on notice that they are no longer capable of unilaterally defining the national debate.

DeLay is the most important of a small but growing group of conservative leaders who are willing and able to operate without permission or praise from Blue State media. The fact that Hastert, DeLay, and their allies have maintained unbroken operational control of the House, never losing a significant floor vote in the four-plus years since Bush became president, has (to put it mildly) opened the door for other ambitious leaders to consider doing the same, either on selected issues or across the board.

If DeLay goes down because of overseas trips and/or fundraising practices that have never caused the slightest political problem for anyone else, the lesson to other Red State leaders will be clear. The four-year House winning streak, so widely taken for granted among conservatives, will not long survive DeLay. That is why Democrats and Blue State media (despite some half-hearted efforts to depict DeLay as a GOP albatross) so fervently desire his career to end as soon as possible.

The Democrats are trying to kneecap DeLay for doing what many of his colleagues of both parties do. The hypocrisy of their attempt to eliminate a powerful political opponent in this fashion really does give off a stench.

Choking the Chinese

Wretchard at Belmont Club has an interesting analysis of China's plans and strategic concerns for the next couple of decades. He concludes that, despite its bluster, it is unlikely that China will launch an assault against Taiwan anytime soon.

The risk for China is not so much that the U.S. would intervene directly, but rather that we, or even the Taiwanese, would be able to block the flow of oil to China which would cause that country to collapse after about a month. China's oil reserves would last only thirty days - perhaps fifty days by 2010.

As long as China's access to oil depends on keeping a series of maritime chokepoints open the Chinese are vulnerable to the small Taiwanese submarine fleet. China's growing dependence upon imported oil, and the ease with which the Taiwanese could shut it off make, in Wretchard's opinion, an attack on Taiwan unlikely, at least in the near term.

Belmont Club's analysis makes a lot of sense, but read the whole thing and decide for yourself. Let's hope he's right.

Pope Benedict XVI

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was named Pope Benedict XVI today. Here is an excerpt from his homily at the Mass for the election of the next pontiff a couple of days ago:

How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking... The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth.

Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4:14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and "swept along by every wind of teaching," looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.

He appears to be a man keenly aware of the corrosive effect modernity has had on the Christian Church in general and Catholicism in particular. If so, he will be a worthy successor to John Paul II. Would that a few such as they could be found among the leaders of mainline protestantism right now.

The whole homily can be read here. You'll have to scroll down.

What Baghdadis Believe

Arthur Chrenkoff has a report and commentary on a recent poll taken of 778 Baghdad residents. The results were published in the April 18 edition of Iraqi Arabic newspaper Almidhar. Baghdadis were asked:

Do you support the pull out of foreign troops?

At once - 12.56%

According to a future timetable - 81.80%

Do not know - 5.64%

Has the security situation improved since the start of the new government?

Yes - 55%

No - 35%

No change - 10%

Chrenkoff's associate Haider Ajina writes:

"Most of us read, heard and saw the media report of the April 9th demonstrations in Baghdad. Most of the U.S. media portrayed it as a massive anti American demonstration in the streets of Iraq. I noticed, however, from Iraqi Arabic newspapers that most the demonstrations were against terrorism and calling for Saddam's trial and hanging (all these signs were in Arabic).

I called my father in Baghdad to confirm this and he confirmed it. My father then confirmed that Al Sadr had asked his followers to demonstrate for the withdrawal of foreign troops, he also said that this group was very small and almost insignificant compared to the rest who were calling for Saddam's trial and hanging and those against terrorism.

My father said the Iraqi media reported the number like this 'about 200,000 demonstrators of which 8,000-10,000 were Al-Sadr and Sunni supporters' (strange bed fellows). He also said that when he listened to the Iraqi elected officials (on live T.V.) in the assembly, that every one (every one including those Sunnis initially opposed to the elections), every man and woman assembly member, reiterated the importance of foreign and specifically U.S. troops staying in Iraq till Iraq is ready to take over its own security. Most of them expressed their thanks for the troops being there and freeing Iraqis from Saddam. This I did not read, hear or see in any U.S. mainstream media outlet.

"These are the people Iraq elected, asking us to stay and thanking us. The poll shows only 12% want us to leave at once. This makes a complete mockery of the mainstream media coverage of the demonstrations. As my wife told me when she heard the coverage on CNN: 'Haider you are going to get mad when you hear this', and I am still mad. Forgive me for rehashing this point. I feel it really needs pointing out. Iraqis are grateful for what we did and continue to be grateful for us being there."

The lesson here is, of course, that we should be skeptical of everything we see or hear in the MSM. They've a profound interest in discrediting Bush's Iraq policy and have demonstrated that they're not going to make him look good by publishing and broadcasting news from Iraq that shows that policy to be succeeding. The news must be unfavorable or it simply gets spiked. And they wonder why they're losing audience.

Thanks to Instapundit for the tip.

A Few Good Men

Go here to read a fascinating account of how a couple of Pennsylvania Marines thwarted the attack on Camp Gannon in Iraq last week in which 21 insurgents were killed and no Americans were seriously injured.

Speaking About the Unspeakable

Richard John Neuhaus asks good questions in a piece on torture called Speaking About the Unspeakable in the March issue of First Things. He writes:

Sanford Levinson who teaches law at the University of Texas has edited a book from Oxford University Press, Torture, with sixteen reflections on the subject. They range from the don't-talk-about-it school to the talk-about-it-only-to-condemn-it view, to a variety of discussions of when torture is permissible and impermissible....Among the more interesting contributions is one by Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Posner notes that "torture" lacks a clear definition in international agreements and American law. "Almost all official interrogation is coercive, yet not all coercive interrogation would be called 'torture' by any competent user of the English language, so that what is involved in using the word is picking out the point along a continuum at which the observer's queasiness turns to revulsion."

There is ... a continuum of circumstances in which most people, rightly or wrongly, would make an exception to the general prohibition of torture. The most commonly cited exception is that of "the ticking bomb" in which there is reason to believe that a suspect knows the location of a nuclear weapon planted in a large city which, if it explodes, will kill thousands of people. In this book and elsewhere, almost all the parties to this discussion feel compelled to address "the ticking bomb" circumstance. Posner says he agrees with (Alan) Dershowitz that "if the stakes are high enough, torture is permissible." He adds, "No one who doubts that should be in a position of responsibility."

The assumption held by many, however, is that torture is intrinsically evil and is therefore absolutely wrong. Even moral subjectivists will sometimes argue that torture is absolutely wrong until they realize the logical awkwardness of their position. In any event, causing pain is not intrinsically evil. If it were then the surgeon who performs a painful operation would be malevolent. What makes torture wrong is not the pain it inflicts but rather the motive or reason for inflicting it.

Torture carried out for amusement, for its own sake, or for punishment is a great evil and should be banished from the earth, but torture to save lives is of a different moral order altogether. Just as all killing isn't of the same moral quality, neither is all causing of pain the same. Just as some killing may be morally justified, so, too, may some instances of causing pain. The justification lies in the purpose for the act.

Neuhaus goes on to say that:

In all this, I am struck by the paucity of serious discussions by Christian moral theologians and ethicists. In these pages I have said, "We dare not trust ourselves to torture." I believe that but acknowledge that it is not sufficient. How do we address these questions of what in fact is happening in circumstances in which conscientious Christians seek moral guidance, and how can we do this without falling into the pits of relativism, proportionalism, consequentialism, and related errors? In the ticking bomb instance, does the duty to protect thousands of innocents override the duty not to torture?

The answer to Neuhaus' question, I think, has to be "yes". Not only in cases where thousands of lives are at stake but also in cases where only a single life hangs in the balance. Consider this entirely plausible scenario: A young girl has been kidnapped and imprisoned in a torture chamber or buried alive by her captor who is subsequently caught. He acknowledges that he is the girl's abductor but will not tell police where she is. He will tell them only that she has just a few days of food, air, and water left before she dies. If this were your daughter would you fault the police if they tortured the man to get the information from him needed to save the girl's life? Indeed, if this were your daughter would you refuse to let the police use such methods on her behalf if they came to you and asked for your assent? If so, why? Is the comfort of a child molester and killer more important than saving your daughter's life?

Most of us don't like to ask ourselves such questions. They make us feel too uncomfortable. Yet unless we do ask them our opinions on this subject remain inchoate. We may well find ourselves thrust into a real ticking bomb scenario in the not too distant future. The bomb may be a nuclear device in a major city. We'd be wise to have done some thinking about this issue before that day arrives.

Rampant Nitwitism

Campus Magazine Online's 2005 Campus Outrage Awards are out. Sterling examples of political correctness run amok on our college campuses, the awards are hilarious in their stupidity but terribly sad in the toll that PC takes on individual lives and what it portends for intellectual freedom in this country.

Here, for example, is the account of the second place winner which Viewpoint thinks may well have deserved top honors:

At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Economics Professor Hans Hoppe received disciplinary sanctions for making an economically verifiable argument that homosexuals engage less in long-term financial planning than heterosexuals because they typically do not have children. One of Hoppe's students, Michael Knight, filed a complaint leading to a yearlong battle between Hoppe and the University (which Hoppe eventually won). Knight accused Hoppe of "stereotyping homosexuals...When the door closes and the lecture began [sic], he needs to make sure he is remaining as politically correct as possible."

In an interview with Professor Hoppe by the Collegiate Network, Professor Hoppe believes he lost a year of his life to the entire affair. The University's Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity Officer affirmed the complaint by Knight and recommended that Hoppe receive a reprimand and be suspended without pay for one week. A grievance committee made up of one student and Hoppe's faculty peers was held on November 18, 2004. The committee upheld the original grievance and recommended that Hoppe be reprimanded and forfeit any merit pay for the current academic year.

On February 9, 2005, Hoppe received "a non-disciplinary letter of instruction" from Raymond W. Alden, III, the university's Executive Vice President and Provost, affirming the decision of the grievance committee, stating that Hoppe had created "a hostile learning environment" in his classroom, and instructing Hoppe "to cease mischaracterizing opinion as objective fact in the educational environment." However, nine days later, the university's president, Dr. Carol Harter, released a statement in which she acknowledged that professors "are entitled the freedom to teach theories and to espouse opinions that are out of the mainstream or are controversial...."

Nowhere in the statement did Harter apologize to Hoppe for what university officials put him through, nor were any individual university officials singled out for criticism.

We have said it before, but it bears repeating. No one should be permitted to serve in any capacity on a college or university campus, or to graduate from any such institution, without having read, discussed, and digested John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. It is the perfect antidote to the rampant nitwitism and intellectual tyranny that afflicts our institutions of higher learning.

The Wolphin and the Hominids

Scientists have found that an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin has bred with a false killer whale to produce a hybrid referred to as a "wolphin".

Although false killer whales and Atlantic bottlenose dolphins are different species, they are classified within the same family by scientists.

Scientists identify a species in terms of whether members of the two groups can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. If they cannot, like cats and dogs which cannot interbreed, or horses and donkeys which can interbreed but whose offspring (mules) is infertile, they are said to be reproductively isolated and are therefore regarded as separate species.

If this "wolphin" is fertile, however, then either the concept of species loses a lot of its meaning or we must allow that at least some kinds of whales and some kinds of dolphins are really the same species.

A revision of the concept of species would have interesting implications for human evolution. There are numerous fossil hominids which have been placed in disparate species on the basis of morphological differences which may or may not warrant the separation. Morphology, after all, is a precarious criterion for taxonomic distinctions. All the domestic dogs around the world, from Chihuahuas to Great Danes, are members of the same species.

If the various hominids were indeed interfertile then the rationale for placing them in different species disappears. As it is, the only rationale for separating them is that paleontologists assume that they have evolved over time one from the other, and that, being separated by vast amounts of time, they must have been reproductively isolated.

If, however, it were to turn out that they were all members of the same species it would certainly make life difficult for evolutionists. They would then be confronted with a relatively abrupt speciation event in which ape-like hominoids transitioned to Homo sapiens while leaving very little evidence of intermediary forms.

The story of human evolution, like evolution in general, is far from settled.

Sarah Lunde

Another little girl has been raped and murdered by a registered sex offender, a man who has committed sexual assault and rape on previous occasions:

David Lee Onstott, 36, was charged with first-degree murder in Sarah Lunde's death after confessing Saturday, Hillsborough County Sheriff David Gee told reporters. He had once dated her mother and unexpectedly showed up at the family's trailer home after the girl returned from a church trip April 9.

Sarah let Onstott into the house when he came looking for her mother, Kelly May Lunde, in the predawn hours of the next day, Gee said. After getting into a verbal fight with Sarah, he put her into a choke hold and killed her, Gee said.

Onstott had been previously convicted of a rape, but his father, David Onstott Sr., has said his son wouldn't hurt the girl. Investigators found Sarah's partially clothed body in an abandoned fish pond Saturday. Gee said Onstott "went to great effort to keep her body from being discovered."

Sarah's 17-year-old brother came home early April 10 to find the front door wide open and his sister gone. He told detectives that Onstott came by shortly after, and took a half-empty beer bottle before leaving the house in a rural community about 20 miles south of Tampa. Both Sarah's brother and mother initially assumed Sarah had gone to a friend's house. She wasn't reported missing until April 11.

Doris Fontana, the mother of Sarah's best friend, said that Sarah had told her she didn't like Onstott. "We felt it was him all along. He had no business being there. He hadn't been there in months," she said.

Before Gee announced the charges, her relatives and her church "family" turned out in droves to tearfully mourn the loss of the girl who'd found a safe haven at First Apostolic Church. Sarah almost never missed Sunday morning services at her beloved church.

Among the mourners were Mark Lunsford, whose daughter Jessica was found dead last month after she was kidnapped from their Citrus County home, and Roy Brown, whose daughter Amanda was murdered in 1997 by convicted child molester Willie Crain.

"People asked me why did she come here, why did she spend her time here," said Matt Fontana, the youth minister at the church. "Because she found love here...Now she's in heaven."

Sherry Cook, who with her husband founded the rural church more than two decades ago, said Sarah rarely missed church services. The girl's life seemed to revolve around the church's youth group, and she had spent her last day at a church function.

Sarah had started coming to the church three years ago on her own. No other members of her family attended with her, church leaders said. So determined was she to make it to church that Sarah would often call two or three families to arrange for a ride; they'd all show up to get her.

Fontana said other members of Sarah's youth group were taking the news of her death hard. "I'm trying to stay composed so they stay composed," he said. "They think only bad things happen to bad people."

Standing at the church's altar and surveying the crowd that included about 20 of Sarah's relatives, Fontana told the mourners that more than anything Sarah had wanted to bring her friends and family to the church she so loved. "It's ironic that not until she goes to be with the Lord that she got her wish," Fontana told the congregation.

If our courts won't put these predators in prison and keep them there the next best thing is for people to know who they are. FoxNews has posted a link to the Megan's Law site that lists all registered sex offenders in the nation. You can search the database by zip code or county. It might surprise you what you'll find.

A search turned up seven offenders living in my zip code and over 250 in my county. If you click on the person's name you'll be given some information about them, including a photo. If you have young children you might wish to see if any of these gentlemen (and a few ladies) are living in your neighborhood.

Not all molestors are repeat offenders, I suppose, but virtually everyone who kills is. Many of them testify to the fact that just as an alcoholic is never cured of his alcoholism, neither are sex offenders, especially those who target children, ever cured of their "addiction". If they're going to be allowed to live among us it's worth knowing who they are.

Just Do It

Bob Novak reports that the Republicans have enough votes in the senate to shut down the Democrats' practice of filibustering conservative judicial nominees:

WASHINGTON -- Republican leaders count only two or three GOP senators who will vote against the efforts to end, by a straight majority vote, filibusters on confirmation of judicial nominations.

Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island will not support this move, and they are likely to be joined by Sen. John McCain of Arizona. That would mean 52 senators would go along with the parliamentary maneuver attempting to end filibusters on judges. Only 50 are needed.

The only Democrat who might possibly join this effort is Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska. But Bush will not press him to break party discipline if his help is unnecessary.

The GOP plans to change the rule in the senate that the Democrats had exploited since 2000 to launch "virtual" filibusters of the president's judicial appointments. The rule actually only applies to legislative bills, but the Democrats extended it to include judicial nominations, which meant that, once a filibuster was declared, sixty senators had to vote for cloture in order to get a floor vote on the nominee. Since the Democrats hold 45 seats it was almost impossible to get the sixty votes necessary to end the filibuster. Thus, by employing this tactic on Bush's judicial nominees the Democrats essentially arrogated to themselves the ability to decide the ideological complexion of all future judges.

McCain's reason for not supporting the rule change, which the Republicans have every right to enact, is that he fears that someday the Republicans will be in the minority and need the filibuster to block excessively liberal Democratic nominees.

The surest way to realize the senator's fear of impending minoritydom, however, is to fail to act like a majority party. If the GOP isn't going to act like they belong in the senate they can't expect the voters to be enthusiastic about keeping them there. The purpose of being in the majority is to use the power it grants to make our nation stronger and more just. Yielding to the will of senate lefties on a matter as important as who sits on the Supreme Court and the federal bench is precisely the wrong way to accomplish those goals.

We urge the Republicans to act like the majority party and to do what it takes to get the president's nominees approved. If the roles were reversed there can be no doubt that the Democrats would use every watt of their political power to appoint judges who possess the proper ideological predilections. The Republicans have the constitutional authority to change the rule and they have a duty to future generations to do so. Just do it.

Andrea Dworkin, 1946-2005

Andrea Dworkin passed away on April 9th after an unspecified illness, according to this summary of the driving passion of her life, rescuing women from the depredations of men and the bondage of marriage:

On April 9 the National Organization for Women (NOW) paid tribute to its longtime member, the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who had died earlier that day at the age of 58. Dworkin authored the 1974 book Woman Hating, a polemic whose objective, she explained, was "to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family, [and] in its most hideous form, the national state." The New York Times quoted her saying the following: "One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man"; "Marriage . . . is a legal license to rape"; "The hurting of women is . . . basic to the sexual pleasure of men."

Possibly she is now in a place where she is free from masculine oppression and safe from the dreaded effects of testosterone. Perhaps she is at peace.

A more sympathetic obituary of Dworkin can be found here.

Captured by the Bamboozle

Our Daily Philosophical Quotation service recently forwarded this one from The Fine Art of Baloney Detection by astronomer Carl Sagan:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge - even to ourselves - that we've been so credulous.

If anyone is qualified to speak on bamboozling an audience it is the author of the astonishingly hubristic claim that "the universe is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be." Why Sagan ever thought that a scientist, speaking as a scientist, should make such a blatantly unscientific assertion he never to our knowledge said. His insistence that reality consists, and has always consisted, solely of matter and energy has the ring of a religious affirmation to it, and it is fair to suppose that Sagan believed it, not on the basis of evidence, but because he wanted it to be true. He was a metaphysical naturalist, an outspoken atheist, who promoted his worldview with unrestrained gusto and who reveled in his vision of a world purged of the supernatural.

He's right, though, that people reach a point in their lives when they're captured by the bamboozle. We each acquire so much psychological inertia in our believings, we invest so heavily of ourselves in our convictions, that we ultimately reach a point of no return after which it is nearly impossible for us to change our minds. We become so enamored of an idea, so comfortable with it, that we don't want it not to be true. Indeed, we sometimes cannot conceive of it not being true. At this stage we have probably already passed the point where it became too painful to acknowledge that we've been taken in.

In the passage quoted above, Sagan probably has in mind, inter alia, religious believers, but one wonders if he could not as easily be talking about himself. Was Carl Sagan himself beguiled, captured, by a naturalistic account of reality that is inherently fraudulent? As an astronomer, he of all people should have been aware of the burgeoning body of evidence being compiled by his colleagues which indicated that the universe is almost unbelievably fine-tuned. He must have known that many scientists in his field were remarking with awe upon the numerous signs of intentionality and foresight that filled the cosmos. There are, it turns out, literally hundreds of facts about the universe discovered in the last several decades which, had they been otherwise than they are by nearly infinitesimally small amounts, the universe either would not have existed at all or it would have been utterly unsuited for living things.

Of course, astonishing precision and enormously high improbabilities are not conclusive proofs that naturalism is a mistake, but it certainly must count as evidence that should provoke doubt in the mind of an honest skeptic. Those who doubt, however, don't make the sort of claim quoted above, a claim which requires a level of dogmatic certainty found only in the staunchest of true believers. Sagan didn't seem to have any doubts whatsoever that man is a purely material being in a purely material universe which is ontologically solitary and unique. If he did have doubts, they were evidently too painful for him to acknowledge. It probably would have dismayed him beyond endurance to think that he might have been so incredibly credulous.

Carl Sagan died in 1996 at the age of 62. The irony is that if he was wrong, perhaps he's now realized it. If he was right, though, he'll never have had the satisfaction of knowing it.

The Center For Naturalism, Pt. II

On April 10th we posted commentary on claims the Center For Naturalism (CFN) present on their web site where they seek to clarify and promote the fundamental tenets of naturalism and to tease out their implications for modern man.

CFN embraces a deterministic view of human volition, a view that all of our behavior is caused by our strongest motives, and that free will is an illusion. They state, for instance, that:

Since on a naturalistic understanding, persons are not self-made, but owe their successes and failures to the conditions into which they were born and developed, major social and economic inequalities cannot be justified on the basis that individuals strongly deserve their status.

Nor, however, can these inequalities be condemned. On the naturalist view, they are neither right nor wrong. They just are. Social inequalities, like everything else, are simply the product of the conditions in which society has emerged.

But if it is true that all our choices are determined, if indeed all of our successes and failures are the result of factors over which we have no real control, why does CFN assert the following:

Because naturalism shows our deep connection to the world, lessening ego-driven acquisitiveness and self-preoccupation, it prompts concern for others and for those who will succeed us on the planet.

Naturalists like those at (CFN) assume that everyone will agree with them that acquisitiveness and self-preoccupation are bad, and that concern for others is good. Yet why, if naturalism is true, should anyone assign value to these things at all? Concern for others, especially those who haven't been born yet, is neither good nor bad. In a Godless universe it's simply a personal preference, an expression of one's taste. CFN suggests that there is some sort of moral meaning in their claim that naturalism prompts concern for others, but in a world without God there is no moral meaning. There's no morality at all. Neither good nor evil have any existence.

They also write that:

Seeing our deep connection to nature in every respect can supply the basis for a mature, fulfilling, and cognitively consistent quest for personal growth and meaning.

The problem here is that if death is the end of all personal existence there really can be no ultimate meaning in our lives. On the assumption of atheism, meaning is at best ephemeral and at worst illusory. Everything man does is doomed to perish, all that he seeks to build are just so many sand castles at the edge of the surf, fated to be washed away at the next tide. We're born, we suffer, and we're annihilated. It's all pointless. There's no more meaning in our individual lives than there is in the life of a solitary fly, nor can there be unless physical death is not really the end of our existence.

Naturalism as a guiding philosophy can help create a better world by illuminating more precisely the conditions under which individuals and societies flourish.

Naturalism does not have the sort of record that engenders confidence in its claims to possess the key to human flourishing. Almost all of what is great in Western culture - its music, art, and much of its literature; its charitable and educational institutions; its hospitals and orphanages; its democratic forms of government; its concern for the oppressed and for human rights; even the work of its seminal scientists, was inspired directly or indirectly by Christian theism.

What cultural achievements, on the other hand, have been specifically contributed by atheistic men and women inspired by their naturalistic worldview? What cultural achievements can atheism point to as unambiguous contributions to "human flourishing"? Totalitarian communism? Darwinian survival of the fittest? Post-modern nihilism? The drug culture of the sixties? Gangster rap and punk rock? The art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano?

The unfortunate fact is that naturalism, so far from assisting human flourishing, actually stifles it. Its fruits are the Gulag, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Tiananmen Square, and the Holocaust. What's more, such fruits are inevitable when man is reduced to a mere flesh and bone machine with no soul nor anything about him that participates in the divine. The naturalist worldview affords meager support for the concept of human dignity and thus no solid basis for human rights. Rights, without transcendent sanction, are arbitrary and transient. They do not inhere in persons, they are mere words on paper which endure only so long as it pleases those who have the power to rescind them.

To paraphrase George Orwell, if you wish to picture the future in a world in thrall to naturalistic materialism imagine a boot smashing a human face, forever.

Gay Ordination in the ELCA

The Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), in their Chicago Conference last week, developed and forwarded three resolutions to the ELCA Churchwide Assembly which convenes this August.

The third of the three resolutions urges that the Church's policy prohibiting the ordination of openly homosexual men and women be waived. The recommendation has to be accepted by two thirds of the voting members at the Churchwide Assembly in order to become church policy.

It's hard to say how the assembly will vote. The voting members who will attend the Assembly are often people who seek appointment because they are politically active, and the politically active, for better or worse, tend to be liberal, and liberals in the church, as elsewhere, tend to favor proposals such as these.

One thing of which I feel somewhat sure is that the vast majority of Lutherans would prefer to keep the policy on gays in the clergy the way it has been since the 16th century. Most Lutherans are pretty conservative folks and they have a hard time reconciling the acceptance of openly gay pastors living in unmarried sexual relationships with what they read in their Bibles about homosexuality.

If the Assembly does choose to accept the Council's recommendation two things will probably happen. The severe shortfall of ordained ministers in the ELCA will be temporarily mitigated by an influx of homosexual applicants, and, secondly, the ongoing decline in churchwide membership will accelerate as many Lutherans will simply take their families to the more conservative and traditional non-denominational church down the street.

The leadership of the ELCA surely understands this, but for reasons of political expediency they prefer not to take a firm stand against the ordination of gays. Indeed, almost everyone whose desk the issue crosses recommends that the prohibition against gay ordination be relaxed. Perhaps they each hope that the buck can be passed to the Churchwide Assembly where the whole matter will be tabled for a couple more years.

If so, they're playing a dangerous game. They have the accelerator pressed to the floor and the car is heading for the cliff. We'll see in August how well the brakes work.

Time's Top 100

Time magazine's list of the world's most influential leaders is out and it includes ... Barack Obama, a freshman senator who has been in the senate now for all of three months. It also includes Abu al-Zarqawi, Mahmoud Abbas, and Hugo Chavez but oddly omits Tony Blair, Ariel Sharon, and Pope John Paul II (who, in fairness, may have been scratched from the list after his death). In other words, it's a rather strange register of the world's most influential leaders.

They have other categories with similar inventories which are equally as peculiar. For example their roster of artists and entertainers consists of all Hollywood types (as near as I can tell) plus Ann Coulter. Why is Ann Coulter placed in this list? If a political commentator does belong here (Jon Stewart is mentioned) why are Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, who are at least as influential as anyone else Time mentions, not included?

The Heroes and Icons selection includes Nelson Mandella, Melissa Ethridge, and LeBron James, but not Billy Graham or Tommy Franks, nor are any other American service men or women mentioned even though some of them are in line for Congressional Medals of Honor.

The group of influential Scientists and Thinkers has Rick Warren (!?) and Peter Singer but omits William Dembski, Michael Behe, and Alvin Plantinga, certainly three of the most influential thinkers of the last twenty years, whether one agrees with them or not.

Nor do we know how Time could have overlooked the Swift Boat Vets if they were really serious about enumerating the most influential people of 2004. If they could place Rick Warren (who certainly deserves to be somewhere in the top 100) in with scientists and thinkers they could surely have found a home somewhere for the Swift Vets and Paul O'Neill.

If readers would like to suggest nominations for significant omissions or dubious inclusions in Time's list please feel free to forward them to us via our Feedback forum.

Why Home-Schooling is So Popular

This is a story of astonishingly brutal and disgusting behavior by students and incredibly bad judgment by administrators in a school in Columbus, Ohio:

A 16-year-old disabled girl was punched in the face and forced to engage in videotaped sexual acts with several boys in a high school auditorium as dozens of students watched, according to witnesses.

Authorities are investigating and no charges have been filed in the alleged attack last month at Mifflin High School. Four boys suspected of involvement were sent home and have not returned to class.

Also, the principal, Regina Crenshaw, was suspended and will be fired for not calling police, school officials said. And three assistant principals were suspended and will be reassigned to other schools.

The girl was forced to perform oral sex on at least two boys, according to statements from school officials, obtained by The Columbus Dispatch.

Part of the alleged assault was videotaped by a student who had a camera for a school project.

School officials found the girl bleeding from the mouth. An assistant principal cautioned the girl's father against calling 911 to avoid media attention, the statements said. The girl's father called police anyway.

Her father said the girl is developmentally disabled. A special education teacher said the teen has a severe speech impediment.

If we read between the lines, the administrators were just going to let this episode slide by. A young handicapped girl is beaten and coerced into sex by a group of boys while dozens of students look on, filming the event, and the administrators urged the father not to call the police because it would make the school look bad. We hope the father presses charges against his daughter's assailants and sues the school's principal for negligence, malpractice, and fraud - the latter for misrepresenting herself as a professional school administrator.

We wonder what the school district will do with these students - not just the ones who did it, but also the ones who watched and did nothing to stop it. Will the perpetrators receive the usual three day suspension and return to the hallways to the cheers of their buddies as though they were heroes, or will the district show more spine than Ms Crenshaw displayed and permanently expel the thugs and administer serious punishments to their cheerleaders?

We also wonder what the parents of the students involved in the assault, and of those who enjoyed the spectacle, will do with their children. Sadly, we would not be surprised if many of them do nothing.

Thank goodness the school board is firing the principal. We suspect that an assistant principal or two should be cashiered as well.

And public school educators wonder why so many parents want to home-school their children. Would any sane parent want his or her child to be attending this school, or any of the hundreds, maybe thousands, like it across the nation?

Chrenkoff's Latest

Arthur Chrenkoff's latest installment of Good News from Iraq is up. It's a mine of information about what is going on in Iraq and it's well worth a perusal.

Let's Let Everybody Vote

New York City presents us with more evidence that liberals in general, and Democrats in particular, have very little confidence in their ability to persuade citizens through the force of their ideas. They're now seeking to win elections by extending the franchise to non-citizens:

Left-wing advocates in New York have convinced a City Council member to put forward a bill that would legalize non-citizen voting in America's largest city.

Council Member William Perkins of Manhattan has drafted a bill that would allow any immigrant over the age of 18 who has been a resident of New York City for more than six months the right to vote in all local elections.

Why is it, we have to ask, that the left seeks to broaden the franchise to include convicted felons and now non-citizens? Is it because they realize that the only people they can persuade to vote for them are crooks, thugs, and those who can't speak English? Is it because they know that these people can be bribed with promises of access to the public purse? Is it because the left is so desperate for power that they don't care who votes as long as they're returned to office? Is it all of these?

Actually, maybe there's merit to extending the franchise to whoever shows up at the polls. Maybe we should allow teenagers to help elect our government. After all, they already vote for student council and homecoming queen, why not school board and county commissioners?

And how about letting al Qaida vote. Maybe if they had a say in how things were run here they wouldn't feel the need to resort to violence.

Somebody please relay this suggestion to the New York City Council.

The Threat to Marriage

Advocates of gay marriage often argue that it is not gays wanting to marry that jeopardizes the institution of marriage, rather it is the high divorce rate among heterosexuals that poses the real threat.

Dennis Prager deconstructs this argument and leaves it lying in tatters. He gives four reasons why the argument fails, and although in our view any one of them by itself is decisive, the third one is perhaps the most interesting. Prager writes:

A third flaw in the argument is that it presupposes that every divorce constitutes a failure of a couple's marriage. Sometimes this is true; sometimes it is not. I know a couple married for 30 years who made a beautiful home for their three now-married children. The couple divorced last year because they had both concluded that they had drifted too far apart to continue living together in any meaningful way (one aspect of the drift was one partner's increasing devotion to religion and the other's decreasing interest in it).

Who has the hubris to call their marriage a failure? Their children surely don't think their parents' marriage was a failure. It produced three wonderful married adults, and it provided them a beautiful and loving home in which to grow up. One can only wish all marriages so "failed."

It is simplistic to maintain that the one criterion of success or failure in marriage is permanence. There are marriages that provided years of comfort to a couple and a fine home to their children that eventually end; and there are permanent marriages that have provided neither comfort to the couple nor a loving environment for their children. If the end of something renders it a failure, every one of our lives is a failure, since they all come to an end.

Read the whole column. It's very provocative and well-reasoned.

Antony Flew's Conversion

A couple of months ago philosopher Antony Flew made news when it came out in the press that he was abandoning his ardent commitment to atheism and accepting the idea that the universe was designed by an intelligent agent. Now Christianity Today has an article by James A. Beverley, professor of Christian apologetics at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, on Flew's very significant philosophical shift. The article will be extremely interesting to anyone who has read and/or been influenced by Flew and should be read in its entirety. Here are a few excerpts:

Flew has been rethinking the arguments for a Designer for several years. When I saw him in London in the spring of 2003, he told me he was still an atheist but was impressed by Intelligent Design theorists. By early 2004 he had made the move to deism.

Flew also cites the influence of Gerald Schroeder, an Israeli physicist, and Roy Abraham Varghese, author of The Wonder of the World and an Eastern Rite Catholic. Flew appeared with both scientists at a New York symposium last May where he acknowledged his changed conviction about the necessity for a Creator. In the broader picture, both Varghese and Schroeder, author of The Hidden Face of God, argue from the fine-tuning of the universe that it is impossible to explain the origin of life without God. This forms the substance of what led Flew to move away from Darwinian naturalism.

I asked Flew more explicitly about the impact of these and other scholars. "Who amazes you the most of the defenders of Christian theism?"

He replied, "I would have to put Alvin Plantinga pretty high," and he also complimented (Terry) Miethe, (J.P.) Moreland, and (William Lane) Craig for their philosophical skills. He regards Richard Swinburne, the Oxford philosophy of religion professor, as the leading figure in the United Kingdom. "There is really no competition to him." He said that (Gary) Habermas has made "the most impressive case for Christian theism on the basis of New Testament writings."

These Christian philosophers have uniform respect for Flew as a person and as a thinker. Craig spoke of him as "an enduring figure in positivistic philosophy" and was "rather surprised by his giving up his atheistic views." He, Miethe, and Habermas have found Flew to be a perfect gentleman both in public debate and private conversations. Swinburne says Flew has always been a tough thinker, though less dogmatic as the years went by. Plantinga, the founder of the Society of Christian Philosophers, said that Flew's change is "a tribute to his open-mindedness as well as an indication of the strength of current broadly scientific arguments against atheism."

There's much more at the link on the reasons for Flew's reluctance to embrace Christianity despite his very positive attitudes toward the person of Christ.

Needless to say, the secularists are beside themselves with angst. If a thinker of Flew's stature can abandon the dogmas of materialism then how do they prevent a hemorrhage of defections? If Antony Flew has become persuaded by the evidence that the universe and life are designed, it makes it that much more difficult to defeat the accursed Intelligent Design advocates who want to expose our children to the same arguments that persuaded Flew. How, they're no doubt asking themselves, will kids remain good Darwinian materialists once they've heard the arguments against it?