Jeanne Kirkpatrick (1926-2006)

Former U.N. ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick passed away Thursday at 80 years of age. Throughout her professional life she set an example of intellectual rigor and ideological strength that probably did as much, or more, for the image of women in positions of statecraft as did anything accomplished by any other woman in the twentieth century with the exception of Margaret Thatcher. Even so, she was largely ignored by most mainstream feminist groups because she was too conservative to catch their notice or merit their praise.

There is an obit of Ms Kirkpatrick here and much comment about her life and service to her country at The Corner.

Why Parents Home School

And public school educators wonder why parents would ever want to pay the extra tuition to send their kids to private schools, or invest the enormous effort it takes to home school their kids. Why knock yourself out, they wonder, when there are professionally trained educators waiting and eager to teach your children the really important things.

As long as there are stories like this, though, public schools will continue to lose the esteem of most Americans:

Sixth-graders at a Queens school were getting quite an education - in homosexuality, French kissing and cursing - thanks to three books widely available in classroom libraries. But after numerous complaints from parents at Public School 150 in Sunnyside, the books - a profanity-laced poetry book, short stories about homosexuality and a novel called "First French Kiss" - were pulled from the shelves last week.

Several parents learned of the racy books after overhearing their kids snickering about the sexual themes. The poem "I Hate School" in a book called "You Hear Me?" includes the rhyme, "F--- this s---, up the a--. I don't think I'll ever pass."

Another poem compares eating an orange to having sex, while several passages repeatedly use vulgar slang for genitalia. And the book "Am I Blue?" is an anthology of stories about gay teenagers that parents found too adult-themed for 11- and 12-year-olds. Parent Gladys Martinez wrote a letter to her son's teacher after hearing him talk about "First French Kiss," which chronicles a teen's bumbling first makeout session in a closet.

"I mean, he shouldn't be sheltered from the world, but if he's going to learn that stuff, it shouldn't be at school," Martinez said.

"You Hear Me?" was suggested for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders by the Columbia University Teachers College's Reading and Writing Project because it is the only anthology with poems written by minority teenagers, said Lucy Calkins, its founding director.

"It's a tricky balance to walk so we are putting books in their hands that they'll want to read," said Calkins, who had not seen the language in the book.

A tricky balance? The school officials can't find books that children will want to read unless they're laced with vulgarity? What does that say about the homes these kids come from? What does it say about the state of minority teenagers that the only poetry they can write is filled with vulgarity? What does it say about the school officials' familiarity with childrens' literature? What does it say about those who publish this stuff for sixth graders?

No answers educators can give to these questions are going to do much to instill confidence in their judgment on the part of parents who really care about the environment schools are creating for their children.

Thanks to Michelle for the tip.

The Iraq Surrender Group

According to those who've read the document in its entirety, the Iraqi Study Group's report never once mentions the possibility of an American victory in Iraq. It seems as if the report is entirely about how we can skeedaddle out of Iraq with a minimum loss of honor and dignity.

Lisa Benson succinctly states her opinion of James Baker, Lee Hamilton and the rest of the committee and their report in the following fashion:

Am I mistaken or am I correct that there is not one person on the committee who is actually an expert on the military, Iraq, Islam, or the Middle East? One member of the committee was Vernon Jordan whose major claim to expertise is that he's Bill Clinton's golfing buddy. There was also Sandra Day O'Connor, who recently retired from the cocoon of the Supreme Court, Leon Panetta was Pres. Clinton's chief of staff, and most of the rest of them were politicians. Only William Perry, a former CIA chief, Lawrence Eagleberger and James Baker, former secretaries of state, served in any capacity which remotely qualifies them to make recommendations that have military and strategic implications. They probably could have appointed five people out of the phone book who would have been as qualified for the task as most of the members of this committee.

Moreover, when the committee went to Iraq to gather data for their recommendations they reportedly never wandered outside Baghdad's Green Zone. It certainly causes us to wonder how they could get a feel for what's going on in the country without having actually visited the country. If all they were going to do was hide out in their hotel they could have just stayed in Washington and interviewed the bigwigs in Baghdad by conference call.

The People Don't Want It

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson demands that we forget about a border fence, insisting that the people don't want it. But what "people" is he talking about? Certainly not the American people. It turns out that he's apparently referring to the wishes of the Mexicans who live along the border and make their living off the trade brought their way by those preparing to cross into the United States:

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson says a fence at the Mexican border authorized by Congress this fall "gets in the way" of U.S.-Mexico relations, and he wants the new Democratic Congress to reverse the legislation.

"The fence is very unpopular on the border in Texas and New Mexico, in Chihuahua," Richardson, a Democrat, said after meeting Wednesday with leaders from the Mexican state of Chihuahua. "So one of the most significant and constructive acts the U.S. Congress should take is to get rid of it."

Richardson said he will call on Congress not to build the fence during an address Thursday. He also will press lawmakers to approve a bill that secures the border and provides a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Gov. Richardson, who is planning on a run for the presidency, believes that the way to win the office is to appease the Mexicans who demand the right to dump their poor and oppressed in our lap and leave us to support them. Viewpoint prognosticates that Richardson's candidacy has just gotten terminally ill and will soon wind up looking like that unfortunate Russian spy who irritated Vladimir Putin.

Jack Cafferty at CNN pretty much takes Richardson apart one limb at a time on Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room.

Pearl Harbor Day, 2006

Today is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 65 years ago. It's fitting that on this day we stop to reflect on the perils we face in today's world. I've been reading Mark Steyn's oustanding book on this very subject titled America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Steyn has the unusual gift of being able to amuse the reader whilst informing him that calamity is on his doorstep, and indeed it seems to be. The following gloomy assessment is not necessarily Steyn's, but it was inspired by what he reveals in his book about the exploding growth of the Muslim population around the world and the diminshing populations of Europeans.

We are, as some have observed, in the same situation as was Europe in 1938. In the late thirties Hitler was testing Europe's resolve and finding their will agreeably weak he decided it was propitious to seize as much of their land as he could. Europe's lassitude was their undoing. War was to them such a distasteful prospect that they convinced themselves that it really was not in the offing, that Hitler was not really the threat to them that people like Winston Churchill were telling them he was. They deluded themselves into a sense of false security just as we're doing today.

The modern threat is not German Naziism, rather it is Muslim fascism. The Islamic world has been waiting for 500 years for their chance to destroy the Jewish and Christian worlds so that they can establish Islam and Sharia law everywhere across the globe. They believe that the fullness of time has come and that we are living on the cusp of a new Islamic age when all will worship Allah, bow to the imams and revere the Koran.Yet despite the lateness of the hour, Europe and much of the U.S. acts as if there really were no Panzer divisions poised to strike across the Rhine, no Japanese fleet poised to launch their aircraft at Pearl Harbor.

The Islamo-fascists are daily probing our will, testing our resolve, searching out our weaknesses. The recent bizarre behavior of the six imams who were removed from the USAir jet is just a recent example of the constant testing to which they are subjecting our security. The pressure is building, especially in Europe, and large tracts of that continent have displayed a deep desire to appease and a total unwillingness to resist. Spain, for example, capitulated to the dictates of the jihadis after the Madrid train bombings. They elected just two days after the carnage a socialist government that had campaigned on the promise to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. Once in office they promptly withdrew their troops, and sent the Muslim world the message that they had had enough and would not offer any impediment to the spread of the Muslim caliphate when the time came.

And the time is coming. Right now the Muslim world is biding its time waiting patiently for several factors to coalesce. They know that soon they will have achieved ireversable demographic superiority in Europe which will give them political power to dictate European foreign policy. They also know that soon some of them will have nuclear weapons which will intimidate nations which might otherwise be inclined to resist them. And they know that soon George Bush will be either weakened by his political enemies or, by 2008, out of office, and the last man with the spine and strength to stand in their way will be gone.

As these three factors conflate over the next two years the Islamic juggernaut will grow unstoppable. There will either be war or bitter and humiliating surrender to these primitives everywhere across the globe. Time is on their side. Psychological certainty that they are doing the will of Allah works to their advantage, and the West is either oblivious to the danger or lacking the will to do what's necessary to forestall it. Most of Europe, including Russia, will fall into their hands with scarcely a whimper. Israel will face extermination. The U.S. will be isolated, alone, confronted not only by the threat of total war with the Islamic world but also by threats from China and North Korea. We will be unable, short of launching a nuclear war, to halt the Islamic annihilation of western civilization in its cradle.

Perhaps it's thought that I overstate the danger to the lives and well-being of our children posed by the Muslim world. Perhaps, but I can think of no better way for anyone who thinks so to spend whatever spare time one might have over the coming holidays than by reading America Alone. It may be too late to stop the Muslim tsunami about to inundate Europe, but if it can be stopped it will only be because people, unlike the Europeans in 1938, see clearly the gathering storm.

The ISG Report

The long anticipated report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) is in and with the exception of the very strange recommendation to bring Iran and Syria into negotiations for implementing stability in Iraq, there doesn't seem to be much that they recommend Bush do that his administration isn't already doing.

The members of the ISG urge that we accelerate the training of Iraqi military and police so that they can take over more of their own security but by all reports such training is already proceeding as quickly as it can.

They call for a withdrawal of combat troops by 2008 if conditions permit. Does anyone seriously think that the Bush administration is not anxious to get combat troops out of Iraq as soon as conditions permit? If the ISG really means to recommend that troops stay as long as the situation there requires then they're simply affirming Bush's policy. If they're saying that we should leave in 2008 whether Iraq is stable or not then they're calling for abject surrender. Either way the recommendation is pointless.

They also appear to regard Israel as a serious impediment to peace in the region, and, although they urge that all of Iraq's neighbors be involved in working out a peaceful solution in Iraq, they pointedly exclude Israel. It seems a bit perverse to urge that Iran and Syria, who are the cause of most of the problems in the Middle East, be included in the process but Israel be shunned.

There are 79 recommendations all told and many of them are doubtless good ideas, but they're not original ideas. For the most part, where the ISG makes a worthwhile recommendation they recommend what the administration is already doing. Where the recommendations are not good, as in treating Iran and Syria as if they were anything but thugs, criminals and assassins, they should be ignored.

Powerline says that the report is about as bad as advertised. Ed Morissey at Captain's Quarters has some excellent analysis as well.

Worst Mistake in History

Al Gore has to be one of the most pompous windbags on today's political scene. On the Today show this morning he opined that the Iraq war was "the worst strategic mistake in the entire history of the United States".

A question comes to mind: How does Mr. Gore know that the Iraq war is not going to result in the long run in a much less dangerous government in Iraq replacing the tyranny of Saddam Hussein? He doesn't, of course. But even if Iraq does turn out badly, to call this the worst strategic mistake in our history is just false. Even if we cut and run and leave the job unfinished it won't be as big a strategic blunder as was the Vietnam war which cost us over 50,000 lives and won us nothing. It may not even be as big a mistake as JFK's failure to support the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Gore was then asked if he would pull U.S. troops out of Iraq even it was seen as a defeat for the U.S., but he dodged the question. His limp response was that were he president, he would have "the full flow of information" and he would be able to test these ideas.

What does that mean other than that Mr. Gore lacks the courage to follow his convictions to their logical conclusions?

It's easy to take shots when you don't have the responsibility of actually making crucial decisions. Gore is a Monday morning quarterback who thinks he should be in the White House, and who insists on reminding us almost every time he speaks why we should be thankful that he's not.

Hubble Space Photos

One of yesterday's posts featured a photo of deep space taken by the Hubble Space telescope. A friend passes along this link to the entire gallery of photos taken by Hubble. The pictures are breathtakingly beautiful and majestic.

Voting Democrat in '08

This will cause some readers to think I'm either delirious or that I'm joking, but actually I'm neither. Well, at least I'm not joking. If the highly improbable, virtually impossible, happens and the Democrats nominate a fairly conservative candidate for the presidency in 2008 I will probably vote for him (her) even if the Republican candidate is equally as conservative. Here's why:

No matter how conservative a Republican president is, the left in this country, in the media and in the Democrat party, make it almost impossible for him to accomplish much good. Of the most important issues facing us today - the war in Iraq, the war on terror, the economy, immigration, social security reform and federal judgeships - Democrats are in a position to block every initiative a Republican president advances. And they will, just as they have in the past.

So why vote for a Democrat candidate? Because if a conservative (don't ask me who that could possibly be) were nominated by the Democrat party, both the media and congress would be much less hostile to his initiatives because they wouldn't see battling them as a partisan duty, and Republicans would, for the good of the country, be cooperative. In other words, a Democrat conservative in the White House could advance the same policies as a George Bush on social security reform, employ the same measures on the war on terror, wage the same war on the insurgents in Iraq, nominate a John Roberts to the Supreme Court, and keep the Bush tax cuts, and he would doubtless meet with little serious opposition from the establishment left (The Michael Moore left is a different matter, but without the MSM and congress they wouldn't be much of a factor).

Just as no one but a hardline anti-communist like Richard Nixon could achieve a rapprochement with communist China, so, too, it will probably take a Democrat president to achieve social security and immigration reform since congressional Democrats will not allow a Republican to solve these problems. Moreover, no Republican conservative would be likely to do much on another issue important to me personally - land use, conservation and preservation - but a Democrat might.

It may be, then, that our best hope to get anything worth doing accomplished in the next ten years is for the Democrats to pull a conservative rabbit out of the hat for '08. Unfortunately, however, that's about as likely as George Bush winning the Most Admired Man in Blue State America award. Since Zell Miller retired there just aren't any conservatives of prominence left in that party.

The Heavens Declare

From time to time it's been mentioned at this space that the universe is extraordinarily fine-tuned for life and that this fine calibration points to intention and purpose in its design. There are numerous examples of this almost unbelievable precision and whole books have been written on the topic. See, for instance, Hugh Ross' The Creator and the Cosmos for an easy to understand introduction.

In this post I'd like to try to convey a sense of the awe that scientists who study the cosmos (cosmologists) feel when they work with some of these delicately balanced parameters. Here's a description of just one of dozens that could be highlighted. It's called the cosmic expansion rate.

The universe since the Big Bang has been expanding outward at a particular rate of speed. If it were to have expanded too rapidly, matter would spread out so uniformly that not enough would clump together and galaxies and stars would never form. If it expanded too slowly, the universe would collapse back onto itself in a huge lump and no life would ever emerge. So the rate of expansion has to be just right in order for there to be a universe which could sustain higher life forms like ourselves.

How precise does this expansion rate have to be? The astonishing thing is that the rate is calibrated so delicately that were it to deviate from its actual value by more than one part in 10[55] - that's a one with 55 zeroes after it - no universe suitable for life would exist.

To give you an idea of how breathtakingly exact the balance is between a universe which can sustain life and one which cannot, imagine seeing a dime held against the night sky from a distance of 75 feet. The space covered by the dime at that distance would look like this if viewed through a very powerful telescope:

Each of those specks is a single discrete galaxy containing billions of stars. The orangeish one at the center is similar to our Milky Way. The whole sky is 27 million times the size of this patch and would thus contain 27 million times this number of galaxies, or about 27 billion galaxies.

These galaxies are enormously huge collections of stars. From one edge of our Milky Way to the opposite edge is 100,000 light years (one light year is 6 trillion miles). If we assumed that all the galaxies were on average similar in size to our own, and that they were strung end to end across space, they would extend for roughly 1.6 x 10[27] miles or about 2.6 x 10[34] millimeters.

A dime is about a millimeter thick. Suppose we imagine a stack of dimes stretching all the way across this vast expanse. Suppose our stack continued across another thousand billion, billion universes full of galaxies like our own strung end to end. If so, there would be about 10[55] coins in the stack. Imagine further that each coin represents a possible value of the expansion rate and that a needle points to the single dime in this unimaginably long skein that represents the value the rate must have in order for any universe to be such as to sustain life.

The rate of expansion is so fine that if the needle deviated from this coin by a only a single dime our universe would have long ago either expanded out of control or collapsed back upon itself. And this example of cosmic fine-tuning is just one of dozens of constants, parameters, and properties that have to be set with similar precision in order for the universe to be compatible with living things.

This sort of phenomenal exactitude is almost impossible to plausibly account for apart from an intelligence which sets the values deliberately and intentionally. To think that nature could have come up with such precision solely by chance, not just for one value but for dozens, requires an extraordinary faith in the power of chance.

Some scientists, reluctant to embrace the implications of the discovery of these finely calibrated values, have resorted to an explanation that posits, without any supporting evidence, the existence of a multiverse, i.e. a near infinite number of universes among which are worlds comprised of all possible values for these dozens of parameters. If there are a near infinite number of worlds then there must be one, it is reasoned, whose constants and forces have the values ours does.

While a multiverse is theoretically possible, there's no evidence for it. It is invoked simply to enable us to escape the conclusion that our cosmos is intentionally designed. The suggestion of a multiverse defies the law of parsimony that tells us that the simplest explantion of the facts is the preferable explanation. It also violates the principle that the accepted theory should be one for which there is at least some evidence rather than one for which there is none.

We have plenty of evidence, of course, that precision and fine-tuning can result from the actions of intelligent agents. But we have no evidence whatsoever either that fine-tuning on this scale of precision can result from sheer chance or that there are any universes out there besides our own.

Much More Civilized

"The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans," says 34-year-old actress Gwyneth Paltrow. I guess Ms Paltrow has never attended an English soccer game.

The Marketplace of Ideas

Why do leftists in our universities hold the concept of free and unfettered exchange of ideas in such low esteem? That they do is evidently the case given the fact that conservative speakers are attacked, shouted down, or in one way or another routinely prevented from speaking by the champions of tolerance and diversity on many of our major campuses.

It's good to remember when we hear of yet another of these abridgements of the spirit of classical liberalism that the people who do this sort of thing generally do so because their own case is so flaccid that they dare not present it to an unsympathetic audience. Their tactics are an admission of intellectual weakness. They realize that the only way their views can prevail is if they can succeed in preventing the other side from being heard.

Here are details of the latest instance of this example of democracy in action at Michigan State University.

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Democrats Down on Defense

Pajamas Media has a good primer on the state of missile defense and the Democrats' plans to eliminate it. It may seem astonishing that in an age when nations ruled by people who are calling for a nuclear holocaust against Israel and the U.S. and who are assiduously seeking the means to carry out that threat, the Democrats are striving just as hard to make it impossible for us to defend ourselves against nuclear missiles should they ever be launched against us.

I wonder how many people who voted for a Democrat in the last election knew that the leadership of this party has as its goal the gutting of the program to develop a protective shield against incoming nuclear missiles.

Why worry about nukes, after all, when there are so many more pressing issues demanding our attention and resources? To listen to the Democrats and their allies in the MSM, for example, we might conclude that we should be much more concerned that the average temperature of the earth has gone up one degree over the last 100 years than we should be concerned by the prospect that psychopaths like Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Amadinejad will soon have nuclear weapons at their disposal.

Check out the story at PM. It's very good.

Kauffman's Emergentism (Pt. II)

The other day we took a look at the thinking of a scientist named Stuart Kauffman who believes the God of classical theism does not exist and who seeks to substitute in His place a universe which somehow (It's not clear exactly how) gives rise to meaning, value, consciousness, etc. Kauffman writes:

Meaning and value have a scientific base. And ethics? At a recent meeting on science and religion on Star Island, we heard more than one lecture on animal emotions and the sense of fairness in chimpanzees. Group selection, we were told, is now making its way into evolutionary biology. With it, natural selection can get its grip on behaviors that are advantageous to the group, like fairness, so it emerges. Far from evolution being anathema to ethics, evolution is the first source of human morality. But not the last, for we can argue whether we should want what we want.

As we said last week, whether fairness "emerges" among Homo sapiens or not is pretty much irrelevant. In order for there to be morality what has to emerge is an obligation to be fair. There can, however, be no obligation unless someone imposes it upon us or we arbitrarily impose it upon ourselves. To suggest that natural selection or evolution can somehow impose moral obligations is simply risible.

Shall we use the God word? It is our choice. Mine is a tentative "yes". I want God to mean the vast ceaseless creativity of the only universe we know of, ours. What do we gain by using the God word? I suspect a great deal, for the word carries with it awe and reverence. If we can transfer that awe and reverence, not to the transcendental Abrahamic God of my Israelite tribe long ago, but to the stunning reality that confronts us, we will grant permission for a renewed spirituality, and awe, reverence and responsibility for all that lives, for the planet.

In other words, Kauffman believes that we need to pretend that the universe is sentient because otherwise it doesn't inspire us quite enough. I think it's true that beauty and grandeur are far more inspiring when we think them to be deliberate products of artistic and mathematical genius than if we think them to be purely accidental, but to suggest that we think of the universe as God in order to somehow fool ourselves into thinking that its beauty is intentional seems a bit perverse. If it's all an accident, a freakish fluke, then let's just say so and resign ourselves to live with the existential consequences.

Does one know that such a transformation of human sensibilities will happen? Of course not. But the sense of justice matured in the Abrahamic tradition from 10 eyes for an eye, to an eye for an eye, to love thine enemy as thyself. Then can a heightened consciousness bring about a global ethic? I believe so. I believe, I hope correctly, that what I have sketched above is true, points to a new vision of our co-creating reality, that it invites precisely an enhancement of our sense of spirituality, reverence, wonder, and responsibility, and can form the basis of a trans-national mythic structure for an emerging global civilization.

Kauffman seems to ignore the fact that "love thine enemy" arises out of a theistic religious milieu and is found nowhere else. Nor is there reason to adopt such an ethic unless one believes that a personal, intelligent Creator demands it. If there is no such moral authority it's hard to see how we could ever justify any ethical principle other than look out for #1. Furthermore, why should we wish to enhance our sense of spirituality, etc.? Why is enhancing these things the right thing to do? All a materialist like Kauffman can say by way of reply is that he appreciates these things, so we should too.

To ever succeed, this new view needs to be soft spoken. You see, we can say, here is reality, is it not worthy of stunned wonder? What more could we want of a God? Yes, we give up a God who intervenes on our behalf. We give up heaven and hell. But we gain ourselves, responsibility, and maturity of spirit. I know that saying that ethics derives from evolution undercuts the authority of God as its source. But do we need such a God now? I think not.

If this is the sort of empty rhetoric to which his view leads then he better re-think. What does Kauffman actually mean when he writes that "we gain ourselves, responsibility, and maturity of spirit"? These are just empty words employed to paper over the profound hollowness of the naturalistic worldview he advocates.

What more could we want of a God? How about a ground for morality, for meaning, for purpose, for justice, for human worth, dignity, and human rights? How about a reason to believe that reason leads to truth, to believe that death is not the end, and that love is not doomed to end in death? Kauffman's pantheism gives us none of that because Kauffman's "god" doesn't care and is not aware of you and I. Kauffman's religion leads anyone who might actually embrace it into the abyss of moral, metaphysical, and epistemological nihilism. It is a god of meaninglessness, hopelessness and despair because it is, alas, no God at all.

Some god that is.

Christmas Gift Idea

This ad in Human Events caught my eye:

The U.S. economy and the stock market are booming, right? But conventional wisdom holds that gold moves in the opposite direction of economic prosperity. So why is gold on the rise, now?

Today, gold is on the move for many reasons. A falling U.S. dollar, rising debt levels and the instability of governments in many energy producing countries are all factors that could effect precious metal prices. The conditions that exist today may cause gold's value to actually double or even triple!

With all of the uncertainty around the world, experts are now calling for $1,000 plus gold prices by 2010. "Gold could easily move above $700/oz. by year's end," reports Bloomberg.com.

So. A piece of lovely gold jewelry as a Christmas gift will cost more this year, but it could also be worth a lot more a couple of years from now. Think of the purchase as an investment.

That's all the recommendations I have for Christmas gift buying. From here on you're on your own.

Joy to the World

'Tis the season to suppress the reason why the season exists in the first place. The august fathers of the city of Chicago have decided that a street fair where people of all faiths sell wares in honor of Christmas, a fair called Christkindlmarket (Christ child market) where Christmas is celebrated, carols are song, and nativity scenes are on display, must not allow as one of its sponsors New Line Cinema, which wishes to promote its new movie The Nativity Story.

Yes, clips from a movie about the birth of Christ is in violation of the delicate sensibilities of the politically correct because it might offend people of other faiths - people, it must be stressed, who of their own volition come to a fair called Christkindlmarket which celebrates the birth of the Christian savior.

The Chicago Tribune has the details, but the reader should be cautioned. The editorial actually mentions once by name the person whose birth is being celebrated so reader discretion is advised for those who may be sensitive to strong language.

The editorial also makes the people who banned New Line Cinema from the fair sound like total buffoons, but that was no difficult feat.

Ethically Challenged

A bunch of grad students at Columbia University School of Journalism have been caught cheating ... on an ethics test, no less. No one should be surprised, I suppose. Look at the role models these students have: Dan Rather slandered President Bush with a totally fabricated story about alleged derelictions during his National Guard days; The MSM ran photoshopped pics purporting to show Israeli atrocities during the recent unpleasantness in Lebanon; AP last week ran a story about Sunnis dragging Shia worshippers out of the mosques and into the streets and burning them alive, without any evidence that the event ever happened and despite denials from our military that it did happen.

There are many fine, conscientious people with real integrity in journalism. They no doubt despair at the shoddy ethical standards of so many of their colleagues and the black eye it gives their profession.

History Repeats

Paul Nowack urges us to learn from the lessons of history:

The Mouse That's Roaring

Peter Hitchens in The Mail Online, a British newspaper blog, has an excellent piece on the Darwinism/ID controversy. He manages in a few paragraphs to capture perfectly the metaphysical nature of the dispute and the misrepresentations and obfuscations that Darwinists employ to try to mask the real nature of the controversy from the general public. Here are some excerpts:

The left-wing Guardian newspaper is in a state about what it calls "creationist teaching materials" being used in British schools. What is this row really about? What does "creationism" mean? Why does hardly anyone discuss it honestly?

For what I noticed (as I have also observed over the global warming controversy) is that the people on one side of this dispute tend to misrepresent the other side. Rational scientists who are doubtful about Darwinism are abused. And expressions such as 'Creationism' are used to suggest that a complex, nuanced position is in fact a crude Hillbilly superstition.

Now, there is no doubt that some of the people behind the campaign for 'Intelligent Design' are passionately religious. Well, so what? Religious belief is a legitimate position of choice, held to by many of the greatest minds who have ever lived (including many scientists) and in my view religion is the foundation of all morality, art, literature and culture. The Darwinist theory of evolution seems to me to knock religion on the head. If Darwin is right, the realm of nature was produced out of random, undirected chaos, in which case we have invented God, and there is no reason why any idea, action or work of art should be considered superior to any other. (Italics mine).

I am sure some supporters of ID do so for tactical reasons, and actually believe (but keep quiet about their belief) that the Genesis account of the creation of the world is literally true, and is an accurate and factual description of events - that the Earth was made in six days and is only a few thousand years old. This I, and many other Christians, do not agree with. I think the scientific evidence on the age of the planet simply contradicts this view.

But what's interesting is that many of the Genesis people, who control large funds, will not support the campaign for ID - because ID refuses to endorse the 'Young Earth' Bible literalist position. Now, when people turn down the possibility of generous cash aid, that seems to me to suggest that principle is involved.

The original opponents of Darwin tried to stick to the Biblical theory. But they were defeated not by Darwin but by the growing body of scientific proof that the Earth is far too old for the Bible account to be literally true. Many ID supporters concede all that. What they say is much more subtle.

They examine various organisms in the light of the latest science, and argue that it is highly improbable that such organisms could have evolved as Darwinists believe. This is the theory of 'irreducible complexity;' advanced by the microbiologist Michael Behe.

Behe cannot be certain that his chosen examples were not produced through natural selection, but he maintains that - for this to happen - an extraordinary number of changes would have needed to take place simultaneously. This is because of the interdependence of the parts of the organism, pointless on their own, all of which would have had to alter at once to have any evolutionary purpose.

Behe and his supporters are not trying to produce a mirror image of Darwinism, in which the hand of a Creator can be observed at work - as you might think from the rage and fury of the liberals who complain when schools propose to include 'ID' in their classes. All they are doing is casting doubt on the supposed certainties of Darwinism, and using advanced scientific knowledge to do so. If Darwinists are as secure in their beliefs as they claim to be, they should easily be able to see off the ID proponents, in school or out of it, without suppressing, abusing or misrepresenting anyone.

And surely the fact that some scientists question Darwin's theory is itself an interesting fact, which any inquisitive mind ought to be informed about. What good does it do to hide the existence of a scientific disagreement from the young?

Yet the evolutionists trumpet and bellow about this small, modest challenge, like an enormous elephant panicking over the presence of a mouse. I wonder why.

Hitchens is exactly right. IDers are not challenging science or the discoveries of science. Not a single empirical datum of science is called into question by Intelligent Design theorists. Rather, these philosophers and scientists are challenging the metaphysical naturalism of some scientists who fervently believe as an article of faith that there are no non-material, non-physical causes or agents responsible for our world. This belief is part of the creed of the naturalist, and, as such, it's a pillar of his materialist religion. It is, as Denyse O'Leary says, the creation story of materialism. It started out as a respectable theory of how species might change from one into another over time. Might be right, might be wrong. But it simply cannot bear the weight that is now placed on it, trying to make it the explanation as to why everything is the way it is.

This is why the Darwinists are so alarmed and outraged at the inroads being made by ID. It's not their science which is being threatened by ID, it's their religion, a religion in which they've invested their entire professional careers and reputations. Few men will suffer something so profoundly important to them to be discredited with equanimity.

Not a Saint, Just a Parent

Here's a beautiful love story, the kind of love story our culture has an increasingly difficult time comprehending. I hope everyone reads it.

Setting the Record Straight

Why the recent outpouring of anti-theistic zeal and hostility? Richard Shweder suggests an answer in the New York Times:

A deeper and far more unsettling answer ... is that the popularity of the current counterattack on religion cloaks a renewed and intense anxiety within secular society that it is not the story of religion but rather the story of the Enlightenment that may be more illusory than real.

The Enlightenment story has its own version of Genesis, and the themes are well known: The world woke up from the slumber of the "dark ages," finally got in touch with the truth and became good about 300 years ago in Northern and Western Europe.

As people opened their eyes, religion (equated with ignorance and superstition) gave way to science (equated with fact and reason). Parochialism and tribal allegiances gave way to ecumenism, cosmopolitanism and individualism. Top-down command systems gave way to the separation of church from state, of politics from science. The story provides a blueprint for how to remake and better the world in the image and interests of the West's secular elites.

Unfortunately, as a theory of history, that story has had a predictive utility of approximately zero. At the turn of the millennium it was pretty hard not to notice that the 20th century was probably the worst one yet, and that the big causes of all the death and destruction had rather little to do with religion. Much to everyone's surprise, that great dance on the Berlin Wall back in 1989 turned out not to be the apotheosis of the Enlightenment.

Indeed, critics are fond of pointing to the Catholic Church's Inquisition as the paradigm of religious evil. Throughout the 500 years of the Inquisition, however, something like 6000 people were murdered. That comes to about twelve people per year. By contrast 110,000,000 people were murdered by officially atheistic communist governments in the 87 years from 1900 to 1987. This does not count those killed in wars instigated by communists nor does it count those murdered by other state atheisms like Naziism. In other words, there's no comparison between the crimes of atheism and the crimes of Christians.

Why has atheism amassed such a horrific record? The English political philosopher John Locke, whose influence on the founding fathers was such that Jefferson incorporated whole sentences from his writings into the Declaration of Independence, offers an answer that has been stressed frequently on Viewpoint:

John Locke, who was almost everyone's favorite political philosopher at the time of the founding of our nation, was a very tolerant man. In his 1689 "Letter Concerning Toleration," he advocated a policy of live and let live for believers in many faiths, even heretics. But he drew the line at atheists. He wrote: "Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all."

Atheists bristle at the suggestion that they cannot be trusted to keep promises, etc. but they shouldn't take umbrage. It's merely the logical consequence of their denial of a transcendent moral authority. There is no reason, given the truth of atheism, why anyone should keep a promise that becomes inconvenient and which can be discarded with impunity. Locke was correct. For the atheist integrity is nothing more than a subjective preference, if it is a preference at all, and as such it can be dispensed with whenever it suits one's self-interest.

As with promises, so with human lives. If it suits the state to murder its people then, unless there is a divine constraint, there is no constraint at all on those who have the power to realize their wish.

What They Can and Can't Do

Dick Morris explains at NewsMax (e-mailed report) why the Democrats' newly won majority in the House and the Senate will avail them nothing if they seek to pass left-wing legislation. Along the way he gives a quick lesson in how our national legislature works:

For all of the dire warnings and pre-election commotion about the impact of a Democratic majority in Congress, the fact is that - now that it is upon us - it can do little or nothing but harass the administration.

There is no real danger of any legislative action emerging from this Congress. Yes, the president has a veto the Democrats cannot override, but nothing will ever make it as far as the desk at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., are just spinning their wheels.

In the Senate, there is no such thing as a majority. Ever since the elder Bush's administration, the filibuster has become routine. No longer reserved for civil-rights issues or for egregious legislation, it now is used to counter even motions for recess and adjournment. Members of the Senate are no longer subjected to the indignity of standing on their feet and reading a telephone book. Rather, the gentlemen's filibuster applies.

The majority leader phones the minority leader and asks if a filibuster is in effect. With his feet up on his desk, the Republican replies that it is and the Democrat, despite his majority, does not even think about bringing up his bill for consideration unless he has a good shot at the 60 votes required to shut off debate. In the Senate, 51 votes determine who gets the corner office, but to pass legislation, one needs 60.

In the House of Representatives, with its 435 members, the Republican Party needed a simple majority - 218 - to rule. The Democrats need considerably more. The normal rules of a mathematical majority do not take into account the fractious nature of the Democratic Party.

Where the Republican majority best resembled the Prussian Army - disciplined, unified and determined - the Democratic majority in the upcoming Congress is disunited, dispersed and divided into myriad caucuses and special interest groups. One could purchase the Republican majority wholesale by making a deal with the speaker and the majority leader. But to get the Democratic majority in line, one has to buy it retail - caucus by caucus.

First, one has to go to check with the Black Caucus - hat in hand - to see if one's bill has enough liberal giveaways to round up its forty or so votes. Thence to the Hispanic Caucus for a similar screening. Then, with one's legislation weighted down with liberal provisions added by these two groups, one has to sell it to the Democratic Leadership Council moderates and, even worse, to the Blue Dog Democrats - the out and out conservatives.

If you are fortunate enough to pass these contradictory litmus tests, you then have to go to the environmentalists, the labor people, and even the gays to see that your bill passes muster. Only then can you begin to hope for House passage.

The result of this labyrinth is that the relatively moderate bill you first sought to pass ends up like a Christmas tree, laden with ornaments added to appease each of the caucuses. Unrecognizable in its final form, it heads to House passage.

This road map will be familiar to all veterans of the Clinton White House of 1993 and 1994. The most recent administration that had to deal with a Democratic House, the shopping from caucus to caucus and the festooning of moderate legislation with all manner of amendments will seem dej� vu to all of the early Clintonites. When Clinton proposed an anti-crime bill with a federal death penalty, he needed to add pork projects in the inner city like midnight basketball to get it past the Democrats in the House.

Nancy Pelosi will face the same obstacle. By the time her legislation emerges from the lower chamber, it will bear little resemblance to what she had in mind, liberal as that might have been. As Clinton said, after he watched the mangling of his legislative program by the various caucuses in the House, "I didn't even recognize myself."

Once the highly amended liberal legislation emerges from the House, it will make easy fodder for a Senate filibuster. So left leaning that it stands no chance of attracting 60 votes, it will be dead-on-arrival.

So forget the nightmares about an amended Patriot Act or restrictions on wiretapping for homeland security. Don't worry about House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel's, D-N.Y., ravings about the draft or the rumors of a tax increase. It's not going to happen.

What is the Democratic majority good for? One thing and one thing only - to give their party control of the committees and the subpoena power that goes with it. The two House Democratic majority can only make noise and make trouble. It can't pass legislation.

What Morris doesn't mention, however, is the power the Senate Democrats have to block judicial nominees. The now unlikely prospect that we will get another Supreme Court jurist of the caliber of Roberts, Alito, Scalia, or Thomas may well be the most unfortunate consequence of the recent elections.

RLC

Angier's God Problem

Natalie Angier, science writer for the New York Times, discusses her God Problem at The Edge. She's mystified, evidently, as to why so few people believe that evolution occurred. Maybe we at Viewpoint can be of service in explaining the mystery. Perhaps it has something to do with the Darwinian insistence that the amazing complexity of living things is a matter of pure accident. This just seems to many people to be too literally incredible for anyone who's not already committed to atheism to accept.

She also seems puzzled as to why many astronomers are open to the possibility of that an intelligent Creator is responsible for the cosmos, but not so much open to the possibility that astrology is true. Perhaps, again, it's because the fine-tuning of the features of the universe astronomers study is so breathtakingly improbable, so unexpectedly exquisite, that the heavens fairly scream that they were intentionally designed. Whereas astrology is obviously just pure guesswork.

She wonders, too, why scientists don't speak out more against belief in God. Perhaps it's because they realize that as scientists their opinions on whether God exists are no more authoritative than anyone else's. Scientists trading on their authority as scientists in order to make metaphysical pronouncements are like, say, Judge John Jones of the famous Dover Intelligent Design trial, speaking authoritatively on matters pertaining to the philosophy of science. In brief, many scientists recognize that to speak publicly and dogmatically on the existence of God would be hubristic, pompous, and absurd, but Ms Angier would apparently like to see them do it anyway.

Nevertheless, at least these were interesting ponderings, even if they were philosophically maladroit. Most of the rest of her essay leaves the reader scratching his head trying to figure out how what she writes has anything to do with the problem of the existence of God.

Limitless Self-Delusion

Syria has been implicated in two recent political assasinations in Lebanon, and Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for the utter destruction of Israel. Yet there are those who believe these two criminal nations can be counted on to help bring stability to Iraq. The ability of some people to delude themselves about the nature of our foes seems utterly boundless.

Ramirez has a more realistic appraisal of the aims of Iran in offering to be a broker for peace in Iraq:

Clean Out Baghdad

Mohammed at Iraq the Model gives us a depressing but riveting glimpse of what life is like for an ordinary citizen in Baghdad these days.

It is Iraqis like Mohammed who are the reason it is morally imperative that we crush the insurgency in Baghdad. They've placed their hopes, trust, and the lives of their families in our hands. If we leave, as John "I don't want a bribe now but maybe later" Murtha is demanding, then we abandon people like Mohammed and his family to the cutthroat thugs who burn innocent worshippers to death in the streets.

Upon our withdrawal, anyone who cooperated with the coalition will be hunted down, tortured and killed by these savages. Maybe the Murthas and Pelosis of the world can live with that likelihood, but no one with any decency should be willing to take the risk. If anything, we should be sending in more troops to clean the vermin out of the city so that the people there can live normal lives free from fear and grief.

Read Mohammed's post at the link.

Kauffman's Emergentism (Pt. I)

Stuart Kauffman is a very bright man who, despite being an atheistic materialist, rejects the reductionism that most materialists embrace and advocates instead a philosophical notion called emergentism.

Simply put, emergentism is the view that when matter reaches a certain critical mass it gives rise to phenomena which cannot be explained in terms of matter alone. Think, for instance, of the picture produced by thousands of color dots on the tv screen. To try to explain the meaning of the picture as nothing but excited dots of color misses something significant about the picture, namely the information and importance it conveys. The emergentist believes that life, consciousness, meaning, and value all emerge out of the universe in somewhat analogous fashion.

Kauffman writes:

In the West, those who hold to a view of a theistic God, including the Christian fundamentalists of such power in the United States, find themselves in a cultural war with those who do not believe in a transcendent God, whether agnostic or atheistic. This war is evidenced by the fierce battle over Intelligent Design being waged politically and in the court systems of the United States. While the battleground is Darwinism, the deeply emotional issues are more fundamental. These include the belief of many religious people that without God's authority, morality has no basis. Literally, for those in the West who hold to these views, part of the passion underlying religious conviction is the fear that the very foundations of Western society will tumble if faith in a transcendent God is not upheld.

Indeed, it's interesting that Dr. Kauffman doesn't assay to refute this belief. He doesn't, of course, because there is no refutation available to him. In order for someone to have a right, say, not to be harmed, others must have an obligation not to harm him, but whence comes this obligation if we are all alone in the cosmos? In order for us to be "obligated" something or someone must lay that obligation upon us and in the naturalistic metaphysics of Dr. Kauffman there's nothing that is up to that task. Even if he's correct that moral value is an emergent property of the universe, which we will see is highly dubious, it is a long and treacherous logical road from the appearance of a value to an obligation to somehow promote that value.

Beyond that, reductionism, wrought by the successes of Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Planck, and Schrodinger, and all that has followed, preeminently in physics, has, as I will expand upon in a moment, left us in world of fact - cold fact with no scientific place for value. "The more we know of the cosmos, the more meaningless it appears", said Stephen Weinberg in Dreams of a Final Theory.

Precisely so. If everything that exists can ultimately be explained completely in terms of quarks and energy, if there's no intelligence out there, nothing beyond death but annihiliation, then life is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. This is where the materialist's reductionism takes us. Unfortunately what Kauffman seeks to put in its stead offers no more satisfaction than does reductionism.

In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

First, Kauffman sets up a choice as ridiculous as it is false - he tells us we must either believe in a six day creation or accept atheism - and then concludes that it is more reasonable to believe that consciousness, agency, meaning, and value have somehow emerged out of the aforementioned energy and quarks than to believe that these phenomena, as well as the material world itself, are the product of an intelligent Being.

Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself.

The universe is God and God just is the universe. But the universe is intellectually inert. Kauffman still hasn't explained how physical matter can give rise to meaning and value. He just holds out the hope that it has.

In short, in wondrous ways, these our universe, biosphere, econosphere, and culture are ceaselessly creative and emergent. The two cultures, science and humanities, stand united in this world view. Meaning and value have a scientific base.

Actually, nothing he has said in this essay supports this claim. He offers not a single testable assertion in support of his belief. Kauffman is a scientist doing speculative metaphysics and the speculations are based on nothing more than his hope that such things as meaning and value really exist.

And ethics? At a recent meeting on science and religion on Star Island, we heard more than one lecture on animal emotions and the sense of fairness in chimpanzees. Group selection, we were told, is now making its way into evolutionary biology. With it, natural selection can get its grip on behaviors that are advantageous to the group, like fairness, so it emerges. Far from evolution being anathema to ethics, evolution is the first source of human morality. But not the last, for we can argue whether we should want what we want.

This takes us back to what we said above. Even if a sense of fairness has emerged through natural selection, we still are given no reason why we should actually be fair to others. The fact that evolution produces some behavior is not an argument for that behavior being morally right or obligatory. Natural selection produces a lot of behaviors that we do not regard as particularly moral - war being one example - so why pick out fairness as an example of a behavior we should cultivate rather than war. The only way Kauffman can do this is by holding war and fairness up to some other standard and seeing which one conforms to the standard and which doesn't. But where does this higher standard come from? Neither Kauffman, nor any atheist, has an answer to that question.

I'll have more on Kauffman's emergentism later.

Listing Toward Fascism

Ralph Peters rejects the pessimistic prognosis of those who predict that Europe will be Islamified by the the middle of the present century. He believes that the increasing Arabification of Europe will give rise to a nascent fascism which will stem the Islamic tide through forced deportations or, since Europe is so good at it, genocide. Herewith some excerpts:

The notion that continental Europeans, who are world-champion haters, will let the impoverished Muslim immigrants they confine to ghettos take over their societies and extend the caliphate from the Amalfi Coast to Amsterdam has it exactly wrong.

The endangered species isn't the "peace loving" European lolling in his or her welfare state, but the continent's Muslims immigrants - and their multi-generation descendents - who were foolish enough to imagine that Europeans would share their toys.

In fact, Muslims are hardly welcome to pick up the trash on Europe's playgrounds.

Don't let Europe's current round of playing pacifist dress-up fool you: This is the continent that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing, the happy-go-lucky slice of humanity that brought us such recent hits as the Holocaust and Srebrenica.

The historical patterns are clear: When Europeans feel sufficiently threatened - even when the threat's concocted nonsense - they don't just react, they over-react with stunning ferocity. One of their more-humane (and frequently employed) techniques has been ethnic cleansing.

And Europe's Muslims don't even have roots, by historical standards. For the Europeans, they're just the detritus of colonial history. When Europeans feel sufficiently provoked and threatened - a few serious terrorist attacks could do it - Europe's Muslims will be lucky just to be deported.

Sound impossible? Have the Europeans become too soft for that sort of thing? Has narcotic socialism destroyed their ability to hate? Is their atheism a prelude to total surrender to faith-intoxicated Muslim jihadis?

The answer to all of the above questions is a booming "No!" The Europeans have enjoyed a comfy ride for the last 60 years - but the very fact that they don't want it to stop increases their rage and sense of being besieged by Muslim minorities they've long refused to assimilate (and which no longer want to assimilate).

We don't need to gloss over the many Muslim acts of barbarism down the centuries to recognize that the Europeans are just better at the extermination process.

Mark Steyn, author of the highly acclaimed America Alone, disagrees. He sees the emergence of an Islamic caliphate covering almost all of Europe as inevitable, and although he doesn't say this, exactly, Christian dhimmitude would be an ineluctable concommitant along with death to any infidels who refuse to submit.

Good grief! Are these our choices? Have we allowed things to come to the place where someone who augurs the reappearance of fascism actually sounds like an optimist?

Change Toward What?

A friend sends along this meditation on the voters' decision to heed the Democrats' call for a change in Washington:

By now, he writes, you've all seen the Democrats' latest slogan: "A New Direction For America!" Let's analyze this promise:

The stock market is at a new all-time high and America's 401K's are back. A new direction from there means what?

Unemployment is at 25 year lows. A new direction from there means what?

Oil prices are plummeting. A new direction from there means what?

Taxes are at 20 year lows. A new direction from there means what?

Federal tax revenues are at all-time highs. A new direction from there means what?

The Federal deficit is down almost 50%, just as predicted over last year. A new direction from there means what?

Home valuations are up 200% over the past 3.5 years. A new direction from there means what?

Inflation is in check, hovering at 20 year lows. A new direction from there means what?

Not a single terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11/01. A new direction from there means what?

Osama bin Laden is living under a rock in a dark cave, having not surfaced in years, if he's alive at all, while 95% of Al Queda's top dogs are either dead or in custody, cooperating with US Intel. A new direction from there means what?

Several major terrorist attacks already thwarted by US and British Intel, including the recent planned attack involving 10 Jumbo Jets being exploded in mid-air over major US cities in order to celebrate the anniversary of the 9/11/01 attacks A new direction from there means what?

Just as Bush had planned and foretold us of on a number of occasions, Iraq was to be made "ground zero" for the war on terrorism -- and just as Bush said they would, terrorist cells from all over the region are alighting the shadows of their hiding places and flooding into Iraq in order to get their faces blown off by US Marines rather than boarding planes and heading to the United States to wage war on us here. A new direction from there means what?

Moreover, bear in mind that all of the above occurred in the face of the 1999 tech crash, the epidemic of corporate scandals throughout the 90's, and the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks on NYC years in the planning which collectively sucked 24 trillions dollars and 7.8 million jobs out of the US economy even before G. W. Bush had time to unpack his suitcases in the White House.

It's easy for the Democrats to attempt to discredit, disgrace and defame our commander in chief, George W. Bush -- that's what they do. What's not so easy for them to do is to refute irrefutable facts no matter how they might try.

I suppose the voters who wanted "a change" knew what they were doing three weeks ago. I just wish they'd explain it to the rest of us.

Purpose Driven Prevarications?

Joseph Farah seems to have it in for Rick Warren, author of Purpose Driven Life, and Warren seems to be making it easy for him. See here and here. Maybe Pastor Rick should stick to evangelism and stay away from political pronouncements. Evangelism makes fewer demands on a man's integrity.

Land of Few Friends

One leftist Brit decides that the left-wing anti-Israel drumbeat is unwarranted, and her former allies vigorously protest. Read Lorna Fitzsimons' succinct explanation of her support for Israel and then scroll down to the comments her essay elicits. Many on the left seem to believe that if only Israel would stop defending itself against the Palestinians peace would be at hand.

It would, of course, but only because Israel as a nation, and Jews as inhabitants of the Middle East, would cease to exist. This would certainly make Arab Muslims, and perhaps much of the European left, happy as clams, but it's hardly an acceptable way to resolve the problem.

Until the Arab world reconciles itself to the fact that Israel is in the Middle East to stay, and that they have a right to exist, there will be no peace in that region. Every time the Arabs feel strong enough they will provoke new wars and conflicts with Israel and every time Israelis defend themselves they will incur condemnation from those parts of the globe that wish to see them gone.

Cheap Labor

A friend shares this bit of insight with us:

Isn't "cheap labor" what so much of the immigration issue is about? Business doesn't want to pay a decent wage. Consumers don't want expensive produce. Government will tell you Americans don't want the drudge jobs. But the bottom line is cheap labor.

The phrase "cheap labor" is a myth, a farce, a lie...an oxymoron. There is no such thing as "cheap labor." Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children.

He takes a job for $5.00 or $6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200 free.

He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent. He qualifies for food stamps. He qualifies for free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care. His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.

He requires bilingual teachers and books. He qualifies for relief from high energy bills. If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI. Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare.

All of this is at the taxpayer's expense. He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.

Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material. He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in benefits. Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after paying their bills and his.

The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean up.

Is this what people mean by "cheap labor"?

Good question. In his book State of Emergency Pat Buchanan notes that each immigrant who comes to the U.S. without a high school education costs the American taxpayers a net $90,000 over the course of his lifetime. He cites economist Donald Huddle of Rice University who estimated that by the end of this year the net annual cost of immigration, both legal and illegal, will be $108 billion.

Crazy Old Aunts

Now isn't this about the silliest thing you've ever heard:

According to reports, Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, CO said this at a recent conference for atheist scientists:

"We should let the success of the religious formula guide us. Let's teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome - and even comforting - than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know."

She said this while displaying a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck - our Earth.

This specimen of materialistic fatuity was delivered at a conference at La Jolla, CA the theme of which was "Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival." The proceedings rapidly escalated into an "intellectual free-for-all" as reported by George Johnson at The New York Times.

It seems that it was the usual suspects at this donnybrook who were throwing most of the low blows:

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is "a mustard seed of DNA") was dismissed by Dr. [Richard] Dawkins as "bad poetry," while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is "brainwashing" and "child abuse") was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, [who assured the atheistic faithful that he himself had "not a flicker" of religious faith], as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called "pop conflict books" like Dr. Dawkins's "God Delusion," as "commercialized ideological scientism" - promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, "Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine," was written to counter "garbage research" financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful ... one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. "The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty," said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation.

"Every religion is making claims about the way the world is," he said. "These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality."

By shying away from questioning people's deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. "I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair," he said.

What?! In order to flay religion he has to travel all the way to the madrassas of Saudi Arabia where the 9/11 terrorists were weaned to obtain his illustrations. This is a marvelous example of a straw man argument - find the most dastardly examples of religious people you can and then present them as if they were typical of all religious people. Is this what Mr. Harris has in mind when he refers above to "intellectual honesty"?

Then Francisco Ayala inadvertantly let the cat out of the bag. He tacitly acknowledged that people need to believe their lives are meaningful and although scientific naturalists bravely insist that an unimaginably vast ocean of nothingness is nevertheless a wondrous and meaning-laden place, the fact is that there's no meaning in Prof. Porco's universe. There's no meaning, value, hope, or purpose if we're all alone on a tiny speck adrift in a near infinite sea of matter and energy:

"There are six billion people in the world," said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. "If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming - it is like believing in the fairy godmother."

"People need to find meaning and purpose in life," he said. "I don't think we want to take that away from them."

In other words, if people really understood the metaphysical implications of Darwinism they'd be in despair, but Dr. Krauss wants to leave them an "out". It's still possible to believe in God, he helpfully assures the audience:

"Science does not make it impossible to believe in God," Dr. Krauss insisted. "We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it."

But Captain Ahab Dawkins will have none of it:

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. "I am utterly fed up with the respect that we - all of us, including the secular among us - are brainwashed into bestowing on religion," he said. "Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence."

It would be interesting to learn what real evidence there is for God's non-existence. I hope he wasn't referring to the "evidence" he alludes to in his book The God Delusion which is about as insubstantial an argument against God's existence as has ever been put to print.

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of "a den of vipers."

"With a few notable exceptions," he said, "the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?"

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, said. "Something fundamental is going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understand." "Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,"

And this is an admission of ignorance by Dr. Tyson. He's evidently unaware that intelligent design is not a claim about what we don't know, it's a claim about what we do know. What we know is that complex specified information is the product always of an intelligent agent. To the extent we find CSI in the biological or physical universe it is more reasonable to infer, IDers maintain, that it is the result of intelligence than that it is the result of blind, mechanical processes.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.

"She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she's getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once," he lamented. "When she's gone, we may miss her."

Dr. Dawkins wasn't buying it. "I won't miss her at all," he said. "Not a scrap. Not a smidgen."

Talk about a crazy old aunt.

Big Trees and Satellite Photos

If you enjoy the beauty of old, massive trees, as I do, then this site, passed along by our friend Byron at Hearts and Minds Bookstore is for you. In the left margin you'll find links to state registers for the largest trees of each species in each state. There's also information on "tree hunting", an activity in which people search out record trees in their states. It's pretty neat.

Another amazing site recommended to me by my student Hannah is Google Earth. The site allows you to navigate the globe from the perspective of a satellite and zoom in on any part of the planet you wish. The resolution of the satellite photos is best in urban areas, but it's impressive wherever you choose to zoom down. Unfortunately, the software has to be downloaded, which takes a while, but maybe the computer literate readers will be able to figure out how to just download Google Earth without having to download all the other stuff that comes with it.

Enjoy.

Another Myth About Religion

Julie Ponzi at No Left Turns links to this piece by Dinesh D'Souza writing on the myth that religion has been responsible for more wars and death than any other force in history. D'Souza explains that the myth is not supported by the historical facts which, indeed, point in quite the opposite direction.

Ponzi then goes on to relate this amusing story:

This reminds me of a time sitting in one of the required (but not so interesting or rigorous) courses I took in graduate school. The professor, who was a nice man but not the most engaging teacher, made the point in passing that more people had died in the name of religion than anything else in the history of the world. It sort of woke up the room for one brief shining moment. The lefties in the class became engaged as they finally heard a claim being staked--something that was not milquetoast from their point of view. I looked around the room at some of my like-minded friends and we prepared to go to battle. But we overlooked one of our more quiet friends who usually sat in the back of the room and rarely made comments in class. To our amazement, he slowly raised his hand. When called upon he asked the following question, "What religion, exactly, were Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot working to advance?" And then he put his hand down, put his head down, and went back to reading whatever it was that he brought with him to pass the time. There was stunned silence in the room.

Read D'Souza's piece. It really is quite good, and the lesson it contains needs to be learned by believers and unbelievers alike.

It needs to be borne in mind that unless there is a transcendent moral authority to impose moral obligation upon us there is no compelling reason, absolutely none, why anyone should not simply adopt a might-makes-right ethic. It is almost inevitable that in states which are officially and formally atheistic might-makes-right will be the unofficial policy of the government, and any government which adopts this standard will almost inevitably devolve into tyranny, war, and mass killings. This is the lesson of the twentieth century and the lesson which historian Paul Johnson hammers home repeatedly and insistantly in his wonderful history, titled Modern Times, of the century in which materialistic atheism reached its high water mark.

Defending "Science" Against the Yahoos

The secular humanists are made as hornets and they're not going to take it any more. They've decided to set up a think tank in Washington D.C. from whence they will sally forth when necessary to defend Truth, Justice, and Scientific Naturalism from the Christian fundamentalists who have the impertinence to seek to undermine the latter by insisting on a wall of separation between genuine science and speculative metaphysics.

What the humanists are trying to protect, of course, is not science, because science is not under assault. What is under assault is the philosophical assumption of many scientists that, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, physical, material nature is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be. This assumption is an article of faith among secularists, and they are mobilizing to launch a crusade against the infidels who have emerged from the intellectual backwaters of American society to challenge it.

Meanwhile, Back in Iraq

Here's more on the war in Iraq that you'll never hear on the evening news. Whenever the insurgents try to take on our troops they just get walloped. Bill Roggio gives some details.

The Times Online also has a good feature on how the people of Ramadi are taking up the fight against al Qaeda and the insurgents. Michael Fumento has been to Ramadi recently and files an excellent report on his experiences in that city here.

The impression the average person in the U.S. gets of Iraq from the evening news is of a land torn by a hopeless civil war raging throughout the country, with American troops hunkered down to avoid the bullets. The facts are a lot different. The real picture isn't rosy, certainly, but it's a lot brighter than most of us have been led to believe.

Carter v. Campolo

Joe Carter takes Bart Campolo, son of Tony Campolo, to the woodshed for what he perceives to be a wimpish, even heretical view of God. Carter once or twice comes across as uncharacteristically nasty, but the post is pretty interesting. So are the comments.

Here's what Campolo said that elicited Carter's chastisement:

Some might say I would be wise to swallow my misgivings about such stuff [like God's sovereignty, wrath, hell, etc.], remain orthodox, and thereby secure my place with God in eternity. But that is precisely my point: If those things are true, then God might as well send me to Hell. For better or worse, I simply am not interested in any God but a completely good, entirely loving, and perfectly forgiving One who is powerful enough to utterly triumph over evil. Such a God may not exist, but I will die seeking such a God, and I will pledge my allegiance to no other possibility because, quite frankly, anything less is not worthy of my worship.

Please, don't get me wrong. I am well aware that I don't get to decide who God is. What I do get to decide, however, is to whom I pledge my allegiance. I am a free agent, after all, and I have standards for my God, the first of which is this: I will not worship any God who is not at least as compassionate as I am.

Read Carter's response to Campolo at the link.

Happy Thanksgiving

On behalf of my brother and co-laborer here at Viewpoint I'd like to wish all our readers a very meaningful Thanksgiving. We ran the following last year, but it's certainly just as relevant this year. So, in case you missed it last November here is the:

THANKSGIVING DAY PROCLAMATION OF 1789 BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA :

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor - and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness."

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be - That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks - for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation - for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war -for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed - for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions - to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually - to render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed - to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord - To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and Us - and generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789. GO. WASHINGTON.

All Presidential Thanksgiving proclamations can be found here. No doubt those who say that this country was not founded by religious men nor upon Judeo-Christian presuppositions would rather you not read these, but here they are.

We hope that each of us takes time this day to reflect upon all that we have to be grateful for and to reflect, too, upon our relationship to the God from whom all of our blessings flow. Have a great Thanksgiving Day.

Dick and Bill Cleary

Proof at Last

In the spirit of the recent spate of scientists and philosophers publishing books which ridicule belief in God, Mike Gene at Telic Thoughts conducts a fool-proof experiment to prove that God does not exist.

The experiment strikes me as every bit as convincing as the antitheistic arguments of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, and I'm sure these fellows will be grateful for the additional ammunition which Gene's research provides them.

Too Sexy For His Body

Reading this blurb taken from Richard Dawkins' website is a real chuckle. Atheism, I suppose, is quite an aphrodisiac for some women.

Perhaps Prof. Dawkins will wear tight leather pants on his next speaking tour and have all the religiously-liberated ladies swooning when he punctuates his pronouncements that "God is dead" with Elvis-style hip rolls.

Why No Demands to Raise the Driving Age?

This reference page points out that 14% of all traffic fatalities are teenagers. Since there were 42,840 traffic fatalities last year that means that in 2005 alone some 6000 American young people died in automobile accidents. This is, in one year, more than twice the number of Americans killed in Iraq in three years, yet there are no calls from politicians demanding that we raise the legal driving age or impose strict nation-wide curfews on young motorists.

Why are there not? Are politicians so concerned about saving American lives in Iraq that they urge a pull-out that would leave that nation soaking in a bath of blood, but they're not willing to make the unpopular decision to raise the driving age to save the lives of our kids here at home?

It couldn't be, could it, that for many of those demanding that we cut and run in Iraq, it's not really about saving lives but rather about gaining political advantage?

Feedback

Check out the Feedback page for comments on some of last week's posts.

Dyed-in-the-Wool Materialism

Here's Daniel Engber at Slate.com in an article on neuroscience and the brain:

Let me be clear: I'm a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. I believe that each and every aspect of our minds derives from the firing patterns of neurons in our brains.

Here's a question for Mr. Engber. How do chemical reactions, such as constitute a firing neuron, produce things like self-awareness, memories, intentions, desires, regrets, disappointments, guilt, thankfulness, appreciation of beauty, forgiveness, desire for peace, enjoying a good book, deciding, doubting, worrying, or believing?

Even more, how do chemical reactions generate the content of our decisions or our beliefs? How is what I believe about who should be ranked in college football's top five teams produced by a series of molecules shuffling about among the cells of my brain?

Perhaps there's a purely dyed-in-the-wool material explanation for such things, but, if so, I hope Mr. Engber shares it with the rest of us. A lot of people would love to have an answer to these questions. Or perhaps there is no purely physicalist answer, and Mr. Engber's Kierkegaardian committment to materialism is just a blind leap of religious faith in inanimate matter.

Unbelievable

There's a radio show coming out of England called Unbelievable whose host, a man named Justin Brierly, invites guests on to debate matters of interest to Christians and atheists. Go here and scroll down for a menu of the topics they've discussed on their show. Some of them look like they'd be very much worth listening to.

Banning the Burqa

This is an odd story:

The Dutch cabinet has backed a proposal by the country's immigration minister to ban Muslim women from wearing the burqa in public places.

The burqa, a full body covering that also obscures the face, would be banned by law in the street, and in trains, schools, buses and the law courts. The cabinet said burqas disturb public order, citizens and safety.

The decision comes days ahead of elections which the ruling centre-right coalition is expected to win. Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, who is known for her tough policies, said it was important that all people in the Netherlands were able to see and identify each other clearly to promote integration and tolerance.

Last year a majority of MPs in the Dutch parliament said they were in favour of a ban. An estimated 6% of 16 million people living in the Netherlands are Muslims. But there are thought to be fewer than 100 women who choose to wear the burqa, a traditional Islamic form of dress.

Unless they have good security reasons for this ban it really does seem to be a gratuitous gesture. The Netherlands is a sexually freewheeling country in which all manner of sexual expression is permitted. No doubt a woman could walk down the street in a string bikini, exposing just about every square inch of her body, and few would object, but actually covering one's body is going to be made illegal. Why?

Apparently, a number of other countries in Europe are taking similar measures:

The issue of the type of clothing worn by Muslim women has become a hotly-debated subject in a range of European countries. France has passed a law banning religious symbols, including Muslim headscarves, from schools. Some German states ban teachers in public schools from wearing headscarves, but there is no blanket rule against burqas.

Italy has banned face-coverings, resurrecting old laws passed to combat domestic terrorism, while citing new security fears. The issue of Muslim women's dress also surfaced in the UK, where former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said women should not wear the veil.

I'd like to know whether there has been an example of criminals exploiting the burqa to commit crimes or acts of terrorism. If not, then why prohibit it?

Uncle Charlie Wants You

Hey, want to return to the good old days of a draftee army? Vote Democratic.

Wasn't the story going around in 2004 that young men needed to vote for Kerry because the Republicans were going to reinstate the draft, and the Democrats would make sure that didn't happen? Now it's a Democrat, Charlie Rangel, who's introducing legislation to restart the military draft.

Actually, though, I don't think Rangel really wants a draft. In fact, he introduced a similar bill a couple of years ago, but, when the Republicans called his bluff and put it up for a vote, he voted against it.

So what's he up to? My guess is that he believes most people won't have any idea where the impetus for this bill comes from, but they will hear all the draft talk which will cause them to think the administration is behind it. That'll get people much more energized, maybe Rangel hopes, to oppose "Bush's war".

That would be a pretty cynical ploy, and maybe that's not Rangel's real objective, but what else could it be? He explains that if we have a draft the government will be less likely to engage in foreign adventures because they won't be using volunteers, but if he really thinks this why did he vote against his own bill two years ago?

The only explanation that makes sense is that Rangel actually wants draft talk in the air in order to arouse people's passions against the war.