Wallis on Saddam's Execution

Jim Wallis of Sojourners regrets the execution of Saddam Hussein and argues that it is wrong to resort to capital punishment. He states a number of objections which are pretty much summarized in his last two paragraphs. The first is contained in a quote from the Archbishop of Canterbury:

"I think he deserves punishment, and sharp and unequivocal punishment; I don't think that he should be at liberty, but I would say of him what I have to say about anyone who's committed even the most appalling crimes in this country; that I believe the death penalty effectively says 'there is no room for change or repentance'."

How much horror must a man inflict upon people before the Archbishop and Mr. Wallis conclude that whatever change the man undergoes is insignificant by comparison? Saddam had plenty of "room for repentance." He has been feeding people into wood chippers for decades, gassing children and cutting out tongues and torturing people to death for decades. How much time is enough?

The argument that if we only give him time enough he might repent and be saved is a peculiar one. By extension it essentially calls God unjust because He allows people to perish for eternity, and sometimes even causes their deaths, before they've accepted the gospel. It's even more peculiar when offered by someone of Calvinist proclivities who holds that God foreordains who will be lost and who will be saved before they're even born. If Saddam was elected for salvation then he will be saved no matter what the Iraqi government did to him, and if he is to be lost then he will be lost no matter hjow long he lives.

Wallis concludes his piece with this paragraph:

Saddam Hussein, like other murderers before him, was a violent and remorseless man. But by taking his life, we sink to his level. If we truly believe that all human life is created in God's image, then no matter how distorted that life may become, we do not have the right to take it. We simply should not kill to show we are against killing. It is indeed to prefer revenge over justice.

Let's take this a couple of sentences at a time. The second sentence is, to put it politely, inadequate. To put those who support the legal execution of a mass murderer on the same level as the murderer is morally ludicrous. We do not sink to his level by endorsing his execution but rather we make a profound moral statement, i.e. we tell the world that to take the life of innocent people is the very worst crime one can commit and merits the most severe penalty. It is to tell the world that we value innocent life so much that one who wantonly destroys it will be required to pay the highest price that he can pay, the forfeiture of his own life. Conversely, to refuse to exact the highest penalty from one who has butchered and terrorized innocent people is to implicitly say that the lives of his victims are not so precious that their loss justifies the death of their killer.

The third sentence is a logical confusion. How does Wallis get from being made in God's image to being insulated from ever having to forfeit one's own life? What's the connection between the two? Being made in God's image means having rationality, personality, and a sense of justice, etc. It does not mean that one's life is absolutely inviolate.

The fourth sentence simply asserts a moral preference that hangs unsupported by any reasons. By Wallis' logic we should not incarcerate kidnappers nor fine embezzlers, since we simply should not deprive persons of their freedom in order to show that we are against depriving people of their freedom, nor take money from people to show that we are against taking money from people.

In the final sentence he states that an execution is to prefer revenge over justice. This is perhaps the most incredible claim of the lot. What is it about executing a man who has murdered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that is unjust? How is it unjust to mete out to someone the same as they have done to others? The Christian obligation to be merciful dictates that we don't torture Saddam but it would certainly not be unjust to do so.

Moreover, even if Wallis is right that the Iraqis were motivated by revenge what is it about revenge that is unjust? There is nothing wrong with revenge, i.e. the desire to see someone who is responsible for an evil be made to pay for that crime. Indeed, revenge is an essential component of justice. Without it there is no motivation to punish criminals at all. The only problem with revenge, and why it is generally disapprobated, is that it is sometimes arrogated by individuals. Revenge is a perfectly acceptable motive, however, for the state and indeed Paul says as much in Romans where he tells us that vengeance is the prerogative of God who employs the state as His agent in the world.

RLC

Lefty Laugh-fest

Don Imus and Mike Barnicle yuk it up speculating about the courage/cowardice of Bush administration figures. Unfortunately, their banter is no more funny than it is tasteful.

There's something sad about people who find this sort of exchange humorous. Perhaps it lies in the fact that the attempt to get cheap laughs by viciousness and mean-spiritedness is a mark of very little people who are insecure in their own virtues. If I can be permitted an amateurish psychological speculation, I suspect that most men who mock their betters do so in order to enhance their own self-importance and worth which they subliminally hold in low esteem.

RLC

Nancy Pearcey

Byron links us to this excellent interview with Nancy Pearcey, author of Total Truth and other books. The interviewer questions her on her support for intelligent design and related matters and she gives some of the most concise and clear corrections to common misunderstandings of the topic that I've seen anywhere.

If you're at all interested in this controversy you'll want to check it out.

RLC

Should They or Shouldn't They?

This stunner was in the Times Online:

Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear "bunker-busters", according to several Israeli military sources.

The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open "tunnels" into the targets. "Mini-nukes" would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout. "As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished," said one of the sources.

The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad's assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years.

Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock. However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said.

Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action. Military analysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack.

There's much more on this rumored strike at the link. The question I'd like to pose to our readers is, should Israel go ahead with the attack if the rest of the world is content to let Iran continue to produce nuclear weapons? If not, why not?

RLC

Minimum Wage and Moral Grandstanding

There will be much talk on the news in the weeks ahead on raising the minimum wage. George Will instructs us as to why raising the minimum wage makes no sense, and why it will be raised anyway:

...raising the federal minimum wage is a bad idea whose time has come, for two reasons, the first of which is that some Democrats have a chronic and evidently incurable disease -- New Deal Nostalgia. Witness Nancy Pelosi's "100 hours'' agenda, a genuflection to FDR's 100 Days. Perhaps this nostalgia resonates with the 5 percent of Americans who remember the 1930s.

Second, the president has endorsed raising the hourly minimum from $5.15 to $7.25 by the spring of 2009. The Democratic Congress will favor that, and he may reason that vetoing this minor episode of moral grandstanding would not be worth the predictable uproar -- Washington uproar often is inversely proportional to the importance of occasion for it. Besides, there would be something disproportionate about the president vetoing this feel-good bit of legislative fluff after not vetoing the absurdly expensive 2002 farm bill, or the 2005 highway bill larded with 6,371 earmarks, or the anti-constitutional McCain-Feingold speech-rationing bill.

Democrats consider the minimum wage increase a signature issue. So, consider what it says about them:

Most of the working poor earn more than the minimum wage, and most of the 0.6 percent (479,000 in 2005) of America's wage workers earning the minimum wage are not poor. Only one in five workers earning the federal minimum live in families with household earnings below the poverty line. Sixty percent work part-time and their average household income is well over $40,000. (The average and median household incomes are $63,344 and $46,326 respectively.)

Forty percent of American workers are salaried. Of the 75.6 million paid by the hour, 1.9 million earn the federal minimum or less, and of these, more than half are under 25 and more than a quarter are between 16 and 19. Many are students or other part-time workers. Sixty percent of those earning the federal minimum or less work in restaurants and bars and are earning tips -- often untaxed, perhaps -- in addition to their wages. Two-thirds of those earning the federal minimum today will, a year from now, have been promoted and be earning 10 percent more. Raising the minimum wage predictably makes work more attractive relative to school for some teenagers, and raises the dropout rate. Two scholars report that in states that allow persons to leave school before 18, a 10 percent increase in the state minimum wage caused teenage school enrollment to drop 2 percent.

The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 1997, so 29 states with 70 percent of the nation's work force have set minimum wages of between $6.15 and $7.93 an hour. Because aging liberals, clinging to the moral clarities of their youth, also have Sixties Nostalgia, they are suspicious of states' rights. But regarding minimum wages, many have become Brandeisians, invoking Justice Louis Brandeis' thought about states being laboratories of democracy.

But wait. Ronald Blackwell, the AFL-CIO's chief economist, tells The New York Times that state minimum wage differences entice companies to shift jobs to lower-wage states. So: states' rights are bad, after all, at least concerning -- let's use liberalism's highest encomium -- diversity of economic policies.

The problem is that demand for almost everything is elastic: When the price of something goes up, demand for it goes down. Obviously were the minimum wage to jump to, say, $15 an hour, that would cause significant unemployment among persons just reaching for the bottom rung of the ladder of upward mobility. But suppose those scholars are correct who say that when the minimum wage is low and is increased slowly -- proposed legislation would take it to $7.25 in three steps -- the negative impact on employment is negligible. Still, because there are large differences among states' costs of living, and the nature of their economies, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., sensibly suggests that each state should be allowed to set a lower minimum.

But the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices. Washington, which has its hands full delivering the mail and defending the shores, should let the market do well what Washington does poorly. But that is a good idea whose time will never come again.

Moral grandstanding is a good description of what we can expect to be subjected to from our political leaders over the coming weeks on this issue.

RLC

Ronald Numbers

Steve Paulson has a very interesting interview with Ronald Numbers at Salon Books. Numbers is a historian of science who has written extensively on the rise of creationism. Among historians not involved with either group he is probably the foremost authority on the history of creationism and intelligent design.

Numbers grew up in a strict Seventh Day Adventist family and attended Adventist schools until he went to Berkely to do his graduate work. At Berkely his faith crumbled and he describes himself today as a man with no religious belief, either theistic or atheistic. He himself is an evolutionist, but he is often trashed by other evolutionists because he treats creationists and IDers with respect in his professional writings.

His story is sad on several levels but especially when he talks about the effect his work had on his relationship with his father. While discussing Numbers' book titled The Creationists there is this exchange between Paulson and Numbers:

Paulson: That [the book] must have created trouble for you in your own family of Adventists.

Numbers: It did. And it created trouble for my father, who was a minister. Some church ministers were very harsh with him. Here I was, about 30 or so. They were telling him he had no right being a minister if he couldn't control his son. So he took early retirement.

Paulson: Because of your book?

Numbers: Yes. He was thoroughly humiliated by this.

Paulson: Did he try to talk you out of the book?

Numbers: Oh yes. We had hours and hours of argument. He had a limited number of explanations for why I would be saying this about the prophetess [Ellen White, founder of the Seventh Day Adventists]. One was that I was lying. But he knew me too well, so the only explanation left for him was that somehow Satan had gained control of my mind. And what I was writing reflected the power of Satan. For a number of years, he could not bear to be seen in public with me.

Very sad. Read the rest of the interview at the link.

RLC

Future Tech

For a fascinating glimpse into what military combat might look like in the not too distant future go to Hot Air and watch the top video. It's actually a promotional video produced by Future Combat Systems which, I surmise, is a technology firm working on weapons, communications, and reconnaissance systems.

RLC

The Argument From Fine-Tuning

Joe Carter gives a fine summary of the argument for God's existence based on the fine-tuning of the cosmos. I agree with Carter that this is one of the most powerful of teh arguments for God's existence, even if it doesn't constitute a proof, sensu strictu.

I would caution, though, that the argument does not lead to the conclusion that the architect of the universe is the God of the Bible. Nevertheless, despite this technical shortcoming, the argument goes a long way in clearing away the brush that stands in the way of people accepting that the God of the Bible exists.

If we agree that the design of the universe suggests an intelligence behind the creation we might also conclude that it's reasonable to assume that that intelligence is personal, powerful, and knowledgeable since it has created personal beings and since a great deal of power and mathematical knowledge were required to create the universe. This brings us very close to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. What we cannot infer, however, is that the architect of the space-time cosmos is unqualifiedly good. The existence of suffering prevents us from making that move.

Thus the finely-tuned universe is a compelling reason to believe that there's a creator, but the question whether the creator is identical to the God that Christians have traditionally believed in cannot be settled by reference to the physical creation alone.

Even so, the argument is very powerful. Check out Carter's discussion of it at the link.

RLC

Time Has Come

Michael Ledeen believes that confrontation with Iran can no longer be avoided and, as Machiavelli instructed his Prince, that to delay only works to the advantage of our adversary:

There is no escape from the war Iran is waging against us, the war that started in 1979 and is intensifying with every passing hour. We will shortly learn more about the documents we found accompanying the high-level Iranian terrorist leader we briefly arrested in Hakim's compound in Baghdad some days ago, and what we will learn-what many key American officials have already learned-is stunning. At least to those who thought that Iran was "meddling" in Iraq, but refused to believe that it was total war, on a vast scale.

I have little sympathy for those who have avoided the obvious necessity of confronting Iran, however I do understand the concerns of military leaders, such as General Abizaid, who are doing everything in their considerable power to avoid a two-front war. But I do not think we need massive military power to bring down the mullahs, and in any event we now have a three-front war: within Iraq, and with both Iran and Syria. So General Abizaid's objection is beside the point. We are in a big war, and we cannot fight it by playing defense in Iraq.

You can read the whole piece at the link.

RLC

The Moral Argument

Joe Carter outlines three arguments for the existence of a transcendent moral lawgiver at his blog The Evangelical Outpost. The three are all variations of the same argument - that there must be an objective ground for morality if moral discourse is to make any sense. The versions Carter summarizes are those of Immanuel Kant, C.S. Lewis, and D. Elton Trueblood.

The arguments of these thinkers are not intended to serve as proofs of the existence of God, but they are certainly powerful pointers in that direction. Unless one adopts the position of moral nihilism it's very difficult to evade the force of the reasoning, and the move to adopt nihilism is, of course, a move to forfeit rationality.

Read Carter's summary and see if you don't agree that the moral experience of humans all but demands an either/or choice between nihilism and the existence of a transcendent moral authority.

RLC

Ethical Conundrum

From time to time Christian students express their conviction that the Bible gives answers to all of life's ethical problems. The next time I hear a student say that I hope I remember this story to which I was alerted by my friend Jason:

Until New Year's Day, not even her first name was known. Ashley was a faceless case study, cited in a paper by two doctors at Seattle Children's Hospital as they outlined a treatment so radical that it brought with it allegations of "eugenics", of creating a 21st-century Frankenstein's monster, of maiming a child for the sake of convenience.

The reason for the controversy is this: Three years ago, when Ashley began to display early signs of puberty, her parents instructed doctors to remove her uterus, appendix and still-forming breasts, then treat her with high doses of estrogen to stunt her growth.

In other words, Ashley was sterilized and frozen in time, for ever to remain a child. She was only 6 years old.

Ashley, the daughter of two professionals in the Seattle area, never had much hope of a normal life.

Afflicted with a severe brain impairment known as static encephalopathy, she cannot walk, talk, keep her head up in bed, or even swallow food. Her parents argued that "keeping her small" was the best way to improve the quality of her life, not to make life more convenient for them.

By remaining a child, they say, Ashley will have a better chance of avoiding everything from bed sores to pneumonia - and the removal of her uterus means that she will never have a menstrual cycle or risk developing uterine cancer.

Because Ashley was expected to have a large chest size, her parents say that removing her breast buds, including the milk glands (while keeping the nipples intact), will save her further discomfort while avoiding fibrocystic growth and breast cancer.

They also feared that large breasts could put Ashley at risk of sexual assault.

The case was approved by the hospital's ethics committee in 2004, which agreed that because Ashley could never reproduce voluntarily, she was not being subjected to forced sterilization, a form of racial cleansing promoted in the 1920s and known as eugenics (it was satirized in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby").

However, the case of Ashley X was not made public, and, as a result, no legal challenges were ever made.

Ashley's doctors, Daniel Gunther and Douglas Diekema, wrote in their paper for the October issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine that the treatment would "remove one of the major obstacles to family care and might extend the time that parents with the ability, resources and inclination to care for their child at home might be able to do so."

The paper inspired hundreds of postings on the Internet: many supportive, some disapproving but sympathetic, others furious.

"I find this offensive if not perverse," read one. "Truly a milestone in our convenience-minded society."

It was the critical comments that finally provoked Ashley's father to respond.

While remaining anonymous, he posted a remarkable 9,000-word blog entry at 11 p.m. on New Year's Day, justifying his decision.

The posting includes links to photographs of Ashley, in which the faces of other family members, including Ashley's younger sister and brother, have been blanked out.

"Some question how God might view this treatment," he wrote. "The God we know wants Ashley to have a good quality of life and wants her parents to be diligent about using every resource at their disposal (including the brains that He endowed them with) to maximize her quality of life."

Ashley's father went on to describe how her height is now expected to remain at about 4 feet 5 inches, and her weight at 75 pounds.

Without the treatment, she would have grown into a woman of average height and weight, probably about 5 feet 6 inches and 125 pounds, with a normal lifespan.

The medical profession is divided.

"I think most people, when they hear of this, would say this is just plain wrong," wrote Jeffrey Brosco of the University of Miami, in an editorial. "But it is a complicated story ... you can understand the difficulties. [But] high-dose estrogen therapy to prevent out-of-home placement simply creates a new Sophie's Choice for parents to confront.

"If we as a society want to revise the nature of the harrowing predicament that these parents face, then more funds for home-based services, not more medication, is what is called for."

George Dvorsky, a director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, countered: "If the concern has something to do with the girl's dignity being violated, then I have to protest by arguing that the girl lacks the cognitive capacity to experience any sense of indignity.

"The estrogen treatment is not what is grotesque here. Rather, it is the prospect of having a full-grown and fertile woman endowed with the mind of a baby."

So here's my question: Is what the parents are doing wrong? Is there anything in Scripture which supports a yes answer to that question?

RLC

Why?

President Bush has worked out an agreement with Mexico that would allow illegal aliens who work in the United States and who pay into our social security system to eventually collect social security benefits. This has not been voted into law as yet but one wonders why, when the social security system is in such sorry shape, we are offering to subsidize the retirement of people who broke the law not only to come here but also to obtain a phony social security number. Why is the president rewarding people for breaking the law by allowing them to put a further drain on the benefits U.S. citizens are hoping are there for their own retirement?

This report comes, by the way, on the heels of Governor Schwarzenegger's decision to grant health care insurance to every child in California whether they are citizens or not, and whether they are legal or not.

I suppose there is some reason why Bush and Schwarzenegger feel that it's the right thing to do to take money out of the pockets of people who are here legally and put it in the pockets of those who are breaking our laws, but I confess I don't see what it is. Defenders will say that it's the compassionate thing to do, but it doesn't seem compassionate to essentially take money from the social security checks of elderly people and give it to people whose only claim to it is based on a fraud.

If people through their churches and civic organizations want to help those who have come here in violation of our inmmigration laws they have every right to do that, but for the government to compel its citizenry to sacrifice for illegals makes no more sense than if they decided that we would give every poor person in Mexico free access to our social security and health care systems. Indeed, this policy would be much more compassionate since it would enable people to receive the benefits of being in America without having to undergo the arduous and dangerous trek across the desert to get here.

RLC

The Unheralded War

Every now and then we catch a glimpse of the war against Islamic terrorists that doesn't get much play in the media. Bill Roggio calls attention to our military's involvement in the war being waged by Ethiopia against the Islamic Courts forces in Somalia.

In the course of describing the latest developments in that conflict Roggio states:

The United States has publicly stated its naval forces are actively blockading the Somali coast with assets from Combined Task Force (CTF) 150. "Coalition naval forces are performing boardings on a number of vessels to deter individuals with links to al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations the use of the sea as a potential escape route," notes a CENTCOM press release. The USS Bunker Hill, a Ticonderoga class cruiser which wields the AEGIS Combat System, and the destroyer USS Ramage are engaged in the blockade.

U.S. Special Forces have been rumored to be accompanying Ethiopian and Somali forces on the ground, hunting for senior members of the Islamic Courts, including the three al-Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

The dedicated jihadi in Somalia, as elsewhere, enjoys neither ease nor length of life.

RLC

Ten Myths About Atheism (Pt. II)

With this post we continue our critique of Sam Harris' Ten Myths About Atheism with his second alleged myth. Harris claims the following is not just mythical but also false:

Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

Harris is playing a bit of a shell game here. He slides in the first two sentences from an allegation against atheism and individual atheists to the evils of fascism and communism. He tries to shift the onus away from atheism and onto the nature of political ideology. It's true that these ideologies were very religious but that's irrelevant. It's not fascism which led to the holocaust and not communism that perpetrated the Killing Fields and the crimes committed against humanity in the Soviet Union. Neither ideologies nor religions do anything. It is individual fascists and communists who committed the horrific crimes or the twentieth century and in doing so they were simply carrying to its logical conclusion the basic assumption of atheism.

They believed there was no God and that meant that there is no moral right nor wrong, no eternal consequence for what one does, no reason not to adopt the ethic of might makes right, and no reason to consider others as having dignity and worth. Since they disdained the belief that other people are made in the image of God and loved by God, they therefore concluded that those people have no more rights than do cattle in an abattoir. If one has the power and the wish to kill them there is no moral reason why one should not.

That Hitler, et al. committed the greatest crimes of the century is beyond dispute. That these men were atheists is beyond dispute. That their deeds were wholly consistent with their atheism is also beyond dispute. Thus the myth is not a myth at all. It's a historical reality.

Moreover, even if we were to grant Harris' premise that the responsible agent for the evils of the twentieth century was a kind of religion (fascism and communism), the salient point about this is that these were atheistic religions. Not all religions are bad, but those two were and it could be argued that they were bad precisely because they were, implicitly in one case and explicitly in the other, anti-theistic. Harris, though, clearly seems to think that because some religions are bad therefore they all are, but this is such obvious nonsense that one wonders how an intelligent man could hold that view.

You can read our comment on the first of Harris' ten myths here.

RLC

Post-secular Holland

Who would have thought it? It seems that there may be a religious revival taking place, in Holland of all places, and the revival is not among Holland's Muslims but amongst its Christians. Indeed, Mohammed seems to be having trouble holding on to his followers in the land of tulips:

In spite of this decline of the old religious establishment, however, the century-long wave of secularization seems to have crested, and may even have begun to recede. The Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) finds that the number of self-described Christians stopped declining as early as the beginning of the 1990s. Among the under-20s, the number has started to increase in recent years. If the CBS figures are to be believed, in 2005 a small majority of the Dutch population (52 percent) still called itself Christian. The figures are disputed, however, by another major government research body, the Social and Cultural Planning Agency (SCP).

The SCP uses a stricter definition of religiosity, allowing only those who not only describe themselves as Christians but also belong to a particular church to be counted as "real" Christians. The others, the so-called "fringe Christians," are not attached to a particular church and are excluded from the official head count. Even by the SCP's strict standards, Christians still form a 40 percent plurality among the wider population. Much like the CBS statistic, the SCP's 40 percent figure hasn't changed since the early 1990s.

From both sets of figures, it seems clear that something of a high-water mark for secularization in Holland was set in the last decade.

Islam is already finding itself in a difficult position fighting off another threat, namely that of apostasy. Traditional approaches--honor killings and fatwas--have caused outrage among Holland's general public and political class. That doesn't mean these intimidation tactics won't be effective in the short term--in a recent article in a Dutch political magazine about Islamic converts to Christianity, most sources would talk only on condition of anonymity. But in the long term, they won't work if they don't have the full force of the law behind them (as they do in most Islamic countries). Inevitably, Christian evangelists will try to develop ways of communicating with the Islamic community with a view to converting its members.

Read the whole thing. It's a very interesting article.

RLC

Evading the Questions

Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, is on the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News. The paper's editors recently had a meeting with representatives of the Dallas Muslim community which Dreher reports on here.

Dreher tried to get his interlocutors to answer a set of simple questions, but all he got in reply, according to him, were obfuscations and evasions. The Muslims simply would not deal with the questions to which Dreher, and, I expect, most Americans, would like to hear answers.

According to Dreher, the Muslim spokespersons avoided direct answers to the repeated question of whether the US should live under sharia law which mandates punishments like hand-chopping and stoning, and instead repeatedly challenged the motives of the journalists for asking those questions. They also defended having Muslim youth read the writings of radical Islamists who advocate the imposition of a world-wide Islamic caliphate and retorted to Dreher and his colleagues that the only thing wrong with this is thinking that there's something wrong with it.

The article is both interesting and important, and I urge readers to give it a perusal.

RLC

Distrusting the Times

Why don't people trust the mainstream media to present the news objectively? Well, here's an example of the sort of thing that seems to happen with alarming frequency and which causes people to shake their heads at the apparent willingness of those who present the news to waive journalistic standards when the story supports their ideological preconceptions:

The cover story on abortion in El Salvador in The New York Times Magazine on April 9 contained prominent references to an attention-grabbing fact. "A few" women, the first paragraph indicated, were serving 30-year jail terms for having had abortions. That reference included a young woman named Carmen Climaco. The article concluded with a dramatic account of how Ms. Climaco received the sentence after her pregnancy had been aborted after 18 weeks.

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco's pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the "recently born." A three-judge panel found her guilty of "aggravated homicide," a fact the article noted. But without bothering to check the court document containing the panel's findings and ruling, the article's author, Jack Hitt, a freelancer, suggested that the "truth" was different.

The issues surrounding the article raise two points worth noting, both beyond another reminder to double-check information that seems especially striking. Articles on topics as sensitive as abortion need an extra level of diligence and scrutiny - "bulletproofing," in newsroom jargon. And this case illustrates how important it is for top editors to carefully assess the complaints they receive. A response drafted by top editors for the use of the office of the publisher in replying to complaints about the Hitt story asserted that there was "no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported."

The Times had a story which, they evidently thought, would make the forces arrayed against abortion look very bad and they ran with it without bothering to check its accuracy. With how many other stories have they done the same thing?

The New York Times does deserve some credit, though. The above article was done by their ombudsman, Byron Calame, and appeared in their pages last Sunday.

Read the rest of it at the link.

RLC

Saturn

This photo of Saturn was taken with the sun directly behind the planet. What astonishing beauty.

RLC

Ten Myths About Atheism

I know it seems as though I write far too much about Messrs. Harris, Dawkins, et al. but they are influential people whose arguments should be taken seriously, even when it's difficult to do so.

Sam Harris has a piece at Edge titled 10 MYTHS - AND 10 TRUTHS - ABOUT ATHEISM about which I can't resist commenting.

Harris writes:

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.

1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness ... well ... meaningless.

Harris' reply would likely come as a surprise to many atheists in the popular culture and the most philosophical among them, including the scientists.

Consider these quotes from prominent atheists among dozens more that could be summoned:

"Life is an unpleasant interruption of nothingness." Clarence Darrow

"I am a traveller on a train with no ticket, travelling to a place where no one is waiting." Jean Paul Sartre

"Neither the existence of the individual nor that of humanity has any purpose." Bernard Rensch

"Man's [only] significance lies in the fact that he can look out on the universe and it can't look back on him." Will Durant

"The only plausible answer to the question of the meaning of life is to live, to be alive, and to leave more life." Theodosious Dobzhansky

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." Steven Weinberg

Consider, too, the sense of meaningless conveyed through the literature produced by atheists like Albert Camus in his book The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, or The Plague.

Even so, all the above is really beside the point, as is Harris' reply to the "myth." The question isn't whether atheists do or do not believe life is meaningless. Anyone can believe anything they'd like. The question is whether Harris' belief that life does have meaning is based on anything more substantial than wishful thinking. After all, if human existence in the aggregate has no meaning it's hard to see how an individual human's existence would be meaningful.

If everything we do is destined to vanish utterly, if we are all alone in the cosmos and when our sun dies nothing at all will be left, what ultimate meaning can there be in our lives or loves? There is no more meaning in human existence, individual or corporate, than there is in the life of an ant in an anthill or a bacterium floating in a swamp. We're born, we suffer, perhaps we have a flash of temporary joy here and there, and then we die. Our lives are nothing more than footprints in the sand at the edge of the surf. When we die all trace of our existence will sooner or later vanish from the earth. It will be as if we never lived, and if there's no difference between having lived and never having lived then living has no enduring meaning, purpose, or value.

Only if we survive for eternity can life be meaningful. Some people tacitly acknowledge this when they say that what we do can live on after us. This reply is an attempt to achieve a kind of immortality, but it ultimately collapses since eventually, in a godless universe, nothing anyone has ever done will remain. Harris is free to believe that love gives his life all the meaning he needs, but it sounds like he's whistling past the graveyard.

There'll be more comment on the other nine myths in the days ahead.

RLC

The State of Jihad

Bill Roggio gives us a year end round up of the status of the global war against Islamo-fascism at The Fourth Rail. There's lots of good news, but the war against the Islamists is going to take more than just a few years to complete.

RLC

Chavez Taking Over

Hugo Chavez is shutting down a television station in Venezuela which air material he deems a threat to his power:

In an address to troops, Mr Chavez said he would not tolerate media outlets working towards a coup against him. Radio Caracas Television, which is aligned with the opposition, supported a strike against Mr Chavez in 2003.

But the TV's head said there must be some mistake as its licence was not up for renewal in the near future. Marcel Granier also vowed to fight against the president's plans in Venezuela's courts and on the international stage. Mr Chavez, who was returned to power by a wide margin on 3 December, said Mr Granier was mistaken in believing "that concession is eternal".

"It runs out in March. So it's better that you go and prepare your suitcase and look around for what you're going to do in March," he said during a televised speech to soldiers at a military academy in Caracas. "There will be no new operating licence for this coupist TV channel called RCTV. The operating licence is over... So go and turn off the equipment," Mr Chavez said.

Mr Chavez said the channel was "at the service of coups against the people, against the nation, against national independence, against the dignity of the republic". The channel is among a number of private TV and radio networks that in recent years have strongly criticized Mr Chavez' government and favoured the opposition.

Many media outlets, including RCTV, supported a bungled coup in 2002 and a devastating general strike in 2003 that failed to unseat the president. The press freedom campaign group, Reporters Without Borders, said the proposed move would be a grave violation of freedom of expression in Venezuela.

RCTV is one of the country's oldest channels and began broadcasting in 1953.

This is not surprising, of course, since it is always one of the first acts of those who aspire to dictatorial power to seize control of the media or to shut it down. It'll be interesting to see how Chavez's fan club among American leftists reacts to this incipient act of tyranny.

Cindy Sheehan and Hugo Chavez: Best Buds

RLC

Trusting State

Why do some people have the feeling that our own Department of State can't be trusted? Well, perhaps one reason is that the State Department seems to have known for years that Yassir Arafat was implicated in the murders of Americans in a terrorist strike in Khartoum in 1973, but they did nothing to publicize it. They did nothing to see that the man be brought to justice. Instead, they were content to let anyone gullible enough to believe that Arafat deserved his Nobel Peace Prize to go on believing it. Captain Ed sums up:

The State Department had proof all along that Yasser Arafat not only masterminded this attack, but deliberately plotted to kill American diplomats as a means to pressure the US out of the Middle East. In other words, the PLO/Fatah/BSO conducted a terrorist attack on American interests, murdered Americans, and got away with it. They sat on this information while the US insisted on negotiating with Arafat, even though many suspected he had planned the murders all along.

The State Department should have warned successive administrations from dealing with this terrorist and instead recommended that we capture him and try him for the murders of Noel and Moore. These men worked for the State Department themselves. I guess the lesson here is that State won't lift a finger to bring assassins of diplomats to justice, a lesson that current diplomats may want to consider now.

Laer at Cheat Seeking Missiles has a personal connection to one of the victims. Read his post on the murders. Upon reading it one has cause to wonder about the judgment of former President Jimmy Carter.

RLC

Twenty Favorites For 2006

Herewith my list (by topic) of the twenty books I read (or reread) in 2006 which I enjoyed the most. I'd be interested in hearing from readers about which books they'd put on their list. If anyone sends such a list (It doesn't need to be twenty. It might be only one) I'd be happy to post it.

SOCIAL/CULTURAL

America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It by Mark Steyn - An absolute must read. Steyn argues that Europe as a cultural entity is doomed. There is no realistic way to reverse the trends that are turning Europe into Eurabia.
State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America by Pat Buchanan - Buchanan builds a powerful case against the current policy of turning a blind eye to immigration from the southern hemisphere, particularly illegal immigration. No one who reads this book will think the same way about immigration as they did before reading it.
White Guilt by Shelby Steele - Every page of this book has at least one gem of a thought about how we have come to be in the racial predicament we're in. The problem, Steele argues, is that whites are so loaded with racial guilt that they have no will to do the right thing and blacks and Hispanics are all too eager to exploit that guilt for their own purposes.
The Evolution/Creation Struggle by Michael Ruse - A sympathetic look at the conflict between two apparently irreconcilable camps. Ruse is partial to the Darwinians but is generally even-handed in his treatment of Intelligent Design advocates.

NOVELS

The Road by Cormac McCarthy - A story of the love between a father and his son as they struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. On a deeper level it seems to be a bleak description of the meaninglessness of modern life.
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown - A page turner similar to the later DaVinci Code. Especially good reading if the reader has been to Rome.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The classic story of a man named Raskolnikov who actually tries to live as a Nietzschean superman. He's a man whose values are what he decides them to be. The novel was apparently Woody Allen's inspiration for both Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - A wonderful story of an elderly man, a pastor, close to the end of his life who had married a younger woman in his congregation and had a son late in his life. The narrative is actually a journal the father is keeping as a letter to his son with the intention of having his son read it when he is older and after the father is gone. Beautifully written.

PHILOSOPHY

Warranted Christian Belief (reread) by Alvin Plantinga - A classic both in epistemology and in Christian apologetics. It devastates both liberal theology and atheistic pretensions to superior rationality.
What Can We Know (reread) by Louis Pojman - An excellent introduction to the issues and problems of epistemology.
Nature, Design and Science by Del Ratszch - An excellent work by one of the best philosophers of science. He considers the nature of science and the nature of various theories of design and argues cogently that science does not, or at least should not, exclude such theories.
Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science by Angus Menugue - A powerful critique of materialistic reductionism, the belief that everything, including mind, is reducible to matter and energy.
Who's Afraid of Post-Modernism by James Smith - Smith sympathetically examines the thought of Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault and finds that, properly understood and despite their shortcomings, there's much in these three post-modern thinkers that Christians can embrace with profit.
Abolition of Man (reread) by C.S. Lewis - Lewis' classic essay in protest of modernity's attempt to deify man which actually has resulted in his dehumanization.

SCIENCE

Privileged Planet by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards - The earth is very likely unique in the universe not only in terms of its ability to sustain life but also in terms of the opportunity the physical properties of the earth offer intelligent inhabitants to make discoveries about the universe.
Life's Solutions: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris - Conway Morris argues very persuasively that evolution repeatedly finds, or converges upon, the same solutions to biological problems and that if the tape were run again something very like the organisms we are familiar with would recur.The interesting point to be made is that it seems that the laws of chemistry and physics impose constraints that force evolution in certain directions, almost as if it had been planned that way.
The Soul of Science (reread) by Nancy Pearcy - A fine, engaging history of the development of modern science and the Christian influence on that development.

BIOGRAPHY

Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis - This is Lewis' spiritual autobiography, and I should have read it long before now.

HISTORY

Nothing Like it in the World by Stephen Ambrose - A history of the building of the transcontinental railroad. A little too heavy on the financial machinations behind this monumental project, but much of the story is otherwise fascinating.
America's Secret War by George Friedman - An enthralling account of the political and military decisions made by the Bush administration from 9/11 through the war in Afghanistan. The Bush people look better and smarter than their critics allow and worse than their supporters would hope.

In my opinion the first two books in the list are the most important, but they were all good reads.

Best wishes for a safe and rewarding 2007.

RLC

Dissenting From the Vatican

I have a great deal of respect for the Catholic church and for the ethical thinking it produces, but these statements from the Vatican on the occasion of the execution of Saddam Hussein are difficult to agree with:

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- The Vatican spokesman on Saturday denounced Saddam Hussein's execution as "tragic" and expressed worry it might fuel revenge and new violence. The execution is "tragic and reason for sadness," the Rev. Federico Lombardi said, speaking in French on Vatican Radio's French-language news program.

Why is it tragic that the world is rid of a mass murderer? Why should we be sad that a man who gassed and murdered thousands of children is gone? We should take no delight in seeing a man die but neither should we be sad that he will no longer be around to terrorize innocent people. Rev. Lombardi should reserve his sympathy for the victims of terror and oppression rather than the perpetrators.

In separate comments to the station's English program, Lombardi said that capital punishment cannot be justified "even when the person put to death is one guilty of grave crimes," and he reiterated the Catholic Church's overall opposition to the death penalty.

Why, exactly, can capital punishment not be justified? Surely God commands it in the Old Testament and nothing in the New Testament rescinds the command. It may be that as Christians we should reserve execution for the most heinous criminals, but it's hard to imagine a criminal more heinous than Saddam Hussein.

In an interview published in an Italian daily earlier in the week, the Vatican's top prelate for justice issues, Cardinal Renato Martino, said executing Saddam would mean punishing "a crime with another crime."

This is as much sophistry as it is inanity. Cardinal Martino essentially places the execution of a mass murderer after a trial by a legitimate court in the same moral category as the horrific murders of hundreds of thousands of people. If taking Saddam's life is a criminal act, one wonders, why would it not also be criminal to take his freedom? Or his property?

What makes an act criminal is that it violates both the state's legal code and the natural law. Executing Saddam does neither of these.

RLC

Is ID Testable?

Intelligent Design is often criticized for being untestable. There is no experiment, the argument goes, that we can imagine that might give results that could show ID theory to be false. GilDodgen at Uncommon Descent offers a passage from Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe who states that this is the exact opposite of the truth. ID is testable, Behe insists, it's Darwinian natural selection that cannot be falsified:

The National Academy of Sciences has objected that intelligent design is not falsifiable, and I think that's just the opposite of the truth. Intelligent design is very open to falsification. I claim, for example, that the bacterial flagellum could not be produced by natural selection; it needed to be deliberately intelligently designed. Well, all a scientist has to do to prove me wrong is to take a bacterium without a flagellum, or knock out the genes for the flagellum in a bacterium, go into his lab and grow that bug for a long time and see if it produces anything resembling a flagellum.

If that happened, intelligent design, as I understand it, would be knocked out of the water. I certainly don't expect it to happen, but it's easily falsified by a series of such experiments.

Now let's turn that around and ask, How do we falsify the contention that natural selection produced the bacterial flagellum? If that same scientist went into the lab and knocked out the bacterial flagellum genes, grew the bacterium for a long time, and nothing much happened, well, he'd say maybe we didn't start with the right bacterium, maybe we didn't wait long enough, maybe we need a bigger population, and it would be very much more difficult to falsify the Darwinian hypothesis.

I think the very opposite is true. I think intelligent design is easily testable, easily falsifiable, although it has not been falsified, and Darwinism is very resistant to being falsified. They can always claim something was not right.

Eventually it's going to sink into the minds of even the most obdurate that the intelligent design advocates' claim that intelligence is a necessary cause of specified and irreducible complexity is at least as scientific as the claim of the Darwinians that intelligence was neither necessary nor involved in the creation of biological information or the fine-tuning of the universe.

It's interesting that Judge Jones decided a year ago that ID, unlike scientific theories, was not empirically testable and therefore could not be taught in Dover School District science classes, but Darwinism, which rests on the equally untestable claim that intelligent agency had no role in the appearance and development of life, could. Maybe even Judge Jones will someday be persuaded that his judgment was ill-informed.

RLC

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

Joe Carter offers a good discussion of what is called the Kalam Cosmological argument for the existence of God promoted most notably by philosopher William Lane Craig.

As Carter stresses, an argument is not necessarily a proof. It's always possible to deny one of the premises of the argument and thus evade its force. Even so, if the premises seem reasonable to believe and the argument has a valid structure, then it is reasonable to accept the conclusion. In the case of the Kalam argument the conclusion is that there exists a transcendent, logically necessary, personal, very powerful, very intelligent creator of the universe.

The only question is whether it is reasonable to accept the premises of the Kalam argument. Read Carter's summary and see what you think.

RLC

The End

News outlets are reporting that Saddam has been executed. I watched Alan Colmes and others argue tonight that executing him was unnecessary, that he was no longer a threat to the Iraqi people, that the U.S. had him in custody and that it would be best to just move on and let him languish in prison.

This, in my opinion, is naive.

Suppose the Democrats were successful in getting the United States to withdraw from Iraq by the end of this summer. What would we have done with Saddam? He would have surely been turned over to Iraqi forces and that would have increased the chances that somehow he would be freed. Those who want to see him returned to power would have been given new hope that he might yet survive and be released to regain his seat as head of the Iraqi state, and with that hope there would have been a renewed commitment to topple the government that we left behind.

Indeed, if we pull out too soon the Iraqi government will almost certainly fall, and, depending upon who got to him first, Saddam would be either sprung from prison or shot dead in his cell. If the former, this psychopathic killer would be seen by the Arab world as invincible, almost mythic in his indestructability, chosen by Allah to lead the Arab world against their enemies, both Muslim and non-Muslim. To what horrors would that lead?

Moreover, as long as Saddam was alive many Iraqis would have been reluctant to openly support the new government for fear that he would somehow be returned to power and punish those who collaborated with the government that succeeded him.

Executing Saddam was not only an act of justice, it was an act of manifest prudence. The Iraqi government did what they had to do.

RLC

Tonight's the Night

Evidently Saddam will sometime tonight be sent to stand before God to give an account for the horrors he inflicted on so many hundreds of thousands of people during his reign of terror. Sic semper tyrannus.

RLC

George Weigel's Best Five

Catholic writer George Weigel lists for the Wall Street Journal what he considers to be the five best books for understanding Christianity. They are:

1. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church Edited by F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (Oxford University, 1997).

2. Jesus Through the Centuries by Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale University, 1985).

3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Classics, 1949, 1955, 1957).

4. The Challenge of Jesus by N.T. Wright (InterVarsity, 1999).

5. The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers, O.P. (Catholic University of America, 1995).

Weigel comments on each of his selections at the link.

Speaking of books, Touchstone offers a pretty good satire on Border's, oops, ... I mean Belial's. It opens with this:

The other day I poked my nose into a store run by one of the nation's two great booksellers: Belial's. As I rummaged through the aisles, I found myself growing testy and irritated, and that made me wonder -- why, when I used to love drowning an hour or two in a bookstore, do I hate going there now? What is it about Belial's (and his rival Beelzebub's) that makes the flesh creep?

Not all bookstore's fit Touchstone's description, of course. We like a cozy little shop in York Co. called Hearts and Minds. Try them.

By the way, I'll be posting my own twenty favorite reads for 2006 on Viewpoint early next week.

RLC

The War Against the West

A reader points out that we must be careful when we condemn the Muslim perpetrators of atrocities not to give the impression that we are condemning all Muslims or all of Islam. It's not fair, he argues, to criticize Muslims as a whole for the actions of a relative minority of extremists. He's right, of course. When we condemn Islamic terrorism we don't mean to imply that all Muslims are terrorists. On the other hand, it must be added that there is far more guilt borne by the Muslim community than just that incurred by the killers.

Mark Steyn in his excellent book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, describes the shared responsibility of Muslims by pointing out that surrounding the killers are a series of concentric rings that he describes this way:

...the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them are a larger group of cocksure young male co-religionists gleefully celebrating mass musrder, and around them a much larger group of "moderates" who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting treason against the state, and around them another mesh of religious and community leaders who serve as apologists for the inciters, and around them a network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they're the real victims, and around them a vast mass of elite opinion in the media and elsewhere too sqeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a mangerial problem that can be finessed away with a few new laws and a bit of community outreach.

It's these insulating circles...the imams, lobby groups, media, bishops, politicians - that bulk up the loser death-cult and make it a potent force.

Whatever the thickness of that outermost ring of Muslims, it is as relevant, or irrelevant, to the discussion of the war against Islamism as the general run of German people were during WWII. When someone observes that we were fighting the Germans and the Japanese in the early forties everyone knows what is meant. It doesn't mean that there weren't Germans and Japanese who deplored what their governments had done, it doesn't mean that there weren't Germans and Japanese who didn't see themselves as our enemy, rather it means that those who had power, the fascists who determined the course of events, acted on behalf of all German and Japanese citizens whether those citizens wanted them to or not. It means, too, that a citizen whose allegiance was to the states with which we were at war was presumably an enemy until he demonstrated otherwise. Moreover, many of those Germans and Japanese who deplored the war their governments pushed upon them nevertheless hoped for victory over the United States. They would have been delighted had their military won and they were despondent when they lost.

Likewise, those in the umma who have the power today act on behalf of all of Islam, especially since much of Islam acquiesces in silence to their atrocities. There are, I'm sure, Muslims in that outer ring who do not see themselves as our enemy, mostly Sufis I suspect, but their innocence doesn't negate the fact that we are at war with Islam today in the same sense that we were at war with Germany in 1943.

Just as it was the Nazis who were our specific enemy in Europe even though the war was against the nation of Germany, so today it is the Islamofascists who are our specific enemy now. Yet the foe is much broader than just those who blow up trains and behead innocent Americans. It extends to everyone, American citizen or not, who supports, in word, deed, or thought, the effort to impose Islam by force on the non-Islamic world.

Not all of those who are arrayed against us will resort to violence, of course, and thus violence should not be used against them. To be sure, against some we must fight with bullets, but against others we must fight with economic measures and against others we must fight with ideas. The important thing, though, is that we see the urgency of the conflict we are in and the necessity of fighting. For we are certainly fighting for our survival.

RLC

Ethiopia and Somalia

Below much of the American media's radar Ethiopia has joined non-Muslim Somali forces to defeat the Islamic Courts which had taken over Somalia. The war raged for about a week, and Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail has been providing updates all along. If you wish to catch up go here and scroll down through the last several days' posts.

An Atheist's Pilgrimage (Pt. II)

On Tuesday we alluded to the account by Gary Wolf of Wired who shares with us his quest to find kinship among the "New Atheists." We noted that his search ultimately foundered on the shoals of the stridency, extremism, and weak thinking he found among three main representative figures in this movement. One should read his essay in its entirety because it's quite fascinating, but we'll offer some commentary on the second part of it here.

Writing about his interview with Sam Harris, Wolf says:

Harris argues that, unless we renounce faith, religious violence will soon bring civilization to an end.

This is a half-truth which Harris tries to pass off as a wise insight. It's true that one religion, Islam, is inherently violent and seeks to bring Western civilization to an end, but it's simply a logical fallacy to extrapolate from that fact to the claim that religion per se poses a threat to civilization. Does he really believe that religion is somehow inherently anti-civilzation? Does anyone really feel threatened by Mennonites, Amish, or Quakers? Does anyone seriously believe that his Christian neighbors wish to bring Western civilization to an end? Can Harris name just one Christian who presents such a threat?

Is Harris actually unaware of the work of historians who credit Christianity with creating, shaping, and preserving modern Western civilization?

While we're waiting for answers to those questions, let's pause for a moment to reflect on the legacy of 20th century atheists who have indeed been demonstrable threats to civilization as we know it, or who have committed genocidal acts of one sort or another. Our list might begin with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Kruschev, Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, The African Hutus, the Japanese leadership during the 1930s, and on it goes, seemingly without end. Yet who does Harris see as a threat? It's your grandparents and parents, the kids at school who comprise much of the honor roll, and the majority of people in this country who are the most generous givers in the history of the world.

"At some point, there is going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God."

Oh? And what is it, exactly, that will make it embarrassing to believe in God? The discoveries by scientists of the astonishing fine-tuning of the universe? The incredible complexity of living things? The inexplicable nature of consciousness? Is it more intellectually embarrassing that one believes that a mind is responsible for a world filled with information or that it all happened by grand accident?

Harris is a doctoral student in philosophy. Surely he's aware of the utter failure of materialism as a metaphysic to explain much of anything at all about life. If anyone should be embarrassed it is the person who argues that life can have meaning and purpose, that morality can be grounded, and that justice and hope can exist in a world where death erases everything.

We discuss what it might look like, this world without God. "There would be a religion of reason," Harris says.

Great. And what do we base our confidence in reason upon? Why do we think that reason is a trustworthy tool for finding truth? If reason emerged as a result of evolution then it evolved to promote survival during the stone age, but survival is not the same as truth. A person who reproduces with amazing fecundity because of a genetic predisposition to believe that the gods will torment him if he doesn't will certainly promote the success of those particular genes but they have nothing to do with truth. If our reason is the product of non-rational reactions occuring in our brains then ultimately it is itself non-rational.

Harris wants to place his faith in reason but reason leads to nihilism and despair. To avoid these requires an irrational desision to live as if life mattered, as if it had meaning, as if anything had value or worth. Reason doesn't lead to these conclusions. Nor does reason lead to any kind of ethic except egoism and survival of the strongest. Harris, like so many atheists, envisions a world in which people live as if the Christian God exists, but he wants to replace that God with that which leads to a barren, desolate, hopeless hell.

See here and here for more discussion of the problem materialism has in trying to justify or explain rational thought.

Here in Los Angeles, every fourth Sunday at 11 am, there is a meeting of Atheists United. More than 50 people have shown up today, which is a very good turnout for atheism. Many are approaching retirement age. The speaker this morning, a younger activist named Clark Adams, encourages them with the idea that their numbers are growing. Look at South Park, Adams urges. Look at Howard Stern. Look at Penn & Teller. These are signs of an infidel upsurge.

Good Lord. South Park and Howard Stern are offered as testaments to the virtues of atheism? That's the best that Mr. Adams can come up with as examples of what we can expect in an atheistic world? And the modest little coterie of atheists led by Mr. Adams is proud that this is who comes to mind when Mr. Adams conjures up the names of prominent atheists?

Harris is typically severe in his rejection of the idea that evolutionary history somehow justifies faith. There is, he writes, "nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors."

Harris stumbles again. Certainly some rapists believe that rape is a good, so it's not true that no one would argue on its behalf. The question Harris needs to address, but never does, is on what grounds does he demonstrate that the rapist is wrong. In other words what reason can he give for believing that rape is bad? Any answer an atheist gives to this question distills to the simple fact that rape is something he doesn't like, but that hardly makes it wrong for everyone else. If Mr. Harris is right that there is no God then there simply is no right or wrong. Or, more to the point, might makes right, in which case there's no moral sanction attaching to the rapist's act.

"Would intelligent robots be religious?" it occurs to me to ask (of Daniel Dennett).

"Perhaps they would," he answers thoughtfully. "Although, if they were intelligent enough to evaluate their own programming, they would eventually question their belief in God."

This is a very odd statement for Dennett to make, for it unwittingly brings him as close as he could come to refuting his own atheism. One thing robots could not correctly deny is that they have been programmed by a mind. They might doubt it, but they would be mistaken to do so. Thus, for them to realize that they must have been programmed by a mind which transcends their robotic world, but to question their belief in such a mind teeters on the brink of nonsense.

I think Mr. Wolf senses the inadequacy of what he has heard from these three spokespersons of the New Atheism, and, without abandoning his atheism, he nevertheless shies away from identifying with them. Perhaps he will someday realize that chance and physics can no more write the robot's program than he himself can jump over the moon. Perhaps someday he'll realize that none of the arguments for atheism are any better than what he heard from Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett. Perhaps on that day he'll realize that his search has led him, not to atheism, but to God.

Genuine Faith

I suppose this is a good thing, but I just can't help wondering how genuine one's faith is if you have to hire people to advise you on how to impress others with it:

Hillary Clinton has hired an "evangelical consultant" to help woo Christian conservatives in her likely 2008 presidential campaign.

The move comes after a similar political operative successfully aided Democratic candidates in several states in the midterm elections.

More than one-quarter of the nation's voters identify themselves as evangelical - a voter bloc that has long been courted by Republicans.

Clinton's new hire is Burns Strider, an evangelical Christian who directs religious outreach for House Democrats and is the lead staffer for the Democrats' Faith Working Group, headed by incoming Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina.

Politics is all about image, of course, and the job of these consultants is to create an image of religiosity. Perhaps there is substance behind the image, perhaps not, but it seems phony, even Machiavellian, to have to hire someone to tell you how to express your faith in ways that will seem convincing to voters.

I doubt that neither Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan nor George Bush, three of the most genuinely religious presidents of the last thirty five years, felt the need to employ someone to do the job of burnishing their faith in the public eye.

Gerald R. Ford (1913-2006)

Gary Varvel

Heading into the Past

Byron passes along an article by James Howard Kunstler, writing for Orion Magazine, who argues that because so much of our present culture is centered around the gasoline engine and because gasoline is going to become increasingly expensive to market in the years ahead, our future will be very different from the present but, perhaps, surprisingly similar to our past.

Whether Kunstler is correct or not about oil supplies being outstripped by demand, I think he's right that we need to begin now to become less dependent upon it. I also believe that he's correct when he asserts that there's not much hope that alternative fuels will be able, by themselves, to sustain our current standard of living.

I especially liked this:

If you really want to understand the U.S. public's penchant for wishful thinking, consider this: We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period.

This dilemma now entails a powerful psychology of previous investment, which is prompting us to defend our misinvestments desperately, or, at least, preventing us from letting go of our assumptions about their future value. Compounding the disaster is the unfortunate fact that the manic construction of ever more futureless suburbs (a.k.a. the "housing bubble") has insidiously replaced manufacturing as the basis of our economy.

In other words, our exalted standard of living and our related way of life are unsustainable and will at some point collapse. It's hard to see how this can be avoided given the growing world demand for oil.

Our dependence upon the gasoline engine is surely going to have to change. Mass transit, electric cars, nuclear energy, less sprawl, and more urban living are all in our future, and I think that's a good thing. On the other hand, I think there will be much greater use of coal, at least for a time, and much pressure to lower emissions standards for motor vehicles and coal-burning facilities. That won't be so good.

Although he doesn't put it quite this way, Kunstler's vision implies a return to the nineteen thirties' through fifties' style of social organization, decentralized government, local control, and dependence upon family and community rather than government. This may sound shocking to some who have been reciting for decades the conventional wisdom that we can't turn back the clock, but it should warm the hearts of those conservatives who want to see us at least try.

It would warm mine if I thought the transition would be painless, but I'm afraid it won't be. In fact, I fear that it will be quite convulsive with violence from both within and without instigated by enemies who will seek to take every advantage of our instability.

The challenge will be to dampen the convulsions as much as possible and to maintain our power as we do so. This will not be an easy task, but that the challenge is looming within the next decade or so seems all but certain. Read Kunstler's article and see if you don't agree.

Ideas Have Offspring

Christianity Today has a review by Edward Oakes of Richard Weikart's new book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany the thesis of which is that Darwin's ideas led pretty much directly to the holocaust. It's a thesis guaranteed to produce howls of protest from Darwinians, but one which Oakes' review certainly confirms:

According to the myths of standard historiography, Darwin confined himself strictly to matters biological-even in The Descent of Man, when he finally came, late in life, to apply his theory to man's place in the evolutionary tree. So whatever damage came to the poor and downtrodden from Darwin's theory is due to others, above all Herbert Spencer. Here, in Spencer, can be found the villain of the piece: that second-rate thinker ruined a perfectly good biological theory by hijacking it for cutthroat capitalism, contempt for the poor, laissez-faire lassitude about social legislation, and so forth. Spencer, the claim goes, was the first to transpose ethics into evolutionary terms, defining as good whatever promoted the "progress" of evolution and as bad whatever hindered it.

Unfortunately for Darwin's own reputation, this thesis does not bear scrutiny. Spencer might well have been the first to coin the phrase "survival of the fittest." But Darwin enthusiastically adopted it in the 6th edition of his Origin of Species as a substitute term for "natural selection." Nor did he ever demur when other advocates of evolution's social application came pleading their case. Karl Marx asked if he might dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, which request Darwin declined only because he did not want to offend the religious sensibilities of his deeply Christian wife.

Nor were Darwin's own musings on the social implications of his theory limited to private correspondence. In one particularly chilling passage in Descent of Man he asserted, "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races." Even more ominously, this insouciantly expressed sentiment cannot be regarded as an illegitimate conclusion from the earlier and more reliable Origin of Species.

In a passage historians often cite to prove that at the time of the Origin Darwin was still struggling to maintain his belief in God, Darwin actually, if unwittingly, promulgated the charter for all later social Darwinists: "Let the strongest live and the weakest die.... Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows." In effect, this passage turns Christian theodicy on its head and gives St. Paul's line "Death is swallowed up in victory" a total reversal of meaning. Victory now belongs only to the fittest.

Don't miss Oakes' review. It's lengthy, but it's chock full of important information establishing the link between Darwin and the social Darwinists and through them to Nietzsche and ultimately the Nazis. Every twentieth century Western calamity seems traceable to some 18th or 19th century philosophical enthusiasm, and the Nazis' "final solution" is no exception.

Markets and the Family

The family and free markets are perhaps two important arenas of American life where conservatives have had a consistent and credible voice, and where liberal ideas have been largely found inadequate or harmful.

Yuval Levin has a fine column on the American family and the direction in which conservatism should be moving over the next decade with regard to both of these arenas at The Weekly Standard. Here are a couple of excerpts from the first half of the piece:

American conservatives have worked politically in recent decades to advance two sets of goods: the family and the market. They have advocated traditional values that sustain cultural vitality, and economic freedom that brings material prosperity. These two sets of ideals are mutually reinforcing to an extent. The market relies on a stable and orderly society made possible by sturdy families and strong social institutions; and freedom from unduly coercive authority is an essential prerequisite for making moral choices.

But markets and families are also in tension with one another. The market values risk-taking and creative destruction that can be very bad for family life, and rewards the lowest common cultural denominator in ways that can undermine traditional morality. Traditional values, on the other hand, discourage the spirit of competition and self-interested ambition essential for free markets to work, and their adherents sometimes seek to enforce codes of conduct that constrain individual freedom. The libertarian and the traditionalist are not natural allies.

The left at its height viewed capitalism and traditional social institutions like the family as equally unjust and oppressive, and sought to use government power to replace or to undermine both.

This allowed conservatives to serve the cause of family and market by opposing big government. That doesn't mean the conservative coalition always held together amicably, but a common enemy can go a long way toward smoothing over differences.

Because of welfare reform and conservative pro-family policies, it is no longer fair to say that government is the greatest threat to American families. In the wake of Reagan's and Bush's tax cuts, the federal government is not the drain on Americans' pocketbooks or the deadweight on economic dynamism that it was in 1981. The federal government remains too big and overbearing. But opposition to government can no longer do as the primary means of advancing the interests of families and markets--which has been and should remain the twofold aim of American conservatives.

The genuinely statist left, which opposed both the family and the market, has not exactly disappeared, but it is beleaguered and badly bruised. American "progressives"--triangulated out of bounds by Clinton and then driven out of their minds by Bush--are in sorry shape, notwithstanding their good cheer at the recent election results. They are cynical "realists" in foreign policy, badly confused in domestic policy, with no clear purpose but power, no clear adversary but Bush, no clear ideals but clinging desperately to every tattered remnant of a failed vision even they no longer take seriously. When their electoral fortunes wax, as they surely have this year, it is not because voters think highly of them but because of the country's low opinion of Republicans.

Limited government is inherent to any conservative governing vision, but if those who run the government no longer explicitly seek to undermine capitalism and traditionalism--if government is no longer the greatest danger to both--then what is that greatest danger? And what is the best way to serve the causes of family and freedom?

Read at the link how Levin answers that question and what he prescribes for conservatives over the next decade.

Carrier Landing

So you say you'd like to be a Navy pilot? Well, landing jets on moving aircraft carriers is not an easy job as this video from the British Royal Navy attests.

An Atheist's Pilgrimage (Pt. I)

Gary Wolf has a very interesting essay at Wired in which he discusses his wish to join the ranks of the militant anti-theists who have come to be called the New Atheists and why, ultimately, though he is no theist, he declines. Wolf interviews three exemplars of the New Atheism - Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett - and sympathetically elaborates on those interviews in the essay, explaining what he found agreeable and what he found to be disagreeable.

Any theist, particularly any Christian theist, who wishes to engage the culture apologetically would do well to read Wolf's account. It's a fascinating story, told with gentleness and apparent sincerity. It's a narrative that is probably common among intelligent, college-educated moderns. It's also a story which poses challenges to those who would have such people as Mr. Wolf come to believe that, in the words of Francis Schaeffer, He is there and He is not silent.

A couple of passages from his interviews struck me as noteworthy for what they revealed about the vacuousness of atheism. Consider, for example, this from the section in which Wolf meets with Richard Dawkins:

"I'm quite keen on the politics of persuading people of the virtues of atheism," Dawkins says, after we get settled in one of the high-ceilinged, ground-floor rooms. He asks me to keep an eye on his bike, which sits just behind him, on the other side of a window overlooking the street.

I don't know if Wolf intentionally juxtaposed these sentences, but if he did it was as brilliant as it was subtle.

I doubt Dawkins would have worried about his bike being stolen had he left it in an Amish neighborhood, or a Mormon town, or in the parking lot of any evangelical church which takes it's Christian faith seriously. But "the virtues of atheism" being what they are he worries because his bike is situated in the middle of a campus upon which those virtues are extolled and embraced. It is because atheism offers its votaries no grounds whatsoever for, say, the virtue of honesty that Dawkins is concerned about his bike being stolen. And yet this is what he wants the whole world to be like.

"How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?" Dawkins asks. "It's one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?"

"Manifest" falsehoods? It's philosophically absurd to say that God's nonexistence is "manifest." Moreover, if society is justified in preventing parents from teaching their children theism why would they not be justified, in a society that believes that atheism is a manifest falsehood, in preventing parents from teaching their children that there is no God. No doubt Dawkins would be outraged should an effort be made to pass such legislation.

...the weak-minded pretense that religious viruses are trivial, much less benign. Bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. We should think harder about how to stop them.

Dawkins evidently wishes to make it illegal to take one's children to church. He's apparently unaware of studies such as the one discussed here which show that children raised in religious homes, on average, are far better off than those which are not.

In any case reading Dawkins reminds me of a passage from Noam Chomsky who once wrote that: "If we don't believe in the freedom of expression for people we despise then we don't believe in it at all." Dawkins is a classic totalitarian who wants to micromanage every aspect of peoples' lives including what they say in front of their children. If he lived seventy years ago he'd have doubtless been a Stalinist.

the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism. The sensible" - and here he pauses to indicate that sensible should be in quotes - "the 'sensible' religious people are really on the side of the fundamentalists, because they believe in supernaturalism.

Here Dawkins is correct. The "war" is between naturalism and supernaturalism. It's between materialism and theism. It's a philosophical struggle, and it's a shame that having enlisted in the battle he's still allowed to trade on his standing as a writer of science books to give him standing as a philosopher. His writings on the question of God's existence have absolutely nothing to do with science and everything to do with a metaphysical preference that he wishes to persuade everybody else to accept.

Richard Dawkins is an interesting, and tragic, person to watch. Having become obsessed with eradicating Christianity he has willingly embraced the role of village atheist and is making himself, a once accomplished writer of important books on biology, a bit of a laughingstock.

We'll have more on Wolf's journey in Part II tomorrow.

True Fiction

A man named Michael, a father of a teenage daughter, Jennifer, had been a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force in the military and his duties caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew up without him. Indeed, his wife Judy had left him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to go home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he had not been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Apparently, Jennifer had run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. Judy had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man they knew whom they thought sold girls into slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her now and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was a living hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in her life she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys who she originally left with might be. He set out not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days, days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each day that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she hardly knew what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on the filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was barely alert enough to comprehend what was happening, but too groggy to respond. Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared in front of her with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front and told Jennifer to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she ran, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, her father lay bleeding and bruised, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to Michael. Cradling him in her arms she wept and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had acted? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice of her father?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the anniversary of his birthday she went to the cemetary alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him. Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers. His love for her, his sacrifice changed her life.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

Producing Good Kids

I wonder what the Brits who signed that petition calling for legislation that would make it illegal for parents to instruct their children in religious belief would say about this recent study. I wonder, too, what Richard Dawkins, who claimed in his recent book The God Delusion, that religious instruction is a form of child abuse, would say about the findings contained in this report.

The study shows that teens from religiously observant families with two biological parents who are married or cohabiting ("intact families") are much less likely than other teens to engage in any of ten different undesirable behaviors.

For example, teens from intact families with frequent religious attendance were least likely to have ever gotten into a fight (27.1 percent) when compared to (a) their peers from intact families with infrequent religious attendance (32.1 percent), (b) peers from non-intact families with frequent religious attendance (34.3 percent), and (c) peers from non-intact families with infrequent religious attendance (43.5 percent).

Teens from intact, religiously observant families also had lower levels of drug use, larceny, run-aways, sexual activity, drinking, disciplinary trouble at school, and were generally the highest academic achievers.

Since the study was conducted in the U.S. the religious teens were presumably mostly Christians.

Is anyone surprised at these results? No high school teacher would be. The survey simply puts numbers to what teachers have known for years - the best kids very often come from stable, religious families. You might think this need not be said, but sadly there are some, like Dawkins and his acolytes, who see religion as a great evil which must be purged from our society. One might think that even if they're convinced Christianity is false that they would still support it on purely pragmatic grounds, but it's not just that it's false, it's that it is, in their minds, an evil so great that it must be banned.

Paul in his letter to the Romans alludes to those who, professing themselves wise, are in fact fools. For obvious reasons that seems apposite in this context.

The details of the study can be found at the link.