Thought For A Sunday

Concerning that part of devotion which relates to times and hours of prayer. Of daily early prayer in the morning. How we are to improve our forms of prayer, and how to increase the spirit of devotion.

HAVING in the foregoing chapters shown the necessity of a devout spirit, or habit of mind, in every part of our common life, in the discharge of all our business, in the use of all the gifts of God; I come now to consider that part of devotion, which relates to times and hours of prayer.

I take it for granted, that every Christian, that is in health, is up early in the morning; for it is much more reasonable to suppose a person up early, because he is a Christian, than because he is a labourer, or a tradesman, or a servant, or has business that wants him.

We naturally conceive some abhorrence of a man that is in bed when he should be at his labour or in his shop. We cannot tell how to think anything good of him, who is such a slave to drowsiness as to neglect his business for it.

Let this therefore teach us to conceive how odious we must appear in the sight of Heaven, if we are in bed, shut up in sleep and darkness, when we should be praising God; and are such slaves to drowsiness, as to neglect our devotions for it.

For if he is to be blamed as a slothful drone, that rather chooses the lazy indulgence of sleep, than to perform his proper share of worldly business; how much more is he to be reproached, that would rather lie folded up in a bed, than be raising up his heart to God in acts of praise and adoration!

Prayer is the nearest approach to God, and the highest enjoyment of Him, that we are capable of in this life.

It is the noblest exercise of the soul, the most exalted use of our best faculties, and the highest imitation of the blessed inhabitants of Heaven.

When our hearts are full of God, sending up holy desires to the throne of grace, we are then in our highest state, we are upon the utmost heights of human greatness; we are not before kings and princes, but in the presence and audience of the Lord of all the world, and can be no higher, till death is swallowed up in glory.

On the other hand, sleep is the poorest, dullest refreshment of the body, that is so far from being intended as an enjoyment, that we are forced to receive it either in a state of insensibility, or in the folly of dreams.

Sleep is such a dull, stupid state of existence, that even amongst mere animals, we despise them most which are most drowsy.

He, therefore, that chooses to enlarge the slothful indulgence of sleep, rather than be early at his devotions to God, chooses the dullest refreshment of the body, before the highest, noblest employment of the soul; he chooses that state which is a reproach to mere animals, rather than that exercise which is the glory of Angels.

You will perhaps say, though you rise late, yet you are always careful of your devotions when you are up.

It may be so. But what then? Is it well done of you to rise late, because you pray when you are up?

Is it pardonable to waste great part of the day in bed, because some time after you say your prayers?

It is as much your duty to rise to pray, as to pray when you are risen. And if you are late at your prayers, you offer to God the prayers of an idle, slothful worshipper, that rises to prayers as idle servants rise to their labour.

Farther; if you fancy that you are careful of your devotions when you are up, though it be your custom to rise late, you deceive yourself; for you cannot perform your devotions as you ought. For he that cannot deny himself this drowsy indulgence, but must pass away good part of the morning in it, is no more prepared for prayer when he is up, than he is prepared for fasting, abstinence, or any other self-denial. He may indeed more easily read over a form of prayer, than he can perform these duties; but he is no more disposed to enter into the true spirit of prayer than he is disposed to fasting. For sleep thus indulged gives a softness and idleness to all our tempers, and makes us unable to relish anything but what suits with an idle state of mind, and gratifies our natural tempers, as sleep does. So that a person who is a slave to this idleness is in the same temper when he is up; and though he is not asleep, yet he is under the effects of it; and everything that is idle, indulgent, or sensual, pleases him for the same reason that sleep pleases him; and, on the other hand, everything that requires care, or trouble, or self-denial, is hateful to him, for the same reason that he hates to rise. He that places any happiness in this morning indulgence, would be glad to have all the day made happy in the same manner; though not with sleep, yet with such enjoyments as gratify and indulge the body in the same manner as sleep does; or, at least, with such as come as near to it as they can. The remembrance of a warm bed is in his mind all the day, and he is glad when he is not one of those that sit starving in a church.

Now you do not imagine that such a one can truly mortify that body which he thus indulges: yet you might as well think this, as that he can truly perform his devotions; or live in such a drowsy state of indulgence, and yet relish the joys of a spiritual life.

For surely no one will pretend to say that he knows and feels the true happiness of prayer, who does not think it worth his while to be early at it.

It is not possible in nature for an epicure to be truly devout: he must renounce this habit of sensuality, before he can relish the happiness of devotion.

Now he that turns sleep into an idle indulgence, does as much to corrupt and disorder his soul, to make it a slave to bodily appetites, and keep it incapable of all devout and heavenly tempers, as he that turns the necessities of eating into a course of indulgence.

A person that eats and drinks too much does not feel such effects from it, as those do who live in notorious instances of gluttony and intemperance: but yet his course of indulgence, though it be not scandalous in the eyes of the world, nor such as torments his own conscience, is a great and constant hindrance to his improvement in virtue; it gives him eyes that see not, and ears that hear not; it creates a sensuality in the soul, increases the power of bodily passions, and makes him incapable of entering into the true spirit of religion.

Now this is the case of those who waste their time in sleep; it does not disorder their lives, or wound their consciences, as notorious acts of intemperance do; but, like any other more moderate course of indulgence, it silently, and by smaller degrees, wears away the spirit of religion, and sinks the soul into a state of dulness and sensuality.

If you consider devotion only as a time of so much prayer, you may perhaps perform it, though you live in this daily indulgence; but if you consider it as a state of the heart, as a lively fervour of the soul, that is deeply affected with a sense of its own misery and infirmities, and desires the Spirit of God more than all things in the world: you will find that the spirit of indulgence, and the spirit of prayer, cannot subsist together. Mortification of all kinds is the very life and soul of piety; but he that has not so small a degree of it, as to be able to be early at his prayers, can have no reason to think that he has taken up his cross, and is following Christ.

A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law 1686 - 1761

Liberal Angst

Nobody is funnier than Mark Steyn, and he's at the top of his game in this column skewering the various guilt-induced neuroses afflicting the Democratic party and the angst they're generating in the current primary. It reminds me a little of a short version of Tom Wolfe's devastating satire of '60s liberals in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.

RLC

Nanny State

Some city government officials in London just have too much time and too little to do:

A London street is experimenting with padded lampposts to protect those not paying attention from banging into them, ITN reports.

A study conducted by 118 118, a phone directory service, found that one in 10 people has been hurt while focusing on their cell phone instead of where they were walking, ITN reports.

The test lampposts will be given a trial run in London's East End on Brick Lane. If the trial is successful it will be rolled out in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

Maybe next they'll put up signs reminding pedestrians to wash behind their ears. A photo of one of the padded lampposts can be found here.

RLC

Giving Them Our Cloak Also

Last month we noted the remarks of Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams whose unfortunate suggestion it was that Britain should allow Muslims to arbitrate certain civil matters according to their own law. Despite being met with a chilly reception in those precincts in the West were dhimmi status has yet to penetrate, some asked what's the harm. If the Muslims wish to beat their wives or own several of them to beat, so what? It's the Christian thing to do to let the Muslims have their way.

David Yerushalmi at First Things offers a dissenting opinion:

So what's the fuss all about? The fuss is about the elephant in the room, or, better yet, the wolf in sheep's clothing that some Americans fail to acknowledge. Put simply, not all foreign or religious laws are equal. Most foreign laws, be they sourced in secular legal codes or religious ones, are not predicated on a doctrine of world domination and holy war. But what if a legal system is founded upon the goal of conquering the world through holy war when persuasion and subjugation are not immediately successful?

In other words, should a society lend legitimacy to a legal system whose raison d'�tre is the destruction of that society? Moreover, how should a society treat a legal system that obligates its faithful to use violent jihad to accomplish its goals?

The chorus of objectors at this point is predictable: Who says that Shari'a's goal is world hegemony and its method violent jihad? The answer of course rests with the Shari'a authorities who have addressed this question over the past 1,200 years. Granted, there have been some lone voices (notably certain Sufi scholars) that have sought to temper this rather violent doctrine, but one need only pick up any treatise of the Shari'a authorities, including the great Andalusian philosopher and jurist Ibn Rushd, known to the Western world as Averro�s and lauded as the model of moderation during Islam's Golden Era, to learn that the Muslim nation is obligated to engage in kinetic warfare against polytheists and other manifestations of apostasy. For the record, Shari'a authorities consider a secular constitution that does not abide by Islamic law as a form of polytheism.

And, sadly, one need not rely on ancient medieval Shari'a authorities to know that Osama bin Laden bases his war against the infidel on more than dusty fatwas or even the radical political writings of the twentieth-century Islamists such as Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi or Sayyid Qutb.

For example, Dow Jones & Company, the owner of the Wall Street Journal, employs Mufti Taqi Usmani, a world-renowned Shari'a authority. Sitting as one of the most esteemed members of the Dow Jones Shari'a Advisory Board, Usmani informs Dow Jones which companies are Shari'a-compliant for admission into the Dow Jones Islamic Index. This index is then licensed by mutual funds to determine which companies are permissible investments for their Shari'a-compliant portfolios.

It should surprise no one that Usmani has ruled in line with Shari'a's 1,200 years of jurisprudence that violent jihad against the infidels in the West is an ongoing obligation. In fact, he has dedicated an entire chapter to the subject in his book Islam and Modernism. [C]hapter 11 sets out Usmani's legal ruling explicitly rejecting the notion that violent jihad is no longer obligatory for Muslims in the West.

In this chapter, Usmani carefully explains that the goal of jihad is not "freedom of religion" but the absolute "domination" of the non-Muslim by the Muslim. The Muslim's freedom to practice his religion in the West does not excuse the Muslim from his obligation to engage in violent Jihad against the non-Muslim West.

Thus, the problem with the "live and let live" approach is that there is at least one creed that will use every means available, including violence, to destroy every other. A civil society that is not prepared to make distinctions between anti-Western theo-political legal codes and innocuous religious ones could eventually find itself engaged in a battle for its very existence.

Precisely. We must remind our friends from time to time that just because Muslims are religious doesn't mean they're Amish.

RLC

Pew Survey

The Wall Street Journal has some thoughts on the recent Pew Survey of Religion in America. A couple of highlights:

A new survey of the American religious landscape, out this week from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, confirms the dynamism of American religious experience. Its results stand in contrast to Europe, where Christian observance has slowly withered under the Continent's now moribund state-sanctioned churches.

Some 60% of Americans say religion is "very important" to them. That's compared with 12% for the French and 25% for the Italians. The study describes a "competitive religious marketplace" in which 84% of Americans claim one of hundreds of religious affiliations -- from Pentecostalism and Judaism to Islam and Mormonism.

Religions that demand the most of people are growing the fastest. The mainline Protestant churches -- with their less exclusionary views of salvation, looser rules for sexual conduct and sermons about social justice -- have lost membership, especially since the early 1990s. The more traditional evangelical churches keep growing.

People need something to believe in, and if they don't have it their lives become arid and meaningless. Secularism offers nothing to fill the void left by the loss of religious faith and many liberal churches are virtually secular in the extent to which any real religious conviction has been scrubbed from their worship service.

The lesson of the survey seems to be that if people are offered a muscular faith they'll respond to it, but a tepid faith that amounts to little more than weekly fellowship offers nothing more than what most people could find at the corner tavern. Why should anyone find that compelling or attractive?

There's more on the Pew findings at the link.

RLC

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

I'm no golfer so I shouldn't pass judgment, but this poor woman's shot makes it appear as though she's not much of a golfer either. Even so, what are the chances?

The hapless bird appears to be a ring-billed gull of which there are zillions. I guess that makes it a dead ringer.

HT: Telic Thoughts

RLC

The Silence

Ingmar Bergman is famous for his films addressing man's (and his own) estrangement from God. The Seventh Seal, for example, raises questions about God's goodness in the face of death and evil, Winter Light depicts a clergyman's loss of faith due in large measure to his sterile service to a God who does not speak, and The Silence is a bleak, stark examination of modern secular man's alienation from himself and others, the utter emptiness of his life, and, most of all, his total loneliness. All three films, but especially the last, drive home the same simple Sartrean message in quiet, somber voice: In a world without God man is forlorn - he is in despair.

For Bergman, raised in a Lutheran parsonage by devout parents, God doesn't exist, but His non-existence is not something the film-maker celebrates. Rather it's a cause of great disquiet and anguish. Every scene in The Silence stresses our alienation and isolation from each other. We are aliens in a foreign country, we don't speak the same language, we don't share the same purposes, we harbor bitterness and resentments, and, as a result, we are miserable, alone, and emotionally barren. In the absence of God our lives, in Bergman's telling, are boring, empty, tedious and bleak. They are a darkness relieved only by momentary sparks of joyless and tawdry pleasure.

These films are not for children (This is especially true of The Silence which is sexually explicit), but they are most assuredly for thinking adults, especially Christians and agnostics, and for the same reason: They tease out in artful metaphor the existential predicament of contemporary man without God and reveal the fraudulence of modern materialism's charming but treacherous promise to lead us to earthly contentment. Bergman's films confront the viewer with the uncomfortable truth that where materialism actually leads is straight into an abyss of hopelessness and meaninglessness.

Sadly, although Bergman was able to brilliantly diagnose the human condition and translate it onto the screen, he was unable, as far as I know, to bring himself to accept the only remedy for that condition that works. Bergman died last year at the age of 89.

RLC

Canadian Brownshirts

Liberal fascism expresses itself in many ways. One is to intimidate and coerce their opponents into silence by threatening them with lawsuits as is happening in Canada. The publisher of the Mohammed cartoons, Ezra Levant, is being hounded by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, as is conservative columnist Mark Steyn and many others. Canada doesn't have the equivalent of our First Amendment so unpopular or politically incorrect speech is much riskier there than here, at least for now. Connie Fournier writes:

The conservative internet ... is under attack [in Canada]. The Canadian Human Rights Commission has already been used on many occasions to shut down websites and to place lifetime speech bans on webmasters who have been hauled before its tribunals. The human rights commission attacks on Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn have made a lot of people aware of the danger of allowing these government bodies to regulate the speech of Canadians, and the internet has been abuzz with stories of bureaucratic abuse. The fight for free speech has begun.

As you might expect, these commissions and those who support them are not prepared to go down without a fight. In recent days, defamation notices have begun to arrive at the doors of the bloggers and website owners who have dared to comment on former human rights investigator and EGALE member, Richard Warman, or his staunchest defender, former Liberal war room strategist, Warren Kinsella.

The defamation suits that are being filed by this pair threaten to put a chill on the conservative blogosphere. The fact that site owners are being sued over posts that have been made by their members is already making webmasters wonder if allowing free speech on their websites is worth the risk to their homes or their savings.

The people bringing these suits don't wear brown shirts and don't sport swastika tattoos, but they've adopted the same tactics as those in the 1930s who did: Intimidation and denial of free expression. History always repeats itself.

RLC

Crumbling Paradigm

Suzan Mazur at Scoop reports on an upcoming conference convened to discuss the current ferment in evolutionary biology. It turns out that behind the scenes a lot of biologists are growing increasingly disenchanted with Darwin's theory of natural selection because it doesn't have the explanatory power that it was thought to have a few decades ago.

Here are some excerpts from Mazur's article:

What it amounts to is a gathering of 16 biologists and philosophers of rock star stature - let's call them "the Altenberg 16" - who recognize that the theory of evolution which most practicing biologists accept and which is taught in classrooms today, is inadequate in explaining our existence. It's pre the discovery of DNA, lacks a theory for body form and does not accomodate "other" new phenomena.

A wave of scientists now questions natural selection's relevance, though few will publicly admit it. And with such a fundamental struggle underway, the hurling of slurs such as "looney Marxist hangover", "philosopher" (a scientist who can't get grants anymore), "crackpot", is hardly surprising.

When I asked esteemed Harvard evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin in a phone conversation what role natural selection plays in evolution, he said, "Natural selection occurs."

Philosopher Jerry Fodor essentially argues that biologists increasingly see the central story of Darwin as wrong in a way that can't be repaired.

When I called Fodor to discuss his article, he joked that he was now in the Witness Protection Program because he'd been so besieged following its publication ...."all I'm wanting to argue is that whatever the story turns out to be, it's not going to be the selectionist story".

Fodor also told me that "you can't put this stuff in the press because it's an attack on the theory of natural selection" and besides "99.99% of the population have no idea what the theory of natural selection is".

Not all the participants at the conference agree with the sentiments expresswed above, but there is clearly an upheaval taking place among evolutionary thinkers. Scientists don't go looking to replace a paradigm unless there is a sense that the old paradigm is no longer fruitful.

Neither should anyone think that the participants are slouching toward Intelligent design, even though ID proponents have for almost twenty years (and creationists for even longer) been pointing out that Darwinism is an inadequate explanation for biological complexity. The "Altenberg 16" are all metaphysical materialists and any theory with which they supplant Darwinism will be perforce a materialist theory, which is too bad. It just means that in a few years they'll have to have another conference.

HT: Evolution News and Views.

RLC

First Spouse

We're hearing much vaporous rhetoric this election season concerning the "change" we need to make in our politics. Most of the rhetoric is coming from the Democrats, and one wonders exactly what sort of change they have in mind, but one change is becoming increasingly obvious. If either of the Democrat candidates wins the presidency there will be a stark transformation in the nature of the person who fills the role of first spouse.

If a Democrat prevails in November we'll go from the classy Laura Bush to either the decidedly unclassy Bill Clinton or the virago Michelle Obama. Ms Obama, in case you haven't heard, has followed her announcement that she is now, for the first time in her adult life, proud of her country with the tactless insult that America is "just a downright mean" country. Somehow one gets the feeling that Ms Obama doesn't much like being an American. Neither she nor Mr. Clinton will bring to the White House the quiet grace and elegance Mrs. Bush did. She'll be sorely missed.

RLC

Why the Young Don't Vote

I was listening the other day to the host of a local talk show discussing with some college kids the lack of interest in politics among young people and why the young are so unlikely to vote.

The host thought that youthful apathy was a shame, but I didn't see what the problem was. Why should young people care about politics? Most people become interested in the process when they start paying taxes, owning property, raising families, and serving in the military. It's when they become invested in society and start thinking about the future that they begin to see the importance of the ideas which will determine that future. Until then they're much too preoccupied with their studies, sports and the opposite sex to spend the time it requires to learn about what's going on in the political arena.

The problem, in my opinion, is not that young people don't care about politics. That's normal. Nor is it a problem that they don't vote. Those who don't keep abreast of the affairs of state are doing the right thing by not voting. The problem is that our politicians, in an attempt to exploit the ignorance of the young for their own political gain, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1971 thereby enfranchising a demographic group which is very unlikely to go to the voting booth with an informed opinion on whom they should vote for.

It does not enhance democracy to have an electorate consisting of large numbers of uninformed voters. It's bad enough that many people over 21 really have no well-thought out idea why they're voting for the person they are, but it makes the problem worse when we add to their number by encouraging 18 year olds to join them.

While we're on the subject he's a voluntary voter disqualification test. If you can't get at least twelve answers correct perhaps you should consider recusing yourself from voting while you bone up:

1. Which political party is most likely to let you keep most of your paycheck?
2. Which political party is most likely to appoint judges who will rule on matters of law according to what the constitution says?
3. Which political party is most likely to scale back spending on national security?
4. Which political party looks most favorably on abortion, gay marriage, and the secularization of society?
5. Which political party is most likely to reduce the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S.?
6. Which political party is most likely to favor measures which will make us a "color-blind" society?
7. Who is the current Secretary of State? Vice-President?
8. Which party currently controls the House of Representatives?
9. Which party currently controls the Senate?
10. Who is the current Speaker of the House? Senate Majority Leader?
11. Who were the last two justices appointed to the Supreme Court?
12. Who is the current Chief Justice of the United States?
13. Which party favors policies which would lower the price of oil and gasoline by increasing the supply?
14. Which party is more likely to try to make it easier for businesses to operate profitably?
15. Which has more value, the dollar or the Euro?

Answers:

1. Republican
2. Republican
3. Democrat
4. Democrat
5. Republican
6. Republican
7. Condaleeza Rice, Dick Cheney
8. Democrat
9. Democrat
10. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid
11. John Roberts, Samuel Alito
12. John Roberts
13. Republican
14. Republican
15. Euro

How'd you do?

RLC

Losing Touch

A USA Today article laments the cultural amnesia which has settled over the last couple of generations of Americans. There is, it appears, a diminishing awareness of the history, literature, religion, etc. that have shaped our nation, and this causes historical, literary and Biblical allusions to pass right over the heads of many of us:

Twenty-five years after the federal report A Nation at Risk challenged U.S. public schools to raise the quality of education, the study finds high schoolers still lack important historical and cultural underpinnings of "a complete education." And, its authors fear, the nation's current focus on improving basic reading and math skills in elementary school might only make matters worse, giving short shrift to the humanities, even if children can read and do math.

"If you think it matters whether or not kids have common historical touchstones and whether, at some level, we feel like members of a common culture, then familiarity with this knowledge matters a lot," says American Enterprise Institute researcher Rick Hess, who wrote the study.

I recall once referring in a high school class to an event as reminding me of Moses parting the Red Sea and being greeted by a roomful of puzzled faces. When I asked why they were perplexed it turned out that only a handful of students knew what I was referring to and one of them only knew because he'd seen the movie Prince of Egypt.

Even when they're taught history and literature, of course, many students don't learn it, but even so, we do seem to be drinking from many more cultural wells than did our grandparents. Allusions which would have been widely understood a generation or two ago are met with blank looks today, but this isn't so much a failure of our schools as it is a consequence of cable tv and the internet which offer so much variety that we no longer have a shared cultural repertoire. It used to be that everyone pretty much watched the same television shows, saw the same movies, listened to the same music, and read mostly the same newspapers, magazines and books. That's no longer the case and one result is that our cultural heritage feels like it's slipping away from us.

People can argue to what extent this is true and whether it's good, bad or indifferent. For my part, I think it forebodes ill. A healthy society is one in which there is a high degree of cohesion, and cohesion depends upon a shared language, shared religion, shared values, shared literature, shared historical and cultural experience, etc. Modern culture exerts a centrifugal force on society, pulling us away from each other, by limiting the things we share in common, and that's not a good augur for the future. The less we share in common the more difficult it will be for us to live together as one people.

RLC

Bait and Switch

Like the spouse of a chronically unfaithful husband, Americans who trust the promises of our government and this administration to secure our borders have been betrayed yet again. The Washington Post reports that:

The Bush administration has scaled back plans to quickly build a "virtual fence" along the U.S.-Mexico border, delaying completion of the first phase of the project by at least three years and shifting away from a network of tower-mounted sensors and surveillance gear, federal officials said yesterday.

Technical problems discovered in a 28-mile pilot project south of Tucson prompted the change in plans, Department of Homeland Security officials and congressional auditors told a House subcommittee.

Though the department took over that initial stretch Friday from Boeing, authorities confirmed that Project 28, the initial deployment of the Secure Border Initiative network, did not work as planned or meet the needs of the U.S. Border Patrol.

The announcement marked a major setback for what President Bush in May 2006 called "the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history." The virtual fence was to be a key component of his proposed overhaul of U.S. immigration policies, which died last year in the Senate.

Investigators for the Government Accountability Office had earlier warned that the effort was beset by both expected and unplanned difficulties. But yesterday, they disclosed new troubles that will require a redesign and said the first phase will not be completed until near the end of the next president's first term.

The whole thing seems like a shell game, a scheme to drag out construction of a fence until the American people finally just come to accept their responsibility to subsidize Mexican poverty. George Bush's failure to stanch illegal immigration will haunt this nation in numerous ways for generations. Despite the many good things he has accomplished as president, achievements we've discussed on Viewpoint on numerous occasions, his failure to deal with illegal immigration is seen by many Americans as stupid at best and treacherous at worst. And the depressing thing is that no matter who gets elected in November the situation will only deteriorate further.

HT: Michelle Malkin.

RLC

Obamian Logic

Two more key al Qaeda in Iraq figures were killed in Mosul yesterday which brings to 142 the number of leaders and operatives killed or captured in and around Mosul since an offensive was launched in January to wipe them out.

Bill Roggio has details on who the latest casualties were.

Here's a question for Senator Obama: If, as president, he will pull our troops out of Iraq as he promised but send them back in if al Qaeda shows up there, why pull them out while al Qaeda's still there? Am I just obtuse or is there something peculiar about Chauncy's logic?

RLC

Intellectual Genealogy of the Holocaust

Last year I read a book by Richard Weikert titled From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany and was very impressed with the evidence Weikert brought to bear on his thesis. He argued cogently that Darwinian assumptions provided the rationale for the early eugenicists who wanted to purify the German race as well as for the Nazis who came along in the twenties and thirties and put the eugenic dream into nightmarish practice. Weikert explicity said in his book that he wasn't arguing that Darwinism leads inevitably to Nazism, only that Nazis found justification for their beliefs in Darwin's work. In other words, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Nazi.

Books like Weikert's are uncomfortable reading for most Darwinians, however, and one philosopher has taken it upon himself to fight back. Michael Ruse has written an article for the Tallahassee Democrat in which he dismisses the connection between Darwin's ideas and those of the later eugenicists and Nazis. Unfortunately, almost everything in Ruse's piece either misrepresents what people like Weikert have said or is otherwise a punch that doesn't land.

Weikert himself replies to Ruse and part of that response can be read here. Here's a highlight:

Contra Ruse's claim, Nazis did not abandon Darwinism because of its racial egalitarian implications. In fact, the vast majority of Darwinists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries argued that Darwinism proved racial inequality. Darwin claimed in chapter two of The Descent of Man that there were great differences in moral disposition and intellect between the "highest races" and the "lowest savages." Later in Descent he declared, "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races." Racial inegalitarianism was built into Darwin's analysis from the start.

Haeckel, whom Ruse correctly cites as the most prominent German Darwinist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even claimed that humanity should be divided into twelve distinct species in four separate genera. He declared repeatedly that the distance between the highest and lowest humans was wider than the distance between humans and apes.

This Darwinian-based racial inegalitarianism was a mainstream view among early twentieth-century German scientists and scholars. Before and during the Nazi period, the leading anthropologists and eugenicists - Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz, Otmar von Verschuer, Hans F. K. Guenther, and many others - were all avid Darwinists and all believed that Darwinism implied racial inequality. Ruse's claim that "Nazi ideologists quickly realized how completely antithetical the whole evolution idea was to their own ideology" is about as far from the mark as you can get.

Also, I should mention that Haeckel was also the first person in German history to advance the idea that disabled people should be killed, a program the Nazis carried out. Most of the eugenicists and physicians who promoted "euthanasia" for the disabled - and most of those who carried it out under Nazism - used overtly Darwinian justifications for it.

In his article in the Tallahassee Democrat Ruse seeks to persuade us not to read too much into the fact that many eugenicists were Darwinians:

[T]he message of Jesus has [also]been used to draw contradictory inferences - because of their faith, some Christians (starting with George Bush and Tony Blair) think the move into Iraq was morally justified, whereas others (Quakers, for a start) oppose the war bitterly because of their reading of the Christian Gospels. Likewise, Darwinism has been used to draw contradictory inferences.

Ruse says that just as people draw different conclusions about the morality of war from the teachings of Jesus so, too, can one draw different conclusions about the teaching of Darwin. Ruse is implicitly comparing going to war with eugenics, but there's a confusion in this.

Nothing Jesus said was an explicit justification for war. The controversy among Christians over the morality of war arises because it's not clear that Jesus ever actually prohibited it. In other words, because of the logic of Jesus' words enjoing peace and compassion, war is seen by many Christians as justifiable only as a last resort before surrender or as a necessary tactic for securing the safety of the oppressed and endangered. No Christian sees war as good or desirable, only necessary.

On the other hand, Darwin places no such constraints upon the eugenicist. Much of what Darwin said was clearly a justification for eugenics. The logic of Darwin's own words leads to the conclusion that it's morally permissable, even desirable, to actively cull the weak and infirm from society's midst. Darwin's thought doesn't require one to support eugenics, of course, but the conclusion that eugenics is good or desirable follows like the wagon behind the tractor from his writings.

Consider the quote above from The Descent of Man in the context of this statement from Darwin's Autobiography: "One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life...only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best."

Mix the belief that selection processes are exterminating the savages with the belief that there are no objective moral constraints acting on human beings together and out pops the Final Solution to the race problem in Germany.

RLC

Talking Our Way to Nuclear War

Bernard Lewis is one of the world's foremost authorities on Islam and the Middle East so when he speaks people listen. The World Tribune.com ran an article the other day on a conference in Jerusalem at which Lewis was a featured speaker. Here's the gist of the article:

Iran could welcome a nuclear war with Israel or the United States.

A leading U.S. scholar on the Middle East has asserted that Iran's leadership does not resemble the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Bernard Lewis, a professor at Princeton University, said the mullah regime in Teheran believes that the Shi'ite messiah would be ushered back by a nuclear war, Middle East Newsline reported.

"Iran's leadership comprises a group of extreme fanatical Muslims who believe that their messianic times have arrived," Lewis said. "This is quite dangerous. Though Russia and the U.S. both had nuclear weapons, it was clear that they would never use them because of MAD - mutual assured destruction. Each side knew it would be destroyed if it would attack the other."

"But with these people in Iran, mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent factor, but rather an inducement," Lewis said. "They feel that they can hasten the final messianic process. This is an extremely dangerous situation of which it is important to be aware."

In an address to the Jerusalem Conference on Feb. 20, Lewis, a longtime consultant to the U.S. and other Western governments, said Iran was working to assemble a nuclear weapon. He said Teheran regards a nuclear weapon as in the interest of Islam.

"It is actively pursuing nuclear power. Even a non-nuclear Iran is dangerous for Israel, and it must be carefully watched."

So, Iran yearns for the advent of the twelfth imam which can only happen if there's a nuclear war. Iran is building nuclear weapons and will not be dissuaded from their goal. So far from being intimidated by the prospect of mutual destruction, they welcome it. Given these facts, what is the only rational policy for the world to adopt? Obama says he'd gather our allies and sit down and talk to the Iranians, but what would they talk about? Unless we are prepared to use overwhelming force to destroy their weapons program what incentive do the Iranians have to heed anything a President Obama tells them? Why aren't the Democrats being pressed harder on this?

The civilized world needs to unify behind a two stage policy of shutting down the Iranian economy and fomenting revolution in Tehran. If that doesn't work then there needs to be a massive pre-emptive air and ground assault on their nuclear facilities and their leadership. This would have terrible consequences, to be sure, but the only other option is to let Iran build their nukes and that option is an invitation to a nuclear holocaust.

Unfortunately, George Bush seems to have decided to pass Iran on to his successor. God help Israel, and us, if that successor thinks that talk without the threat of real punishment will deter religious zealots who see themselves as the agents of Allah.

RLC

D.C. Stranglers

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are slugging it out to see who will outdo the other in condemning the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which abolished tariffs on imports moving between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Both of them have claimed that the agreement has harmed the American worker and will be rescinded just as soon as they are elected president.

It turns out, however, that on the facts, they're both wrong. Steve Chapman at Real Clear Politics explains why. Here are his key points:

[Obama] claims a million jobs have vanished because of the deal. That sounds devastating, but over the last 14 years, the American economy has added a net total of 25 million jobs -- some of them, incidentally, attributable to expanded trade with Mexico. When NAFTA took effect in 1994, the unemployment rate was 6.7 percent. Today it's 4.9 percent.

But maybe all the jobs we lost were good ones and all the new ones are minimum-wage positions sweeping out abandoned factories? Actually, no. According to data compiled by Harvard economist Robert Z. Lawrence, the average blue-collar worker's wages and benefits, adjusted for inflation, have risen by 11 percent under NAFTA. Instead of driving pay scales down, it appears to have pulled them up.

Manufacturing employment has declined, but not because we're producing less: Manufacturing output has not only expanded, but has expanded far faster than it did in the decade before NAFTA. The problem is that as productivity rises, we can make more stuff with fewer people. That's not a bad thing. In fact, it's essentially the definition of economic progress.

We're not the only country facing that phenomenon. China makes everything these days, right? But between 1995 and 2002, it lost 15 million manufacturing jobs.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, estimates that 90 percent of the people in his profession regard [NAFTA] as a good thing.

Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University trade economist, supports Obama and thinks his positions on trade are generally better than Clinton's. "But on NAFTA," Bhagwati told me, "he is dead wrong."

Both Democrats have promised to do away with the Bush tax cuts which were the engine to the economy for the last seven years and now they wish to do away with NAFTA which has been a benefit to the American consumer and worker. They will also raise taxes on business and pile on more onerous regulations. Democrats, in short, seem never to have met an economy they didn't want to strangle.

UPDATE: Now there is reason to think that the Obama camp has been talking out of both sides of its mouth on NAFTA:

On Wednesday, CTV reported that a senior member of Obama's campaign called the Canadian government within the last month -- saying that when Senator Obama talks about opting out of the free trade deal, the Canadian government shouldn't worry. The operative said it was just campaign rhetoric not to be taken seriously.

The Obama campaign told CTV late Thursday night that no message was passed to the Canadian government that suggests that Obama does not mean what he says about opting out of NAFTA if it is not renegotiated.

However, the Obama camp did not respond to repeated questions from CTV on reports that a conversation on this matter was held between Obama's senior economic adviser -- Austan Goolsbee -- and the Canadian Consulate General in Chicago.

If there's nothing to the story why don't the Obama people simply deny that they had the conversation? And if the story's true, Obama's new politics looks just like the old politics - say whatever you need to say in order to win.

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

The Negro Project

Planned Parenthood was founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger in the 1920s in order, among other reasons, to better purge society of undesirables in general and blacks in particular. Here are a few excerpts from her writings which give us an insight into her thinking:

Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.

It [charity] encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant [emphasis added].

The most serious charge that can be brought against modern "benevolence" is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.

We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the [black] minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

It doesn't seem like things have changed much among Sanger's heirs at Planned Parenthood. This video was made by some folks pretending to want to make a financial contribution to PP for the express purpose of aborting black babies because the world needs fewer blacks. The group was interested to see how PP would respond to their offer. At least one representative of the organization sounded both delighted and sympathetic:

You can read more about Margaret Sanger and her "Negro Project" at the link.

HT: Evangelical Outpost

RLC

Liberal Fascism

Not long after I started to become politically aware I noticed that anyone who was conservative was often called a fascist or a neo-nazi by the left. To sit on the right on the ideological spectrum was to be a fascist, and fascism, as everyone knew, was evil, ergo conservatives were evil. This struck me as arrant nonsense then, and Jonah Goldberg explains in his best-seller Liberal Fascism why it should strike us all as arrant nonsense today.

Fascism, as Goldberg points out over 400 pages of impressive historical scholarship, so far from being an ideology of the right, is in fact the incubator out of which the modern political left has emerged.

Fascism arose in the second decade of the 20th century in Italy, Germany and the United States pretty much contemporaneously, and in each country it took on a hue unique to the personality of the nation. Nevertheless, despite the differences, all fascist movements shared certain traits in common. These include a predilection for economic socialism, a fervent nationalism, anti-Christian secularism, totalitarianism, militarism, egalitarianism, tribalism, subordination of the family and individual to the state, and so on.

In the U.S. all of these traits were found among the progressives of the first quarter of the 20th century, particularly among those who served in the Wilson administration (and later in FDR's administration) and, indeed, to some extent in Woodrow Wilson himself. Progressivism gradually morphed into contemporary liberalism which still exhibits many, though perhaps not all, of the fascist traits of its earlier forebears.

Goldberg explores the similarities and differences between the fascism of Wilson, Mussolini, Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton. At first, the reader thinks the author must surely be overstating his case, but it needs be borne in mind that he's not arguing that Wilson, FDR or Mrs. Clinton are of the same ilk as Adolf Hitler, only that their politics and policies are all drawn from the same ideological well. We tend to assume that fascism is, in Orwell's phrase, "a boot stamping on a human face, forever", but Goldberg persuades us that that's a myth. Much American fascism is actually "smiley face" fascism, and the book's cover features a smiley face with a Hitlerian moustache.

Nor does Goldberg think that everything about liberal fascism is bad, though much of it is. Rather his purpose is to instruct us in the history of this political ideology and to show that those on the left who hurl the charge of fascism at conservatives really don't know what they're talking about.

It's often thought, too, that modern liberalism is closer to communism than to fascism, but communism and fascism are actually fraternal twins. The main difference between them is that communism tends to be an international version of socialism whereas fascism is a nationalistic brand of socialism. Fascists are also usually content to allow business to remain in private hands provided that owners and managers use their enterprises to promote the ends of the state. In fascist polities government controls business without actually expropriating it. For this reason 20th century fascists often saw themselves as promoting a "third way" between total state ownership and laissez faire capitalism.

Perhaps the best way to picture ideological relationships is to visualize a divided line. At the far right of the line is libertarianism, the view that individuals should be as free of government interference as possible. Moving toward the center we encounter conservatism which shares the libertarian desire for individual freedom but which sees a more significant role for government than libertarians do. As we cross the center of the line we find socialism or statism, the view that government should own or control all important elements of the economy and society. Statists believe that the rights of the individual should be subordinated to the welfare of the collective. The individual lives to serve the state.

Socialism comes in two forms, totalitarian and democratic. Many moderate liberals are democratic socialists. It's among the totalitarian socialists that we find communists and fascists, and it is here that many of the modern left find their home. They don't usually call themselves communists or fascists, of course, preferring instead to identify themselves as progressives or leftists, but their sympathies with the goals and methods of the totalitarians make the label they apply to themselves moot.

It is, of course, impossible to do a 400 page book justice or to summarize its argument in a single post, but anyone who wishes to read more about it can visit the Liberal Fascism site at National Review Online. If you can't read the entire book, which, despite its scholarship, is very accessible, reading just the introduction would be of considerable benefit. Goldberg has written an excellent tutorial, and his work should be on the reading list of anyone studying, or interested in, politics and political ideology.

RLC

Obama's Defense Strategy

Senator Obama tells us why we shouldn't vote for him to be President in November:

He will end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. To understand why this would be exceedingly reckless go here.

He'll set a goal of eliminating nuclear weapons from the world. This is empty rhetoric. How, exactly, does he propose to disarm the rest of the world including Israel, India, Pakistan, China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia?

He'll work for a global ban on fissile material. This would mean that nuclear power plants, the only feasible alternative to coal burning power plants, would be taken off the table not jut in the U.S. but around the world.

He'll end our missile defense program. This is the prgram that currently gives us hope that we'll one day be able to shoot down an incoming nuclear-tipped ICBM. Why would he want to deprive us of a technology that could one day save millions of American lives?

He'll take our ICBMs off hair trigger alert, but I didn't think, though I could be wrong about this, that they were on one.

In any event, the Senator simply doesn't sound to me like he's really thought through what he's saying. His strategy for a strong defense seems to be not to have one. It's disturbing to think that someone of his views may be our next Commander-in-chief.

RLC

Badgering Rape Victims

Newsday.com carries a deeply troubling story about a twelve year old girl who was raped, but when the case went to trial the defense attorney badgered the young girl, damaging the credibility of her testimony to the point where the rapist, an adult against whom there was considerable evidence, got off on a reduced charge.

This is outrageous enough but the story takes on a surreal aspect when we learn that the lawyer, despite her aggressiveness toward the young victim and her lack of sympathy for the ordeal the girl was going through, is a prominent champion of women's rights.

The story becomes almost incredible when we learn that the lawyer was Hillary Clinton:

Hillary Rodham Clinton often invokes her "35 years of experience making change" on the campaign trail, recounting her work in the 1970s on behalf of battered and neglected children and impoverished legal-aid clients.

But there is a little-known episode Clinton doesn't mention in her standard campaign speech in which those two principles collided. In 1975, a 27-year-old Hillary Rodham, acting as a court-appointed attorney, attacked the credibility of a 12-year-old girl in mounting an aggressive defense for an indigent client accused of rape in Arkansas - using her child development background to help the defendant.

In May 1975, Washington County prosecutor Mahlon Gibson called Rodham, who had taken over the law clinic months earlier, to tell her she'd been appointed to represent a hard-drinking factory worker named Thomas Alfred Taylor, who had requested a female attorney.

In her 2003 autobiography "Living History," Clinton writes that she initially balked at the assignment, but eventually secured a lenient plea deal for Taylor after a New York-based forensics expert she hired "cast doubt on the evidentiary value of semen and blood samples collected by the sheriff's office."

However, that account leaves out a significant aspect of her defense strategy - attempting to impugn the credibility of the victim, according to a Newsday examination of court and investigative files and interviews with witnesses, law enforcement officials and the victim.

Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader's honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out "older men" like Taylor, according to a July 1975 affidavit signed "Hillary D. Rodham" in compact cursive.

Rodham, legal and child welfare experts say, did nothing unethical by attacking the child's credibility - although they consider her defense of Taylor to be aggressive.

"She was vigorously advocating for her client. What she did was appropriate," said Andrew Schepard, director of Hofstra Law School's Center for Children, Families and the Law. "He was lucky to have her as a lawyer ... In terms of what's good for the little girl? It would have been hell on the victim. But that wasn't Hillary's problem."

And that's the point. Hillary was able to suppress her feminist principles in order to win the case, even if it meant browbeating and confusing a sixth grade rape victim so that the child's testimony was discredited.

The victim, now 46, told Newsday that she was raped by Taylor, denied that she wanted any relationship with him and blamed him for contributing to three decades of severe depression and other personal problems.

"It's not true, I never sought out older men - I was raped," the woman said in an interview in the fall. Newsday is withholding her name as the victim of a sex crime.

Questions: What difference does it make if the girl did seek out older men? Does that justify the rape? Don't feminists like Ms Clinton remind us that sexual provocations on the part of women never justify sexual assault? Is anyone in the MSM ever going to ask her about her tactics in this case?

Answers: None, no, perpetually, be serious.

RLC

Interview With Timothy Keller

Timothy Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhatten and author of the very popular (currently #18 on the New York Times best-seller list) The Reason for God, is interviewed by Anthony Sacramone at First Things.

In answer to a question about how thinking has changed between the 1940s when C.S. Lewis was writing books on Christian apologetics and the current era Keller replies:

Lewis definitely lived at a time in which people were more certain across the board that empirical, straight-line rationality was the way you decided what truth was, and there's just not as much of a certainty now. Also, when Lewis was writing, people were able to follow sustained arguments that had a number of points that built on one another. I guess I should say we actually have a kind of rationality-attention-deficit disorder now. You can make a reasonable argument, you can use logic, but it really has to be relatively transparent. You have to get to your point pretty quickly.

In New York City, these are pretty smart people, very educated people, but even by the mid-nineties I had found that the average young person found Mere Christianity-it just didn't keep their attention, because they really couldn't follow the arguments. They took too long. This long chain of syllogistic reasoning wasn't something that they were trained in doing. I don't think they're irrational, they are as rational, but they want something of a mixture of logic and personal appeal.

Another question tries to pin down how Keller would describe the church of which he is the pastor. Sacramone says: I've heard you refer to Redeemer as a seeker church. Do you see Redeemer as part of the emerging church phenomenon, and what does that mean?

No, no, no, no. The words "seeker church" now I think mean Willow Creek to most people, which is a service that is strictly-Willow Creek branded that term, so I probably can't use it anymore.

Seriously?

Yeah, well the seeker church is a church in which you have sort of low participation, there's a talk, there's good music-but it's not really a worship service. You're not trying to get people engaged. You are targeting nonbelieving, skeptical people as the audience. That's considered a seeker church. And I would have always said that Redeemer is the kind of church in which we're trying to speak-it's a worship service, but we're trying to speak in the vernacular. We're trying to speak in a way that doesn't confuse or turn off nonbelievers. We want nonbelievers to be there. I think that a lot of ministers would never say, "We expect nonbelievers to be constantly there, lots of them there, incubating in the services." And we do. We do expect that. In that sense we'd be a seeker church. But now I'm afraid I don't think it's a good word to use, because when people hear "seeker church" they're thinking something else.

I found that if you define megachurch as anything over two thousand people, then yes, then we are. But here's four ways in which we're not a megachurch, or we don't do things people associate with megachurches. One is, we do no advertising or publicity of any sort, except I'm trying to get the book out there so people read it and have their lives changed by it, but Redeemer's never advertised or publicized. And the reason is, if a person walks in off the street just because they've heard about Redeemer through advertising, and they have questions or they want to get involved, there's almost no way to do it unless you have all kinds of complicated programs, places where they can go. But if they come with a friend who already goes there, their questions are answered naturally, the next steps happen organically, the connections they want to make happen naturally . . . We do not want a crowd of spectators. We want a community.

Secondly, we do almost no technology. We don't have laser-light shows, we don't have Jumbotrons, we don't have overheard projectors, we don't have screens. We don't have anything like that. Thirdly, we have a lot of classical music, chamber music-we are not hip at all. We don't go out of our way to be hip.

There's much more on the interview at the link.

RLC

Three Cheers for Cultural Chauvinism

Lawrence Harrison of Tufts University and author of The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save It From Itself looks at the assumptions of our nation's multicultural moment and finds much not to like. In an essay in Christian Science Monitor Harrison observes that:

Since the 1960s, multiculturalism has become a dominant feature of the political and intellectual landscape of the West. But multiculturalism rests on a frail foundation: cultural relativism, the notion that no culture is better or worse than any other - it is merely different.

When it comes to democratic continuity, social justice, and prosperity, some cultures do far better than others. Research at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, summarized in my book, makes this clear.

Extensive data suggest that the champions of progress are the Nordic countries - Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden - where, for example, universal literacy was a substantial reality in the 19th century. By contrast, no Arab country today is democratic, and female illiteracy in some Arab countries exceeds 50 percent.

Culture isn't about genes or race; it's about values, beliefs, and attitudes. Culture matters because it influences a society's receptivity to democracy, justice, entrepreneurship, and free-market institutions.

A key component of a successful democratic transition is trust, a particularly important cultural factor for social justice and prosperity. Trust in others reduces the cost of economic transactions, and democratic stability depends on it.

Trust is periodically measured in 80-odd countries by the World Values Survey. The Nordic countries enjoy very high levels of trust: 58 to67 percent of respondents in four of these countries believe that most people can be trusted, compared with 11 percent of Algerians and 3 percent of Brazilians.

The high levels of identification and trust in Nordic societies reflect their homogeneity; common Lutheran antecedents, including a rigorous ethical code and heavy emphasis on education; and a consequent sense of the nation as one big family imbued with the golden rule.

Again, culture matters - race doesn't. The ethnic roots of both Haiti and Barbados lie in the Dahomey region of West Africa. The history of Haiti, independent in 1804 in the wake of a slave uprising against the French colonists, is one of corrupt, incompetent leadership; illiteracy; and poverty. Barbados, which gained its independence from the British in 1966, is today a prosperous democracy of "Afro-Saxons."

In other words, all cultures are not equally good, and some are clearly superior to others. Harrison draws important and doleful conclusions from this fact concerning our efforts in Iraq and our failure to get a handle on immigration. Read the rest of his piece at the link.

RLC

The Next Holocaust

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah, a terrorist organization supported by Iran and Syria and operating in Lebanon, declares that they will destroy Israel to avenge the death of Imad Mughniyeh, a murderous terrorist assassinated recently under mysterious circumstances:

The Hizballah leader, in his most vituperative speech against Israel ever, said Friday, Feb. 22: "Arab opposition, including Syria, and popular opposition will eliminate Israel; its armed forces will be defeated and Israel will be left with no army. We will fight as we have never fought before, confronting the Israeli army with a type of combat it has never before experienced." Nasrallah pledged "Mughniyeh's blood would not go unpunished, declaring," He was killed in a pre-emptive Israeli strike, an open war."

Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi indicated Hizballah planned to seize on an Israeli ground offensive against Gazan missiles to launch a revenge attack in the north and force Israel to fight on two fronts. He told graduating IDF officers: "It is up to us to achieve a quick victory in every confrontation."

What is the rest of the world, particularly the United Nations, doing to see that Nasrallah's prediction doesn't come to pass? The same thing it did during the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s? The same thing it has been doing to stop the systematic slaughter of non-Arabs in Darfur? If the past is any indication of U.N. resolve and dependability they are likely to be doing very little to prevent another war against Israel.

Three relatively recent films give the viewer a clear picture of the utter uselessness and fecklessness of the United Nation's attempts at peace-keeping: No Man's Land, Beyond the Gates, and Hotel Rwanda. Watch any of these and you'll wonder why the U.S. even belongs to this organization and why we help fund it. When Hezbollah launches its war of extermination against Israel we have no reason to think that the U.N. will be of any more help in saving Israeli and Lebanese lives than it was in saving the Tutsis from the Hutus in Rwanda or in preventing the genocide in Sudan.

RLC

Dualism vs. Materialism

Materialist neuroscientist Dr. Steven Novella, in a post that reflects the sour, dyspeptic rhetorical style typical of materialists who are unaccustomed to having their worldview challenged, makes several claims about what we should expect in the relationship of mind and brain if materialism is true. He states:

If the mind is completely a product of the material function of the brain then:

• There will be no mental phenomena without brain function.
• As brain function is altered, the mind will be altered.
• If the brain is damaged, then mental function will be damaged.
• Brain development will correlate with mental development.
• We will be able to correlate brain activity with mental activity - no matter how we choose to look at it.

He is arguing, for example, that damage to the brain will produce impaired mental function and that this is strong warrant for the belief that the mental world is completely reducible to material processes. Dr. Novella is simply wrong about this.

If the mind and brain work in tandem to produce mental phenomena something like a television signal works with a tv set to produce an image on the screen, then nothing really follows from Dr. Novella's claims. In other words, substitute "screen image" for "mental phenomena" in the above claims and substitute "television set" for "brain".

It's true, then, that there will be no screen image without a properly functioning television set, but that doesn't mean that the set is all there is to the production of the image. The signal is a necessary part of the production of the image even though its presence is not apparent to the person viewing the set.

It's true, too, that as the television's settings are altered, the image will be altered, but it doesn't follow that the set is all that's controlling the image.

Moreover, if the set is damaged the image will be disrupted, but it doesn't follow from this that the set is all that's involved in generating the image. In other words, it is one thing to say that the brain, like the tv, is necessary for mental experience, but it is quite another to say, as Dr. Novella does, that it is also sufficient to account for that experience. Neither he nor anyone else has ever come anyhere close to demonstrating that.

Dr. Michael Egnor replies to Novella's argument in a different and interesting way. He cites a 2006 study done on a woman in a persistent vegetative state who had seriously impaired brain function, but whose mental function, as assessed by MRI tests, was indistinguishable from that of subjects who had no impairment.

Egnor's discussion of this study is fascinating and his reply to Novella is very strong. I urge readers interested in the mind/brain controversies in general and the relationship of consciousness to matter in particular to check it out.

RLC

Another Candidate at Risk

Yesterday we talked of fears in some quarters for Barack Obama's safety. Here's another presidential candidate whose safety may be in jeopardy:

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, blamed by many Democrats for their loss of the White House in the 2000 election, said on Sunday he is launching another independent campaign for the White House.

Nader called Washington "corporate occupied territory" that turns the government against the interests of the people. "In that context, I have decided to run for president," he said.

If Nader pulls enough votes away from the Democratic candidate in one or two very closely contested states resulting in another Republican victory like 2000, the left will explode. This would be ironic since Nader would be their hero were he not a political cipher. As it is, he can only earn their hatred by costing them another election. If he does well enough in November to make a difference in the outcome he would be wise to add kevlar to his wardrobe.

RLC

William F. Buckley (1925-2008)

In November of 2005, on the occasion of William F. Buckley's 80th birthday, I wrote the post below as a way of honoring a man who was as influential in my life, especially during the decades of the 70s and 80s, as anyone I can think of. Bill Buckley passed away last night, and I think it appropriate to reprise what I wrote on his birthday:

Anyone who looks back on his life and seeks to identify the influences which led him to the place he presently finds himself will probably be able to point to a half dozen or so people, in addition to his parents, who exerted a strong push on his life in at least one of its aspects.

There are those who help shape one's character, one's ambitions, one's religious, philosophical, and political views, and so on. In my own life there have been several such men, some I knew personally and others whom I never formally met but whose influence I nevertheless soaked up through their written work like leaves soak up sunshine.

One example of the latter is William F. Buckley. When I was fresh out of college in 1969 I stumbled across Mr. Buckley's Firing Line television show. I was just beginning to develop an interest in political affairs, having somehow managed to scoot through college in the ideologically charged 60's with hardly a political thought in my head to show for it.

I was impressed with all the things about Buckley that impress everyone who watches him - his wit, his breadth of knowledge, his mastery of the language, his ability to articulate conservative ideas with an eloquence and charm that disarmed his opponents - but most of all I was impressed with his demeanor. He was never rude or overbearing. He never got nasty or raised his voice. His colloquies with his guests were always marked with courtesy, good humor, and unfailing graciousness (except in his famous debate with Gore Vidal). In those early years of my adulthood he was an exemplar of how political disagreements should be navigated and how discourse should be conducted.

Although I possessed none of his gifts, I subliminally decided that I wanted to be like him anyway, to the extent that I could. I read his books and National Review, the magazine he founded in the 1950s, and found myself wishing to learn all the things I should have learned in college but was too busy being a jock to trouble myself with. I regretted, having fallen under his sway, that I had squandered so many years and opportunities that could have been devoted to the cultivation of a fuller intellectual life.

Eventually, my interests evolved in various directions and followed channels not closely related to politics, but those other pursuits were always in some sense a product of the appetite he had stimulated in me for learning. He had given my appreciation for what Hannah Arendt calls "the life of the mind" a spark, a sturdy kick start, and I have always been grateful for the richness that that has added to my life.

I heard Bill Buckley give a lecture a few years back, and I wanted to tell him after his talk how much he has meant to me, but he was surrounded by adoring fans and besides, I thought, he probably hears stories similar to mine all the time anyway. I've regretted not taking the opportunity then, and I thought I'd write him and tell him what I wanted to tell him that night, but I somehow never got to it. I suppose I assumed that WFB has always been around and always will be. There'll be other opportunities.

Now I see that his 80th birthday is the 24th of this month, and I realize that if I don't do it soon it might never happen. That would be an omission I would deeply regret, so as Mr. Buckley approaches this milestone in his life I've resolved to contact him and tell him what he has meant in mine.

Happy birthday, Bill.

I did send him this post after I had written it, but I don't know if he ever saw it. I hope he did. The AP has an overview of the man and his accomplishments here.

We are deeply saddened at the loss of this great man, but heaven is rejoicing at their great gain.

UPDATE: See National Review Online for their farewell to Bill Buckley.

RLC

Government-Run Health Care

My friend Jason D. links us to this short video which should be required viewing for anyone who thinks that the health care proposals of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are a good idea:

This is an illustration of what happens when people turn enterprises like health care over to the government. We certainly need insurance reform and tort reform, but we don't need socialized medical care, not if we want to be able to get the care we need when we need it.

RLC

Dancer, Farmer, Bottle

Bilbo at Telic Thoughts has an interesting post on the nature of God's action in creation. Bilbo dislikes the idea that God intervenes at intervals throughout history to tinker with things. This seems to him to be inelegant and so he offers a couple of alternative analogies:

The idea of a God continuing to intervene in the universe in a nonsensical hodgepodge repels our sense of the way things should be. That is why in the past I offered an analogy that might help make aesthetic sense of God as designer: a duet. I proposed that we see it as a dance between God and Nature, where God is Fred Astaire, and Nature is Ginger Rogers. Most of the time, Ginger dances on her own two feet, and God merely leads her, invisible to the probing eyes of science. But just as occasionally Fred might pick up Ginger and twirl her around, so might God do the same with Nature, when designing organisms. It's an analogy that might help us make more aesthetic sense of what might be God's relationship with the universe.

But there may be another analogy that might make even more sense of God's action: the image of a farmer planting seeds. In this case, maybe only two or three seeds. The first seed would have been the universe itself, which we are told started out as a very small thing, much smaller than a mustard seed. Yet it has grown into a giant tree, that all the stars and planets can find shelter in. The second seed would be the first microorganisms planted on our planet, billions of years ago. If Mike Gene's hypothesis of front-loaded evolution turns out to be correct, this is all the direct design intervention that may have been necessary. And from this tiny seed grew the huge tree of life that we see around us today.

On the other hand, there may be ways to think of God's relationship with creation which illustrate a more continuous involvement of God in the world. Perhaps we can think of God as a vessel, a bottle, and the world as a liquid that gradually fills the bottle. As the liquid pours into the vessel it takes the shape the container imposes upon it. God, by virtue of His intimate contact with the creation, impresses upon the world the pattern of its development, or unfolding, continuously as the creation moves through time. The biological and physical "shape" or structure of the world, in other words, is a perpetual moment by moment expression of God's intention and immanence, not an episodic phenomenon or a once-and-done event. God, in this view, is the template upon which the world evolves.

RLC

Obama's Safety

The Associated Press, whether intentionally or not, perpetuates the notion that America is irredeemably racist by running an article publicizing the fear of some African Americans that Senator Obama's success has placed him in mortal jeopardy. Their concern is that a black man calling for "change" is going to be the target of an assassin's bullet just like Medgar Evans or Martin Luther King.

Perhaps the fear is legitimate, although we should note that we have to reach back forty years to find precedents. Even so, I don't recall similar articles expressing concern about George Bush's safety when he took on Islamic terrorism, nor was there a lot of concern about his father's safety despite his humiliation of Saddam Hussein in 1991 and the thwarted attempt on his life after he had left the presidency. Nor do we read of concerns for John McCain's safety even though he will undoubtedly continue, if elected, to prosecute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and target Muslim terrorists around the globe.

In our world, every president and presidential candidate has a bullseye on his chest, and for the AP to suggest that Obama's bullseye is bigger than others just because he's black is to accuse white America of a racism that is presumably, given their lack of concern about the safety of the Bushes and McCain, much more virulent, violent and dangerous than is Islamic terrorism.

Nevertheless, despite the shortcomings of the AP's article there may indeed be good reason to fear for Obama's safety. Consider the startling number of people associated with the Clintons who have came a cropper either by murder, "suicide", or mysterious accident. Of course, it may all be coincidence that the Clintons must spend half their waking hours attending viewings for acquaintances who have passed on prematurely, or maybe there's some kind of voodoo curse on the couple, but even so, if people are concerned about the Senator's safety they may try urging him to not ask Hillary to be his Veep. No sense tempting voodoo.

RLC

Prairie falcon

A western species of falcon, almost never found in the east, has turned up within an hour's drive of my home and thus made a trip to see it yesterday irresistable. The bird is a Prairie falcon, and it's been hanging around some fields and a quarry just north of Shippensburg, PA. The Prairie falcon is about the size of a crow and a much faster flier. There are more strikingly plumaged raptors than this one, but watching him in flight was quite a treat.

RLC

Vantage Point

Debbie Schlussel loves the new movie thriller Vantage Point:

Hollywood is finally giving us true terrorists who are unsympathetic. Hollywood is finally giving us good guys who are good and bad guys who are Islamic terrorists without an excuse or any redeeming value.

In "Vantage Point," out [last] Friday, the terrorists are Islamic, and they are evil, cold-blooded killers. Finally, Hollywood is giving us "truth-in-terrorism." And it's an exciting thriller.

Boy was I ever wrong about "Vantage Point." And boy am I glad I was. As readers will recall, I wrote on this site that the trailer for this movie made it look like this was, yet again, another movie in which Muslims were not actually the terrorists, but good and victimized people mistaken for terrorists--yet another movie in which the Westerners are the bad guys.

But it was the exact opposite. The President (William Hurt) and the U.S. Secret Service Agent (Dennis Quaid) who is the hero in this movie are, without reservation, the good guys. The terrorists are Muslim and they are the bad guys. There is nothing presented in this movie to justify the mass carnage they produce.

There's much more about the movie and its plot at the link. Schlussel criticizes it for taking too long to get going, but, like a roller coaster, once it climbs to the top the rest of the ride is an adrenalin rush. Here's the trailer:

Actually, this isn't the first good movie to treat terrorism in a realistic fashion. If you can't wait for Vantage Point try The Kingdom with Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, and Jason Bateman. It, too, is very good and very believable though it is R-rated so you might not want to sit down to it with the children.

But Schlussel's point is well-taken. So many movies and shows like 24 sacrifice credibility by adopting the politically correct but totally implausible story line that terrorists are disaffected Europeans, CIA renegades, or corporate megalomaniacs motivated by little more than revenge or greed. That may have worked in the 1970s when European terrorism was a serious problem, or in a movie about Ireland's "troubles", but the intelligent viewer simply loses interest in any movie today about global terrorism that features non-Muslims in the role of the terrorist.

It's as if we're being asked to ignore what everyone knows to be true and believe that the naked emperor is actually arrayed in fine raiment simply for the sake of not offending the very people who are trying to kill us. The Kingdom doesn't do this and neither, apparently, does Vantage Point.

RLC

Evolving Sex

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting article on parthenogenesis in Komodo dragons and other species. Parthenogenesis occurs when an ovum produces offspring without benefit of male fertilization, making the offspring a genetic clone of the mother. In other words, it's a form of virgin birth.

Here's one passage of several from the article which caught my attention:

The big question these virgin births raise is this: If some females can get along without males, why does any species have males? The reason is simple. With virgin birth, hatchlings are simply genetic duplicates of the mother. In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul.

Ah, so easy. Sexual reproduction is necessary to produce genetic diversity, diversity helps a species survive, therefore sexual reproduction evolved through the blind, purposeless processes of natural selection and genetic mutation. This is what some scientists and philosophers refer to as a wave of the wand explanation. It tells us why sexual reproduction evolved while glossing over the much more intractable question of how such a process evolved.

Think of all the changes that have to occur, most of them simultaneously, in order to produce two different sexes of the same species. The evolution of meiosis and the production of gametes in both males and females (before males and females ever evolved), the means of getting the gametes from the male to the female, the entire complex of reactions which occurs when a male gamete encounters the female ovum allowing the male's DNA to penetrate to the nucleus of the ovum, the synchronization of the two sets of chromosomes, the coordination of embryonic development and the entire panoply of anatomical structures and behaviors which need to evolve in order to facilitate the process, along with the physiological and biochemical adaptations which must also be in place. It's no wonder that evolutionary treatments of sex almost always focus on the advantage that sexual reproduction affords, they almost never address the problem of how sex evolved. The problems are staggeringly difficult.

Consider, too, how rare it is that mutations occur that are beneficial to an organism, much less simultaneous beneficial mutations occurring in the same populations of the proto-sexes. Each of these mutations had to confer a survival advantage even before sexual reproduction was possible. Moreover, since both plants and animals reproduce sexually we can assume that this ability evolved pretty early on in the evolutionary process, so it must have unfolded with comparative rapidity.

Well, maybe it all did happen, but the more one learns about the extremely complex series of events and the sheer number of adaptations that must have occured in order to produce fertilization in all sexual species the more skeptical one becomes that chance and nature could, with no conscious intention, produce such a breathtaking process.

The Darwinian, perhaps, can trace out a long, elaborate hypothetical scheme which results in the emergence of sexual reproduction among protists and conclude that, since it is logically possible that it could have happened that way, that therefore it's plausible that it did happen, and since it's plausible then it's probable that it indeed happened because, after all, here we are, and we're sexual creatures.

But logical possibility is hardly a sufficient condition for plausibility, much less probability. Whether evolution produced sexual reproduction, I don't know, but I am quite certain that if it did, it was not the blind, unguided evolution of the Darwinian materialists. Their story of the evolution of sex is a fairy tale of magic wands and pixie dust.

RLC

Global Swelling

The consensus among scientists today is that the earth's continents have drifted apart over the ages due to the spreading of the sea floor caused by the introduction into the crust of new rock from deep in the earth's mantle. This new rock, the theory goes, is exuded through crevices in the mid-ocean ridges and pushes the continents away from each other. The continents then slide under each other along contact faults in a process called subduction. This returns rock back to the mantle where it's melted.

There is a minority view, however, which holds that continental drift is not a result of sea-floor spreading and subduction but rather is caused by an expanding globe. According to this theory (see video) the earth is inflating like a balloon, and it's this expansion which pushes the tectonic plates(continents)apart. The earth's crust was originally a solid shell, the story goes, and over vast time the planet grew in size forcing the crust to fracture and spread. There are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_earth_theory various hypotheses as to the causes of the expansion, but that it happened the narrator of the video, Neal Adams, is quite convinced:

Wait until the global warming people here about this. They'll be hurling themselves off of bridges.

HT: Jonah @ NRO

RLC

The Russian Bear Is Stirring

Recent statements and provocations by the Russian leadership and military suggest to some that Vladimir Putin wishes to initiate a new cold war with the United States by rebuilding Russia's military to a state of parity with American forces. Strategy Page thinks a rebuild of the Russian military is highly unlikely, however:

The government is making a lot of noise about rebuilding the armed forces, and another Cold War with the U.S., but this is all talk, to make the government appear like it's doing something. The military would need massive amounts of money (over $100 billion a year, for a decade or more) to restore any meaningful amount of military power. Nothing near that amount is forthcoming. The government is trying to get the population stirred up so there is less resistance to the purchase of many expensive warplanes and ships.

A lot of this is necessary because China is buying less and starting to offer their own stuff, often containing stolen Russian military technology, on the world market. China is threatening to offer its copy of the Su-27 (the J-11). Currently, half of Russian weapons export sales are Su-27s. The Chinese ignore Russian complaints about the stolen technology. To keep Russian weapons manufacturers in business, the Russian military has to buy more, to make up for the lost Chinese sales. Western firms are also going after the lucrative Indian arms market, which Russia has dominated for decades. Last year, Russia sold $7 billion worth of weapons overseas, and may have a hard time topping that this year.

In other words, the talk of a new military aggressiveness on the part of the Russians is all bluster. They haven't the resource base or the economic power to sustain the kind of program that would be necessary to catch up. The real problem they pose is that out of resentment toward western superiority they may provide assistance to those, like the Chinese and the Islamists who intend to,and can, hurt us.

RLC

Reforming Education

Sol Stern has an article in City Journal that should be read by everyone pursuing or contemplating a career in education or who cares about the issue of educating our children. Stern breaks education reformers into two camps, the incentivists who want to increase competition and rewards for success and the instructionists who believe that the best way to improve our schools is to impose rigorous curricula K-12.

Stern himself used to be an incentivist and acknowledges that they still dominate the reform movement, but he cites three reasons why he's moving away from it. First, alternatives to failing urban public schools are diminishing. Catholic schools, for example, are closing their doors. In Detroit only one Catholic school is still operating in the city. There's no place else for public school students to go even if they had vouchers and tax incentives to leave the schools they're in.

The second problem is that incentives like vouchers simply haven't won the allegiance of most voters and their proponents cannot compete in referenda into which the NEA can pump money and volunteers that choice advocates simply can't match.

The third reason he's reconsidering his position is Massachusetts:

...where something close to an education miracle has occurred. In the past several years, Massachusetts has improved more than almost every other state on the NAEP tests. In 2007, it scored first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. The state's average scale scores on all four tests have also improved at far higher rates than most other states have seen over the past 15 years.

The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credits, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers. The state owes its amazing improvement in student performance to a few key former education leaders, including state education board chairman John Silber, assistant commissioner Sandra Stotsky, and board member (and Manhattan Institute fellow) Abigail Thernstrom.

Starting a decade ago, these instructionists pushed the state's board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam. In its English Language Arts curriculum framework, the board even dared to say that reading instruction in the early grades should include systematic and explicit phonics. Now a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky sums up: "The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students' academic achievement."

In other words, those who have been advocating that schools teach what and how they did two generations ago are being vindicated in, of all places, Massachusetts. It remains now for courts and legislatures to wake up and facilitate the removal from middle and high schools those students whose behavior acts as a drag on the rest of the student population. Combine the academic rigor which our schools used to demand of our students along with the behavioral expectations that once prevailed in our schools and our educational crisis will be largely solved. And it won't cost a dime of taxpayer money.

Stern goes on to say that:

The Massachusetts miracle doesn't prove that a standard curriculum and a focus on effective instruction will always produce academic progress. Nor does the flawed New York City experiment in competition mean that we should cast aside all market incentives in education. But what has transpired in these two places provides an important lesson: education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don't produce verifiable results in the classroom. After all, children's lives are at stake.

Read the whole essay at the link. There's a lot of discussion on it at Tuesday's Corner blog at NRO.

RLC