Moral Absolutes

A former student taking a grad course in Old Testament ethics asks this question (slightly edited):

What do you think about the idea of non-conflicting absolutes? With regards to moral laws, for example, do you think it is correct to claim that there are moral absolutes that never conflict? Do you think there may be exceptions intrinsic to the absolute, which allow for a "non conflicting scenario" to take place...?

Here's my reply:

Good questions, Jeremy. No, I don't think moral absolutes never conflict. Nor do I think there are exceptions to an absolute. Absolutes may certainly be in conflict with each other, and if there were exceptions to them they wouldn't be absolutes.

In my view there are only two moral absolutes (unless we count our duty to love God with our whole self as a moral absolute): Do justice and do compassion. These two could be conflated into a single absolute as Jesus does in Matthew 22:39, i.e. Love others, but for the sake of this discussion I think we are commanded to always do what is just and do what is compassionate. These may sometimes conflict, however, and that creates a tension. For example in the matter of war, criminal punishment, or even disciplining a child, it may be that the demands of justice and the command of compassion seem to tug us in opposite directions.

It's part of our responsibility as free and thinking Christians to find in any situation the best balance between the two. It's as if they sometimes reside at either end of a see-saw and we need to find the center of gravity at which point they're in balance. Thus, in a particular situation we may have to punish to satisfy justice, but our punishment should be tempered with compassion. We should not punish someone who tortured someone to death by doing the same thing to him. Whether the fulcrum is closer to the justice end of the see-saw or the compassion end may depend upon the details of the case.

It's a consequence of living in a fallen world that moral decisions are often not as neat and clear as we'd like them to be. There are situations in life where we have no specific rules to guide us, only the principles of compassion and justice. In those situations we must decide what to do, it is our existential burden, but our decisions must be informed by those two absolute principles and a desire to maximize both to the extent possible.

RLC

Public Opinion of the War

David Paul Kuhn has an interesting piece at Politico.com on public perception of the surge:

American public support for the military effort in Iraq has reached a high point unseen since the summer of 2006, a development that promises to reshape the political landscape.

According to late February polling conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 53 percent of Americans - a slim majority - now believe "the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals" in Iraq. That figure is up from 42 percent in September 2007.

The percentage of those who believe the war in Iraq is going "very well" or "fairly well" is also up, from 30 percent in February 2007 to 48 percent today.

Views of the war in Iraq have long varied depending upon party affiliation, unlike during the Vietnam War. Although even Democratic discontent has ebbed for the first time in more than a year - 29 percent now support keeping troops in, an increase of 8 percentage points since last summer - foreign policy advisers to both candidates dispute the idea that Democrats are in the unenviable position of disagreeing with the majority of Americans over whether the war in Iraq can succeed.

There's more on this at the Politico link.

The trend lines here explain why the media has suddenly lost its voice on Iraq and why the war has almost ceased to be an issue for Democrats. The poll results are certainly good news for Republicans, especially John McCain who was an early advocate of the surge and has been a steady supporter in the Senate of the need to win both militarily and politically in Iraq.

We have argued in the past that to yield to the Democrats' call for withdrawal would be a calamty for the region, the U.S. and the whole world. Any candidate for president who says he or she would pullout of Iraq before the country has been secured demonstrates a myopia that ipso facto disqualifies him or her from the office. We give our reasons here.

RLC

Looking at the Veep

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard runs through all the potential Vice-Presidential picks on offer to McCain and concludes that his best prospect is Mitt Romney. Maybe so, but one person Barnes doesn't mention who would surely enhance the ticket in the minds of the conservative GOP base McCain must reconcile with is Rick Santorum.

It isn't likely to happen, however, since Santorum dislikes McCain and has been outspoken in his opposition to him, especially early in the campaign. No doubt the feeling is mutual.

Even so, since Santorum is despised by the left for all the right reasons he'd would be a boffo selection at the GOP convention. His only real drawback, other than the personal issues with McCain, is that he's never been a governor, which, in my mind, is crucial preparation for the office of President. Other than that he'd be an excellent selection.

Perhaps the two could reconcile their differences, shake hands, and form a dynamite ticket.

RLC

Dispelling Darkness

Wafa Sultan, an Arab-American psychologist speaks truth to power in this video of a "debate" with an Egyptian Islamist:

Go here for more videos featuring Wafa Sultan. This one in particular is worth watching. One gets the feeling that her opponents in these debates are like high schoolers competing against a pro:

RLC

Remembering Sarah

David Horowitz has written a beautiful and very moving eulogy for his daughter who passed away last week at the age of 44.

Horowitz was a leftist radical in the 1960s who eventually came to believe that the left had no answers to our national problems so he became a conservative. His daughter, on the other hand, was a very liberal Obama campaign volunteer. The tension that existed between them and the gracious way she handled it and all the difficulties which life imposed upon her makes the father's remembrance all the sweeter.

RLC

Lonesome Dove

C.S. Lewis writes that man was created to be infinitely happy, and I believe this to be true, but I sometimes wonder whether happiness is really possible this side of heaven. Indeed, the area of life which should bring us our greatest happiness, our relationships with others, is really an existential minefield.

I was reminded of this over the last couple of nights as I sat down to watch the old television mini-series Lonesome Dove. I don't know what the main theme of the story was supposed to be, but the lesson that was driven home to me in every segment of the series is that our relationships with other people are inherently tragic. Every relationship in the film, there are about a half dozen major relationships and several lesser ones, is marred either by an inability to connect with the other or by heart-breaking tragedy.

Alienation, heartbreak and grief. It's the human condition, and Lonesome Dove artfully and dramatically reminds us that man's fallenness ripples across the span of our lives, isolating us from each other, even those we love, fracturing our relationships and robbing us of the intimacy and union we crave. Our fallenness places each of us in a bubble that prevents us from getting close to others, and sooner or later it causes each of us to suffer the loss of those who are the source of our greatest contentment and joy.

There are some who write of Christian hedonism, a provocative term designed, I suppose, to get our attention, and which denotes the idea that Christians are, or should be, the happiest people around. Maybe they should, but I'm not convinced.

We are called by Christ to empathize with others, to share in their suffering and pain. How can we look at all the sorrow and hurt all around us, if not in our own lives then in those of our neighbors - how can we pick up the newspaper and read of the myriad tragedies and horrors experienced every day by everyday people - and say that, even so, I'm happy.

It seems to me that the only way we can be happy in the face of so much human suffering is to shut ourselves off from the pain and heartache which surrounds us, to close our eyes to it and simply be egoists. If we are Christians, however, that option isn't open to us. We're obligated to carry on our shoulders not only our own cross but the crosses of others, and crosses don't conduce to happiness. As far as I know, Jesus promised us crosses in this life, but He never promised us happiness, not in this world, at least.

So, what then, someone will ask, is the advantage of being a Christian if it means that we must forego happiness? This is an odd question in a way. We should be Christians, not because it confers some advantage, but because we believe Christianity is true.

Beyond that, though, Christianity does confer an important advantage. In the midst of the hurt and alienation, in the midst of our loneliness and grief, we have an assurance that life won't always be like this. There will be a day when suffering and pain will afflict us no more, and genuine happiness, that infinite happiness Lewis talked about, will be attainable. It's a hope that those without God don't have, and it's the only thing that makes any sense out of our suffering now. It's the only thing that redeems life from being nothing more than a cruel and absurd joke.

RLC

Honorable People

Honor killing, that symbol of barbarism and depravity, is still alive and well, so to speak, among Israel's Arab population. The young woman in the story that follows is a divorcee who was shot because she was seen being "friendly" to men:

Police investigators noted that the attempted murder was meticulously planned. The youth had informed his family members that he was going to murder his sister early Tuesday morning, and then set off to do just that. He headed to the entrance of the village in a vehicle which he had borrowed from his brother, and awaited his sister's arrival. The youth then shot his sister, who was startled to see him and proceeded to kick her repeatedly in order to ensure that she was no longer alive.

Chief Superintendent of the Afula Police Department, Orli Malka, stated that "the young woman was clever enough to play dead so that her brother would stop kicking her." The shooter than called MDA medics and phone the police emergency hotline. "I just shot my sister," he said, all the while keeping vigil over what he assumed was his sister's lifeless corpse. The young man than informed his family that he had shot his sister and was warmly greeted, hugged and congratulated by his brother and other family members.

Since all cultures are equally worth celebrating it may reveal a woeful lack of tolerance and sensitivity to point out that in Western societies we usually save our congratulations for those who have done something kind or beneficial to the larger community, or who have achieved some distinction in a field of endeavor. Since I don't wish to appear so churlish I won't belabor the point. I'll just mention that in some cultures congratulations are apparently merited for rather less lofty accomplishments.

Lest you think this is merely an isolated incident there are links at the story to two other recent cases of honor killings in Arab-Israeli families. In one family eight women have been slain in the last six years. In another family the figure stands at seven. If we want to look for a silver lining in this, we might note, I suppose, that it's good that Arabs are so concerned about honor.

Why is it, though, that the least honorable people seem often to be the most obsessed with preserving their honor? In our own cities you can get shot for simply appearing to "diss" some marginally human thug, but even these neanderthals don't slaughter their own sisters just because they socialize with men.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

The Company We Keep

Suppose Senator John McCain were discovered to be a member of, say, Westboro Baptist Church pastored by the infamous Fred Phelps who believes that America's problems are God's judgment on our tolerance of homosexuality. Should McCain's affiliation with that kind of thinking matter to people who are trying decide who is best suited to be our next president? Would the MSM be interested in the story? The answer to both questions is "of course".

Well, we're faced with a somewhat similar situation in this primary season, but it doesn't involve John McCain - it involves Barack Obama. Obama has belonged to a church in Chicago for twenty years the pastor of which, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, can fairly be described as a bigot. Wright has honored the anti-semite Louis Farrakhan with a lifetime achievement award and traveled with him to Libya. He employs in his sermons racially charged rhetoric that is certainly divisive and potentially incendiary. He has said that the United States brought the 9/11 attacks on itself through its own "terrorism," and that "the government gives [blacks] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' He says we should be singing "God damn America." (No wonder Michelle Obama says the things she does)

If a Republican belonged to such a church and contributed to its "ministry" I'm pretty sure he'd be flayed alive by the media. Nevertheless, MSNBC's Dan Abrams, for example, doesn't think anyone should judge Obama by the church to which he belongs and to which he takes his children.

To get a taste of what Obama listens to whenever he attends Reverend Wright's services go here and ask yourself these questions as you're watching: Aren't churches that engage in political partisanship supposed to lose their tax exempt status? How much of what this man says is factually correct? What if a white preacher were to give a similar sermon but talked about blacks the way Wright talks about whites? Why don't the same standards that apply to white pastors apply to their black counterparts?

Bill O'Reilly had an interesting segment on this topic on his television show:

Obama has said he doesn't agree with his pastor's views, but if so why does he contribute to the church? Why does he take his daughters to hear the man preach? Why has he been a member for twenty years? So many questions. I wonder why Hillary, or her surrogates, aren't asking them.

RLC

Damascus Road

Playwright and movie-maker David Mamet has the scales fall from his eyes and consequently finds himself converting from "brain-dead" liberalism to, well, a more mature and thoughtful view. He describes his journey from darkness into light at The Village Voice. Here are a couple of excerpts:

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind. As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f--- up?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been-rather charmingly, I thought-referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

Mamet has more on his ideological journey at the link.

The observation has been misattributed to Churchill but whoever said it nevertheless hit upon a great truth: a man who's not a liberal at 20 has no heart. If he's still a liberal at 40 he has no head. Not wishing our liberal friends over 40 to despair, we want them to know that, like Mamet, it's better to find one's head late than to never find it at all.

HT:Hot Air

RLC

Speech Nazis

Geraldine Ferarro has resigned from Hillary Clinton's campaign because she's been mugged by her fellow Democrats for daring to note the obvious: Barack Obama is where he is in the contest for president largely because of his skin color. Why anyone should think this is offensive, or even mistaken, is beyond me, but even Sean Hannity was saying yesterday afternoon that he thought it was incorrect and insensitive. What's wrong with people?

Obama has made it this far against Senator Clinton largely on the basis of overwhelming black support and the votes of white Democrats eager to vote for a credible black candidate in order to innoculate themselves against any future charge of racism. Does anyone really think that an inexperienced first-term white senator with Obama's same charisma would have attracted so many African-Americans to his side? Does anyone seriously believe that a white male candidate, other things being equal, would have gotten so much support from the MSM against Hillary Clinton?

We are a nation afraid to talk openly about race. We're cowed into refusing to say things that everyone knows to be true but which are guaranteed to gain one the opprobrium of the speech Nazis who preemptively censor all unapproved mention of race. Almost any reference to race in our society - unless accompanied by a truckload of qualifiers, demurrals, and clarifications - risks being interpreted as "racist". This is quite bizarre and a symptom, I think, of some sort of national psychosis. It's certainly not intellectually mature or honest.

Why should people pretend that race hasn't played a critical part in the presidential contest? We're certainly not skittish about observing that gender has been a prominent factor. Blacks are turning out in large numbers and Obama is taking 90% of their votes. That phenomenon has largely propelled him into contention, and to avoid seeing that requires a kind of willful contortionism at which liberals seem to be quite skilled.

Geraldine Ferarro made a perfectly reasonable observation, and she's been forced to resign because what she said offends foolish liberal conventions. We might well ask in what sense are the people who think it racist to mention the advantage Obama's color has conferred upon him "liberal" in any classical sense of the word?

RLC

If Not Him, Who?

I don't know whythis young man was refused asylum, but it would be an ugly blot on Europe, and a sign that Christian compassion has been all but extinguished on that continent, if he were forced to return to Iran:

Mehdi Kazemi, 19, traveled to Britain to study in 2005 and applied there for asylum after learning that his male lover in Iran had been executed for sodomy. After British authorities rejected Kazemi's application, he fled and applied for asylum in the Netherlands.

Upholding a ruling by the Dutch government, the Council of State said Britain is responsible for Kazemi's case because he applied for asylum there first. European Union rules say the member state where an asylum seeker first enters the bloc is responsible for processing that person's claim.

The fact that a man is gay should not earn him a death sentence any more than prostitution should be a capital crime. Unfortunately, in the Islamic state of Iran, it does. This photo is of the hanging of two teenagers in Iran who were sentenced to death simply because they were gay.

In Iran being homosexual is a worse crime than raping a woman. Why send Mehdi Khazemi back to that? If someone like this 19 year-old boy should not be given asylum, who should?

RLC

How the Mighty Have Fallen

Democrat Eliot Spitzer has resigned as Governor of New York. It's easy to feel sorry for his family which must be absolutely mortified to learn that their father and husband has spent perhaps $80,000 on prostitutes over the last six years.

It's harder, however, to feel sorry for Spitzer himself. By all accounts he was an arrogant prosecutorial bully who used his previous office as state attorney general to destroy people who hadn't really done anything wrong. He was, in other words, another Michael Nifong, the man who prosecuted the Duke lacrosse players on charges of rape even though he had every reason to know they were innocent.

Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal composes a scathing indictment of the news media's complicity in Spitzer's abuse of power. In the course of her essay she says this:

Consider the report in the wake of a 2005 op-ed in this newspaper by John Whitehead. A respected Wall Street figure, Mr. Whitehead dared to criticize Mr. Spitzer for his unscrupulously zealous pursuit of Mr. Greenberg. Mr. Spitzer later threatened Mr. Whitehead, telling him in a phone call that "You will pay the price. This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done." Some months later, after more Spitzer excesses, Mr. Whitehead had the temerity to write another op-ed describing what Mr. Spitzer had said.

Within a few days, the press was reporting (unsourced, of course) that Mr. Whitehead had defended Mr. Greenberg a few weeks after a Greenberg charity had given $25 million to the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation -- a group Mr. Whitehead chaired. So Mr. Whitehead's on-the-record views were met with an unsourced smear implying bad faith. The press ran with it anyway.

In 2005, Mr. Spitzer went on national television to suggest that Mr. Greenberg had engaged in criminal activity. It was front-page news. About six months later, on the eve of a Thanksgiving weekend, Mr. Spitzer quietly disclosed that he lacked the evidence to press criminal charges. That news was buried inside the papers.

In 2004 Attorney General Spitzer arrested 18 people on prostitution and related charges:

Spitzer proudly announced on April 8, 2004, that authorities had arrested 18 people on promoting prostitution and related charges-including money laundering and falsifying business records-in an investigation of escort services in New York.

"This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure," Spitzer said at the time. "It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring, and now its owners and operators will be held accountable."

In the 2004 probe, investigators used wiretaps and other surveillance to build their case, said Vincent Romano, who defended the man accused of running the ring. Prosecutors also charged some of the defendants with enterprise corruption-a charge carrying heavier penalties than simple prostitution. No charges were brought against the ring's customers, just those accused of working for or running the service.

"It was a big splash. They had the perp walk. He caused a lot of embarrassment to a lot of people in the case to his benefit. What he put their families through at the time, he's probably experiencing now: the level of embarrassment and ridicule," Romano said.

"He's got this overzealous, mean-spirited prosecution, but behind closed doors in another state, he's doing the identical thing that he's accusing others of doing," he added. "And the other irony of it is that you've made a career off of a wiretap, and your demise is by the same prosecutorial tool."

There's more on Spitzer's Nifong-like prosecutorial abuses at the above links. We're called to offer our compassion to the sinner, but some cases are a lot harder than others.

RLC

Anti-War Thug

Another left-wing peace activist convinces us of the rightness of his cause through the power of gentle, non-violent persuasion.

I know that there are lots of people on the left who are good, decent individuals. Unfortunately, there seem to be an awful lot like this guy, too, especially among the secular lefties. I wonder how many are willing to distance themselves from him. I hope that everybody who opposes the war would, if confronted with this guy's blog, be repulsed by it, but if they aren't it would tell us much about their own character and convictions.

RLC

Re: The Negro Project

To find out what this Glenn McCoy cartoon is about go here.

RLC

Saturday Night Live

In case you've missed these clips of Saturday Night Live's parodies of the treatment the MSM has been giving Barack Obama you can watch them below. If you've seen the actual CNN and NBC debates the parodies will make you laugh, especially the foreign policy questions at the end of the NBC debate.

RLC

Seven Questions

Dennis Prager suggests seven questions parents should ask of any prospective college or university which their child is interested in attending. Here are three of them with some of his remarks:

1. Can one obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree at your college without having read a single Shakespeare play, one Federalist Paper or one book of the Bible? If so, why attend such a college?

5. Can my child live in a same-sex dorm and are the bathrooms co-ed?

One generation ago and for all of American history, the university acted in loco parentis, in the place of the parent. You could send your daughter to college more or less assured that the college would act on behalf of her welfare as you would -- meaning, for example, that boys had to leave girls dorms by a certain hour. Now, most colleges have no boys or girls dorms and do everything they can to enable boys and girls to fraternize in each other's rooms at any hour of the night and even share bathrooms.

7. Would a typical graduate of your university be able to say anything intelligent about Josef Stalin, Louis Armstrong, Pope John XXIII or Pope John Paul II, differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, Cain and Abel, the Gulag Archipelago, Franz Josef Haydn, Pol Pot, Martin Luther, Darfur, how interest rates affect the dollar, dark matter, and "Crime and Punishment"; explain what the Korean War was about and when it was fought; identify India on a map; and know the difference between the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council?

If not, why not? How could someone be considered in any way educated and not be able to intelligently answer all or nearly all of those questions? If they don't know about such essential and basic things, what do they know? Movies? The supposed dangers of global warming? The importance of race, gender and class? The meaning of menage a trois (or "threesomes")? Great gay writers?

Read the rest at the link, and check out the readers' comments, too. Some of them are pretty interesting.

RLC

Review of <i>Expelled</i>

Film reviewer Brett McCracken was pleasantly surprised by Expelled. He feared that it would be a documentary that tried to prove that evolution was all hokum but found instead that it's a funny yet disturbing look at censorship in American universities. He writes:

Indeed, the film hits a nerve in its critique of the contemporary American academy. As a graduate student immersed in academia and all its idiosyncrasies, I can attest to the pervasive and disturbingly hypocritical sense of close-mindedness that stifles the spirit of progressive discourse. It goes beyond the scientific communities in higher education and touches many disciplines.

Quite simply: if you are not on the "right" side of the wall (whatever wall it may be), your voice is stifled, your work discredited, and your intelligence questioned. It's gone beyond political correctness and is now something altogether more militant and sinister. Sadly, the academy today is less about the sharing and discovery of truth as it is about the wielding and protecting of power.

Critics will attack this movie and claim that it is manipulative propaganda, but if Michael Moore can get an Oscar for it, why hate on Ben Stein?

Read the rest of the review at the link. Expelled is due to be released to the general public April 18th.

RLC

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