Why They Hate Her

Stuart Schwartz argues that the reason the elites, both liberal and conservative, can't stand Sarah Palin and are obsessed with destroying all vestiges of her political influence is that she takes her religious faith seriously. I imagine that that's largely true. I wrote a couple of years ago that it was his commitment to Christianity that lay at the root of much of the elite hostility to George Bush. It also accounts for a lot of the antipathy that Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are likely to encounter if they throw their hats in the ring for 2012.

The secular elites, especially those on the left but some on the right, as well, are deathly afraid of any politician who takes the Bible as an authority on how one should live. To actually think that one could talk to God, that God might guide one in making important decisions, that God cares about how we order our lives, that evil is a real moral category, that there are moral constraints on how we express our sexuality, that God actually played a significant role in the creation - is abhorrent to our intellectual and social betters whose religion, if they have one, is a tepid, lukewarm deism.

Sarah Palin, like George Bush, believes in a muscular Christianity. It guides her life and is a lightning rod for the contempt, derision and hatred of people who believe themselves too sophisticated for such superstitious nonsense. Having been to Ivy League universities they scoff at the plebians who presume to think there is really any such thing as Truth, particularly religious truth. They embody the cynicism of historian Edward Gibbon who wrote of the ancient Romans that all religions for the masses were equally true, for the intellectuals equally false, and for the politicians equally useful.

Schwartz does a pretty good job of lampooning the haughty superciliousness of the pseudo-sophisticates of the political and chattering classes. Check it out.

RLC

Neo-Nazi?

You can tell much about a President's frame of mind by looking at the people he appoints to positions of influence and power. In the case of President Obama those appointments have been troubling, including as they do a series of tax cheats, radical pro-abortionists, and leftists of various stripes, but perhaps none is more disturbing Mr. Obama's appointment to the position of new science czar, John Holdren.

Hot Air directs our attention to this report at ZombieTime:

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens. The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?

These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology -- informally known as the United States' Science Czar. In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation's drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" -- in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans' lives -- using an armed international police force.

ZombieTime has direct quotes from Holdren's book and they're pretty disturbing, not just because this man, whose ideas are frighteningly similar to those of the Nazis, is in charge of science policy, but because his ideas may not be considered objectionable in the Obama White House.

Perhaps the administration was unaware of Holdren's views when they selected him for this post. That would cast doubt on their competency, but at least we can expect the President will do the right thing and terminate his appointment now that he knows.

If, however, the administration does not dissociate itself from this man after his views have been brought to public attention then we have very good reason to worry that the President does not find those views disagreeable, in which case we have very good reason to be very alarmed.

RLC

The State of Hate

We often hear that there's too much hatred in America, and indeed there no doubt is, but much of what's sometimes called "hatred" really trivializes the word. In any case, whatever the state of hate in America, it's strictly minor league compared to what can be found elsewhere in the world, even in civilized countries like, say, France.

Consider this piece from NRO:

Late last night a Parisian court finally announced its verdict in the Ilan Halimi murder trial, which I first wrote about over three years ago here. As I noted at the time, while The Independent in London headlined its piece on the murder "This anti-Semitic attack is terrifying" and Le Monde called it "the anti-Semitic crime of an era," other papers - notably The Guardian's sister paper The Observer in London - scrupulously avoided any mention of the fact that the victim was a Jew, and The New York Times was initially silent about the story.

Youssouf Fofana, leader of the gang that masterminded Halimi's kidnap, torture and murder, which was described by a leading police officer as the most brutal and sadistic in modern French history, was sentenced to life (with a minimum of 22 years). Of the 26 other defendants in the case, two were acquitted and the rest received sentences of between six months and 18 years. Fofana admitted in court that the plan was to "kill a Jew". Halimi, a 23 year-old shop clerk, was chosen at random.

At the end of 24 days of torture that left cuts and burn marks all over his body, including his eyes and throat, Halimi, who was handcuffed throughout his ordeal, was doused in alcohol and set alight. One of the young torturers told police his accomplices took turns to stub out cigarettes on Ilan's forehead and tongue while voicing hatred for Jews. They cut bits off his flesh, fingers and ears.

Fofana, who screamed "Allah Akbar!" (God is greatest) during the trial, has called on others to now murder Halimi's parents and other French Jews. Scores of police, some in full riot gear, took up posts around the Palais de Justice in central Paris as the verdict was read out last night.

The lawyer for Halimi family's immediately announced he would lodge an appeal against some of the lenient sentences the other gang members received.

Halimi's remains have been reburied at Jerusalem's Mount Herzl Cemetery after repeated threats by anti-Semites to attack his grave in France.

Nidra Poller, who was in the court for the verdict last night, writes from Paris that the strange timing of the verdict (after 10 pm on Friday when much of Paris had already departed for the "14th July" weekend, the biggest French holiday of the year, and also after the Jewish Sabbath had started when Halimi's friends and families, many of whom are observant Jews, had left the court) was probably no accident and designed to minimize media coverage. Indeed state-owned France 3 TV unashamedly admitted that the verdict was announced during the Sabbath in order to avoid incidents.

"Allah Akbar," indeed. If Allah is at all just Halimi's torturers will, in the world to come, yearn to be back in the French prisons.

There are haters in this country, to be sure, and doubtless there are some individuals capable of doing to other human beings what these savages did to Halimi, but thankfully it seems we still have a way to go before we've degenerated to the level of barbarity that some Muslims in France have achieved. Thankfully, such acts of pure evil are not yet in this country front page news.

RLC

Common Sense vs. the Ninth Circuit

The LA Times informs us of yet another assault on common sense by the liberal left. This time it centers around whether a pharmacist has the right not to carry abortifacients in his/her pharmacy:

Pharmacists are obliged to dispense the Plan B pill, even if they are personally opposed to the "morning after" contraceptive on religious grounds, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

In a case that could affect policy across the western U.S., a supermarket pharmacy owner in Olympia, Wash., failed in a bid to block 2007 regulations that required all Washington pharmacies to stock and dispense the pills.

Family-owned Ralph's Thriftway and two pharmacists employed elsewhere sued Washington state officials over the requirement. The plaintiffs asserted that their Christian beliefs prevented them from dispensing the pills, which can prevent implantation of a recently fertilized egg. They said that the new regulations would force them to choose between keeping their jobs and heeding their religious objections to a medication they regard as a form of abortion.

Ralph's owners, Stormans Inc., and pharmacists Rhonda Mesler and Margo Thelen sought protection under the 1st Amendment right to free exercise of religion and won a temporary injunction from the U.S. District Court in Seattle pending trial on the constitutionality of the regulations. That order prevented state officials from penalizing pharmacists who refused to dispense Plan B as long as they referred consumers to a nearby pharmacy where it was available.

On Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction, saying the district court was wrong in issuing it based on an erroneous finding that the rules violated the free exercise of religion clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air offers this opinion. Unfortunately, Morrissey's opinion is so sensible that the jurists who sit on the 9th Circuit were sure to reject it:

There have been two different issues in the legal fight over Plan B. In one group, pharmacists not working for themselves - for instance, at chain pharmacies - objected to dispensing the pill and wanted job protection despite their refusal. Those cases hardly stand up to scrutiny. The owner of the pharmacy has the right to decide on his own inventory and what to sell, and the employees of that pharmacy either should follow that policy or find a job somewhere else if it offends them. It falls into the same category as a cashier who refuses to handle meat at the checkout counter because he's a vegetarian.

However, this is something else. The owners of the pharmacy do not want to stock the pills for their own reasons. Even apart from religious grounds, that still seems to be their decision in the marketplace. If they don't want to sell aspirin, or Ginsu knives, or inflatable life vests for swimming pools, that should be their decision, too. If their customers object to their policies, they will find other pharmacies to patronize. The government has a public interest in telling retailers what they cannot sell for safety reasons (like dynamite, as an example), but should not force business owners to sell something they do not want to sell.

How would Judge Sotomayor rule on this case? We may have an opportunity to find out since it seems that the pharmacists are going to appeal it as far as they can. We wish them luck.

RLC

Why?

Like many other Americans you may have wondered why in the world the Obama administration released back to Iran five terrorist operatives who had been captured in Iraq. You may have wondered why we would freed people who were implicated in the deaths of over four hundred Americans and countless civilian Iraqis to a government that is hip-deep in fomenting death and destruction in Lebanon and Israel, which refuses any concessions on its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and which is fresh off the rigging of an election and the murders of its citizens. What possible basis could there be for this shameful act of abasement and appeasement?

Andrew McCarthy offers a pretty good analysis of this question at National Review Online. His piece is compelling and not very flattering to Mr. Obama. McCarthy doesn't use these words, but he gives the impression that if we were being led by people who have no particular love for this country, no particular pride in either our history or our traditions - if we were being led by people who see the U.S. as the source of all the world's problems - they wouldn't govern much differently than Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats are governing today.

During the sixties leftist students demanded that AmeriKKKa be brought low. Those students have now risen to positions of power and influence and find themselves ideally situated to bring about the destruction they dreamt of in their youth.

Letting those who kill American soldiers go free, saddling the nation with so much debt that we collapse under the burden, nationalizing as much of the private sector as they can get their hands on, repeatedly apologizing to the entire world for vague historical shortcomings, and refusing to protect our national borders are all very perplexing policies, but they're not accidents or misjudgments. They're completely consistent with the belief that capitalism is evil and that America is the cause of most of the world's problems.

Read McCarthy's piece. It's worth the time.

RLC

A Little Late

Liberal talk show host Randi Rhodes says she has knowledge about Al Franken that leads her to believe that he'll make an awful U.S. Senator, but she refused to broadcast this information during the election campaign, leaving it instead to Franken's Republican opponent, Norm Coleman, to disclose.

Now she comes out, after Franken has been certified for the Senate, and says that he's a very bad choice for the job. Can you imagine any liberal who had information about George Bush in 2004 that would have changed people's minds about voting for him and not shouting it from the housetops? They were so desperate for any dirt they could find on Bush that people like Dan Rather were making stuff up.

Now Rhodes expects us to think that she had some noble motive for not discrediting Al Franken when she had the chance? Isn't it more likely that she knew she'd incur the wrath of her fellow liberals if she diminished Franken's chances against Coleman? Isn't it more likely that rather than put her country first she put her popularity and career first?

Anyway, courtesy of Radio Equalizer, here's her statement on the ascendancy of Mr. Franken to the Senate:

This is a little bit like watching a house burn down and then, after the place is reduced to ashes, calling the fire company. Thanks for waiting until after the election to tell the people of Minnesota they made an absurd choice for senator, Randi. What good does it do to tell everyone now?

RLC

What Happened in Honduras?

Mona Charen brings us up to speed on the goings on in Honduras and also why Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is a serious no-goodnik:

The U.S. State Department called the events in Honduras an "attempted coup," and demanded that Mr. Zelaya be returned to power in order to facilitate the "restoration of democratic order."

There was an attempted coup in Honduras, but it was Zelaya who initiated it, not his opponents. As the invaluable Mary Anastasia O'Grady reported in the Wall Street Journal, Zelaya, a Hugo Chavez acolyte, was attempting to ape his mentor by rewriting Honduras' constitution. Under Honduran law, however, the president cannot call a referendum on the constitution on his own authority. O'Grady explains: "While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite ... A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chavez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do." The attorney general of Honduras, as well as the nation's Supreme Court, had declared the referendum illegal.

Zelaya attempted an end run. O'Grady writes: "Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order."

He also fired those military people who would not violate the Supreme Court's order and distribute the ballots. Anyway, Charen has more helpful information on the sort of democracy Mr. Zelaya had in mind for Honduras at the link where she also describes the tyranny Hugo Chavez is imposing in Venezuela.

Meanwhile the Obama administration has cut off military aid to the new Honduran government and is demanding that Zelaya be reinstated. One can only shake one's head at where our new loyalties seem to lie.

RLC

Coyne's Confusion

Earlier this year we posted a five part response to Jerry Coyne's essay in The New Republic in which he argued that science and religion are incompatible. The core of our case was that Coyne's argument was essentially confused and irrational.

Now Martin Cothran at Evolution News and Views wittily, and perhaps more succinctly, makes the same point.

The Darwinian materialists really are at loose ends trying to make the case for a purely materialist worldview without admitting that their materialism is really a mere philosophical preference that no one should feel intellectually compelled to accept.

Check out either our response or Cothran's essay to get a sense of the confusion and embarrassing self-contradictions employed by those anxious to convince us that religious belief is epistemically illegitimate.

RLC

Ecological Benefits

Ecological benefits of global warming keep coming to light even though the articles that mention them rarely draw the conclusion that, biologically speaking, global climate change is not only not new, it's also not necessarily a bad thing to have happen.

Here's another example from New Scientist:

"Teeming with life" may not be the description that springs to mind when thinking of the Arctic Ocean, but that could soon change as global warming removes the region's icy lid. A study of what the Arctic looked like just before dinosaurs were wiped off the planet has provided a glimpse of what could be to come within decades.

Ice-free summers and icy winters are precisely what glaciologists fear could happen in the Arctic within decades. Over the past few years, wind pattern and warm temperatures have been gradually thinning Arctic sea ice, making it less and less likely to survive the summer. Some believe the Arctic could be ice-free during the summer as soon as 2030.

The researchers say that the sheer number of diatoms locked in the mud suggests that when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth the Arctic Ocean was biologically very rich during the summer, on a par with the most productive regions of the Southern Ocean today. Since diatoms are at the very bottom of the food chain, waters rich in diatoms can support a lot of larger life forms as well.

"On the basis of our findings, we can say that it is likely that a future Arctic Ocean free of summer sea ice will also be highly productive," says Kemp. Arctic fauna today is limited by the region's harsh conditions. The ocean is home to very few species of fish - such as the Arctic cod - which in turn support seals, whales and polar bears.

While more diatoms during the summer does not mean that larger animals will spontaneously appear in the Arctic over the coming decades, it could give species that currently live further south an incentive to move into the region by providing them with food. The most likely scenario is one in which larger species migrate to the Arctic in the summer to feed on the enriched summer food chain, then move back south during the dark winters.

Why scientists should "fear" that ice-free summers will be typical of Arctic summers within twenty years is not made clear by the article. It seems to me that the appearance of a nutrient-rich habitat for wildlife is something that biologists would rather welcome, but I suppose there are the politics to consider. Not only is there a risk of incurring their colleagues' censure if scientists wax too enthusiastic about the advantages wrought by climate change, but all the global warming Chicken Littles will be implicitly rebuked, and President Obama will never get his energy bills passed.

RLC

American Racism

Those who say that racism is no longer a problem in this country are simply burying their head in the sand. They choose to ignore the evidence that racism in America is as virulent as ever.

For example, Drudge recently linked to a gut-wrenching story of a group of about fifty white kids attacking and beating a black man and his wife and two children, along with a couple of their friends, at a Fourth of July fireworks celebration in Akron, Ohio.

The police are investigating but have so far declined to call this a hate crime even though the young thugs were yelling "this is a white world" and "this is our world" as they beat their victims with kicks and punches.

Surely there's something rotten in a society that turns out young men so prone to hatred and violence. What are these kids' parents teaching them, or as is probably the case, did they actually learn their hatred and racism from their parents?

What more reason the police need to make this a hate crime is hard to say, and, in fact, the reluctance of the police to file that charge strongly suggests that there may be some bigotry among the Akron authorities as well. It seems that some races are more protected than others in this country.

All of that is quite true and it tells us something ugly about our culture. The only thing in the preceding that's not true is the racial identities of the perpetrators and victims in this report, which were reversed, but you probably suspected that.

RLC

Facing the Tyrants

I know that DEBKAfile doesn't enjoy a reputation for utter reliability so I offer the following with that caveat. Nevertheless, according to reports at DEBKAfilethere have been between 5000 to 6000 Iranians arrested since the massive protests of two weeks ago. Other sources put the figure at roughly half that. Even so, a number of those arrested have made televised "confessions" and appear to have been tortured.

Mir Hossein Mousavi, the man who seemed to have actually won the disputed election that precipitated the mass demonstrations, may be brought to trial according to the DEBKAfile post:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, driven by a thirst for revenge, is preparing a wave of show trials, public confessions and executions to crush the opposition which dared to refute the legitimacy of his election. The West, especially the Obama administration, hoping the bloody crackdown was over, can forget about re-engaging Tehran in talks on the nuclear controversy any time soon, when Mir Hossein Mousavi and the reformist ex-president Mohammed Khatami are denounced for "acting as America's fifth column."

Hossein Shariatmadari, writing in the conservative Kayhan daily Saturday, July 4, said Mousavi must be put on trial as a "US agent" who committed "horrible crimes and treason." The writer is a close adviser to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and must be presumed to represent his boss's views.

Whether Mousavi is actually executed or not, it's almost certain that many others will be. The current regime was born in mass executions of their enemies and can't afford to allow the protests to continue to challenge their legitimacy.

President Obama needs to rethink his unwillingness to use force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. He has gotten no help at the G-8 summit in Italy from the Russians, who are up to their eyeballs in complicity with the Iranian weapons development program, or anyone else, and without Russian pressure there's little the West can do to stop Tehran without using military means.

When the executions start in Tehran there should be a total blockade of oil and other goods to Iran, and if that fails to stop the mullahs then there should be a reprise of shock and awe on the nuclear weapons facilities in the country. The Iranians are a nation of sophisticated, civilized people ruled by an elite of Islamic Neanderthals. The world cannot afford to allow the Neanderthals access to the most fearsome weapons in history.

RLC

Stay Classy, Mr. President

One wonders what will transpire between the President and First Lady when she sees this photo of her husband, Mr. Sarkozy, and an unidentified passerby at a G-8 photo-op:

Ogler in Chief

And you thought that this sort of thing ended when the Clintons left Washington.

UPDATE: ABC News has posted the entire video sequence here, and it appears to exculpate the president. The photo above merely catches him turning to assist the woman behind him down the steps.

At least the video absolves our president. France's president, not so much.

RLC

Economic Tsunami

I have a quirk that manifests itself just about every time I go to the beach. As I sit there in my chair gazing out over the ocean I can't help imagining what a one hundred foot tsunami would look like as it rose up just off the coast. I picture with a shudder how much death, damage, and devastation such an unimaginably powerful wave would cause to the entire coastline. I think a lot of people might be starting to experience similar fantasies right now about our economy.

Whether you think the trend illustrated by the graph below is good or bad will depend upon your point of view, of course, but I wonder if it's not an indication that a significant number of people are emerging from their hope-and-change trance and starting to realize that the current administration's policies are generating an economic tsunami.

The wave crest of a tsunami may not be particularly high at first, but as it approaches the shore it suddenly rises to enormous heights and wipes out everything in its path. People standing on the beach of our economy are seeing the surf suddenly rush out to sea. The ocean is beginning to swell and rise to alarming proportions in the distance, and many, especially among political independents, are gathering up their children and preparing to flee.

The green line represents those who think the President is doing a good job. The red line represents those who think he's not:

When people consider the cumulative effect another "stimulus" bill, higher taxes, the cap and trade energy bill, nationalized health care, and astronomical deficits and debt will have on their personal finances they begin to feel genuine fear for their future and that of their children. I suspect the above trend lines reflect that growing fear.

The really bad news for White House political strategists is this: Eventually the media may tire of playing the Washington Generals to Barack Obama's Harlem Globetrotters, and when they do these numbers will get much, much worse for the President.

If the media starts reporting the consequences of our debt and extraordinary spending binges voters will start fleeing the beach in panicked thousands as the tsunami looms high over their heads, and then that red line will shoot right off the top of the chart.

RLC

Spiritual Alcoholics

Mark Galli at Christianity Today writes that it's been a tough couple of months for evangelical Christians:

We discovered that Carrie Prejean, Miss California, sudden heroine in the gay marriage debate, posed nude for the cameras to kick-start her modeling career.

Then there were the Gosselins, a seemingly devout couple who were sacrificially raising a "ginormous" family on reality TV for all to see their Christian witness. They have decided to divorce. They mouthed the usual mantra, about doing it for the sake of the kids-and the hearts of the devout nationwide sank in despair.

This week we're squirming over South Carolina Governor, and active Christian, Mark Sanford. Every day we discover more sordid details of his extra-marital affair, with Sanford himself revealing, well, just way too much information. Do we really need to know how many times he kissed his paramour, and where they met, and which meetings resulted in "crossing the line" and so forth? Now he's trying to spiritually justify staying in office. It feels so narcissistic and self-serving.

It's discouraging to see Christians who could have been models of our faith become merely examples of what G. K. Chesterton called the one doctrine subject to empirical proof: original sin.

There is something in the evangelical psyche that denies this reality. Yes, we're a movement that preaches repentance and confession of sin as a chief means of grace. But after conversion, our holiness heritage kicks in. We preach, teach, and live "discipleship," "obedience," and "following" Jesus. We're deathly afraid of cheap grace. We assume that with sufficient exhortation and moral effort, our sins will become smaller than a widow's mite and our righteousness larger than life.

This is coupled with the long-standing evangelical myth that there should be something different about the Christian. A look. An attitude. A lifestyle. Something noticeable, something that causes the unbeliever to pause and wonder, "What does that person have?" Because it is such an integral part of our evangelistic method, we spend enormous amounts of psychic energy trying exude that something.

After rightly suggesting that the flaws of Jon and Kate reflect our movement's flaws, she says that we must do things differently: Find new role models, practice forgiveness better, and take marriage vows more seriously. Do, do, do. Then she concludes, "Then, and only then, will Christians have something to offer the world." The problem, of course, is that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that Christians will actually do these things consistently. Not private Christians. Not public Christians-it's only a matter of months, maybe days (!) before another scandal will be revealed in the press.

Such moral exhortations are no doubt needed, but we must never believe that "then and only then" will we Christians have something "to offer the world." What we offer the world is not ourselves or our moral example or our spiritual integrity. What we offer the world is our broken lives, saying, "We are sinners saved by grace." What we offer the world is Jesus Christ and him crucified.

All of this is true, but too many of Christianity's detractors draw from these sad truths precisely the wrong conclusion. They occasionally think they're making some devastating criticism of Christianity by pointing out that too many Christians are no better in their personal lives than those outside the faith. That's a charge that cannot and should not be denied, but the question it should prompt is: So what follows from that? Does it invalidate Christianity that Christians are flawed human beings like everyone else? Christians don't (or at least shouldn't) claim to be better people than those outside the Faith. They claim only to have a reason to think that some behavior is wrong and to have a motive to strive to improve it. Secular man has neither.

It has been noted that a church is like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The pews are filled with people wrestling with demons of one sort or another, and a single moment of weakness can toss any of them off the wagon and back into their own personal agonies. It happens to all of us amid the stresses and strains of work and family life. For the critic to point at us and say, "See, Christians are no better than anyone else so Christianity is false and has nothing to offer," is like pointing at an alcoholic fighting to stay sober who nevertheless succumbs and takes a drink, and saying, "See, AA members are no better than a drunk in the street, so AA is worthless."

Christianity is not something people are urged to consider because it makes its followers perfect. Christians urge others to consider the Gospel because they believe the Gospel is true; they believe that it offers grace and forgiveness to people who very much need it; it offers a basis for moral behavior in a world that has no grounds for saying that anyone is obligated to act one way rather than another; it holds up a mirror to our faces and makes us aware of our faults and flaws; it gives life meaning and hope that no secular worldview can offer; and it helps people to be better than they would otherwise have been. It does not promise that if you become a Christian you'll be a moral exemplar.

Every person, Christian or not, is wrestling with at least one "addiction" in their life. It could be alcohol or drugs, sex or power, anger or lying, unkindness or selfishness, money or pride, hypocrisy or self-righteousness. Everyone, Christian or non-Christian, has something in his or her life that, like the alcoholic, may be defeated for a time but from which he or she is never completely freed. Christian faith gives people the resources to help them wage the life-long struggle with that addiction, but, like AA, it doesn't deliver them from it. It offers them forgiveness and acceptance, not total deliverance, not in this life. Christ, Christians believe, helps us be better people than we would have been had we not been Christians.

It's very disappointing and sad to see anyone fail to remain "on the wagon," but it's a little odd of the critics to fault the wagon just because the people riding it are, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, human, all too human.

RLC

Five Cups a Day

Here's a piece from Science News that may prove very helpful for people concerned about Alzheimers:

When aged mice bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease were given caffeine - the equivalent of five cups of coffee a day - their memory impairment was reversed, report University of South Florida researchers at the Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.

Back-to-back studies published online July 6 in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, show caffeine significantly decreased abnormal levels of the protein linked to Alzheimer's disease, both in the brains and in the blood of mice exhibiting symptoms of the disease. Both studies build upon previous research by the Florida ADRC group showing that caffeine in early adulthood prevented the onset of memory problems in mice bred to develop Alzheimer's symptoms in old age.

Five cups is a lot of coffee for some people. In fact that much caffeine would probably kill you, but at least you'd remember why you were dying.

Maybe it's time to invest in coffee stocks.

RLC

Neo-Con Vindication

Dan Calabrese argues that 2009 is the year of vindication of neo-conservative ideals. In a way he's right. Here's how he opens his essay:

Regardless of whether the current Iranian regime survives the uprising it provoked with its sham election, the events in Tehran are the latest affirmation of a pretty darn happy fact:

The first year of the post-Bush era is turning out to be a triumphant one for neoconservatism.

It is deliciously ironic that a doctrine America supposedly rejected, even though few really knew what it was, has emerged as a set of principles no one seriously questions as the world evolves to prove its wisdom. Indeed, in order to escape the political firestorm that nearly engulfed him this week, President Obama had to finally give in and talk like a neocon.

So what is neo-conservatism and how is it being vindicated in Iran? Read the rest of Calabrese's argument at the link.

RLC

As California Goes, So Goes the Nation

Kevin Hassett at Bloomberg.com declares that California's economic nightmare will kill Obamanomics. Everything that's wrong with California is writ large in the federal government. When people see how that once great and prosperous state is turning itself into an economic basket case unable to pay its bills and without any light at the end of the fiscal tunnel, they'll finally, one hopes, come to see that Obama and his team have been almost criminally reckless in driving up our national debt and insuring economic hard times in this country for generations to come.

Here are some excerpts from Hassett's column:

With California mired in a budget crisis, largely the result of a political impasse that makes spending cuts and tax increases impossible, Controller John Chiang said the state planned to issue $3.3 billion in IOU's in July alone. Instead of cash, those who do business with California will get slips of paper.

The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama's health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California's. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat.

California has engaged in an orgy of spending, but, compared with our federal government, its legislators should feel chaste. The California deficit this year is now north of $26 billion. The U.S. federal deficit will be, according to the latest numbers, almost 70 times larger.

The federal picture is so bleak because the Obama administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of the U.S. I would imagine that he would be the intergalactic champion as well, if we could gather the data on deficits on other worlds. Obama has taken George W. Bush's inattention to deficits and elevated it to an art form.

Nobody believes that [Obama's] unprecedented expansion of the welfare state will lead to enough economic growth. Nobody believes that it will pay for itself. Everyone understands that higher spending today begets higher spending tomorrow. That means that his economic strategy simply doesn't add up.

As bad as the California legislature has been over the years, it has never entered a fiscal crisis like the one that we face today and then doubled down with a massive spending increase. In the end, when times got tough, patriotic and sensible Californians of both parties stood up and began acting like adults.

With the price tag of Obama-care likely to exceed $1 trillion, moderate Democrats face a simple choice. They can jump off the cliff with the president, or they can stay true to the principles that they have espoused throughout their careers.

Perhaps there are two things for which we may hope: First, that moderate Senate Democrats will join Republicans to stop the runaway train that is Obamanomics, and, second, that voters in 2010 and 2012 will realize that the man and the party they thought were wizards of competence are in fact quite the opposite. By 2010 we will be clinging to the edge of the cliff with one hand. It'll still be possible to pull ourselves back up to safety by undoing some of the president's reckless excesses. But if in the meantime either Cap and Trade or Obama's health care plan become law our children will grow up in a country very much poorer than the one in which our parents grew up.

RLC

Generation Gap

Perhaps few events in recent years have defined the generation gap in our society more vividly than has the death of Michael Jackson. On the one hand are the boomers who enjoyed Jackson's music as he was growing up, but who were put off by his weirdness, his drug use, his self-mutilation, his crotch-groping, and his fondness for little boys.

On the other hand are the generation Xers who don't care about his weirdness, his drugs, his self-mutilation, and his fondness for little boys. All those things are rendered irrelevant to them by his ability to sing, dance and put on a great show. Having no gods and few heroes, a lot of younger people deify celebrities, and Jackson was nothing if not a celebrity. He was, in fact, an entertainment genius in an age when entertainment is all that gives meaning to so many lives. Consequently, his death has been mourned in many precincts as though it were a matter of cosmic importance.

It's sad that the emptiness and shallowness of modern life is such that when Jackson died many young people felt that a piece of them died with him. Like many gifted individuals he was a troubled wreck of a human being. His premature death is to be lamented, but he was not a god, he was not a role model, and he was not admirable, except for his talent as a performer. He was, in fact, a literal man-child for whom we should pray and feel pity. The encomiums and eulogies running 24/7 on our grief-stricken media notwithstanding, he was not someone who merited either shrines or adulation.

The significance of Jackson's life and death lies in their reinforcement of this lesson: Neither great fame, nor great wealth, nor great talent can bring happiness or meaning to life. Neither can identification with and idolization of those who have achieved these things.

RLC

If the Founders Were Modern Democrats

No Taxation Without Reading the Legislation:

Glenn McCoy

RLC

Winning the War on Drugs

One of many wars being fought beneath the media radar is the war against the Colombian drug cartels. Evidently, that war is going fairly well judging by this report on Strategy Page:

Last year, cocaine production fell by 28 percent in Colombia. In addition, security forces seized and destroyed a record 200 tons of the stuff. The main causes for this decline are a drop in demand from the 17 million cocaine users world-wide. Another side-effect of the global recession. But the cocaine gangs are also being driven out of business by the security forces. Many are moving operations to Peru (where production was up 4 percent last year, to 302 tons) and Bolivia (up 9 percent to 113 tons). Last year, Peru and Bolivia together produced about as much cocaine as Colombia.

The president of Bolivia is a former coca farmer (although he only backs the traditional chewing of the coca leaves, which has a mild narcotic effect). In Peru, the most productive coca growing areas are controlled by Shining Path, a vicious leftist movement that was almost wiped out in the 1990s, but is now making a comeback via cocaine profits.

As more Colombian cocaine operations move to Peru and Bolivia, the ones remaining in Colombia come under greater pressure from the security forces, and a population glad to see the drug trade move somewhere else, or just disappear. The reason for the many recent defeats of the drug gangs and leftist rebels has been better trained and equipped military and police units.

Not only is the war going well but Colombians themselves are prospering despite the current economic climate:

The leftist rebel group FARC's allies in the United States and Europe have tried to paint the government as the bad guys in all this, but that has had no effect on Colombians, who are safer and more prosperous than they have been in decades. Violent deaths have declined sharply in the last six years, and the economy is booming. The global recession caused a less than one percent dip in GDP during the first quarter of the year, and that's apparently as bad as it's going to get.

Sounds like Columbia is both safer and more prosperous than most major cities in the U.S. It might be a nice place to which to flee from the economic devastation about to be visited upon our once prosperous land by people who think that the best way for a nation to heal our economic woes is to emulate third world countries by burying our woes under a mountain of taxes and debt.

RLC

Eye Evolution

You've probably heard the Darwinian explanation for the evolution of vision - how a few light-sensitive cells underwent some mutational changes which were then preserved by natural selection and after a wave of Mother Nature's wand, some pixie dust, and a couple hundred million years out came the mammalian eye.

Actually, the story is not nearly as simple as the Darwinians would have us believe and the complexity of it does not count in favor of naturalistic theories of the origin of vision.

Cornelius Hunter has some details over at Darwin's God.

Meanwhile, one of the major objections leveled by critics against the truth of intelligent design over the years has to do with an alleged puzzle related to the structure of the eye. It's been argued that the cluster of nerves situated in front of the retina, blocking light to a part of the retina and creating a blind spot where the nerves pass through the retina to join the optic nerve, is evidence that the eye is not designed intelligently. Why, it is asked, would an intelligent designer make the eye in such a way as to produce a blind spot? Why not tuck these tissues behind the retina so that nothing interferes with our vision? That's how a rational engineer would do it, or so we've been told.

It turns out, however, that the way these tiny structures are arranged is in fact a very clever solution to certain problems regarding the health and efficient functioning of the eye, and that when all the reasons for the arrangement are understood the eye emerges as a wonder of intelligent organization and design (See here for a less technical account of why the eye's anatomy is completely compatible with the theory that it was intelligently designed.).

Anyone today who uses the allegedly poor design of the retina as an argument against intelligent design is simply revealing that he doesn't really know much.

RLC

Integrity

Over at National Review Online Guy Benson has dug up a series of candidate Obama's campaign ads critical of John McCain's proposal to tax employer provided insurance benefits as income. Obama's ads declared this to be an intolerable imposition that the taxpayers could not afford and should not be required to bear. Now it appears he very well might impose such a tax himself. Here's one of the ads:

Benson has other ads at the link. Mr. Obama is a deft practitioner of the old political two-step: Criticize your opponent during the campaign for planning to do the very thing you will do once he's out of the way. This is what qualifies one as a political genius nowadays, but there are other, perhaps more accurate, names for it.

RLC

Wildlife Habitat

Here's part of an interesting news release from the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service that raises some interesting questions about climate change and related environmental concerns:

The preliminary estimate of total ducks from the 2009 Waterfowl Breeding Population and Habitat Survey was 42 million, which is 13 percent greater than last year's estimate and 25 percent greater than the 1955-2008 average, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced today. (emphasis added)

Blue-winged teal

Overall, habitat conditions for breeding waterfowl in 2009 were better than conditions in 2008. The total pond estimate (Prairie Canada and United States combined) was 6.4 million. This was 45 percent above last year's estimate of 4.4 million ponds and 31 percent above the long-term average of 4.9 million ponds.

This heartening news is no doubt largely the result of increased rainfall this spring which may well be a consequence of global climate change. If so, it's yet another example of how climate change is producing positive environmental and ecological benefits. The assumption in the media is that any change to our climate is going to be harmful, but as we've argued before there's no reason to think that that's true.

I remember, speaking of ecological matters, reading as a young man about the awful environmental damage that strip mining inflicted upon the earth. And so it did, I suppose, but damage is not always permanent. I had occasion last week to visit an area in Pennsylvania that was largely a reclaimed strip mine, and if this is what happens with old strip mines then I wish we had more of them. The area has been converted into a beautiful and extensive grassland that is habitat for species of birds that can be found almost nowhere else in the state except on these old mines.

Henslow's sparrow

I might also mention that much of the best wildlife habitat in the area in which I live is owned and managed either by the water company or by electrical utility companies who use part of it to house nuclear and coal generated power facilities. When some of this land was purchased back in the sixties and seventies I was deeply disappointed to see the farmland get gobbled up. Now I wish the utilities would gobble up more of it before the developers get it.

The same thing can be said of landfills. No one likes landfills near their home, but some of the best grassland habitat for birds and butterflies in my county sits atop an old landfill. It takes a lifetime to fill these up, but once they're full there's not much else they can be used for, and if the community makes wise decisions, they become oases for wildlife in the midst of a desert of suburban sprawl, and the natural habitat they provide will be enjoyed for generations to come.

The point I'm trying to make is that before we go running around trying to save the environment by destroying coal and other industries and throwing capitalism overboard in favor of socialism we should reflect for a moment that much of what we have in terms of natural treasures in this country we have because of the wealth generated by capitalism and the civic-mindedness of corporations that preserve or create natural lands for public enjoyment. If we want to see what ecological disaster looks like we need only look at those countries, like China, Russia and much of the third world, which impoverish themselves, and consequently their natural environment, by their embrace of socialism.

RLC

Flying by the Seat of Our Pants

Kevin Williamson at NRO quotes from an Obama speech pre-stimulus:

Economists from across the spectrum have warned that if we don't act immediately, millions more jobs will be lost, and national unemployment rates will approach double digits. More people will lose their homes and their health care. And our nation will sink into a crisis that, at some point, we may be unable to reverse.

Well, Williamson notes, we acted immediately. Millions more jobs were lost. National unemployment rates are approaching double digits. So now what?

Williamson quotes the New York Times' economic poobah Paul Krugman:

"O.K., Thursday's jobs report settles it. We're going to need a bigger stimulus."

Well, I'm glad that's settled. A trillion dollars hasn't worked (Of course, the wiser heads were telling us it wouldn't work from the beginning) so the problem must be that we haven't yet dug ourselves deep enough into debt. Let's spend a couple trillion more that we don't have and see what that does for us.

And this guy won a Nobel Prize in economics. It just goes to show that in this amazing country anybody can get to the top.

Back when I learned to fly airplanes I was taught that when visibility is poor you must trust your instruments, not your senses. Trying to keep the plane straight and level based on what feels right will quickly cause you to become disoriented and spiral into the ground. Flying by what your body is telling you instead of by the objective data provided by your instruments is called flying by the seat of your pants, and that's what Krugman sounds like he's doing. Despite Mr. Krugman's intrepid willingness to go where no economist has gone before, the economic results of flying by the seat of your pants are pretty similar to the aerodynamic results.

RLC

Israel Grows Closer to Strike

Drudge links to a Times Online article which reveals that Saudi Arabia has given the Israelis permission to transit their air space to launch an attack on Iran's nuclear weapons facilities. It's in the Saudis' interests to have these facilities destroyed and since President Obama doesn't seem too resolved to do much to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region, the Saudis are apparently content to let Israel do it.

The Obama administration, if Vice-president Biden can be relied upon to have been speaking for the president, seems to have given Israel a green light to do what it is loath to do itself.

Perhaps the Israelis will hold off for a while, however, since the instability in Tehran may yet cause that regime to topple and be replaced with one that'll have a more sensible position on nukes. But if it appears after three or four weeks that the regime is simply consolidating its power, the Israelis will probably feel they are being left with no choice but to launch a strike, or series of strikes, to destroy Iran's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction.

RLC

Maybe She's Had Enough

Sarah Palin has resigned as Governor of Alaska. The reasons are as yet obscure, but if I may speculate I imagine that she's finally had enough of the indescribable crudity and cruelty of the "progressives" in our culture. She didn't give that as her motive for resigning, but it's not unreasonable to think that it factored into her decision.

A decent, honest, woman who sought to serve her state and her country, she became a target for those who, like cockroaches scuttling away from the light, are repelled by the values she lives by. Her family has been humiliated as one vile low-life after another climbed out of the septic tank to laugh at her mentally retarded son, to criticize Palin for birthing him, to joke about her daughter being raped, and to harass her with incessant and asinine ethics probes. Lest you think that I'm stretching things a bit take a look at what the diseased mind of someone named Erik Nelson put up at Huffington Post.

Why would any decent human being want to serve in public office in this country when good people are treated like the left has treated Palin and her family? Why doesn't the media demand that people stop this insanity? Why aren't Democrats insisting that those who are registered in their party and who vote for their candidates stop acting like a pack of cowardly, giggling hyenas unleashed on a helpless victim? Why doesn't our culture demand that the vulgarians on the left be held to the same standard of decency to which Republicans and conservatives would be held? Imagine for a moment that Republican bloggers were saying the same things about Michelle Obama and her daughters that are being said at Huffington Post, Daily Kos, or on the Letterman show about the Palin family. There would be blood in the streets.

It's a shame that Palin has decided to resign because it means that the haters, the sick people, win. They've hounded her from office. Even so, I don't blame her. To engage in politics in this country today means one has to suffer being bespattered with the sewage thrown at you daily by creatures who feel perfectly at home wallowing in the stuff. Until the left disowns these people our political environment will continue to coarsen and deteriorate, but it's doubtful that the left really wants to disown them or they would have done so long ago.

RLC

Freedom

Today is Independence Day, a day which honors our nation's declaration of freedom from oppressive, meddling government. Lots of people will be picnicking and watching fireworks, but it would be good if everyone set aside a few minutes to read either the Declaration itself or perhaps the Bill of Rights appended to the Constitution a decade and a half later, or both. Wikipedia has a good summary of the history behind the Declaration and the people who signed it.

Like a church liturgy recited every Sunday, we've heard the main points of the founding documents so many times that we tend not to think about the significance of the words when we hear them again. Yet on this day we should take time to let them sink into our hearts and minds. Here, for example, is the best known passage in the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Some of the men who undersigned these words paid dearly for it. They lost all they owned and in some cases, even lost their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Rush Limbaugh posts an outstanding essay (adapted, I believe, from a piece by Paul Harvey) which describes what the signers endured in order to secure our freedom. I urge you to read it to get a sense of the sacrifice these people made.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about freedom and individual liberty is this: In every generation there are those who seek to diminish liberty in order to promote what they think to be the collective good or to consolidate their own power. The struggle for freedom is not a once and done fight. It's an ongoing battle, like the contention between a rocky shore and the ceaseless pounding of the waves. The struggle may take different forms, the price to be paid might be greater or less depending on how far freedom's erosion has been allowed to advance before it's arrested and reversed, but it's the same struggle. It's the conflict between those who value being a free people and a state that inveigles us with grand promises of bread and circuses if we will but lay our freedom at their feet.

We live in a time when many citizens of this country have no memory of the cost of freedom and no particular love of the traditions and values which made this country great. Some of these persons have ascended to positions of political influence. For them the great beacons of the past are not our founding fathers but rather people like Karl Marx who argued vehemently for the abolition of individual rights and the establishment of a state where everyone was kept at the same level of economic and personal achievement. These individuals desire to establish a state in which those who get an education, work hard, stay married and sacrifice for their children can be exploited and pillaged in order to bail out those who choose not to order their lives this way, and that's what they've dedicated their lives to working for.

Individual freedom and liberty are under continual assault, even in the United States of America, and the Fourth of July offers us the perfect opportunity to reaffirm our vigilance and our commitment to protect our liberties and to maintain the values and traditions that have made this the greatest nation in the history of human civilization.

RLC

Liberal Racism

Charles Krauthammer skewers Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissenting opinion in the New Haven firefighters case (Ricci vs. DeStefano):

The defenders of the old racial order, led by Ginsburg, objected sternly, declaring that the white firefighters "had no vested right to promotion." Of course they didn't, but they did have a vested right to fairness, to not being denied promotion because of their skin color.

Of course no one has a vested right to promotion. Isn't that why they gave those tests in the first place? Isn't that why for the past, oh, 125 years we have been using objective civil service exams to allocate government jobs not on the basis of right -- or patronage or favoritism or racially discriminatory advantage -- but on the basis of merit and job-related skill?

It's the Ginsburg dissent that, in effect, grants a vested right to promotion -- to African Americans, simply because of their race -- and makes the frustration of that specious right the basis for denying promotion to white (and Hispanic) firefighters who had objectively qualified for promotion.

Krauthammer then goes on to predict the twilight of affirmative action:

The major conundrum of the civil rights age remains. The 14th Amendment bans discrimination on the basis of race. But the Civil Rights Act, which bans "disparate impact" discrimination -- procedures (such as exams) that yield racially unbalanced results -- affirmatively mandates racial favoritism to undo those results. The evil day will come, writes Justice Antonin Scalia in his concurrence, when this contradiction will have to be resolved.

He is right. For decades we have been finessing the issue with a mess of compromises, euphemisms, incoherences and pretenses such as banning racial quotas but promoting racial "goals." Anyone who has ever had to make hiring or admission decisions knows that this angel-on-the-head-of-pin distinction is 95 percent a matter of appearances, gestures and lawsuit-avoiding paperwork.

As Krauthammer explains, it's hard to see why we still need affirmative action in an age when blacks hold the highest office in the land as well as the highest office in many of our major cities. Yet old ideas die hard on the left. Yesterday while on the road I was listening to a radio show out of Buffalo and heard a liberal guest named Brad Bannon opine that Ricci was poorly decided by judge Sotomayor and her colleagues, but that what New Haven should have done to ensure that blacks did well on the test is award them points at the start so that their final scores would be competitive. He was completely serious.

This is classic progressive thinking. It is at once manifestly unfair to whites and grossly insulting, and harmful, to blacks. It tells blacks that they shouldn't be expected to study hard for a promotion like everyone else. It tells them that expecting them to actually know something is an injustice. It tells them that they're too dumb, by virtue of being black (or Hispanic), to compete intellectually with whites and Asians so the city will give them a head start. I can't imagine being black and not being deeply insulted by this. It's exactly the sort of dopey racism-with-a-smile that many whites remember cringing at when they heard it from their parents and grandparents, and it still exists today among progressives like Ginsburg and Brad Bannon.

RLC

Science and God

Lawrence Krauss has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that attempts, rather lamely, to show that science and theism are incompatible. Despite the philosophical dubiety of this view it's so widespread among materialist scientists today that Krauss' piece deserves some scrutiny.

He writes:

Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in several exciting panel discussions at the World Science Festival in New York City. I ended up being one of two panelists labeled "atheists." The other was philosopher Colin McGinn. On the other side of the debate were two devoutly Catholic scientists, biologist Kenneth Miller and Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno. Mr. McGinn began by commenting that it was eminently rational to suppose that Santa Claus doesn't exist even if one cannot definitively prove that he doesn't. Likewise, he argued, we can apply the same logic to the supposed existence of God.

It really is quite embarrassing that a philosopher of some note would make such a silly argument. The difference between Santa Claus and God is that there is no evidence of the existence of Santa Claus, no rational argument that can be given in support of the proposition that Santa Claus exists, and lots of reasons to think that he does not exist, including the fact that we have the historical record of his genesis in folklore. Nor is there anything like the historical universality of belief in God to be explained in the case of Santa Claus. McGinn just trivializes the debate by making such a statement and Krauss does nothing to elevate the tone by sniggering at it.

[People like] Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are simply being honest when they point out the inconsistency of belief in an activist god with modern science.

J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a "god, angel, or devil" will interfere with one's experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science.

But why would any scientist, even if he were a theist, assume that God would interfere with his experiments? Did Newton, or Galileo, or Faraday, or Boyle, or any of dozens of other Christian scientists make such an assumption? Krauss and Haldane are making the elementary mistake of confusing the possibility of divine interference with the probability of such interference. The fact that it's possible that God could intervene does not make it very likely that He would. The assumption that there will be no supernatural interference with one's experiments is based on the further assumption that what almost always has happened in the past will continue to happen and what has almost always happened, as far as we know, is that God has chosen not to interfere with scientific experiments.

Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.

Yes, but of course this is an illicit, indeed a ridiculous, assumption. From the fact that nature exhibits certain regularities which it is reasonable to assume will hold whenever Nature is put to a test it hardly follows that there is no God.

Though the scientific process may be compatible with the vague idea of some relaxed deity who merely established the universe and let it proceed from there, it is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed tenets of most of the world's organized religions.

Krauss here pulls a little bait and switch. His argument is that science is incompatible with belief in the existence of God, but finding that a difficult case to make, he subtly changes the argument to a discussion of the incompatibility of science and religion.

As Sam Harris recently wrote a "reconciliation between science and Christianity would mean squaring physics, chemistry, biology, and a basic understanding of probabilistic reasoning with a raft of patently ridiculous, Iron Age convictions."

Well, let's play along. Which primitive convictions does Harris have in mind, those of the Christian or those of the atheist? Perhaps he's referring to the very modern conviction that the incredible fine-tuning of the universe is the product of mind rather than the Iron-Age conviction, promoted by ancient Greeks and Romans like Leucippus and Lucretius, that it is the unimaginably improbable product of chance and matter. Perhaps he has in mind the very modern conviction that the emergence of information in the first living things is most likely the product of intelligent direction rather than the Iron-Age conviction that it's just a fluke of blind, purposeless nature. Or maybe he's confusing the contemporary view that human consciousness derives ultimately from a transcendent consciousness with the conviction of the ancients that it derives from inanimate stuff. Which of the Iron-Age convictions, still held by modern atheists, do Krauss and Harris have in mind here?

When I confronted my two Catholic colleagues on the panel with the apparent miracle of the virgin birth and asked how they could reconcile this with basic biology, I was ultimately told that perhaps this biblical claim merely meant to emphasize what an important event the birth was. Neither came to the explicit defense of what is undeniably one of the central tenets of Catholic theology.

What his Catholic colleagues should have done is ask Mr. Krauss what principle of basic biology is violated by a miracle like the virgin birth? Does biology teach us that an unfertilized ovum can never develop into a zygote? Actually, it doesn't. Does biology say that it's impossible that a woman could conceive without benefit of a man? In fact, it does not and can not, and Mr. Krauss should know this elementary philosophical fact.

What biology and other sciences tell us is that nature operates in certain highly regular ways unless it's subject to some outside interference. A moving object, for example, will continue to move forever, in a straight line, unless acted upon by an outside force. The only way biologists could say that a virgin could never conceive is if they know a priori that there are no outside forces involved. In other words, miracles like the virgin birth are impossible only if we know there is no God, but if Krauss knows that there's no God, he's certainly not telling us how he knows it. Unless you count this odd piece of reasoning:

So while scientific rationality does not require atheism, it is by no means irrational to use it as the basis for arguing against the existence of God, and thus to conclude that claimed miracles like the virgin birth are incompatible with our scientific understanding of nature.

Krauss is arguing in a circle. He claims to refute the Christian's belief in God by saying that miracles are impossible, but he can only know they are impossible if he already knows there is no God: Because there is no God miracles are impossible, and because miracles are impossible there is no God. Indeed.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that these issues are not purely academic. The current crisis in Iran has laid bare the striking inconsistency between a world built on reason and a world built on religious dogma. Perhaps the most important contribution an honest assessment of the incompatibility between science and religious doctrine can provide is to make it starkly clear that in human affairs -- as well as in the rest of the physical world -- reason is the better guide.

This is interesting. Global atheistic communism claimed to be built on reason and even though religion, specifically Islam, has had a terrible history in the last century, it recedes to insignificance compared to the atheistic ideologies based on reason. More people were butchered in the twentieth century in the name of a rational atheistic communism than died in all the wars motivated by religion in modern history.

I wouldn't want to live in a world built upon the dictates of religious leaders but would want even less to live in a world built on the dictates of political leaders who seek to promote a political philosophy built upon atheism and reason. Atheism and reason have led us to the deaths of twenty million Russians, forty million Chinese, six million Jews, five million Cambodians, and thirty million miscellaneous human beings just in the twentieth century alone. I think I'll pass, Mr. Krauss.

Reason is a wonderful gift, but to paraphrase Einstein "Reason without religion is blind. Religion without reason is lame."

RLC

Prager on Soraya M

Dennis Prager offers a powerful endorsement of the recently-released The Stoning of Soraya M. Here's the heart of his column:

If you want to understand the type of people who run Iran, see this film. If you want to understand why men and women risk their lives to demonstrate against the fascist theocracy that rules Iran, see this film. The film is about the type of people who become "supreme leader" (Ali Khamanei) or president of Iran (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). It is about their mendacity, their use of religion to commit barbarity, and, of course, their despicable treatment of women.

And don't see it solely in order to understand what the dissidents in Iran are fighting -- though that would be an entirely valid reason. See it also because it is a powerful theatrical and emotional experience. Washington Post reviewer Dan Zak wrote that he wept while watching the movie. The Wall Street Journal described "The Stoning of Soraya M." in these words: "This is classic tragedy in semi-modern dress that means to horrify, and does so more successfully than any film in recent memory." Los Angeles Times film reviewer Kevin Thomas wrote that the film, achieves "the impact of a Greek tragedy through its masterful grasp of suspense and group psychology, and some superb acting." And Claudia Puig of USAToday called the film "emotionally explosive," a "shattering and powerful drama."

On the other hand, Amnesty International loathed the film. Which is another good reason to see it. This organization is morally confused. It has become a leftist organization in the guise of a human rights organization. It calls the film "sensationalist" because "the audience response is likely to be disgust and revulsion at Iranians themselves, who are portrayed as primitive and blood-thirsty savages." I wonder if there are 10 people who see this film who will then conclude that Iranians in general -- as opposed to many religious fundamentalists among them -- are "primitive and bloodthirsty savages."

Furthermore, Amnesty International argues, Iranians and foreign human rights organizations are already fighting for women and against such atrocities as stoning. Therefore, the film is unnecessary. If you don't follow that argument, you are not alone.

Finally, the most important reason to see the film could be this:

Many of us lament Hollywood's lack of courage, its lack of moral seriousness, and its political correctness. Here, then, is a courageous, morally deep, and politically incorrect film that mainstream reviewers -- as cited above -- have lavished praise on. It should be the ideal film for serious Americans who properly complain about Hollywood's offerings. But if a riveting drama with a courageous theme, Oscar-level acting, which is as relevant as today's headlines, fails at the box office, Hollywood will have been vindicated.

As of now the film is restricted to http://www.thestoning.com/theaters/ major markets, but it should make its way to a theater near you sometime this summer. You can view the trailer here.

By the way, did anybody follow Amnesty International's reason for not seeing the movie? Why on earth would they not want people to see it? If this were a movie about the horrors of apartheid or some Jewish murder of a Palestinian I doubt that AI would have any problems with it at all, even if it were fictional. The only people who would seem to have a motive for discouraging viewers from seeing this film would be Muslim extremists and those who fear upsetting them.

Okay. Maybe I've answered my question.

RLC

N.T. Wright on Deism and Darwin

Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent posts this video of renowned theologian N.T. Wright discussing deism and Darwin. It's pretty good:

RLC

What Is a Christian?

Matthew Mullins at Prosblogion, a blog given to questions and issues in the philosophy of religion, contemplates the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a Christian. He concludes that among the necessary conditions is this:

It shouldn't be the case that one have eternal salvation and not be a Christian.

To translate this from philosopherese into English what Mullins is saying is that only Christians have eternal life, but surely this is false.

Unless one is prepared to argue that infants and mentally retarded individuals do not have eternal life then there must be lots of people who have salvation who are not Christians (assuming that being a Christian requires a willful assent to Christ). Nor is it hard to imagine the universe of eternally saved individuals being expanded further to include people like the heroes of the Old Testament. If one is a theological inclusivist one might also expand the universe still further, as C.S. Lewis does in The Great Divorce, to include all whose hearts are open to God even if they've never heard of Christ or, for reasons psychological and/or sociological, have never made a commitment to Him.

At any rate, whether one's theology goes that far or not, it still seems highly unlikely that the proposition quoted above is true since it excludes innocents who die in infancy or who never possess the mental capacity to understand what being a Christian entails.

There are some who would argue that whoever is saved is ipso facto a Christian. Lewis, for example, talks about people who are "anonymous" Christians, but this seems to me to empty the concept of Christian of most of its unique content. Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that universalism were true - i.e. the view that everyone is ultimately saved is true. If that were the case then everyone would be a Christian, which seems, to me at least, exceedingly odd and would certainly seem odd to Muslims, Jews and atheists.

I think it makes more sense to simply think that eternal life might be available to others besides Christians.

RLC

Just War Poll

Christianity Today has a poll up in which they ask readers to vote Yes or No on whether the Iraq war met the conditions of a Just War. As I write this it's 58% No and 36% Yes.

I wonder exactly which of the Just War criteria those who voted No think the Iraq war violated.

In fact, I wonder how many of the respondents even know what the criteria of a Just War are.

RLC

Gay Adoption

Frank Lombard, you may or may not have heard from the major media, is the associate director of Duke University's Center for Health Policy who, over the internet, recently offered his five year-old adopted son to pedophiles who wished to molest him. Lombard himself has admitted to molesting the boy and photographs have been found of his cruel perversions.

Lombard and his gay partner (who seems to have been unaware of Lombard's behavior) adopted the boy, a fact which may explain the media's reluctance to make much of the story, since it certainly wouldn't do much to advance the cause of gay adoption. Mike Adams points out that the child is black and goes on to write that:

If this case goes to trial, it could be an interesting one to watch. But it will be just as interesting to watch the Duke faculty respond to these allegations. It didn't take them long to respond when several white Duke Lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper. A whopping 88 professors signed a statement accusing the players of both racism and rape. Such was their regard for the presumption of innocence.

Perhaps even more stunning was the response of some professors after it became apparent that the white lacrosse players were innocent. After that became so obvious the school had to readmit the students, Professor Kate Holloway resigned her committee assignments in protest.

So it will be interesting to see how Duke faculty members respond to Frank Lombard. Because he is white, Lombard is fair game at Duke, isn't he? But Lombard is also gay, so will that complicate things?"

I think it much more likely that if this case goes to trial it will make nary a ripple on the evening news. If white males are accused of raping a black female then that's worth 24/7 coverage, but if a gay white man rapes a black child, well, those things happen, unfortunately, and we really shouldn't try to draw any larger meaning from it. So let's all move on to more important matters like what Michael Jackson will be wearing at his viewing.

RLC

Liberty and Tyranny

I've on occasion voiced my uneasiness with the on-air habits of radio and TV talkers who use rudeness as a substitute for dialogue. I'm put off by the shouting, name-calling, and talking over each other that some talkers, both left and right, seem to employ as standard procedure. Even so, despite my misgivings, I purchased a book written by one of the worst offenders (Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, by Mark Levin) which has been riding the New York Times best-seller list for a couple of months now.

I wasn't much impressed at first since it seemed in the beginning to be a little long on rhetoric and a little short on specifics, but as I worked my way into it I found myself becoming more and more intrigued. Having now finished it, I can say that it's as fine a book on what it means to be a Conservative as I've read. It may turn out to be for the first half of the twenty-first century what Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative was for the latter half of the twentieth century.

Levin's aim is to explain for the current generation what Conservatism is, to discuss what Conservatives tend to hold in common and to contrast Conservative principles with the beliefs held by those he calls "Statists." Levin eschews the term "liberal" because there's too much confusion surrounding the word. Classical liberals were anti-authoritarian, which is a better description of modern Conservatives than of modern liberals who tend to be enamored of the power of the state, a proclivity which makes them the antithesis of classical liberals.

At any rate, Levin explains that, contrary to popular belief, Conservatives do not oppose government: "The Conservative does not despise government, he despises tyranny. This is precisely why the Conservative reveres the Constitution and insists on adherence to it."

Neither do Conservatives oppose change. Indeed, they desire it since much of the status quo is the result of Statist policies inimical to liberty: "The Conservative seeks to preserve and improve the civil society, not engage in a mindless defense of the status quo inasmuch as the status quo may well be a condition created by the Statist and destructive of the civil society - such as the 1960s cultural degradations which are all too prevalent today. It is the Statist, who rejects even minor change if such change promotes the civil society, thereby challenging his authority."

He quotes C.S. Lewis who describes the danger posed by the Statist thus: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under the omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Beginning with chapter 3 Levin undertakes to clarify some important truths about the role of faith in the founding of the country, the crucial importance of fealty to the Constitution, and the importance of federalism and free markets. He also explains modern attempts by the Statist to undermine each of these.

Toward the end of the book he offers a compelling critique of the welfare state, enviro-statism, and lax immigration policies. He concludes with a chapter on the need for a strong national defense and, what some readers might find the most useful part of the book, a succinct statement of Conservative principles arranged in the format of a manifesto.

The book should be required reading for every student of political theory. It should also be read by everyone who wishes to understand the Conservative worldview and everyone on the left who thinks he knows what Conservatism is, but whose criticisms often reveal an unfortunate ignorance and lack of understanding.

RLC

Birds of a Feather

After posting The Common Thread which speculated on the similarities between Barack Obama's reaction to the Iranian protests and his reaction to the removal of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, I came across this political cartoon by Michael Ramirez.

A picture certainly is worth a thousand words.

RLC

Negative Arguments

Over the years one criticism made by Darwinian evolutionists of any theory of divine agency in creation has been that the creationists rely on negative argumentation. Creationists don't offer evidence for divine agency, critics allege, so much as offer arguments against naturalistic evolution.

I've always thought this a strange objection because, in fact, negative arguments, properly understood, are a perfectly legitimate way to argue.

Creationists and other theists often employ the following disjunction: Either the universe and life are best explained by divine agency or they're best explained solely by natural processes and forces. Natural processes and forces, however, are inadequate by themselves to explain either the existence of the universe or many of the facts about life. Therefore these are best explained by a divine agency.

Of course, creationists offer reasons for believing that natural processes and forces are inadequate, but basically their argument can be represented as: Either P or Q; not Q; therefore P, and it's a proper, logical form of argumentation.

So, it's odd that Darwinians would object to it, but their objections are even odder given the fact that, as Cornelius Hunter at Darwins' God points out, the Darwinians argue in exactly the same manner for which they criticize creationists.

Hunter points out that because the evidence for naturalistic "molecules to man" evolution is so thin those who believe it frequently resort to the same disjunction I outlined above. The difference is that their argument goes more like this: Either God had a role in the creation or everything is the result of natural processes. God did not have a role, the Darwinians argue, therefore it must all be the result of natural processes even if we can't explain how it all happened.

It seems to be a case of "Only we Darwinians can argue this way. You creationists can't."

Of course, the only way anyone could conclude that God had no role in the creation of the universe is if one knew a priori that God did not exist. So, it turns out that the defense of Darwinism is often predicated upon the theological assumption of atheism rather on scientific justification.

Yet many people think that if we let creationism or intelligent design into the public schools we'll be introducing religious ideas into the classroom. It's ironic that they don't see that religious ideas are already there. They've been smuggled in via the Trojan horse of Darwinism.

RLC

Letting the Process Work

President Obama all but swore on the Bible during the campaign that he would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 per year. Now it appears that that promise, like others made by candidate Obama, may have an expiration date:

Pity poor Robert Gibbs having to go before an increasingly skeptical White House press corps and avoid saying that the President is breaking a fundamental promise of his campaign when, in fact, it looks as though that's a real possibility. It's pretty humiliating to be the subject of hoots of derision from people you thought were your friends.

RLC

The Common Thread

Maybe there's a relevant difference between Honduras and Iran that eludes me, but I thought I understood President Obama's reasoning for not interfering rhetorically in Iran on the side of freedom and democracy, until he turned around and became actively involved in Honduras to help a president, an acolyte of Hugo Chavez, circumvent the law to stay in power. Perhaps the appearance of inconsistency is only superficial. There is, after all, one common denominator here: In the case of Iran President Obama's silence (until it was really too late to make any difference) essentially aided the dictators. In the case of Honduras his interference also would have had the effect of supporting a would-be dictator:

The Obama administration and members of the Organization of American States had worked for weeks to try to avert any moves to overthrow President Zelaya, said senior U.S. officials. Washington's ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, sought to facilitate a dialogue between the president's office, the Honduran parliament and the military.

Soldiers stormed the house of leftist President Manuel Zelaya in a predawn raid Sunday, arresting him and removing him from power amid a growing crisis over Mr. Zelaya's plans to try to get re-elected.

The efforts accelerated over the weekend, as Washington grew increasingly alarmed. "The players decided, in the end, not to listen to our message," said one U.S. official involved in the diplomacy. On Sunday, the U.S. embassy here tried repeatedly to contact the Honduran military directly, but was rebuffed. Washington called the removal of President Zelaya a coup and said it wouldn't recognize any other leader.

The U.S. stand was unpopular with Honduran deputies. One congressman, Toribio Aguilera, got prolonged applause from his colleagues when he urged the U.S. ambassador to reconsider. Mr. Aguilera said the U.S. didn't understand the danger that Mr. Zelaya and his friendships with Mr. Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro posed.

On the other hand, maybe the Obama administration understood perfectly the significance of those friendships, and wanted very much for them to thrive. Mr. Obama's ideological sympathies lean much closer toward the Zelayas, Chavezs, Castros, and Ortegas of the world than toward those who oppose them, a fact which makes one wonder what schemes may be afoot to keep President Obama in power beyond his own constitutional term limit.

RLC