Atheist Delusions

Theologian David Bentley Hart has favored us with a wonderful book which he has titled Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, a takeoff from Richard Dawkins' God Delusion, the basic argument of which is the target of Hart's book. Hart doesn't spend much time deconstructing Dawkins' book itself but rather addresses himself to the larger genre of atheistic tomes which have flooded the marketplace of late.

Hart takes their main premise that religion generally, and Christianity specifically, have been toxins in the bloodstream of human civilization and with an eloquence that's often lapidary, exposes such claims as utterly lacking in significant historical foundation. By way of christening his rebuttal Hart launches in chapter one a witheringly eloquent assault on the thinking of such as Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and their epigones which is worth the price of the book all by itself.

Subsequent chapters take us on an excursis of the ancient world into which Christianity was introduced. It was a world of unbelievable brutality, violence, and superstition, a world in which women and slaves were property and newborn children were often left along roadsides to die from exposure. He then chronicles how Christianity changed all that, not all of a sudden and certainly not perfectly, but inexorably nevertheless. Along the way he puts to rest all sorts of myths about the history of the Christian church.

For instance, everyone has heard how Christianity oppresses women, but the history of Christianity simply doesn't support this myth and, in fact, shows that Christianity has done more to elevate women to equal status with men than any other belief system or culture had ever done. Consider how the status of women in the Roman world changed under the influence of the Christian church.

...there can be little question regarding the benefits that the new faith conferred upon ordinary women - women, that is, who were neither rich nor socially exalted - literally from birth to death. Christianity forbade the ancient pagan practice of the exposure of unwanted infants - which is almost certainly to say, in the great majority of cases, girls - and insisted upon communal provision for the needs of widows - than whom no class of persons in ancient society was typically more disadvantaged or helpless. Not only did the church demand that females be allowed, no less than males, to live; it provided the means for them to live out the full span of their lives with dignity and material security. Christian husbands, moreover, could not force their wives to submit to abortions or to consent to infanticide; and while many pagan women may have been perfectly content to commit their newborn daughters to rubbish heaps or deserted roadsides, to become carrion for dogs and birds or (if fortunate) to become foundlings, we can assume a very great many women were not. Christian husbands were even commanded to remain as faithful to their wives as they expected their wives to be to them; they were forbidden to treat their wives with cruelty; they could not abandon or divorce their wives; their wives were not their chattels but their sisters in Christ....Christians had been instructed by Paul that a man's body belonged to his wife no less than her body belonged to him, and that in Christ a difference in dignity between male and female did not exist....

Christian emperors instituted laws which, though we today might wish went further than they did, were nevertheless unprecedented among prechristian pagans:

Constantine decreed laws that eased the hardship of widows, shielded women from prosecution in public, forbade divorce on trivial grounds, made public accusations of adultery against women illegal, and protected girls against marriage by abduction and forcible proleptic "consummation."

Theodosius and his successors went even further....A wife abandoned by her husband simply on the grounds of domestic unhappiness was now entitled not only to reclaim her dowry but to retain her husband's betrothal gifts to her as well....inheritance law was made more equitable in general by assuring that the estates of deceased women passed uncontested to her children. A girl whose father prostituted her was entirely liberated from his authority, and (more remarkably) a slave girl similarly abused by her master ceased to be his property.

In other words, rights and protections were conferred upon women and slaves under the aegis of Christianity that had no parallel in any pagan culture, which is probably why the Faith had such a strong appeal to so many who had been historically disenfranchised and marginalized.

There's much more in this excellent book which would make a fine gift for someone you know who perhaps labors under the benighted delusion that Christianity has been a pernicious blight on human history. To the contrary, Christianity was the engine that produced the modern understanding of human rights, dignity, and the value of every person.

RLC

Confused Freedom Fighter

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a very brave woman. She lives under the threat of death because she dares to criticize the Islamic religion in which she was raised, yet she persists, and her courage has inspired millions. Unfortunately, she's as philosophically naive as she is courageous. An interview with her that appears in the LA Times suggests why. Here's part of the Times' story:

For five years Ali has lived under the threat of death from Islamic radicals, and in those five years, she has become an acclaimed and provocative author on matters about Islam and the West. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born into a Somali Muslim family and eventually made her way to the Netherlands as a refugee.

There she wrote a screenplay for a short film about women's treatment under Islam. Just over two months after it aired, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was assassinated. A letter threatening Ali's life has meant she has lived under guard ever since -- most recently thanks to a fund set up by private donors.

Controversy follows her: In 2006, she resigned from the Netherlands parliament under fire for lying on her asylum papers; the complex charges and countercharges precipitated a Dutch political upheaval.

She now works for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which is headquartered in Washington. She established her AHA foundation to defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam. Her autobiography, "Infidel: My Life," which detailed her own genital mutilation in Somalia, was a bestseller, and her next book, "Nomad," is to be published in February.

Your own grandmother oversaw your genital mutilation when you were 5, even though your father opposed it.

That's why I keep hammering on principle. My grandmother was convinced she was doing something right. She was brainwashed. She was doing it out of love. She had done it to all her daughters; it was done to her, to her grandmother. She didn't know it was possible not to be, as she called it, "cleansed." Yes, education helps, but it had everything to do with the conviction that what she was doing was right.

Will any country ever go to war for rights and women's safety?

It looks like it will not happen. But I am very, very optimistic -- not about going to war but about human beings changing their minds. You'll remember how communism was stigmatized. The big problem is [how] to define the protection of women's rights as the problem of the 21st century. If the world does that, [women's inequality] will become like the eradication of apartheid -- people will insist that it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong, and that's when change happens.

And here's why Ms Ali, for all her courage and ideals, is quite confused. Ayaan, you see, is an atheist:

Do you regard yourself as an atheist?

Did God create man, or did man create God? I belong to the group who say man created God. I am comfortable to live without an outer force telling me what to do. I'd rather believe in human beings.

Ayaan has rejected the God of both Islam and Christianity, but if she's correct that there's no God upon what does she base her strong belief that her grandmother was wrong and that she is right? If there's no God then there's no reason why anyone should care about anyone other than themselves, no reason not to think that might makes right, and no reason for thinking that those who have the power to oppress women are doing anything wrong if they exercise that power.

Ms Ali doesn't like what they do, of course, nor should she, but if there's no "outer force" to act as a moral authority, if morality is just a matter of one's subjective intuitions, she has nothing upon which to base an assertion of the right of women not to be mutilated other than that such treatment offends her own personal sense of morality. If there is no God, if morality is nothing more than an expression of individual taste, like one's preference for Coke over Pepsi, then no one's morality is any better or worse than anyone else's.

Ms Ali doesn't think women should be reduced to chattel, others think they should. Neither side is right nor wrong any more than those who prefer Coke are right and those who prefer Pepsi wrong. Ayaan has no authority to which to appeal to support her asseveration that those who disagree with her are "wrong, wrong, wrong." It's all based on her preferences which are no more binding on others than is her preference in soda.

Only if God exists does the claim that something is morally wrong make any sense. Only if right and wrong are grounded in an objective transcendent moral authority can the claim that oppression and abuse are wrong rise to anything more substantive than the equivalent of "I don't like oppression." Only if practices such as genital mutilation violate the objective moral law of the Creator of the cosmos can we say that someone is wrong to do it. Otherwise, we are just emoting when we say something is wrong.

Anyway, despite the philosophical inadequacy of the foundations of her convictions she is a heroic woman. Read the rest of the interview with her at the link.

RLC

Another Weird Appointment

How many bizzare appointments must the Obama administration make before the media starts to catch on that there's something very wrong with the way these people see the world?

You might remember Mark Foley the Republican congressman from Florida who sent salacious emails to House pages and subsequently resigned his office, his reputation in tatters, even though he had evidently broken no laws. No less than 1400 news stories were written about his sleazy behavior, and it was universally agreed that such people have no place in our government.

Well, I say universally agreed, but it's not clear where the Obama administration stands on such behavior. No doubt they would be glad to see Foley discredited, because he was, after all, a Republican, but their opinion of the behaviour that Foley actually engaged in is more ambiguous.

I say this because Mr. Obama has appointed as his "safe school czar" a man named Kevin Jennings who makes Mark Foley look like the picture of moral rectitude. Mr. Jennings is a gay activist who wants schools to actively promote and affirm the gay lifestyle. He relates an incident that occurred when he was teaching at a private boarding academy in Massachussetts that is disturbing in what it reveals about his own attitudes toward gay sex. Jennings tells the story of a 15 year-old homosexual student named "Brewster" who confided to Jennings about an encounter he had had with a man in a Boston bus station rest room. Human Events provides the sordid details:

Jennings quotes the boy and then comments: "'I met someone in the bus station bathroom and I went home with him.' High school sophomore, 15 years old. That was the only way he knew how to meet gay people."

Did Jennings report this high-risk behavior to the authorities? To the school? To the boy's parents? No -- he just told the boy, "I hope you knew to use a condom." Sex between an adult and a young person below the "age of consent" (which varies from state to state) is a crime known as statutory rape, and some states mandate that people in certain professions report such abuse.

So, here we have a teacher of children who refrained from advising this boy to stay away from strange men in toilet stalls, impressing upon him only the importance of donning a prophylactic in such encounters. He's a man who apparently thinks that sex between boys and men is no big deal even if it's against the law, and even if it exploits and dehumanizes the boy. Yet in the eyes of this White House such a man is deemed qualified to be put in charge of the safety of our nation's schoolchildren.

What's the difference between Kevin Jennings and Mark Foley? Fourteen hundred news stories.

RLC

Out of the Body Experience

An article by Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist probes the phenomenon of out of the body experiences. These events appear to be generated by a particular part of the brain called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), but exactly what is going on in these experiences, which researchers don't doubt are genuine, remains a mystery.

Ananthaswamy seems to assume a dualistic view of the body and the self with the self somehow tied to the body unless released by certain triggers. Here's an account of one such episode that he cites as an introduction to his article:

The young man woke feeling dizzy. He got up and turned around, only to see himself still lying in bed. He shouted at his sleeping body, shook it, and jumped on it. The next thing he knew he was lying down again, but now seeing himself standing by the bed and shaking his sleeping body. Stricken with fear, he jumped out of the window. His room was on the third floor. He was found later, badly injured.

What this 21-year-old had just experienced was an out-of-body experience, one of the most peculiar states of consciousness. It was probably triggered by his epilepsy. "He didn't want to commit suicide," says Peter Brugger, the young man's neuropsychologist at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland. "He jumped to find a match between body and self. He must have been having a seizure."

In the 15 years since that dramatic incident, Brugger and others have come a long way towards understanding out-of-body experiences. They have narrowed down the cause to malfunctions in a specific brain area and are now working out how these lead to the almost supernatural experience of leaving your own body and observing it from afar. They are also using out-of-body experiences to tackle a long-standing problem: how we create and maintain a sense of self.

Dramatised to great effect by such authors as Dostoevsky, Wilde, de Maupassant and Poe - some of whom wrote from first-hand knowledge - out-of-body experiences are usually associated with epilepsy, migraines, strokes, brain tumors, drug use and even near-death experiences. It is clear, though, that people with no obvious neurological disorders can have an out-of-body experience. By some estimates, about 5 per cent of healthy people have one at some point in their lives.

So what exactly is an out-of-body experience? A definition has recently emerged that involves a set of increasingly bizarre perceptions. The least severe of these is a doppelg�nger experience: you sense the presence of or see a person you know to be yourself, though you remain rooted in your own body. This often progresses to stage 2, where your sense of self moves back and forth between your real body and your doppelg�nger. This was what Brugger's young patient experienced. Finally, your self leaves your body altogether and observes it from outside, often an elevated position such as the ceiling. "This split is the most striking feature of an out-of-body experience," says Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

All this raises several questions: What exactly is it that's "outside" the body? Is it really outside the body or is the outsideness an illusion? If it is illusory how does it perceive things from an "outside" perspective? Is there something about us that's immaterial and yet can still perceive and move? How does it do this if it has no sense organs and no locomotive system? Can both the "outside" self and the body have simultaneous cognitive experience, i.e. can the mind be split between the two?

There's a debate among philosophers whether minds actually exist as a substance separate from material bodies and brains. Materialists usually hold that minds have no actual existence. For them mind is just a word we use to describe the function of the brain much like we use the word digestion to describe the function of the stomach. Dualists, on the other hand, believe that minds are an altogether different kind of "substance," an immaterial substance, from material bodies. No doubt materialists will try to explain out of body experiences in terms of purely physical mechanisms giving rise to illusory experience, but I don't see how the weight of the evidence doesn't at least offer prima facie support to mind/body dualism.

Read the rest of the article and see what you think.

RLC

Early Graduation

We recently did a post on extending the school year which I closed by saying that this would be of special benefit to the better students. There was quite a lot of response to this post and a number of readers asked why I added that last sentence. They wondered why it wouldn't also benefit the weaker students to have a longer school year.

Well, I'm not convinced that it would. In fact, I've long felt that we overschool weaker students, particularly those in the bottom fifth of their class. Indeed, I've advocated, not that anyone has paid any heed, that the state institute a two-tiered graduation that would allow students who feel unsuited to an academic setting to graduate after their sophomore year in high school. Here's why:

Research has shown that students in the lowest ranks of their class who persevere through their senior year learn no more than similar students who drop out after tenth grade. The additional two years of schooling turned out to be of almost no academic benefit to those who opted for them.

This finding will come as no surprise whatsoever to teachers who wear themselves out daily trying to motivate these particular students, but it does raise a question:

If these youngsters are unlikely to add significantly to their knowledge base in their last two years of school, and if it is the case, as some observers suggest, that many, perhaps most, of the jobs of the future are going to require unskilled workers, why do we expend so much effort and treasure trying to keep these kids in school for twelve years as if there was something magical about the number twelve?

Part of the answer, of course, is that a diploma generally opens more opportunities than are available to a high school drop-out, but if so, it might be much more to the benefit of these youngsters if schools offered two kinds of diploma.

Students who elect to remain in school through their senior year, perhaps 85% of an incoming freshman class, would be eligible for one type of diploma while students who choose to graduate after the successful completion of tenth grade would receive another.

A two-tiered graduation, similar to those found in some European countries, has a number of advantages:

1) Apathetic ninth-graders who often harbor a dread of having to endure four more years of schooling might be motivated to work a little harder if they knew that by so doing they can receive a diploma after less than two more years of effort.

Indeed, it's not inconceivable that the prospect of early graduation might spur some of these students to improve their academic work, their attitude, and their attendance during their freshman and sophomore years thus helping them to draw more benefit from these two terms alone than they would get were they to just hang on until they either drop out or eke out a traditional diploma.

2) Students who wish to attend a post-secondary trade or technical school but who would likely be defeated by two additional years of academic courses would be able to bypass these and get on with the vocational education that will eventually be of most use to them. Public schools might even wish to restructure their tech-ed programs to accommodate these graduates.

3) Kids who remain in school but who don't really want to be there are usually the most disruptive. The prospect of a tenth grade graduation gives them an incentive to improve their conduct while simultaneously providing a means of easing the frustrations that often lead to undesirable behavior.

4) Schools which are caught between the desperate need for additional space on the one hand and tight budgets on the other would obtain some measure of relief if every year a percentage of the sophomore class - and perhaps even some juniors - were to choose to graduate.

5) Those who might otherwise choose to drop out of school with nothing to show for the time they spent there would now have hope of obtaining a diploma which would reflect a modicum of achievement and confer some measure of dignity.

And, of course, some students who take advantage of early graduation might wish later to acquire a regular diploma. They could be allowed to return to school, motivated, perhaps, by an enhanced appreciation of the value of, and a new desire for, an academic education.

Early graduation could be immensely helpful for precisely those students who invariably benefit the least from traditional education. If keeping them in school until twelfth grade doesn't really help them, let's do something for them which might.

RLC

The Difference Between Us

Here's a piece that gives a lot of insight into the difference between how the U.S. and its allies wage war against our enemies and how our enemies wage war against us. While the Islamists are sending suicide bombers into markets and schools to blow innocent civilians to pieces Western forces do things like this:

Britain revealed that, last month, the pilot of a Harrier jet, maneuvering a Paveway IV laser guided bomb towards a moving vehicle carrying a Taliban leader, moved the bomb away at the last minute. This was because the Taliban vehicle suddenly stopped near some civilians, and the new ROE (Rules of Engagement) mandated that civilian casualties be avoided at all costs. The bomb went off in a nearby field, causing no injuries. The Taliban vehicle then sped away and was not caught again until several days later. At that point, a bomb took out the target. The Taliban leader had been under observation for weeks, and several opportunities had been lost because of nearby civilians.

I'd like to know what nation in history would have been so solicitous of innocent bystanders that they would do what our military, and that of our allies, does every day to avoid civilian casualties. Anyone who says that all cultures are equally worth celebrating and that our way of seeing the world is no better than that of other peoples simply doesn't know what they're talking about.

RLC

Alzheimer's Research

Alzheimer's disease results from the buildup of amyloid plaques in the brain. A recent discovery shows that mice can recover from Alzheinmer's by tweaking their brains' immune cells with a particular protein which causes the immune cells to remove the plaque.

If this can be made to work in humans it could be a wonderful breakthrough in the treatment and cure of this terrible disease. Science Daily has the story.

RLC

Protect Free Speech

Hovering below the media radar screen is an important piece of legislation now being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill is titled The Free Speech Protection Act 2009, and it's extremely important that it be voted out of committee and brought to the Senate floor for a vote by the full Senate. Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent explains why:

Paul Williams is a journalist who has written extensively about the threat of terrorism in North America. He is being sued by McMaster University [In Canada] for millions of dollars for alleging in print that they have abetted terrorists and allowed radioactive materials to be stolen. How could he be tried in a Canadian court given that he broke no U.S. law and did everything that McMaster University is upset about on U.S. soil?

As he explained to me, "Bill, I am being tried in Canada because of free trade agreements, including NAFTA. Such agreements give foreign entities the right to take action against American citizens. I am not the only journalist to suffer this fate. New York Times reporter Joe Sharkey is undergoing a similar plight for offending the 'dignity' of Brazil by criticizing an air-traffic control official. Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil, is being sued in England for criticizing Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire. Many more will suffer a similar fate in the coming years."

For more on this travesty go here.

People like Williams have been essentially stripped of their right to freedom of speech because of a provision in NAFTA that should be rescinded. American citizens should not lose their fundamental freedoms because people in another country don't appreciate the rights that we enjoy. The Free Speech Protection Act would guarantee American citizens would not be subjected to this kind of shameful harrassment which has already cost Williams in legal fees his entire life savings of $500,000.

This is a matter of basic justice upon which Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, should be able to agree. There are no constitutional rights more precious than those enshrined in our first amendment, and we should not suffer any agreement with another country that permits their abridgement.

RLC

Miracle Workers

If President Obama is not up to the task of reversing the rising seas as he promised he would do during the campaign, maybe we can get this guy to take care of it:

[T]he mayor of Moscow promises to keep it from snowing. For just a few million dollars, the mayor's office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city. Authorities say this will be a boon for Moscow, which is typically covered with a blanket of snow from November to March. Road crews won't need to constantly clear the streets, and traffic - and quality of life - will undoubtedly improve.

The idea came from Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who is no stranger to playing God. In 2002, he spearheaded a project to reverse the flow of the vast River Ob through Siberia to help irrigate the country's parched Central Asian neighbors. Although that idea hasn't exactly turned out as planned - scientists have said it's not feasible - this time, Luzhkov says, there's no way he can fail.

I think it would be great to have a contest between these two to see who can perform the most spectacular miracles. The winner could be awarded the Nobel Prize for Sheer Awesomeness.

RLC

Outraged at the Left's Tactics

Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was invited recently to join a consortium of buyers interested in purchasing the St. Louis Rams football team. Immediately the Left saw an opportunity to punish Limbaugh for his political opposition to President Obama by spreading false stories about statements he has made in the past pertaining to race. It turns out that Limbaugh never made the statements, that many of the people who claimed he did knew he didn't make them, but they disseminated the slander anyway until he threatened legal action. At that point they began retracting their libels, but by then the damage had been done. Limbaugh was dropped from the consortium, denying him the opportunity to realize his dream of owning an NFL team. Limbaugh himself discusses this sordid episode here.

This is the modus operandi of the Left. They rarely try to defeat their opponents by offering superior ideas because their ideas are rarely superior. This is why they try to push legislation through without giving the public a chance to read it. If they lack the power to bulldoze their opposition they'll try to win by lying about their opponents, vilifying them or traducing their reputations. They seek to destroy, both politically and personally, anyone who stands in their way. Indeed, this was Saul Alinsky's Rule #12, from his Rules for Radicals which has become the handbook for left-wing political activists everywhere.

Watch this clip of a seemingly unlikely trio commentators coming to Limbaugh's defense. The three consist of a black liberal, a black conservative, and a lesbian who's a former leftist. All of them are disgusted with what the Left is doing to American politics in general and to Limbaugh in particular:

RLC

Israel Prepares to Attack

Yet another report that Israel is planning an attack on Iran, this time from a French magazine:

According to the report in Le Canard Enchain� quoted by Israel Radio, Jerusalem has already ordered high-quality combat rations from a French food manufacturer for soldiers serving in elite units and has also asked reservists of these units staying abroad to return to Israel.

The magazine further reported that in a recent visit to France, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi told his French counterpart Jean-Louis Georgelin that Israel was not planning to bomb Iran, but might send elite troops to conduct activities on the ground there.

These, according to the magazine, could involve the sabotage of nuclear facilities as well as assassinations of top Iranian nuclear scientists.

The magazine report said that the Israelis will probably move "after December." This raises several interesting questions. For example, is a preemptive assault on Iran morally justified? Is assassinating the scientists who are working on constructing the Iranian nuclear bomb justified? If your answer is yes, what circumstances must be met in order for such acts to be justified? If your answer is no would it be better to simply let Iran build a nuclear weapon?

Give these questions some thought. They may prove to be pertinent soon enough.

RLC

Amazing

This is really unbelievable. A video camera in a London tube station catches what seems to be certain tragedy, but somehow it isn't:

RLC

God and Scientism

In an article at the Wall Street Journal William McGurn expresses heretical misgivings about scientism - the view that only knowledge obtained through the scientific investigation is genuine and that science is the ultimate authority on every subject.

In the middle of his piece he notes that:

In contrast to the majority of scientists whose wondrous discoveries seem to inspire humility, today's advocates of scientism can be every bit as dogmatic as the William Jennings Bryans of yesteryear. We saw an example a week ago, when the New York Times reported that many scientists view "outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia."

The reporter was Gardiner Harris, and the object of his snark was Francis Collins-the new director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is perhaps best noted for his leadership on the Human Genome Project, an effort to map the genetic makeup of man. But he is also well known for his unapologetic talk about his Christian faith and how he came to it.

Mr. Harris's aside about dementia, of course, is less a proposition open to debate than the kind of putdown you tell at a private cocktail party where you know everyone in the room shares your orthodoxies. In this room, there are those who hold that God cannot be reconciled with what science has discovered about the human body, the origin of the species, and the beginnings of the universe.

Of course, these fashionable detractors of Christianity haven't a clue about that of which they speak. There's nothing that's been discovered by scientists which does anything to cast doubt on the existence of God and much that has been discovered which affirms it (Doubters are referred to Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell). Indeed, the more we learn about the human body the more easily one draws the conclusion that it's the product of intentional engineering. The more we learn about the origin of life the more we realize how implausible it is that blind, purposeless forces could have brought it about. The more we learn about the origin the universe and its origin the more compelling does Genesis 1:1 sound.

There is no conflict whatsoever between science and God. How could there be? The conflict we see today is between naturalism (the view that physical nature is all there is) and theism. There is nothing about science that requires its practioners to embrace naturalism. Those who do, do so because they simply don't want the universe to be the kind of place where a God might intervene.

McGurn continues:

The more honest ones do not flinch before the implications of their materialist principles on our understanding of human dignity and human rights and human freedom-as well as on religion.

In 1997, for example, an International Academy of Humanism statement in defense of human cloning-whose signatories included scientists such as E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins-went out of its way to attack the special dignity of human beings. "Humanity's rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover." They concluded "it would be a tragedy if ancient theological scruples should lead to a Luddite rejection of cloning."

This is important. The logical conclusion of naturalism is that man is nothing but a complex mass of chemical reactions and electrical circuitry. We are, at bottom, just a bunch of atoms arranged in a rather interesting way, but ultimately we're nothing more than a flesh and bone machine. There's nothing about us, certainly no soul, that gives us inherent value.

It's a view that amounts to a stark denial of human dignity. If we're just a machine there's ultimately no freedom of the will, no soul, no imago dei, no inherent human rights - just blood, muscle and excrement. If that's all man is then there's no reason why those who have the power should not enslave him, exploit him and slaughter him if they so wish. After all, what's wrong with abusing a bunch of electrochemical brain impulses? It's no different, at the end of the day, than tossing your old computer into the trash.

This is the logic of humanism and all other views which deny God and human transcendence. This is the logic that has throughout modern times led powerful men to kill weaker men by the thousands and millions.

The humanist may be convinced that naturalism is true and that man has no specialness, no dignity, and no worth, but that he should want to tout the fact in pronouncements and manifestos, given the ghastly consequences this belief entails, strikes me as perverse. One would think that humanists would be horrified at the logic of the "truth" they have discovered and believe and do everything they can to keep that "truth" secret.

RLC

Mao?!

Glenn Beck is pretty upset, as well he should be. What is it, after all, about President Obama that so many of the people he surrounds himself with are people like White House Communications Director Anita Dunn? Ms Dunn announces in a speech to high school students that two of her favorite "political philosophers" are Mother Teresa (political philosopher?!) and Mao Tse Tung.

Perhaps there's another Mao Tse Tung out there that I don't know about. Ms Dunn can't be alluding to the same Mao who murdered some 35-70 million of his fellow Chinese. She can't be an admirer of the same Mao who during the cultural revolution had his enemies buried up to their chins and then bludgeoned to death, can she? What does it say about Ms Dunn that this most monstrous of men is one of her heroes? What does it say about President Obama that he brings people like Ms Dunn into his administration? What does it say about Mr. Obama that so many of his associates have been admirers of people who hate the U.S. and who have themselves been brutal thugs and murderers?

Beck offers an apt analogy at the end of the clip. He's absolutely right. Take a look:

Next we'll see President Obama jogging in a Che Guevara T-shirt.

RLC

What a Deal

The Hill has a column that states that despite White House claims of having created a million jobs via the stimulus bill passed last February they can only account for 30,083, most of which are probably temporary and/or government positions. Since only $16 billion of the stimulus has been spent so far, you and I have paid just under $532,000 per job. What a deal. And this from the administration that sold itself to the American voters on competency and intelligence.

Meanwhile, 3.4 million jobs have been lost since February and reports come out almost daily on the wasteful make-work and payback schemes toward which the stimulus is being applied.

The best thing that could happen would be for Congress to repeal the stimulus before we waste any more money that we don't have, but repeal won't happen as long as Democrats control both houses and the White House. November 2010 can't come soon enough.

RLC

SoJo on Health Care Reform (Pt. II)

As I mentioned yesterday, Sojourners' magazine editor Jim Wallis published an argument that seeks to provide the moral rationale for passing health care reform. While I certainly agree that we have an obligation to help those who suffer, I think there are several weaknesses with Wallis' case. We considered the first two of Wallis' five points yesterday. Today we'll consider his last three. He writes:

3. Patients not profits. No one should be discriminated against in their health care because they are sick. Our faith mandates that we give extra consideration and help to those who are sick, but every time an insurance company denies coverage for "pre-existing conditions," excluded ailments, or confusing fine print, their profits go up. Every doctor I know decided to pursue medicine to help people. Many insurance companies make a profit by not helping people, but our faith requires it.

Insurance companies are not in business to help people any more than grocery stores are in business to help people. They go into business to make a profit. There's nothing wrong or unsavory about that. It's absurd to expect insurance companies to accept customers who will cause them to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay outs because the customer has a pre-existing condition that's bound to cost the insurer vast sums of money down the road, Requiring insurance companies to accept new clients with pre-existing conditions who haven't paid a dime in premiums is like demanding that grocery stores give away free food. It's certainly proper to require that insurance companies not be allowed to back out of agreements or deceive customers, but the solution is not to add another "company," the government, to the list of malefactors. The solution is to prosecute those companies which refuse to write clear contracts or which abridge those contracts.

4. Life and liberty must both be protected. The health-care system should protect the sanctity and dignity of life in accordance with existing law and the current rules, and the prohibition on federal funding of abortions should be consistently and diligently applied to any legislation. Strong "conscience" protections should be enacted for health-care workers to ensure they have the liberty to exercise their moral and religious beliefs in their profession. Evidence suggests that supporting low-income and pregnant women with adequate health care increases the number of women who chose to carry their child to term -- if we reform health care in the right way, we can reduce abortions in the U.S. While religious people don't all agree on all the issues of abortion, we should agree that those differences must not be allowed to derail the crucial need for comprehensive health-care reform.

Wallis is right to demand that there be conscience protections and no federal funding for abortions - something Democrats are loath to include in their bills - but his argument that if their health care is paid for women will be less likely to have abortions, so we should therefore pay for their health care, is silly. If we just give a pregnant woman ten (or more) thousand dollars if she agrees to carry her child to term many, perhaps most, women would accept the offer. Doing this would probably prevent far more abortions than would paying for a woman's health care whether she agrees to have the child or not. If preventing abortions is the justification for subsidizing a woman's health care why not pass a law requiring each of us to chip into the ten thousand? Even if such a law were workable and didn't result eventually in having to pay every pregnant woman in the U.S. the money, any participation in it should be voluntary, not compulsory.

5. For the next generation, health-care reform should be based on firm financial foundations. Health care is a vital and wise investment for the future of our families and society. But the way we pay for it should be fair and equitable and seek to lessen the burden on succeeding generations -- both in bringing everyone into the system and by bringing the costs of health care under control over time. Our religious traditions suggest that social justice and fiscal responsibility must not be pitted against each other, but balanced together in sound public policy that is affordable for individuals and for society.

Wallis seems to imply that the current debate is about whether or not we should make health care more affordable. It's not. Everyone agrees that the cost of insurance and care has skyrocketed and needs to be reigned back. The current debate is about the best way to bring costs back down without compromising the quality of the system we have, and a government run system is surely not the best way to do that. One recent report, for example, shows that within ten years the average premium for a family of four will actually be $4000 higher under the senate's Baucus plan than it is now.

What we need to do to bring costs down is to make it cheaper for insurance companies and medical practitioners to do business. The best way to do that is to relieve insurance companies of state imposed mandates, allow for competition across state lines, and reform medical malpractice so that doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical manufacturers don't have to pay a fortune in malpractice insurance. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office has calculated that total savings to the entire medical industry if malpractice laws were reformed would be $110 billion over ten years, but tort reform is not in any of the Democrat plans.

They would rather, as DNC chairman Howard Dean admitted, keep their lawyer friends rich than make health care for you and I cheaper. That's the moral canker in this system that Wallis should be writing about, but it doesn't seem high on his list of concerns.

Jim Wallis would have a lot more credibility if he were as outraged by Dean's admission on this video as are most people who believe, as Wallis once wrote, that God is neither Democrat nor Republican.

RLC

Darwin's Dilemma

There's a new documentary just out titled Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record which has evolutionary materialists all in a swivet. The DVD examines an event believed to have occurred 530 million years ago called the "Cambrian explosion," during which, in a geologically brief sliver of time, fossils of almost every major phylum appeared suddenly and fully developed in the rocks.

This fact is a bit of an inconvenience to those who wish to argue that life evolved slowly over the eons, and it's particularly embarrassing for Darwinians since the sudden appearance of the major body types with no fossilized precursors is quite compatible with the view that life is the product of an intelligently guided creation.

For such reasons, perhaps, secular Darwinians don't want this particular embarrassment being called to the attention of the general public so they're fighting the showing of the DVD in public, taxpayer-supported venues. In their minds discussing the scientific problem posed for Darwinian evolution by the fossil record is ipso facto religious, or something, and, of course, we can't have religious materials disseminated through public facilities.

Next they'll be trying to ban documentaries that explain to a popular audience the theory of the Big Bang because any theory that implies a beginning to the universe also implies a cause of the beginning, and we all know who that cause would be, don't we, so no more talk of Big Bangs on the taxpayers' dime you sneaky creationists.

Exit activity: Everyone raise your hand who thinks that in the brave new world envisioned by secular progressives there'd still be a meaningful right to free speech.

RLC

Great Divorce Correction

In an earlier post I noted that the film version of C.S. Lewis' novel The Great Divorce was slated for release next month. This is inaccurate. Filming is not scheduled to begin until 2010 and no release date has been announced.

I know that that seems like a considerable error on our part, so I went back and checked the records, and it turns out that that's the first mistake we've ever made here at Viewpoint.

RLC

SoJo on Health Care Reform (Pt. I)

Sojourners magazine editor Jim Wallis lays out his case for health care reform. I agree with Wallis that there are moral reasons to support reform, but I think there are several shortcomings in the argument he presents. This is part I of a two part consideration of Wallis' case. Part II will follow tomorrow.

Mr. Wallis writes:

I believe there are some fundamental moral and biblical principles on which to evaluate any final legislative agreement, principles on which many people of faith -- even politically diverse people -- might agree. After the heat of the summer's confrontations over health care, it's time for a cooler fall debate. It's time for a re-set of the health-care debate, and a return to some basic principles could help.

Five Principles of Faith for Health-Care Reform

1. Health, not sickness, is the will of God. We can see this from the story in Genesis of the garden, where sickness was never found, and from the vision in Revelation of a city in which death will be no more. When we are instruments of bringing about that good health, we are doing the work of God. The gospel stories of Jesus healing people, of restoring them to physical wholeness and full participation in their community, always signaled God's presence.

All this may be true about God's will, but it's not an argument for government subsidized health care. It's an argument for healthy living, wise personal choices, and, in emergency cases, for neighborly assistance. Churches, especially, should, and do, devote a large measure of their resources to helping those in the community who are in need. By laying this responsibility on community organizations there can be an expectation that the recipients of our benevolence will be supervised, that the church can require of them that they submit to being instructed as to how to function in healthier, more productive ways, and that they're not depersonalized by simply being reduced to a number in a giant government bureaucracy. In the long run this would be a far better solution for many poor individuals than just signing up to have the government throw money at their medical bills.

2. United we stand, divided we fall. The division between those who can afford adequate coverage and those who cannot is a threat to our unity, to the health of our neighbors, and to our nation. 46 million people in our country are uninsured, and millions more who are insured still can't keep up with their bills. Our moral and religious standards say no one should be left out of a system simply because of not being able to afford good health. The common good requires a system that is accessible to all who need it.

This is a little bit misleading. As many observers have pointed out, the 46 million figure includes millions who can afford insurance but choose not to buy it, millions of children who qualify for programs like SCHIP but whose parents have not signed them up, and millions of illegal immigrants who have no claim on the public purse. The number of actual indigent citizens who cannot, through no fault of their own, get insurance is more on the order of a fourth of the figure Wallis cites.

When Wallis writes that our moral and religious standards demand that no one should be left out of a system because of not being able to afford good health he's being somewhat disingenuous. Our values call upon us to help people in need, to be sure, but no one disputes that. What is in dispute is whether we as individuals should have the right to determine who among the needful gets our help. To insist that we have a moral obligation to help people is an oversimplification.

After all, we are no more obligated to pay for our neighbor's medical care than to pay for his auto repairs and insurance or his rent or home mortgage. We are under no moral obligation to forfeit what we have worked hard to earn for our families in order to subsidize someone else's consistently poor choices about diet, smoking, drug use, etc. We may well decide that we want to help such persons in our community, but that should be our choice, based upon our assessment of his need and his responsibility for the circumstances in which he finds himself. For the government to take money from us to give to people who, for all we know, refuse to help themselves is itself immoral.

More on the Sojourners argument tomorrow.

RLC

Mashed-Up Bag of Meat?!

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC is an avatar of much that's wrong with our political discourse today. His tirades against anyone with whom he disagrees are often laced with vitriol, artery-popping anger, and sheer spittle-spewing meanness. His persona is humorless and strident. He rarely smiles except to sneer, and the only thing that elicits anything close to a laugh is the misfortune of his ideological opponents.

I mention all this because of what I heard him say on his Countdown show last night (Don't ask me why I had him on. It's a long story). Talking about Michelle Malkin, a columnist who also manages one of the best blogs on the internet and whom Olbermann awarded his nightly "Worse Person in the World" prize, the gentleman opined that without Malkin's "total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred," she would "just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it."

Set aside the fact that anyone who's at all familiar with Malkin would be repelled by the obscene misrepresentation in the first part of Olbermann's characterization, and ask yourself how ugly and twisted must be the mind that would come up with the second part (What exactly is a "mashed-up bag of meat" anyway?). Sadly, this is not the first time Olbermann has sought to dehumanize a woman with whom he disagrees. A few months ago he had on his show a guest named Michael Musto who launched a distasteful, unfunny rant against Carrie Prejean simply because Ms Prejean had answered a question in a beauty contest in a way approved of by neither Musto nor Olbermann. Olbermann snickered in sympathy throughout Musto's entire embarrassingly stupid revilement:

Mr. Olbermann has also favorably quoted Geraldo Rivera, another fine gentleman who once hosted a television show in which guests threw chairs at each other, and who said of Malkin that he'd spit on her if ever the two should cross paths. Such a statement tells us far more about Rivera, and Olbermann, than it does about Malkin, of course, but Malkin's response to Olbermann's sophomoric name-calling, tells us quite a lot about her. It certainly answers the question of who, between the two of them, has the most class:

"In case you were wondering what kind of lipstick we big mashed-up bags of meat wear, I prefer M.A.C. Lustreglass in Ornamental or Lipglass in Spite. Because nothing goes better with fascistic hatred!"

Mr. Olbermann is a hero to the MoveOn.org crowd because of his relentlessly ill-natured attacks on anyone who doubts the wisdom of progressive political nostrums. If the left ever had the power to launch an inquisition against its opponents, Olbermann would bid fair to be its Torquemada. He's a man for whom no blow is too low, no insult too hurtful. He seems to delight more in humiliating people than in criticizing their ideas. Indeed, for such as Mr. Olbermann, one achieves the latter by doing the former.

Its a shame that a corporation like NBC would continue to pay this man to say the things he does, but perhaps the NBC bigwigs kind of like it. Thankfully, hardly anyone ever watches.

RLC

Do the Right Thing

Ralph Peters at the New York Post has been a reliable commentator throughout the last decade on teh wars in the middle east so when he offers his opinion on what we should do in Afghanistan, as he does in this column, it's wise to listen.

Peters writes that the President is faced with essentially three options: He can give McChrystal the troops he's asking for to suppress the insurgency, he can adopt the Biden strategy of waging war surgically in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, or he can essentially do nothing by sending a token increase of troops to Afghanistan.

The surprise for me was that Peters thinks McChrystal is wrong and Biden is right. He also fears that President Obama will make the worst of the three choices which is to do nothing:

The evidence on the ground, the lessons of history, and our real security needs strongly favor the Biden approach, but giving Gen. Stan McChrystal the full surge he wants would be far better than "more of the same, with new slogans."

This president has to make a decision. A real decision. But it looks like he's going to wiggle, squirm and dodge, then go in front of the teleprompter to vote "present" again.

Worsening the muddle, the troop-level debate is being disgracefully politicized on all sides.

Obama's seeking the least politically damaging choice, rather than the most effective military approach. He's less concerned with winning than with avoiding blame.

Shameful, shameful, shameful.

Meanwhile, too many conservatives are doing to Obama what they rightly decried when the left did it to Bush: Dems used Iraq as a club to beat Bush; now Republicans want to wield Afghanistan against Obama. Hey, this is about our national security and the lives of those in uniform -- not scoring cheap political points.

Shameful, shameful, shameful.

Read the whole thing. It's pretty interesting, especially his assessment of General McChrystal.

RLC

Decline Is Not Inevitable

Charles Krauthammer has composed an excellent snapshot of America in 2009. He argues that despite the doom and gloom prognostications of the declinists, there is nothing inevitable about Americas sinking influence, power, and economic well-being. We have the choice whether to continue along that path or to remain on the road of American exceptionalism. Unfortunately, those currently in power see America as a deeply flawed, immoral hegemon which needs to repent of its sins by abdicating its role as world leader. So far from agreeing with this analysis, Krauthammer rightly argues that America is the most benign hegemon in the history of the world, that we have been a great benefit to the world and that we need to maintain that role both for our sake and for the world's.

Our current leadership, being both historically naive and economically inept, sees things differently. We have the opportunity to recover and retain our greatness and to hold at bay the darkness that threatens civilization, but it will mean shedding the burden of a left-liberal ideology which seeks to turn us into Sweden.

Krauthammer's is an excellent essay. A little long, but well worth the read. Thanks to Jason for sending it along.

RLC

Re: Dissed

Caleb writes to opine that:

Although President Obama did not win the Nobel Prize for economics, when he makes good on his campaign claim to stop the rise of the oceans, I am sure that he would be a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize for physics.

The fact of the matter is that if the President is held to the same standard by the Physics committee as he was by the Peace committee he should have a lock on the prize. The Peace committee awarded the prize to the president on the basis of his good intentions to work for world peace. Since he has already, in the course of his campaign, promised that he will cause the sea levels to subside, that should be enough for the selection committee to grant him the Physics prize, and I for one will be very suspicious if they award it to anyone else.

RLC

Great Divorce

I just learned that one of my favorite C.S. Lewis books has been made into a movie to be released next month. The book is The Great Divorce in which Lewis depicts the difference between heaven and hell and how both are, at the end of the day, each man's choice.

The novel opens at a bus stop in a gray, rainy, dreary city with querulous riders squabbling and complaining about banal slights, offenses and inconveniences. They board the bus which doesn't so much drive anywhere as it does levitate upward through a vast cavern. As they emerge from the chasm what had at first appeared to be a vast canyon now seems like a small crack in the earth. The bus comes to a stop on the outskirts of what turns out to be heaven and the passengers disembark. The contrast with the city is stark. The terrain here is gorgeous but as the passengers soon realize they're not at all suited for it. The grass is so hard they can't walk on it and the leaves of the trees so heavy they can't lift them. Suddenly they seem almost insubstantial compared to the new realm, the really real, in which they find themselves.

It's here that Lewis wants to make his most important point. Each passenger finds him or herself greeted by someone they once knew who encourages them to choose to stay, but many of them find one excuse or another to decline. They'd rather return to the bus and thence back to the gray city. In other words, Lewis is saying, we choose our destiny. Those who return to the city want to. No one is forced to go back on the bus.

Ultimately, Lewis writes, there are two kinds of people, those who say to God 'Thy will be done' and those to whom God says 'Thy will be done.'

Anyway, I hope the movie does a good job with Lewis' story. It's being made by the same guy who did To End All Wars which was pretty well done so there's some reason for optimism.

RLC

Hamlet in the White House

Charles Krauthammer at the Washington Post asks the key questions concerning President Obama's leisurely response to General McChrystal's request for more troops:

So what does their commander in chief do now with the war he once declared had to be won but had been almost criminally under-resourced by Bush? Perhaps provide the resources to win it?

You would think so. And that's exactly what Obama's handpicked commander requested on Aug. 30 -- a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize a downward spiral and save Afghanistan the way a similar surge saved Iraq.

That was more than five weeks ago. Still no response. Obama agonizes publicly as the world watches. Why? Because, explains national security adviser James Jones, you don't commit troops before you decide on a strategy.

No strategy? On March 27, flanked by his secretaries of defense and state, the president said this: "Today I'm announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." He then outlined a civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And to emphasize his seriousness, the president made clear that he had not arrived casually at this decision. The new strategy, he declared, "marks the conclusion of a careful policy review."

Conclusion, mind you. Not the beginning. Not a process. The conclusion of an extensive review, the president assured the nation, that included consultation with military commanders and diplomats, with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with our NATO allies and members of Congress.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of "counterterrorism" in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world's expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy -- "counterinsurgency," meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge -- you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he'll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand Gen. David Petraeus, the world's foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world's foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Well, the President will have to make a decision soon. He has to decide either to disdain the Nobel Peace prize and the rest of the international left and fight to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, or he must decide to cede this tragic land and its hapless people to these savages. He may try to finesse the choice with some half-measure, but there really is no middle ground. Either McChrystal gets what he needs to win or we and the Afghan people lose. The first choice runs counter to every fiber in Mr. Obama's being. The second would be a moral and strategic catastrophe.

RLC

Dissed

The Nobel committee responsible for awarding the prize in economics has dissed President Obama and awarded the prize to two economists instead. We understand, however, that he's still in the running for the awards in physics, chemistry, and medicine.

We await the inevitable charges of racism at the economic committee's affront to our president who is trying harder than anyone in history to alter the economic landscape of this country and who certainly deserves the economics prize as much as he did the peace prize.

RLC

Moral Subjectivism (Pt. II)

Friday I wrote about an exchange at Uncommon Descent between Barry Arrington, a lawyer, and a commenter who calls himself camanintx. In response to Arrington's question about the existence of absolute right and wrong camanintx replied that morality is determined by the society in which people live and is thus subjective to the individual or relative to the society:

Barry: Let's assume for the sake of argument that drugging, raping and sodomizing a young girl was considered moral behavior in Arabia between the years 501 and 600 AD [I by no means concede that, but will accept it arguendo]. On the basis of your response, camanintx, I assume you would say that the fact that it was considered moral behavior in the society in which it occurred, is in fact determinative of the morality of the behavior, and therefore if Polanski had done what he did in that place and time it would have been moral. Is that what you are saying?

camanintx: Since morality is a subjective term, yes, that is exactly what I am saying.

The notion that moral right and wrong are purely subjective is a very difficult view to live out consistently and is devastating to any society in which it's widespread. If one is one's own moral authority then nothing is really right or wrong. No matter what I do, if I think it's right then it is. Thus, if one thinks slavery is right, or human sacrifice, or torturing children or animals, or raping little girls, whatever it is, camanintx would not say that a person is morally wrong either to think this or to actually practice these things. In camanintx's universe moral worth is a matter of one's own choice and preference or that of the society in which one lives.

This view is fraught with problems. Here are a couple:

1) What exactly is the decisive unit of moral authority for camanintx? Is it a nation, a subculture, or the individual? Is it his intellectual or professional peers or is it people of the same gender, ethnicity, or political party? Moral relativists rarely answer this question with any lucidity.

2) But however those questions are answered, how many people in that unit have to hold something to be wrong before it is indeed wrong? A majority? If so, how do we ascertain what the majority thinks? Do we take a daily poll? If 51% of the people today think that infant sacrifice is acceptable it would be moral today to sacrifice infants, but if tomorrow 51% think it's unacceptable then tomorrow it would be wrong. It's a strange view of right and wrong that sees it as so fluid a concept.

3) Suppose someone lives in two different morally relevant societies. The consensus view of this person's ethnic group, say, is that cheating people is wrong, but the consensus of his professional peers is that cheating is the proper way to do business. On what basis does he decide which group is morally authoritative? Ultimately he has to decide for himself which means that the individual is the ultimate arbiter of moral right and wrong, and whatever he think is right is, in fact, right by definition.

4) Moreover, if the majority decides what's right then someone who holds a minority view is ipso facto wrong. It's logically impossible for them to be right since they hold a view contrary to that of the majority, and there's no reason why their society should tolerate their opinion. If this view of right and wrong were held consistently there could be no reform since a minority opinion could never be true and there'd be no reason to consider it.

5) Most ironic, if camanintx is correct that the truth about moral right and wrong is decided by the majority then one who believes as he does, if he lives in a society whose majority disagrees with him, would have to admit that his belief is wrong and he should change his view to conform to that of the majority.

Charles Darwin wrote in his Autobiography that "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." Darwin was right about this. If there is no God then there is no real right or wrong. Our action has no real moral value. The problem is that not only is this socially catastrophic, it's personally impossible. No one can live this way unless one is an arrant nihilist. In other words, ironically, few people can live consistently with the entailments of atheism. What's worse for atheism, few people would want to.

RLC

In Search of the Conservative Intellectual

Steven Hayward at the Washington Post wonders about the intellectual vigor of today's conservatism. Along the way he makes some observations that are both interesting and puzzling:

During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the 1960s and '70s to its success in Ronald Reagan's era, there was a balance between the intellectuals, such as William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman, and the activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, the leader of the New Right. The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of populism and elitism troubled neither side. Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We've traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.

The best-selling conservative books these days tend to be red-meat titles such as Michelle Malkin's "Culture of Corruption," Glenn Beck's new "Arguing with Idiots" and all of Ann Coulter's well-calculated provocations that the left falls for like Pavlov's dogs. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these books. Politics is not conducted by Socratic seminar, and Henry Adams's dictum that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds should remind us that partisan passions are an essential and necessary function of democratic life. The right has always produced, and always will produce, potboilers.

Conspicuously missing, however, are the intellectual works. The bestseller list used to be crowded with the likes of Friedman's "Free to Choose," George Gilder's "Wealth and Poverty," Paul Johnson's "Modern Times," Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," Charles Murray's "Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve," and Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man." There are still conservative intellectuals attempting to produce important work, but some publishers have been cutting back on serious conservative titles because they don't sell.

About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism," which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book "Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present," it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.

I think Hayward overstates his case here. He gives the impression that conservative books are all polemic and no ideas. This requires that he overlook the work of writers like Newt Gingrich, Thomas Sowell, Pat Buchanan, and Mark Levin. Their books are filled with ideas, but perhaps they don't qualify for Hayward since they're written to be comprehensible by the average person rather than just academics. If it's scholarly work he wants, however, he could find it at the Heritage Foundation and in more modest publications like Hillsdale College's Imprimus. The point is that there are plenty of ideas being generated on the right and it's surprising that Hayward seems to have missed them.

Yet it was not enough (for conservative intellectuals) just to expose liberalism's weakness; it was also necessary to offer robust alternatives for both foreign and domestic policy, ideas that came to fruition in the Reagan years. Today, it is not clear that conservative thinkers have compelling alternatives to Obama's economic or foreign policy. At best, the right is badly divided over how to fix the economy and handle Iran and Afghanistan. So for the time being, the populists alone have the spotlight.

I don't see the division on the right that Hayward apparently does. Conservatives seem to be pretty much in agreement as to how to fix the economy and manage foreign policy. The economy is like a beach ball, and taxes, debt, and burdensome regulations are like a weight pushing the ball under water. Remove the pressure and the economy will bounce back to the surface. Almost all conservatives agree with this prescription which is why they oppose Obama's plans to raise taxes, increase debt, and impose ever more onerous regulations on businesses.

In foreign affairs the most effective policy is to have a strong military and be prepared to use it when justice and our interests are at stake. Again, this is not the Obama view, but it is one upon which most conservatives are united.

The blend of entertainment and politics is not unique to the right (exhibit No. 1 on the left: "The Daily Show"). And it is perfectly possible to conduct talk radio at a high level of seriousness, and several talkers do well at matching the quality of their shows to their intellectual pedigree. Consider Hugh Hewitt (Michigan Law School), Michael Medved (Yale Law School), William Bennett (Harvard Law and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas) -- all three of these brainiacs have popular shows on the Salem Radio Network.

All three have written a number of books as well, it should be noted, in case Hayward has overlooked that fact.

With others -- Michael Savage and "Mancow" come to mind -- the charge of dumbing down is much more accurate. Rush Limbaugh adheres to Winston Churchill's adage that you should grin when you fight, and in any case his keen sense of satire makes him deserving of comparison to Will Rogers, who, by the way, was a critic of progressivism. Others among the right's leading talkers, such as Sean Hannity, seem unremittingly angry and too reflexively partisan on behalf of the Republican Party rather than the conservative movement (they are not the same thing).

This is actually, in my opinion, too kind to Hannity who to my ear comes off as a callow narcissist bully who doesn't have the faintest idea how to have a civil conversation with someone who disagrees with him. Ten seconds into his show he hits a vocal pitch that approximates the sound of a faulty blow dryer and maintains that level of stridency for the duration of his monologue. It's as much an assault on the listener's nerves as on the intellect, and I say this as one who thinks that in terms of substance Hannity is usually right.

Hayward goes on to discuss Glenn Beck. It's pretty interesting stuff, especially if you listen to talk radio at all. In fact the whole article is interesting, despite my misgivings about some of what he says. Give it a read.

RLC

Gary Cooper vs. Michael Jackson

People who study such things claim that over the last three or four decades women's preference in men has evolved. Whereas a couple of generations ago women were attracted to masculine men, that no longer seems to be the case. Today, a paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution notes, women seem to be partial to men who appear more boyish or even feminized. I don't pretend to have any idea whether this is true, but some of those who believe it is also believe that the culprit behind this development is The Pill.

The Daily Mail Online reports:

Scientists have long known that a woman's taste in men changes over her menstrual cycle. During the few days each month when women are fertile - around the time of ovulation - they tend to prefer masculine features and men who are more assertive.

On these fertile days, women are also more attracted to men who are 'genetically dissimilar', Dr Alvergne said. Picking a partner whose genetic make-up is unlike their own increases the chances of having a healthy child.

On days when women are not fertile, their tastes swing towards more feminine, boyish faces and more caring personalities, researchers have shown. However, if women are taking the Pill (which first became available in the 1960s) they no longer have fertile days.

That means they no longer experience the hormonal changes that make them more attracted to masculine men and those with dissimilar genetic make-up.

Whatever. I think the preference for boyishness, if it does in fact exist, is more likely to be a product of a trend toward androgeny in a culture which has for four decades derogated traditional masculinity. Two generations of men have grown up being encouraged in all sorts of ways to be more like women and women have been encouraged to favor men who are quick to display their softer side.

In other words, it would be frowned upon today to hold up John Wayne and Gary Cooper as role models for young males. They're too aggressive, too violent, too reserved and laconic. They don't show their feelings. They don't listen. They don't empathize. Instead, boys should emulate the Michael Jacksons of the world if they really want to win the lady's heart.

Guys can thank me for this advice through our Feedback page.

RLC

Afrocity

It's difficult for a liberal to convert to conservatism. The difficulty doesn't lie so much in the ideological transformation, rather it lies in the opprobrium a liberal apostate must suffer at the hands of his former friends. Liberal tolerance extends only marginally beyond those with whom they agree. There's little acceptance and well-wishing for those who come to the point in their lives where liberalism or progressivism is seen as a failed worldview. Such a realization is an indictment of the religion that other liberals hold dear, and they often revile the person who rejects the faith upon which they have staked their lives.

The conversion is particularly difficult for African Americans who are considered by their friends and families to be doubly traitorous. Not only do they reject the political ideology in which so many blacks have placed their hope and trust, but they're seen as rejecting their own people as well. It's like an Arab Muslim forswearing his family to become a Catholic Christian or a conservative Jew becoming a Baptist.

Such has been the experience of increasing numbers of blacks who think beyond the soothing blandishments and seductions of the liberal elite and recognize that liberalism is an ideological plantation for blacks and that the Democrat party is a false hope.

One black woman who had the scales fall from her eyes is Anita Moncrief who talks here about her sojourn with liberalism, her return to the faith and values of her youth, and the insults she's had to endure as a result.

Another fiesty former liberal calls herself Afrocity and writes a blog where she discusses her disillusionment with the left, her subsequent move to conservatism, and the bitter acrimony from black liberals that her perfidy has earned her.

One hopes that as the excitement of having an African American president begins to subside more African Americans will ask the questions Moncrief and Afrocity asked, that they'll have the strength to withstand the pressures exerted on them to remain faithful to their liberal sugardaddys, and that they'll reject the platitudes, dogmas, and failed nostrums with which the left has plied them for the last 70 years.

RLC

More on the Nobel Fatuousness

If any more evidence that the Nobel Peace Prize committee is motivated by purely political considerations this piece from the WSJ provides it. It points out that the nominations for the prize had to be submitted by February 1st, a mere two weeks after the President's inauguration. In other words, the committee evidently judged that of all the people in the world working for peace and the betterment of mankind, President Obama, in the first two weeks of his presidency, accomplished more than any of them.

A couple of our readers wondered why someone like Paul Farmer didn't get the prize. Probably for the same reason Irena Sendler didn't get it. Neither of these two heroes represent any political ideology, they just help people. Neither of them are/were glamorous celebrities and thus could hardly be expected to catch the notice of people who swoon at the thought of bestowing awards upon political rock stars like Al Gore and Barack Obama and possibly being permitted to touch the hem of their garments.

Jason, who sent me the link to the article, suspects that the Nobel Committee gave the award to Mr. Obama as a means of slapping George Bush in the face. If so, Alfred Nobel must be spinning in his grave at the way his legacy is being perverted.

RLC

Embarrassing the President

As you have probably heard by now President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ........ well, I don't exactly know what for, but anyway, the Nobel committee saw fit to give it to him. The prize has been awarded in the past to such peace-loving souls as Yassar Arafat so I don't know how much importance it carries.

I do hope, though, that President Obama is embarrassed by the honor. He knows that at this stage in his presidency he has done nothing to merit it and that accepting it makes him look silly. That's not his fault, of course, but I think that if the Nobel committee had wanted to make him risible in the eyes of the world they couldn't have done anything more likely to achieve that result than what they did.

And in the process they make themselves look ridiculous as well. In 2007 they had the choice of giving the prize to an elderly woman named Irena Sendler who had, as a young nurse, risked her life to smuggle dozens of Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Europe or give it to someone who made a film about global warming. They evidently thought the film was more important because they gave the prize to its maker, Al Gore.

The Peace Prize, evidently, has little to do with peace and everything to do with left-wing politics. The prize committee has made themselves, their award, and its recipient, laughingstocks.

RLC

Moral Subjectivism (Pt. I)

It's one of the most perplexing and disturbing aspects of our age that so many people have adopted a relativistic or subjectivistic view of moral right and wrong. Moral subjectivism is the view that right and wrong are matters of one's own personal taste, preference or bias. Moral relativism is a form of subjectivism that says that right and wrong are defined by the time and/or society in which people live. Thus, when we hear people insist that "what's right for you isn't necessarily right for me" or that "what's right for one culture isn't necessarily right for another" we're hearing the verbal expression of these views.

Barry Arrington has a post at Uncommon Descent where he writes about the Roman Polanski rape of a thirteen year-old girl. The post elicited a comment from a reader that serves as a good example of the influence of moral relativism in our culture. Arrington writes:

Here are the facts concerning the Roman Polanski case: Polanski gave a Quaalude to a 13 year-old child, instructed her to get into a Jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she asked, performed oral sex on her as she asked him to stop, raped her (no, not the "statutory" kind, the "forcible" kind), and sodomized her. In a plea bargain Polanski pled to unlawful sex with a minor.

As is common knowledge, Polanski has his defenders because he has made some terrific movies. For example, critic Tom Shales says: "There is, apparently, more to this crime than it would seem, and it may sound like a hollow defense, but in Hollywood I am not sure a 13-year-old is really a 13-year-old."

Here's today's question: "Is it wrong in all times and at all places (even Hollywood) for a 44 year-old man to drug, rape and sodomize a 13 year-old girl?"

For our materialist friends who answer "yes" to the question (as I hope you will), I have a follow-up question: "How can you know that you are right and Polanski's defenders are wrong?"

It's at this point that things took a distressing turn. Here's Arrington:

At first the materialists dodged my second (and much more important) question. But then a brave soul who calls himself "camanintx" took up for the materialist side the gauntlet I had thrown down, and we had the following exchange:

Barry: How can you know that you are right and Polanski's defenders are wrong?

camanintx: Because the society in which I and Polanski (at the time) live in define it as such. Had Polanski lived in 6th century Arabia, he probably would have been treated differently, no?

Barry: Let's assume for the sake of argument that drugging, raping and sodomizing a young girl was considered moral behavior in Arabia between the years 501 and 600 AD [I by no means concede that, but will accept it arguendo]. On the basis of your response, camanintx, I assume you would say that the fact that it was considered moral behavior in the society in which it occurred, is in fact determinative of the morality of the behavior, and therefore if Polanski had done what he did in that place and time it would have been moral. Is that what you are saying?

camanintx: Since morality is a subjective term, yes, that is exactly what I am saying.

In other words, for camanintx, morality is simply a matter of personal taste or (a reflection of the taste of the consensus). Arrington will have none of this foolishness and does a good job of illustrating one of the half dozen or so fundamental errors of camanintx's position. I encourage you to read the rest of his post.

Because I think this is such an important topic I hope to have more to say on it tomorrow.

RLC

Promise Them Anything

President Obama is rapidly proving himself to be a serial promise-breaker. What he says often seems to be at variance with what his administration does. There are a host of examples - from his promise not to hire lobbyists, to his promise to insure adequate airing of any legislation before it becomes law, to his promise to have the most transparent administration in history. Here's another example from Hot Air's Ed Morrissey to add to the list:

When Barack Obama went to Notre Dame to speak at their commencement and accept an honorary law degree from the Catholic university, he attempted to quiet the outrage from conservative Catholics and pro-life activists by claiming to respect the religious teachings of Catholics and protect freedom of conscience on abortion. He insisted that he would do the same during a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI.

Well, it turns out that not everyone got the memo. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding that a tiny Catholic college in North Carolina has to offer health care coverage for abortion and contraception to their employees. Gateway Pundit tells us that:

Belmont Abbey College is a small, private, Catholic college located in North Carolina. For 130 years, it and the Benedictine monks who run it have been dedicated to handing on the Catholic faith.

But the Obama Administration is now trying to force them to abandon that faith or go out of business.

[T]he Administration at Belmont Abbey College removed contraception, abortion, and voluntary sterilization from its faculty's health care policy after discovering it had accidentally been a part of existing plans.

Employees of the school who objected to this change in policy brought a complaint against the school accusing them of "gender discrimination."

At first, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) found no evidence of gender discrimination by Belmont Abbey College... After a few weeks, the EEOC mysteriously reversed course and announced, in effect, that the college had better toe the Administration's line, or else.

The President of the college has declared he will shut down the school rather than be forced by the government to violate Catholic teaching. It's good to know that at least one president in this sorry narrative is taking a stand on principle.

RLC

Sensus Divinitatis

Bradlaugh at Secular Right discusses an article that reports some very inconclusive evidence that somehow belief in God is linked to the evolution of the brain and vice versa. Brad then says that:

I'm curious to know how a religious person processes these news items from cognitive science.

Obviously the fact that the varieties of religious experience can be explained from brain phylogeny does not exclude the possibility that religious experiences are apprehending something that exists as other than brain events, something real in the world outside the skull. Binocular vision has an explanatory pathway from brain phylogeny, but the things we see are real (mostly).

Yet if the possibility isn't excluded, isn't it at least weakened? Do religious people feel this? Well, I'm sure they don't! - but what do they feel? Perhaps one of them could tell us.

I take Brad to be asking whether people who believe in God don't feel that their beliefs are discredited by evidence that religious belief is somehow a function of our cognitive apparatus. Brad evidently thinks that if a belief is a result of the brain's evolution then it is ipso facto less likely to be true.

But this cuts both ways. If belief in God is somehow an evolutionary adaptation then unbelief is also a product of the evolutionary process (either that or it's a degenerate mutant form of belief). If so, the skeptic has no reason to trust that his unbelief corresponds in any way to what's really true. If our beliefs, including our belief in the trustworthiness of our reason to lead us to truth, are simply adaptations that increase the survivability of the species, then we have no reason whatsoever to trust that our beliefs are actually true or that our reason will lead us to have true beliefs.

Survivability of the species may have little to do with what's true. Consider, for example, a belief in a primitive society that the more children one has the greater will be the reward in the afterlife. The belief could be completely false but having it confers a tremendous selective advantage since those who have it are likely to produce more offspring than those who don't.

Nevertheless, set all that aside. Why should it diminish the veridicality of belief in God if it turns out that we are cognitively predisposed to believe? If God exists it might be expected that He would design us to have some sense of His existence. Isn't this essentially what Paul said in the first chapter of his letter to the Roman church? Haven't Christians maintained for two thousand years that the knowledge of God is an a priori conviction inscribed in our consciousness? Why should it be troubling to learn that the predisposition to believe is located in a particular area of the brain?

Indeed, one who believes that life is the product of God's creative purpose and design would respond to Brad by asserting that the odd thing is not that our cognitive apparatus seems to predispose us to belief in God. The odd thing would be if it didn't.

RLC