Jihadi Rehab

An air raid in Yemen Thursday morning is believed to have taken out thirty al Qaeda, including some pretty big fish. Among the latter were the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasser al-Wahayshi, his No. 2, Saeed al-Shehri, and Anwar al-Awlaki (although there's some doubt about this last one).

Awlaki is the man whom Hasan Nidal, the Fort Hood shooter, had emailed asking for guidance on whether it was permissible under Islamic law to kill American soldiers.

Awlaki said the query was a year before the Fort Hood shooting, making him "astonished. Where was American intelligence that claimed once that it can read any car plate number anywhere in the world?"

Well, perhaps Thursday morning he received his answer.

Saeed al-Shehri was a prisoner at Gitmo who was released by the Bush administration in 2007 and underwent jihadi rehab in Saudi Arabia, a kind of 12 step program designed to detoxify jihadis. After graduating from the program he promptly popped up in Yemen where he was planning the murders of more Americans. So much for the Saudis' rehabilitation program.

It's not very comforting to know that President Obama plans to release a hundred more detainees as soon as he can find a place to send them. On the other hand, maybe it's a bit like releasing caged game birds. As soon as they fly free into the open air they get blown to smithereens by the shotguns of the waiting sportsmen.

I suspect that a lot of detainees, reflecting on the fate of their brother al-Shehri, might decide that they're perfectly happy to remain in the comfy confines of perhaps the most commodious prison facility in the world rather than risk having their body parts strewn across the desert by a hellfire missile.

In any event, innocent people are a little bit safer today than they were a few days ago if these psychopaths really have been eliminated. It's perhaps the most effective method of jihadi rehab on offer.

RLC

Which Came First

Some readers have noted similarities between the story of Michael in Why Christians Celebrate Christmas (see post below) and the movie Taken. Lest anyone think that our story was borrowed from the movie we should point out that our tale first appeared on Viewpoint on December 24th, 2006 - two years before Taken was released - under the title True Fiction.

No doubt the film's screenwriters read Viewpoint, saw the story, and liked it so much that they wrote it into a movie. Well, it's possible, isn't it?

RLC

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christians celebrate Christmas. The following allegory, which we've run on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective. Apologies in advance to those who may be a little squeamish:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, it was all over, finished.

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

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

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

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

May all our readers have a wonderful and meaningful Christmas this year.

Bill and Dick Cleary

Naturalism = Nihilism

Like Marc Hauser, whose essay we critiqued earlier this week (see here for links), Alex Rosenberg is a naturalist. That is to say he's a philosopher who believes that the natural universe, matter and energy, is all that is. There's nothing else.

Rosenberg believes that everything that exists can, in principle, be explained in terms of the laws of physics, and he's written an essay in which he faces squarely the consequences of the naturalistic worldview. Rosenberg admits that they're not pretty. Indeed, he argues - correctly, I think - that naturalism leads him to deny the existence of meaning in life, morality, consciousness, the self, and free will.

Unlike Hauser's, Rosenberg's conclusions are logically consistent with his starting point. Naturalism does lead to the denial of much of what makes us human. It leads, in fact, to nihilism, the view that nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters. That we recoil from these consequences, that we have deep-seated yearnings for meaning, morality, significance, etc., should suggest that naturalism itself is not true. Why, after all, would nature shape us in such a way that our deepest longings are unfulfillable and incompatible with the way reality is?

The unpleasant consequences of naturalism (which may be considered a synonym for atheism) should lead us to wonder whether nature really is all there is. They should lead us to wonder whether our deepest yearnings really are capable of being fulfilled, and if so what must reality be like in order to be able to satisfy them?

Read the essay as well as the comments which follow, and then reflect on the astonishing fact that atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens argue vociferously that it's Christianity which is harmful to human flourishing and that their nihilistic naturalism is what we should all eagerly embrace. It certainly is one of the peculiarities of modern intellectual life that a belief system that exalts humanity, offers meaning and purpose, a ground for morality, an explanation for beauty, and a hope for eternal life is considered harmful while a worldview that leads to nihilism and hopelessness is thought to be liberating.

If nothing matters why is it so crucially important to these men that we embrace such a depressing view of life? Why take away people's hope, even if it's a false hope, if in the end it makes no difference what one has believed? Perhaps the answer is no more complicated than that misery loves company.

RLC

Fruitflow

Millions of people rely on aspirin to keep their blood thin to prevent heart attacks and strokes, but aspirin often causes stomach problems. It turns out that a natural blood thinner has been found in the gel that surrounds tomato seeds. In Britain a product called Fruitflow is made from an extract of this gel and has none of the side effects of aspirin.

Check it out here.

Here's the crux of the article:

10 studies -- two of which were published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition -- reported that three grams of Fruitflow were effective just three hours after consumption, making platelets smoother while leaving the rest of the blood able to clot normally in the case of injury. Regular tomato juice is subjected to multiple processing methods that degrade the gel ingredient, rendering it far less effective than its concentrated form. Plain tomatoes are also less effective because the body must slowly digest all parts of the fruit.

The article doesn't say how long it will be before this product is available in the U.S.

RLC

Silent Monks

To help you get into the spirit of Christmas, sort of, a group of "silent monks" perform one of the greatest pieces of music ever written - Handel's Hallelujah chorus. Enjoy.

RLC

The Cosmos

The American Museum of Natural History takes us on a quick tour of the known universe. Fasten your seat belts:

Thanks to Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent for posting the video.

RLC

Change Nobody Believes in

Maybe it's not too much of a stretch to estimate that there are about 280 Americans who favor ObamaCare. They're all Democrats and they're all in Congress. No one who'll have to pay for it seems to want it, but that's not stopping the Democrats from ramming it down our throats and forcing us to accept their plan to nationalize about 16% of our total economy. The Wall Street Journal is particularly incensed, as would be anyone who has followed the sordid details of how Harry Reid has bribed and bought enough Senators to win passage of a bill that will cripple the economic prospects of our grandchildren and greatgrandchildren and destroy the best health care system in the world.

But don't take my word for that. Read the bill of particulars that the WSJ brings against the Democrats' plan. Here's the lede:

The Senate Majority Leader (Senator Harry Reid) has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.

Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new "manager's amendment" that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what's in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning.

After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.

The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that "reform" has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state. An increasing roll of leaders in health care and business are looking on aghast at a bill that is so large and convoluted that no one can truly understand it, as Finance Chairman Max Baucus admitted on the floor last week. The only goal is to ram it into law while the political window is still open, and clean up the mess later.

A detailed criticism of the bill follows and is worth reading. Perhaps the most stunning part is this:

Health costs. From the outset, the White House's core claim was that reform would reduce health costs for individuals and businesses, and they're sticking to that story. "Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn't read the bills," Mr. Obama said over the weekend. This is so utterly disingenuous that we doubt the President really believes it.

The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on.

These increases are solely the result of ObamaCare.

Will you be able to afford having your insurance premiums double? Then there's this:

For no other reason than ideological animus, doctor-owned hospitals will face harsh new limits on their growth and who they're allowed to treat. Physician Hospitals of America says that ObamaCare will "destroy over 200 of America's best and safest hospitals."

If the editors at the WSJ are correct President Obama and his left-wing allies in Congress are taking us canoeing over Niagara Falls. I guess the lesson to be learned by all those young voters who were so swept up in the hopeychangey rhetoric, the charisma, and the thrill of electing our first black president, is that fine speeches and skin pigment are extremely poor reasons for electing a man to our nation's highest office. What matters is what he has already accomplished in his public life and what he plans to do if elected, and in Mr. Obama's case all that was perfectly clear in the summer of 2008. Unfortunately, too much of the electorate was too love-struck to take notice.

Perhaps when the full import of the 2008 election starts to sink in people will finally shake off their infatuation with Mr. Obama's "cool," and, like the girl on the morning after, wonder what in the world they could possibly have been thinking. Either that or they'll somehow blame George Bush and Dick Cheney for the debacle.

By the way, I live in a state with two Democratic senators and as far as I know they got nothing for their votes on this bill. What's up with that? For that reason alone they should both be booted out of office next time they're up for reelection. What good is a senator who's too dumb to put his vote up for sale like many of his colleagues?

RLC

Hentoff on Obama

Nat Hentoff, no conservative Republican he (he wrote a weekly column for the Village Voice for fifty years), has some pretty strong words concerning our President in an interview he did with the Rutherford Institute. When Nat Hentoff says about Mr. Obama what he says in this interview the liberals and moderates who elected him better sit up and pay attention:

Rutherford Institute: When Barack Obama was a U.S. Senator in 2005, he introduced a bill to limit the Patriot Act. Now that he is president, he has endorsed the Patriot Act as is. What do you think happened with Obama?

Nat Hentoff: I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had. An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system. If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer.

In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he would do, such as transparency in government, Obama has reneged on his promises. He pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated. Why is Obama doing that if he doesn't want torture anymore? Throughout Obama's career, he promised to limit the state secrets doctrine which the Bush-Cheney administration had abused enormously. The Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued. Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to.

So in answer to your question, I am beginning to think that this guy is a phony. Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to. His only principle is his own aggrandizement. This is a very dangerous mindset for a president to have.

RI: Do you consider Obama to be worse than George W. Bush?

NH: Oh, much worse. Bush essentially came in with very little qualifications for presidency, not only in terms of his background but he lacked a certain amount of curiosity, and he depended entirely too much on people like Rumsfeld, Cheney and others. Bush was led astray and we were led astray. However, I never thought that Bush himself was, in any sense, "evil." I am hesitant to say this about Obama. Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution. The irony is that Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.

In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now. The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency. The NSA has the capacity to keep track of everything we do on the phone and on the internet. Obama has done nothing about that. In fact, he has perpetuated it. He has absolutely no judicial supervision of all of this. So all in all, Obama is a disaster.

RI: Obama is not reversing the Bush policies as he promised. But even in light of this, many on the Left are very, very quiet about Obama. Why is that?

NH: I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people. I say this because the Left has taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don't think anymore. They just react. When they have somebody like Obama whom they put into office, they believed in the religious sense and, of course, that is a large part of the reason for their silence on these issues. They are very hesitant to criticize Obama, but that is beginning to change. Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their "deity."

There is much more to this interview that I wish I could include in the post. Read the whole thing at the link.

For the thoughts of another remorseful Obama voter see Michael Goodwin's column at The New York Post.

RLC

Keep Your Opinions to Yourself

We often hear complaints about those officious Christians who are always going about trying to impose their values, especially sexual values, on the rest of society. Religion and religious reasons are excluded from public discourse, we are told, by the requirements of both good taste and the First Amendment, and people who insist on offering religious objections to certain matters are offending social and Constitutional propriety.

Of course, the complainers are usually pretty selective in their criticism. When Christians speak out against war, or in favor of human and civil rights, or on behalf of the poor, the complainers suddenly go silent. As long as the issue is one the secularists themselves favor, why, then Christians are speaking prophetically and have every right to be heard. When, however, Christians speak out against something the secularist supports, like abortion on demand or gay marriage, then the meddlesome Christians are sternly instructed to keep their opinions out of the public square.

A recent example of the secularists' selective outrage might be illustrated by a controversy brewing in, of all places, Uganda. The Ugandan church largely supports passage of a bill that would make homosexual conduct punishable by either life in prison or death, and American Christians are roundly condemning it. This disagreement is causing a lot of tension between Ugandan and American Christians, but the Americans are arguing on theological grounds that such a law violates the biblical demands for both justice and compassion.

Given this insertion of religious arguments into a debate occuring in a foreign country we might ask our secularist friends why they're not demanding that Christians just keep their religious opinions to themselves and stay out of Ugandan affairs. I doubt, though, that very many secularists will raise such objections because they're just as appalled by the bill as are the American Christians who are risking a rift with their Ugandan brethren over it. Nevertheless, if these same Christians were to speak out against gay marriage they'd be quickly and loudly condemned for "intolerance," gay-bashing, and breaching the wall of separation between church and state. They'd have their tax-exempt status threatened and told to keep their bibles out of politics.

For the secularist religion is just fine if employed in a cause which they themselves wish to advance, but they find it abhorrent and out of place in a pluralist society when employed in causes they oppose. In other words, religious arguments have no place in our political debates except when they do.

It's amusing to listen to these people.

RLC

Is AARP Bought and Paid for?

Michelle Malkin notes that AARP offers the only health coverage that under "ObamaCare" would be exempt from having to accept clients with medical pre-conditions. Their Medigap program rakes in $400 million a year and will not be required to incur the expense of insuring those whose medical conditions make it a near certainty that the insurer will have to pay out huge sums for treatment. What did AARP do to get this favored status?

The intrepid Jason Mattera chases down an AARP officer to get an answer to that question and others. He wonders whether the exemption has anything to do with AARP's support of the health care reform bill currently before Congress. Needless to say, he doesn't get much satisfaction:

RLC

Evolutionary Ethics (Part III)

This post concludes our discussion of Marc Hauser's essay Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality in which he attempts to argue that morality can be, and should be, based upon our biological nature. You can read Parts I and II here and here.

Mr. Hauser's essay continues by presenting us with examples of moral dilemmas from which he draws the wrong conclusion:

... if five people in a hospital each require an organ to survive, is it permissible for a doctor to take the organs of a healthy person who happens to walk by the hospital? Or if a lethal gas has leaked into the vent of a factory and is headed towards a room with seven people, is it permissible to push someone into the vent, preventing the gas from reaching the seven but killing the one? These are true moral dilemmas - challenging problems that push on our intuitions as lay jurists, forcing us to wrestle with the opposing forces of consequences (saving the lives of many) and rules (killing is wrong).

Based on the responses of thousands of participants to more than 100 dilemmas, we find no difference between men and women, young and old, theistic believers and non-believers, liberals and conservatives. When it comes to judging unfamiliar moral scenarios, your cultural background is virtually irrelevant.

Well, maybe, but it shouldn't be. I would be among the last to say that moral choices are never excruciatingly difficult, but, in the cases that Hauser cites, not so much. The Christian is guided by one overarching principle: Always do the act which maximizes compassion and justice. In the scenarios that Hauser constructs it would be manifestly unjust to take organs from an unwilling passerby and equally unjust to push someone into the vent to save others, even if the others were children, even if they were your own children (surely an individual should jump into the vent himself rather than push another into it).

Hauser assumes, apparently, that everyone thinks in utilitarian terms which require of us that we produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. A utilitarian could superficially justify sacrificing the happiness of one innocent person in order to maximize the happiness of many, but a Christian cannot.

What guides your judgments is the universal and unconscious voice of our species, a biological code, a universal moral grammar....If this code is universal and impartial, then why are there are so many moral atrocities in the world? The answer comes from thinking about our emotions, the feelings we recruit to fuel in-group favouritism, out-group hatred and, ultimately, dehumanisation.

Actually the answer is because atheism offers us no reason why we should not submit to our emotions, nor does it offer us any reason why we should care about anyone but ourselves, but that aside, on what biological or evolutionary grounds does Mr. Hauser condemn in-group favoritism or out-group hatred? These behaviors are as natural to our species as breathing. They've been encoded in our DNA by millenia of evolution. Why, in an atheistic view of things, are they wrong? What is the standard Mr. Hauser is smuggling in here in order to judge them as wrong?

It can't be that he finds warrant for disdaining them in our biological nature because these behaviors are fundamentally ingrained in that nature. It can't be that evolution gives him reason to condemn them because on his view evolution is responsible for their existence.

Mr. Hauser wants to say that out-group hatred is wrong but he can't tell us why. He wants to say, in effect, that there is a natural law written on our hearts that forbids such behavior, but no natural "law" rooted in our evolutionary development can be morally obligatory (see part II). Favoritism or hatred can only be wrong if the source of the natural law is a transcendent moral authority, and that's something Hauser's atheism does not allow.

Consider the psychopath, Hollywood's favourite moral monster. Clinical studies reveal that they feel no remorse, shame, guilt or empathy, and lack the tools for self-control. Because they lacked these capacities, several experts have argued that they lack the wherewithal to understand what is right or wrong and, consequently, to do the wrong thing. New studies show, however, that this conclusion is at least partially wrong. Psychopaths know full well what is right and wrong but don't care. Their moral knowledge is intact but their moral emotions are damaged. They are perfectly normal jurists but perfectly abnormal moral actors. For the psychopath, other humans are no different from rocks or artefacts. They are disposable.

In fact, if naturalism is true we should all be moral psychopaths. Remorse, guilt, shame, etc. are simply illusions that deceive us into thinking we've done something terribly wrong when in fact we haven't. Now that we're enlightened and realize, as atheist Michael Ruse puts it, that "morality is just an illusion fobbed off upon us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate," we should shed these emotions like a growing child sheds his fear of the dark and face the fact that we have nothing to feel guilty about because there's no such thing as guilt.

Guilt can only exist in a world in which our behavior stands condemned by a competent moral judge. In the world of the naturalist there are no moral judges, only, in Richard Dawkins' words, "blind, pitiless indifference."

RLC

Kiva

A while ago we made brief mention of the increasing popularity of microfinance as a great way to help poor entrepreneurs get enough capital to start or maintain their businesses. In the post we touted an organization called Kiva which is involved in this sort of work. I've since come across an article about Kiva in Christianity Today that some of you might like to check out. It's a wonderful way to do something truly meaningful this Christmas season.

RLC

Fat Lips, Fat Heads

In a post we did a week or so ago I mentioned the injustice of court martialing three navy SEALs who were accused of punching a terrorist and then trying to cover it up. In my opinion the people who ought to be court martialed are the Navy poobahs who are charging these men. Surely fatheadedness among the brass is a court-martial-worthy offense, and if it's not it should be.

Clifford May has a piece on this at National Review Online that's worth reading if you want to see how wimpish the higher echelons of our military have become. May writes:

Surely, these SEALs - like all American citizens - deserve the presumption of innocence. It's also worth recalling that the al-Qaeda manual recommends that all detainees complain of torture and abuse.

But what if it turns out that one of the SEALs did give the guy a shot? What if Abed was uncooperative, or spit at them, or bragged about how he slaughtered the Americans (one of whom was a retired SEAL) and how they begged for their lives and squealed like pigs as they died? I can imagine how a normal guy - even one as disciplined as a SEAL - might lose his temper for a moment.

In that case, I wouldn't expect a senior officer to turn a blind eye. I'd expect him to take the SEALs aside and say, "Let me be clear: You guys cut the John Wayne stuff or you're going to be peeling potatoes on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf for the next six months. Understood?" The reply would be: "Yes, sir! Understood, sir!" And that would be the end of that.

But a court martial? Maybe there's more to it than we know. But how much more could there be? Abed is alive. He has two eyes, two ears, ten fingers, and ten toes. This much is clear: If a single alleged knuckle sandwich is all it takes to remove three special operators from the battlefield, Abed won this battle.

A terrorist in American custody should be aware that he is in the presence of principled professionals. But he should not believe that he is untouchable or that he is entitled to the rights enjoyed by an American citizen under the U.S. Constitution - a document he'd gladly trample underfoot.

He should know that the troops who detain him are not like him: They won't chop off his head on video tape while chanting praise for a divinity pleased by the carnage. But he also should know that if he asks for a fat lip, he might just get a fat lip.

Read the whole article. The more I read about political correctness in the military the more convinced I am that our troops are made of far sterner stuff than are those who command them.

RLC

An Exact Science

Since the filched emails from East Anglia were released a month ago we've come to learn a lot about the scientific method, at least as it is practiced by some leading global warming enthusiasts. Consider this graph, for example, which shows temperature data at Darwin, Australia for the twentieth century:

The red line is alarming indeed. It shows temperatures in a runaway ascent, but there's a catch. Although the red line is what's usually cited when the global warming folk want to put a good scare into school children, it actually represents what is called "adjusted" data. In other words, the field measurements are deemed in need of adjusting to account for all sorts of factors like the implementation of new equipment or moving the recording apparatus to a different location, etc. So the climatologists throw into the data mix an eye of newt and a wing of bat and out comes adjusted temperatures that'll frighten the bejabbers out of you.

On the graph the black line represents the adjustment factor. The raw data, the measurements that were actually recorded by the instruments at Darwin, are in blue, and notice that these temperatures have been essentially flat throughout the twentieth century.

It's not until the global warming alchemists have applied their ministrations to the raw data that we get something that Al Gore can sell books about. In the meantime, it looks like the raw data show no real change occurring at all, at least not in Darwin.

Go to the link for a more thorough analysis.

RLC

Evolutionary Ethics (Part II)

This post continues our discussion of Marc Hauser's essay Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality in which he attempts to argue that morality can be, and should be, based upon our biological nature. You can read Part I here.

Hauser writes:

None of my comments so far are meant to be divisive with respect to the meaning and sense of community that many derive from religion. Where I intend to be divisive is with respect to the argument that religion, and moral education more generally, represent the only - or perhaps even the ultimate - source of moral reasoning. If anything, moral education is often motivated by self-interest, to do what's best for those within a moral community, preaching singularity, not plurality. Blame nurture, not nature, for our moral atrocities against humanity. And blame educated partiality more generally, as this allows us to lump into one category all those who fail to acknowledge our shared humanity and fail to use secular reasoning to practice compassion.

But why should we care about our "shared humanity?" Why should we practice compassion? Hauser never tells us. He just assumes that this is the right thing to do, but we need to ask him what fact of evolution or our biology is he basing this assumption upon? Indeed, what fact of our biology tells us that we should not act in our self-interest? To such questions Hauser gives no answer.

He adds this:

If religion is not the source of our moral insights - and moral education has the demonstrated potential to teach partiality and, therefore, morally destructive behaviour - then what other sources of inspiration are on offer?

One answer to this question is emerging from an unsuspected corner of academia: the mind sciences. Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.

This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn't dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially.

This is fascinating. It sounds exactly like what natural law philosophers and theologians have been saying for centuries. Indeed St. Paul writing to the church at Rome in the first century observed that everyone has a moral law "written on their hearts" (See Romans 2: 15).

But the question is not whether we have such a moral code or moral sense but rather where it comes from. This makes all the difference as to whether it is in any way incumbent upon us. If the code is inscribed on our hearts by God then it is presumably morally obligatory, but if it's the product of evolution then we're no more obligated to observe it than we are obligated to cover our mouth when yawning. If this law that Mr. Hauser thinks he has discovered is the product of blind chance and purposelessness which somehow conspired to fit us for life in the stone age then why should we live our lives by it today? It's merely an evolutionary vestige, like a man's beard, and can be ignored or removed with just as little moral consequence.

To argue that because we have a moral sense we are therefore bound to live by it is to commit the fallacy of deriving an "ought" from an "is" (sometimes called the naturalistic fallacy). It simply does not follow that because something is a certain way it therefore ought to be that way. Just because in some situations we feel compassion for others does not mean that if we didn't feel compassion we'd be in some sense morally wrong.

Moreover, evolution-based ethics are highly selective in what they deem right and wrong. On what basis, for instance, do we determine which of our evolved behaviors are morally good and which are not? Men are just as likely, perhaps more likely, to be selfish, cruel and violent as they are to be generous, kind, and peaceful. Both tendencies, according to Hauser's view, are part of our biological makeup and must result from our evolutionary development as a species. On what basis, then, does he prefer one behavior over the other? On what basis does he decide that we're required to do one and required to avoid the other? Why, exactly, should I care about the poor or care about the world my great-grandchildren will inherit? Why shouldn't I just live for myself and let the poor or future generations worry about their own survival? What answer based upon our biological make-up can Hauser possibly give to these questions?

The fact is that naturalistic, evolutionary ethics provide us no basis, other than one's individual feelings, for judging one behavior to be morally better than another and certainly no reason for thinking that we're in any way obligated to do one thing rather than its opposite. As a guide to moral behavior it is utterly useless.

More tomorrow.

RLC

Debunking the Shroud

I don't know what to make of the Shroud of Turin, the famous burial cloth that bears the scientifically inexplicable imprint of a man whose wounds appear consonant with those which Jesus is described as suffering during his execution.

The Shroud is believed by many to be the actual burial cloth of Christ and the imprint is believed to have been preternaturally impressed into the fabric. Perhaps. I'm not in a position to say. What I can say, however, is that arguments like the one below which purport to debunk the Shroud as spurious are risibly dumb.

According to an article in Science Daily another burial shroud has been unearthed in Jerusalem dating to the first century. The shroud is apparently that of a man who was a leper and who died of tuberculosis, all of which is pretty interesting, but then the article quotes the researchers as claiming that the leper's shroud proves that the Turin Shroud could not be that of Jesus:

This is also the first time fragments of a burial shroud have been found from the time of Jesus in Jerusalem. The shroud is very different to that of the Turin Shroud, hitherto assumed to be the one that was used to wrap the body of Jesus. Unlike the complex weave of the Turin Shroud, this is made up of a simple two-way weave, as the textiles historian Dr. Orit Shamir was able to show.

Based on the assumption that this is representative of a typical burial shroud widely used at the time of Jesus, the researchers conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from Jesus-era Jerusalem.

In other words, we can assume that the leper's shroud had a weave typical of the period and since the Turin Shroud had a more sophisticated weave it must have dated from a more recent era or a different place.

If the researchers are being accurately represented in the article theirs is a remarkably shallow argument. What reason is there for making the assumption that the weave of the leper's shroud is typical? How many such linens have we discovered that we can make such a determination? And even if it were typical of the common folk to use such shrouds do we know that the more expensive weave was not preferred by the well-to-do? Why could it not be that Jesus was buried in a fabric typically imported for purchase and use by the wealthy from outside Jerusalem? Why could it not be that the rich man who donated the grave for Jesus' burial also donated the shroud? It was also typical of that time that the garments people wore were stitched together from numerous strips of cloth and thus had many seams, but Jesus' garment was seamless and thus considered unusual enough by his executioners for them to gamble for it. Should we assume that this story is false because it suggests that Jesus wore a garment not typical of that worn in the region at the time?

Sometimes in their eagerness to discredit Christian belief skeptics resort to the most desperate reasoning and wind up saying the silliest things. The Shroud of Turin may not be what its devotees believe it to be, but it'll take a lot more than the reasons offered in this article to convince them of that.

RLC

Evolutionary Ethics (Part I)

The idea that our moral sense is a product of human evolution has been around ever since Darwin, but in all those years it has never managed to convince most philosophers that it's plausible. Marc Hauser at Edge takes another stab at it in an article titled Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality. There's much to think about (and to criticize) in his essay so I'd like to offer an analysis over the next several days. This post will be part I of the series.

Hauser writes:

For many, living a moral life is synonymous with living a religious life. Just as educated students of mathematics, chemistry and politics know that 1=1, water=H2O, and Barack Obama=US president, so, too, do religiously educated people know that religion=morality.

As simple and pleasing as this relationship may seem, it has at least three possible interpretations.

First, if religion represents the source of moral understanding, then those lacking a religious education are morally lost, adrift in a sea of sinful temptation. Those with a religious education not only chart a steady course, guided by the cliched moral compass but they know why some actions are morally virtuous and others are morally abhorrent.

Actually, it's not so much a lack of religious education which casts one adrift, it's the lack of any objective ground for moral judgment and moral obligation. If morality is not rooted in the goodness of a transcendent moral authority then it's entirely rooted in human subjectivity and what's moral is simply a matter of whatever feels right to me. Any ethics that seeks to ground itself in something other than God ultimately founders on the shoals of subjectivity, and, as we'll see Hauser's attempt is no exception.

Second, perhaps everyone has a standard engine for working out what is morally right or wrong but those with a religious background have extra accessories that refine our actions, fueling altruism and fending off harms to others.

Well, at least those who understand Christianity do. The "extra accessories" that the Christian has at her disposal are the twin motivators of love for, and gratitude to, God. The reason why there are relatively few charities run by atheists is that motives rooted in evolution will almost always drive people toward egoism rather than altruism. Love and gratitude, especially when directed toward something or someone beyond ourselves, are the most powerful incentives anyone has for caring about others, and the atheist has denied himself access to these resources.

Third, while religion certainly does provide moral inspiration, not all of its recommendations are morally laudatory. Though we can all applaud those religions that teach compassion, forgiveness and genuine altruism, we can also express disgust and moral outrage at those religions that promote ethnic cleansing, often by praising those willing to commit suicide for the good of the religious "team".

The obvious question Hauser raises for himself here is what standard is he using to judge compassion, forgiveness, and altruism as laudatory and ethnic cleansing as outrageous? Where does he get the idea that the former are good and the latter is bad? What is he basing this evaluation upon? The answer has to be either evolution or his own feelings, but if so how can either of these tell us that something is good or bad?

Indeed, an ethic based on evolution should see ethnic cleansing as a natural expression of the survival of the fittest gene pool. It should view suicide bombers as altruists sacrificing their own lives to promote the survival of the genes of the larger group of which he is a part.

In other words, Hauser wants to ground morality in the evolution of humanity, but as soon as he starts making moral judgments he finds himself forced to import values that have their source elsewhere. This is a problem that many naturalists face. They simply cannot consistently reconcile their naturalism with their moral sense. They see where the train of naturalist morality is taking them, and they don't like it so they make an irrational leap onto the back of Christian morality, and hope no one will notice as they piggyback upon the very assumptions they wish to discredit.

More tomorrow.

RLC

Taxes

Jason sends along a cartoon that's both depressing and funny:

There's more than a bit of truth to this. President Obama insists he wants to create jobs, but nothing he's done so far has worked. The reason joblessness is still over 10% is that businesses won't hire when they fear their taxes, i.e. their costs, are going to go up in a few months. Yet the current Congress and administration seems unconcerned about this common sense impediment to job creation as they push legislation that will elevate taxes to levels that will be a disincentive for many businesses to increase their workforce.

If the President wishes to stimulate job creation, rather than throw money at programs that pay people to rake leaves, he should drop health care reform (at least in its current form) and cap and trade. If employers are confident that there won't be huge levies waiting for them down the road they'll be much more likely to hire workers today.

Unfortunately, the Democrats' solution to our economic woes has been to sink the nation further into debt, throw more money at pointless jobs, provide health care for those who don't have it, tax industry for using energy, and then raise taxes on everyone to try to pay for it all. The irony is that raising taxes simply means more people will be out of work and unable to afford health care so that more people will be dependent upon government to pay for their care, which means that taxes on everyone else will have to be raised even higher.

It doesn't make much sense.

RLC

Safe Schools Czar

Jim Hoft has been documenting the career of Kevin Jennings, President Obama's Safe Schools czar, and has the latest here. In 2000 Mr. Jennings apparently organized and led a conference for teenagers in which almost every imaginable sexual deviancy was promoted to the teens. Among these were ... well, you'll have to read it for yourself if you have the stomach for it.

That the administration would deem this man suitable to put in charge of children shows an appalling lack of judgment. The man is an embarrassment to the President, and the longer he's allowed to hang around the more unavoidable will be the conclusion that the President actually wants him around.

Read the article (or this one) and see if this is the sort of man you want supervising your children's safety.

RLC

More Complex Than Expected

Telic Thoughts directs us to an article which reports on a study that assesses how complex the simplest functional cell would have to be. What the researchers found is that the simplest biologically viable cell is still very complex indeed:

What are the bare essentials of life, the indispensable ingredients required to produce a cell that can survive on its own? Can we describe the molecular anatomy of a cell, and understand how an entire organism functions as a system?

...three papers published back-to-back today in Science, provide the first comprehensive picture of a minimal cell, based on an extensive quantitative study of the biology of the bacterium that causes atypical pneumonia, Mycoplasma pneumoniae. The study uncovers fascinating novelties relevant to bacterial biology and shows that even the simplest of cells is more complex than expected.

The rest of the article explains the complexity. The significance of this is that before the mechanisms of evolution could take over and generate, at least theoretically, all of the diversity of living things we see today, blind, purposeless chance still had to produce a structure which was highly integrated and organized and which possessed enormous information content (see video below).

Perhaps a non-biologist, uninitiated in the mysteries of the discipline, might be forgiven for thinking this is all a bit far-fetched. It seems rather like constructing a computer, together with its operating system, by shaking together a random assortment of its parts. It's not as if we see such prodigies happening every day, after all.

The irony is that those who believe that the feat of producing an information-rich, highly organized and functional systems like the one in the video requires the agency of an intentional mind - and who point to the fact that every time we see similar structures manufactured there's always a mind behind it - are nevertheless called superstitious. But those who claim that random chance and physical law can somehow create such a marvel, and have probably done so countless times across the cosmos - even though no one has ever actually observed chance or physical law producing information and no one knows how it could possibly have been accomplished - are said to be enlightened. It's pretty funny.

RLC

Heading for Default

This article that Bill passes along will fill you with hope for change. Here's the nut of it:

It's one of those numbers that's so unbelievable you have to actually think about it for a while... Within the next 12 months, the U.S. Treasury will have to refinance $2 trillion in short-term debt. And that's not counting any additional deficit spending, which is estimated to be around $1.5 trillion.

Put the two numbers together. Then ask yourself, how in the world can the Treasury borrow $3.5 trillion in only one year? That's an amount equal to nearly 30% of our entire GDP. And we're the world's biggest economy. Where will the money come from?

How did we end up with so much short-term debt? Like most entities that have far too much debt - whether subprime borrowers, GM, Fannie, or GE - the U.S. Treasury has tried to minimize its interest burden by borrowing for short durations and then "rolling over" the loans when they come due. As they say on Wall Street, "a rolling debt collects no moss."

What they mean is, as long as you can extend the debt, you have no problem. Unfortunately, that leads folks to take on ever greater amounts of debt... at ever shorter durations... at ever lower interest rates. Sooner or later, the creditors wake up and ask themselves: What are the chances I will ever actually be repaid? And that's when the trouble starts. Interest rates go up dramatically. Funding costs soar. The party is over. Bankruptcy is next.

When governments go bankrupt, it's called a "default." Currency speculators figured out how to accurately predict when a country would default. Two well-known economists - Alan Greenspan and Pablo Guidotti - published the secret formula in a 1999 academic paper. The formula is called the Greenspan-Guidotti rule.

The rule states: To avoid a default, countries should maintain hard currency reserves equal to at least 100% of their short-term foreign debt maturities. The world's largest money-management firm, PIMCO, explains the rule this way: "The minimum benchmark of reserves equal to at least 100% of short-term external debt is known as the Greenspan-Guidotti rule. Greenspan-Guidotti is perhaps the single concept of reserve adequacy that has the most adherents and empirical support."

The principle behind the rule is simple. If you can't pay off all of your foreign debts in the next 12 months, you're a terrible credit risk. Speculators are going to target your bonds and your currency, making it impossible to refinance your debts. A default is assured.

So how does America rank on the Greenspan-Guidotti scale? It's a guaranteed default.

Read the rest at the link, but make sure you're not near any open windows or sharp objects.

RLC

The Hockey Stick

Doc at The Autopsy has put together an interesting video that puts the global warming "hockey stick" into perspective. The "hockey stick" is the name given to the way a graph of temperatures over the past century or so stays fairly constant and then suddenly shoots upward like a hockey stick lying on the ground with its blade pointing up. What the video does is start with a graph that shows recent temperature changes and then keeps putting those changes into greater and greater historical context. The longer the reach of the data the less significant the hockey stick appears:

If this is accurate it makes all of the "sky-is-falling" panic about global warming seem rather melodramatic and overblown.

RLC

Stretching the Truth

Planned Parenthood continues to embarrass itself. This undercover video filmed in a Wisconsin PP clinic shows a counselor and doctor providing a young mother inaccurate information and even resorting to scare tactics to persuade her to terminate the pregnancy:

LiveAction.org observes that:

In the undercover video, when the two women ask a Planned Parenthood counselor if the pregnant woman's 10-week-old unborn child has a heartbeat, the counselor emphasizes "heart tones," and answers, "Heart beat is when the fetus is active in the uterus--can survive--which is about seventeen or eighteen weeks." On the contrary, embryologists agree that the heartbeat begins around 3 weeks. Wisconsin informed consent law requires that women receive medically accurate information before undergoing an abortion.

The counselor then says, "A fetus is what's in the uterus right now. That is not a baby." Dr. Prohaska, the abortion doctor, insists, "It's not a baby at this stage or anything like that." Prohaska also states that having an abortion will be "much safer than having a baby," warning, "You know, women die having babies."

Hey, what's a little truth-stretching when there's a boodle of money to be made? There's more on this at the link.

RLC

Buyer's Remorse

According to Ben Smith at Politico.com things are President Obama's popularity is in serious decline. For example:

...just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they'd rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that's somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country's difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited.

Less than a year in office and President Obama is making the country wish George Bush was back. By this time next year he may be making the country wish Jimmy Carter was back.

I heard on the radio yesterday, though I haven't been able to find it documented anywhere, that 20% of Americans would support impeachment of the President. As harmful as I think the President's policies are, as much as I fear that he is deliberately driving us toward bankruptcy in order to fulfill his ambition of destroying capitalism and imposing socialism, I nevertheless find impeachment a ludicrous solution.

Like it or not, the President isn't doing anything that he didn't tell us he would do during the campaign. Voters had every indication that he was a radical leftist, that he favored a radical redistribution of wealth and that he would fundamentally change our economic structure, but, in a free and open election, the majority cast their ballots for him anyway.

His policies may be extremely harmful (though no moreso than those of the Congress whose lead he follows), but they are what the nation voted for. To now say that he deserves to be impeached because he's doing what anyone who was paying attention knew he would do is to make a mockery of our Constitution and to turn the U.S. into a banana republic.

The best way to stop the President is at the ballot box by voting progressives out of Congress in 2010, and voting for Mr. Obama's opponent in 2012. Maybe next time voters will take their franchise seriously, pay attention to what's being said and who is saying it, and not be so impressed by a candidate whose r�sum� is as empty as his speeches are stirring.

RLC

Microscopic Beauty

Here are some beautiful pictures of living things so tiny that most of us never see them.

Here's one of my favorites. It's a unicellular algae called Penium:

RLC

This Year's Daniel

Stephen Meyer has been awarded World magazine's "Daniel" award for 2009, presented to the man or woman who withstands intense opposition, often in the form of personal assaults, with grace and resolve:

This fall Meyer came out with a full account of what science has learned in recent decades: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (Harper One, 2009) shows that the cell is incredibly complex and the code that directs its functions wonderfully designed. His argument undercuts macroevolution, the theory that one kind of animal over time evolves into a very different kind. Meyer thus garners media scorn for raining on this year's huge celebration of the birth of Charles Darwin 200 years ago and the publication of On the Origin of Species 150 years ago.

From his office Meyer has ventured forth to debate at least nine prominent Darwinians on CNN, NPR, FOX, the BBC, and other venues. In it he has written numerous newspaper and magazine columns in defense of Intelligent Design (ID), as well as an academic article that became notorious five years ago when Richard Sternberg, a Smithsonian-affiliated scientist, agreed to publish it in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Darwinian higher-ups demoted Sternberg for allowing the other side to have its say. They interrogated him about religious and political beliefs.

ID proponents regularly receive that type of harassment: No lion's den, but denials of tenure and media depiction as anti-science. Ironically, scientific advance is now backing ID, which starts with the idea that - in Meyer's words -"certain technical features in a physical system reveal the activity of an intelligence or a mind. A simple example might be Mount Rushmore: You drive into the Dakotas and you see carvings of the presidents' faces up on the mountainside, and you immediately recognize that you're dealing with a sculpture, an intelligence, rather than an undirected process like wind and erosion."

Our new ability to peer into cells also shows ID: Meyer says, "We don't see little faces but we do see other indicators of intelligent activity, such as the digital code that's stored in a DNA molecule, or the tiny little miniature machines, the nanotechnology, the sliding clamps and turbines and rotary engines that biologists are now finding inside living cells." Darwin did not know any of that and Meyer, 51, did not always know it. His career shows the four-stage pattern that is common among intellectual Daniels: Questioning, discernment, courage, and perseverance.

The article goes on to trace Meyer's journey through those four stages, and it's quite interesting. Also interesting is the note that the author, Marvin Olasky, appends to the end of the essay:

This year atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins refused my offer to schedule a debate in New York between Meyer and himself: Dawkins, who says that Darwinism makes for "intellectually fulfilled atheism," apparently does not want to lose his sense of fulfillment. But theistic evolutionist Francis Collins also attacks ID and is unwilling to enter into a public discussion with Meyer.

For all their bluster and bravado about slaying the dragons of superstition and exposing the ridiculousness of theistic belief the atheistic Darwinians, and even some of their theistic allies, really want nothing to do with the ID people (see the post below this one). They know such battles, especially if held in public fora, would be as hard on their scholarly reputations as they'd be on their egos.

RLC

Flincher

Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent introduces the brief video clip below with these words:

William Lane Craig is not only one of the world's leading Christian apologists but he has actually made outstanding original contributions to philosophy. Yes, Craig publishes popular-level books. Unlike Dawkins, however, who in 20-years plus has been purely a popularizer (of Darwinian evolution, materialist science, and atheism), Craig continues to publish at the highest levels of the academy addressing scholars of the highest caliber (and gaining their respect). Dawkins, by contrast, increasingly appeals to the lowest common denominator. It's in this light that Dawkins glib dismissal of Craig should be viewed:

This is another example of how the smack-talkers among the new atheists would prefer to attack straw men in the comfort of their study rather than venture out to wage face-to-face combat with a real opponent. One wonders what rank and file atheists must think when they see their champions eager to embarrass liberal bishops who don't know what they believe or why they believe it but flinching from encounters with formidable Christian thinkers like Craig.

RLC

Who's to Say?

Richard Weikert, the historian who wrote the excellent study (From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany) of how the Darwinian worldview prepared the intellectual and moral ground for eugenics and eventually the Holocaust, writes about a conference he attended recently at San Diego State. The convocation was given to celebrating the theme, "150 Years of Evolution: Darwin's Impact on the Humanities and the Social Sciences." At the event he had a couple of disconcerting conversations. Here's his account:

A young man was performing rap songs on evolutionary themes that he had been commissioned to write and perform for the Darwin celebrations in Britain. He told us between his songs that in some species, such as praying mantises and black widows, the females kill their mates after procreating. This is an evolutionary adaptation. The rapper then continued by saying that it is only chance-like the flip of a coin, he said-that our own species does not exhibit such a behavior. He then stated that if we did act this way, our moral systems and religions would revolve around females killing their mates. (Take-home lesson: Morality and religion are contingent products of mindless processes).

This view may sound bizarre, but it is actually very similar to a statement Darwin made in the Origin of Species, where he mentioned that some species commit infanticide. He then stated that if we as humans had been raised with their instincts, infanticide would then be moral. Darwin's own moral relativism was even more apparent in Descent of Man, where he argued that sexual morality had evolved over human history. At one point in the human past, he argued, "promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world." Polygamy and monogamy were later evolutionary adaptations, he thought. Similar ideas are commonplace today in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, both influential movements in intellectual circles.

At a dinner at the close of the conference, I spoke with a philosophy graduate student who told me that because empathy and thus morality were traits produced by evolution, he was convinced that morality was relative. When I asked him if he then thought Hitler was not evil, he told me that even though he personally finds Hitler repugnant, that repugnance has no objective validity, so, he stated, "Hitler was OK." He then told me that he doesn't want his rational belief in relativistic morality to influence his own moral standards, but he still considered his moral standards evolved traits that are purely subjective. I told him that I thought the reason his "instincts" and rationality about morality were at odds was because morality really is objective, but he didn't see it that way.

This was not the first time I had heard someone defend moral relativism-even to the point of claiming Hitler was neither right nor wrong, but still I am horrified by this display of moral blindness. However, if one buys into the relevant presuppositions, I'm not sure his position is so philosophically outlandish....If evolution produced morality, as many Darwinists think, what fulcrum could possibly exist to condemn Hitler objectively for pursuing his ideals?

Weikert's conversations illustrate a crucial moral problem that faces us in the 21st century: How can subjectivism be avoided in a secular society? If there's no God then there's no ground for moral obligation, no ground for moral judgment of right and wrong other than one's own personal feelings. For now most people are unaware that when they make a moral judgment they're really not talking about anything other than their own tastes. They simply assume that there's an objective right and wrong, that they're just stating t6he obvious when the say we should help the poor or that Hitler was evil, but they've never really asked themselves how this could possibly be. Once it begins to dawn on society at large that moral talk is just a bunch of hocus pocus if we reject the existence of a transcendent moral ground, once we find that there's no real basis for saying that the Adolf Hitlers of the world are evil men, society will lose whatever cohesion it has and begin to unravel. It will start with the elites first. Indeed, it's already well along the way.

RLC

Imploding Justice

You might recall the voter intimidation carried out by a group called the New Black Panthers at a Philadelphia polling place during the 2008 election. The Department of Justice attorneys brought several charges against the thugs involved in this illegal activity, but last spring they were instructed by higher ups to drop the case. This has apparently had a demoralizing effect on the Holder Justice Department, as it should, and three top attorneys have resigned. The Washington Times has an editorial claiming that the Attorney General's department is actually imploding as a result of what some see as an attempt to protect political allies from prosecution.

The Times story on this can be read here. This seems to be just another example of how justice seems to be undergoing a redefinition in the age of Obama. A young couple surreptitiously videotape Obama's old friends at ACORN counselling them how to break the law, and it's the videotapers who face a lawsuit. Three Navy SEALS are facing a court martial because the terrorist who planned and carried out the kidnapping, torture, and murder of several American security personnel in Iraq claims one of them punched him in the stomach after they captured him and that the others lied about it to cover it up. Hackers uncover damning emails on the computers of the world's leading climate-change scientists and Senator Barbara Boxer wants the hackers hunted down and prosecuted. I wonder if back in 1971 she demanded that Daniel Ellsberg and the others who leaked the top secret Pentagon Papers be prosecuted. I'm sure she would have because Ms Boxer is nothing if not fair and consistent.

This is not to say that the SEALS shouldn't be disciplined or the hackers should be allowed to go unpunished (Though I do say that the young couple who videotaped the ACORN sleaziness should be given a Pulitzer instead of being slapped with a lawsuit), but surely there are reprimands for military personnel that fall far short of court martial, and surely Ms Boxer should at this point in time be more focussed on what the emails reveal than how we came to be in possession of them, particularly since it's not even clear that a crime was committed or if it was that it was committed in the U.S.

The people we should be praising and thanking for the service they're performing to the country and to truth are being turned somehow into the bad guys and the people who really are the bad guys are made to look like victims. What's happening to us?

RLC

Ethical Question of the Day

Listen to this 911 call and discuss with your friends (or yourself if you have no friends) whether this woman, who exhibits a calm and courage that seems quite remarkable, should be prosecuted. She lives in New York so it's iffy. If you're a pacifist what do you think she should have done?

According to Hot Air, the intruder may have been under the influence of some potent pharmaceutical products. That would certainly explain his behavior.

RLC

Clarification

Byron writes to clarify that contrary to the impression our post on the Manhattan Declaration may have given, Ron Sider did sign it and does support it. My point was that Sider thought it should have included other issues as well as those it did include, but I may have given the misleading impression that for this reason he didn't sign it.

RLC

Faith Commitments

In his very fine book on the Argument from Reason for God's existence (C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea), Victor Reppert invites us to imagine the reaction of the intellectual world should a proponent of the inerrancy of the Bible say something like the following:

Our willingness to accept biblical teachings that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between faith and unbelief. We take the side of Scripture in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the existence of unsubstantiated just-so stories in Scripture, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to Scripture's inerrancy. It is not that the methods and institutions of biblical study somehow compel us to accept only interpretations that are in accordance with the Bible's inerrancy, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to biblical inerrancy to create a method of biblical study that produces explanations that are consistent with inerrancy, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, our commitment to inerrancy is absolute, for we cannot allow doubt to get its foot in the door. For anyone capable of doubting the Word of God in any respect will wind up doubting it in all respects.

Such a defense of the doctrine of inerrancy would render the opinion of any individual who mounted it irrelevant in any setting outside the church. Certainly such a person would be treated with derision in the secular academy. Critics would reasonably charge that such a belief is based solely upon religious faith, and blind faith at that. It is religious fideism - the idea that we should just believe regardless of the evidence arrayed against our belief or, for that matter, the evidence in favor of it - and fideism is an abdication of our intellectual responsibility to submit our beliefs to the evidence.

Yet this is exactly, mutatis mutandis, what atheistic evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin once said about his commitment to materialism. His commitment, and that of those for whom he speaks, is simply scientific fideism based on blind, irrational faith. Here are Lewontin's words:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material causes, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.... anyone who believes in God can believe in anything.

This is from the pen of the same man who has criticized Creationists for a prior commitment to the truth of Genesis and who has said that that commitment disqualifies creationism as science and makes creationists irrelevant to the discussion of origins. But how is an unfalsifiable, apriori faith commitment to Genesis any different than an unfalsifiable, apriori faith commitment to materialism? If creationists are not credible because they will believe Genesis no matter what the evidence how is their view different from Lewontin's position that he will cling to materialism no matter what the evidence against it? How is the creationist any more closed-minded, any more anti-intellectual than is Lewontin?

The answer is that he is not. Lewontin, and many other Darwinians, are just as religious as any creationist except that their religion is materialism. They hold to it with a tenacity that is impervious to argument and immune to evidence.

Reppert goes on to quote atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel who makes this faith commitment even more explicit:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I am right about my belief. It's that i hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

Nagel's materialism is based on his wish that God not exist. A Christian's theism is based, let's just say for argument's sake, on his desire that God does exist. Why is the latter considered somehow more intellectually disreputable than the former? Why is one kind of faith considered unacceptable in the public square when the other kind is not?

RLC

A Lot of Eggs

Do you get weary of hearing what a terrible train of death and destruction the Christian Church has wreaked upon the world? Me too.

To be sure, there have been black spots in the history of the Church, the most infamous, perhaps being the inquisitions in which several thousand people died over several centuries. But as bad as they were the inquisitions were scarcely a drop in the ocean of atrocious behavior compared to the legacy bequeathed us by state atheism in the eighty years from 1920 to 2000.

The Black Book of Communism documents the carnage wrought by atheists in pursuit of the millenial kingdom they tried to usher into the world under the banner of Marxist-Leninism. Here's the tally:

• 65 million in the People's Republic of China
• 20 million in the Soviet Union
• 2 million in Cambodia
• 2 million in North Korea
• 1.7 million in Africa
• 1.5 million in Afghanistan
• 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
• 1 million in Vietnam
• 150,000 in Latin America
• 10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international communist movement and communist parties not in power."

The statistics of victims includes executions, intentional destruction of population by starvation, and deaths resulting from deportations, physical confinement, or through forced labor. It's quite a record - 94 million people - all in the space of a single lifetime.

When the Church has engaged in murderous behavior it was acting contrary to the principles upon which it was founded. There is no justification in the teaching of Christ or the apostles for persecuting and murdering those with whom one has theological disagreements. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

When atheists engage in mass murder on a scale almost impossible to imagine, however, there is no contradiction whatsoever with the basic assumptions of their worldview. If atheism is true might makes right, and whatever those who have the power do to achieve their goals is simply the way things are.

Lenin put it this way:

We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas....Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order....(emphasis mine)

Lenin also observed once that in order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs. Ninety four million is a lot of eggs. Remember that number the next time someone harangues you about the terrible atrocities committed by the Christian Church.

RLC

Who's the Man in 2012?

Who in the Republican party has the experience, the seriousness, the respect, the gravitas, the intelligence and the worldview to run for president in 2012? Right now there's only one person who comes to mind - Dick Cheney. Will he run? No. At least he says not, and his heart condition makes it doubtful that he's being coy. Could he win if he did run? Depends. If Obama fails to get health care reform it's doubtful that he'll get much else. It's hard to imagine that after flopping on health care that he'd get cap and trade or immigration reform or a restructuring of the financial industry.

Moreover, our economic woes show no signs of abating any time soon and almost certainly will be made far worse than they had to be by the extraordinary indebtedness into which the current administration has pushed us. Add to this a sense that our foes around the globe are taking the measure of Mr. Obama and finding him unthreatening, and it's likely that we'll begin soon to suffer some foreign policy challenges that could haunt the administration into 2012.

Given all that voters in 2012 will be looking for a man with a proven record of strength, maturity, experience and seriousness and of all the people on the current scene, Dick Cheney is the man most closely associated with those virtues.

As things are shaping up almost any Republican who projects competence could win in 2012. Unfortunately, there are few who have the national name recognition and a record of accomplishment to capture the nation's attention. Dick Cheney is one who does [Haley Barbor, governor of Mississippi, is another], and there may be such a clamor for him to throw his hat in the ring that he finds it difficult to demur.

If Obama continues to flounder, and especially if we come under another terrorist attack on our soil, look for Republicans to pressure both Cheney and Barbor to consider running next time around. It would certainly be an impressive ticket.

RLC

Tale of Two States

Jason sends along a link to a Weekly Standard article that makes an interesting comparison between Texas and California as widely disparate economic models. The two states have followed quite different paths in developing (or devastating) their economies:

From the Great Depression on, California was a dream destination for Americans. Now it looks more like a nightmare, taking on new debt at a rate of $25 million a day."

Texas, on the other hand, boasts unemployment lower than the national average, a budget surplus, no state income taxes, and low rate of repossession on mortgage defaults, Trends writes.

In other words, Texas is economically ascending, while California is in a nosedive.

Texas by itself accounted for 70% of the new jobs created last year. How? Why? The article gives four reasons:

First, Texans believe in laissez-faire markets with an emphasis on individual responsibility. California, on the other hand, has favored central planning solutions and reliance on a social safety net for the past two decades.

Second, California treats environmentalism as a "religious sacrament," rather than just one component in people's quality of life. Texans take a more balanced approach.

Third, California elevates "ethnic diversity" above "assimilation," while Texas has done the opposite.

Finally, while Texas has emphasized streamlining regulatory and litigation burdens, California has used the government to transfer wealth from its creators to special interest groups.

In other words, California has pursued a policy of massive spending and high taxes and the result is that productive citizens and businesses are either crushed or have fled the state. Texas is much more business friendly and is consequently in much better fiscal shape with much better employment numbers.

So, which of the two models are the Democrats in Washington determined to impose on the country? Silly question.

RLC

The Other Shoe

The other shoe appears to be ready to drop:

The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.

"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," Mr. Horner said. "These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this."

There are more details at the link. Maybe there's nothing to NASA's refusal to comply with Mr. Horner's FOIA request, but if they have nothing to hide it sure makes one wonder why they appear so resolved to hide it.

RLC

The Irrepressible Law of Unintended Consequences

One need not be a philosopher to appreciate the irony of this:

The APA (American Philosophical Association) strives to establish an anti-discrimination policy that, as Alexander Pruss points out, winds up protecting the very behavior it sought to do away with. The policy seeks to prevent philosophy departments from discriminating in their hiring practices against anyone on the basis of:

...race, color, religion, political convictions, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, gender identification or age, whether in graduate admissions, appointments, retention, promotion and tenure, manuscript evaluation, salary determination, or other professional activities in which APA members characteristically participate. This includes both discrimination on the basis of status and discrimination on the basis of conduct integrally connected to that status,

Pruss observes that such a policy is ironic in that the very conduct which the policy was intended to eliminate becomes protected by the policy:

Suppose George is a member of Westboro Baptist Church (for those who don't know about it, it's a virulently anti-gay congregation--and that's by far an understatement, as is indicated by their URL which I shall not reprint but which you can see if you google for them). George applies for the position of chair of a philosophy department at a state school, and expressly states during the interview that if appointed he would, under all possible circumstances, do his utmost to block the hiring of any gay faculty. It is clear that he ought to be dismissed as a candidate there and then, since he is committed to conduct that is unprofessional in the institutional context he is a candidate for. However the APA policy appears to prohibit dismissing George from one's list of candidates.

Thus, the policy prohibits discriminating against George for his adherence to the tenets of Westboro Baptist or acting in ways that are "a normal and predictable expression" of his adherence. But it is extremely plausible that doing one's best to block the hiring of gay faculty is "a normal and predictable expression" of being a Westboro Baptist .... Therefore, the committee cannot discriminate against George on the basis of his unwillingness to comply with university policies that, we may suppose, prohibit discrimination against gays.

There's more on this at the link. Pruss takes the matter pretty seriously, and I suppose he should, but it amuses me that the more people try to formulate codes to articulate their tolerance of every difference imaginable, the more the law of unintended consequences rises up to bite them. Wouldn't it be easier to simply state that hiring will be based primarily on the candidate's qualifications and character, and let it go at that?

RLC