Millenials

Byron forwards us an interesting article from Time magazine which discusses the attitudes of the demographic known as the "millenials." According to Time writer Nancy Gibbs:

Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them. The members of the millennial generation, ages 18 to 29, are so close to their parents that college students typically check in about 10 times a week, and they are all Facebook friends. Kids and parents dress alike, listen to the same music and fight less than previous generations, and millennials assert that older people's moral values are generally superior to their own.

Yet even more young people perceive a gap. According to a recently released Pew Research Center report, 79% of millennials say there is a major difference in the point of view of younger and older people today. Young Americans are now more educated, more diverse, more optimistic and less likely to have a job than previous generations. But it is in their use of technology that millennials see the greatest difference, starting perhaps with the fact that 83% of them sleep with their cell phones. Change now comes so strong and fast that it pulls apart even those who wish to hang together--and the future belongs to the strong of thumb.

In some respects the millennials emerge as radically conventional. Asked about their life goals, 52% say being a good parent is most important to them, followed by having a successful marriage; 59% think that the trend of more single women having children is bad for society. While more tolerant than older generations, they are still more likely to disapprove of than support the trend of unmarried couples living together. While they're more politically progressive than their elders, you could argue that their strong support for gay marriage and interracial marriage reflects their desire to extend traditional institutions as widely as possible.

They are also unconventionally conventional. They are, for example, the least officially religious of any modern generation, and fully 1 in 4 has no religious affiliation at all. On the other hand, they are just as spiritual, just as likely to believe in miracles and hell and angels as earlier generations were. They pray about as much as their elders did when they were young--all of which suggests that they have not lost faith in God, only in the institutions that claim to speak for him.

I don't know what to make of all this or the other findings reported by Gibbs, but it's interesting that there's not much distance between the beliefs and values of the young and those of their elders. As I reflect upon that fact I have to say that I really don't know whether that's good or bad.

RLC

Michelle Antoinette

The price tag for Michelle and Sasha Obama's lavish bit of self-indulgence in Spain tops out at $375,000 according to an article in Daily Mail U.K. How much of that will be paid by you and me is unknown, but certainly the plane and secret service expenses will. Moreover, this is Michelle's eighth taxpayer subsidized vacation this summer.

I'm waiting for the left, which would be having a cow had Nancy Reagan or Laura Bush done something like this, to point out the tacky unseemliness of the First Lady's extravagance while so many in this country are hurting. It seems as if the Obamas, who love to spend other people's money on galas and vacations, are tone deaf to how tawdry this all looks to the American people (Go to the link for details and photos of the opulence to which Ms Obama has treated herself.).

As another example of their dissipation, we learn that Mr. Obama employed Marine One, his personal helicopter, to transport him six miles across town to give a speech on the economy the other day. And he has the chutzpah to lecture us about the need to conserve energy and buy electric cars?

Do liberals no longer identify with the common people? Do they no longer empathize with the unemployed family, the family on welfare? I wonder how much empathy Michelle was feeling gliding around Spain with her huge entourage. The Obamas pay lip service to their concern for hurting Americans, but when they conduct themselves like third world oligarchs luxuriating in the perquisites of power they make themselves look like common hypocrites.

It's bad enough that the Obamas are bent on transferring wealth from those who pay taxes to those who don't, but it's quite outrageous that they also seem bent on transferring wealth from those who work to earn it to those like themselves who think they're entitled to it.

As for the beleaguered Americans who must write the checks for the Obamas' voluptuous lifestyle while their homes are in foreclosure and their jobs are drying up - let them eat cake.

RLC

No Rational Basis

Of all the hosts on cable television the worst, in my opinion, is Chris Matthews. Some hosts are pompous and obnoxious (Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly). Some of them are rude (same list). Some of them, despite being intelligent (Keith Olbermann, Bill O'Reilly), seem on occasion, to be astonishingly dim. Chris Matthews fits all three categories - pomposity, rudeness, dimness - and exceeds all his colleagues by comfortable margins in the last two.
I was watching his show, called Hardball, last night (I can only tolerate it for brief periods) as Matthews was grilling a woman about the decision by federal judge Vaughn Walker to strike down California's Proposition 8, a ballot referendum banning gay marriage, which had been approved by a large majority of Californians.
Matthews' interview technique, on this occasion as on so many others, was to ask a question and then, as soon as the guest began her answer, smother the reply with another question, and then another, so that the audience never got to hear a coherent response. The show is exceedingly unenlightening, perhaps deliberately so, and I really can't understand why any intelligent person would watch it regularly. Matthews seems to be psychologically incapable of calm, reasoned discussion with someone with whom he disagrees, and he makes himself look the fool as a result.
The question that Matthews preened himself for badgering the woman with last night was what harm she thought same-sex marriage does and why anyone should feel threatened by it. The answer, of course, is simple, but even if the guest had proffered it, which I don't think she did (it was hard to tell), Matthews really wasn't interested in hearing an answer. He simply wanted to bully the woman and try to make her look foolish and inept to his audience which he must think possesses an average IQ somewhere around room temperature.
Anyone who values marriage and thinks it critical for the health of a society may with justification see same-sex marriage as a threat because it's a giant step toward the collapse of that institution. Here's why: When the sex of the people in a marriage, which had for two thousand years been defined as the union of one man and one woman, is no longer legally enforceable then there's no longer any logical justification for continuing to enforce the number of people in the union. If marriage is a union of people of any sex why not of any number? Indeed, the logic can, and almost certainly will, be taken a step further and the courts will eventually find they have no non-arbitrary justification for thinking that a marriage has to involve people at all. Why not, in an age of animal rights, extend marital rights to animals? Why not permit "blended" marriages between humans and their beloved pets?
Liberals, of course, scoff at the notion that allowing gays to marry would open the door for polyamory or the legalization of marrying one's chimpanzee (or horse, as in Caligula's case), but this simply shows either their disingenuousness or their naivete. People will do whatever they can do. They'll push every envelope they can push, if for no other reason than to achieve notoriety, and the courts will have forfeited the only bulwark that could've prevented the complete disintegration of marriage, i.e. the millenia-old definition of marriage as a union of one man and one woman.
Once that's gone, everything becomes arbitrary. There's no place on the slippery slope to grab a handhold, and the matter of the legal status of marriage will be settled by the whim of whoever is sitting on the federal bench. At that point marriage will collapse into meaninglessness. It'll become whatever people want it to be, and the left will have achieved a goal they've striven for ever since Marx - the abolition of the traditional family and the atomization of society.
It seems a fairly obvious argument, one for which I've never heard a satisfactory rebuttal, or any rebuttal for that matter, other than the rather tepid reply that slippery slope arguments don't amount to a proof. The premise is that no one actually knows whether same sex marriage will open wide the door for the sorts of perversities mentioned above. That's technically true, of course, but the fact is that there'll be nothing in either logic or social momentum to prevent such a denouement. It will all come down to some judge's personal taste and preference, a reality which should give us all pause.
Judge Walker stated in his opinion that there's "no rational basis" for restricting marriage to heterosexuals. I think this is quite mistaken, as I've just argued, but it illustrates what we can now expect in the future. The next judge could easily rule that, similarly, there's "no rational basis" for restricting marriage to just two people, or people unrelated to each other, or people of a particular age, or people at all.
It'd be nice if talk show hosts like Matthews were sincerely interested in considering the actual arguments and the logical precedents being laid down by Judge Walker's ruling. It'd be nice if Matthews hosted a show that clarified these issues for his audience rather than merely using his position as a platform to verbally pummel his guests, obfuscate the issues, and keep everyone in the dark as to the trajectory we're putting ourselves on.

RLC

Good Analogy

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is taking a lot of heat for the crime of exercising common sense on a political issue. The issue, of course, is illegal immigration, and Gov. Brewer is insisting, contra the wishes of the Obama administration, that the law against it be enforced. This defiance of liberal political correctness is too much for most of her ideological opponents to bear, and as a result the left has encircled Brewer, tomahawks aloft, whooping and grunting in the characteristic fashion of primitives about to sacrifice a prisoner of war. One of Gov. Brewer's antagonists is Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver who recently demonstrated that running a basketball team does not require the same intellectual skills as running a state.

In response to Sarver's criticism of the Arizona law Governor Brewer issued this statement:

"What if the owners of the Suns discovered that hordes of people were sneaking into games without paying? What if they had a good idea who the gate-crashers are, but the ushers and security personnel were not allowed to ask these folks to produce their ticket stubs, thus non-paying attendees couldn't be ejected. Furthermore, what if Suns' ownership was expected to provide those who sneaked in with complimentary eats and drink? And what if, on those days when a gate-crasher became ill or injured, the Suns had to provide free medical care and shelter?"

This is, of course, a good analogy to what is happening along our southern border. The same logic may be applied in other cases, too. Why is there a fence around the White House and what would happen to someone who tried to climb it? Why do most people, including most liberals, lock the doors of their homes? What would they do if they came home and found an intruder sitting at their kitchen table availing himself of refrigerator, toilet and television? What if the intruder insisted not only on staying but on bringing his family to enjoy the benefits and screamed in protest if the homeowner objected? How are these situations any different than what's happening on our southern border?

Questions like these, of course, never get answered by those who oppose the Arizona law because even they can see where the answers lead. Instead, people like Sarver try, in effect, to convince us that, even though he would never dream of doing so himself, other people should allow the less fortunate into their arenas without tickets and that it's just unAmerican and churlish to deny them the opportunity to see a game.

As Governor Brewer's rejoinder suggests, many of the arguments against the Arizona law are either stupid or hypocritical. Or both.

RLC

Secularism's Debt

John Steinrucken is an atheist which makes his excellent column at American Thinker a remarkable feat of intellectual objectivity and detachment. Steinrucken argues, correctly in my view, that the future viability of a free society is contingent upon the vitality of the Judeo-Christian belief system. Indeed, the title of Steinrucken's essay is Secularism's Ongoing Debt to Christianity. Here's his lede:

Rational thought may provide better answers to many of life's riddles than does faith alone. However, it is rational to conclude that religious faith has made possible the advancement of Western civilization. That is, the glue that has held Western civilization together over the centuries is the Judeo-Christian tradition. To the extent that the West loses its religious faith in favor of non-judgmental secularism, then to the same extent, it loses that which holds all else together.

Succinctly put, Western civilization's survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends upon the perdurance in our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The heart of his argument is a series of rhetorical questions the answers to which illuminate the crucial importance in modern society of a religious ground for the morals and values which the people embrace:

Although I am a secularist (atheist, if you will), I accept that the great majority of people would be morally and spiritually lost without religion. Can anyone seriously argue that crime and debauchery are not held in check by religion? Is it not comforting to live in a community where the rule of law and fairness are respected? Would such be likely if Christianity were not there to provide a moral compass to the great majority? Do we secularists not benefit out of all proportion from a morally responsible society?

An orderly society is dependent on a generally accepted morality. There can be no such morality without religion.

Those who doubt the effect of religion on morality should seriously ask the question: Just what are the immutable moral laws of secularism? Be prepared to answer, if you are honest, that such laws simply do not exist! The best answer we can ever hear from secularists to this question is a hodgepodge of strained relativist talk of situational ethics. They can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion.

I couldn't help wondering, though, as I read this essay, why Steinrucken remains an atheist. If he's really convinced that God doesn't exist then his support for religion as a moral foundation is, at bottom, an endorsement of a Platonic "Noble Lie," a falsehood that he believes should be foisted upon the masses in order to get them to behave well.

As much as I appreciate the case he constructs and the fine spirit in which he presents it, I cannot agree with him that religion should be honored and encouraged for its practical value irregardless of its truth. A society built upon a lie, after all, is doomed to fail once the people recognize the lie. Steinrucken is right in his analysis of the importance of Christianity for society, but he's mistaken about it's truth. Perhaps, like many atheists before him, he'll soon rectify his error and embrace the truth of Christianity as well as its practical value.

Anyway, the piece deserves to be read in its entirety. There's much more to it and it's all quite good.

RLC

Electoral Armageddon

I am by nature a cautious man. I tend to see the glass as half empty. I have a strong disinclination to assume that what is true today will be true tomorrow. I'm keenly aware that in the affairs of men there's much that can go wrong and often does. So it is with considerable reservation that I call your attention to a piece by political analyst Mark McKinnon at The Daily Beast that proffers ten reasons why, in his view, the Democrats are "toast" in November. Perhaps it is so, but I'm not going to start pouring the champagne just yet.

With that caveat in mind here are the first three reasons McKinnon gives for thinking that the GOP is going to kick the donkey's butt three months from now:

1. Red regions are gaining; blue are bleeding. Folks are fleeing stricken states in search of jobs. Based on these population changes, eight states in the more conservative South and West are projected to gain one or more U.S. House seats. With a probable gain of three or four seats, the biggest winner is Texas-not surprising, with its continuing record job growth. Ten states, mostly in the more liberal Northeast, will likely lose one House seat or more.

2. Republicans are pulling ahead in U.S. House races. With a projected gain of more than 40 House seats in November, Republican candidates also have the financial lead in most of the 15 competitive races in which Democratic incumbents aren't running. Republicans only need a net gain of 39 seats to take the "damn gavel" away from Speaker Pelosi.

3. Toss-ups are turning red in the U.S. Senate. The GOP is leading or tied in eight Senate races for seats now held by Democrats, and is ahead in all Republican-held districts. More toss-up states on the map are leaning Republican. And the National Republican Senatorial Committee predicts a change in control of the Senate is now possible in just two election cycles.

Read McKinnon's article for the other seven. The ones that surprised me most have to do with the loss of support for President Obama among both minorities and young people. To be sure the erosion among blacks is only about ten percent, but it's indicative of the President's inability to achieve a level of competence as president equal to the quality of his rhetoric as a candidate.

RLC

Goose-icide

The Investor's Business Daily is a sober journal not given to political theatrics and overheated rhetoric. Thus it was alarming to find a column in a recent issue that paints the policies of the current administration as unprecedentedly baneful for the nation.

The authors, two former Treasury officials, one an economist and the other a former deputy secretary, make the case that the Obama presidency, with the aid of a Democrat-controlled congress, is dragging the country toward almost certain ruin. They write:

His bullying and offenses against the economy and job creation are so outrageous that CEOs in the Business Roundtable finally mustered the courage to call him "anti-business."

Veteran Democrat Sen. Max Baucus blurted out that Obama is engineering the biggest government-forced "redistribution of income" in history.

Fear and uncertainty stalk the land. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says America's financial future is "unusually uncertain."

A Wall Street "fear gauge" based on predicted market volatility is flashing long-term panic. New data on the federal budget confirm that record-setting deficits in the $1.4 trillion range are now endemic.

Obama is building an imperium of public debt and crushing taxes, contrary to George Washington's wise farewell admonition: "cherish public credit ... use it as sparingly as possible ... avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt ... bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue, that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised, which are not ... inconvenient and unpleasant ... ."

Opinion polls suggest that in the November mid-term elections, voters will replace the present Democratic majority in Congress with opposition Republicans - but that will not necessarily stop Obama. A President Obama intent on achieving his transformative goals despite the disagreement of the American people has powerful weapons within reach. In one hand, he will have a veto pen to stop a new Republican Congress from repealing ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank takeover of banks.

In the other, he will have a fistful of executive orders, regulations and Obama-made fiats that have the force of law.

Believe it or not this litany of grievances is only the half of it. Read the IBD column for the rest and perhaps pass it on to those of your friends who swooned as Mr. Obama enchanted the nation, or at least a majority of its voters, with his eloquent promises to "fundamentally transform" America. He certainly is doing that - sort of like killing the goose that layed the golden eggs transformed the society that was home to the goose.

RLC

Honey Pots

There's an interesting column at Strategy Page on methods being employed by security personnel in industry and government to prevent serious hackers from accessing their servers. One tactic is to set up pseudo-servers called "honey pots" that attract the attention of the hackers but which, in fact, are recording data on who the hackers are:

The Internet's criminal underground shares a lot of information. Technical tips and newly found net vulnerabilities are traded in password protected chat rooms and encrypted e-mail groups. When the black hats see a particularly promising new vulnerability, they go in themselves. They proceed very carefully. The criminal black hats plan their operations as thoroughly as a professional heist. Nothing is left to chance, for getting caught can be fatal. In China, they execute black hats.

Until recently, the only way you found out about a successful black hat operation was after it was too late. And sometimes not even then. The black hats covered their tracks carefully. To them, a successful operation was one that was never discovered. Then the white hats came up with the concept of honey pots.

The honey pots have proven useful in finding out what tools and techniques the black hats have. This makes it possible to build better defenses. Honey pots also make the black hats uncomfortable and less confident that any server they are hacking into is not rigged to catch them. This makes the white hats happy.

Perhaps the next step is to configure the honey pot so that it sends a return message to the hacker's computer informing him that he's now toast and can expect to spend the next twenty years providing tech support for the staff at the federal penitentiary.

RLC

Pastor Lewis

Timothy Larsen relates a couple of anecdotes about the hostility of academics to the Christian worldview and calls for a more systematic study of the phenomenon.

Colleges and universities are hypersensitive to the slightest indication of discrimination against racial minorities and women, they're sharply attuned to the faintest sign that Muslims are being offended, but do they ever try to discover if their Christian students or scholars experience discrimination?

Larsen issues the call for just such an effort:

This could be done through surveys, or focus group discussions, or even just by inviting people to tell their experiences and following up on them, seeing if certain patterns emerge. If these are not the best methods, just think of what you would do in response to reports that a university or academic society was marked by institutional racism or sexism and then apply those same strategies of listening, investigation, and response.

This sounds like fun. I hope the idea catches on.

One of the anecdotes Larsen recounts is this:

John had been a straight-A student until he enrolled in English writing. The assignment was an "opinion" piece and the required theme was "traditional marriage." John is a Southern Baptist and he felt it was his duty to give his honest opinion and explain how it was grounded in his faith. The professor was annoyed that John claimed the support of the Bible for his views, scribbling in the margin, "Which Bible would that be?" On the very same page, John's phrase, "Christians who read the Bible," provoked the same retort, "Would that be the Aramaic Bible, the Greek Bible, or the Hebrew Bible?" (What could the point of this be? Did the professor want John to imagine that while the Greek text might support his view of traditional marriage, the Aramaic version did not?) The paper was rejected as a "sermon," and given an F, with the words, "I reject your dogmatism," written at the bottom by way of explanation.

Thereafter, John could never get better than a C for papers without any marked errors or corrections. When he asked for a reason why yet another grade was so poor he was told that it was inappropriate to quote C. S. Lewis in work for an English class because he was "a pastor." (Lewis, of course, was actually an English professor at Cambridge University. Perhaps it was wrong to quote Lewis simply because he had said something recognizably Christian.)

It's unfortunate that the halls of academe are populated by narrow-minded ignoramuses like this pompous English prof who use their power to intimidate young students and to impose upon them an ideological and religious conformity. Even so, the silver lining is that even students who might be inclined to agree with such professor's beliefs are often repelled by their coercion and bullying when they see it applied to their fellow students.

At any rate, Larsen's piece is interesting and reinforces the opinion of many others who've reported similar reactions to student or faculty Christians at their own schools. The comments to this article are worth reading as well. Check it out.

RLC

Control Freaks

Terry Jeffrey's new book - Control Freaks - makes the case that freedom and prosperity are in serious jeopardy at this point in our country's history, threatened by a ruling class that devoutly desires to control every aspect of our economic and civil life.

Jeffrey was interviewed by Kathryn Lopez at National Review Online and outlined his case that the current administration and its congressional allies are seeking to curtail our individual freedom and rights in at least seven different essential areas of our lives. Jeffrey tells Lopez:

I picked four basic rights that Control Freaks are attacking (property, speech, life, and conscience), two elements of the welfare state they are using to reduce middle-class Americans to government dependency (Social Security and government-controlled health care), and one freedom that goes to the heart of the American experience and is crucial to the survival of our other freedoms: the freedom of movement.

It's Jeffrey's thesis, and the conviction of conservatives in general, that individual freedom and centralized government exist in a state of tension. As one expands the other must shrink. There has never been a time in history when a burgeoning government actually enhanced individual freedom. The desire for government to "take care of us," called statism or socialism, is the desire to lay our freedom, and thus our individuality and humanity, at the feet of bureaucrats in exchange for the illusion of security. The more the state does for us the less free we will be to say, go, or do as we please. The bigger the state grows the more it stifles creativity, genius, and prosperity. Big states make for small citizens and, to quote John Stuart Mill, a state that dwarfs its citizens finds that with small men no great thing can be accomplished.

The rights we take for granted, the freedoms that have made this country great - the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, the right to life and to personal property are all under assault by a generation of arrogant politicians who believe that they know what's best for us and who believe that rights and freedoms just get in the way of creating a better life for all. So far from being revered by these people the Constitution is seen as an irritating impediment.

Listen, for example, to this woman's second question and to the answer she gets from congressman Pete Stark (D, CA). For Stark and his fellow progressives, there are no constitutional limits on the ability of the federal government to do whatever it wants to do:

Modern political liberals like those who populate the White House and Congress, believe that a just society is one in which people who've worked all their lives to accumulate property can have their wealth seized by the state, with or without their consent, and awarded to those who've done nothing to earn it. That seems to many to be not only an inversion of justice but also an extraordinarily counterproductive way to increase the wealth from which everyone benefits.

Anyway, while we're about the business of talking about books that describe the threat that statism poses to our polity, another example that I must mention is Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny. It's quite simply the best contemporary book on the difference between conservatism and progressivism (i.e. liberalism, statism) that I've read.

RLC

Honor

Allen West is just the sort of man we need in Congress. He's a Republican running for the House of Representatives in south Florida against a Democrat incumbent who has stood with Nancy Pelosi on 98% of the votes cast. At the very least West would elevate the level of honor and integrity in the House of Representatives by a couple of orders of magnitude:

If you agree that West would be a fine addition to Congress you can contribute to his campaign here.

Exit question: What's wrong with a military that fines an officer for taking steps to save lives when the steps taken brought no harm to anyone? Details here.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

RLC

Anne Rice Abjures the Faith

David Goldman at First Things Blog informs us that author Anne Rice has renounced, sort of, her Christianity. On Wednesday she posted this on her Facebook Page:

I quit being a Christian. I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

Well. This is certainly a perplexing renunciation. If these are the reasons she can no longer call herself a Christian one has to wonder how deep her commitment was in the first place.

Few Christians, for example, are anti-gay. One is not anti-gay just because one opposes legalizing gay marriage any more than one is anti-youth because one opposes giving 18 year-olds the right to vote.

Nor are most Christians anti-feminist, at least not if we define feminism as the belief that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men, allowing for the physical differences between them. If, though, Ms Rice defines feminism as many modern feminists wish to define it, i.e., as the view that a woman should have the unfettered legal right to destroy her unborn child, well, then, yes, many Christians take exception to that.

In any case, Ms. Rice seems unmindful of the fact that no social force in history has done more to liberate women from oppression than has Christianity. To recant it now because some Christian groups do not ordain women nor support abortion seems to reflect a very pinched view of Christianity's historical influence on civilization.

Moreover, I know of no Christian outside the Catholic Church who is "anti-artificial birth control" - unless Rice is lumping abortion in as a form of birth control - so I don't know why this should be a stumbling block for her either.

She declares that she also refuses to be "anti-Democrat," which is good. A lot of Democrats are Christians (I even know some), so again it's not clear why she should make this a point of contention.

So, too, are a lot of scientists Christians which makes her refusal to be "anti-science" puzzling. Presumably, she doesn't wish to be associated with folks who question the dogma of many atheistic scientists that naturalism gives us a true picture of reality. Naturalism, though, is metaphysics, not science. What Rice seems to be complaining about here is that Christians reject a philosophical worldview that claims that God doesn't exist, and she oddly finds that intolerable.

The same point applies to her refusal to be "anti-secular humanism." Secular humanism is a belief system that maintains that the core miracles of the Christian faith, including the miracle of the Resurrection of Christ upon which the entire belief system of Christianity is based, are frauds and myths.

Thus, Ms Rice appears to be saying that, given her sympathy for views which are inimical to Christianity, and given her shallow understanding of what Christians believe about homosexuality, women, and so on, she can no longer count herself a Christian.

As I said above, one wonders why she ever thought of herself as one in the first place.

RLC

Sliding Toward Nihilism

The Edge Foundation held a symposium recently in which a collection of naturalistic scientists and philosophers discussed the topic of morality. From the summary of the proceedings at The Edge's web site, it doesn't seem that very much of importance was achieved.

Most of the participants seemed to agree that we're hard-wired to be moral, but, of course, this is not a new discovery. It's been known ever since at least the first century when the apostle Paul observed that we have a moral law written on our hearts (Romans 2:15).

The crucial question about morality that atheists need to stop sweeping under the rug is how human beings can be obligated by moral sentiments that are nothing more than the product of naturalistic evolution. How, we need to know, can blind, mindless forces like natural selection and genetic mutation impose duties upon us to behave one way rather than another? This question never seems to have come up at the Edge symposium. It's like the 500 pound gorilla in the room whose presence no one seems inclined to acknowledge.

New York Times columnist David Brooks was in attendance at the meeting and notes that Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argued that our moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, Haidt believes, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty.

It's of course true, on the assumption of naturalism, that morality is merely a matter of personal taste. One person feels we should care for the world's poor while another feels we should ignore them and let them die out. One person says we should be faithful to our spouses while another says we should do whatever we can get away with. Who's right? The answer is neither is right. Neither one can say that anyone should adopt a particular attitude toward the poor or toward marital fidelity any more than he can say that we should like sweet rather than sour flavors. Whichever behavior we prefer is right for us but not necessarily right for anyone else. Thus, on Haidt's assumptions, there can be no genuine moral norms, only subjective preferences.

According to another symposiast, Roy F. Baumeister, human nature was shaped by an evolutionary process that selected in favor of traits conducive to new, advanced kinds of social life. Morality, in his view, is ultimately a system of rules that enables groups of people to live together in reasonable harmony.

But if morality is just a system of rules that regulate the behavior of one's group, how do we decide which group is relevant to our behavior? Is our morally relevant group our nation? Our ethnic group? Our tribe? No matter how we decide the question our answer is going to be arbitrary. Each person could answer the question differently.

Furthermore, if morality is about how members of a group live together among themselves then how that group treats other groups has no moral significance. For example, on what grounds could we say that the genocidal attacks of the Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda in the mid-nineties was immoral? If morality is merely a means of regulating intra-group behavior, then murdering members of other groups is not immoral. For that matter, inter-group murder and war would be right if it promoted the overall benefit of the aggressor group?

It was the opinion of Yale psychologist Paul Bloom that a deep sense of good and evil is "bred in the bone." His research shows that babies and toddlers can judge the goodness and badness of others' actions; they want to reward the good and punish the bad; they act to help those in distress; they feel guilt, shame, pride, and righteous anger.

All of what Bloom says could be true, but it's beside the point. The relevant question is whether a hard-wired moral sense can impose any behavioral obligations upon us if it's merely the product of random chance and the laws of chemistry. Evolution bestows upon us a head full of hair, but it cannot obligate us to refrain from shaving it off. Likewise, it may bestow upon us certain behavioral preferences, but it cannot obligate us to honor those preferences.

Moreover, the preferences evolution bestows are notoriously conflicted. Most people think that altruism is good and selfishness is bad, but surely selfishness is our natural condition. We have evolved to be fundamentally selfish, self-centered creatures. How then can that be bad? Likewise with aggressiveness and promiscuity. The natural tendency evolution has instilled in human beings, at least in males, is to be both aggressive and promiscuous. Why then are these things not considered good? To what criterion do we revert to evaluate our inborn behavioral dispositions if the way we are is the way we should be?

Harvard cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher Joshua D. Greene sees our biggest social problems - war, terrorism, the destruction of the environment, etc. - arising from our unwitting tendency to apply paleolithic moral thinking to the complex problems of modern life. Our brains trick us into thinking that we have Moral Truth on our side when in fact we don't, and blind us to important truths that our brains were not designed to appreciate.

But if our moral sense evolved to suit us for life in the stone age and is now obsolete what has taken its place? Greene gives no answer. If, on the other hand, someone suggests that we should submit to the genetic imperatives evolved to suit us for life in the paleolithic the question again is why we should.

Finally, neuroscientist and "new atheist" Sam Harris laments that the failure of science to address questions of meaning, morality, and values provides an opening for the insinuation of religious faith into our corporate life. The silence of scientists on these "big questions," Harris contends, encourages people to turn to religion for answers.

The problem for scientists, though, is that there's simply nothing that science can say about these questions. Science may be able to give us a description of how people behave and maybe can tell us why they behave that way, but it cannot say anything at all about how people ought to behave. It can't say, for example, that we ought to be kind rather than cruel, or that we ought not torture others. By it's very nature science cannot be prescriptive or normative. For prescription we need something more than science. We need a transcendent authority.

Thus the problem for any morality based on naturalistic assumptions about the world is that there can only be moral obligation if there is, in fact, a moral law, and a moral law is only possible if imposed upon us by a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly just moral lawgiver who obligates us on pain of punishment to keep it.

As long as The Edge symposiasts ignore this uncomfortable and ineradicable fact they're not talking about the questions that really matter. As long as society refuses to acknowledge the need for a transcendent moral authority in the lives of its people it will be pulled ineluctably, as if by a kind of gravity, toward the abyss of moral nihilism.

RLC

Against the Wind

Two years ago we featured a post about David Mamet, the highly acclaimed playwright (American Buffalo (1975), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), and Speed-the-Plow (1988)), who, leaning into the powerful ideological winds that dominate modern theater, abandoned his former liberalism and embraced a sort of libertarian conservatism.

Now Terry Teachout has an article in Commentary on Mamet that elaborates on his iconoclastic political thinking. Teachout begins with this:

American theater is a one-party town, a community of like-minded folk who are all but unanimous in their strict adherence to the left-liberal line. Though dissenters do exist, they are almost never heard from in public, and it is highly unusual for new plays that deviate from the social gospel of progressivism to reach the stage, whether in New York or anywhere else.

All this explains why David Mamet, America's most famous and successful playwright, caused widespread consternation two years ago when he published an essay in the Village Voice called "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" in which he announced that he had "changed my mind" about the ideology to which he had previously subscribed. Having studied the works of "a host of conservative writers," among them Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, Thomas Sowell (whom he called "our greatest contemporary philosopher"), and Shelby Steele, Mamet came to the conclusion that "a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."

For the most part, members of the American theater community responded to the publication of "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" in one of two ways. Some declared that Mamet's shift in allegiance was irrelevant to the meaning of the plays on which his reputation is based. Others claimed to have suspected him of being a crypto-conservative all along, arguing that the essay merely proved their point.

Now Mamet has published a book of essays called Theatre (Faber and Faber, 157 pages) in which, among other things, he seeks to integrate his new way of thinking into his view of the art of drama. Although Theatre is not so much a political treatise as a professional apologia, it seems likely that those of his colleagues who write about it (to date, most have ignored it completely) will focus on its political aspect, in which they will doubtless find much to outrage them.

Teachout takes as an example of that which he expects will outrage Mamet's critics his definition of theater:

The theatre is a magnificent example of the workings of that particular bulwark of democracy, the free-market economy. It is the most democratic of arts, for if the play does not appeal in its immediate presentation to the imagination or understanding of a sufficient constituency, it is replaced. ... It is the province not of ideologues (whether in the pay of the state and called commissars, or tax subsidized through the university system and called intellectuals) but of show folk trying to make a living.

Anyone interested in plays or politics will find Teachout's column on Mamet an interesting read. Check it out.

RLC

Free Speech For Me, Not Thee

I was reminded recently of the book by civil libertarian Nat Hentoff titled Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee. The occasion for this recollection was an email from my friend Caleb who sent along an article on a discussion at CNN about how "anonymous" bloggers should be shut down by the government because they can say anything they want even if it's unfair and damaging to people as it ostensibly was to Shirley Sherrod.

I could hardly believe these words were coming from the mouths of journalists, the very people we trust to be most vigilant in defending our right to free speech. Whatever happened to those courageous sentiments frequently voiced a generation ago about despising what people say but defending to the death their right to say it? It seems that today the opinion of at least some on the left is that only some Americans enjoy the rights bestowed by our First Amendment, specifically those Americans who agree with them. Everyone else should be compelled to just shut up:

Anchors Kyra Phillips and John Roberts discussed the "mixed blessing of the internet," and agreed that there should be a crackdown on anonymous bloggers who disparage others on the internet.

"There has to be some point where there's some accountability. And companies, especially in the media have to stop giving these anonymous bloggers credit," she said.

Roberts responded that anonymous blogging might benefit from "checks and balances."

"If you're in a place like Iran or North Korea or something like that, anonymous blogging is the only way you could ever get your point of view out without being searched down and thrown in jail or worse," said Roberts. "But when it comes to a society like ours, an open society, do there have to be some checks and balances, not national, but maybe website to website on who comments on things?"

The irony in this, to which Mr. Roberts is apparently oblivious, is that restricting political speech is the usual first step in turning a country into a totalitarian state like North Korea. The best antidote to scurrilous speech, at least political speech, is not government control but a free and easy access to the truth. When political speech is controlled by government or media surrogates the scurrility won't disappear but free and easy access to the truth will.

It was bloggers who exposed the Dan Rather fraud. It was bloggers who exposed ACORN. It is bloggers, both left and right, who have largely set the terms of our national debates. Many journalists resent this usurpation of their cultural prerogatives, they know, too, that it's very difficult for them to compete with the blogosphere, and so they want the upstarts regulated, stifled and perhaps silenced altogether.

This is the equivalent of banning religious freedom and imposing a state church because of the perversities of groups like Westboro Baptist or the Branch Davidians. It's similar to trying to control the abuse of alcohol by prohibition, or rescinding the right of the people to protect themselves by owning firearms because firearms are often used by the people who do the harm.

One troubling aspect of the CNN discussion is that the individuals involved hold freedom of speech so lightly that they'd be happy to see it sacrificed for the "greater good" of facilitating a political order more amenable to their tastes.

RLC

Understanding the Suicide Bomber

There's an interesting article at Strategy Page on some of what the Israelis have learned about suicide bombers over the years. We learn, for example, this:

Israel...has captured at least fifteen suicide bombers who did not (could not or would not) carry out their mission. These terrorists were extensively questioned, as were family and friends. The Israelis also collected similar data on dead suicide bombers, including email or tapped phone calls and other material the bomber left behind. The Israelis, like the suicide bomb organizations, came to the same conclusion; that certain personality traits make someone very willing to carry out these attacks. And the chief characteristic is usually not fanaticism, but deference to authority and public opinion. This is one reason why the Palestinian media campaign to glamorize suicide bombers is so dangerous.

The most interesting information in the article, however, is the explanation for what many in the West find a deplorable practice by the Israelis:

Eventually, the Israelis found several weaknesses in the suicide bomber system. The first one discovered was transportation. Most of the suicide bomber volunteers lived in the West Bank, and had to be transported to areas with a large Israeli population. As the Israelis discovered, most of the cost of each suicide bombing went to paying a driver or guide to get the suicide bomber close to a target area. Using a system of checkpoints and profiling, the Israelis began to catch most of the suicide bombers.

But some still got through. So the Israelis went back to a 1990s technique that, while it worked, was widely criticized as unfair and inhumane. Namely, the family home of the suicide bomber was destroyed. The bomber usually came from a family that housed several generations in one house (which was often the family's major asset. Before resuming this practice, the family actually profited from the bombing, receiving up to $30,000 for their son (or daughter's) sacrifice. Soon after the house destruction policy went into effect, there were reports of family's forcibly restraining adult children from joining the suicide bombing effort (or reporting the kid to the Israelis, who would then arrest the bomber volunteer.) While that dried up the source of the more competent bombers, it did not eliminate all the bombings. So Israel cut the West Bank off from Israel. Thus for the last five years, there have been hardly any attacks. Because the Palestinians continue their suicide bomber recruitment program (especially on children's television shows), the Israelis don't plan on reopening their borders to the Palestinians any time soon.

The knowledge that their act will result in the destruction of the only living quarters available to their loved ones is a powerful deterrent to those who might otherwise be inclined to commit mass murder. In other words, razing their families' houses is not an act of vindictiveness or spite, as it's often portrayed in our media, rather it's a deliberate attempt to provide a disincentive to the potential terrorist who doesn't value his own life but does care deeply about his family.

Evidently it works.

RLC

Reaching the A Students

Pete Spiliakos at No Left Turns offers some thoughts on a problem that has concerned me for a number of years - how to reach our brightest young people with conservative arguments that they'll find compelling.

Spiliakos writes:

My own experience with really bright, hard working, ambitious, and politically engaged (but not obsessive) kids is that conservative messages rarely get to them in a detailed or friendly form outside of major election campaigns. There are exceptions, but those kids are a minority and usually have to find conservative media on their own. That means that, for most of these kids, their perceptions of politics are framed by media institutions that are liberal-leaning to various degrees of intensity and openness. They are also going to go to colleges where their professors will be varying degrees of liberal. This makes a generalized friendliness to liberal politicians and policies the default position.

The populist conservative media isn't really much of a help. The vast majority of these kids don't listen to the radio for politics (neither talk radio nor NPR.) They aren't going to watch Hannity or Beck. Those shows aren't really designed for them anyway. Those shows work best for those who have already bought into the conservative narrative and they don't really take on the best arguments of the other side. But these kids will have heard the best arguments that liberals have to offer and they are smart enough not to forget them.

This is all very true, unfortunately, as is this:

The communication problem with this group is tough. We need a set of institutions that speak to an audience that will have heard many of the best (or maybe second best) liberal arguments for this or that liberal policy. As Murray pointed out, if conservatives "take a cheap shot" or "duck an obvious objection" to their arguments, they will lose this audience.

Which is why it's good, I suppose, that they don't listen to Sean Hannity. Anyway, Spiliakos has much more to say about this at the link.

It does seem to be the case that many young people simply imbibe liberal assumptions from their cultural or academic environment and never stop to wonder whether those ideas are really true. They rarely hear those ideas challenged and are often surprised, like a zoologist who chances upon a species heretofore thought to be extinct, to encounter people who don't assent to them. When such encounters occur the bright young person is prone to assume that the doubter is simply uninformed or otherwise backward.

I don't know how this can ever be changed until more smart young conservatives choose to do what liberals did back in the 60s and 70s which is to begin their own long march through the institutions. When more bright young men and women who hold conservative views undertake careers in cinema, education, law, journalism and other fields which shape the culture, the situation that Spiliakos laments might change. But unless they do, I'm afraid that liberals we will always have with us and liberal worldviews will be the default position for so many of our most intelligent young people.

RLC

Crash

A number of readers have expressed concern that Viewpoint hasn't been updated for the last three days. The reason for this apparent dereliction is that my computer crashed on the morning of the 27th and has been in the shop ever since. I now have it back, but it still doesn't seem to be running as it should, and, since I have no idea how to diagnose it or to solve the problem, I don't know how long I'll be able to keep it going.

It's been frustrating, of course, but there's nothing to be done about it short of having the hard drive wiped clean and starting over. Should that be necessary I suppose we'll be down for several more days, but as long as the devilish thing is working I'm eager to get back to posting.

Thanks for bearing with us.

RLC

Not Going Along for the Ride

Andy McCarthy at NRO declines to jump on the bandwagon of folks proclaiming Shirley Sherrod to be a "wonderful person" who was maliciously maligned as a racist by those nasty right-wingers at BigGovernment.com. After having been fired by the Obama administration and condemned by the NAACP for ostensibly racist comments in a speech excerpted at Andrew Breitbart's website, it turns out that her most troubling comments were apparently taken out of context.

So now the conventional wisdom is that Sherrod was really transcending race in her speech and that she has suffered terribly because she was misrepresented by Breitbart. Whether Breitbart did this deliberately I don't know, but McCarthy points out that whatever she was doing in her speech, she wasn't trying to transcend race. Rather, intentionally or not, she was actually stoking the fires of racial animosity, at least when she spoke about the rise of slavery in the U.S.

Here's what she said:

So that's when they made black people servants for life. That's when they put laws in place forbidding them [i.e., blacks and whites] to marry each other. That's when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they - It started working so well, they said, "Gosh, looks like we've come upon something here that could last generations." And here we are, over 400 years later, and it's still working.

What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us. The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power and whether it's healthcare or whatever it is, they'll do what they need to do to keep that power, you know. [Applause] It's always about money, ya'll. [Applause and murmurs of agreement.] You know. I haven't seen such a mean-spirited people as I've seen lately over this issue of health care. [Mumurs of agreement.] Some of the racism we thought was buried - [someone in the audience says, "It surfaced!"] Didn't it surface? Now, we endured eight years of the Bushes and we didn't do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black president. [Applause]

I wanted to give you that little history, especially the young people, I want you to know they created it, you know, not just for us, but we got the brunt of it because they needed to elevate whites just a little higher than us to make them think they were so much better. Then they would never work with us, you know, to try to change the situation that they were all in.

So, in Ms Sherrod's world opposition to Obama and opposition to health care is all about power and hatred toward blacks. That incendiary sentiment is not the sort of thing likely to bring blacks and whites together, I don't imagine.

In any case, it's the same tired old tune from the left, just sung by a different vocalist. Unable to engage the opposition on the level of ideas they keep reverting to their traditionally reliable trump card. They're like a football coach who keeps calling the same play in the same situation because once upon a time it worked pretty well. It's why the liberal "journalists" on Journolist suggested that Republicans be deliberately smeared as racists without any regard for the veracity of the claim.

The play used to work, it used to instill fear in the opposition, but now everyone has pretty much caught on to the ruse, it's become predictable, and it's more and more being seen as a sign of intellectual inanition among those who resort to it and an occasion for mirth and derision among those it is intended to intimidate.

RLC

Fundamentalist Narcissism

Elizabeth Scalia writes that while liberals wring their hands at the prospect of Christian fundamentalists establishing a theocracy or, via the Tea party, resorting to political violence, there are secular religions among us that are at least as radical and fundamentalist as any member of the Westboro Baptist Church. Environmentalism and the pro-choice feminist left are two examples she cites.

Mrs. Scalia elaborates:

And these secularist religions have their violent radicals, too. The Earth Liberation Front, a little irony-challenged, has burned Hummers in an attempt to save the Earth from air pollution and deadly carbon. And some abortion-stalwarts say they'll give up their lives to insure the right of every woman to procure violent death within her own womb. Antonia Senior of in the Times of London, who - to her immense credit - is utterly honest about what abortion is and does, visits the Tower of London; after pondering martyrdom, Senior identifies what she will not die for (dolphins, England) and writes:

"I could think of one cause I would stake my life on: a woman's right to be educated, to have a life beyond the home and to be allowed by law and custom to order her own life as she chooses. And that includes complete control over her own fertility."

"Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life. That little seahorse shape floating in a willing womb is a growing miracle of life. In a resentful womb it is not a life, but a foetus - and thus killable."

"As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil. The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too."

After quoting these startling words, Scalia notes:

That last line should resonate profoundly with horrified anti-religionists everywhere, if they are consistent. I wonder if Rosie O'Donnell or David Lettermen would find it troubling, what even secularists will do, in the name of their fundamentalism.

There's no better illustration, perhaps, of our devolution into a culture of narcissism, egoism and death than the adamantine demand that the right to sacrifice one's offspring on the altar of personal autonomy be preserved.

RLC

Why So Much Anger?

Many average Americans are perplexed by the political discontent they see and hear among their neighbors and are asking questions like: Why is there a Tea Party movement? Why do talk radio hosts seem so angry? Why do so many Americans, at least the slim majority which pays income taxes, hold our government in such disdain?

Perhaps the following will help us understand:

• Reports reveal that Congress spent over a billion dollars of your money between June 2009 and March of 2010 on things like bottled water and donuts.

• Charlie Rangel, former chairman of the House Ways and Means committee which writes the laws that determine what taxes you and I will pay, how much we will pay, and what the penalties will be if we don't pay is facing charges that he has failed to pay his own taxes(Thanks to Jason for this link).

• Senator John Kerry, who has repeatedly voted to raise taxes, dodged a six-figure Massachussetts state tax bill on his new multimillion-dollar yacht by mooring it in Rhode Island.

• And, of course, Timothy Geithner, the man who currently oversees the nation's budget and tax policy, had found a way to avoid meeting his own tax obligation until he was chosen by Mr. Obama to serve as Treasury Secretary. Only then did it come to light that he'd been essentially cheating the American public by not paying his taxes.

People are understandably angry because while the President is imposing polices that guarantee that you and I will have to pay more of our meager incomes in taxes to the government, much of which will go to buy our elected elites bottled water and other amenities, the people who comprise those elites and who implement those policies are themselves looking for ways to avoid having to pay those taxes. They treat themselves as an aristocracy, a privileged class to be borne along on the backs of middle class Americans.

It's one big reason why this Congress has an 11% approval rating. It's also the main reason, perhaps, why there's a Tea Party and why there are ads like this:

Thanks to Powerline for the video.

RLC

TT

From July 12 through the 22nd I visited the tropical islands of Trinidad and Tobago, just off the coast of Venezuela. During my trip Bill posted some things I wrote before I left, for which I thank him, and I also want to thank him for getting Viewpoint back up and running despite the headaches he encountered in his move to Florida.

Trinidad is a remarkable place, and the time I spent there was memorable. I went for the birds, which were spectacular (I've posted below a few photos gleaned from the internet of just a sampling of the more beautiful species I saw there), but was profoundly interested in the culture of the island as well. I met a number of very interesting people from around the world, had several fascinating conversations, and learned a lot about a place which had heretofore been for me just a name on a map.

For most of my stay I lodged at the Asa Wright Nature Center which is a world famous destination for nature admirers. Prince Charles even paid a visit in 2008. So many of the birds, butterflies, and flowers on this island are gorgeous, and I couldn't possibly show them all, but here are a few that are representative of a much larger variety of species that even a non-naturalist might see and enjoy there.

The Scarlet ibis is the national bird of Trinidad and makes spectacular flights to it's roosting grounds every evening:

Photo by Roger Neckles

The Red-legged honeycreeper is a beautiful little bird that's found on the grounds at Asa Wright:

The Green honeycreeper is a cousin to the Red-legged and is just as breathtaking. It comes regularly to the numerous feeders the staff at Asa Wright set out in the morning:

The striking Blue-crowned motmot with its unusual tail and iridescent blue head feathers is a favorite at Asa Wright:

Everyone who comes to Asa Wright hopes to see the Collared trogon which inhabits the rain forests of Trinidad and Tobago:

Finally, there's the Channel-billed toucan with it's extraordinary beak and marvelous coloration:

There were many more. To view some lovely photos of the birds of Trinidad you can go here.

RLC

Offensive

Imagine that Japanese Americans in the early 1950s decided to build a shrine right next to the American military base at Pearl Harbor in honor of their Japanese heritage.

Imagine that Catholic missionaries, representatives of the religion which killed thousands of Muslims during the crusades, tried to build a church in the sacred city of Mecca.

Imagine that Germans wishing to celebrate their glorious past decided to construct a monument to their military to be placed within a few yards of a camp in which tens of thousands of Jews were murdered.

If you find these projects at best a bit insensitive and at worst deeply offensive to the people who hold those places sacred then you will understand why the attempt to build a huge Muslim facility adjacent to the site of the World Trade Towers is opposed by so many Americans.

RLC

Debunking Christianity (Pt. II)

This post continues some thoughts, begun yesterday, on John Loftus' arguments against theism in general and Christian belief in particular.

Loftus writes:

But let's say the Christian faith is true and Jesus did arise from the dead. Let's say that even though Christianity must punt to mystery and retreat into the realm of mere possibilities to explain itself that it is still true, contrary to what my (God given?) mind leads me to believe. Then what would it take to convince me?

Well, I don't wish to sound cheeky, but if it's stipulated that something is true that should be enough to grant that it is true, but maybe what Loftus is getting at here is something other than logical or epistemic assent to a proposition. Perhaps he's asking what it would take to get him to really live a life of love and gratitude toward God when there are certain facts about the nature of God that he finds repugnant. He continues:

I would need sufficient reasons to overcome my objections, and I would need sufficient evidence to lead me to believe. By "sufficient" here, I mean reasons and evidence that would overcome my skepticism. I am predisposed to reject the Christian faith and the resurrection of Jesus (just as Christians are predisposed to reject atheism). So I need sufficient reasons and evidence to overcome my skeptical predisposition.

Well, here we've struck close to what is perhaps the chief reason for his unbelief. Loftus simply doesn't want Christianity to be true. He's predisposed, we may even say biased, against it. If that's so, then no amount of evidence will be dispositive. Indeed, this was Jesus' very point in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16: 19-31). Belief, for one who is determined to find reasons not to believe, is like the horizon. No matter how much ground one covers, no matter how much evidence one adduces, it keeps receding into the distance.

When it comes to sufficient reasons, I need to be able to understand more of the mysteries of Christianity in order to believe it. If everything about Christianity makes rational sense to an omniscient God, then God could've created human beings with more intelligence so that the problems of Christianity are much more intellectually solvable than they are. I would need to have a better way of understanding such things as the trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, and why a good God allows so much intense suffering even to the point of casting human beings into hell.

I don't wish to minimize the problems to which Loftus refers here, but this strikes me as an odd complaint. What if these problems, like perhaps the nature of the cosmos itself, are like the peels of an onion. As soon as we think we understand something we find that a whole new set of questions presents itself. If that's so, then no level of understanding short of that possessed by God Himself would ever satisfy Loftus' precondition for belief. To understand these matters fully may require us to have the mind of God, to actually be God.

All of us would like answers to the questions Loftus asks, but perhaps those answers would just raise more questions and then, as Kierkegaard says, we find ourselves never able to arrive at the point of commitment. Like a man who refuses to marry a woman until he is satisfied that he knows every single fact about her, no amount of knowledge or time would ever satisfy the demands of one who really doesn't want to commit himself.

Belief, after all, is not just a matter of convincing the intellect, it's a matter of persuading the will. As the old aphorism has it, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." A man who wills to disbelieve, who does not want to marry the woman, will never be lacking in reasons to postpone the wedding.

Perhaps if Loftus would simply and sincerely open himself up to God and invite Him into his heart he would find what Pascal discovered: The heart has reasons that reason can never know.

RLC

Letting the Days Go By

Pretty funny:

Thanks to Hot Air.

RLC

What's Going On?

The Saudis have apparently given Israel permission to use bases on their soil for an attack on Iran.

The U.S. has moved a war fleet into the seas near Iran.

A U.A.E. diplomat endorses an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

What's going on here? It looks like the U.S. and Israel are preparing for a joint effort against Iran's nuclear facilities and they've managed to get the support of at least some of Iran's Arab neighbors.

The Arabs fear a nuclear Iran and they know that if nothing is done to prevent the mullahs from getting these devastating weapons several very bad things will happen in the near term. Iran will use nuclear blackmail to bully it's way around the Middle East; a lot of other countries in the region will rush to procure their own nuclear weapons; Iran will use it's power to bring about the destruction of Israel either through the direct use of nuclear warheads or through the action of surrogates.

Moreover, down the road, it's almost a certainty that these weapons will fall into the hands of those who want to smuggle them into European and U.S. cities.

So here's the question confronting Mr. Obama: Is it better to attack the Iranian facilities now and face the uncertain consequences of such an attack, or is it better to let Iran build their nukes and face the certain consequences of a Middle East embroiled in a nuclear arms race and probable nuclear war?

RLC

Debunking Christianity

John Loftus is an interesting fellow. He holds several degrees in philosophy of religion including a ThM from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and studied under one of the foremost Christian apologist/philosophers, William Lane Craig. Nevertheless, Loftus has renounced his faith and written a book titled Why I Became an Atheist. He also manages a blog titled Debunking Christianity on which he once posted an essay titled What Would Convince Me Christianity Is True? In that post he raises a number of objections to belief, and I'd like to consider some of them here.

Loftus writes:

I have been asked what would convince me Christianity is true. Let me answer this question.

I could just as easily ask Christians what it would take to convince them that atheism is true. Given the Christian responses I see at DC (Debunking Christianity), I dare say probably nothing would convince them otherwise. Atheism is outside of that which Christians consider real possibilities. It would take a great deal to change our minds across this great debate, no matter what side we are on. Although, since people convert and deconvert to and away from Christianity there are circumstances and reasons for changing one's mind. Here at DC we have changed our minds, and we offer reasons why.

Loftus seems to be contrasting Christianity and atheism, implying that if Christianity is false atheism must be true, but surely this is not correct. Everything that makes Christianity unique among the world's religions could be false and it would have no bearing at all on the question of whether God exists. Even so, Loftus is probably correct that most people who really want Christianity to be true are highly resistant to evidence that it's not. Likewise, despite what Loftus says, people who don't want Christianity to be true are not likely to be persuaded that it is. We cling to beliefs we want to be the case even when the evidence goes against them, because evidence is rarely dispositive. As Thomas Kuhn says in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, anomalies in a belief system simply do not cause us to overthrow the paradigm. We learn to accommodate them or ignore them as long as this can be done. Belief is more a matter of the heart than of the head.

In the second place, Christianity would have to be revised for me to believe that Jesus arose from the dead, since if Jesus arose from the dead then the whole Bible is probably true as well. But many Biblical beliefs are outside of that which I consider real possibilities for the many reasons I offer on this Blog. I see no reason why a triune eternal God is a solution to any of our questions. I see no reason why God should test Adam & Eve, or punish them and their children and their children's children with such horrific consequences for such a mistake. I see no good reason for the animal pain caused by the law of predation in the natural world if a good God exists, either. Nor do I see why God should send a flood to kill practically all human beings. I can no longer believe in the bloodthirsty God of the Bible. He's a barbaric God. I no longer see the Bible as an inspired book, since it contains absurdities and contradictions, being as it were, written by an ancient superstitious people before the rise of modern science.

Loftus is pulling a bit of a switcheroo here. Logically speaking, one can believe that the New Testament, or the Gospels, are reliable history without holding that the Old Testament is. In other words, suppose we resolve all of the above objections by agreeing with Loftus that the Old Testament misrepresents the nature of God at certain key points. What does that have to do with the heart of Christianity? The claim that Jesus was the self-revelation of God, God incarnate, who died to redeem us from our estrangement from Him and who demonstrated His supernatural provenience through a literal and physical resurrection from the dead could all be true even if the Old Testament contains factual errors and contradictions. Whether it really does contain historical mistakes is a separate question from the matter of the reliability of the Gospel accounts.

I see absolutely no way to understand what it means to say Jesus is "God in the flesh", nor how his death on the cross does anything for us, nor where the human side of the incarnation in Jesus is right now. I see no intelligent reason why God revealed himself exclusively in the ancient superstitious past, since it was an age of tall tales among the masses at a time when they didn't understand nature through the laws of physics.

With all due respect to Mr. Loftus, I think these objections are just smokescreens. If they're not then he's saying that it's a sufficient reason for not believing God exists if a full understanding of God is beyond his ken. This strikes me as extraordinarily presumptuous. It also strikes me as inconsistent with how we normally form our beliefs. We may not understand how the universe could consist of eleven dimensions or how light could be both a wave and a particle, or how a photon would not exist in a particular spot until it is observed there, but we don't disbelieve these things just because our comprehension is not up to the task. Indeed, a god that we could understand would not be much of a god. It'd be more like the gods of the ancient pagans, and people like Loftus would be saying that they can't believe in a god so paltry that our puny understanding is sufficient to encompass him.

I see no reason why this God cares about what we believe, either, since people have honest and sincere disagreements on everything from politics to which diet helps us lose the most weight.

Of course people have sincere disagreements and it could be that religions have historically put too much weight on believing the right thing as a condition of eternal life. Let us suppose they have. Let us suppose that eternal life is primarily a matter of one's attitude toward God and only secondarily a matter of believing the correct things about God. Whether you think this is right or not, it could be right, so why doesn't Loftus embrace this possibility rather than letting what could be a misleading dogma keep him from belief in God?

More on Loftus' essay later.

RLC

Biggest Failing

Joe Carter at First Things argues that American sex education is not education at all:

Unless the middle school in Shenandoah, Iowa, is training junior gynecologists, it is unclear why its eighth-graders need to be taught how to perform female exams and to put a condom on a 3-D, anatomically correct, male sex organ.

The representative from Planned Parenthood, which provided the instruction, justified the curriculum by saying, "All information we use is medically accurate and science based." For them, sexual education can be denuded of all moral content as long as research studies and reams of statistics back up their claims.

The advocates of "comprehensive sex education" want teenagers to "just wear a condom." Planned Parenthood's amoral appeal to "science" shows why that fails: medically accurate and science-based information doesn't give children any idea how to use that information, while it makes them think they can do what they want if only they practice the "safe sex" techniques they've been taught. But I don't think the abstinence advocates' "Just say no" is always an improvement.

Both types of programs are equally flawed and flawed in the same way. Each indoctrinates the children in a particular viewpoint and tries to inoculate them against the negative results of sexual behavior. Neither school of sex educators is primarily concerned with providing an education.

Carter goes on to argue that sex education should include three broad themes. The first is the purpose of sex. Carter writes:

Is sex mainly for pleasure? For bonding? For procreation? For all three, and if so in what proportion? Which is primary? Is sex a gift from a benevolent Creator or merely blind evolution's way of tricking us into passing on our genetic material? Students must be helped to ask these types of questions before they begin the other discussions.

If, for example, we are nothing but gene transmitters, do we have a reason to value monogamy? Do other evolutionary imperatives, like the maintenance of a stable community, require certain restrictions on sexual behavior? If one of the main purposes of sex is procreation, must we accept responsibility for any children that might be conceived as a result of our behavior, and are we limited in the number of people with whom we can bear children?

The rest of his piece is equally good. Check it out.

It's my opinion that one of the biggest failings of the contemporary church is it's failure to tackle this issue head on. I am mystified as to how we can put our children through confirmation classes and teach them all about church doctrine and history but ignore what may be the single most important aspect of growing up in today's society: the nature of love and the proper purpose of their sexuality. It is for many young people the single toughest issue with which they struggle, and we often leave it to the culture to instill in them the assumptions and attitudes they hold about it.

That seems to me to be gross irresponsibility.

It's also a major reason, perhaps, why the church is often considered irrelevant by young people. It doesn't come to grips with the questions of deepest importance to their lives, it largely ignores the cultural waters they swim in, and if it should assay to dip a toe into those waters it often does so in a very tentative and superficial way.

It may be the biggest failing of the church in the last sixty years.

RLC

Agnostic Manifesto

First we had the New Atheism. Now Ron Rosenbaum at Slate is calling for a New Agnosticism. There are a couple or three things to say about his interesting essay.

First, Rosenbaum is at pains to define agnosticism in a way that, I think, distorts the word.

Second, his piece is largely given to criticizing the New Atheists, people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens (who, parenthetically, is reported to be suffering from esophageal cancer), an enterprise of which I heartily approve, but when he mentions theism, he mostly fires at a straw man.

Let me explain my objection to Rosenbaum's definition of agnosticism. He starts his manifesto with this:

Let's get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer.

Agnostics have mostly been depicted as doubters of religious belief, but recently, with the rise of the "New Atheism"-the high-profile denunciations of religion in best-sellers from scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and polemicists, such as my colleague Christopher Hitchens-I believe it's important to define a distinct identity for agnosticism, to hold it apart from the certitudes of both theism and atheism.

I don't think this is correct. An atheist is one who lacks a belief in a God or gods. Since agnostics lack a belief in God or gods they are atheists, ab defino. To be sure, there are two kinds of atheists - what we might call strong and weak.

The strong atheist, like Dawkins, et al, claim, often dogmatically, that there is no God. The weak atheist allows that God may exist but that even if he does there's not enough evidence to justify belief that he does. This is precisely the agnostic's position and there's really not much practical difference between it and the stronger form of atheism.

Although his critique of the strong atheists is quite good (despite placing a little too much weight on the atheist's inability, or failure, to come to grips with the question why there is something rather than nothing, a criticism which a lot of atheists will probably dismiss with a shrug of indifference) his problem with Christian theism seems to stem from a profound misunderstanding of Christianity.

For instance he says:

Having recently spent two weeks in Cambridge (the one in the United Kingdom) on a Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship, being lectured to by believers and nonbelievers, I found myself feeling more than anything unconvinced by certainties on either side. And feeling the need for solidarity and identity with other doubters. Thus my call for a revivified agnosticism. Our T-shirt will read: I just don't know.

I don't know which theists he was talking to or what they said, but when I hear intelligent people talk about their Christianity I rarely hear them speak in certainties. I hear them mention their "faith commitment," or a "leap of faith," or "wrestlings with doubts," or "seeing through a glass darkly," or the fact that God's existence is the "best explanation for a host of facts about the world," but I don't hear them talking, as the New Atheists often do, as if they just couldn't be wrong about God's existence. If Rosenbaum thinks Christianity is about certainty he hasn't read Kierkegaard.

He seems to think that Christian commitment is something one makes once they arrive at some proof of the truth of the Gospel, but I don't think that's the case at all. Christians place their trust in God because they're convinced he's there, they have good reasons for believing he's there, and they hope they're right. But what they don't have is certainty. No one is vouchsafed that luxury this side of the Jordan. That's why Scripture says that believers "live by faith."

I did enjoy Rosenbaum's essay, however, and I recommend it for the many good things he says about the New Atheists. Here's one example:

You know about the pons asinorum, right? The so-called "bridge of asses" described by medieval scholars? Initially it referred to Euclid's Fifth Theorem, the one in which geometry really gets difficult and the sheep are separated from the asses among students, and the asses can't get across the bridge at all. Since then the phrase has been applied to any difficult theorem that the asses can't comprehend. And when it comes to the question of why is there something rather than nothing, the "New Atheists" still can't get their asses over the bridge, although many of them are too ignorant to realize that. This sort of ignorance, a condition called "anosognosia," which my friend Errol Morris is exploring in depth on his New York Times blog, means you don't know what you don't know. Or you don't know how stupid you are.

Pons asinorum. I like that.

RLC

Free Will and Murder

Victor Reppert, author of C.S. Lewis' Dangerous Idea and keeper of a blog called The paper is relatively short and does a good job of covering the main issues.

It opens with the horrifying account of a murder that took place in England in 1993:

On February 12th 1993, British toddler Jamie Bulger was enticed away from his mother at a local shopping center and led away by his abductors on a short journey that would end in his tragic and horrific death on the railroad tracks three hours later. Evidence at the trial of the two perpetrators indicated that there were points along the way that they could have changed their course of action. Instead, they brutalized, sexually molested, and battered the child to death with bricks and an iron bar before laying his body across the tracks in hopes of hiding evidence of their involvement in his death. The two murderers, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, were ten years old (Scott).

From a determinist point of view, Jon Venables's and Robert Thompson's fate was set even before their birth. Born to ill-educated, working class parents, the details of the boys' lives constitute a veritable catalogue of social ills. Venables's parents were unstable and depressed and the father eventually abandoned the family. The boy's older and younger siblings were both developmentally challenged and he suffered the brunt of his suicidal mother's physical and verbal abuse. When arrested for the murder of Jamie Bulger, Venables was described as "nearly illiterate" (Slaughter). Thompson's environment was even worse. The second to the youngest of seven violent and aggressive boys, he was, early on, exposed to the criminal habits of his brothers, one of whom was an arsonist and another who was a master thief. Both parents were alcoholics and the father beat the mother regularly. Given the effects on the boys of the atrocious environments and their family histories of alcoholism and abuse, could Venables and Thompson be said to be morally responsible for the actions which led to the tragic death of Jamie Bulger?

The difficulties in trying to navigate between free will and determinism seem intractable. The determinist challenges the libertarian (one who believes in free will) to explicate the nature of a genuinely free choice. Is a free choice one that is completely uncaused? That can't be because our choices, especially our moral choices, arise out of, and are in some sense caused by, our values and beliefs. If our choices are uncaused then they would seem to be spontaneous, unrelated to anything, and, if so, how can we be responsible for them? So, the challenge for the libertarian is to explain how a choice can be influenced by our character, and how our character can be influenced by our environment and genetics, without being determined by these influences.

On the other hand, determinism, if true, has several very unpleasant implications. If it's true then reward and punishment are never deserved since if our choices and behavior are determined by environment and genetics and not freely chosen, an individual is not responsible for anything he does. He's just a passive piece of flotsam swept along by forces outside of his control. Moreover, if determinism is true there can be no moral obligation for one cannot be obligated to do what one cannot do. Finally, determinism is dehumanizing because it tells us that that which makes us unique as humans, the ability to choose our behavior, is just an illusion. On determinism we are essentially robots which means that the idea that humans have dignity and worth is also an illusion.

There's one more problem with determinism. The determinist holds that we always act upon our strongest motives, but the only way we can assess which motives are strongest is to see what it is that we choose. For example, if I choose to have cereal for breakfast the determinist would tell me that my strongest motive was to eat cereal, but if I chose instead to have pancakes he would say that my strongest motive must have been to eat pancakes. In other words, we can only discern our strongest motive by looking at the choice we made. If this is true, however, it means that determinism reduces to a tautology. Since our strongest motive equals whichever motive we act upon the above italicized claim says nothing more than that we always act upon the motive that we act upon. This is true but not very edifying.

So what's the upshot? Philosophical reasoning seems unable to settle the question. There's no compelling reason, if one is a libertarian, to give up one's belief that one is free. One must decide on other than philosophical grounds where one will stand on the matter. If, for example, one believes that we are all accountable for our actions, that people are not just robots, that there are genuine moral obligations, and that at many moments in our lives there really is more than one possible future, then there's no compelling reason the determinist can give to persuade us otherwise. Nor, for that matter, is there reason, if one is a determinist, if one believes that at every moment in our life there's only one possible future, to give up that belief as long as one is willing to accept the existential consequences.

Anyway, read the article at the link. It's quite good.

RLC