Can a Conservative Be an Atheist?

Andrew Klavan and Bill Whittle discuss whether a conservative who lacks a belief in the existence of God is being consistent. Their answers are interesting and helpful, after the first thirty seconds of silliness, but I wonder if there's not more that can be said about this.

It's true that conservatives are often, though not always, theists, particularly Christian theists, but maybe it's equally as interesting to ask why Christians are usually (but certainly not always) conservatives. One reason for this correlation, perhaps, is that Christians believe in the inherent depravity of men. Thus, they tend to believe that when power is centralized in a big, bureaucratic government in which anonymous men and women are unaccountable to the people they putatively serve but whom they in fact rule, then all manner of evils ensue. Thus the Christian doctrine of man's fallenness fits snugly with the conservative predilection for small, accountable government.

Liberals and progressives, on the other hand, tend to see human beings as basically good and even perfectable. They believe that by creating better incentives, better environments, by freeing men from their inhibitions and guilt, we can construct a better world. Creating these conditions, they also believe, can best be accomplished by a strong central government. Like atheists, liberals tend to see the world in evolutionary terms, and the idea of progressively evolving toward something better than we are today resonates with them. Thus the atheistic belief in evolutionary advance fits well with the liberal belief that the state should be the engine of that progress.

Conservatives and Christians, of course, think the idea of state induced human improvement is a fantasy. Human beings are basically flawed. They're by nature selfish, violent, promiscuous, and power-hungry. Since that is their nature, changing their environment without changing their heart will only bring about marginal improvements in their behavior. Moreover, investing autonomous power in the government only insures that these human vices will be writ large in the state.

Conservatives also believe deeply in the social value and efficacy of the mediating institutions of family, church, school, voluntary associations, etc. and that government has no role in these except to prevent abuses within the institutions. This conviction dovetails neatly with the Protestant notion of sphere sovereignty and the Catholic idea of subsidiarity, which gives conservatives and Christians another point of resonance that is not so important to liberal statists. Indeed, liberals often place little value on these mediating institutions and the omnicompetent government they endorse is one which often seeks to squeeze them out of existence so that nothing remains between the individual and the state. The progressive statist wants the individual's greatest allegiance to be not to his community, his family or to his God but to his government.

Furthermore, both Christians and conservatives also believe that our rights derive from God, not from the state. Our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not bestowed upon us by bureaucrats, they are bestowed by God and are thus unalienable. One who does not believe in God has nothing in which to ground unalienable rights, nor, for that matter, human worth and dignity. Christian conservatives believe with John Locke that, though man is fallen, he nevertheless is created in the image of God and is loved by God and therefore has worth and dignity. Atheist progressives believe that man is an animal in many important respects just like any other animal and is therefore nothing "special." His rights are arbitrary gifts bestowed upon him by the state because the state finds them expedient and are granted or revoked depending upon the current needs of the state.

So conservatives can be, and sometimes are, atheists, but the metaphysical basis for conservatism in the West is the Christian tradition. As was pointed out in the video, no nation without this tradition has ever placed a value on individual freedom and worth.

An atheist who embraces conservative principles, and there are many who do, does not do so because of the theistic ground upon which conservatism rests but because he or she simply believes conservatism works best to produce the ends he/she desires.

A Story for Our Time

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is resonant with allegorical applications to events unfolding in Washington D.C. Its plot and characters make a fascinating template for interpreting what we read in our daily news.

Consider, for example, the simple Hobbits. They're innocent, ordinary folk who just want to be left alone, much like contemporary Tea Party and Christian conservatives, but they're hounded and pursued, threatened and persecuted, by the fearsome Nazgul, just like the IRS hounds, audits and makes life miserable for any group which identifies itself as conservative and which opposes the current administration.

Meanwhile, the all-seeing eye of Sauron surveys the land of Middle Earth. Almost nothing escapes its notice, just like our NSA, sweeping the cyber-landscape, searching relentlessly for those who would deny Sauron the Ring of Power.

Sauron, whom good manners prevents me from identifying, but you can figure it out, seeks the Ring that will make him unstoppable and invincible, the same effect, if you think about it, that a Democratic sweep of Congress in 2014 would have.

Meanwhile, the Huru-Kai (i.e. Rush Limbaugh's "low information voters") are unleashed on the land as the means by which Sauron seeks to crush all opposition and carry out his quest for power.

I'm sure there are other parallels between our current perilous state of affairs and the frightening goings on in Middle Earth. Readers who think of some are welcome to submit their ideas through the Contact Us button.

Syria's Not Our Fight

A friend sent along a link to an article by Michael Gerson advocating American military intervention on behalf of the rebels in Syria. My friend asked me what I thought about Gerson's piece. Here's the gist of my reply:

Once again I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to disagree with Gerson, a man I deeply admire.

I sympathize with the notion that we have an obligation to prevent the slaughter of innocents when we can. Clinton balked in Rwanda, which I thought was wrong, and he intervened in Bosnia, which I thought was (partly) right. One of the great merits of Bush's presidency, I've argued in the past, is that he freed from tyranny 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Syria is different. Unlike Rwanda we would not be intervening against people armed only with machetes. Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan there's no immediate national interest at stake in Syria. There's no threat to the world's oil supply, as there was in Kuwait and Iraq, and neither, so far as I know, is Syria harboring terrorists who are planning to attack us, as Afghanistan was. Nor do they have nuclear weapons that they're threatening to use against us, as Iran and North Korea do.

The only reason for intervening in Syria would be to stop the slaughter of Syrians by Syrians, and we should have learned from recent experience with Egypt and Libya that picking a side in such affairs often turns out badly. We favored the freedom-lovers in Egypt over our ally Mubarak, and what we and the Egyptians got for our efforts is the Muslim Brotherhood. We favored the rebels over Quaddafi in Libya and what we got was Benghazi.

The Syrian rebels are not just a bunch of Jeffersonian Democrats. If they were I'd feel differently, but they're largely composed of elements of al Qaeda and affiliated groups hostile to both us and Israel. If they succeed in toppling Assad it will only catapult al Qaeda into power because, surely, if the rebels prevail, they'll quickly come to be dominated by the most extreme factions in their coalition. This is what happened in Egypt and as is threatening to happen in Libya, and as indeed happened in just about every communist revolution of the 20th century. Do we want to send American troops and pilots to die and be captured and tortured so that al Qaeda will rule Syria?

Moreover, should the rebels succeed, they'd doubtless launch their own mass killing of the supporters of Assad. Would we then feel morally compelled to intervene again on the side of the Alawites who are supported by Iran and Hezbollah?

The war in Syria is largely a Sunni/Shia conflict. If we're going to intervene in internecine bloodshed, why not go back into Iraq where we have much more at stake. We've already made a huge investment in Iraq and since we've pulled out, that nation threatens to unravel. Would those who counsel intervention in Syria agree with going back into Iraq if the situation there deteriorates further?

Indeed, Iran is a much greater threat to the peace and stability of the region, and to us, than is Syria. How can we justify bombing Syrians while allowing Iran to continue to develop nuclear weapons which they've promised to use against Israel?

Syria shares a 600 mile border with Turkey, a largely Sunni nation, and another border with Israel. These are the two most powerful militaries in the Middle East. If the civil war is a threat to the region then the regional nations should handle it, just as the regional nations should have handled Bosnia. Why we should go further into debt and risk more American lives when Turkey and Israel are capable themselves of dealing with Damascus Gerson doesn't explain.

We should, at least for now, continue humanitarian aid to those who are suffering, but if we're going to kill Muslims on one side in order to save Muslims on the other, and risk having our own sons killed or captured in the process, I think we're going to be playing a very dangerous game with our own future. In order to justify intervention we need to have much more to lose by staying out than by going in. Failing that, let the nations in the region handle it.

Father's Day Gift Idea

Father's Day is coming up and if dad is a reader may I suggest that In the Absence of God would make a fine gift. It was written primarily about men and for men, although a lot of women have also told me how much they enjoyed it and appreciated its message.

You can read more about Absence at the link at the top of this page. Here's a representative sample of the feedback I've received about it:

I finished reading In the Absence of God yesterday, which isn't anything to marvel at other than the fact that I also started reading In the Absence of God yesterday. I don't think I've ever read an entire book in one sitting before, and I certainly wasn't planning on reading this book in one day, but I simply couldn't put it down.

Also, I don't think a book has ever affected me so deeply as this one has, I cannot stop thinking about the ideas that were presented throughout In the Absence of God. I was nervous when I started reading the book that I would be bored by an abundance of philosophical ideas but the conversations in the book were engaging and masterfully weaved throughout the action and plot.

The speech at the end by "Smerk" gave me chills as I was reading it, and I was deeply disturbed by how true it was that this was the logical conclusion of a materialist worldview. I identified with Professor Weyland in that I have been through some very difficult struggles with my faith because it seems as though the more "intellectual" and "logical" way to look at the world is through the lens of materialism.

This book answered many questions that I've been asking for a long time, and I feel stronger in my faith because of it. One quote in particular stuck with me as I finished the book, "For so much of his life Weyland simply took for granted that atheism made so much more sense, was so much more reasonable, so much more intelligent, than theism, but he could no longer think that. He'd never again be able to think his rejection of God, if that was the choice he ultimately made, was because atheism was so much more appealing or satisfying. What appeal is there in a worldview that has no answer to life's most important questions?"

This describes where my mind was before reading this book. Thank you for writing this book and reminding me of the truth I should have known all along.

I'm sure a lot of dads would enjoy it as much as this reader did. You can order it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, both of which have it on e-books, or you can get it from Hearts and Minds Bookstore, as well as Berean, Lifeway, and BAM bookstores.

Crazy Logic

The more evidence of malfeasance that accumulates against Attorney General Eric Holder the more need there is, obviously, to investigate him and his tenure at the Department of Justice. Yet there's a Catch-22 buried in this observation. It turns out that the more the Republicans investigate the AG the more the Democrats complain that the Republicans are just "out to get" him, and, the more dubious the Democrats are of the legitimacy of Republican complaints, the less inclined they are to go along with any investigation of them.

In other words, the worse the AG behaves the more innocent the Democrats believe him to be. Perhaps the only way these Dems could be persuaded to assist with an investigation of an Obama appointee would be if the individual were known apriori to be squeaky clean and was not the target of any Republican allegations of wrongdoing.

The New York Times rather obliquely and tacitly acknowledges that this is, in fact, the view of at least some Democrats. Their article begins with a depressing summary of Eric Holder's inadequacies:

Under his leadership, the department scaled back a voter-intimidation lawsuit from the Bush era involving the New Black Panther Party, a decision that conservatives used to portray the black-nationalist fringe group as a political ally of the Obama administration. He reopened criminal investigations into the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogations of terrorism suspects and tried to prosecute five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks in civilian courts rather than military tribunals, which provoked accusations that he was soft on terrorism. And he abandoned the legal defense of a law barring federal recognition of same-sex marriage that social conservatives viewed as a bulwark against attacks on the traditional family.

The party-line furor peaked with hearings into Operation Fast and Furious, a botched gun-trafficking investigation by federal agents based in Arizona. When Mr. Holder, after Mr. Obama invoked executive privilege, refused to provide department e-mails relating to the fallout after the operation ended, the House voted to hold him in contempt of Congress. A report by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general essentially exonerated Mr. Holder of accusations that he had sanctioned risky investigative tactics that were used in the case, but that did not satisfy Republican lawmakers who are still pressing for a court order for the e-mails.

One might think that this indictment of the AG's suitability for the office he holds would elicit the antagonism of any honest, fair-minded Democrat, but the Times closes its piece with this:

Yet Democrats remain reluctant about furthering what they see as a partisan campaign against the attorney general. “There is a set of recurring patterns on the Republican side trying to grind him into the dust, so we’re a bit dubious of their complaints,” said Representative Peter Welch of Vermont.

Has it occurred to Rep. Welch that perhaps the pattern is recurring because the AG's delinquencies are recurring? Does he think there's some point at which Mr. Holder should be rewarded with immunity for achieving the distinction of being the most scandal-ridden AG in history? Does Rep. Welch think that when the number of ethical derelictions reaches a certain level it's just partisan politics to continue to investigate them?

For the Dems, it seems, it doesn't matter whether Holder is actually an inveterately incompetent, unscrupulous, deceitful, partisan misfit heading up the DoJ. What matters is that the GOP is out to get him (precisely because he is an inveterately incompetent, unscrupulous, deceitful, partisan misfit) and therefore the Democrats resist. The idea of doing what's best for the country? Who cares about that? A similar tactic, of course, is employed by Democrats in defense of the President.

As the scandals swirling around the White House grow thick as flies in a horse barn the more assured we may be that the President's defenders will accuse his critics of being motivated by racism. It works like this: The more Mr. Obama is shown to be out of his depth, intellectually and ethically, in the Oval Office the more he's criticized. The more he's criticized the more his defenders see the criticisms as racially motivated. So, the more Mr. Obama screws up the more racist the Republican critics prove themselves to be.

The syllogism may be more simply stated thusly: Pres. Obama is a black man. Pres. Obama is criticized. Therefore the criticism is obviously due to the fact that he's a black man. If you think no one could be so addlepated as to argue like this, you haven't watched MSNBC.

As if taping a training video to illustrate the tactic here's MSNBC's Martin Bashir demonstrating it for us:

Such is the logic of those who feel compelled to defend the indefensible.

Hope for MS Sufferers

From the frontiers of medical science comes word that a treatment has been developed which may be effective in halting the advance of multiple sclerosis. This will give hope to millions of people who are in various stages of this disease and for whom heretofore there was little chance that the degeneration of their nervous systems would ever be arrested.

What happens in MS is that the sufferer's own immune system attacks the myelin sheath that insulates nerve fibers. As these sheaths are degraded the fibers lose the ability to transmit signals which eventually results in paralysis of the limbs.

The new treatment involves programming the immune system to recognize the myelin protein as part of the body and to leave it alone. The treatment also does nothing to alter the immune system in any other way.

It's been tested on mice and it works. If it works as well in humans, which it's expected to do, it'll be a fantastic breakthrough. You can read more on the details of the treatment here.

Big Brother Is Watching You

It appears the dam has broken in Washington and people who otherwise would have kept what they knew to themselves for fear of retribution are now leaking it fast and furiously (sorry). Revelations of Orwellian practices by this government are spilling forth so rapidly it's hard to keep up. No sooner did we learn that the Obama National Security Agency was downloading the data on millions of Verizon users that we learned that the NSA and the FBI have also been monitoring the internet usage of the customers of nine different internet providers.

The Washington Post has the story.

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil. (italics mine)

The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

There's much more at the link. The story concludes with a bit of explanation as to how the WaPo got this information:

Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin explains why all of this spying on American citizens is qualitatively and quantitatively different from what the Bush administration was doing. One obvious difference, of course, is that the Bush NSA was eavesdropping on terrorism suspects. The Obama administration is eavesdropping on everyone. Perhaps Mr. Obama considers every American a terrorism suspect.

Even the New York Times seems to have had about all it can stand. At least for now. In an editorial yesterday the Times wrote that the Obama administration has lost all credibilty on its promise to be transparent and accountable. In the opinion of most people, of course, they lost credibility a long time ago, but the Times apparently believes in being fashionably late to the party, unless the party is a Bush bash, in which case they'd be the first to show up with the chips and pretzels.

As I followed the events of the last few weeks I kept thinking of a movie that I urge readers of Viewpoint to watch this summer. The film is titled The Lives of Others and it's about how the East German secret police spied on East German citizens prior to the Berlin Wall being torn down. It's a chilling but superb movie and every American should make it a point, in the age of Obama, to see it.

Please don't think it can't happen here. It is happening here.

Atheist Inspirations

Lawrence Krauss is a cosmologist of some note and a militant atheist. In fact, judging by this interview, he'd much rather talk about why he rejects religious belief than about the science that is his profession.

One of the interesting things about the interview is that Krauss tries to argue that despite the fact that atheism leads to some very distressing conclusions about the human predicament it's nevertheless more inspiring to be an atheist than to be a theist who believes in eternal life. For example, he says - using the word "science" as a synonym for "naturalism," that:

I don't mean that science isn't spiritually uplifting. I do think it is, but for the very reasons — the very antithetical reasons to religion, I guess, is the fact that it causes us to feel less comfortable. [It] should provoke us to try and understand what we can do and what meaning we can make in the universe. So learning that we're more insignificant or learning that the universe isn't made for us, or there's no evidence that it is, is profoundly inspiring or should be.

Why it should be inspiring to learn that we are far more insignificant than we could ever know, as he tells one audience member during the Q&A, and that the universe is a meaningless, purposeless, indifferent, and hostile place Krauss doesn't explain. The interviewer, Kate Tippett, later presses him on the point:

Ms. Tippett: What does science have to say to death, to dying, not to the biological breakdown of a body, but to the existential moment of dying?

Dr. Krauss: I think it has a tremendous amount to say. I mean, it has to say to us that, you know, first of all, it has to say what dying is. What is dying? What's the process of dying?

That's it? That's the "tremendous amount" that naturalistic science has to say about what death is and what it means? Well, maybe not exactly. There's also the fact, Krauss tells us, that death means the end of our existence. Perhaps Prof. Krauss finds that inspiring, too:

I mean, we're all going to experience it [death], and I think a realistic assessment of what the process is helps us understand what we're going to experience and try and make sense of it. It seems to me you can't make sense enough to make even an ethical or moral decision without understanding the basis in reality.

What seems to me what science could say is what I've sort of said in the book is that - look, what I'm about to say is going to sound awful, and I'm not going to go to someone's bedside and offer this, OK? It's up to them to decide if they want to look at these things - but we should at least offer the possibility of that knowledge that there's no evidence — in fact every bit of evidence that there's no afterlife, that you're here, but in fact the meaning of your life is the meaning that you make.

And in your life, you've made incredible meaning. You created love for other people. You've brought up children. You've allowed people to have livelihoods and that meaning has made your life worthwhile and enjoy every second of being alive. And death is a sad but necessary part of being alive. That may not sound like the same comfort of saying that, you know, you're going to have eternal life and you're going to be with your family ...

Indeed. In fact, it's hard to see how there's much comfort in this at all, particularly if we're talking about a tragic death of a young person rather than the death of someone at a ripe old age. What Krauss offers, so far from being comfort, so far from giving hope, is despair.

Of course, that doesn't mean that he's wrong about the existence of God and an afterlife. He could well be right. It could turn out that the truth is very depressing, but what is silly of him to say, in my opinion, is that atheism offers a view of the world that is at least as inspiring as the theistic view. The theistic view may be wrong, but any belief system that offers the hope of eternal happiness is far more inspiring, it seems to me, than one that offers nothing more than the prospect of eternal annihilation.

Perhaps this has something to do with why Christianity has inspired far more art, music, science and moral progress than has atheism which has inspired pretty much nothing.

At any rate, Tippett then makes the observation that although Krauss is calling his view the scientific view, it's really not:

Ms. Tippett: But what you just said isn't science.

Dr. Krauss: Yes, it is. It's saying there's no evidence. I mean, here's what we're saying is that...

Ms. Tippett: But you can't put meaning under a microscope. You can't shoot particles at it in a Large Hadron Collider.

Dr. Krauss: No, but I don't understand what meaning is till I ask the questions of how the universe behaves.

Which is a complete non-sequitur, but Krauss plows on undeterred by logic.

You know, some people say that religion gives meaning to their lives, but to me, the knowledge that the meaning we have is the meaning we make should inspire us to do better. So I think that — I personally think that every single thing that religion provides, rationality, empiricism and science can provide, and not only that, it can provide it better.

Well, no. It can't. Especially if Krauss is using science as a place-holder for atheism. It can't give our lives ultimate meaning, it can only tell us there is no meaning. It can't give us an objective ground for morality, it can only tell us that any moral system we live by is purely arbitrary. It can't give us hope, it can't give us a reason for desiring truth, it can't even give us a basis for trusting our reason to lead us to truth, as philosopher Alvin Plantinga has so cogently argued in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies.

In fact, earlier in the interview Krauss said something that implicitly undermines his claim that an atheistic worldview based on science can give better answers to the big questions than can religion. He said:

We've been, as I often say, like people locked in a room with sensory deprivation for 40 years. What happens? You hallucinate, and that's what most of the business of what I've been in is hallucinating for the last 40 years.

Most of the hallucinations we've had, namely theoretical physics, will be wrong. Most ideas are wrong. We don't celebrate that enough, but it's true. Most ideas are wrong, so all of the ideas may be wrong. But we won't know until nature points us in the right direction. And I think, and many other people think, that if what we really discovered is the Higgs, there's bound to be new things at the Large Hadron Collider that will point us in the much more interesting direction.

Ms. Tippett: And you don't even know what that direction is right now.

Dr. Krauss: No, no. I mean, I have speculations. I have ideas and so do other theorists. I always hope I'm wrong. I've often said the two greatest states to be in if you're a scientist is either wrong or confused, and I'm often both.

It seems rather odd to say on one hand that one's intellectual approach to truth leads either to error or confusion and on the other that it is nevertheless superior to other approaches. Any approach to truth that causes one to always hope he's wrong is hardly inspiring.

I can't help but think that all the talk about the wonder of life from the point of view of naturalism is just so much wishful thinking. Perhaps a more realistic assessment comes from another famous atheist Bertrand Russell. Russell wrote in A Free Man's Worship:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

I think Russell was closer to where things stand for the atheist than is Krauss, and I don't think many will find Russell's assessment of life in a world without God particular inspiring.

Contra Scientism

Man, it has been said, can't live without religion. Whether it be the ancient faiths of the semites, the polytheisms of the pagans, the ancestor worship of the orient, or the secular faiths of the moderns, religion is essential, it seems, to the human psyche.

Non-theists, or atheists, often object that they are not religious and don't need religion, but I think they don't realize their own religiosity and their dependence upon it. At least that's true of many of them. Their religion doesn't involve an afterlife or a transcendent, personal deity so it doesn't seem to them to count as a religion, but Buddhism lacks a belief in an afterlife and a personal deity yet it's still a religion.

One example of a secular religion is the modern faith in science, often called scientism, that pervades our culture. Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic recently gave a graduation address at Brandeis University in which he described scientism this way:

Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but scientism is dogmatic, and peddles certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. But even the question of the place of science in human existence is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical, which is to say, a humanistic, [question].

Owing to its preference for totalistic explanation, scientism transforms science into an ideology, which is of course a betrayal of the experimental and empirical spirit. There is no perplexity of human emotion or human behavior that these days is not accounted for genetically or in the cocksure terms of evolutionary biology.

It is true that the selfish gene has lately been replaced by the altruistic gene, which is lovelier, but it is still the gene that tyrannically rules. Liberal scientism should be no more philosophically attractive to us than conservative scientism, insofar as it, too, arrogantly reduces all the realms that we inhabit to a single realm, and tempts us into the belief that the epistemological eschaton has finally arrived, and at last we know what we need to know to manipulate human affairs wisely. This belief is invariably false and occasionally disastrous. We are becoming ignorant of ignorance.

Scientism stands to naturalism in much the same way that, say, Christianity stands to theism. Scientism is an expression of the belief that nature is "all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be" as Carl Sagan famously put it, and scientism offers its devotees all the trappings of traditional religion. There is a metanarrative (naturalism) that explains the cosmos, a faith (the conviction that science will usher in the eschaton)that unites the laity and offers them hope, an ethic (the principle that we should follow the promptings of our reason), a view of what is allowed to count as truth, there are dogmas (e.g. Darwinian evolution, climate change) to which one must adhere, there's a priesthood (scientists) whose authority is almost beyond question, there are sacred texts (e.g. Origin of Species), heresy trials, a view of salvation (see Luc Ferry's Brief History of Thought), holidays (Darwin Day), and all the rest.

But, as C.S. Lewis points out in Abolition of Man, this is a religion which ultimately dehumanizes. That's Wieseltier's point, too, in his remarks to the Brandeis graduates:

For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work.

Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality – modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness -- and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.

The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep. There are thinkers, reputable ones if you can believe it, who proclaim that the exponential growth in computational ability will soon take us beyond the finitude of our bodies and our minds so that, as one of them puts it, there will no longer be any difference between human and machine. La Mettrie lives in Silicon Valley. This, of course, is not an apotheosis of the human but an abolition of the human; but Google is very excited by it.

Considering the boilerplate one often hears at Commencement exercises this really is a remarkable address. The students at Brandeis were fortunate. I just hope some of them were paying attention.

Boltzmann Brains

The attempt by philosophers and scientists to escape the conclusion that the universe is the work of an intelligent agent has led to some bizarre hypotheses but none more bizarre than what are called Boltzmann Brains.

Boltzmann Brains, named for the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) who was the first to suggest that the universe arose as a spontaneous fluctuation, are disembodied brains that should be abundant in the universe if the universe is old enough. Recall that Darwinians are fond of saying that although the spontaneous generation of life from inert matter purely by chance is extraordinarily improbable, given enough time it should happen just as given enough time a million monkeys typing away on a million typewriters should produce a Shakespearean sonnet.

The problem is that given a sufficiently vast amount of time we should also expect that everything not ruled out by the laws of physics and logic should happen. Thus, since these laws don't absolutely prohibit it, we should expect that in a universe of vast age atoms will randomly combine to form functioning minds/brains, and that the numbers of these brains would expand as the universe continues to age.

Sure it's breathtakingly improbable but given enough time the improbable becomes probable, or so we've been told by Darwinians, and the probable becomes actual. If time is the hero of the story of evolution then so, too, must it be the hero of the production of Boltzmann Brains.

This seems literally incredible, of course, but it's the sort of thing that's taken seriously by people who've embraced a naturalism that rejects the worldview of classical monotheism.

The irony is that naturalists scoff at the miracles believed in by theists, but on naturalism, miracles are not only possible, they are inevitable given enough time. If someone objects that miracles violate the laws of physics and are thus impossible, it need only be replied that the laws of physics are statistical probabilities. Given enough time, or enough universes, there's bound to be one in which a particular deviation from those laws occurs or in which the laws themselves are different. In any case, the naturalist seems to have very little grounds for rejecting the occurrence of a miracle.

After all, anyone who takes Boltzmann Brains seriously can hardly criticize those who believe that a virgin bore a child.

Why This Scandal Is Different

The Obama administration is finding itself simultaneously embroiled in three separate scandals, each of which reflects, in different ways, very badly on the administration.

The Benghazi scandal, for instance, is actually three distinct sub-scandals. First was the refusal to grant the diplomats in Libya the extra security they requested. Then was the failure to at least try to rescue those diplomats when they came under attack. These two sub-scandals probably don't involve anything illegal, but they certainly reveal gross incompetence and/or a callous indifference to the peril of American personnel. The third aspect of the Benghazi imbroglio was the attempt to cover-up this incompetence and indifference by deliberately lying to the American people about exactly what precipitated the attack that took the lives of four Americans.

Lying to the American people is not illegal either, but lying under oath to Congress is. In any case, this administration has shown itself to be unworthy of the public's confidence that they know what they're doing and unworthy of the public's trust that they'll be honest with them.

The second scandal involved the Department of Justice seizing the phone records of journalists in order to spy on them. This was done ostensibly to ferret out leaks in the Department, but it is a chilling abuse of power and a flouting of the first amendment of the Constitution by a government agency which has already shown itself to hold the law in disdain in the Fast and Furious debacle.

Moreover, since Attorney General Eric Holder patently lied to Congress while under oath, claiming he knew nothing of these seizures when, in fact, he had signed off on at least some of them, makes him guilty of perjury.

Both of these aforementioned scandals are bad and would have been enough to have the media baying at the gates of a Republican White House demanding the impeachment of a Republican president who presided over them, but the third scandal is, as Peggy Noonan asserts, doubtless the worst.

The Internal Revenue Service used its enormous power to harass, intimidate, and suppress conservative individuals and grass roots organizations in order to punish them and to essentially cripple their efforts to educate the public about the issues confronting the nation in the 2012 election. The media and the Democrats were incensed that conservatives supported voter ID laws that would cut down on the number of people casting illegitimate ballots because, the left claimed, this was a subtle effort to suppress the vote. That objection was nonsense, but the IRS was engaged in an undeniable effort to suppress the vote prior to the 2012 election and the outrage on the left has been muted. Some liberals have even given their approval to what the IRS did.

But what makes this scandal worse than the others? Here's Noonan's thought:

Sometimes when you’re writing part of a column you keep getting close to the meaning of what you want to say but you don’t quite get there, the full formulation of the idea eludes you. Then two days later, relaxing in conversation with friends, the thought comes to you whole, and you think: That’s what I meant to say. That’s what I was trying to get.

This week I had one of those moments. I kept trying, the paragraph kept not quite working, the deadline came.

I got an email last night that had the effect of a clarifying conversation. It was from a smart friend who works in government. He understood the point I was trying to make about how the current IRS scandal is different from previous ones and more threatening to the American arrangement. I had written that this scandal isn’t a discrete event in which a president picks up a phone and tells someone in the White House to look into the finances of some steel industry executives, or to check out the returns of some guy on an enemies list.

But my friend got to the essence. He wrote, “The left likes to say, ‘Watergate was worse!’ Watergate was bad—don’t get me wrong. But it was elites using the machinery of government to spy on elites. . . . It’s something quite different when elites use the machinery of government against ordinary people. It’s a whole different ball game.”

It is.

That’s exactly what I meant.

In previous IRS scandals it was the powerful abusing the powerful—a White House moving against prominent financial or journalistic figures who, because of their own particular status or the machineries at their disposal, could pretty much take care of themselves. A scandal erupts, there are headlines, and then people go on their way. The dreadful thing about this scandal, what makes it ominous, is that this is the elites versus regular citizens. It’s the mighty versus normal people. It’s the all-powerful directors of the administrative state training their eyes and moving on uppity and relatively undefended Americans.

That’s what makes this scandal different, and why if it’s not stopped now it will never stop. Because every four years you can get yourself a new president and a new White House, but you won’t easily get yourself a whole new administrative state. It’s there, it’s not going away, not anytime soon. If it isn’t forced back into its cage now, and definitively, it will prowl the land hungrily forever.

Noonan says more in her column at the link.

Even though any two of the three scandals above, especially following on the heels of Fast and Furious, would be enough to topple a Republican administration, I doubt that that'll happen in this case. Attorney General Holder may resign, but I doubt anyone high up in the administration will be impeached or go to jail, although both should happen. I certainly don't think it likely that President Obama will be impeached, although were he a white Republican and the Democrats were in control of Congress he surely would be, and deservedly so.

Perhaps it's enough that the American public learn that when you vote for leftist progressives whose only ethical principle is Machiavellian pragmatism what you wind up with is incompetence, corruption and tyranny. If enough voters learn that lesson, if enough voters are moved from their indolence to pay attention henceforth to what this administration has done and is trying to do to this country, perhaps that will be the silver lining in all of this.

Still Standing

In 2010 Stephen Hawking gave us a fine illustration of the maxim that brilliance in one area is no guarantee of even a modicum of competence in another when he famously pronounced philosophy, by which he meant metaphysics, to be dead. Perhaps it's fitting to note, given our current cultural infatuation with zombies, that philosophy still walks about upright, declining to actually die. Neuroscientist Raymond Tallis makes sport of Hawking's premature declaration of demise in an article in The Guardian in which he discusses five or six problems in modern physics which seem indistinguishable from metaphysical problems.

To take just one example, consider the idea of the multiverse. This is the hypothesis that physical reality is like a vast foam in which every bubble is a discreet universe. This is a completely untestable hypothesis for which not only is there no empirical evidence, there couldn't be, by the nature of the case, any empirical evidence. In other words, the multiverse hypothesis is a metaphysical, not a scientific, hypothesis.

Another problem that seems impervious to empirical evaluation is the problem of consciousness. Tallis writes:

Beyond these ... problems there is the failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).

There is, as far as I know, no physical theory that explains how a physical process such as might occur in the brain can generate something like the conscious experience of redness. Nor is there any physical description of what, exactly, the experience of redness actually is. Nor is there any physical explanation for how meaning, what philosophers call intentionality, can be generated by chemicals moving across neuronal membranes in the brain. How does the movement of atoms produce something like a meaning? How can one describe a meaning, for instance the meaning of this sentence, in terms of chemical reactions in the brain? Science has no answer to these questions.

Read Tallis' relatively brief essay for more on how physics is shot through with, and quite dependent upon, philosophy.

Clue to Hannity's Popularity

One of the irritants in the life of one who seeks to keep abreast of current events, I think I have on occasion admitted, is Sean Hannity. I think he's right about much of what he says, but how he says it is very hard for me to take for more than about five minutes before I have to turn him off.

When, after a few minutes of his talking over and interrupting callers, his incessant prattling about himself (why does he insert himself into virtually every discussion topic?), or his endless recitations of the entire corpus of his opinions when he's interviewing guests who would be much more interesting to listen to than he is, I find myself yelling at the radio, I know it's time to switch the station to some easy-listening music.

Mr. Hannity is, I regret to say, vain, pompous, egotistical, rude, and talks like a fifteen year-old girl (Really?? Seriously??? I'm like ...) so why is he so popular, even with some liberals? Perhaps a study discussed here affords us a clue:

Being confident and loud is the best way to win an argument - even if you are wrong, a new study suggests.

Researchers from Washington State University drew this conclusion after studying the activity of Twitter users. The more opinionated they were, the more influential and trustworthy they were perceived to be.

Mr. Hannity is certainly confident and, if not loud, at least strident in expressing his opinions. The possibility that he might be mistaken is never allowed to perch upon his lips. Nor are his listeners permitted to hear any cogent counterpoints offered by his masochistic callers without him drowning them out. Sadly, maybe that's why he's so successful.

It really is a shame that someone with such a prominent platform from which to articulate ideas and who holds political views so worthy of being articulated, is such an insufferable, boorish spokesperson for those ideas.

Of course, this applies a forteriori to people like Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews on the other side of the ideological spectrum. In fact, if rude, loud, opinionated commentary expressed with no hint of intellectual humility is the key to popularity, Olberman and Matthews should be the two highest rated commentators in the business.

What's Apple's Fair Share?

Congressman Keith Ellison was complaining recently to Ed Schultz of MSNBC that corporations like Apple don't pay their fair share of taxes.

Neither Mr. Ellison nor Mr. Schultz seemed to recognize the fatuousness of their remarks. Here are a few questions we might ask these gentlemen:

• Whenever someone complains, as do Messers. Schultz and Ellison, that it's somehow immoral for a corporation or wealthy individual to take deductions to which they're legally entitled the first question we should ask them is whether they themselves shelter income or claim any deductions on their own tax return. If they do then isn't there something hypocritical about complaining that others do the same thing?
• What exactly is the fair share that corporations should pay and how is that figure arrived at? Unless they can tell us this how does anyone know whether corporations are paying their "fair share" or not?
• Have not these corporations, particularly Apple, blessed this country and the world with their i-phones, i-pods, i-pads, and macs? Why does Mr. Ellison seem to think that somehow Apple has gotten rich without making any contribution to the society in which it has prospered and that they haven't done enough good until they've also paid more taxes than the law requires of them?

These men are shortsighted, to be sure, but they're typical of the thinking commonly found on the left. Perhaps the most ironic thing about it is that Apple and other corporations simply follow the tax laws that Democratic congressman have devised and then these Democratic congressmen criticize them for following their laws.

Parenthetically, I wonder if Rep. Ellison and Mr. Schultz were as outraged that Democrat Charlie Rangel, who used to chair the Ways and Means Committee in Congress, the committee which writes tax law, was himself discovered to be not paying his taxes. I wonder, too, if these gentlemen were as outraged that Mr. Obama's choice for his first Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, was found to be in arrears in his tax payments. I doubt it.

The Gibson Guitar Raid

A couple of years ago an American guitar manufacturer was raided by the feds for reasons that seemed to make no sense at the time. Investors Business Daily has put the pieces together and, in light of what we now know about the corruption that permeates this administration, those raids seem to make perfect sense:

The inexplicable raid nearly two years ago on a guitar maker for using allegedly illegal wood that its competitors also used was another [example of] targeting by this administration of its political enemies.

On Aug. 24, 2011, federal agents executed four search warrants on Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., and seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. One of the top makers of acoustic and electric guitars, including the iconic Les Paul introduced in 1952, Gibson was accused of using wood illegally obtained in violation of the century-old Lacey Act, which outlaws trafficking in flora and fauna, the harvesting of which had broken foreign laws.

In one raid, the feds hauled away ebony fingerboards, alleging they violated Madagascar law. Gibson responded by obtaining the sworn word of the African island's government that no law had been broken.

In another raid, the feds found materials imported from India, claiming they too moved across the globe in violation of Indian law. Gibson's response was that the feds had simply misinterpreted Indian law.

Interestingly, one of Gibson's leading competitors is C.F. Martin & Co. According to C.F. Martin's catalog, several of their guitars contain "East Indian Rosewood," which is the exact same wood in at least 10 of Gibson's guitars. So why were they not also raided and their inventory of foreign wood seized?

Gibson claimed they were innocent and had violated no law either domestic or foreign. Nor had they done anything different than their competitor, so why were they being harassed like some Jewish business in the early years of the Nazi persecutions? IBD offers insight:

Grossly underreported at the time was the fact that Gibson's chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz, contributed to Republican politicians. Recent donations have included $2,000 to Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and $1,500 to Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

By contrast, Chris Martin IV, the Martin & Co. CEO, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400 in contributions to Democratic candidates and the Democratic National Committee over the past couple of election cycles. Nothing happened to Martin and Co. but Gibson endured "two hostile raids on its factories by agents carrying weapons and attired in SWAT gear where employees were forced out of the premises, production was shut down, goods were seized as contraband and threats were made that would have forced the business to close."

Gibson's support for Republicans cost them dearly, as IBD explains:

Gibson, fearing a bankrupting legal battle, settled and agreed to pay a $300,000 penalty to the U.S. Government. It also agreed to make a "community service payment" of $50,000 to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation — to be used on research projects or tree-conservation activities.

The feds in return agreed to let Gibson resume importing wood while they sought "clarification" from India.

This is America under Mr. Obama. You play ball or you get punished. It's how thugs run protection rackets and how tyrants run countries. The Obama administration may very well turn out to be the most corrupt in the history of the United States, and while we should all decline the angry (and surprising) adjuration of the otherwise demure Andrea Tantaros to "punch Obama voters in the face" one can certainly sympathize with the outrage that elicited it.

Andrea Tantaros

Half the American electorate have foisted upon the rest of us a man lacking any discernable qualification for the job of President. He had never had a job in the private sector, never actually served in any executive or leadership position, was never accountable to anyone, and whose own personal history was, and still is, shrouded in mystery.

The president these voters have selected seems to lack any understanding of how government should behave in a free society, and whatever his own personal virtues might be, he has appointed people to run his administration who evidently have nothing but contempt for the niceties of the law, the constitution, and the truth.

These voters, in many cases, supported Mr. Obama for no weightier reason than that they thought it'd be "cool" to be part of the history-making election of the first black president, or they wished to clothe themselves in racial piety and demonstrate to themselves and others that they weren't racists.

At least those voters have the excuse, perhaps, of just being irresponsible. The voters who knew what Mr. Obama's ideological inclinations and ambitions were, what he would do and how he would do it, and voted for him anyway, or voted for him because that's precisely what they wanted from him, were something worse than irresponsible.

EC-EE

People skeptical of both miracles and of the idea that the universe is intelligently designed often invoke the objection, which goes back to philosopher David Hume but which was most succinctly expressed by astronomer Carl Sagan, that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The argument is that since the claim of a miracle - or an intelligent design (ID) of the universe - is extraordinary, and since no extant evidence matches the extraordinariness of the claim, we should remain skeptical that such things happened.

There's an excellent discussion and rebuttal of this objection by DonaldM (henceforth DM) at Uncommon Descent. DM labels the objection the EC-EE (Extraordinary Claims-Extraordinary Evidence) objection and reveals it to be a rather empty assertion.

For example, he notes that the term "extraordinary" in both EC and EE is so vague as to be meaningless. It is, moreover, a term that's worldview dependent. The claim that Jesus performed miracles is not at all extraordinary to the community of Christian theists but is extraordinary indeed for naturalistic materialists. Put differently, if a personal God exists the claim that miracles happened is not necessarily surprising. If God doesn't exist then a miracle would be surprising, of course, but one cannot assume that God doesn't exist and then conclude that miracle claims are "extraordinary" since that would beg the question.

Even setting that aside, the EC-EE objection cuts both ways. Intelligent Design advocates argue that the specified complexity (information) content of living cells is so improbable on naturalism as to make the claim that natural processes gave rise to it without the benefit of intelligent input an unimaginably extraordinary hypothesis. Where is the extraordinary evidence to support it? Yet, despite the utter paucity of evidence that blind, purposeless forces can produce meaningful information the very people who believe it happened often treat with scorn anyone who doubts it, and they demand of them "extraordinary evidence" that an intelligence guided the process while proffering none in favor of their own belief.

VJTorley has it right in the comments section of DM's post when he states that:

[W]hat I would say is not that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (which is a very vague term), but that they require evidence that renders alternative hypotheses very unlikely.

In the case of the resurrection of Jesus and of the fine-tuning of the cosmos the naturalistic explanations are so implausible that the only reason anyone would believe them is that they have an apriori commitment to naturalism. If, however, one suspends one's apriori commitments and leaves open the question of whether there is or is not a God the evidence for the resurrection and the fine-tuning of the universe certainly supports the conclusion that a miracle occurred in the first case and that a mind was involved in the second.

Memorial Day 2013

On Memorial Day we remember the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized. … There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its yearlong mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God.

Sowing and Reaping

It's beginning to look a lot like Eric Holder is guilty of lying to Congress under oath, which is perjury, and/or lying to a federal judge in order to get a warrant to search the personal communications of Fox News reporter James Rosen. Whatever the nature of Mr. Holder's prevarications, if such they be, his future as Attorney General looks bleak. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has the details:

Last week, under relatively friendly questioning from Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) about the Department of Justice seizure of Associated Press phone records, [Mr. Holder was] asked about the potential to prosecute reporters under the Espionage Act of 1917. ”You’ve got a long way to go to try to prosecute the press for publication of material,” Holder responded.

Later, though, he returned to the topic unbidden, emphasis mine:

In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material. This is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.

As it turns out, Holder not only heard of it, he personally approved it. The warrant in the Rosen case specified that he was considered a potential suspect in the leak of classified material, [which is why] the DoJ didn’t bother to follow the existing Watergate-era statute in coordinating the records request with Fox News.

And note that Holder’s testimony in this case wasn’t produced by some sophisticated perjury trap sprung by a Republican, but as a freely-offered representation to no particular question during the question period of a Democrat.

There is no other way to view this except as a lie.

In fact, Mr. Holder was under oath which makes his lie perjury. Moreover, as Morrissey explains later, Holder may also have lied to a judge to obtain the warrant for seizing Rosen's records.

In an update, Morrissey notes that there's a bipartisan consensus emerging for Holder's resignation. The Huffington Post and Esquire have both had enough. Pressure to resign would seem, though, to be the least of Holder's worries. He may also be looking at disbarment and a few years in prison.

Exit questions: Does anyone seriously think that Holder would have signed off on the Rosen matter without someone high up in the White House knowing about it? How high does this go? How many more scandals must attach themselves to this administration before the media starts talking about it being the most corrupt administration in American history?

War of Attrition

Mark Steyn is a brilliant satirist, but I don't think I've ever read anything by him quite as good as his piece on the fatuousness of the liberal European political figures and media in the wake of the grisly murder of officer Lee Rigby on the streets of London last week.

I thought as I read it that at some point in the not-too-distant future Europeans and Americans are going to arrive at the realization that our refusal to see that a substantial portion of the Islamic world is at war with the West has been a form of self-delusion. Our authorities keep telling us, despite repeated and ample evidence to the contrary, that acts of savagery and murder being carried out against non-Muslims are the random acts of a few extremists:

• Heavily influenced by a Muslim cleric, Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen soldiers and wounded thirty more at Fort Hood, Texas, shouting that "God is Great," and the Obama administration refuses to call it Islamic terrorism, preferring instead to label it an instance of "workplace violence."
• Two young Muslims kill and maim hundreds at the Boston Marathon and we're told that we must not blame Islam which does not countenance such barbarity.
• Stockholm, Sweden is in the fifth night of rioting and the news reports refuse to mention that it is Muslim youths who are burning their communities.
• Two British Muslims behead a British soldier and the British authorities rush to see who can utter the most asinine banality as to the irrelevance of the religion of peace to the atrocity.

How many acts committed in the name of Allah by devout Muslims citing Koranic warrant and perceived offenses against Islam must we suffer before our valiant public servants recognize that maybe there's a connection?

One of the most risible excuses for the Stockholm riots is the assertion that Muslim violence is a result of penurious social conditions. What were the social conditions these immigrants came from in Somalia, Sudan, and Chad? As one Swedish commentator put it,

"In Sweden you’ve got welfare, access to the educational system – up to university level, you got access to public transport, libraries, healthcare – to everything. And still they feel that they [immigrants] need to riot, throw stones and Molotov cocktails. It’s ridiculous and a bad excuse."

Another adds,

"The problem is not from the Swedish government or from the Swedish people. The last 20 years or so, we have seen so many immigrants coming to Sweden that really don’t like Sweden. They do not want to integrate, they do not want to live in [Swedish] society: Working, paying taxes and so on.

"The people come here now because they know that Sweden will give them money for nothing. They don’t have to work, they don’t have to pay taxes – they can just stay here and get a lot of money. That is really a problem."

The world is changing. Anyone in the next generation who can afford it will likely be living in gated communities with armed security guards. Armed guards will patrol shopping malls, businesses, schools and school busses. As in Europe today there'll be entire neighborhoods into which police and fire personnel simply will not venture.

We are, whether we wish to recognize it or not, deeply embroiled in a generational war of attrition waged against us by people who see themselves as agents of Allah, a deity who desires his votaries to kill any and all of those who disparage Islam or refuse to embrace it. The Obama administration, in a state of purblind denial, responds by treating the threat as a law enforcement problem, and strives to strip Americans of the right and the means of protecting themselves against just the sort of horror that befell that young soldier in London.

Europe seems to be realizing, though probably too late, the folly of allowing so many who have no intention of ever assimilating into Western culture to immigrate to their cities. Perhaps we in America will realize it, too, but as of yet our somnambulant cultural elites are too intoxicated on political correctness and multicultural moonshine to offer much ground for optimism.

Atheists Can Be Good

Pope Francis created a minor kerfuffle when in a homily the other day he told the story of a priest who was asked if even atheists had been redeemed by Jesus:

"Even them, everyone," the pope answered, according to Vatican Radio. "We all have the duty to do good," he said. "Just do good and we'll find a meeting point," the pope said in a hypothetical conversation in which someone told a priest: "But I don't believe. I'm an atheist."

Matt Lewis at The Daily Caller asks:

Who can oppose that?

His [the pope's] comments may also speak to the long-held notion among some Christians that, having no eternal life to worry about, atheists lack an incentive for good behavior. Doing good, thus becomes an irrational example of cognitive dissonance.

But there is an earthly incentive to living a good life. There are consequences to bad behavior in the here and now. And whether this is because a virtuous life coincides with God’s plan, or whether it’s merely the product of nature’s arbitrary laws, it is observably true.

All of this is true. In fact, I agree with everything both Lewis and the pope said. One can do good things whether one believes in God or not, but I think a larger point is being missed in some of the commentary on Francis' homily. When the pope says that an atheist can do good what he means, I assume, is that the behavior is good, i.e. has objective moral worth, in light of a theistic worldview. In an atheistic worldview there can be no objective moral value to anything.

In other words, to say that an act is good is to say that it's the right thing to do, but if atheism is true then the only criterion for whether our behavior is right or wrong is whether it produces desirable consequences for me. If atheism is true there really is no behavior that's good except for how it affects me, and to say that something is wrong is simply to point out that I don't like it. On atheism moral worth can only be subjective, it can't be objective.

On atheism, there's no axiological distinction between selfishness and generosity, kindness and cruelty, other than in the consequences these things produce for oneself. Their consequences for others are of no moral moment unless I care about those others. Thus atheism, taken to it's full conclusion, leads to an egoistic might-makes-right ethic wherein whatever I have the power to do is right as long as I benefit from it. Or, it leads to nihilism.

I made this point, in a general way, in the comment section of Lewis' column. A fellow by the name of Winston Blake replied:

Nature is pure war with every man against another...Fear of death is the only way to keep the peace, so man is civilized by the threat of violence against him for transgressions upon his neighbor. The only thing that makes man civilized is the ability for the weakest to kill the strongest. This happens either by learned machination or by confederacy. "Morality" is just another esoteric hobgoblin.

Winston is saying that morality is simply a convention we adopt to allow people to live in relative security. It has no objective reality. Given his atheism, he's right. His reply is essentially an admission that apart from a divine moral authority there are no objective moral values or duties and thus all behavioral decisions reduce to the question "what's in it for me?"

Winston is a real-life avatar of the ideas of a fictional character in my novel (see the link to In the Absence of God at the top of this page) named Brian Davik. Davik, like Winston, sees clearly that, as Dostoyevsky put it, if God is dead then everything is permitted. I hope you'll read Absence if you haven't already.

Throughout the story I argue that the only escape for the atheist who wishes to avoid nihilism and who rejects egoism, who believes that there really is an objective right and wrong, who really believes that kindness is better than cruelty and that selflessness is better than selfishness, is to renounce his atheism.

Miscellany

The congressional hearings into the deplorable conduct of the IRS in targeting over 500 politically or religiously conservative organizations for special scrutiny and onerous tax exemption requirements took an odd turn yesterday when the head of the relevant IRS section, Lois Lerner, refused to testify.

Perhaps because I'm not a lawyer I don't understand how the fifth amendment, which she invoked, can be used to extricate one from testifying. It seems to me that the law's intention is to protect someone from being compelled to answer questions which would incriminate herself, but that it's an abuse of the amendment to employ it to refuse to answer any questions at all.

If Lerner's application of the amendment is legitimate then what's to keep everyone in the entire agency from invoking the fifth, refusing to say anything, and shutting down the investigation altogether? How can any government agency be held accountable to the people if those under suspicion can simply refuse to speak during any investigation into their possible malfeasance?

It seems to me that if Lerner refuses to testify she should be held in contempt of Congress. She should be required to either answer specific questions or to plead the fifth to each one and let the public, to the extent it cares, make up their own minds as to her guilt or innocence.

As I was preparing to put this post up on VP I came across an article in which the renowned lawyer Alan Dershowitz says essentially the same thing I did. Since he's far more qualified to comment on these matters I urge you to read his comments at the link.

By the way, I implied above that the public might not care much about this scandal. I said that while still reeling from watching the video here. It's disheartening but sadly unsurprising.

And speaking of videos, I can't bring myself to watch the recording of the two British Muslims who hacked the soldier to death, beheading him on the streets of London, but I can't help wonder whether that young man who died such a horrific death might be alive today if someone in the crowd of onlookers had been carrying a firearm.

Political Correctness

This post could have been titled, had I had enough space, How Liberal "Political Correctness" Destroys Lives, Tramples the Pursuit of Truth, and Stifles Free Speech.

Jason Richwine was a doctoral student at Harvard whose dissertation incorporated the following rather indisputable facts:

IQ tests fairly measure mental ability. The average IQ of immigrants is well below that of white Americans. This difference in IQ is likely to persist through several generations with the result that we can expect, as he puts it, “A lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.”

This thesis brought down the wrath of the Guardians of Proper Thought for whom any deviation from the dogma that claims there are no distinctions between ethnic groups as to intelligence is considered heresy warranting literal social banishment and figurative execution.

What these elites will not do, however, what they apparently cannot do, is show why Richwine's argument, an argument good enough to pass muster at Harvard, is not sound.

Pat Buchanan writes about this sad episode and tells us this:

Consider Richwine’s contention that differences in mental ability exist and seem to persist among racial and ethnic groups.

In The Wall Street Journal last month, Warren Kozak noted that 28,000 students in America’s citadel of diversity, New York City, took the eighth-grade exam to enter Stuyvesant, the Bronx School of Science and Brooklyn Tech, the city’s most elite high schools. Students are admitted solely on their entrance test scores. Of the 830 students who will be entering Stuyvesant as freshmen this fall, 1 percent are black, 3 percent are Hispanic, 21 percent are white — and 75 percent are Asian.

Now, blacks and Hispanics far outnumber Asians in New York. But at Stuyvesant, Asians will outnumber blacks and Hispanics together 19-to-1.

Is this the result of racially biased tests at Stuyvesant?

At Berkeley, crown jewel of the California university system, Hispanics, 40 percent of California’s population and an even larger share of California’s young, are 12 percent of the freshman class. Asians, outnumbered almost 3-to-1 by Hispanics in California, have almost four times as many slots as Hispanics in the freshman class. Another example of racial bias?

The 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, which measures the academic ability of 15-year-olds worldwide, found the U.S.A. falling to 17th in reading, 23rd in science, 31st in math. Yet, Spain aside, not one Hispanic nation, from which a plurality of our immigrants come, was among the top 40 in reading, science or math.

But these folks are going to come here and make us No. 1 again?

Buchanan goes on to examine the evidential basis for Richwine's other claims and finds them equally compelling, but facts don't matter when the "true faith" of progressive egalitarianism has been transgressed. Our politically correct elites instead conduct themselves like the parade spectators exclaiming how admirably attired is the emperor whose actual nakedness is plain to see. It's as silly to pretend that there are no differences in intellectual ability among ethnic groups as it is to pretend that there are no differences in physical abilities - as if African-Americans and Asians are equally adept in the athletic skills it takes to be a good basketball or football player.

But, alas, these are uncomfortable topics. The conclusions to which the evidence about intelligence leads doesn't fit the egalitarian worldview. Thus, since the elites have no counterargument or refutation to offer, they deem it expedient to silence and suppress those who investigate such inconvenient truths rather than allow them to freely go about persuading the public with their convincing arguments.

Buchanan has more at the link. Richwine himself offers his take on his recent encounter with our Orwellian thought police at National Review Online. It's worth the time to read both. If you do read them ask yourself whether you prefer to live in a society in which people are punished for advancing heterodox ideas, or if you would rather live in a society where each idea is evaluated on the basis of the evidence that can be mustered in its support.

The first type of society is what our liberal progressives envision, the second type is what our Founding Fathers envisioned.

The President Is Conservatism's Best Argument

John Dickerson at Slate.com writes a column similar to (but much better than) the VP post titled What's Wrong with Big Government?

Dickerson explains how the recent ethical and policy debacles of the Obama administration are inadvertently making the case for the conservative (as distinct from the Republican) political philosophy. His essay is very good. Here are a few excerpts:

The Obama administration is doing a far better job making the case for conservatism than Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, or John Boehner ever did. Showing is always better than telling, and when the government overreaches in so many ways it gives support to the conservative argument about the inherently rapacious nature of government.

First let's get our terms straight. Conservatives are not the same as Republicans. The former believe in a philosophy which stays roughly fixed and the latter belong to a party that occasionally embraces the philosophy but deviates when necessary to win elections, pass legislation, and follow the selfish aims of those who are in office and want to remain there. Conservatives argue against the expansion of government, whereas Republicans sometimes enlarge it to please their constituents or themselves.

[E]conomist James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for his work studying economic incentives in government [argued] that politicians are not benevolent agents of the common good but humans acting in their own self-interest or for a special interest. "If there is value to be gained through politics," Buchanan wrote, "persons will invest resources in efforts to capture this value." Since Democrats and Republicans alike are sinful, each side will find ways to work that is self-interested, rapacious, and boundary breaking. Keep the government small to limit the damage.

Whether these [recent] scandals are the result of base motives or a desire to act for the greater good, the eventual result is the destruction of individual liberties. Your IRS comes down on you because you have the wrong ideology or, in the name of protecting the citizenry, the Justice Department starts listening to your phone calls.

What effect does a general distrust of government have on policy? In order to capture public support for gun control, immigration reform, measures to mitigate global warming, etc. the government has to have the trust of the people but this administration has squandered that trust. Only the true believers still think that Mr. Obama is the sainted messiah he was portrayed to be by the media and his campaign in 2008. His administration is run by people, from the chief on down, who are either incompetent, corrupt, or who list toward tyranny. Or perhaps they are all three, but no administration so constituted is going to have the trust of the people, nor should it.

As Dickerson states in his concluding sentence, it looks like conservatives understand something (about government) that liberals do not. Indeed, what they understand that liberals do not is not so much about government as it is about human nature. They understand that human beings are corrupt, deceitful, and power-hungry. When this flawed condition is combined with a lack of relevant experience, personal narcissism, and left-wing ideological zealotry, the blend is very dangerous. When such people are placed in positions of power, whether in the Oval Office, the Department of Justice, the EPA, the SEC, or the IRS, then our freedoms are in serious jeopardy and our childrens' future is put at grave risk.

Questions and Evasions

Why won't Mr. Obama or his underlings tell us where the President was during the attack on the American ambassador to Libya? If the President was doing what he's supposed to do, as these people insist he was, why won't they tell us where he was, whom he was speaking to, and what he was doing?

The attempts to dodge these questions are not only laughable they make it impossible not to believe that the President was not on the job during this crisis and that his staff fears that if the public knew what he was doing they'd blow their stack.

Here's white House staffer Dan Pfeiffer making a complete buffoon of himself on Fox News Sunday yesterday twisting himself into rhetorical pretzels to avoid having to answer these questions:

Media apologists as well as administration spokespersons like Pfeiffer repeatedly insist that 1) We'll get to the bottom of this unprecedented skein of scandals as long as the Republicans don't "play politics" with them, and 2) The important thing now is to put all these impertinent questions aside and focus on making sure these kinds of scandals don't happen again.

But this is arrant nonsense. Any criticism the Republicans make of the administration's conduct in these scandals will inevitably be interpreted by the Democrats as "playing politics," and they know it. The call to refrain from political game-playing is simply a ploy to intimidate the Republicans into shutting up about the scandals so that they'll be allowed to die down and fade away. We can be very sure that if the Republicans were to keep quiet the Democrats certainly wouldn't do anything to "get to the bottom" of them and the media wouldn't demand that they do.

The second assertion is equally nonsensical. The only way we can intelligently undertake to insure that such things don't happen in the future (other than refusing to elect liberal progressive Democrats) is to ascertain what happened this time. If we don't know what and why things went wrong in Benghazi, in the Department of Justice, and in the IRS, how can we know what to do to fix them?

The congressional Republicans owe it to the country to find out what happened in Benghazi, to find out why the Department of Justice was surreptitiously purloining journalists' phone records, and why the IRS targeted over 500 conservative and religious organizations for onerous, intrusive, political delays and harassment. The GOP also owes it to the country to continue to investigate Fast and Furious, and the EPA's and SEC's practice of discriminatory treatment of conservative and religious groups.

This is an administration riddled with corruption. It has reduced itself to the level of Putin's Russia or Chavez's Venezuela. Mr. Obama and his progressive soulmates are turning the U.S. into a third-world nation in terms of the way the government exercises power, and the only people who can stop him are the Republicans in the House of Representatives. They better not shut up.