Campus Rape Culture

An editorial by Jim Wallis and Sandi Villareal of Sojourners on the topic of campus rape addresses some very important facts about the problem of sexual assault on our nation's colleges and universities.

It's predictable but disappointing that in the wake of the phony Duke Lacrosse team case and the more recent Rolling Stone mess some commentators are minimizing the problem of sexual assault on campus. This, it seems to me, is precisely the wrong response. The conclusion that should be drawn from these episodes is not that there's really no problem, but that it's absurd to assume, as the left enjoins us to do, that every report of an assault is true.

Even so, given the atmosphere of sexual licentiousness that's promoted by and pervades our popular culture, given, too, the easy access to alcohol and drugs on campus and their effect on students' inhibitions, and given the complete inability of a secular society to instill in young men (and women) any sort of moral governor of their appetites, it would be remarkable were there not a problem with sexual assault. Indeed, in the current cultural and moral climate one wonders how there could not be.

Nevertheless, one sentence in the Sojourner's piece is a bit jarring. The authors write:

Rape culture is living in a society in which your story is dissected rather than heard; it’s being told your inherent, God-given value begins to disintegrate once your story gets uncomfortable and its trajectory skewed.

I'm not sure how the authors intend this rather opaque passage to be understood, but it sounds like they're saying that it's wrong for people to examine the claims made by putative rape victims and instead everyone should assume their claims are true.

If this in fact is the intended meaning then I think the authors are going way too far. It's the job of the police, for example, to ascertain that a crime really has been committed. That requires asking sometimes uncomfortable questions and seeking out evidence. The accuser's word that someone assaulted her is simply and unfortunately not enough upon which to base charges that could ruin someone's life. Unlike most crimes, sexual assault sometimes leaves no real evidence, sometimes involves a lot of ambiguity, and often takes place where there are no witnesses. It's thus very hard to prove. It's also very hard for the wrongly accused young man to prove his innocence. Even if he can demonstrate that the claims are false his reputation is often in tatters just by virtue of having the charges made against him.

All of this is tragic, but it's why the authorities just can't accept uncritically the alleged victim's word for what happened.

Sojourners nentions that only 2% to 8% of assault allegations are false, but even if those figures are accurate that's certainly not a reason, by itself, to believe that any given allegation is true.

Young women are in a tough spot in our culture. They're urged to go along with the prevailing sexual winds, but those prevailing winds often lead to awful destinations (Read for example, Tom Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, if you can stomach Wolfe's enthusiasm for vulgarity). When a young woman finds herself victimized by young men weaned on the pornographic ideas and images served up to them throughout their adolescence - young men, it might be added, who've been taught that they're simply animals engaged in the Darwinian imperative to mate and that their sexual urges should never be repressed - she has either to try to prove what may be very difficult to prove and risk public humiliation, or she must accept what happened to her and realize that she is a victim of a culture that has lied to both her and her assailant about what human beings are, what right and wrong is grounded in, and what sex is all about.

One thing we can be pretty certain about: The campus rape culture will never fade away until sexual morality is once again considered part of the will of the God who created sex. Failing that, young women will continue to be victimized and young men will continue to be both victims of false allegations and victimizers of young women whom they'll continue to see as sexual prey.

The Horror That Is ISIL

With all the news vying for our attention it's easy for yesterday's news to be quietly overtaken by other events and forgotten, but it hasn't gone away. One example is ISIL in Iraq and Syria. A pair of reports on today's Drudge Report warn us that the horrors of radical Islam are still with us and remind us what lies in store for any people who come under the rule of these savages.

The first is a story by Adam Kredo at the Washington Free Beacon. Kredo informs us that ISIS has released a penal code to which everyone in the territories it has subjugated must submit. It's unimaginably brutal. It imposes the death penalty for blasphemy against Allah, Mohammed, or Islam in general. Adultery is punishable by stoning if the adulterer was married and 100 lashes if he/she was not. Homosexuality, spying on behalf of unbelievers, murder and stealing are all punishable by death, the latter two by crucifixion. It should be pointed out that death has always been a standard punishment under Islamic law for most of these offenses.

Mercifully, some crimes do not merit the death penalty. Some forms of theft, for instance, will result merely in cutting off the offender's hand. Drinking alcohol will earn the tippler 80 lashes, as does the crime of slander. Banditry, a special form of stealing, will cause the criminal to have both his right hand and left leg cut off.

Meanwhile, Breitbart reports that at least 150 recalcitrant women and young girls, some pregnant, in Fallujah, Iraq were executed for refusing to accept "jihad marriage" to ISIS fighters. Many families fled the town of Al-Wafa after receiving death threats. Many of these families were stranded in the desert where their children perished.

The Islamic State also slaughtered over 50 people from the Al Bu Nimr tribe in Iraq’s Anbar Province on November 2. The massacre included six women and four children. Witnesses said the militants lined up the victims, whom they “publicly killed one by one.” Over seventeen people were kidnapped, as well. Militants murdered 98 people from the same tribe 24-48 hours before the massacre. The tribe is Sunni, which holds the same Islamic beliefs as the Islamic State, but ISIS views the tribe as a threat.

From the Breitbart article:

Militants claim they adhere to a very conservative interpretation of Islam, yet they run brothels and keep sex slaves. They even allow women from the West to perform “sexual jihad” for the terrorists. A 2013 edict allows this behavior “to boost the morale of fighters.” Islamic State issued its own edict in June after conquering towns in Iraq. Jihadists set up brothels filled with kidnapped females and placed British women in charge. One Yazidi sex slave begged the West to bomb the brothel at which she was held to end her suffering. A video in November showed militants laughing and joking about buying female Yazidi slaves.

It may be hard for some readers to believe that this sort of evil exists today. It sounds like something out of the Lord of the Rings, but it's how much of the Islamic world thinks. Unfortunately, we in the West have become so immersed in the cultural and moral relativism that's purveyed by so many of our intellectual betters that we're convinced that labeling this "evil" is to be inexcusably judgmental and culturally chauvinistic. Perhaps, but I'll bet that Yazidi woman would dearly love for us to be a little more judgmental and chauvinistic.

Voltaire, Please Call Your Office

Sony has cancelled their premiere of a comedy film about an assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The film was called The Interview and Sony claims that too many theater chains have chosen not to show it for fear of terrorist reprisals threatened by hackers who have infiltrated Sony's computers. In other words, the very people, liberal Hollywooders, who talk about how brave and bold and courageous it is when a film or book comes out that skewers Christianity are now not only meekly submitting to the tender sensibilities of Muslims but also to some of the most atrocious people on earth, the North Koreans.

It's fine if they don't want to offend people, and I certainly don't blame them for being anxious for their safety, but it's unseemly of them to prance, preen and bloviate about how brave it is to attack the beliefs of people who would never dream of retaliating, and then cower in fear when they're given ultimatums by people who just might carry them out.

I wonder, for instance, what the reaction would have been had a few anonymous threats of violence been received when Religulous or Last Temptation of Christ were released. I suspect there would've been a lot of defiant huffing and puffing about the First Amendment, the Critical Importance of Art, Freedom From Religion and all that, and the film would still have been shown amidst congratulations all around for the amazing heroism of the doughty people in the art world who surely deserve the Congressional Medal of Honor for their courage.

Liberals used to love to quote a dictum attributed to Voltaire to the effect that though they "may hate what you say they'll fight to the death for your right to say it." Apparently that only applies to saying things critical of people you know won't hurt you for it. Since Muslims have started to hold them to it liberals don't say that sort of thing much anymore. Indeed, the actors and cast of The Interview aren't showing their faces in public lately without bodyguards.

Totally Unnecessary Sacrifice

Anne Applebaum has an interesting article in The Spectator about the woes befalling the long-suffering Russian people. They're being caught in an economic squeeze by a combination of international sanctions imposed by the West in response to Putin's assault on the Ukraine, Putin's decision to retaliate against the West by refusing to import food from Europe which has caused food prices to rise in Russia, and the falling price of oil, Russia's chief export. Here's part of her article:

The US, Europe, Australia and Japan responded with sanctions which were deliberately designed to target a small number of wealthy Russians. But Putin broke new ground again. Instead of responding in kind, he banned food imports from the West. Because Russia normally imports at least a quarter and possibly as much as half of its food — not only Parmesan from Italy but frozen vegetables from Poland — he ensured that food prices would rise, not just for a small number of people but for the entire nation.

It was a calculated risk: the Russian President and his entourage apparently reckoned that the Russian people would agree to pay higher prices for food in exchange for military glory. Unlike decadent Europeans and spoiled Americans, Putin seemed to believe that Russians would stoically suffer on behalf of the motherland at a time of crisis.

Was he right? We are about to find out. This week the rouble, which has lost a third of its value in three months, slid by 9 per cent in a single day. A recession is now predicted. Inflation is predicted too, as high as 8 or 9 per cent. A controversial but long-planned pipeline construction has been abruptly cancelled. Major Russian banks are asking for government loans. Russian companies which earn in roubles and borrow in dollars are suddenly in trouble. Capital has been swiftly flowing out of the country, and some banks are rumoured to be limiting withdrawals. There are so many rumours about capital controls that the prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, has explicitly denied them.

What effect have falling oil prices had? Applebaum explains:

Not all of Russia’s economic disruption is caused by sanctions, of course. Since last spring, oil prices have also dropped by nearly 40 per cent. The world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, has just made it clear that it won’t lower production in order to push them up again, at least for the time being.

This might not matter as much to other oil producers, but for more than a decade Putin has coasted on the illusion that historically high oil and gas revenues could both support the national budget and disguise Russia’s failure to create a more productive economy. High energy prices even paid for the excesses of autocracy and an expansionist foreign policy: the Sochi Olympics, the billionaires’ palaces, the adventure in eastern Ukraine, the military exercises on a Cold War scale, even the €9 million loan which a shady Russian bank has just made to the far-right French National Front.

All this puts Russia in a difficult position as Applebaum goes on to tell us, but what the outcome will be is hard to predict. What's clear, however, is that Russia has embarked on a course that could lead the world back to a cold war, or even open hostilities, and nobody wants that. Here's how Applebaum concludes her essay:

... the past decade of high oil prices gave many Russians a standard of living that their Soviet parents and grandparents could never have imagined. There are not just oligarchs but concentric circles of people who have invested in the West, traveled in the West, shopped in the West or otherwise benefited from Russia’s integration into the global economy, if only because they bought those cheap frozen vegetables. They have no clear mechanism to respond to the onrushing economic crisis. Alternative leaders have been eliminated, and alternative policies are not discussed, but that doesn’t mean they’ll remain passive forever.

They could leave the country, withdraw their money, stage a palace coup or simply find ways to make life in Russia unpleasant for Russia’s leaders in ways we haven’t yet imagined.

It's unfortunate that Putin has chosen to take the path he has, he certainly didn't have to, but it's the road he's chosen, and it's a very dangerous road for everyone.

Thoughts on Some Racial News

Three black effigies were found hanging on the campus of UC Berkeley over the weekend. Perhaps this was the work of cruel, thoughtless, stupid bigots, but given the number of incidents staged by blacks to make whites look bad over the years we shouldn't automatically assume that it was the work of bigots, nor should we be surprised if it turns out that the perpetrators of this incident were themselves African-American students, trying either to make it appear as if it were done by white racists or trying to make a political statement about being black in America.

Also over the weekend thousands of people took to the the streets of New York and other cities to protest the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and others by police. It's good every now and then to protest excessive use of force by government agents, and to demand that they not use more force than a situation warrants, but I wonder when we'll start seeing huge demonstrations on behalf of the dozens of police who are murdered every year by killers, many (most?)of whom are black. Or doesn't anyone care about the lives of police officers?

Even as the African American community expresses it's outrage at the death of Eric Garner, black kids continue to die by the hundreds at the hands of other black kids in cities across our nation, and no one is organizing protest marches on behalf of these anonymous young men. Why is that? Do "all black lives matter" or do only politically expedient black lives matter? Do all lives matter or do police officers' lives not matter?

Reading the news about these protests, and reflecting on the relative silence when a black man is killed by another black man, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that at least some of the people who are venting their rage are angry not so much because black men have died but because these black men died at the hands of white men. If so, one wonders why. It is, after all, far less likely that a black man in the United States will die at the hands of a white man than that a white man will die at the hands of a black man.

Maybe you think I'm missing the point. Maybe you think that the protests are in fact directed against the kind of police brutality and overreaction on display in the Eric Garner case. I'm sure this is what animates many, maybe most, of the protestors, but ask yourself a hypothetical question: Do you think that there would be any organized protests at all, any media coverage at all, had Michael Brown and Eric Garner been white, or, alternatively, had the cops who killed them been black?

Neither do I.

Which Is Worse?

Consider this scenario: You're in the position of a terrorist detained by the intelligence service of the country whose citizens you were trying with all your might to slaughter. You are given the choice either to be tortured in order to provide information on the plans of your terrorist associates or be executed.

If you're tortured no permanent physical damage will be done to you, and moreover, you will have complete control over how much pain you'll have to endure. You know that as soon as you're forthcoming with the information that will save thousands of innocent lives the torture will immediately cease. If, on the other hand, you're executed quite possibly your spouse and children will be executed with you as may many of your innocent friends. Which would be worse in your mind, the torture or the execution?

I ask the question because it illustrates the hypocrisy of many of those who've expressed moral indignation in the wake of the Democrats' report on CIA "enhanced interrogation" practices in the wake of 9/11. Much of the Progressive left is livid that the CIA and, by extension, the Bush administration were practicing things like sleep deprivation, threats, uncomfortable positions, water boarding (on three people), and something called rectal hydration (don't ask).

Meanwhile, the Progressives are silent about their own leader in the White House carrying out a policy of drone strikes on terrorists that have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of innocents along with the intended targets. Some of these strikes have even killed American citizens.

I'm not criticizing the drone strikes, but I'd like those who are so outraged by what the CIA did in order to prevent another 9/11, and who are so nonchalant about what President Obama is doing, to answer one simple question: Which is worse, the infliction of pain which produces no lasting physical effects to speak of, or the infliction of death on not only terrorists but also their families?

If you're outraged by the former but haven't had much to say about the latter then some of us would like to know why.

ESPN?

Remember when the media was swooning over "the most brilliant man" ever to occupy the White House? Remember advisor Valerie Jarrett saying of President Obama that:

I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is.... He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never been challenged intellectually.... He's been bored to death his whole life. He's just too talented to do what ordinary people do.

So how does a man of such extraordinary intellectual abilities choose to spend his time when he's not golfing?

I have to say this is disconcerting. He's the leader of the free world, for heaven's sake. He wanted this job, it's going to make him very rich some day (perhaps as a commentator on ESPN), and he has a responsibility to all of us to devote himself to it. If he'd rather watch sports talk shows then he should quit the Oval Office and let Joe Biden take over.

Well, maybe not that, but look, I don't begrudge the Vacationer-in-Chief some down time, but I do get a little perplexed when I hear pundits praise Mr. Obama's genius. I mean, maybe brilliant men do spend time watching sports and shows about sports, but somehow I can't see someone whose intellect is alleged to be imported directly from Mt. Olympus spending hours every day watching ESPN.

Why doesn't the media ever ask him what books he reads, as they did both George Bush and Sarah Palin, or what movies he watches, or who his favorite writers are? Why don't they ask him, as they always do Republicans, his views on evolution, or the significance of Antietam, or the work of James Madison?

I wonder if they never ask because they're afraid they know the response they'll get from the man who only learned after he became a candidate for the nation's highest office that there are 50, not somewhere between 57 and 60, states and that military medics are not "corpse" men.

This is not meant to be a criticism of Mr. Obama, though it may sound that way. A lot of good, ordinary people enjoy sports and don't know some basic facts about the country. It's rather a criticism of a media which consistently misled the American people about Mr. Obama's qualifications for high office and which set such high expectations (A Nobel Peace Prize in his first few months in office!?) for his presidency that it was inevitable that he'd fail to live up to them.

Soon we're going to start hearing the same sort of glowing encomiums to the genius of Hillary Clinton. Hopefully, voters will be less gullible this time around.

The Origin and Importance of the Moon

We've been following a series at Evolution News and Views on the uniqueness of the earth, a uniqueness which suggests that life may be very rare in the universe. Properties of the universe, and particularly those of our immediate neighborhood, seem incredibly fortuitous. Myriad aspects of our planet, our solar system and our galaxy have to be just right for life to exist on earth.

One of those parts of the solar system upon which life on earth depends is our moon. It turns out that had we no moon life couldn't be sustained.

One of the many processes on earth that make life possible is the cycling of carbon from the atmosphere preventing the buildup of greenhouse gases. The process is dependent upon plate tectonics and plate tectonics depend upon the crust of the earth being relatively thin so that crustal plates can slide easily over the underlying mantle. Plate tectonics exist on no other planet in our solar system and may be very unusual elsewhere as well. To have plate tectonics a planet has to be about the size of the earth, have extensive surface water, and have a thin crust.

Why is the earth's crust relatively thin? The answer has to do with the fact that we have an unusual moon:

How did the Earth get such a large moon? It is far too large for the Earth to have captured it, and because of its chemistry and orbital parameters, the only plausible model is an impact scenario. The Moon's creation event is also the most plausible explanation for the resultant thin crust of the Earth that enables its efficient plate tectonics. The most recent models suggest the Earth collided with a body with a mass comparable to itself. These two bodies merged, and became the Earth-Moon system.

The Earth ended up with more mass, and received the cores of both bodies, giving it a large iron rich core, and more radioactive elements. This may explain some of the differences between Venus and Earth. With more iron and heat-generating radioactive materials, the Earth is able to generate its large magnetic field, which Venus lacks. The Moon ended up with more crustal lighter density materials, leaving the crust of the Earth thinner than it would have been.

Earth's plate tectonics can be so efficient because the crust is very thin, cracked, and can slide over the mantle much more easily. Plate tectonics are also responsible for the continent-versus-land distribution. Without it, Earth would be a waterworld, and there would be no carbonate-silicate cycle to maintain the climate over billions of years. We wouldn't be here, and likely no technological civilization of any kind.

Current simulations suggest that only about 2 percent of Earth-sized planets should form an Earth-Moon type system. And by an amazing coincidence, the Moon's size is also quite important to the stability of the Earth's tilt. If it had been any larger, it would destabilize our tilt, for example. On the other hand, much smaller, and Earth's climate would have suffered more frequent and severe ice ages. The other planets in our solar system contribute to this as well, as the interactions between the Moon's influence on the Earth, and the other planets' gravitational effects could have been comparable, [if] the large planets [were] not spaced widely, [there'd be] chaotic swings in the tilt of the Earth's axis. So again the large planets, and their orbits, play a role in the habitability of the Earth.

Here's an animation of what scientists think happened:

Something the video tacitly illustrates is that one advantage of having a large moon is that its gravity sucks up a lot of debris that would otherwise bombard the earth making life, especially early life, a lot dicier than it already was.

The Crucial Question on Torture

Yesterday, the Senate Intelligence Committee under Senator Dianne Feinstein released their report on the CIA's interrogation methods in the wake of 9/11, and has set the media all aflutter. I acknowledge up front that I haven't read the report, so I'll not comment on its contents except in the general sense that the report condemns the CIA for its use of torture to extract information about future attacks from some of the men responsible for the 9/11 atrocity.

Also, we should set aside at the outset the hypocrisy of politicians like Feinstein who condemn the CIA for engaging in tactics which both she and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi were made aware of at the time and which they at least tacitly condoned and encouraged.

Perhaps, too, we should set aside the unseemly political nature of a report drafted by Democrat staffers and released on the same day that Jonathan Gruber was testifying before the House on his claim that dishonest methods were employed to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act. Lest anyone think the roll out of the report was not political just ask yourself whether you think it would have been released at all had Democrats been in the White House when the events it describes occurred or released on the same day that some Republican was being grilled by the Democrat-controlled Senate.

But I want to set aside the hypocrisy and the sordid political motives because as awful as they are, they're irrelevant to the main issue, an issue I haven't seen or heard anyone in the media yet discuss. It can be put in the form of a basic question: Is torture absolutely, categorically, always wrong?

If the answer is no, then the next question is, under what circumstances might it be justified? Was it justified, for instance, in the wake of 9/11 when the entire country had every reason to expect that that attack was just the first in a series of mass murders that terrorists were planning to inflict on the nation? If not, then what circumstances would justify it?

If the answer to the basic question is yes, torture is wrong always and everywhere under any circumstances, then the next question is, upon what grounds is that judgment based? If the person making the judgment is a secularist or naturalist then their claim is groundless, since on naturalism there can be no absolute wrongs, nor any objective wrongs of any sort. On secularism the only grounds for making a meaningful moral claim, i.e. religious grounds, are disallowed. In other words, when secularists/naturalists say that torture is absolutely wrong they're either telling us nothing more than that they personally don't like it, or they're telling us that many of those who, unlike themselves, do have a solid ground for making a moral claim, i.e. those who base their judgments on what they take to be the will of God, believe it's absolutely wrong. In neither case, however, does the secularist/naturalist claim have any rational purchase on the rest of us, and there's no compelling moral reason to pay them any heed.

So, what about those who base their conviction upon what they believe God has commanded of us? They certainly have a solid basis for condemning torture, but it doesn't follow that they're right when they say it's wrong always and categorically.

The theist (Christian, Jewish, or Muslim) is commanded by God to do justice and be compassionate. It follows from this that we are to respect others as persons. Thus, it would seem that torture could never be right (or at least never be not wrong) because by its very nature it certainly seems uncompassionate. Nevertheless, sometimes it's not clear who the recipients of our justice and compassion should be. If a terrorist gang is plotting to kill hundreds of school children by blowing up a school and one of them we have reason to believe has intimate knowledge of the plan has been apprehended, but will not talk, it seems prima facie uncompassionate to inflict pain to compel him to reveal those plans. But it also seems uncompassionate and unjust in excelsis to the children and their families to refrain from doing whatever we can to save their lives. In such a situation it seems to me that our moral duty is to the children and that the pain inflicted on the terrorist to induce him to divulge the needed information is, though distasteful and even ghastly, morally warranted, provided the terrorist knows that it will stop the moment he discloses the information that will save those children's lives.

One objection to this line of thought that we quite often hear is that torture never works, but how can anyone know that? The most we can say is that it doesn't always produce accurate intelligence, but if everything else has been tried and failed it's nonsense to assert that we shouldn't try something else that might work just because it also might not. In fact, using what the CIA euphemistically calls "enhanced interrogation techniques" apparently did work on the two or three terrorists in Guantanamo who were subjected to them.

Santa Claus and St. Nicholas

As we approach the Christmas season I thought it might be worthwhile to rerun a post from last December on the origin of the legend of Santa Claus and why Santa is referred to as St. Nick: Theologian James Parker offers us a brief history of the original Santa Claus (a transliteration of "Saint Nicholas") and how the myths around him grew.

Here's an excerpt:

Most people simply do not realize the rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized and sanitized contemporary version pales in comparison with the deeply Christian ethos and content of the original.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him in the fear and admonition of the Lord and taught him "sacred books" from the age of 5. He was forced to grow up quickly upon the sudden death of his parents.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he had the desire to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute with three daughters. Without marriage dowry money, the daughters would be condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later as a teenager, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine. Upon returning home he felt called to ministry and was subsequently ordained. He spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly elected him bishop, and he became known for his holiness, passion for the Gospel and zeal. He challenged the old gods and paganism at the principal temple in his district (to the god Artemis), and it was said that the evil spirits "fled howling before him."

There's more to the story. Nicholas was imprisoned under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan.

Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they refused to renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was the color of vermilion. Bishop Nicholas was also said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

Nicholas opposed Arianism, the belief that Jesus was a created being and not divine, and according to some perhaps apocryphal traditions, actually attended the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. where he got into a physical altercation with Arias himself.

Whether that's true or not, the story of St. Nicholas is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular mythology surrounding him. Read the whole thing at the link.

What Caused Eric Garner's Death

Marc Fitch, writing at The Federalist, is a mental health worker who trains others in how to restrain difficult patients. He offers his expertise to clarify why Officer Pantaleo was not indicted by the grand jury in the death last summer of Eric Garner in New York. What he says makes sense. Here's the short version:

Garner didn't die from a chokehold as has been assumed by many, including me. Garner died because the officer's weight was on Garner's back and that weight plus Garner's obesity prevented him from getting air into his lungs. This is called Restraint-Related Positional Asphyxia.

As Fitch describes it:

Eric Garner’s death was ruled a homicide due to a chokehold and chest compression. However, while most media outlets have been focused on the chokehold, many have ignored the dangerous, yet overlooked, chest compression known as Restraint-Related Positional Asphyxia... it doesn’t appear that the officer held onto Garner’s throat long enough to directly cause his death. Rather, restraint-related positional asphyxia is the result of the patient being face down on the ground or having someone put his weight on the individual’s chest, leaving the patient unable to expand his or her chest to inhale. In this way (and if this is truly the case), the death could be ruled a homicide (death caused by another human being) without being intentional murder.

Officer Daniel Pantaleo is seen in the video first putting Garner in a chokehold and the group of officers wrestling him to the ground. However, once face-down on the concrete to put the cuffs on, Pantaleo is kneeling on Garner’s upper back and head. It was at this point that Garner began to say he couldn’t breathe.

Face-down on the ground, the patient is often unable to expand his chest to take a breath. This condition is exacerbated by people piling on top of the patient in an effort to keep him or her down, the patient’s weight and health conditions, and his or her stress level at the time. Obviously, Garner was in a stressful situation at the time, which would result in increased blood flow and heart rate. Those would, in turn, cause his breathing to become more rapid and strained. He also had officers placing their weight on top of him as they tried to place the handcuffs on him. Garner was about 350 pounds; his own body weight alone would have made it difficult to expand his chest when face-down on concrete. The added weight of the officers increased this weight and probably made it impossible for a body to withstand.

The police, however, put a suspect face-down in order to handcuff him. Whether or not this can be avoided through new tactics, I don’t know. To some degree it seems necessary in order to facilitate the arrest, but the dangers are amply demonstrated.

This raises a couple of questions. Were the officers following proper procedures? Were they negligent in not heeding Garner's claims to be unable to breathe? I don't know, but I simply have to ask myself what I would think were that my father or my son whose pleas were being ignored by the police. I'm pretty sure I would conclude that they used excessive force. Does that merit an indictment? Only if there was reason to believe that a conviction for manslaughter could be won in a criminal court and this would probably mean that it would have to be proven that proper procedures were not followed. The grand jury apparently felt this was not achievable.

Nevertheless, the whole episode is deeply troubling.

Yes, Garner was breaking a typically stupid bureaucratic ordinance enacted to prevent people from escaping paying a tax to the city on cigarettes. Yes, the police must enforce the law even if it is a stupid bureaucratic ordinance. Yes, Garner was wrong to resist arrest. Yes, Garner should not have allowed his weight to balloon to 350 lbs., but granting all that, a man is dead as a result of the police having ignored his cries that he couldn't breathe. As Fitch says, "having him face-down on the concrete for an extended period of time while screaming that he couldn’t breathe can be seen as negligence on the part of everyone involved."

Even though the grand jury didn't indict, Fitch suggests that Garner's family has a good civil case against the officer and NYPD. In any case, there seems to be no justification for turning this tragedy into a racial issue, but that won't stop the Al Sharptons of the world from doing just that. UPDATE: As if to make that last sentence prophetic here's Eric Garner's widow trying to make the point that her husband's murder was not racial and Al Sharpton trying to convince us that it is:

The UVA Rape Case

Here's what happened. A woman named Jackie accused a group of men in a University of Virginia fraternity of having serially raped her at a party at their frat house. Rolling Stone magazine's Sabrina Rubin Erdely wrote a big spread on the alleged assault. It confirmed what people believed about the rape culture on campus and was vindication, of sorts, for liberals who had forfeited so much credibility in their rush to judgment in the similar Duke lacrosse players case in 2006.

Rolling Stone, however, in a case of journalistic malpractice that will probably be taught in journo schools for decades to come failed to actually interview any of the accused rapists. Erdely and her editors just swallowed Jackie's story hook, line, and sinker.

The Washington Post decided to do some actual investigation of the account and turned up a few interesting facts which have cast a great deal of suspicion on Erdely's account, and now RS is walking back their story and apologizing for their journalistic negligence. You can read a good summary of all these developments here.

Part of RS's problem in this episode is that they are a lefty magazine and the left has been marinating for decades in a bitter stew of assumptions about men. It's assumed on much of the left that all males are sexual predators, that all men are rapists of one sort or another, that women who report rape are never to be doubted, and that actual facts don't matter. Indeed, what matters in the worldview of people who write for magazines like Rolling Stone is whether the charges fit their preferred narrative. If so, then the allegations are "true" regardless of what really happened and the oppressors are to be punished for their crime of being males and ergo rapists, whether they personally committed the crime or not. Perversely, the accused are seen as a synecdoche of male patriarchy and by punishing them a blow is struck for justice on behalf of women everywhere.

Given this environment on the left, RS probably saw no need to question the authenticity of Jackie's account, and now they've seriously jeopardized the reputation of their magazine and made themselves a laughingstock much like the District Attorney in the Duke lacrosse case, Michael Nifong, made himself the butt of countless jokes and ill-will and finally suffered the ruination of his career.

Adding to the chuckles over the left's discomfiture and their absurd worldview is a piece by Charles C. Cooke at National Review which deserves to go down in the annals of journalism as a classic example of parody.

Here's a teaser:

It is with a heavy heart and a furrowed brow that I must conclude this afternoon that Rolling Stone, once a venerated pop-culture institution, is a rape-apology website. A few hours ago, in a “note to our readers,” the magazine cast aspersions on its own story about an alleged rape at the University of Virginia, doing a disservice to women everywhere and buying into an anti-female, denialist agenda that needs smashing from the ground up. As students of feminism know, any institution that would question the testimony of a young woman is by definition buying into a culture of “skepticism” that holds women to be untrustworthy and wishes to derail any conversation about Rape Culture in favor of maintaining the patriarchy and the status quo.

Rolling Stone claims today that it has “concerns about the evidence.” This, I’m afraid, is nothing more than coded obfuscation. Here, the outfit is demonstrating an appalling unwillingness to prioritize the “she said” part of its investigation, thereby bowing to those who would scrutinize and scoff at the lived experience of women everywhere. When the magazine refers to “new information” and to “discrepancies” in the alleged victim’s “account,” it is merely attempting to draw attention from broader truths about sexual violence.

When it throws its source under the bus, conceding that it has “come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” it is broadcasting, loud and clear, that women are not to be believed – effectively declaring them, in fact, second-class citizens. “Rape apologists,” Slate’s Amanda Marcotte clarifies, “think that if they can ‘discredit’ one rape story, that means no other rape stories can be true, either.” It is sad to see an institution such as Rolling Stone harboring such disgraceful aspirations. As Jezebel’s Anna Merlan might say: They are “idiots” — yet more people hellbent on teaching our society a class that Rachel Sklar calls “Rape denial 101.”

Read the whole thing. Cooke's parody of so much of contemporary radical feminist thinking is note perfect.

The lesson in this episode - for all of us, but especially for liberals - is the same as it was in the cases of the Duke lacrosse players, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner. It's to make sure we've seen or heard all the relevant facts before solidifying our judgments, particularly if that judgment is going to contribute to the destruction of other people's lives.

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken. The story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities are purely coincidental.]:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, it was all over, finished.

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

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

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

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

The Death of Eric Garner

Sean Davis at The Federalist has a good piece on the death of Eric Garner last summer. In case you missed it, Garner was illegally selling loose cigarettes on the streets of New York City last July 17. The police, charged with enforcing the absurd ordinance which prohibits this, tried to arrest him.

Garner, who was very large, refused to allow himself to be arrested although he did not try to harm or threaten the officers. At this point several officers sought to subdue Garner in order to handcuff him. One of the policemen, Officer Daniel Pantaleo, placed Garner in a choke hold that had been banned in the police department since the mid-nineties because it had resulted in several deaths nationwide. Garner was asphyxiated.

The whole thing was filmed by a witness. Here's the video, but you're cautioned that it's very hard to watch.

Garner does not appear to have been a thug and didn't deserve to be treated as if he were. Yesterday a grand jury declined to indict the policeman who employed the banned choke hold, and a lot of people are wondering why.

I want to give the police the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, and it is true that Mr. Garner was wrong not to follow the officers' commands to allow himself to be cuffed. Even so, his defiance did not merit his death, and it's hard to see how the officer responsible is not guilty of second degree manslaughter since a person is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree when he recklessly causes the death of another person. Davis writes:

The second-degree manslaughter charge requires only two factors: 1) the person charged must have caused the death of the victim, and 2) the perpetrator must have caused the death of the victim via reckless means. As the video shows, the officer clearly caused the death of Eric Garner, who was alive until the officer put him in a chokehold, a move which is banned by the NYPD for good reason.

This country was shaken by the Trayvon Martin/ George Zimmerman episode and the more recent Michael Brown/Darren Wilson shooting. I didn't think, based on the evidence, that either Zimmerman or Wilson should have been indicted, but I'm mystified as to why the officer who strangled Eric Garner was not indicted. I hope we'll soon hear the evidence that caused the grand jury to decide against it.

A lot of people are using this tragedy to once again stoke racial animosities but there's no indication that race played any role in this incident. In fact, the ranking police officer at the scene, the officer who supervised the arrest, was a black female sergeant named Kizzi Adoni.

What this appears to be is not an example of police racism, as much as the left might like to paint it in those colors, but rather a case of an excessive use of force.

Maybe there's a good reason for the grand jury's failure to indict Officer Pantaleo, but if so we should be told what it is. Otherwise, it appears that a man who recklessly caused the death of another is not going to be held to account, and that's not justice.

Why Everyone Hates You

Perhaps you've heard the story. A low level staffer to a backbench Republican congressman, a woman named Elizabeth Lauten, put some uncharitable remarks about the Obama girls deportment at the annual pardoning of the turkey ceremonies on her Facebook page. It was crass, Lauten apologized and was even fired, but the national lefty media has gone into orbit in their coverage of her faux pas. In the process they've displayed a level of hypocrisy extraordinary even for them.

Mollie Hemmingway has a wonderful column on this at The Federalist titled "Dear Media: This Elizabeth Lauten Nonsense Is Why Everyone Hates You." It's so good I'd like to copy and paste the whole thing, but I'll settle for some excerpts and encourage you to go to the link and read it for yourself.

Hemmingway notes that,

[Lauten's] comments were posted on Twitter where the social media mob fed their hankering for constant outrage. in a city where you can keep your job even if you’re involved in serious scandals at the IRS, State Department, Veterans Affairs or the Department of Justice, an actual job loss is refreshing, in its own way.

Still, what in the world was the media doing reporting on this non-story and firing up the mob? The Washington Free Beacon reported that “major media outlets are pouring resources into tracking her moves and digging into her past.” This included two network news vans camping outside of her parents’ home in North Carolina and a search of Lauten’s leaked juvenile records and college writings.

This is insanity and each and every person involved should be ashamed of himself or herself.

Hemmingway goes on to point out that the same Washington Post that could not summon the enthusiasm to write about the horrors of Philadelphia's murderous abortionist Kermit Gosnell has run a dozen stories on Elizabeth Lauten, even assigning a foreign affairs reporter to dig into Lauten's past where the intrepid investigator discovered, mirabile dictu, that Lauten in high school had opinions on Darfur and Saddam Hussein!

It may surprise you to learn that more journalistic investigative effort has been devoted to uncovering the past of this one obscure staffer than any of the liberal media could bring to bear on presidential candidate Barack Obama's academic record prior to the 2008 election.

Hemmingway writes:

[Columnist] Ruth Marcus ... bashes this low-level staffer for critiquing the daughters, then notes she herself did it to the Bush girls - including attacking them for showing so much “cleavage”, being churlish, and their speaking style - but that it was OK because she did it under the guise of parody and they had notable busts. I’m not joking. You can read it for yourself. As John Podhoretz said, “Ruth Marcus’s double standard FOR HERSELF is absolutely astonishing.”

The Lauten story has been all over other print and broadcast media. So we know that the national media is deeply concerned about stray insults directed toward the Obama family from Congressional staffers. Is raping people worse than that? Or not? I’m confused. Because a few years ago Congressional staffer Donny Ray Williams, Jr., was indicted for a series of alleged sexual assaults and it got only one “local crime” story in the Washington Post. Yesterday he pled guilty and that also generated one story in the Washington Post. If there’s network coverage of this congressional staffer raping people, I’m not seeing it. Did I mention he was a staff director for Democrats on a Senate panel?

Or what about child rape? We’re still opposed to that, right? I only ask because Terry Bean, a major campaign donor to President Obama — and a co-founder of the Human Rights Campaign — was just charged with sexual assault of a minor. And the Washington Post hasn’t covered it, according to a search of their archives. I mean, there are pictures of him on Air Force One and he was at the White House seven times including for a state dinner. He’s a member of the DNC. I know, I know, he’s certainly not as important as Lauten, but maybe a single story would be in order? Maybe that [foreign affairs] reporter could dig around and see if Bean wrote anything interesting in high school or something?

I already noted Ruth Marcus’ stunning hypocrisy regarding treatment of presidential children. On Twitter, S.M. noted that Salon’s Joan Walsh had her own troubles with consistency on whether it’s OK or not OK to go after presidential children. And this is not the first time Walsh has been called out for her double standards on the topic. Let’s also note another example. When the painfully unfunny David Letterman made a “joke” about Willow Palin getting impregnated by Alex Rodriguez, the New York Times’ “ethicist” Randy Cohen wrote an 1,100-word qualified defense.

See, he explained, it’s OK because Letterman meant to suggest Bristol Palin was a slut, not Willow Palin, the 14-year-old. According to Cohen, David Letterman “should not be fired. He should not even have apologized.” Bristol was fair game even at the age of 17, he said, because she chose to participate in the presidential campaign. Cohen said that Letterman is “an honest guy,” “ethical,” and “determined to do the right thing” (NB: this was written a few months before news broke that Letterman’s multiple affairs caused him to get caught up in a $2 million extortion plot). Further, Bristol was “a legitimate subject” if “a slightly pathetic one.” He conceded the “joke” was a “bit bullying.” Cohen said that Willow and Bristol’s parents were faking umbrage or were unable “to get the joke.”

Only recently, you might remember, a CNN host told viewers to “sit back and enjoy” listening to a woman traumatized by assault, saying it’s the “best audio in years.” That woman? Bristol Palin, of course.

What’s perhaps most surprising in the media coverage isn’t that the New York Times covered the story or that the Washington Post put one of its eleventy billion stories on the matter on the front page. It’s that even the broadcast networks with extremely limited time constraints covered it.

And they covered it immediately. The Free Beacon reports that networks news combined to give nearly four and a half minutes of coverage on Monday night. These same outlets either dramatically delayed or completely failed to cover Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber saying the healthcare law was passed in 2010 thanks to a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of American voters.”

NBC aired a segment on Lauten that lasted more than two minutes and featured White House correspondent Kristen Welker giving a detailed breakdown of the story. Welker interviewed Ruth Marcus — yes, the same woman who made jokes about the cleavage of the Bush daughters — for the piece.

[M]aybe Jonathan Gruber said something about Darfur in high school? Who can we get to check that out?

The media constantly tries to punish Republicans and conservatives for the same things they ignore when Democrats and liberals do them. It's so obvious and so dishonest that very few people have much respect any more for journalists. It's a shame because there are some good ones, but the good ones find themselves in a profession increasingly dominated by ideological hacks. They deserve the skewering Hemmingway gives them.

The Goldilocks Sun

Last week we posted a piece on how delicately balanced the solar system must be in order for biologically advanced life to exist on earth. The balance needed to sustain such life, however, involves far more than just the solar system. It turns out that the star which supports the life-bearing planet must also meet a number of requirements.

Daniel Bakken at Evolution News and Views mentions a few of those conditions. He notes among other things that in order to support life a star must be (I'm paraphrasing him here):

1. A single star, not a binary star: Many stars in our galaxy are binaries.

2. Must be just the right size and temperature: The stellar classification system used by astronomers ranks stars in surface temperature, and assigns letters to them, in the sequence O, B, A, F, G, K and M, O being the hottest, largest stars and M being the lowest in temperature, and smallest in mass.

It's likely that only F and G dwarf stars are homes for potentially habitable planets as they are stable for billions of years, yet are large enough so their habitable zones are outside the tidal locking limit (the region where the star's gravity "locks" the planets rotation so that only one side of the planet ever faces the star). The Sun is a G-type dwarf star. F-type dwarf stars are slightly larger. Stars between O and A are large and evolve too quickly, providing only a short-lived habitable zone (the zone around the star where temperatures are moderate enough to allow for liquid water and life to exist).

The K and M dwarf stars are smaller red dwarfs. A serious problem with red dwarf stars in the K and M classes is their energetic flares and coronal ejection events. Potentially habitable planets need to orbit closer to these stars to be in their habitable zones. Yet the exposure to their stellar winds and more frequent and energetic flares becomes a serious issue for habitability. Because of these stars' smaller mass, ejections get released with more violence. Any planet's atmosphere would be subject to this ionizing radiation and likely expose any surface life to much more damaging radiation.

3. Emit just the right amount of UV radiation: Life needs enough UV radiation to allow chemical reactions, but not so much as to destroy complex carbon molecules like DNA. Just this flux requirement alone requires the host star to have a minimum stellar mass of 0.6 solar masses (a solar mass is equal to the mass of our sun), and a maximum mass of 1.9 solar masses.

In other words, our sun is not just an average star. In many respects it's unusual. Not only does it satisfy the above conditions, but it's also located in just the right place in our galaxy. It's between spiral arms where it's less likely to collide with debris, and also far enough from the center of the galaxy and not too high above nor too far below the plane of the galactic disk so that harmful radiation from the center is blocked by the intervening matter.

When we factor together all the conditions that must be met by the various parts of the solar system in order for intelligent life to exist anywhere within it the probability that any other star/planet system in the universe would duplicate these traits is dramatically diminished. It may be that, contrary to popular belief, earth is the only place in this enormous universe in which advanced life exists or even could exist. That's a stunning possibility.

Xmas

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, but perhaps their discomfiture is misplaced, as theologian R.C. Sproul explains:

People seem to express chagrin about seeing Christ’s name dropped and replaced by this symbol for an unknown quantity X. Every year you see the signs and the bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to this substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ.

First of all, you have to understand that it is not the letter X that is put into Christmas. We see the English letter X there, but actually what it involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has come through church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ....There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect.

This is interesting and helpful, but I still suspect that a lot of people use Xmas to avoid writing Christmas and have no idea what the etymology of the word is. In any case, Sproul goes on to explain the origin of the fish as a symbol for Christianity:

The church has used the symbol of the fish historically because it is an acronym. Fish in Greek (ichthus) involved the use of the first letters for the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” So the early Christians would take the first letter of those words and put those letters together to spell the Greek word for fish. That’s how the symbol of the fish became the universal symbol of Christendom.

If you already knew all this you have VP's permission to feel pleased with yourself. If you didn't know it before, now you do.

Christmas Gift Idea

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our ten years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd. It's an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare put it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-size university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the person who's perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It has been said that ideas have consequences and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

The book is available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reader/reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it on your Christmas shopping list.

Does America Have a Racism Problem?

Writing at CNN in the wake of the decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown LZ Granderson states that we have a real problem with racism in this country.

He quotes Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP, who claimed that "What we have continued to see linger is the perception of young African-American men as dangerous and criminal. Until we begin to reverse this perception, and until all Americans -- white Americans in particular -- believe in the humanity of black people, we will continue to have these incidents of violence."

In other words, it wasn't Brown's actions which resulted in his death, it was the racism of the cop who shot him. She may be right, of course. Wilson may have done what he did because he was a bigot. It's possible, but who knows what was in his heart at the time he pulled the trigger? I certainly don't and I doubt very much that Ms Ifill does either. Why is it assumed that Mr. Wilson wouldn't have acted in the same manner had Brown been a white kid who punched him in the face? How does Ms Ifill or Mr. Granderson know that white Americans don't "believe in the humanity" of black people? Well, Granderson cites statistics:

A USA Today study found at least 70 police departments nationwide arrested blacks at a rate 10 times higher than nonblacks. Furthermore, "only 173 of the 3,538 police departments USA Today examined arrested black people at a rate equal to or lower than other racial groups." This isn't a coincidence or a fluke. This is a problem too many whites don't see, and too many blacks are besieged by.

We can agree that there's surely a problem here (although given that so many police departments operate in areas where the population is largely comprised of blacks, I'm not sure how significant that second statistic is), but I think it's simply nonsense to say that "too many whites" don't see it. I think they see it all too clearly. The problem is that blacks like Granderson, and many white liberals, are simply oblivious to what whites see.

What many whites see in their daily newspapers and evening newscasts is a minority group that commits crime out of all proportion to its size as a percentage of the population. They see a minority group that evidently seethes with hatred for whites to the extent that they're disproportionately inclined to victimize whites. If blacks are arrested at a much higher rate than other racial groups, then just maybe it's because they commit crimes at a much higher rate than other groups.

After reciting some of the claims made by black leaders concerning "the scourge of white-on-black violence" the editors at Discover the Networks offer some statistics on such violence:

Viewing America as a hotbed of racism, leftist civil-rights leaders and academics routinely promote the notion that white-on-black violence is a major scourge plaguing the black community. Al Sharpton once said that such violence had reached “epidemic proportions.” Professor Cornel West characterizes African Americans as our country's “exemplary targets of racial hatred.” Robert Staples, a former professor of sociology at a University of California medical school, has spoken of “a sort of genocide, targeting young black males.” Mary Frances Berry, former chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, says that “the primary explanation for racially motivated violence against blacks has been the need of a segment of the white population to preserve [its] belief in the inferiority of blacks, and to maintain the social and political subordination of an historically outcast group by any means, including violence.”

But in fact, white-on-black crime is a statistical rarity. According to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), an estimated 320,082 whites were victims of black violence in 2010, while 62,593 blacks were victims of white violence. That same year, according to the Census Bureau, the white and black populations in the U.S. were 196,817,552 and 37,685,848, respectively. Whites therefore committed acts of interracial violence at a rate of 32 per 100,000, while the black rate was 849 per 100,000. In other words, the “average” black was statistically 26.5 times more likely to commit criminal violence against a white, than vice versa. Moreover, blacks who committed violent crimes chose white victims 47.7% of the time, whereas whites who committed violent crimes targeted black victims only 3.9% of the time.

For many years and for a wide variety of crimes, this pattern has been among the most consistent findings of criminal-justice research. Nationwide in 2010, there were approximately 67,755 black-on-white aggravated assaults, as compared to just 1,748 white-on-black crimes of the same description. Thus, blacks committed acts of interracial aggravated assault at a rate of 181 per 100,000—fully 201 times higher than the white rate of 0.9 per 100,000. Moreover, blacks guilty of aggravated assault chose white victims 44.1% of the time, while whites who committed aggravated assault selected black victims only six-tenths of 1% of the time.

Also in 2010, there were approximately 13,463 black-on-white rapes and 38,744 black-on-white robberies. Blacks guilty of rape chose white victims 50.2% of the time, and blacks who committed robbery chose white victims 48% of the time. By contrast, the number of white-on-black rapes and robberies reported in the NCVS surveys were so infinitesimal, that in each case whites were estimated to have accounted for 0.0% of all rapes and robberies committed against black victims in the United States.

If these statistics are accurate then several conclusions follow. First, we do indeed have a problem with racial violence in this country, but the problem is not primarily with white people. Second, if young black men resent being profiled by police then perhaps they should blame their fellow black males who are statistically far more likely to commit crimes than are any other group (If cops are such racists why aren't Asians the targets of police harassment and brutality?). Third, if interracial crime is a consequence of race hatred then by far the largest deposit of that hatred rests in the black community.

To be sure, whites sometimes say and do awkward, insensitive things. They sometimes tell racially-tinged jokes and indulge in stereotypes that blacks find offensive, but they rarely commit acts motivated by racial animus which actually and deliberately harm someone.

The out-of-whack statistics that Granderson cites will never be meliorated until responsible black voices stop imputing them to the phantom of ubiquitous white racism and instead start laying the blame where it belongs, in a community in which fatherlessness is epidemic and too many undisciplined youngsters enter their teen age years unequipped and unwilling to function in socially productive ways.

If we can't accurately identify the problem there's not much chance we'll ever solve it.

Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation

Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. On September 28th, 1863, a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.

During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861, he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, however, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.

She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution." Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states. President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.

According to an April 1, 1864, letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, this proclamation was actually written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to benefit Union troops. Here's Lincoln's proclamation:

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

In some respects the proclamation reads as if it could have been written today. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Political Nihilism

Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal is certainly no bomb-thrower, but even she has come to the conclusion that the current administration is sui generis, i.e. completely unique in American history, and not in a good way. In a column at the Wall Street Journal (subscription required)she writes:

What they [the Obama administration] forget is that facts largely decide what history thinks — outcomes, what happened, what it means. What they also forget, or perhaps never knew, is that the great [presidencies] are always constructive. They don’t divide and tear down. They build, gather in, create, bend, meld, and in so doing move things forward. That’s not this crowd.

This White House seems driven — does it understand this? — by a kind of political nihilism. They agitate, aggravate, fray and separate. Look at three great domestic issues just the past few weeks.

ObamaCare, whose very legitimacy was half killed by the lie that “If you like your plan, you can keep it,” and later by the incompetence of its implementation, has been done in now by the mindless, highhanded bragging of a technocrat who helped build it, and who amused himself the past few years explaining that the law’s passage was secured only by lies, and the lies were effective because the American people are stupid.

I don’t know how ObamaCare will go, but it won’t last as it is. If the White House had wisdom, they’d declare that they’d won on the essential argument — health coverage is a right for all — and go back to the drawing board with Congress. The only part of the ObamaCare law that is popular is its intention, not its reality. The White House should declare victory and redraw the bill. But the White House is a wisdom-free zone.

The president’s executive action on immigration is an act of willful nihilism that he himself had argued against in the past. It is a sharp stick in the eye of the new congressional majority. It is at odds with — it defies — the meaning and message of the last election, and therefore is destructive to the reputation of democracy itself. It is huge in its impact but has only a sole cause, the president’s lone will. It damages the standing of our tottery political institutions rather than strengthening them, which is what they desperately need, and sets a template for future executive abuse. It will surely encourage increased illegal immigration and thus further erode the position of the American working class.

And there is the Keystone XL pipeline and the administration’s apparent intent to veto a bill that allows it. There the issue is not only the jobs the pipeline would create, and not only the infrastructure element. It is something more. If it is done right, the people who build the pipeline could be pressed to take on young men — skill-less, aimless — and get them learning, as part of a crew, how things are built and what it is to be a man who builds them.

On top of that, the building of the pipeline would show the world that America is capable of coming back, that we’re not only aware of our good fortune and engineering genius, we are pushing it hard into the future. America’s got her hard-hat on again. America is dynamic. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Not just this endless talk of limits, restrictions, fears and “Oh, we’re all going to melt in the warm global future!”

Which is sort of the spirit of this White House.

Great presidencies have a different one. They expand, move on, reach out....

“But history will be written by liberals.” Fair enough, and they will judge the president the more harshly because he failed to do anything that lasts. ObamaCare will be corrected and torn down piece by piece. The immigration order will be changed, slowed or undone by the courts, Congress or through executive actions down the road. Keystone will pass and a veto overridden.

And the president has failed liberals through unpopularity, which is another word for incompetence.

And if all that happens, if ten years hence nothing of the last eight remains, will we look back at the Obama years as a promise broken and an opportunity squandered? What lessons will we have learned?

A Very Sad Night for America

In the days to come there'll doubtless be much commentary on the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri.

I don't know whether or not the black community in Ferguson has been mistreated by the police over the years, as has been claimed. Maybe they have. Maybe some of the treatment about which the community has complained is warranted by the circumstances that exist in their community. In any case, even if there have been unjustifiable abuses by the Ferguson police force that doesn't mean that Officer Wilson was one of the offenders, and it is unconscionable to insist that he be made a scapegoat regardless of whether he acted properly in the shooting of Michael Brown.

Justice demands that individuals be treated according to how they behave, not according to the behavior of others who may have the same job or may be of the same religion or race. To demand an indictment and to riot, burn businesses, and threaten lives because the grand jury didn't believe the evidence warranted the indictment the rioters insisted upon is disgraceful.

Some of the businesses that were burned last night were small minority-owned enterprises whose owners have lost everything. No doubt all of the ruined businesses employed blacks who now find themselves out of work. The actions that deprived these people of their livelihoods were not only criminal they were incredibly stupid.

The rioters didn't care about the exculpatory evidence presented to the grand jury, much of it by black witnesses. They didn't care whether Officer Wilson was in danger of being done great harm by Michael Brown. Many of them probably didn't even care about Michael Brown.

What they cared about was that a white cop killed a black man, and given that solitary fact, the cop is, in their minds, ipso facto guilty. Moreover, if he's not punished they'll take matters into their own hands and burn down the stores and other businesses which employ them, and then they'll wonder in a year or two why no businesses want to open in their neighborhood and why they have to travel across town to shop.

If Americans cannot base guilt and innocence on facts and evidence, but must base it instead on some racial calculus - one tribe pitted against another - then we are in real danger of devolving toward the sort of mindless feuds and hatreds that plague the Arab world, and our civilization, built on the rule of law, truly is in peril.

David Harsanyi at The Federalist has some wise words on the Ferguson situation. I recommend his column.

Goldilocks Planet

Scientists have cataloged dozens of parameters that have to be just right for life to appear on earth. The improbability of a planet having so many of these properties is so high that some scientists have speculated that life, at least complex life, might exist nowhere else in the universe no matter how many other planets are out there. This is the thesis of such books as Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee and Privileged Planet by Gonzalez and Richards.

A few such parameters are:

...a galactic habitable zone, a central star and planetary system having the requisite character, the circumstellar habitable zone, a right sized terrestrial planet, the advantage of a gas giant guardian and large satellite, conditions needed to ensure the planet has a magnetosphere and plate tectonics, the chemistry of the lithosphere, atmosphere, and oceans, the role of "evolutionary pumps" such as massive glaciation and rare bolide impacts, and whatever led to the still mysterious Cambrian explosion of animal phyla. The emergence of intelligent life may have required yet other rare events.

New Scientist has a report on some research that shows yet another cosmic coincidence that allows life to exist on earth. It turns out that, as strange as it may seem at first, the orbit of Saturn has to be almost exactly as it is for life to exist on earth:

Earth's comfortable temperatures may be thanks to Saturn's good behaviour. If the ringed giant's orbit had been slightly different, Earth's orbit could have been wildly elongated, like that of a long-period comet.

Our solar system is a tidy sort of place: planetary orbits here tend to be circular and lie in the same plane, unlike the highly eccentric orbits of many exoplanets. Elke Pilat-Lohinger of the University of Vienna, Austria, was interested in the idea that the combined influence of Jupiter and Saturn – the solar system's heavyweights – could have shaped other planets' orbits. She used computer models to study how changing the orbits of these two giant planets might affect the Earth.

Earth's orbit is so nearly circular that its distance from the sun only varies between 147 and 152 million kilometres, or around 2 per cent about the average. Moving Saturn's orbit just 10 percent closer in would disrupt that by creating a resonance – essentially a periodic tug – that would stretch out the Earth's orbit by tens of millions of kilometres. That would result in the Earth spending part of each year outside the habitable zone, the ring around the sun where temperatures are right for liquid water.

Tilting Saturn's orbit would also stretch out Earth's orbit. According to a simple model that did not include other inner planets, the greater the tilt, the more the elongation increased. Adding Venus and Mars to the model stabilised the orbits of all three planets, but the elongation nonetheless rose as Saturn's orbit got more tilted. Pilat-Lohinger says a 20-degree tilt would bring the innermost part of Earth's orbit closer to the sun than Venus.

In other words, our solar system is like a delicately balanced ecosystem, all the parts of which seem to be important in making earth the sort of place where life can arise and be sustained. The odds of such a system existing elsewhere in the universe would seem to be very small.

It might be mentioned in passing that it's not just Saturn's orbit that makes life possible on earth. Scientists have shown that massive outer planets like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune act as gravitational vacuum sweepers sucking up a lot of debris that would otherwise invade the inner reaches of the solar system and threaten earth with constant collisions. It really is astonishing how many factors must all be just right for life to exist on this one little planet.

A Meaningful Thanksgiving

Looking to do something that'll make a difference in people's lives, a meaningful way to celebrate the Thanksgiving season? Why not consider Kiva:

Kiva is a world-wide microfinance organization. People from all around the world lend money to small businesspersons and others in the third world to help them obtain the capital they need to manage their businesses successfully. The borrowers then pay the loan back over time and the lender can relend the money or withdraw it.

It's a great way to help the poor help themselves and a wonderful way to express your gratitude for all that you have.