How Physics Refutes Common Sense

Yesterday's post looked at some of philosopher Bruce Gordon's thoughts on the philosophical theory called idealism.

Idealism holds that the world is real, but it's subjectively real. Its reality is like that of pain. Pain is real, but it's completely in the mind of the one who's experiencing it. It's reality is subjective. If there were no creatures on earth whose nervous systems could create the sensation of pain, pain would not exist.

The common sense view, of course, is that most of the world is objectively real. It exists independently of whether or not anyone is experiencing it. The moon is there whether anyone sees it or not. This common sense view is called realism.

Realism is the view that there is a world outside our minds existing independently of our minds and perceptions, whereas idealism holds that the world is created by our minds by means of the observations we make. Idealism is a philosophical expression of the ideas popularized by the movie The Matrix.

Idealism strikes most of us as at best counter-intuitive. We're accustomed to think of matter as the fundamental reality (a view called materialism). Matter, we assume, is objectively real and exists whether we perceive it or not. On this view, whatever mind is it's somehow a creation or function of our material brains. Idealism turns this view on its head and declares that mind is actually the fundamental reality and that matter only exists as a subjective experience in our minds.

As I said, this view is counter-intuitive, but it's the view held by a lot of physicists who study the fundamental quantum structure of the world. This video gives a pretty clear idea of the thinking of many physicists, some of whom think that idealism is not only correct but that it leads to the conclusion that there is a God, or something very much like God.

The video's a bit long (17 minutes) and moves quickly. It also discusses some arcane physics at points along the way. Nevertheless, you don't have to understand the physics in order to follow the narrative. The science really only illustrates the basic idea which is that mind is fundamental and that matter is downstream, as it were, from mind.

Give it a click, kick back and savor how mysterious is the world in which we live and move and have our being:

A Philosopher Discusses Idealism

Bruce Gordon is one of the most brilliant and accomplished thinkers alive today. Among other things he's a historian and philosopher of science and was interviewed recently by another scientist, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, on a number of topics, including philosophical idealism.

Gordon is one of a growing number of philosophers who find idealism a compelling hypothesis. The interview begins with Dr. Gordon explaining George Berkeley's (1685-1753) version of idealism:

Michael Egnor: What is idealism?

Bruce Gordon: There are a lot of different varieties of idealism, and rather than go through a laundry list of its variations, let me just start with the kind of idealism that I would be an advocate of, which is an ontic theistic idealism, essentially a form of idealism that is probably most closely identified with the Anglican Bishop, George Berkeley.

George Berkeley 1727

Basically, it’s the idea that material substances, as substantial entities, do not exist and are not the cause of our perceptions. They do not mediate our experience of the world.

Rather, what constitutes what we would call the physical realm are ideas that exist solely in the mind of God, who, as an unlimited and uncreated immaterial being, is the ultimate cause of the sensations and ideas that we, as finite spiritual beings, experience intersubjectively and subjectively as the material universe....So we are, in effect, living our lives in the mind of God.

And he is a mediator of our experience and of our inner subjectivity, rather than some sort of neutral material realm that serves as a third thing between us and the mind of God, so to speak.

The discussion then turns for a bit to Plato's notion of idealism as expressed in his theory of Forms.

Plato believed that every particular thing that exists has an ideal essence or form that exists in some abstract realm of reality. Every chair, for example, is recognizable as a chair because it "participates" in the perfect abstract form of "chairness," every tree is recognizable as a tree because it "participates" in the perfect form of "treeness."

Likewise with everything, including humans.

Later Christian Platonists argued that these essences, or forms, or ideals existed not in some abstract realm but rather as ideas in the mind of God, and this, it seems, is Gordon's view as well.

Michael Egnor: There are, I believe, other kinds of idealism. For example, idealism by German philosophers. And how does that differ from Berkeleyan idealism?

Bruce Gordon: Well, .... [Immanuel] Kant (1724-1804) advocated a kind of epistemic, as opposed to ontic, idealism. Kantian idealism is entirely compatible with the existence of material substances, even though they are inaccessible as things in themselves.

So for Kantian idealism, you’ve got a self that .... precedes and grounds all of our experience. And our perception of reality, then, is governed by the innate structure of the human mind.

Immanuel Kant 1768 

What Gordon is saying here is that Kant believed that a material world existed but that everything we know about it is based on our sensory perceptions which produce ideas or sensations in the mind. Our mind is so structured as to create these ideas, but they may be nothing at all like the thing they represent.

In other words, what we know about the "thing in itself" is the sum of the ideas (or sensations) we have of it in our minds. We can't know it as it exists independently of our perceptions of it.

For example, our minds, upon seeing, smelling and tasting chocolate, generate the ideas of a certain color, fragrance and flavor, but these ideas are in our minds, they're not in the chocolate. The chocolate itself doesn't have color, it simply reflects certain wavelengths of light. Likewise, it doesn't have fragrance or flavor. It simply exudes chemicals which interact with our senses to produce the ideas of fragrance and flavor in our minds.

As Kant put it, “You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am."

Bruce Gordon: So we never experience reality in itself, which he called the noumenal world, but only reality as it appears to us, a ... phenomenal reality that is ordered by the innate structures of the human mind.

Kantian idealism and its descendants are, in many ways, an epistemic form of idealism, whereas the Berkeleyan form of idealism is ontic.

By this Gordon means that Kant's idealism had to do with what we can know about the world whereas Berkeley's idealism had to do with the ontology of the world - what was actually real and what reality was like. Gordon adds:

[Berkeley's Idealism is] a denial that there is material substance and [is instead] an embedding of reality in the mind of God, such that it is finite spiritual beings experiencing the reality brought into existence by this unlimited, uncreated, immaterial being.

Berkeley's idealism, then, was different from Kant's. Berkeley held that there was no material world at all. Everything we experience we experience as ideas in our minds, ideas which are presented to our minds by the mind of God.

As Berkeley himself says, “All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth — in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world — have not any subsistence without a mind.” This may seem bizarre at first reading, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Berkeley’s system, while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections.”

It's interesting that in the last fifty years or so many physicists have embraced idealism. They're persuaded by developments in quantum mechanics that reveal that at the subatomic level many properties of the entities scientists study at that level don't exist until they're observed.

For instance, the 20th century scientist Max Planck, often called the father of quantum mechanics, once stated that,

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.

We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

And Sir James Jeans, in his book The Mysterious Universe, wrote that, "The universe is beginning to look more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine."

Idealism has considerable intellectual appeal for quantum physicists, but I should think it would also be attractive to some thoughtful theologically oriented folks, especially those who are heirs to the Calvinist tradition and its doctrine of predestination and who believe that everything that exists, and thus everything that happens, is in fact predestined by God.

Such a doctrine conforms nicely to the conviction that the reality we experience is fundamentally an idea in the mind of God.

Christopher Rufo Explains CRT

Christopher Rufo, a writer at City Journal who has done a lot of research and reporting on Critical Race Theory (CRT) gave an address on the topic last month at Hillsdale College.

I can't excerpt everything from his speech that I'd like to, but I'd like to pull a few things from it. Rufo's topic is very important and his lecture is very informative, and I urge readers interested in what's happening in our culture today to go to the link and read the whole piece.

He begins with a brief history of Marxism and explains how Marx's economic class theory mutated into a theory about race:

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, where there were large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living.

Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.

But rather than abandon their Leftist political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s.

Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.

He follows with an explanation of CRT:

Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, over the past decade it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions.

It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human resources departments in the form of diversity training programs, human resources modules, public policy frameworks, and school curricula.

Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality.

But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, equality — the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — is explicitly rejected by critical race theorists.

To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.

In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism.

In the name of equity, UCLA Law Professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines.

Critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, has proposed the creation of a federal Department of Antiracism. This department would be independent of (i.e., unaccountable to) the elected branches of government, and would have the power to nullify, veto, or abolish any law at any level of government and curtail the speech of political leaders and others who are deemed insufficiently “antiracist.”

One practical result of the creation of such a department would be the overthrow of capitalism, since according to Kendi, “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.” In other words, identity is the means and Marxism is the end.

An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property, but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech.

These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority....critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.

Rufo disabuses anyone who might think something like this would never gain a foothold in America. He describes how CRT is being taught throughout our government, universities, even in elementary schools:

Last year, I authored a series of reports focused on critical race theory in the federal government. The FBI was holding workshops on intersectionality theory. The Department of Homeland Security was telling white employees they were committing “microinequities” and had been “socialized into oppressor roles.”

The Treasury Department held a training session telling staff members that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” and that they must convert “everyone in the federal government” to the ideology of “antiracism.”

And the Sandia National Laboratories, which designs America’s nuclear arsenal, sent white male executives to a three-day reeducation camp, where they were told that “white male culture” was analogous to the “KKK,” “white supremacists,” and “mass killings.”

The executives were then forced to renounce their “white male privilege” and write letters of apology to fictitious women and people of color.

This year, I produced another series of reports focused on critical race theory in education. In Cupertino, California, an elementary school forced first-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”

In Springfield, Missouri, a middle school forced teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix,” based on the idea that straight, white, English-speaking, Christian males are members of the oppressor class and must atone for their privilege and “covert white supremacy.”

In Philadelphia, an elementary school forced fifth-graders to celebrate “Black communism” and simulate a Black Power rally to free 1960s radical Angela Davis from prison, where she had once been held on charges of murder. And in Seattle, the school district told white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murder” against black children and must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”

I’m just one investigative journalist, but I’ve developed a database of more than 1,000 of these stories. When I say that critical race theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions, it is not an exaggeration—from the universities to bureaucracies to k-12 school systems, critical race theory has permeated the collective intelligence and decision-making process of American government, with no sign of slowing down.

He then discusses why attempts to halt these encroachments have been ineffective and discusses what people can do to stop it from taking over the culture completely. He argues that it must be countered on three levels - governmental action, grassroots mobilization, and an appeal to principle - and he explains each.

Most of all, though,

... we must have courage — the fundamental virtue required in our time. Courage to stand and speak the truth. Courage to withstand epithets. Courage to face the mob. Courage to shrug off the scorn of the elites.

When enough of us overcome the fear that currently prevents so many from speaking out, the hold of critical race theory will begin to slip. And courage begets courage. It’s easy to stop a lone dissenter; it’s much harder to stop 10, 20, 100, 1,000, 1,000,000, or more who stand up together for the principles of America.

Truth and justice are on our side. If we can muster the courage, we will win.

For an example of the kind of courage Rufo's talking about, read this remarkable letter, written by an angry father who explains to his fellow parents why he's taking his daughter out of an elite girls school in Manhattan.

An Email That Made My Day

I was browsing through some old posts and came across this one from shortly after my novel In the Absence of God (See button at top right of this page) was released, and I thought I'd share it with you. Emails like this one from a reader named T.J. just make my day. It did when I received it several years ago, and it did again when I reread it today:

I finished reading In the Absence of God yesterday, which isn't anything to marvel at other than the fact that I also started reading In the Absence of God yesterday. I don't think I've ever read an entire book in one sitting before, and I certainly wasn't planning on reading this book in one day, but I simply couldn't put it down. Also, I don't think a book has ever affected me so deeply as this one has. I cannot stop thinking about the ideas that were presented throughout In the Absence of God.

I was nervous when I started reading the book that I would be bored by an abundance of philosophical ideas, but the conversations in the book were engaging and masterfully weaved throughout the action and plot. The speech at the end by "Smerk" gave me chills as I was reading it, and I was deeply disturbed by how true it was that this was the logical conclusion of a materialist worldview.

I identified with Professor Weyland in that I have been through some very difficult struggles with my faith because it seems as though the more "intellectual" and "logical" way to look at the world is through the lens of materialism. This book answered many questions that I've been asking for a long time, and I feel stronger in my faith because of it.

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

Thank you for writing this book and reminding me of the truth I should have known all along.

If you'd like to read more about In the Absence of God click on the link at the upper right of this page. It'd make a fine graduation gift for a high school or college student who's a reader interested in questions of faith and philosophy.

Help Me Hate White People

In his great dystopic novel, 1984, George Orwell depicts a totalitarian society, called Oceania, in which the government produces in its citizens a hatred for their enemies, real and imagined, that's as deep and ugly as it is irrational. One way the state achieves this is by requiring daily something called the "Two Minutes Hate."

Every day the citizens of Oceania gather in front of large screens on which is projected the image of an "enemy" of the state, a man named Emmanuel Goldstein, who is giving a speech. The citizens are taught to loathe Goldstein who may not even exist, and as part of their loathing they participate in two minutes of hysterical invective directed at the person on the screen.

Orwell describes it thus:

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room....the Hate rose to a frenzy.

People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the top of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen....The horrible thing about the Two Minute Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.

Within thirty seconds any pretense was unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture to smash faces with a hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

I thought of this awful display of hatred while reading an article about a black "theologian" named Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Mercer University associate professor of practical theology, who wrote a prayer in which she implores God to help her hate white people. The prayer is included in a best-selling devotional titled A Rhythm of Prayer: A Collection of Meditations for Renewal.

The prayer opens with these words:

“Dear God, Please help me to hate White people. Or at least to want to hate them.”

The prayer continues, “At least, I want to stop caring about them, individually and collectively.”

Walker-Barnes explained that she has no desire to hate openly racist white people and “strident segregationists” because they are “already in hell,” but instead, she wants to hate “the nice ones.” Specifically, Walker-Barnes said she wants to hate the “Fox News-loving, Trump-supporting voters who ‘don’t see color’ but who make thinly veiled racist comments about ‘those people.’”

“Lord, if you can’t make me hate them," she pleads, "at least spare me from their perennial gaslighting, whitemansplaining, and White woman tears,” the prayer says. “Lord, if it be your will, harden my heart. Stop me from striving to see the best in people. Stop me from being hopeful that White people can do and be better. Let me imagine them instead as white-hooded robes standing in front of burning crosses.”

On her Twitter feed she wrote this:

In all truth, my family and my personal experiences have given me millions of reasons to hate White people,” she added. “The hatred would be justified. I could even find biblical precedent for it.

Well, I doubt it. Any theologian who actually earned her degree would know Jesus' words from the Sermon on the Mount: "I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you" (Matt. 5:44). If Christians, even the ones who are theologians, are called upon to love even those who persecute them, how does someone who calls herself a Christian justify hatred of those who don't persecute her at all?

Indeed, I can't imagine an uglier, more unchristian prayer than this, nor can I imagine a God whose second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as you love yourself (Matt. 22:37-40) being at all pleased by it, although I can well imagine such a prayer as Ms. Walker-Barnes' being very pleasing to Satan.

The Continuing Border Crisis

National Review's Jim Geraghty cites some statistics that give us a snapshot of what's happening on our southern border. It's not pretty:

Since last Thursday morning, on the U.S.–Mexico border:

• McAllen Border Patrol station agents encountered a large group of 107 illegal aliens entering south of La Joya, Texas.
• Rio Grande Valley Sector agents disrupted three human-smuggling events resulting in 15 arrests.
• Other border agents in the Rio Grande Valley arrested three sexual predators and a gang member within 72 hours.
• Border Patrol agents arrested the leader of a human-smuggling organization, a 43-year-old Mexican national who had “become a top target for San Diego Sector after several investigations indicated he orchestrated smuggling events throughout San Diego County.”
• CBP agents at the Pharr International Bridge apprehended a man after discovering he had an arrest warrant from the Dallas Police Department for felony child-sexual-assault charges.

From October to March, in the current fiscal year, the Customs and Border Patrol has apprehended 5,018 individuals with criminal convictions — about double the total for fiscal year 2020, higher than fiscal year 2019, and below the total for fiscal year 2018.

Those apprehended so far this year have been convicted of 576 counts of assault, battery, and domestic violence; 265 sexual offenses; 381 counts of burglary; 162 counts of illegal weapons possession or transport; 832 counts of driving under the influence; and three counts of homicide or manslaughter. (One individual may be convicted of more than one of those crimes.)

This morning, Geraghty notes,

[T]here is no mention of these particular events or the situation at the border on the front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or USA Today. CNN mentions that the Biden administration has secured agreements for Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala to tighten their borders with more troops in an effort to stem the flow of migration.

That first sentence is not surprising, but the second sentence is. Mr. Biden is evidently adopting, at least partially, one of the measures employed by Donald Trump. Had he of course built on Trump's border policy rather than tearing it all down, and for no better reason than that it was Trump's policy, we wouldn't have this mess on the border in the first place.

In any case, it's encouraging to see that the president is inching back toward sensible actions to stem the tsunami of people seeking to cross our border.

Who knows, perhaps we'll soon be reading that President Biden has authorized completion of the border wall and implementation of a "Remain in Mexico" policy that will require anyone seeking asylum in the U.S. to remain in Mexico until their case is adjudicated.

Just kidding. I very much doubt that Mr. Biden will embrace Mr. Trump's tactics, and if he does he almost certainly won't give Mr. Trump credit for getting it right or even acknowledge that he's adopting the policies of his predecessor.

It would, after all, be humiliating for Mr. Biden to implicitly acknowledge that Mr. Trump was right and he, Biden, was wrong on immigration, so it'd be shocking if he were to adopt Trump's plan for dealing with the problem. Better to muddle along leaving the present calamity unresolved than have to confess that the immigration policy of the detestable Trump was wiser than his own.

Corporate Sanctimony

In a column in the Wall Street Journal Karl Rove highlights the hypocrisy of our corporate CEOs - particularly Robert Manfred of Major League Baseball - in objecting to the Georgia voting reforms. It's a wonder that after columns like this any of them still wish to continue embarrassing themselves by persisting in their sanctimonious condemnations of the Georgia effort to protect their election integrity.

Here are some excerpts from Rove's piece:

Major League Baseball’s offices are located in Manhattan and the commissioner, a native of Rome, N.Y., lives in the Empire State. Why is that relevant? Georgia has no-excuse absentee voting by mail, but New York state doesn’t....Where’s Mr. Manfred’s crusade to ensure that Yankees and Mets players and fans and baseball staff in New York ... have the same voting rights as Georgians?

Similarly, Georgia has a robust early-voting period, expanded by the new law to 17 days, with two optional Sundays. New York has only eight days of early voting, while neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey have none. You’d think the woke commissioner would speak out against these “restrictions to the ballot box,” but you’d be wrong.

If Mr. Manfred’s concerns were authentic, he’d condemn states such as Missouri, which has two major-league teams — the Royals and the Cardinals — but doesn’t allow no-excuse absentee voting or early voting. But he won’t.

There’s no early voting in Michigan, so you’d think he’d work to ensure every Tiger fan “participates in shaping the United States,” which he said he wants for “everyone.” But again, he won’t.

Ohio and Pennsylvania each have two pro baseball teams, yet neither state has early voting. Minnesota has the Twins and Wisconsin the Brewers, yet no early voting. While Massachusetts allowed no-excuse vote by mail in 2020 because of the pandemic, it expires June 30....When will Mr. Manfred speak out against all this voter suppression?

Or is Georgia the only state worthy of his condemnation?

Sen. Marco Rubio slammed Mr. Manfred in a letter Monday, asking if he’d remain a member of the exclusive Augusta National Golf Club, since it is located in Georgia; end baseball’s profitable engagement with China and Cuba, which certainly don’t hold free elections; and terminate the major leagues’ “lucrative financial relationship” with Tencent, a Chinese company with close ties to the Communist Party.

The commissioner has yet to respond.

Rove might also have mentioned that in moving the All-Star game from Atlanta to Denver, Mr. Manfred transferred over $100 million in revenue from a city that's 51% black to a city that's only 9% black. That seems like a strange way to demonstrate concern for Georgia's black citizens.

He goes on:

Mr. Manfred isn’t the only hypocritical CEO. Speaking from his Atlanta headquarters, Delta’s Ed Bastian ripped into Georgia’s law, but he, too, won’t castigate other states with more-restrictive voting laws.

Delta flies into Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia, none of which have no-excuse absentee voting; Iowa, Montana, Oklahoma and South Dakota, which don’t offer early voting; and Indiana and Mississippi, which have neither no-excuse absentee nor early voting.

Apparently Mr. Bastian sees no need to insult every state he does business in, just his home base.

Mr. Rove has more at the link.

Americans can all be proud of our Woke corporate CEOs whose unswerving commitment to social justice is unfettered by any similar commitment to logical consistency.

A Bunch of Questions

Here are some questions that have probably occurred to just about everybody who has thought about these matters, but perhaps the questions should continue to be asked until someone offers a compelling answer to them:

• If it's child abuse for adult men to marry underage girls, why is it not child abuse for surgeons to permanently alter the sex of underage children? Why is it considered transphobic to merely raise the question?
• If it's child abuse for the parents to give a young daughter to a man as a child bride, why is it not child abuse for parents to have their child undergo irreversible sex transition surgery or give their child hormone blockers?
• In this age of birth control and childless couples how long will it remain illegal for siblings to marry? If the genetic sex of the people getting married doesn't matter, why should the genetic relationship matter?
• How long will polyamorous marriages remain illegal? If the gender of the people getting married doesn't matter why does the number of people getting married matter?
• If gender is what one chooses it to be and should not be imposed on a child at birth, does that mean that gender-reveal parties are transphobic?
• On what criteria does a transgendered person's psychology trump their biology? Why does a transgendered person's psychological view of their gender trump everyone else's psychological view of their gender?

And on a different topic:

• Why did we require people traveling into our state (Pennsylvania) to quarantine while at the same time allowing masses of immigrants, many of whom were covid positive or untested, to come across our nation's southern border?
• Why is there so much concern over those who don't wish to be vaccinated? If the vaccine works then those who want it and get it are protected. Those who don't want it and and don't get it are not protected, but they're not a threat to those who choose to get vaccinated. Shouldn't those who choose not to be vaccinated be free to assume the risk, just like smokers and motorcyclists?
• Why is the left pushing the idea of requiring people to prove that they've been vaccinated by showing a "vaccine passport" in order to participate in many activities, but are horrified of being required to show an identification in order to vote?

And finally:

• Why do we build a fence around our Capitol and declare fences to be both workable and necessary to protect our politicians from the rowdy masses, but oppose building fences at the border because they're allegedly unworkable?

Maybe there are good answers to some, or even all, of these questions, but if so, someone will have to help me with them.

Fueling Racial Resentments

In a column at The American Conservative Rod Dreher cites four recent cases where a member of a racial or ethnic minority murdered one or more whites or Asians and the media all but ignored the possibility that racial hatred played a role in the crime.

The cases he cites are that of two young black girls who killed an elderly Asian in the course of trying to hijack his car; the Black Muslim, Noah Green, who killed a white Capitol police officer; the former black NFL player who shot and killed five whites, including two children; and the Syrian born Muslim Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa who shot and killed ten ten white people in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket.

He might also have mentioned the recent murder of Julie Eberly, a white mother of six, in a road rage incident that occurred while she and her husband were on a trip to celebrate their anniversary. Her murderer was a black man.

At any rate, after describing each case Dreher concludes that the media's reluctance to emphasize the racial dynamic is appropriate. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, Dreher rightly observes,

...there is no reason to think that racial animus played a role in the murders. Why racialize a murder without solid evidence that it had a racial angle?....That is the standard the media have for killings in which the suspected perpetrator is a racial minority, and (especially) when the victims are white.

But, he points out,

This is definitely not the standard the media have for killings in which the (suspected) murderers are white people killing minorities. They are still yammering about how Robert Long, arrested in Atlanta for mass killing at Asian spas, is guilty of an anti-Asian hate crime — this, though there is no reason at all to believe that Long was motivated by anti-Asian hate. We know that he was tormented by his sexual obsession.

Perhaps we will learn that there was an anti-Asian component of this, but we don’t know it now. That has not stopped the media from racializing this terrible crime.

After highlighting recent examples of media attempts to portray the Atlanta killings as a crime motivated by racial animus he concludes with this:

This keeps happening with the media. Why? I mean, I know why: because newsrooms are filled with progressives who are drunk on left-wing race grievance ideology.

To hell with professional standards or moral responsibility — they have a Narrative to propagate. I spoke this week to a foreign journalist working in the US, and he told me that he’s having to work harder than before to find out what’s happening in the US, because he can no longer trust what he reads in the American newspapers.

I can’t stop asking myself the question: Why are they teaching non-white people to fear and loathe whites? What are they preparing America for?

Good questions.

Media progressives fear, I think, that if they make too much of what is a disproportionate victimization of whites by other racial groups it will fuel hostility among whites toward those groups, so they downplay the possibility of the motive of race hatred when the perpetrators are non-white.

But then by promoting the racism narrative when the perpetrators are white they surely fuel hostility among minority groups toward whites. What's more, these people aren't stupid, they must know what they're doing.

Would there be constant coverage last week and this week of the Derek Chauvin homocide trial in Minneapolis had Chauvin been a black police officer or if George Floyd had been white? Everyone, including the most obtuse media news people, knows the answer to that question.

Had the racial component not been what it is there would've been no riots last summer in the wake of Floyd's death and little interest in Chauvin's trial last week and this.

So we return to Dreher's questions: Why are progressives in the media (and in academia) teaching non-white people to fear and loathe whites? What, excactly, are they trying to accomplish?

The Assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh

Some readers might recall the killing of the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh last November. The details of the assassination were scant at the time, but a recent piece at Strategy Page fills in some of the blanks.

Here are some excerpts:

Mossad, the Israeli external-intelligence agency, planned the operation. Some twenty operatives, including Israelis and Iranians, observed Fakhrizadeh for eight months. At the same time Israel smuggled a RWS (Remote Weapon System) machine-gun into the country. This RWS was modified to operate from a pickup truck or van.

It is unclear what caliber machine-gun was used against Fakhrizadeh, who was shot dead after the security vehicle ahead of his car was fired on. He was curious as to what was happening, exited his own vehicle, was fired on and shot twice, fatally.

Apparently, the Iranians did not suspect a concealed vehicle mounted RWS, and that vehicle was rigged with explosives that were set off remotely after the attack. There was little left for the Iranians to collect and reassemble. The Israelis may have used a foreign RWS or an Israeli one “sanitized” to hide its origins.

None of the Mossad personnel involved were captured and all got away.

This attack involved a machine-gun controlled by a skilled operator. One report described the RWS as mounted and concealed on a pickup truck. Another source reported that this was strictly an Israeli operation, with no American involvement.

Fakhrizadeh, be it noted, was no innocent. He was a senior Iranian nuclear scientist working to develop nuclear weapons to be used against Israel and other of Iran's enemies.

He was also a veteran IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) general. The IRGC is a terrorist organization whose erstwhile leader Qasem Soleimani was killed in a drone strike in Iraq in January of last year.

During decades of IRGC service the 63-year-old Fakhrizadeh also managed to get several advanced scientific degrees, including a doctorate in physics. With that technical training Fakhrizadeh became a key member of the team developing nuclear weapons for Iran.

His prominence in the nuclear weapons program was mentioned several times in the half-ton of secret nuclear program documents Israel stole from Iran in 2018. Those documents confirmed the key role Fakhrizadeh played in the nuclear program, something he was sanctioned for by the United States as far back as 2008.

He is the fifth key member of the Iranian nuclear weapons effort to be killed since 2010. The loss of Fakhrizadeh is expected to slow Iranian nuclear weapons development, and it will take years to find a suitable replacement.

The gun used to kill Fakhrizadeh was controlled remotely, and apparently no operatives were actually at the scene.

There's more in the article about the RWS. Someday when a history of Mossad's operations is written - if it ever is - we'll probably be astonished at the cleverness and skill of those who fight to protect Israel against those who've sworn to annihilate it and its people in a nuclear fireball.

What?!

You may not have heard about it from the mainstream media but President Biden delivered himself of a remarkable claim the other day while promoting his infrastructure plan. The president who urged us to follow the science about the Covid virus has chosen to abandon that advice when it comes to high speed trains and planes.

In pitching his proposal for spending enormous sums of money, some relatively tiny amount of which will go to infrastructure improvements, Mr. Biden blurted out this astonishing claim:

. . . what we’re really doing is raising the bar on what we can imagine. Imagine a world where you and your family can travel coast to coast, without a single tank of gas, or on a high-speed train close to as fast as you can go across the country in a plane.

As National Review's Jim Geraghty observes, this feat would require a suspension of the laws of physics. Commercial airliners cruise at a speed of between 550 and 580 mph. The fastest trains can travel on a straight-away at about 350 mph.

Geraghty notes that, "...what Biden envisions, and implicitly is promising, is a train that goes across the continental U.S. at an average speed that is 47 percent faster than the top speed of the fastest prototype trains that exist today."

To achieve the speeds Mr. Biden asks us to imagine would necessitate enormous curve radii. Here's Geraghty again:

“Tracks rated for fifty miles per hour need almost no banking and can have a curve radius of fifteen hundred feet, while a train traveling at a hundred and twenty miles per hour needs a track with significant banking, and a minimum curve radius of more than a mile and a half.”

A train track designed for a train going 550 miles per hour would have to have an absolutely gargantuan curve radius. Our current system and routes of train tracks would be completely unsafe for a train moving at that speed; it would fly off the tracks at the first curve.

Nor is this the end of the engineering problems. Since Mr. Biden is urging us to use our imaginations let's imagine the consequences of an accident involving a train full of hundreds of passengers traveling at 550 miles an hour, or the invitation to sabotage such a target would present to terrorists.

The president's king-sized imagination has also created a plane that can fly at 21,000 mph, a fantasy he shared with his listeners recently. Geraghty remarked that this idea "is a strong argument for mandatory drug testing in the White House."

The fastest jet in the world, the SR-71 Blackbird, travels at 2,100 mph. The effects on a plane's structure and the amount of fuel it would take to boost top speeds by a factor of ten make such aspirations as the president's highly implausible.

It's always dangerous, of course, to say that something could never be done. Technology has a way of accomplishing what had previously been thought impossible, but the president is asking us to imagine that if we just spend enough money we'll be able to do what certainly seems at present to violate the laws of physics.

We might wonder if trains that move as fast as planes are worth the cost when we still lack cures for dementia and cancer.

Geraghty concludes his column on Mr. Biden's fanciful proposals with this:

Biden is envisioning a commercial airliner that will travel ten times faster than the current fastest jet in the world. He might as well have promised warp speed, a hyperdrive, or teleportation. It goes well with his promise to cure cancer if elected president.

But when Biden talks about advances in plane and train technology, he speaks as if the main problems are that we’re not dreaming big enough and we’re not spending enough money. This is the rallying cry of a man who has never thought about the engineering challenges and who apparently never intends to think about them.

Or the rallying cry of a man who knows that most Americans have never thought about those challenges either and that the media will never do to him what they would've done to his predecessor had Mr. Trump ever proposed something as unrealistic as what Mr. Biden has proposed.

Moral Paralysis

I've run the following post on moral relativism several times in the past, and having talked about that topic recently in my classes I thought it'd be appropriate to run it again, slightly edited:

Denyse O'Leary passes on a story told by a Canadian high school philosophy teacher named Stephen Anderson. Anderson recounts what happened when he tried to show students what can happen to women in a culture with no tradition of treating women as human beings:

I was teaching my senior Philosophy class. We had just finished a unit on Metaphysics and were about to get into Ethics, the philosophy of how we make moral judgments. The school had also just had several social-justice-type assemblies — multiculturalism, women’s rights, anti-violence and gay acceptance. So there was no shortage of reference points from which to begin.

I decided to open by simply displaying, without comment, the photo of Bibi Aisha (see below). Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban fighter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains. After crawling to her grandfather’s house, she was saved by a nearby American hospital.

I felt quite sure that my students, seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, would have a clear ethical reaction, from which we could build toward more difficult cases.

The picture is horrific. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that many were experiencing deep emotions, but I was not prepared for their reaction.

I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture.

They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots of this kind of stuff.” Another said (with no consciousness of self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”

While we may hope some are capable of bridging the gap between principled morality and this ethically vacuous relativism, it is evident that a good many are not. For them, the overriding message is “never judge, never criticize, never take a position.”

This is a picture of Bibi Aisha. She was deliberately mutilated by her family because she did not want to stay in a marriage to which she did not consent and in which she was treated like livestock.

Anyone who would do this to another human being is evil. Any culture which condones it is degenerate, and any person who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this, or to sympathize with her suffering, is a moral dwarf.

The shocking prevalence of moral dwarfism in our culture should not surprise us, however. Once a society jettisons its Judeo-Christian heritage it no longer has any non-subjective basis for making moral judgments. Its moral sense is stunted, warped, and diminished because it's based on nothing more than one's own subjective feelings.

With no objective moral standard by which to judge behavior people lose confidence in their moral judgments. They doubt that their opinions are any more "right" than the opinions of the people who did this to Bibi Aisha, and so they say things like, "If it's right for them then it's right", or "It's wrong for us to judge others", or "If you say it's wrong that's just your opinion."

This is moral paralysis, and it's a legacy of modernity and the secular Enlightenment which, in their embrace of metaphysical naturalism, have pulled the rug out from under all objective moral standards and offered nothing that can take their place beyond a vapid subjectivism.

Human Equality

It's commonly assumed that our ideas of the worth of the individual, of human rights and human equality all arose out of the period roughly between 1650 and 1800 called the Enlightenment, but that's a mistaken assumption. An article by Cameron Hilditch in National Review helps to set the record straight.

He writes, "...the Enlightenment was much less of a break with what preceded it and much more indebted to centuries of ... moral osmosis: It was not a sudden kickstart of reason after ages of enforced ignorance."

Hilditch quotes scholar Brian Tierney:

... already by 1300 a number of rights were regularly claimed and defended...: “They would include rights to property, rights of consent to government, rights of self-defence, rights of infidels, marriage rights, procedural rights,” and also measures to make these rights enforceable against positive law.

But from whence did people living in the Europe of the late Middle Ages get this notion of rights? It certainly wasn't from the ancient Greeks and Romans whose concept of rights was extremely attenuated. The only people who had rights in ancient societies were those who were powerful enough to protect themselves and their property. Women, children and the average male had few rights. Slaves and aliens had none.

Somewhere along the line that began to change, and the change agent was Christianity.

Several doctrines of the early Christians were responsible for this revolutionary view of human beings. First among these was the belief that we are all made in the image of God. This by itself conferred enormous dignity on humanity. We aren't just beasts, we were made by the Creator of the universe just a little lower than the angels.

Second, was the belief that the incarnate God in the person of Jesus loves each individual enough to sacrifice His life for us on the cross. Thus, Paul could write, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” People who believed this could scarcely avoid thinking of all persons as equals in the eyes of God.

Third, the fact that Jesus spent His brief life ministering not to the rich and powerful but to the poor, the diseased and the suffering sent the message to all who followed Him that these individuals were the special objects of God's concern and compassion. To believe that was to realize that the most wretched soul was infinitely important to God and thus to be valued by those who sought to follow God's command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

Jesus' teaching on servanthood, that the first shall be last, inculcated into Christians that the lowly were every bit as important, if not more so than those exalted by the world. Christians couldn't very well claim to love God while despising those He loved.

As Hilditch observes,

It’s almost impossible for us to get a real sense of just how earth-shattering the millennia-long aftershock of Easter has been on our civilization. We are all in our moral sensibilities and basic worldview creatures of Christianity to such a great extent that we cannot see it from the vantage point of a pre-Christian society without tremendous imaginative effort.

We might say, as Tom Holland does in his book Dominion, that we're saturated in Christian assumptions to the extent that we're not even aware of it, nor of how historically unique those assumptions were.

The message of human equality and human rights didn't always sink in, of course. It didn't always find receptive soil, either in the hearts of men or in cultures, but over the centuries it continued to germinate until it eventually blossomed into a set of ideas about the human person that are today, at least in the West, taken for granted.

Hilditch writes:

The contingency of everything we think decent and valuable about ourselves and our society upon the sorrows and the triumph of this one man, in whose luminous shadow we have all lived for the last 2,000 years, consistently eludes us. We forget that in a historically demonstrable way, we in the West owe our sense of common universal humanity entirely to Jesus of Nazareth and his Church.

It is a great irony, and a great tragedy, that just as the ideas of human worth, dignity and rights have reached a historical apogee in the West, Westerners are rejecting the very source and foundation of those ideas. They think they can hold on to worth, dignity and rights while discarding the God who has bestowed those gifts and upon whom those gifts depend.

It won't work. Nothing else, neither reason nor ideology, can support and sustain them. If modern man succeeds in expunging God from his culture and institutions he will also succeed in plunging humanity into a terrifying darkness whose brutality and inhumanity will rival or surpass the horrifying regimes of the Nazis and the Stalinists.

Perhaps, though, it's not too late to reverse course and avert this looming catastrophe.

Gonzaga Won?!

A friend writes:

Congratulations to Gonzaga! Turns out those mail-in baskets that weren't counted until around 3 a.m. made all the difference. Sure am glad we got the right champion. 😉

Funny.

Brouhaha Over the Georgia Voting Law

It's astonishing to see how corporations, which just a decade or two ago were the boogeymen of Democrat mythology, have now become that party's BFFs. The Democrats have within the space of a few years become the fat cat party and Republicans are now the party of the working man.

Who'd have thought twenty five years ago that that would happen?

The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel describes a good example of obsequious corporate genuflection to the progressive agenda can be found in the behavior of Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian who has seized upon the Georgia voting reform legislation to ostentatiously place his moral virtue on public display.

Unfortunately for Mr. Bastian, as well as for Major League Baseball, Coca Cola, Big Tech, all the way up to President Joe Biden, none of the folks condemning the Georgia law appear to know what they're talking about.

Strassel writes:

According to Delta CEO Ed Bastian, there is only one reason Georgia passed a voting reform: to suppress the votes of black Americans and other minorities. Georgia’s Republican Legislature used the “excuse” of voter fraud to “make it harder for many underrepresented voters” to “exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives,” Mr. Bastian wrote this week in a memo to employees.

Mr. Bastian has plenty of company in the C-suites. Some 72 black executives, including the CEO of Merck and a former CEO of American Express, signed an open letter calling on corporate colleagues to fight “undemocratic” and “un-American” GOP efforts across the states to “assault” the “fundamental tenets of our democracy.”

Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Apple chimed in, and dozens more are readying outraged press releases.

They're eager to voice their moral outrage at the Georgia legislature for their allegedly bigoted attempt to suppress the black vote, but their umbrage serves as a good lesson on why it's wise to check your facts before strutting your moral superiority for everyone to admire.

You suffer much less embarrassment that way and don't look nearly as stupid:

Thus the sight of the nation’s top business leaders monotonously reciting a fact-free narrative. As they know, state legislatures are moving to reaffirm longstanding rules and restore confidence in electoral systems that were arbitrarily remade during Covid.

ID requirements are no more racist at the ballot box than on a Delta flight. Some 36 states have them, and they’ve been upheld by the Supreme Court.

Mr. Bastian’s moralizing memo fails to cite a single one of the supposedly “egregious measures” in the bill that will suppress the vote, although he does stress he hears his employees’ “pain.” The letter from the 72 executives misstates the Georgia rules, suggesting the only way to satisfy the ID requirement is with a driver’s license, even though “200,000 Georgians lack a license.”

In fact, voters can also use a free, state-issued nondriver ID, and those who lack one can fulfill the requirement with a Social Security number or even a copy of a “current utility bill, bank statement, government check, or paycheck.” The letter suggests the Georgia “playbook”.... is of a piece with “police dogs, poll taxes, literacy taxes.”

One can only hope Merck is more rigorous when conducting pharmaceutical trials.

When people in my state present themselves to receive the Covid vaccine they have to show proof of eligibility, and as far as I know no one has complained that that's racially discriminatory. Why then is it racially discriminatory to require proof of eligibility in order to vote?

If there's racism afoot in requiring an ID of some sort it's on the part of those progressives who think so little of minority voters that they don't believe them capable of mustering the wherewithal to secure a free ID.

And then there's Major League Baseball whose commissioner Rob Manfred was so outraged at this almost completely innocuous legislation that he's decided to punish many innocent Georgians, including a lot of black Georgians, by yanking the All-Star game from Atlanta. Mr. Manfred must figure that depriving average citizens of the 100 million dollars of income the game would've brought to their businesses is an effective way to show those Georgia legislators how awful they are and how righteous he is.

Unfortunately, President Biden has done nothing to help clarify what Georgia has actually done and has instead thrown gasoline on the fire by demonstrating that he either doesn't know what he's talking about (plausible) or that he's deliberately trying to deceive the American people (equally plausible).

In what appears to be a ridiculous pander to the far left-wing of his party, a wing which perhaps he finds more congenial than he let on during the election campaign, he repeatedly misrepresented the Georgia law and encouraged MLB, and by extension, all American corporations, to boycott Atlanta.

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post (The Washington Post!) has in fact given Mr. Biden four "Pinocchios," the maximum possible, over his misrepresentations of the Georgia reforms. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air fills us in:

Here are the two Biden statements with which Kessler takes specific issue:

“What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick … deciding that you’re going to end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work.” President Biden, in remarks at a news conference, March 25.

“Among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.” Biden, in a statement “on the attack on the right to vote in Georgia,” March 26

In fact, as Kessler explains, the bill does neither of those things. It doesn’t change the voting times at all on Election Day, which was 7 am – 7 pm before the new bill passed and will still be 7-7 afterward.

It doesn’t change the rule that people who get in line by 7 pm are allowed to vote even if polls close; that’s still the case, too. Some of those ideas were discussed, but none made it into the final version of the bill. Neither did ending early voting on Sundays.

Contrary to what Biden claims, the bill actually expands early voting time:

"One of the biggest changes in the bill would expand early voting access for most counties, adding an additional mandatory Saturday and formally codifying Sunday voting hours as optional. Counties can have early voting open as long as 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., or 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at minimum.

If you live in a larger metropolitan county, you might not notice a change. For most other counties, you will have an extra weekend day, and your weekday early voting hours will likely be longer."

The previous version of the law set the times for early-voting locations as “normal business hours,” which was interpreted as 9-5. Counties now have to provide that at a minimum, but could choose to extend those hours as they see fit.

The biggest changes to Georgia law had nothing to do with polling times, but with the absentee-ballot process. Access to that did get significantly restricted on timing, but not on eligibility, although the law also puts new restrictions on third-party groups trying to register people for absentee voting

. Even those changes are hardly Jim Crow-esque, as Biden painted them in his presser:

Mail-in absentee voting will look the most different for voters, especially after 1.3 million people used that method in the November general election. Voters over 65, with a disability, in the military or who live overseas will still be able to apply once for a ballot and automatically receive one the rest of an election cycle. But the earliest voters can request a mail-in ballot will be 11 weeks before an election instead of 180 days — less than half as much time.

The final deadline to complete an application is moved earlier, too. Instead of returning an application by the Friday before election day, SB 202 now backs it up to two Fridays before. Republican sponsors of the bill and local elections officials say this will cut down on the number of ballots rejected for coming in late because of the tight turnaround....

State and local governments are no longer allowed to send unsolicited applications, and third-party groups that send applications have new rules to follow, too. Their applications must be clearly marked as being “NOT an official government publication” that it is “NOT a ballot,” and must clearly state which group is sending the blank request.

Plus, third-party groups are only allowed to send applications to voters who have not already requested or voted an absentee ballot. The groups potentially face a penalty for each duplicate sent.

In fact, as anyone who cares about the truth could easily ascertain, the Georgia law is less restrictive than the voting laws in very liberal New York and President Biden's home state of Delaware. Does Mr. Biden think the legislators of those states are sick bigots?

Moreover, the Georgia law is certainly less draconian than the voting laws in Communist China which President Biden's own State Department has accused of committing genocide against its Muslim Uighur population. So, will the president encourage a boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics?

Of course not. But no matter. Mr. Biden may be a mendacious, hypocritical nincompoop, but he's not that nefarious Trump, and to our Democrat friends that's evidently all that matters.

Big Tech Book Burning

Josh Holdenried vice president and executive director of Napa Legal Institute, summarizes Big Tech's efforts to cancel organizations, authors and books which are grounded in a Christian worldview.

So far this year, Holdenreid tells us, religious groups and figures have been silenced by tech companies at a rate of about one a week.

LifeSiteNews, a popular religious news website had its YouTube channel permanently banned by Google in February. All its videos were deleted.

Google claimed its action was a response to Covid-19 misinformation but wouldn’t tell LSN which video had offended its standards. The tech giant had flagged LSN for a video of an American Catholic bishop criticizing vaccines developed with fetal cells. The website’s editor in chief said “our best guess is that the channel was taken down for our frank and factual discussion of the controversy around abortion-tainted medicines and vaccines.”

In January, Bishop Kevin Doran, an Irish Catholic, was banned from Twitter for tweeting, “There is dignity in dying. As a priest, I am privileged to witness it often. Assisted suicide, where it is practiced, is not an expression of freedom or dignity.” The company reversed its decision only after public opposition.

Then there was this:

The previous month, Twitter blocked a post from the Daily Citizen, which is run by Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian nonprofit, and suspended its account. The reason: a tweet that respectfully challenged the underlying premise of transgenderism.

Twitter made a similar move against Catholic World Report, though the company later said it had acted in error. Ryan T. Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center saw Amazon ban his book criticizing transgenderism, “When Harry Became Sally.” Amazon shows no signs of changing course.

Books from specific publishers are often targeted, such as Catholic TAN Books. One of its authors is Paul Kengor, who wrote an anticommunist tract called “The Devil and Karl Marx. ” TAN Books can’t advertise his work on Facebook, or that of Carrie Gress, who wrote a book on “rescuing the culture from toxic femininity.”

Facebook has also banned ads for Kimberly Cook’s book, “Motherhood Redeemed.” The offending ad called it “a book that challenges feminism in the modern world.”

Holdenreid concludes with this sage and important admonition:

It seems likely that religious groups and individuals will face mounting threats from tech companies. Their views on marriage, sexuality, life and other moral issues are unpopular among the Silicon Valley set. Religious groups should refuse to silence themselves, change their views, or otherwise back down.

Censorship is a symptom of a national collapse in civic culture. Curing the deeper disease will take all the courage and conviction we can muster.

Tyrants and totalitarians always ban ideas. They realize at some level that their movements are built on lies and that the free exchange of ideas disinfects their lies. They understand that as long as people have access to contrary ideas their nonsense will be exposed and never prevail, but if their views are the only ones ever heard or read then they'll seem compelling and people will accept them, like people accept a current fashion, in order to demonstrate their own moral and intellectual sophistication.

Thus, our high tech, elite barbarians ban books and cancel people. Given the power they'd be happy, if necessary, to eliminate altogether both the books and the people who write and read them.

John Updike on the Resurrection of Jesus

The American novelist John Updike (1932-2009) was not only a great writer, he was something of a paradox. The recipient of two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards, he wrote stories that some consider at least mildly pornographic, stories which reflect his own marital infidelities, but despite his flaws he seems nevertheless to have been devoutly Christian.

A poem he wrote in 1960 titled Seven Stanzas at Easter reflects his piety. Updike makes the point that if one is a believer he/she should really believe. No wishy-washy liberal protestantism for him. The resurrection of Christ was either an actual, historical, physical return to life of a man who had been actually, historically, physically dead or else the whole story doesn't really matter at all.

None of this "Jesus' body actually, permanently decomposed, but he rose in the sense that his spirit lived on in the hearts of his followers" nonsense for Updike. Either it happened objectively, literally, physically or Christianity is a fraud.

About that he was surely correct. As the Apostle Paul wrote (I Cor. 15:16-20):

If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most to be pitied. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. (italics mine)

Here's Updike's poem:

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Best wishes to all my readers for a very meaningful Resurrection Day tomorrow.

A Good Friday Meditation

As Christians observe this the most solemn day of the church year, the day traditionally called Good Friday, it might be helpful for both Christians and non-Christians alike to reflect on one aspect, though certainly not the only aspect, of the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus.

We might facilitate this reflection by means of an allegory, not an allegory in words but in a 30 minute film.

The video isn't in English so it's subtitled. It also may not be easy to understand what's going on in the beginning, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear enough. It's very powerful, very emotional, and sensitive viewers are cautioned. For those who have eyes to see, it dramatically portrays something of what happened behind the scenes, as it were, on Golgotha.

It might be good today to spend some time contemplating the father, his son and who those people on the train were and are.

The Miracle of Easter

The Christian world prepares to celebrate this Sunday what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable. It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false.

Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from a circularity. He seems to base the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible.

But set that dizzying circularity aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if a pot of hot water is added to a pot of of cold water the hot and cold molecules will eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water achieves a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of warm water into hot and cold portions, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern skeptics have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident.

They ground their belief in these things on the supposition that it's possible that there are an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even extremely improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the naturalistic origin of life, which is at least as improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Unlimited time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. To be sure, there's no evidence of other worlds, but part of the faith commitment of the modern skeptic is to hold that these innumerable worlds must exist. The skeptic clings to this conviction because if it's not so then life and the universe we inhabit must have a personal, rather than a mechanistic, explanation and that admission would deal a considerable metaphysical shock to the skeptic's psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos, why can't they also be invoked to explain "miracles" as well? If there are a near-infinite series of universes, a multiverse, as has been proposed in order to avoid the problem of cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the spectacularly improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos and the otherwise impossible origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the incomprehensible precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the origin of life from mere chemicals, the resurrection of a dead man should present no problem at all. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least highly improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

If, though, one is willing to assume the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to explain the properties of our universe, he should have no trouble accepting the existence of a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead. After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

The Evil Men Do

As the Christian world prepares to remember again this Friday the torture and cruel execution of Jesus some two thousand years ago, it would be good to be reminded that Christians still suffer today, often in horrific ways, for their devotion to Him.

In his book Live Not by Lies Rod Dreher takes us back to the Eastern Europe of the 1940s and 1950s and cites a number of examples of the suffering Christians experienced at the hands of the Communists in those years. He writes:

The Romania that Soviet troops occupied at the end of World War II was a deeply religious country. After Romanian Stalinists seized dictatorial control in 1947, among the most vicious anti-Christian persecution in the history of Soviet-style communism began.

From 1949 to 1951, the state conducted the “Piteşti Experiment.” The Piteşti prison was established as a factory to reengineer the human soul. Its masters subjected political prisoners, including clergy, to insane methods of torture to utterly destroy them psychologically so they could be remade as fully obedient citizens of the People’s Republic.

Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand, held captive from 1948 until he was ransomed into Western exile in 1964, was an inmate at Piteşti. In 1966 testimony before a US Senate committee, Wurmbrand spoke of how the communists broke bones, used red-hot irons, and all manner of physical torture.

They were also spiritually and psychologically sadistic, almost beyond comprehension. Wurmbrand told the story of a young Christian prisoner in Piteşti who was tied to a cross for days. Twice daily, the cross bearing the man was laid flat on the floor, and one hundred other inmates were forced by guards to urinate and defecate on him.

Then the cross was erected again and the Communists, swearing and mocking, “Look your Christ, look your Christ, how beautiful he is, adore him, kneel before him, how fine he smells, your Christ.” And then the Sunday morning came and a Catholic priest, an acquaintance of mine, has been put to the belt, in the dirt of a cell with 100 prisoners, a plate with excrements, and one with urine was given to him and he was obliged to say the holy mass upon these elements, and he did it.

Wurmbrand asked the priest how he could consent to commit such sacrilege. The Catholic priest was “half-mad,” Wurmbrand recalled, and begged him to show mercy. All the other prisoners were beaten until they accepted this profane communion while the communist prison guards taunted them.

Wurmbrand told the American lawmakers: "I am a very insignificant and a very little man. I have been in prison among the weak ones and the little ones, but I speak for a suffering country and for a suffering church and for the heroes and the saints of the 20th century; we have had such saints in our prison to which I did not dare to lift my eyes."

After his release, Pastor Wurmbrand, who died in 2001, devoted the rest of his life to speaking out for persecuted Christians. “Not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death,” he wrote, “but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”

Historian Hannah Arendt, in her magisterial work The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote of both the Communists and the Nazis that "It is because men lost their belief in a final judgment that they became monsters. The best had no hope and the worst lost all fear." When men no longer believe there's any accountability for how they behave they're capable of the most monstrous behavior.

Lurking in the heart of every man is a capacity for unimaginable evil. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent years suffering in the Soviet prison camps called the Gulag, observed that "“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts."

In his book Tortured for Christ, Wurmbrand echos Arendt. He writes,

When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil that is in man. The Communist torturers often said, "There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish." I heard one torturer say, "I thank God, in whom I do not believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart."

Here's an excerpt from his book:

A pastor by the name of Florescu was tortured with red hot iron pokers and with knives. He was beaten very badly. Then starving rats were driven into his cell through a large pipe. He could not sleep because he had to defend himself all the time. If he rested a moment the rats would attack him.

He was forced to stand for two weeks, day and night. The Communists wished him to betray his brethren, but he resisted steadfastly. Eventually they brought his fourteen year-old son to the prison and began to whip the boy in front of his father, saying that they would continue to beat him until the pastor said what they wished him to say.

The poor man was half-mad. He bore it as long as he could, then he cried to his son, "Alexander, I must say what they want! I can't bear your beating anymore!"

The son answered, "Father, don't do me the injustice of having a traitor as a parent. Withstand! If they kill me I will die with the words, 'Jesus and my fatherland.'" The Communists, enraged, fell upon the child and beat him to death, with blood spattered over the walls of the cell. He died praising God. Our dear brother Florescu was never the same after seeing this.

Handcuffs with sharp nails on the inside were placed on our wrists. If we were totally still they didn't cut us. But in the bitterly cold cells, when we shook with cold, our wrists would be torn by the nails.

Christians were hung upside down on ropes and beaten so severely that their bodies swung back and forth under the blows. Christians were also placed in ice-box "refrigerator cells," which were so cold that frost and ice covered the inside. I was thrown into one while I had very little clothing on. Prison doctors would watch through an opening until they saw symptoms of freezing to death, then they would give a signal and guards would rush in to take us out and make us warm.

When we were finally warmed, we would immediately be put back into the ice-box cells to freeze. Thawing out, then freezing to within minutes of death, then being thawed out - over and over again! Even today there are times when I can't bear to open a refrigerator.

We Christians were sometimes forced to stand inside wooden boxes only slightly larger than we were. This left no room to move. Dozens of sharp nails were driven into every side of the box, with their razor-sharp points sticking through the wood. While we stood perfectly still, it was all right. But we were forced to stand in these boxes for endless hours; when we became fatigued and swayed with tiredness, the nails would pierce our bodies.

If we moved or twitched a muscle - there were the horrible nails.

What the Communists have done to Christians passes any possibility of human understanding. I have seen Communists whose faces while torturing believers shone with rapturous joy. They cried out while torturing Christians, "We are the devil!"

Some like to think that human beings are basically good, but history doesn't offer much support for that belief.

Around the world today, particularly in many Muslim countries and Communist countries like China and North Korea, Christians still suffer because they seek to model their lives after that of their Master whose own torture and death is commemorated on Friday. Voice of the Martyrs, the organization founded by Pastor Wurmbrand in 1966, is a good resource for those wishing to learn about the nature and extent of that suffering today.

Return of the God Hypothesis

Today is the day that philosopher of science Stephen Meyer's latest book is to be released. It's titled The Return of the God Hypothesis, and according to the reviewers it promises to present a very powerful argument in favor of the idea that the universe and life are the product of an intelligent, transcendent creator - either the God of traditional theism or something very much like God.

Meyer founded and heads the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. He has a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in England and is the author of two previous books that are essential reading in the scientific debate about evolution. The first, Signature in the Cell, examines the role of DNA and the cellular-level evidence for intelligent design.

The second, Darwin’s Doubt, shows how the explosive origin of animal life in the Cambrian era makes a case for intelligent design (ID).

Darwinians have been flummoxed by the arguments in both books and have apparently realized that the best response is to simply pretend they don't exist.

Meyer did an interview recently with World magazine. You can read the whole interview here, but one part of it was particularly interesting to me. Meyer is reportedly taking the debate about intelligent design to the next level. Heretofore, ID theorists were careful to avoid claims about who they thought the designer was, how long ago the designer acted, and so forth.

They simply argued that life showed ample evidence of having been intelligently engineered and that the naturalistic theory which asserts that it's the result of blind, purposeless processes is intellectually unsupportable.

In The Return of the God Hypothesis Meyer makes the case for explicitly identifying the designer with the God of theism. Toward the end of the interview he's asked this (The interviewer's remarks are in boldface, Meyer's reply follows):

Critics of intelligent design have accused the ID movement of secretly pushing creationism. You and your allies have insisted ID is a legitimate scientific inquiry that stops short of trying to identify the designer. Now you’re making the case for His identity. Could this book give fuel to your critics?

I’m sure it could, but that’s not an evidential objection. That’s an accusation as to motive. It is irrelevant to the merits of the argument itself.

The argument we’ve made is that nature points to a designing agent. In biology, we see evidence of design in the digital code that’s present in the DNA molecule. We know from our uniform and repeated experience that information in a digital or alphabetic form—what we call sequence-specific—invariably arises from an intelligent source.

If we’re trying to reconstruct what happened in the past, we want to consider what we know about cause-and-effect patterns in the world around us. The same method of reasoning Darwin used has led us to a non-Darwinian conclusion: If there’s a program, then there’s a programmer. Now, I’m looking at a broader range of evidence to answer: “Who is the designer?”

This then is something new in your quest.

In making the original case for design in biology, I left unspecified whether the designing intelligence was a transcendent designer or an immanent designer, a designer within the cosmos or a designer that transcended matter, space, time, and energy, what we call the universe.

In this new book, what I’m doing is simply looking at a broader range of evidence to answer a question that’s been posed to me, which is, “What can we say from science about the identity of the designer? Is it more likely to be an alien or a god, and immanent or transcendent?”

And you’re seeing ... The designer must have preceded the universe, because the fine-tuning was established at the very beginning of the universe. No immanent intelligence, no space alien designer within the cosmos, can account for the laws of physics upon which its very life depends and which preceded its existence.

The fine-tuning problems point to a transcendent design that preexists matter, space, time, and energy.

Of course, the identity of the designer has been implicit in the fine-tuning argument from the beginning. Anything responsible for the universe had to be extremely powerful, extremely intelligent, extremely knowledgeable and had to transcend the universe it created which means it couldn't be spatial, temporal or material. This sounds very much like the God of theism.

Intelligent Design theorists, however, have for much of the last several decades focused on the biological rather than the cosmological evidence for design so they rarely "officially" drew this inference. Meyer's book evidently takes the next step and fuses the biological evidence with the evidence from physics, chemistry, and cosmology to present a unified philosophical and scientific argument for the existence of God.

I urge you to read the rest of the interview - it's not long - and if you're interested in getting a copy of The Return of the God Hypothesis you can order it from the good people at my favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds. It's a small independent shop standing athwart the Amazonian goliath and the big box stores. I encourage you to check them out and give them your support.