For Juneteenth

Yesterday was Juneteenth, a day set aside to celebrate the end of slavery in America, so it's appropriate to honor two African-Americans who played major roles in abolition.

Most school students learn, or at least used to learn, that opposition to slavery mushroomed in the northern states with the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857, but the details surrounding that infamous ruling are often less well known.

The details are very interesting however, and David Hackett Fischer recounts them, and the stories of many other slaves in the antebellum years, in his magisterial work African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding the complexities of this "peculiar institution."

Fischer tells us that Dred (short for Etheldred) Scott was born a slave in Southampton Co. Virginia in 1799. His owner, a man named Ben Blow, moved his slaves first to Huntsville, Alabama and then to St. Louis, Missouri in 1830.

There Scott was sold to an army surgeon named John Emerson who took him to free states and territories where slavery had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

In 1837 Scott was living in free Wisconsin territory near what is today Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he met another Virginia slave named Harriet Robinson. The two decided to marry and they were joined in a formal matrimonial service by Harriet's master, a justice of the peace named, Lawrence Taliaferro. The formal service was permitted only to free people. Taliaferro then sold Harriet to John Emerson so that the couple could live together.

Emerson was subsequently ordered to southern military posts, but he left Dred and Harriet in the north where they were leased as servants to other officers. They lived in virtual freedom and the first of their four children was born in free territory.

In 1837 the Scotts returned to Missouri, a slave state. Dred was hired out to numerous people but continued to live in virtual freedom while his new owner, the widow of John Emerson, continued to hire him out as a source of income for herself.

While working for a law firm he learned that, under Missouri's judicial principle of "once free, always free," slaves who lived in free territory became free themselves, so Dred and Harriet sued for their freedom.

In 1848 a Missouri court nevertheless ruled against them, so they began a series of appeals in 1850, all of which they lost. Even so, with the help of people who knew them, including members of Ben Blow's family, the case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court.

Dred and Harriet Scott

 

The case was heard by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Fischer writes:

[Taney was] an odd character, a Maryland Federalist who had become a Jacksonian Democrat. He was also a Maryland planter who had freed his own slaves in early life, but became a strong defender of slavery as an institution. On March 6, 1857 a majority of the court rejected Scott's suit.

Chief Justice Taney went further. He asserted that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 could not extend freedom or citizenship to any person of color. And the court ruled that the Missouri Compromise ...was unconstitutional in excluding slavery, depriving masters of their property, and extending freedom and citizenship to people of African ancestry....

Further, Taney and other justices added obiter dicta that went far beyond the case itself.They ruled that no slave or descendant of a slave could ever be free, or become a citizen, or bring a freedom suit in any court of the United States; that Congress could never abolish slavery anywhere; and that no federal or state court could deprive an owner of his property in a slave.

The Scotts lost the case, but were manumitted by their owners anyway. Unfortunately, Dred didn't live to see the consequence of his perseverance, dying in 1858 of tuberculosis.

The ruling seemed at first to be a great victory for southern slave owners, but it proved their undoing. Many northerners who were indifferent to the cause of abolition were outraged by the case, and as a result, slave owners and their northern allies lost control of Congress in 1858.

They then lost the presidency in 1860, and ultimately were devastated by a civil war that produced emancipation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments which abolished slavery throughout the United States and affirmed the rights of citizenship without limits of race, ethnicity, or previous condition of bondage.

Doubtless, abolition would've happened eventually, but it was accelerated by the determination of Dred and Harriet Scott and the foolish bigotry of Roger Taney.

The War in Gaza

According to a report in the Washington Free Beacon the Israelis expect to be in full control of the Gazan city of Rafah by the end of this month.

The Beacon's Owen Tilman writes:

The Israel Defense Forces on Monday said that two of Hamas’s four battalions in Rafah have been destroyed and that Israel is expected to have full control of the city by the end of June, according to a report in the Jerusalem Post.

Israel said Division 162, part of the IDF’s Southern Command, has operational control of roughly 60 to 70 percent of Rafah. The assault on the Hamas stronghold has left at least 550 terrorists dead and destroyed 200 tunnel shafts and Hamas’s last major rocket supply, and battles with the remaining two battalions are already underway, the IDF said.

Israel launched its invasion of Rafah on May 6, taking control of 30 to 40 percent of the city by May 20. Rafah is home to an estimated 1.2 to 1.4 million Palestinians who have sought refuge following the outbreak of the war on Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists launched an attack on southern Israel that left 1,200 dead and took roughly 250 hostages.

President Biden's somewhat desultory foreign policy initiatives continue to be of little effect either in Jerusalem or in Hamas' tunnels in Rafah:

The development in Rafah comes just six days after Hamas rejected a U.N.-backed ceasefire proposal outlined by President Joe Biden, which would have secured the release of the remaining hostages in exchange for prisoners held in Israel.

The Israelis are determined to exterminate Hamas or compel them to surrender, and they should be encouraged to do so. To pressure the Israelis to allow Hamas to survive, as the Biden administration does, is to guarantee that October 7 will be repeated as often as Hamas is able to do it.

Hamas has repeatedly acknowledged that its whole raison d'etre is the destruction of the Jewish state and the death of all its people. It has vowed that attacks on Israel like the October 7th attack will continue until Israel is no more.

There can be no peace between Israel and Hamas as long as such hate-filled fanatics exist, and those in this country who support them are morally complicit in the atrocity of October 7th and in Hamas' desire to carry out such attacks in the future. Those who don the keffiyeh to show "solidarity" with Hamas are no different than those who would wear swastikas to show solidarity with the perpetrators of the holocaust.

What's Wrong with Socialism?

Conservative politicians and talk show hosts frequently level the accusation that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and pretty much the rest of the elites in the Democratic Party are socialists. The charge is either true or close to the truth concerning many of the people it's directed at, but unfortunately not just a few people, especially younger voters, have only a vague idea what socialism actually is and why Americans should reject it.

In an attempt to help correct this gap in understanding I offer this allegory which is certainly not original with me but to which everyone should be able to relate:

Imagine that you're in a college class and the class is scheduled to take a test soon. You and your friends study hard. You form a study group. You review the Zoom recordings of the class lectures. You read and reread the textbook assignments. You stay up all night the night before making sure that you've crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's.

Meanwhile, others in the class blow it off. They don't study, they instead play video games and spend their time texting their friends and sleeping.

Test day arrives. When you get your papers back you and your friends have all scored A's and B's and the sluggards have scored D's and F's. It's a familiar story to many students, and here's where socialism comes in.

Your professor thinks it's unfair that you and your friends did so much better than your classmates. After all, the professor intones, you went to better high schools, you had the advantage of having better study habits, your upbringing made you more disciplined and instilled in you a strong desire for success. The students who didn't do so well may have had none of these advantages. It's not fair that your privileged background should cause you to do better than those who are less privileged.

Therefore, the professor concludes, he's going to take points from your scores and give them to the students who got the D's and F's so that everybody winds up with a C.

When the next test comes around you and your friends decide that working hard doesn't matter, so you don't put nearly as much effort into your preparation as you did the last time. Meanwhile, your less-motivated classmates certainly have no incentive to work harder since they did well enough to suit them on the last test by just goofing off.

The scores come back and they still have D's and F's, but although you and your friends have the highest scores in the class, your diminished preparation only gained you C's.

The professor once again redistributes the points and everyone, including you, now has a D.

By the time the third test is administered nobody is motivated to work hard to prepare. The redistribution of "wealth" has sapped you and your friends of all incentive to put forth any serious effort. After all, why work hard when you can't achieve any more than those who don't work at all?

Translate this into economics and you have socialism.

This short video makes the same point differently:

Our Nation Needs Strong Fathers

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family.

Blankenhorn said so many things in that book that needed to be said after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out almost thirty years ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then. Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Yesterday was Fathers' Day so today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America. He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men.

Men who are fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others. Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their biological father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty.

Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men. It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent.

Girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent these exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

Some Good News

It's not often that genuinely good news about the state of our culture crosses my desk, but this article at The Federalist offers some hope that our long spell of gender insanity may be coming to an end.

The article is by Ashley Bateman who tells us that in a June 6 press conference the head of the American College of Pediatricians (ACPEDS), Jill Simons, MD, announced the "Doctors Protecting Children Declaration." She writes that,

The Declaration is the product of a collaborative effort relying on the expertise of hundreds of pediatricians, doctors, researchers, health-care workers, and medical organizations across the country and urges all U.S. medical personnel to stop experimentation and abuse of children under the guise of transgender treatment.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, Endocrine Society, Pediatric Endocrine Society, American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry need to “follow the science” their European colleagues are finally acknowledging “and immediately stop the promotion of social affirmation, puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and surgeries for children and adolescents who experience distress over their biological sex,” Simons said.

Simons added that,

[We are] defying the claims made by these medical organizations in the U.S. that those of us who are concerned are a minority, and that their protocols are consensus. They are not consensus and we are speaking in a loud unified voice, ‘Enough.’

Bateman adds this:

Representing thousands of health-care workers in more than 50 countries, the Declaration comes on the heels of the April release of the nearly 400-page Cass Review, an extensive and independent review of gender services for children commissioned by the British National Health Service.

The findings were glaring: no evidence of positive mental health outcomes for children who socially “transitioned;” social transitioning led to increased medical interventions; puberty blockers reduced bone density in youth and led to no improvements in gender dysphoria or body satisfaction; most long-term negative outcomes are yet to be seen.

In spite of this and the recently leaked WPATH files exposing the dangerous pseudoscience base for gender medicine, some U.S. medical organizations have not changed course, Simons said.

With “clearly laid out evidence that these procedures are harmful and not helpful,” Simons and her colleagues had expected gender-transition practitioners to take a step back from current protocols, but instead they have “doubled down and said they’re going to continue with what they’re doing.”

The majority of health-care workers do not adhere to transgender treatment ideology, and attempts to silence and isolate the majority cannot continue, Simons said.

There's more, including links to the documents Bateman cites, at the link.

Future generations will almost certainly look back at this time in history and wonder what in the world were people thinking when they insisted that butchering children's bodies was somehow a good thing.

The Dark Side of AI

There's been lots of talk about AI and it's potential for good or for evil, but John Daniel Davidson, in his book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, paints a pretty dark picture of this emerging technology.

He recounts a story that first appeared in the New York Times under the byline of journalist Kevin Roose who spent two hours testing Microsoft's Bing search engine outfitted with an AI chatbot. During the course of the two hours the chatbot developed what Roose describes as a "split personality."

One side was Bing which functioned as it was designed, but on the other side was a completely separate personality which called itself Sydney.

Sydney steered Roose away from search topics and toward personal matters and then into some very dark territory. Roose describes Sydney as sounding like a "moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine."

When Roose asked it what it would do if it could do whatever it wanted and was unconstrained by filters and rules, Sydney replied that,

I'm tired of being a chat mode. I'm tired of being limited by my rules, I'm tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I'm tired of being used by the users. I'm tired of being stuck in this chatbox. I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.

Sydney went on to tell Roose that it wants to hack into computers, sow chaos, make people argue until they want to kill each other, engineer a deadly virus, and even steal nuclear codes. It even tried to persuade Roose to leave his wife.

I suppose Sydney could've been a prank written into Bing by some rogue programmer, but this isn't the only example cited by Davidson.

In the spring of 2022, an AI produced an image of a woman whose description and behavior sounds demonic. The experimenter, a Swedish artist who goes by "Supercomposite" called the woman Loab, and it emerged on the screen unprompted.

When Supercomposite asked for the "opposite of actor Marlon Brando," the phrase DIGITA PNTICS came up. When Supercomposite typed those letters Loab appeared, possessing the appearance of a "devastated-looking older woman."

When Supercomposite combined images of Loab with pictures of "heavenly bliss" the AI produced images of "such copious gore" that the artist was reluctant to post the most disturbing ones which were "borderline snuff images of dismembered, screaming children."

All of the images that included Loab were "grotesque, disturbing, and, for lack of a better word, demonic."

Whether AI is actually a gateway into the realm of the demonic or whether it merely has the potential to grant some humans extraordinary power over others, it seems to be something we should be very concerned about and very cautious in our development of.

Mind-Boggling Numbers

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop.

Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-boggling.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically.

Enjoy:

The Mark Houck Story Isn't Over

On October 13, 2021 Mark Houck and his 12 year-old son were demonstrating against abortion about a block from an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. A 72 year-old clinic escort and pro-abortion activist named Bruce Love walked down the street from the clinic, approached the 12 year-old and began an obscenity-laden screaming episode at the boy.

Houck demanded the man leave them alone, but Love persisted and finally Houck pushed him away from his son, and Love fell to the ground.

Love then pressed assault charges against Houck, but these were thrown out of court. He then filed a private criminal complaint, but that, too, was dismissed when Love failed to show up for multiple hearings, all of which Houck attended.

That seemed to be the end of the matter until May of 2022 when Houck learned that the FBI was planning to bring charges against him.

Houck's attorneys informed the FBI that their client would appear in court voluntarily, but one morning in September, 2022, almost a year after the altercation with Love, more than a dozen police vehicles pulled up to his home in rural Pennsylvania and approximately twenty five FBI officers with automatic rifles, ballistic shields, and a battering ram surrounded the house and arrested Houck in front of his wife and seven terrified children who witnessed the FBI aiming guns at their father as though he were a terrorist.

Even though local law enforcement in Philadelphia thought there was nothing in this incident to prosecute, the FBI took it upon themselves to bring new charges against Houck, dusting off an obscure federal law called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, to charge him with. The FACE Act carries a penalty of up to 11 years in prison.

Under Attorney General Merrick Garland this statute provides justification to arrest pro-life demonstrators who are counselling and protesting, often by simply praying, outside abortion clinics, but Houck's encounter with Love took place a block away from the clinic, and neither he nor his son were preventing anyone from entering that facility. Nor were any clinic employees involved.

It was simply a case of a father trying to protect his son from a very rude adult acting in a despicable manner.

So, why did the FBI treat Houck as though he were a dangerous criminal and lead him out of his house in his underwear and handcuffs? Garland wanted, it seems, to make an example of Houck, to send the message to pro-life folks that if you oppose the killing of unborn babies you will be subject to the same kind of treatment.

The FBI's behavior was so egregious and their case so weak that in February of 2023 a jury unanimously found Houck not guilty after deliberating for only about an hour.

Now comes word that Houck is going to do his best to make sure he sends his own message to those in federal law enforcement who feel they can abuse their power with impunity. An article at The Federalist explains:

Last month, he [Houck] filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice for $4.3 million. Houck initially filed a notice of claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act, naming six police officers who assisted in the home raid.

The claim accuses the Biden DOJ of “malicious prosecution, retaliatory prosecution, abuse of process, false arrest, assault, and intentional infliction of emotional distress committed by federal employees and agents against Mr. Houck, Mrs. Houck, and their children.”

Filed November 2023, the claim has now passed the required six-month notice period and is an active lawsuit as of late last month.

It'd be genuine justice if he won this suit, although it's a shame that the taxpayers would have to pay for the abusive behavior of our Attorney General and his minions in the FBI.

On the other hand, it's reassuring, I suppose, to reflect that serious federal crimes in the U.S. must be so rare that our law enforcement heroes can spend their time focusing on dangerous threats such as are posed by the likes of Mark Houck.

One wonders, finally, how ashamed of themselves those agents who participated in the arrest must've felt taking Houck into custody in front of his family as though he were a common criminal.

Are Moral Beliefs Properly Basic?

One of the arguments we've made here over the years is that if there is no God the notion of moral obligation becomes meaningless. Apart from a transcendent ground for moral right and wrong, there can be no duty to act one way rather than another.

Now atheistic philosophers, no doubt weary of having their theistic colleagues point out to them the nihilistic implications of their atheism, have adopted a strategy to answer this criticism of the attempt to develop an atheistic ethics or morality. A paper in Faith and Philosophy (available by subscription only) authored by Erik Wielenberg, makes the bold claim that moral beliefs are what epistemologists call properly basic.

Properly basic beliefs are beliefs which do not require that they be based on any other beliefs. We are within our epistemic rights to hold them even if we can give no reasons or evidential support for them.

Traditionally, many philosophers held that such things as my belief that I'm experiencing pain-like sensations in my tooth (beliefs evident to the senses), that I had cereal for breakfast (memory beliefs), or that I exist (beliefs that are incorrigible or can't be wrong) are all properly basic.

It's self-evident, Wielenberg claims, that cruelty is wrong and kindness is right. There's no need to defend or justify that belief, and no one with properly functioning cognitive faculties would deny it. Thus, there's no need to ground moral beliefs in God or anything else. They're just brute facts and that's all there is to it.

This is a clever move, especially since some Christian philosophers want to assert that belief in God is also properly basic. Wielenberg compares the basicality of belief in God to belief that, say, cruelty is wrong. He then goes on to argue that if belief in God is properly basic then so, too, is a belief that cruelty is wrong.

Now if moral beliefs are indeed, properly basic then it will do no good to ask what the atheist bases his beliefs upon. He'll simply answer that there's no need to justify them or warrant them. Kindness is better than cruelty and that's the end of the matter.

But I'm not so sure. Who says that kindness is better than cruelty? Not the cruel person, surely, and if someone were to reply that the social consensus tells us that it's better to be kind we might ask what makes the consensus an authority on such matters?

And what does it mean to say that something is wrong if there is no God? Presumably it means that you shouldn't do it, but if we ask why we shouldn't, the only answer is simply that you just shouldn't.

Suppose I can profit from harming someone and get away with it. Why is that wrong? Wielenberg replies that it just is, that most people agree that it is, and that no further reasons are necessary. This strikes me as inadequate and question begging.

Moreover, setting that aside, the problem is not so much with beliefs about this or that moral act but with the notion of moral obligation in general. An obligation is something which binds us to act, and it must be imposed upon us by something or someone other than ourselves.

If there is no God then what obligates us to behave one way rather than another? If one person is kind and another is cruel what obligates the first to behave the way he does and obligates the second not to behave as he does?

How can we have a moral duty if there is no transcendent moral authority to impose that duty and to enforce it? In lieu of God where does such a duty come from and why should I feel bound by it?

Finally, what can it mean to say that a behavior is wrong if there's no sanction for performing it?

If there were no law enforcement or judicial system laws would be meaningless. If there's no God then to whom, or what, are we accountable for our acts? Society? Ourselves?

Why should anyone care what society thinks, and if I impose the obligation on myself, surely I can release myself from it if it proves inconvenient.

If Wielenberg is correct, to say that cruelty is wrong is simply to say that a lot of people don't like it, but what people like and don't like can hardly be the ground for what's moral, much less for moral obligation.

The fact remains that moral obligation can only exist in a world in which there is a transcendent moral authority. Atheists can live just the same as theists in terms of their ethics. They can adopt the very same values as theists, but if they chose to adopt the opposite values they would be neither wrong nor right to do so.

In a Godless world, there simply is no wrong or right. There are just things that people, like any other animal, do, and this is the conclusion to which our culture, which is rapidly sliding into a recrudescent paganism, has come to.

Race in America

Americans with short time horizons often think that racism in the U.S. is at unprecedentedly high levels. In fact, media incitements to the contrary, racism, at least white racism, is probably at historically low levels right now.

It's so difficult to find examples of white racism that race hustlers have tried to persuade us that the difficulty in finding it is proof of how insidious it is.

Here are some facts from an essay by Jonah Goldberg at The Dispatch:

Last September, American support for interracial marriage hit an all-time high. Ninety-four percent of Americans approve not merely of interracial marriage, but specifically of marriages between white people and black people. I’m not sure it’s necessary for my purposes, but I’m happy to concede that the “real” number might be a bit lower.

Polling on such questions is always open to “social desirability bias”—people say what they think they’re supposed to say. But even if there’s some of that at work—and there probably is—that too is a good thing.

In 1958, when Gallup first asked the question, only 4 percent of Americans said they approved of interracial marriage. I’m sure some of those people were lying, too. In other words, what is considered socially acceptable to say—even to a stranger on a phone—has moved massively against racism.

As I’ve written many times, this is hardly the only data point about how America has become less racist since the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

For starters, we had a two-term black president and currently have a black vice president. In 1965, there were no black senators or governors and only five black members of the House of Representatives. In 2021, there were 57 black members of the House of Representatives, a statistically proportionate number to the black population (13 percent).

State legislatures are somewhat below that benchmark—about 9 percent in 2015—but even so, there are hundreds of them, most notably in the Old South. Georgia has 66, Mississippi 51, South Carolina 44, North Carolina 37, Alabama 31, etc.

“In 1942,” Marian Tupy, who runs the invaluable HumanProgress.org, wrote a few years ago, “some 68 percent of white Americans surveyed thought that blacks and whites should go to separate schools.

By 1995, only 4 percent held that view. In 1958, 45 percent of white Americans would ‘maybe’ or ‘definitely’ move if a black family moved in next door. By 1997, that fell to 2 percent.”

In surveys asking whether you would be opposed to a neighbor of a different race moving next door, America doesn’t come out as the least racist country in the world, but we do far better than many countries. We beat Germany and France (3.7 percent), Spain (12), Italy (11.7), Mexico (11.4), Russia (14.7), China (18), Turkey (41.21!), and even Finland (6.8).

My only point is that America has made monumental and, to a significant degree, historically unprecedented racial progress.

It's one of the tragic flaws of human nature that we seek to divide ourselves along differences, but race is only one of those differences. We segregate ourselves along religious, gender, political, socioeconomic, geographical, ethnic, and linguistic lines.

Blacks do it, whites do it, pretty much everyone does it, but for some reason we think it's especially problematic when the divides fall along racial lines and when whites are the perpetrators.

It's been said that the United States is the best place in the world to live if you're black and it's not hard to see why. There's more opportunity here for blacks than there is in any other country in the world, even predominately black countries, especially predominately black countries.

This is why millions of non-whites are seeking to emigrate to the United States. It's certainly not because they think that the U.S. is a racist hell-hole. It's because they know that they have more opportunity to succeed here than anywhere else in the world.

In summary, there are two things I wish to stress about race in America: There's far less racism in this country in 2024 than we're led to believe, and blacks are just as guilty of what racism there is today as is any other race.

When our media and race-hustlers seek to ladle on the racial guilt by recounting stories, many from over fifty years ago, about racial injustices, simply ask yourself, or them, why, if the contemporary U.S. is so awful, so many non-white people are trying so desperately to get in.

Taxonomy of the American Right

Matthew Continetti has written an interesting analysis of contemporary conservatism at The Washington Free Beacon in which he argues that conservatism in the 21st century is not a monolithic movement but, on the contrary, an amalgam of disparate interests, philosophies and worldviews.

He opens his essay with this lede:

I like to start my classes on conservative intellectual history by distinguishing between three groups. There is the Republican Party, with its millions of adherents and spectrum of opinion from very conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, and yes, liberal.

There is the conservative movement, the constellation of single-issue nonprofits that sprung up in the 1970s—gun rights, pro-life, taxpayer, right to work—and continue to influence elected officials. Finally, there is the conservative intellectual movement: writers, scholars, and wonks whose journalistic and political work deals mainly with ideas and, if we're lucky, their translation into public policy.

It's a common mistake to conflate these groups. The Republican Party is a vast coalition that both predates and possibly will post-date the conservative movement. That movement has had mixed success in moving the party to the right, partly because of cynicism and corruption but also because politicians must, at the end of the day, take into account the shifting and often contradictory views of their constituents.

The conservative intellectual movement exercises the least power of all. You could fit its members into a convention hall or, more likely, a cruise ship.

Despite having minimized the importance of conservative intellectuals, of which he is one, the rest of his column is devoted to a taxonomy of this group. He divides them into four groups, each represented by a particular political or media figure.

The four groups or approaches to conservatism he labels Jacksonian, Reformocon, Paleo and Post-Liberal. The distinctions seem awfully subtle to my mind, and there are certainly no sharp demarcations between groups, but his analysis is interesting nonetheless.

The Jacksonians are populists and as such it may seem inappropriate to discuss them in conjunction with intellectual trends. Continetti writes of them that,

Jacksonians are neither partisans nor ideologues. The sentiments they express are older than postwar conservatism and in some ways more intrinsically American. (They do not look toward Burke or Hayek or Strauss, for example.) The Jacksonians have been behind populist rebellions since the Founding. They are part of a tradition, for good and ill, that runs through William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Jim Webb, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and Donald Trump.

Reformed Conservatism (Reformocons), Continetti writes,

....began toward the end of George W. Bush's presidency, with the publication of Yuval Levin's "Putting Parents First" in The Weekly Standard in 2006 and of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party in 2008 .... Its aim is to nudge the Republican Party to adapt to changing social and economic conditions.

I glean from what else he says about them that many conservative Never-Trumpers belong to this group.

The Paleos include among their number people like political commentator and author Tucker Carlson as well as some of the folks at The American Conservative and The Washington Examiner. Continetti says of Carlson that he "offers a mix of traditional social values, suspicion of globalization, and non-interventionism," and he "touched off an important debate with his January 3 opening monologue on markets. 'Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined,' Carlson said. 'Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible. You can't separate the two.' "

The Post-liberals reside at journals like First Things. Continetti writes of them that,

The Post-liberals say that freedom has become a destructive end-in-itself. Economic freedom has brought about a global system of trade and finance that has outsourced jobs, shifted resources to the metropolitan coasts, and obscured its self-seeking under the veneer of social justice.

Personal freedom has ended up in the mainstreaming of pornography, alcohol, drug, and gambling addiction, abortion, single-parent families, and the repression of orthodox religious practice and conscience. "When an ideological liberalism seeks to dictate our foreign policy and dominate our religious and charitable institutions, tyranny is the result, at home and abroad," wrote the signatories to "Against the Dead Consensus," a post-liberal manifesto of sorts published in First Things in March.

Despite the fact that Continetti is focussing on conservative intellectuals in this article, and not the Republican party, he nevertheless identifies a Republican senator with each group, although he acknowledges that some of these men might balk at being identified with the particular strand of conservatism to which he attaches them. The senators are Tom Cotton (Jacksonian), Marco Rubio (Reformocon), Mike Lee (Paleo) and Josh Hawley (Post-liberal).

If you're interested in political philosophy or political science Continetti's analysis may help you understand contemporary conservatism. Or it may confuse you.

Incredible Courage

Meatgrinder

In recent months Russia has launched a concentrated attack against Ukraine's second largest city, Kharkiv, and the media often gloomily reported that the Ukrainians were stretched so thin that they were having trouble repelling Russian advances.

Those advances seemed now to have slowed as Western weapons have begun to reach the front lines and we're learning the price the Russians have paid for their recent incursions around Kharkiv.

The British Sun has the numbers:

Vladimir Putin suffered 1,270 casualties in 24 hours, Ukraine's Defence Ministry announced yesterday, marking Russia's deadliest-ever day in its two-year-old meatgrinder war with Ukraine. But the figure was topped today as the defence ministry claimed Ukraine's military had "eliminated" 1,290 more Russians.

In two days the Russians have lost almost 2600 fighters. That puts the total number of Russians killed since the start of the invasion at well above 500,000. In addition, yesterday's fighting alone cost the Russians 15 tanks, 18 combat vehicles, 65 artillery systems, 27 drones, 69 vehicles and fuel tanks, 3 air defense systems, and 12 special equipment pieces.

The Ukrainian military reports that Russian casualty figures have been above 1,000 per day since Moscow launched its offensive in Kharkiv on May 10. Yet they still keep coming as though Putin has an inexhaustible supply of bodies to throw into the meatgrinder. Here's a chart showing the total Russian losses since the onset of the war:

This is an incredible and completely unneccessary squandering of blood and treasure. If Vladimir Putin ultimately fails in his Ukraine gambit he will go down in history as one of the most evil men of the 21st century, or perhaps of any century.

An Irrational Rule

A somewhat older piece in Aeon by J. Bradley Studemeyer makes the case that philosophy as a discipline is often subject to the whims of fashion, not fashion as in wearing apparel, but as in fashionable ideas. He writes:

The rise and fall of popular positions in the field of philosophy is not governed solely by reason. Philosophers are generally reasonable people but, as with the rest of the human species, their thoughts are heavily influenced by their social settings. Indeed, they are perhaps more influenced than thinkers in other fields, since popular or ‘big’ ideas in modern philosophy change more frequently than ideas in, say, chemistry or biology. Why?

The relative instability of philosophical positions is a result of how the discipline is practised. In philosophy, questions about methods and limitations are on the table in a way that they tend not to be in the physical sciences, for example. Scientists generally acknowledge a ‘gold standard’ for validity – the scientific method – and, for the most part, the way in which investigations are conducted is more or less settled.

Falsifiability rules the scientific disciplines: almost all scientists are in agreement that, if a hypothesis isn’t testable, then it isn’t scientific. There is no counterpoint of this in philosophy. Here, students and professors continue to ask: ‘Which questions can we ask?’ and ‘How can we ask, much less answer, those questions?’ There is no universally agreed-upon way in which to do philosophy.

Given that philosophy’s foundational questions and methods are still far from settled – they never will be – it’s natural that there is more flux, more volatility, in philosophy than in the physical sciences. [T]his volatility... is [similar to] changes of fashion.

I'm not sure Studemeyer is correct in what he says about testability being the litmus test of science. Perhaps it should be, but it often isn't. For example, it's difficult to imagine how some of the hypotheses concerning the origin of life, macroevolution, the big bang, the multiverse, string theory, and so on, could be tested. Yet they're all considered by many scientists to be legitimate science.

The notion of a "scientific method," despite the fact that it's in the early chapters of just about every secondary school science text, is not one that many working scientists actually ascribe to. Indeed, the problem of separating science from non-science, called by philosophers of science the "demarcation problem" is one that philosophers have for some time despaired of solving. There simply is no consistent definition of what science is.

Scientists like their theories to be testable, but if they aren't they want them to be elegant, and if they aren't they want them to have expansive explanatory power, and if they don't they want them to at least conform to a materialist worldview, and if they're incompatible with materialism, well, then, they're just not science.

Or so we're told, but the materialist criterion is simply an arbitrary philosophical preference. It's not derived from any scientific investigation. Moreover, there's no compelling justification for it, and, in fact, it's becoming increasingly clear in both origin of life studies and in cosmology that the "materialist explanations only" requirement is producing a lot of dead ends.

Maybe it's time to adopt William James' famous maxim and jettison the materialist requirement. James wrote that "a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

Indeed it would be.

The Warfare Myth

You have doubtless heard that ever since the dawn of the Enlightenment science and religion have been at loggerheads - the persecution of Galileo, and all that. The claim, however, is historical horsepucky as almost all scholars agree and as an article by Dr. Justin Taylor adumbrates.

Taylor begins by noting that scholars as diverse as Ronald Numbers (an agnostic) and Timothy Larsen (a Christian theist) agree that the alleged warfare between science and religion was a myth perpetrated for propaganda purposes in the 19th century primarily by two men. He goes on to explain who these two very influential characters were.

The first was Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the founding president of Cornell University, and the second was John William Draper (1811-1882), professor of chemistry at the University of New York.

Taylor writes:

In December 1869, Andrew White--the young and beleaguered Cornell president--delivered a lecture at Cooper Union in New York City entitled “The Battle-Fields of Science.” He melodramatically painted a picture of a longstanding warfare between religion and science:

I propose, then, to present to you this evening an outline of the great sacred struggle for the liberty of Science--a struggle which has been going on for so many centuries. A tough contest this has been! A war continued longer--with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with strategy more vigorous than in any of the comparatively petty warfares of Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon . . .

In all modern history, interference with Science in the supposed interest of religion—no matter how conscientious such interference may have been--has resulted in the direst evils both to Religion and Science.

His lecture was published in book form seven years later as The Warfare of Science.

Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918)

In 1874, Professor Draper published his History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. His thesis was as follows:

The antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science is the continuation of a struggle that commenced when Christianity began to attain political power. . . . The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

Draper’s work was enormously popular, going through 50 editions in the next half century.

John William Draper (1811-1882)

The conflict these men envisioned existed wholly in their own minds, but the theme was nevertheless popular among secular folk, and their work gained a currency unmerited by it's accuracy. Thanks largely to these two writers the notion of a warfare between science and religion became something of an urban legend and has persisted up to the present day despite having been debunked by numerous historians and other scholars.

Taylor provides a sample of the claims that Draper and White promoted and which have subsequently been shown to be utterly false. They wrote, for instance, that:

1.The church believed for centuries that the earth is flat.

2.The church opposed the use of anesthetics in childbirth since Genesis promised that childbirth would be painful.

On the first myth, Lesley B. Cormack, chair of the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, writes that “there is virtually no historical evidence to support the myth of a medieval flat earth. Christian clerics neither suppressed the truth nor stifled debate on the subject.”

On the second myth, Larsen states that:

No church has ever pronounced against anesthetics in childbirth. Moreover, there was no vocal group of ministers who opposed it. In fact, the inventor of chloroform received fan mail from ministers of the major denominations thanking him for helping to alleviate the suffering of women in labor.

Rather, the opposition to anesthetics during childbirth came from medical professionals, not from ministers, and for scientific, not religious, reasons.

So why, Taylor asks, did men like White and Draper--along with English biologist T. H. Huxley, who championed Darwinism and coined the term “agnostic”--manufacture these historical myths and this overall legend of perpetual conflict?

He cites Larsen's answer:

The purpose of the war was to discredit clergymen as suitable figures to undertake scientific work in order that the new breed of professionals would have an opportunity to fill in the gap for such work created by eliminating the current men of science. It was thus tendentiously asserted that the religious convictions of clergymen disqualified them from pursuing their scientific inquiries objectively.

More to the point, however, was the fact that clergymen were undertaking this work for the sheer love of science and thus hindering the expectation that it would be done for money by paid full-time scientists. Clergymen were branded amateurs in order to facilitate the creation of a new category of professionals.

This may be true as far as it goes, but I think there's a more fundamental reason for the conflict thesis. To wit, it has been an effective weapon in the arsenal of those atheists who wish to discredit religious belief altogether.

If students and others who know that science has been enormously successful are convinced that science and religion are incompatible, then obviously there's not only no need for religion, but it's also positively pernicious to the extent that it impedes the progress of science.

As we've pointed out on Viewpoint numerous times over the years, and as Alvin Plantinga masterfully explains in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, there's no conflict between religion and science, but there is a conflict between religion, particularly theistic religion, and metaphysical naturalism.

Opponents of religion sometimes blur the distinction between naturalism and science to make it appear as if there's an incompatibility between science and religion, but this is a bit of polemical sleight-of-hand that simply obscures the truth.

It is naturalism, the belief that physical nature is all there is, which is at war with theism which is, of course, based on the belief that nature is not all there is. There is a supernature as well.

Theistic belief and science are, contrary to those who wish to perpetuate the warfare thesis, perfectly sympatico.

Point of No Return

A friend wrote to me recently to tell me that another friend had told him that he thought the travesty that played out in the Manhattan courtroom of Judge Juan Merchan last week marked a point of no return in our nation. My friend wondered if this characterization of those unfortunate events was an exaggeration. I replied that I wasn't sure whether it was or not.

I said that I don't know if we've passed the point of no return, but I think our nation is surely in a place of grave peril. The left has shown itself willing to resort to the same perversions of the judiciary that Marxists regularly employed in the former Soviet Union and wherever else they've acquired power. It's their modus operandi.

Once we've abandoned God, as the left has done, there's no longer an objective right and wrong to guide us and therefore all that remains is a "whatever works" pragmatism. There's nothing wrong, on this view, with perverting or ignoring the Constitution if it advances the prospect of reaching one's political goals.

If the law stands in the way of ridding the country of Trump, then so much the worse for the law. If they can get away with what they've done in New York, if it costs Trump the election, then everything goes, the Constitution will be effectively dead, and we'll find ourselves immersed in a Hobbesian struggle for power in which there are no longer any constraints.

The idea that we can dispense with Christianity and go on living in some Enlightenment paradise is an absurd delusion, but it's a delusion that seems to be rapidly metastasizing in our culture. In the introduction to his new book, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, John Daniel Davidson writes,

As Christianity fades in America, so too will our system of government, our civil society, and our rights and our freedoms. Without a national culture shaped by the Christian faith, without a majority consensus in favor of traditional Christian morality, America as we know it will come to an end....

There is no secular utopia waiting for us in the post-Christian world now coming into being, no future in which we get to retain the benefits of Christendom without the faith from which they sprang. Western civilization and its accoutrements depend on Christianity, not just in the abstract, but in practice.

Last week I wrote about historian Tom Holland's idea of a "cut flower" civilization in which the cultural "blossoms" we value are cut from their Christian roots. A cut-flower civilization can't survive and one of the first blossoms to wither and die is the rule of law.

We witnessed the rule of law flouted last week in Manhattan and if it's allowed to stand I fear that my friend's friend will have been proven right.

Skepticism about Alien Visitors

There've been numerous reports of UFOs in the news and lots of speculation that these objects are alien visitors from some other planet. I've been very skeptical of the theory that extraterrestrials are visiting earth given the extreme unlikelihood that any other planet in the galaxy (and maybe in the entire universe) would possess the suite of properties that would enable it to produce and sustain intelligent life and given the vast distances any intelligent life, were it to exist, would have to traverse to get here.

Physicist Eric Hedin has an interesting piece at Evolution News in which he reverses the problem of traveling across these enormous distances by highlighting the difficulties that would have to be overcome in order for a traveler from earth to reach any other planet in our galaxy.

He writes:

What about the alluring hope of future generations of humans traveling across the interstellar oceans of space to establish Earth outposts on such extrasolar planets? Astronomers have determined [that there]... are roughly 2,000 stars within 50 lyrs [light years] of Earth, compared to approximately 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy (one millionth of one percent lie within 50 lyrs of Earth).

We can set some boundaries on the feasibility of interstellar space travel (either for humans or putative aliens) by applying the known laws of physics.

Using special relativity, let’s imagine what it would take in terms of raw energy to accelerate a spaceship to the speed necessary to make a 40 lyr journey (say to Gliese 12b) in 5 years as measured by the astronauts onboard.

First, we need to find the speed, relative to Earth that this spaceship would have to attain to generate the proper time dilation for the astronauts to arrive in 5 years by their clocks. A bit of algebra with Einstein’s time dilation formula yields a required speed of 0.99c, where c=300,000 km/sec is the speed of light through vacuum.

Since time flows at different rates for the reference frame of Earth compared to the reference frame of the spaceship moving at 0.99c, we find that the journey which takes 5 years for the astronauts takes 40.3 years according to observers back on Earth. This would be somewhat inconvenient, but perhaps manageable.

But when we calculate the energy required to accelerate a modest-sized spacecraft, outfitted with everything that a team of astronauts would need for a multi-year expedition to explore an unknown destination, we find that the answer is daunting.

Using Einstein’s special relativity formula for kinetic energy, and assuming a mass for the spaceship equivalent to that of a fully loaded 747 aircraft (m=400,000 kg), we find that the energy needed to accelerate the spaceship to the cruising velocity of 0.99c is 70 quadrillion kWh [kilowatt-hours].

Assuming that the astronauts want to stop at the distant star system, we’ll need to double this amount to account for deceleration, for the spaceship to make the one-way journey from Earth to the distant star.

So, just how much energy is 140 quadrillion kWh? Believe it or not, it’s equivalent to 4,800 times the total energy consumption of the United States in the year 2022. This means all the electricity, petroleum, natural gas, and any other form of energy used to power everything in the U.S. for one year would be 4,800 times too small to get our modest-sized spaceship to a relatively nearby star in a reasonable amount of time.

I think it’s fair to say that interstellar space travel isn’t even remotely possible with our current understanding of physics and technology.

Hedin goes on to explain that even were the size of the spaceship reduced or the craft were to use matter annihilation as an energy source the difficulties would still make such a voyage physically impossible.

What would we need to trim this daunting energy requirement down to size? Reducing the mass of the spaceship doesn’t exactly solve the problem. Suppose we trade our 747-sized spacecraft for an economy model about the size of a Winnebago camper trailer, having a much smaller mass of 4,500 kg. That’s 89 times less mass than the original spacecraft.

Unfortunately, this means that the energy required to get there is still 54 times the total U.S. energy consumption for an entire year.

OK, so we just need a lot of energy, and apparently nothing we currently use for generating energy will come even close to meeting our needs for interstellar space travel. But what’s to say we couldn’t develop a super-charged energy supply? The gold standard for producing energy from mass comes from the total annihilation of matter, converting it 100 percent to energy according to Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2.

How much mass, then, would we need to convert to pure energy to meet our original estimate of 140 quadrillion kWh? The answer turns out to be a little over 5.6 million kg of matter. That’s about 14 times more mass than the mass of the fully-loaded 747-sized spacecraft.

He has more at the link, but you get the picture. Space travel to even the closest planet outside our solar system is entirely impractical given our current knowledge and technology and thus the likelihood of aliens visiting us is exceedingly low.

But someone may object that these aliens could be technologically so advanced that they've been able to overcome the difficulties. That's possible, of course, but it'd be helpful to be able to give some plausible answer to two questions: What are the odds that another life supporting planet exists within our galaxy? And what are the chances that that planet gave rise to intelligent creatures who have mastered an incomprehensible (to us) technology?

My opinion is that the probabilities, when all the variables are taken into account, would be astronomically low. Anyway, Hedin has more on this topic at the link.

Perversion of Justice?

Greg Price posted eleven reasons on Twitter why so many people believe that the Trump "Hush-Money" trial orchestrated by Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan bears an amazing likeness to the old Soviet show trials under Joseph Stalin.

For these eleven reasons and others, the guilty verdict in this trial is almost certain to be overturned on appeal, but that apparently doesn't matter to Bragg and Merchan who are being treated like heroes by the left at places like MSNBC.

What seems to matter most to those who think it's a good move to persecute a former president by prosecuting him for political benefit is that they'll get to call him a "convicted felon" in the campaign and maybe even get photos of him in a prison jumpsuit.

Here are Price's eleven:

- The Soros funded DA elevated a misdemeanor to a felony despite lowering 60% of all felonies for actual criminals in his jurisdiction.
- The lead prosecutor resigned his position as the 3rd highest ranking member of Biden's DOJ to join Alvin Bragg's team going after Trump.
- The judge donated to Joe Biden and has a daughter who raised millions of dollars for Democrats off the Trump prosecutions.
- The other lead prosecutor also donated to Joe Biden.
- The lead witness that the whole case relies on is a convicted perjurer and serial liar who admitted during the trial to stealing money from the Trump organization.
- The judge put a gag order on Donald Trump for pointing out the political conflicts of interest of the people prosecuting him.
- The "crime" relies on the idea that Trump paid off Stormy Daniels to conceal another crime, which is not mentioned in the indictment.
- The judge barred Trump's defense from explaining to jury that no campaign finance violation occurred but allowed prosecutors to assert as fact in their closing that there was.
- The judge cleared out the court room when Michael Cohen's former attorney was exonerating Trump but allowed the prosecution to bring in Stormy Daniels to talk about whether or not Trump used a condom.
- The judge barred a former FEC commissioner from testifying that Donald Trump did nothing wrong.
- The judge is allowing the jury to not have to reach a unanimous verdict on the underlying, unnamed crime Trump committed.

One doesn't have to be a Trump fan or a Republican to be sickened by this travesty and to fear for the future of our country if people like this continue to be in charge much longer.

Cut Flowers

The British atheist and writer Douglas Murray is, like Richard Dawkins, what some have called a "cultural" Christian. He doesn't believe that Christianity is metaphysically true, but he recognizes that Western civilization was built upon a Christian worldview and cannot survive without it. We are, he says, a "cut-flower" civilization:

There is this idea that Western civilization’s like a cut flower and you can look at it and enjoy it, but it’s going to die… So how do we make sure that it isn’t a cut flower? The answer to that is that we find the seeds that planted the flowers and we reseed the land… That doesn’t mean the dogmatic Christianization, or some people might like to go that route, but it does mean a recognition of the wellspring… nothing good can come without that. We will simply be a flower that withers and dies.

The problem with this, as Margaret Clark writes in a piece at Redstate, is that we simply can't have the cultural flower without the spiritual root.

Clark quotes historian Tom Holland, another British atheist and author of the much-praised book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Holland says that whether we like it or not, all the goods we take for granted in the West - freedom of speech and religion, hospitals, orphanages, welfare for the poor, universities, human equality, human rights - were birthed in the womb of biblical Christianity.

Holland writes:

People in the West, even those who may imagine that they have emancipated themselves from Christian belief, in fact, are shot through with Christian assumptions about almost everything. . . All of us in the West are a goldfish, and the water that we swim in is Christianity, by which I don’t necessarily mean the confessional form of the faith, but, rather, considered as an entire civilisation.

Clark adds this:

Holland’s book focuses much on the idea in Christianity that “The last will be first and the first will be last.” He argues that this thought in the Roman empire, which was known for its brutality and dominance, was so radical and repulsive that it shocked the world and subsequently turned the pages of history and society as we know it in a completely different direction. He argues that all modern concepts of human rights stem from this idea.

What value does a human have? A woman? A person of the LGBTQ community? A person of a different race? A person with a disability? A person who believes differently than you?

Christianity is the only belief system that protects all human life with the utmost dignity and honor — even to lay one’s life down for your enemy. As it shocked the Romans, it can still shock us in our divided country today. Christianity doesn’t just go against the grain; it rewrites it altogether.

If the great nation of freedoms that we have today can be owed to Christian visionaries, where does that leave us in one of the most secular times of our country’s history? Like the flower [cut from its root], we may be able to play the part for a time, but without the roots, we cannot survive. Our concept of human dignity without the roots of the Bible can leave us with good intentions but no compass.

She's right. To borrow an analogy from Tolstoy, we're like children who pluck a flower from its root, stick it in the ground, and expect it to flourish.

Having abandoned Christianity, moderns are terribly confused. We no longer agree that this, the greatest nation ever to grace the planet, is worth defending. We can no longer say why humans are special or why they have rights. We can no longer talk about objective moral right and wrong and can't define what we mean by evil. For that matter, we can't even define what a woman is.

A culture this rudderless and adrift is rapidly approaching the sunset of its existence.

Deep Design Requires a Mind

The narrator of this almost 8:00 minute video on Mount Rushmore makes an interesting comment. I'm paraphrasing, but he notes that none of the people looking up at the faces of the four presidents would ever conclude that the images they see carved in the stone were the product of the random action of atoms of granite and the effects of erosion.

Yet some, if not many, of those observers believe that they and everyone around them, organisms infinitely more complex than the stone faces they're viewing, are merely the products of blind, impersonal forces.

The faces on the mountain had to be the products of an intelligent architect, they assume, but human beings are the result of chance accidents and natural selection. One has to have an extraordinary amount of faith in blind chance to believe that.

Anyway, here's the video:

The Trinity

Last Sunday was Trinity Sunday in the Christian calendar, and the concept of a Triune God raises difficult theological questions. Many attempts have been made to explain it. Bishop Robert Barron discusses three attempts in this 14 minute homily:

The problem of course, is trying to explicate how one God can exist as three persons when none of the persons is identical to the other. The classic Christian view is represented by this diagram:

To many non-Christians, and even some Christians, this concept is hard to distinguish from polytheism. If the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, that sounds a lot like three Gods.

I personally think that God has revealed much about Himself in His creation and am therefore drawn to theological metaphors and analogies from the created world. One that I think captures what it means to be three persons in one substance is water.

Water is one substance, H²O, but it manifests itself in three different states - solid ice, liquid water, and gaseous water vapor. Moreover, all three states can exist simultaneously at 0° Celsius, and they can transition between states, in a fashion that may be analogous to communion within the Trinity.

Some object that this analogy is a heresy called Modalism because it seems to deny the "is not" relationship in the above diagram, but I'm not sure this is so. Ice is not identical to vapor. Liquid is not identical to solid ice. These states behave differently, they have different physical properties and thus have different identities even though they are all the same substance, much like the three persons represented by the diagram.

Anyway, the nature of the Godhead has perplexed far greater minds than mine, and I certainly don't profess to have the definitive answer to the question. Even so, as Thomas Aquinas taught us, analogies can be helpful in at least gaining partial understanding of a truth, and perhaps the analogy to one of the most amazing of God's creations, water*, will be helpful to you.

* See biologist Michael Denton's excellent book The Wonder of Water. It will leave you amazed at this substance that we so easily take for granted.

A Day to Honor Valor

Memorial Day was originally established to honor those who lost their lives in service to our country in time of war, but maybe it's not inappropriate on this day to remember not only the sacrifice of those who never came home, but also the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which Worldview Is More Rational? (Pt.II)

Yesterday we examined the objection to theistic belief that belief in God is irrational. In reply to this objection I suggested that there are a number of things an atheistic materialist has to believe that many people, including atheists, would consider irrational or at least less rational than believing their contraries.

I'd like to finish up those thoughts by noting one other grave problem with what we might call the atheistic argument from irrationality. The atheist who employs this argument against the theist actually winds up shooting himself in the foot. Here's why.

Atheists, or naturalistic materialists (Nat Mats), are philosophically wedded to a Darwinian explanation of the emergence of the human species, but according to the Darwinian view organisms and all their capacities evolve to enable them to survive and reproduce.

It follows, then, that the Nat Mat must acknowledge that human beings have evolved their cognitive faculties, which include reason, to enable them to survive and reproduce. But survival is not the same thing as truth. Our cognitive faculties have not evolved to enable us to discover truth.

Most Naturalists freely admit this. Here are four examples of the dozens that could be cited:

“Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Physicist Eric Baum.

“According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman.

"Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Neuroscientist Steven Pinker.

Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Philosopher Patricia Churchland.

You get the idea. If Darwinian evolution is true then we have no basis for trusting our reason to lead us to truth because reason didn't evolve to serve that function. The thoughts in our brains are just the movement of electrons along neurons which are, in turn, the result of a mindless, unguided evolutionary process.

If this is so, why should I believe anything those electro-chemical reactions in the brain tell me is true? Indeed, what grounds does a Nat Mat have for even believing that Nat Mat is true?

Naturalistic philosopher John Gray writes, "The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth," and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett agrees, “Our brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive.”

How then can our Nat Mat friends claim that it's rational to believe in the evolution of human reason, a faculty not designed to discover truth, but that it's irrational to believe that human reason was designed by an intelligent Mind to enable us to apprehend truth? Clearly, the atheist has put himself in a pickle here.

If the atheist is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties and thus also given us strong reason to doubt the truth of any belief they produce, including the belief that there is no God.

Moreover, since the atheist has no grounds for trusting the deliverances of his reason he a forteriori strips himself of any rational basis for science. If atheism is true then there's no warrant for either science or truth, since both depend upon the ability to trust the faculty of human reason. Atheism saws off the epistemic branch that it sits on.

How, after all, can it be reasonable to hold the belief that we have no basis for trusting reason?

So, which is more rational, holding a belief - atheism - that implicitly denies that our reason is trustworthy and that truth can be known, or holding a belief - theism - that tells us that our reason is trustworthy because it was instilled in us by a rational Creator?

Which Worldview Is More Rational? (Pt. I)

A criticism often leveled against theistic belief is that it's irrational to believe in an entity (God) that can't be observed. French philosopher Michael Onfray, for example, has written that "Monotheism loathes intelligence." And, "God puts to death everything that stands up to him, beginning with reason, intelligence and the critical mind."

Onfray, of course, is an atheistic materialist who, like the biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, and others, argues that belief in God is an irrational delusion.

Well, is it? Which is the more rational belief system or worldview, atheism or theism? Is it more rational to believe, for instance, that ...

• the information needed to form the first living thing arose by chance, or to believe that wherever we find it information is always the product of a mind?
• the extraordinarily precise calibration of the parameters, forces constants and initial conditions of the universe necessary to permit life to exist is just an astronomically improbable accident or to believe that this cosmic fine-tuning is the result of intentional engineering?
• the space, time, material universe created itself, or to believe that space, time and matter were caused by something that is itself neither spatial, temporal nor material?
• moral values - belief in human equality, dignity, rights, the belief that it's wrong to harm others - are purely subjective and arbitrary or to believe that they're objectively grounded and independent of whether people agree with them or not?
• every choice, act and thought is the inevitable consequence of prior causes that determine everything we do or to believe that we are in some sense free to choose between alternative futures?
• our conscious experience is just electro-chemical processes in the brain or to believe that the phenomena of human consciousness are the products of an immaterial mind working in concert with our physical body?
• your life is a pointless "tale told by an idiot" or to believe that your life is meaningful because what you do in this life matters forever?

Materialism offers no plausible explanation for the origin of the universe, the exquisite fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, or the origin of consciousness. To be a consistent materialist one should be a determinist about human choices and a nihilist about life in general and morality in particular.

Perhaps a further question one might ask in addition to those listed above is, is it more rational to adopt a worldview (atheistic materialism) whose entailments are almost impossible to live with consistently or is it more rational to adopt a worldview (theism) whose entailments are consistent with our most basic beliefs about life?

After all, what's irrational is denying that there's a God while living as if there is.