In the Middle of the Night

A recent survey of British millennials found that a shocking 89% of them believe their lives are meaningless.

Reading that depressing statistic I was reminded of a piece writer James Wood did for the New Yorker a number of years ago which the magazine titled Is That All There Is? The book he reviewed attempted to counter the nagging angst among thoughtful atheists (Wood himself is one) occasioned by the realization that their lives are meaningless and that they're headed for eternal oblivion.

Wood opens with this:

I have a friend, an analytic philosopher and convinced atheist, who told me that she sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over a series of ultimate questions: “How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life — beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward — is cosmically irrelevant?”

In the current intellectual climate, atheists are not supposed to have such thoughts.

....as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night.

The book is titled The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now edited by a scholar named George Levine. Wood explains that,

[T]he book’s aim is to “explore the idea that secularism is a positive, not a negative, condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now; that building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised.”

Wood focuses on the book's first essay, written by Columbia philosopher Philip Kitcher, in which Kitcher argues that a theistic worldview founders on a couple of philosophical reefs. If I can summarize Wood's summary, Kitcher argues that two of theism's strongest claims are false.

First, Kitcher believes that the claim that God is necessary for there to be objective moral value and duties is refuted by Socrates' response to this claim from an interlocutor named Euthyphro. This has come to be known as the "Euthyphro Dilemma" and goes like this:

If an act is good because God commands it then cruelty would be good if God commanded it. If, on the other hand, God commands certain acts because they are good, then goodness is independent of God and we don't need God in order to do what's good.

It's surprising to me that this argument still finds employment in contemporary atheistic writings, having been long ago adequately answered by theistic philosophers.

Very quickly, the reason why any act is good and willed by God is because it conforms to God's essential nature. He is Himself perfect goodness. The more closely an act conforms to the ideal the better it is, just as the quality of a photocopy depends on how closely it reproduces the original.

An act, then, is morally better the more closely it conforms to the nature of God whose nature consists, inter alia, of compassion, mercy and justice.

Thus goodness is neither independent of God nor arbitrarily willed by God, but rather emerges from His being somewhat like light and heat flow from the sun. If God did not exist there would be no objective moral good.

The second claim that Kitcher believes to be in error is that theism (Wood uses the word religion, but I think theism is a better word choice for what he's trying to say) is no better at putting meaning into life than is secularism. In other words, it may be true that life is a pretty bleak business if atheism is true, but God's existence doesn't help matters.

I think this is patently false. Imagine a man imprisoned in a slave labor camp sent out every day to dig ditches. He's told by the authorities that his work is necessary, although any prisoner can do it, and that not only will he never be released, but when he can no longer perform the work he will be executed.

Another prisoner is given the same tasks but told that if he performs them well he will be released and given all the amenities of a comfortable life. Do you suppose both lives will seem equally significant to the prisoners?

The first prisoner will constantly be wondering, "How does anything I do really matter? Isn't it all pointless and absurd?" But those questions might scarcely occur to the second prisoner who sees his labor as the means to something much greater.

The skeptic might reply that the promise to the second prisoner of eventual release is false. In real life everybody dies in the prison.

Perhaps, but the skeptic doesn't know that. We do know, though, that unless the promise is true there really is no hope and no meaning to either prisoners' toil.

In other words, our human existence can only have genuine meaning if we are created and loved by God and destined to an existence beyond this one. On that point, it seems, Wood might agree. He closes with this:

Thomas Nagel [once] wrote a shrewd essay entitled “The Absurd,” in which he argued that, just as we can “step back from the purposes of individual life and doubt their point, we can step back also from the progress of human history, or of science, or the success of a society, or the kingdom, power, and glory of God, and put all these things into question in the same way.”

Secularism can seem as meaningless as religion when such doubt strikes. Nagel went on to conclude, calmly, that we shouldn’t worry too much, because if, under the eye of eternity, nothing matters “then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.”

This is impeccably logical, and impishly offers a kind of secular deconstruction of secularism, but it is fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.

In thoroughly secular England it seems that young adults are discovering the hard way that the materialism proffered by a secular society is indeed fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.

Critical Race Theory

The following was originally posted a couple of years ago, but because the topic has become prominent in this election season, I thought it might be helpful to repost it: News reports from around the country have revealed a great deal of discontent among parents with their local school board members who've introduced Critical Race Theory into their children's curricula. A number of defenders of CRT, like MSNBC's Joy Reid, have insisted that the objectors who criticize its implementation in schools and businesses don't really know what it is.

She and others of her progressive ideological leanings would have us believe that CRT is just a benign attempt to educate students about the history of slavery and Jim Crow, etc. It is that, of course, but it's much more than that.

CRT, its own advocates have written, seeks to radically revolutionize America in the name of ending "oppression." It rejects the values of the earlier Civil Rights movement such as the belief that people can, or should, strive to be "color-blind." Race is paramount. To not consider race in any interaction is an instance of "white supremacy."

CRT also repudiates racial integration because, proponents argue, it leads to "cultural genocide" as the minority group is inevitably absorbed into, and assimilated by, the dominant (white) group.

It rejects classical liberalism and the notion of human equality, substituting instead an emphasis on "equity," i.e. the idea that if there are disparities between races in any metric such as mortality rates, life expectancies, incarceration rates, disciplinary actions in schools, etc. they are necessarily the consequence of racism. No other explanation is allowed.

CRT rejects logical reasoning, objectivity, standpoint neutrality and fairness in discussions about race as "white values," and the attempt to adopt these values by People of Color (POC) is to adopt whiteness and to betray one's own race by tacitly affirming the superiority of white values to the values of the oppressed class.

It furthermore dismisses the classical liberal ideals of freedom of speech and the principle of blind justice. These ideals, too, are "white."

Its emphasis is on the subjective "lived experience" of POC. Their stories are self-validating. To question them is to engage in an act of white supremacy or racism. The idea that truth is objective is rejected. Knowledge is experiential and feelings are self-validating.

Science and reason are tainted by "whiteness." Statistics are meaningless if they conflict with what a member of the "oppressed class" feels deep in her soul to be true.

It also teaches that whites, and only whites, are inherently racist, and no matter how hard they may try, they're helpless to expunge the stain. All they can do is submit to the moral superiority of the oppressed, do some kind of penance and plead for forgiveness, which, if it is granted at all, is only tentative.

Moreover, according to CRT the structures of our society are irremediably saturated with racism and must be torn down. What will replace them, they don't know or say, but, like the Jacobins in 1789 and the Bolsheviks in 1917, it's enough at this point to destroy the old order. The new non-racist order will somehow arise of itself.

Further, anyone who benefits from this "structural racism" is ipso facto a racist and if you're not actively seeking to topple these racist structures and institutions, you're also a racist. "Whiteness" refers to anyone who benefits from the norms, values and structures of society regardless of the beneficiary's skin tone. If you're black, but you integrate into the white status quo then you're white regardless of how much melanin your body produces.

But don't take my word for any of this. Instead, watch this video produced by a very bright young man who did his homework and dug into the original sources. His name is Ryan Chapman, and he presents the main points of CRT in a dispassionate, objective fashion that CRT proponents would doubtless dismiss because, after all, Chapman is a white person seeking to be objective, neutral and fair.

Even so, the video is quite good and is a very helpful explication of what the major figures in CRT are themselves saying about it. Maybe Joy Reid should watch it:

Indigenous Peoples Day

A student came across this post from Columbus Day 2019 and suggested that it'd be worthwhile to run it again this year. I concurred so here it is, a day late:

Yesterday was Columbus Day here in the U.S., past observances of which have elicited protests and disdain for the savage legacy of early European conquerors. The topic, in fact, brings to mind a stomach-churning book I read several years ago titled The Destruction of the Indies by a Spanish priest named Bartholomo de Las Casas. The book is an eyewitness account of the horrors inflicted upon the native American people in the West Indies by the Spaniards in the 16th century.

I thought of that book when I read of people who see Columbus as the initiator of the terrible oppression inflicted upon native Americans. I think the record regarding Columbus himself is a bit ambiguous, and I don't have too much sympathy for those who wish to efface his memory. Indeed, it's easy to suspect some of them of ulterior motives, but, be that as it may, neither have I much sympathy for those who wish to replace Columbus Day with what they're calling "Indigenous Peoples Day."

In the first place, there are no indigenous people, or if there were, they're lost to history. The Indians the Spaniard explorers encountered and often massacred had themselves driven out, slaughtered or assimilated other groups who preceded them hundreds, or even thousands, of years before.

But more importantly, if the Spanish Conquistadors were unimaginably savage and cruel, and they certainly were, many of the Indians they conquered (though not all) were their equals in barbarity. Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto illustrates this disturbingly well. So does an essay by Michael Graham at The Federalist.

About the Indians the Spanish encountered in the New World Graham writes:

[I]f we really want to commemorate horrifying, unspeakable violence and oppression in the Americas, I’ve got the perfect holiday: “Indigenous People’s Day.”

“Long before the white European knew a North American continent existed, Indians of the Northern Plains were massacring entire villages,” says George Franklin Feldman in the book Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten. “And not just killed, but mutilated. Hands and feet were cut off, each body’s head was scalped, the remains were left scattered around the village, which was burned.”

When thinking of pre-Columbian America, forget what you’ve seen in the Disney movies. Think “slavery, cannibalism and mass human sacrifice.” From the Aztecs to the Iroquois, that was life among the indigenous peoples before Columbus arrived.

For all the talk from the angry and indigenous about European slavery, it turns out that pre-Columbian America was virtually one huge slave camp. According to Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865, by Tony Seybert, “Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.”

“Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running away.”

Things changed when the Europeans arrived, however: “Indians found that British settlers… eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites.”

That’s right: Pocahontas and her pals were slave traders. If you were an Indian lucky enough to be sold to a European slave master, that turned out to be a good thing, relatively speaking. At least you didn’t end up in a scene from “Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom.”

Ritual human sacrifice was widespread in the Americas. The Incas, for example, practiced ritual human sacrifice to appease their gods, either executing captive warriors or “their own specially raised, perfectly formed children,” according to Kim MacQuarrie, author of The Last Days of the Incas.

The Aztecs, on the other hand, were more into the “volume, volume, VOLUME” approach to ritual human slaughter. At the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs performed a mass human sacrifice of an estimated 80,000 enslaved captives in four days.

Nor was the bloodlust and oppression limited to Central and South America:

According to an eyewitness account of “indigenous peoples” at work—in this case, the Iroquois in 1642, as observed by the Rev. Father Barthelemy Vimont’s The Jesuit Relations—captives had their fingers cut off, were forced to set each other on fire, had their skin stripped off and, in one captured warrior’s case, “the torture continued throughout the night, building to a fervor, finally ending at sunrise by cutting his scalp open, forcing sand into the wound, and dragging his mutilated body around the camp. When they had finished, the Iroquois carved up and ate parts of his body.”

Shocked? Don’t be. Cannibalism was also fairly common in the New World before (and after) Columbus arrived. According to numerous sources, the name “Mohawk” comes from the Algonquin for “flesh eaters.” Anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of “Cannibals and Kings,” reports that the Aztecs viewed their prisoners as “marching meat.”

The native peoples also had an odd obsession with heads. Scalping was a common practice among many tribes, while some like the Jivaro in the Andes were feared for their head-hunting, shrinking their victims’ heads to the size of an orange. Even sports involved severed heads. If you were lucky enough to survive a game of the wildly popular Meso-American ball (losers were often dispatched to paradise), your trophy could include an actual human head.

The lesson in all this is that there is no race of people who is exempt from the human inclination toward savage depravity. White, black, brown and yellow, no race is free from the stain of a deeply corrupted human nature. As Graham points out, racism, violence and conquest are part of the human condition, they're not endemic to Europeans.

If Europeans have managed to dominate and oppress others throughout much of the last millenium or so it's not because they're more evil than others but because for the last thousand years they've been more technologically advanced. Every other group has behaved in exactly the same cruel fashion whenever they've been more powerful than their neighbors.

The great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously observed that,

[T]he 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. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

What Solzhenitsyn said is true of every human being no matter what the race or ethnicity of the individual may be. In these days of identity politics that's worth remembering.

Ackman's Reasons

In the recent edition of First Things Liel Leibovitz notes how absurd the debates at stake in today's culture would've seemed to people three decades ago. In a column titled "The Screwtape Election" Leibovitz writes:

As if the elevation of Kamala Harris, to the role of national savior wasn't enough, we gawk at our media in amazement and witness debate that, not very long ago, would've seemed patently absurd. Should a nation have borders? Should it keep convicted felons from ambling in whenever they please? Should males announce themselves to be female, saunter into the women's locker room at will, and compete freely in women's sports? Should we have a police force, and if so, should our cops be permitted to uphold law and order?

That these matters, once uncontested givens in public life, are hotly debated - rather than, say, bothersome hypotheticals in some agitated adjunct professor's introduction to political philosophy class - is all the proof we need that this is a grave moment for our republic.

The Democrats have moved so far to the left so quickly that they're losing many of their most rational adherents. One example is Democrat megadonor and investor Bill Ackman who has declared that he's seen enough from his party. Writing on Twitter/X he gives 33 reasons why he can no longer support the Democrats.

,Every voter inclined to vote for Democrats should read the whole list. I've only copied the first twelve here. He staes that he can no longer support the party to which he has donated multiple millions of dollars because their policies either would do, or already have done, the following:

(1) open the borders to millions of immigrants who were not screened for their risk to the country, dumping them into communities where the new immigrants overwhelm existing communities and the infrastructure to support the new entrants, at the expense of the historic residents,
(2) introduce economic policies and massively increase spending without regard to their impact on inflation and the consequences for low-income Americans and the increase in our deficit and national debt,
(3) withdraw from Afghanistan, abandoning our local partners and the civilians who worked alongside us in an unprepared, overnight withdrawal that led to American casualties and destroyed the lives of Afghani women and girls for generations, against the strong advice of our military leadership, and thereafter not showing appropriate respect for their loss at a memorial ceremony in their honor,
(4) introduce thousands of new and unnecessary regulations in light of the existing regulatory regime that interfere with our businesses’ ability to compete, restraining the development of desperately needed housing, infrastructure, and energy production with the associated inflationary effects,
(5) modify the bail system so that violent criminals are released without bail,
(6) destroy our street retailers and communities and promote lawlessness by making shoplifting (except above large thresholds) no longer a criminal offense,
(7) limit and/or attempt to limit or ban fracking and LNG so that U.S. energy costs increase substantially and the U.S. loses its energy independence,
(8) promote DEI ideologies that award jobs, awards, and university admissions on the basis of race, sexual identity and gender criteria, and teach our students and citizens that the world can only be understood as an unfair battle between oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressors are only successful due to structural racism or a rigged system and the oppressed are simply victims of an unfair system and world,
(9) educate our elementary children that gender is fluid, something to be chosen by a child, and promote hormone blockers and gender reassignment surgeries to our youth without regard to the longer-term consequences to their mental and physical health, and allow biological boys and men to compete in girls and women's sports, depriving girls and women of scholarships, awards, and other opportunities that they would have rightly earned otherwise,
(10) encourage and celebrate massive protests and riots that lead to the burning and destruction of local retail and business establishments while at the same time requiring schools to be shuttered because of the risk of Covid-19 spreading during large gatherings,
(11) encourage and celebrate anti-American and anti-Israel protests and flag burning on campuses around the country with no consequences for the protesters who violate laws or university codes and policies,
(12) allow antisemitism to explode with no serious efforts from the administration to quell this hatred,

I think it's fair to say that the Democrats have given us only two reasons to vote for them: 1) They'd do what they can to get the Dobbs SCOTUS decision overturned, and 2) They're not Trump. Based on the last four years and based on what they've told us so far in the current campaign, voters have no reason to think that what we'd get from another Democrat administration isn't just more of what Ackman lists above plus his other 21 reasons.

Paying Their Fair Share

Politicians are fond of telling us that the rich must pay their "fair share" of taxes, but "fair share" is almost never defined. What is the fair share of the very rich? Should they pay all of the taxes required to feed our voracious federal government? What percentage of the total tax burden would be fair?

Parts of the following are excerpted from an article by William McBride, Vice President of Federal Tax Policy. It may surprise you to know that according to the latest IRS data for 2020 the top 1 percent of taxpayers (about 1.6 million filers who earn more than $548,336) paid $723 billion in income taxes, or 42.3 percent of all income taxes paid—a larger share than the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers (about 7.9 million filers that earn more than $220,521) paid in aggregate $1.1 trillion in income taxes, amounting to 62.7 percent of all income taxes paid that year.

I couldn't find more recent data but economists think the tax paid by the highest earners is even greater since 2020. According to White:

High income taxpayers also pay the highest tax rates, according to the IRS. The average income tax rate in 2020 was 13.6 percent.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers paid a 22.4 percent average rate while the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 26.0 percent average rate—more than eight times higher than the 3.1 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers.

The top 0.001 percent, or the richest 1,575 tax returns filed in 2020, paid nearly $71 billion in income taxes and had an average tax rate of 23.7 percent.

The next time you hear a politician demand that the rich "pay their fair share" ask yourself why they don't tell us what they think a fair share would be. Maybe the answer is because they know that the rich are already paying a very hefty share of the taxes collected by the federal government every year and that they're just demagoguing the issue.

American Christian Nationalism

For some time there's been concern among many of our fellow citizens, especially those on the left, for what they believe is a threat to our polity from what they call "Christian nationalism." I've been perplexed by this concern, indeed for some folks it's even a fear, and have asked a few of my liberal acquaintances for a definition of this threat.

Unfortunately, "Christian nationalism" has proven to be a difficult term to define. Different people give different answers and often the definition reduces to something benign, like "patriotism" or "American exceptionalism," in which case one wonders what the concern is all about. Others define Christian nationalism as something more virulent but advocated by a relatively tiny fringe group, in which case one again wonders what the concern is all about.

Feeling the need to more deeply educate myself on this issue, I recently read Michael Austin's brief volume titled American Christian Nationalism in which he lays out five features of Christian nationalism culled from the writings of some of its proponents. He states that Christian nationalists adhere to most and sometimes all of the following five beliefs:

1. America was founded as a Christian nation
2. The American government should promote a particular kind of Christian culture
3. American Christians should pursue political and cultural power in order to take "dominion" over America
4. American Christians should prioritize American interests over the interests of other nations.
5. To be American should be identical to being a Christian nationalist

Austin is careful to point out that there are subtleties and complexities in these and that - if I can put it in my words, not his - whether there's anything wrong with any of them, particularly #2 through #5, depends a lot on how Christians go about achieving them.

I personally agree with #1 through #4, and, depending on the definition of "nationalist," maybe #5, but Austin points out that there are those who call themselves Christian nationalists who urge implementation of #2 and #3 by force, if necessary. If that's what Christian nationalism is then I want no part of it, but I doubt that those who support the use of compulsion and violence are more than a small fraction of those who, like me, think that all these beliefs are anodyne and/or desirable.

Let me explain why I think each of these admits of a perfectly innocuous or even salutary formulation.

#1 I think this statement is manifestly true in the sense that the values promoted in the founding documents were explicitly Christian values. Some of the men who founded the nation may themselves have not been Christian but the values they sought to base the nation on were derived from the Christian worldview in which they were immersed. Justice for all, equality under the law, liberty, individual rights, etc. all arose gradually in Europe in a Christian milieu, and there's little doubt that our founders, though not wishing to establish a particular religious denomination, nevertheless were operating from Christian assumptions.

#2 Of course these values - justice, equality under the law, liberty, individual rights, etc. - should be promoted by our government. They should also promote the Christian values of compassion, peacefulness, concern for the poor, honesty, etc., and the government should seek to protect its citizens from vices like greed, lust for power, and tyranny that are expressly forbidden in a Christian worldview.

#3 Christians should seek to be involved in every area of culture and society. That's what it means to be salt in the earth. Why would any Christian think that any profession that's not inherently immoral should be off limits to Christians? We need more Christian influence in the world, not less.

#4 We have obligations of loyalty to those whom God has placed us among and those obligations radiate in concentric circles. First, is our duty to our family, to protect and advance their best interests, then we have a similar but secondary duty to our communities - our neighbors, our church, then a similar duty of loyalty to our nation and then to the world. To the extent that those radiating responsibilities are acknowledged or affirmed by Christian nationalism I fail to see the problem with it.

#5 Every American should hold the values stated above and enjoined upon us by a Christian worldview. Anyone, Christian or non-Christian can hold those values and if holding them, if adhering to what I've said about #1-4 makes one a Christian nationalist then I see nothing wrong with the term.

However, if someone wants to define a Christian nationalist as someone who believes that any of this should be accomplished through compulsion or violence then we part company. If someone believes that the government should actively promote specifically Christian doctrines and that those who don't accept them must be relegated to second-class status then he and I again part company.

So, when we hear people throw around the term "Christian nationalism" as either a threat to democracy or the savior of democracy, either derogating it or affirming it, we need to ask them what they mean by it, and, if what they mean is a resort to violence or compulsion in order to transform the country Christian into a Christian nation then we should distance ourselves from it but we might also ask how many people really hold to that view.

I suspect that, among genuine, thoughtful Christians, as opposed to nominal Christians, it'd turn out to be relatively few, and if that's the case I fail to see why anyone should see it as a serious or imminent threat to our national fabric.

A Sea of Incoherence

I've often made the argument in these pages that moral judgments are vacuous unless there's an objective standard of moral goodness that transcends human feelings or subjectivity. I've also argued that the only such standard that can qualify is God, so that if God does not exist there really is no basis for moral judgment and no obligation to live one way rather than another.

But, why must the objective standard be God? Why can there not be a standard that transcends human subjectivity but also be something like Plato's ideal form of the good?

Plato (c. 427-c.347 B.C.), you might recall, believed that there existed in some ethereal realm the ideal (or form) of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True and everything that existed, to the extent that it contained some goodness, beauty, or truth did so because it derived these qualities from these ideals or forms. But ideal goodness cannot serve as the basis for moral obligation because a) it's not personal and b) it's unable to hold us accountable.

How, for example, can an impersonal standard of behavior communicate to us how we should act and how can it obligate us to act that way? And how can an impersonal abstraction hold us accountable for how we live?

The only adequate foundation for meaningful moral behavior is a transcendent, personal moral authority who is perfectly good and thus able to serve as a universal standard of goodness, and who has somehow intentionally instilled that standard in us and is powerful enough to hold us accountable for our fidelity to it.

This is very close to saying that in order for there to be objective moral duties there must be a God who grounds them.

So, if one refuses to accept that God exists several things follow:

1. Their moral judgments - whether about racism, sexual abuse, child abuse, torture, war and peace, whatever - are moral nullities. They're simply expressions of the speaker's personal predilections or tastes, and are of no more significance than their expressed preference for Coke rather than Pepsi. Individuals may adopt any attitude toward any of these behaviors they wish. They can choose to be kind, respectful, gentle and honest, but these are just individual preferences. Had they chosen to be the opposite they wouldn't be wrong in any moral sense, they'd just be different.

2. Anyone who asserts that racism, torture and the rest are objectively wrong but who denies there's an objective standard of right and wrong is sailing on a sea of incoherence.

3. The only rational position for such a person to hold regarding morality is moral nihilism - the denial of any objective moral duties altogether.

Of course, most people find moral nihilism repugnant, but it's the inevitable endpoint of any worldview that denies a personal, good, and very powerful God to whom we are morally accountable.

Brilliant Engineering

Drew Berry creates computer generated animations of cellular processes and this particular video (below) is especially artful. The processes he depicts are occurring 24/7 in each of the trillions of cells in our bodies. As you watch the video keep in mind a few questions:

1. The proteins which work with the DNA to produce other proteins were themselves produced by DNA. So which came first? How did the DNA produce the helper proteins before the helper proteins existed to guide the process?

2. How did unguided processes like mutation and genetic drift produce such coordinated choreography? How did blind, unguided processes produce the information which tells the proteins where to go and how to function?

3. How does this information get processed by mindless lumps of chemicals, and how is it passed on from generation to generation?

Notice how the motor proteins are structured in such a way that enables them to "walk" along microtubules carrying various items to locations in the cell where they're needed. How do these motor proteins "know" how to do this, and how did this behavior evolve in the first place?

There may indeed be naturalistic, materialistic answers to these questions which we'll someday discover, but it seems that the more progress we make in biology the more implausible and remote such explanations sound to all but the most inveterately committed and the more it looks like the living cell has in fact been engineered by a mind.

If you don't have time to watch the whole video start at the 2:54 mark:

They Just Want to Kill Jews

Jim Geraghty's recent Morning Jolt column is so important and so good, and since it's free anyway, I wanted to share just about the entire piece with you. Most of the claims he makes are linked to a source at the original Morning Jolt column, so go there if you wish to follow up on anything he says: This planet is full of people who just want to kill Jews, and this country has no shortage of people who just want to cheer on the murderers. I hate to begin your Monday morning with such a bracing statement, but that’s the lesson of the past year.

When’s the last time you saw a college campus with a protest against the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs? (Perhaps the students are just following the guidance of billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya: “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay?”)

Russia has kidnapped an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 Ukrainian children over the course of the war, sending them deeper into Russian-occupied territory or to Russia, and a couple hundred have been shipped off to a boot camp, where the Russians are training them to become child soldiers against their own homeland. This is separate from the 11,743 Ukrainian civilians killed during the war through August, the 24,614 injured, and the 168 summary executions of civilians, including five children, committed by the invading forces.

Anybody on campus want to march in the quad about that?

When’s the last time you saw a college campus with a protest against the Taliban and its nightmarish oppression of women? How many college students even know that the Taliban has now banned all women from public spaces — banned their faces, banned their voices?

Anybody seen any campus protests against the Iranian government’s rapidly increasing rate of executions — in August, 29 executions in one day?

Have you seen any college protests against the Houthis’ “partial and limited reintroduction” of slavery and child marriages?

There are ongoing “atrocities against Black African ethnic groups in Sudan — wrenchingly similar to the Darfur genocide here two decades ago.” Nicholas Kristof reports:

After two military factions started a civil war in 2023, one of them — a descendant of the janjaweed called the Rapid Support Forces, armed and supported by the United Arab Emirates — tried once again to drive Black Africans from Darfur. Naima recounted the same pattern I heard from so many people: The militia surrounded her village, lined up men and boys, then shot them one by one.

“We’re going to get rid of this Black trash,” she quoted the Arab gunmen saying.

Then the gunmen went house to house to kill, plunder and rape. Mostly, those they raped were girls and women, she said, but they also raped at least one man.

Do these black lives matter? Apparently not, judging from the lack of reaction of the overwhelming majority of America’s college students.

Any activists even notice new claims of the mass killing of the Rohingya by the Arakan Army in Myanmar?

Nope, the only “genocide” that seems to interest the angry young leftists on America’s college campuses is the Israeli use of military force against Hamas in retaliation for the massacre perpetrated by the terror group.

If your lone measuring stick of geopolitical events was the reaction of American college students, you would think that (a) the October 7 massacre and mass rapes were a minor provocation, not even worth much discussion, and (b) the Israeli military response to that massacre is a greater outrage than the Rwandan genocide, the Islamic State’s brutality, the “ethnic cleansing” of the Balkan wars, or the millions killed or displaced in Congo.

Maybe, if you look hard enough, you can find a sparsely attended, largely ignored, on-campus effort against these other moral abominations, one that garnered little or no media coverage and minimal student interest. But only Israel gets American college students’ blood pumping, propelling them up off the dorm bed and out to march, protest, occupy buildings, and assault their classmates. (From an Anti-Defamation League report released last month, summarizing the 2023–24 academic year: “Twenty-eight assaults were recorded on approximately 20 campuses across the country in the following states: California (10), Massachusetts (4), New York (4), New Jersey (2), North Carolina (2) and one assault each in Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Tennessee, Washington and Wisconsin.”)

I would ask how many of these students could find the Uyghur homeland or Sudan or Myanmar on a map, but we learned that many of those protesting Israel, and chanting “From the river, to the sea, Palestine will be free,” have no idea which river and which sea are the subject of their chants. (My favorite answer is “the Caribbean.”)

Allow me to offer an ugly theory: The antisemitism is the point. You could hate the Chinese regime for what it’s doing, or Russia for what it’s doing in Ukraine, or the Iranians or the Houthis. (Let’s face it, the overwhelming majority of Americans have no idea who the Rapid Support Forces or Arakan Army are.) Lord knows those regimes — not the people trapped under the boot heels of those thuggish governments — deserve to be hated.

But if you’re really mad at Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or the Taliban, whom do you protest?

Most of the Chinese-government-sponsored Confucius Institutes are gone, having withered away once Congress cut off Department of Defense research funding to any school that had one. But there are still enormous financial ties between America’s higher-education system and Chinese companies, often either state-run or state-influenced. The Wall Street Journal reported: “Nearly 200 U.S. colleges and universities held contracts with Chinese businesses, valued at $2.32 billion, between 2012 and 2024, according to a review by The Wall Street Journal of disclosures made to the Education Department. The Journal tallied roughly 2,900 contracts.”

That’s separate from the $4 billion from Qatar, the nearly $3 billion from Saudi Arabia, and the nearly $2 billion in contracts and gifts from Chinese-controlled Hong Kong. The higher-education administrative blob will be extremely sensitive to any student actions that might mess with any country with institutions that are paying U.S. universities a giant pile of money.

If you’re an angry young man (or woman) — “boring as hell,” as a lyric once accurately described the type — you’ve got no easy, convenient, or useful target for your fury when it’s those autocratic, brutal regimes that are the object of your rightful outrage.

But if you hate Israel, well, just about every college campus has a Hillel:

Hillel International, the premier Jewish on-campus organization that supports Jewish life at hundreds of colleges across the United States and abroad, has been one of the most frequent targets of anti-Israel activists and other antisemites in recent months, totaling more than a hundred incidents in the U.S. since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Jewish students and Hillel staff members have received threatening emails and phone calls; Hillel buildings have been vandalized and tagged with graffiti; and Hillel-sponsored events have been protested; and in some cases, anti-Israel student groups have even launched campaigns demanding that Hillel be banned entirely from universities.

Most recently, on July 19, 2024, an anti-Zionist student group at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee posted a message on social media declaring that “ANY organization or entity that supports Israel is not welcome at UWM,” calling out Hillel and the Jewish Federation by name. The post went on to ominously state that these organizations “will be treated accordingly as extremist criminals. Stay tuned.”

The university administration quickly denounced the threatening language, but UW-Milwaukee Popular University for Palestine — the group that published the original post and also served as a key organizer of the anti-Israel encampment at the school earlier in the spring — doubled down on its rhetoric in a follow-up post that reiterated that Zionist groups “will not be normalized or welcomed on our campus.” The group’s statement was endorsed by UW-Milwaukee’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) and others.

The university has since temporarily suspended the SJP chapter and those of SDS and YDSA.

These folks don’t really care about human rights in some far-off land. They just want someone to hate; more specifically, someone whom it is socially acceptable to hate. These people would likely insist that they’re not racist, homophobic, or sexist. They just appointed themselves the arbiters of who is “normalized or welcomed on our campus” and have decided that the kinds of people who go to Hillel must be treated like extremist criminals, driven out and barred from returning.

Hey, what do we call the kinds of people who go to Hillel? Oh, that’s right . . . Jews.

These snot-nosed punks found someone they can openly hate without too much of a negative social or legal consequence.

A dear friend told me of their rabbi’s Rosh Hashanah sermon last week — I nearly typed “homily” — discussing the three concepts of “Israel” covered by that name. The first is the people, the greater Jewish community. The second is the nation, the land long called by that name. And the third is the current government of the nation. The rabbi talked about the challenges of always supporting the first and the second while having disagreements with the third.

I would note that it works in the other direction as well. A whole lot of people who claim they only hate Israel, the government, let out their bile at anybody who is Jewish, looks Jewish, or they think is Jewish — which means they really loathe the greater Jewish community.

When you’re tearing down the menorah on the quad, or in the public square, or outside some family’s home — as we saw at Harvard, and in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Framingham, Mass., Montgomery County, Md., Palm Beach, and Oakland, screw you! You’re not an anti-Zionist, you just hate Jews.

Unspeakable Evil

A few days after the horrific slaughter of Israelis on October 7th of last year I wrote the following. It bears repeating today, one year after the barbarism of the Gazan Muslims:

Palestinian Muslims invaded Israel over the weekend, murdered hundreds of Israeli men, women and children, raped numerous women, beheaded captured soldiers, and leftists on our campuses and elsewhere have cheered them on. It turns one's stomach to think that not only is the Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran axis of evil being celebrated by Muslims around the world, but the evil that we've seen perpetrated by Hamas over the weekend actually has supporters in this country as well.

Students on university campuses, talking heads in our leftist media, and some of our political leaders are expressing support for Hamas and blaming Israel which is like blaming a rape victim for not being nicer to her rapist.

What did the Muslim terrorists actually do? Noah Pollack describes the horror:

When Hamas invaded Israel this morning, terrorists streamed across the border in pickup trucks, by motorcycle, on foot, and even on paragliders.

Once inside Israel, they abducted and murdered Israelis. They shot people in cars and at bus stops, they rounded up women and children into rooms like Einsatzgruppen—yes, the comparison is appropriate—and machine-gunned them.

They went house to house to find and murder civilians hiding in their closets, and they dragged the bloody, dead bodies of Israelis back into Gaza where they are now being paraded, beaten, and mutilated in front of exultant crowds.

One young woman was murdered and stripped to her underwear, and her corpse was thrown in the back of a pickup truck so it could be paraded around Gaza while young Hamas men beat and mutilated her body.

Hamas terrorists attacked a music festival in the desert. Dozens were killed and injured, and many more are missing. Footage shows young Israelis running for their lives.

As if all that were not barbaric enough, they took videos of all this and posted them to social media. Some even called their mothers to boast about how they slew their victims.

The number of Israelis murdered is proportional, population-wise, to the murders in a single day of 25,000 Americans. It's an attack much worse for Israel than the 9/11 attack was for the U.S.

People who do this to other people are savages. They're evil. Those who approve are equally as despicable. Those who are seeking to draw some kind of moral equivalence between Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran and the Israelis should be prayed for but otherwise ignored. They're either ignorant or complicit in the evil, and, sadly, there seem to be a lot of them around.

Fire and Water

Geneticist Michael Denton has favored us with a number of books that are very much worth reading. Two of my favorites are Fire-maker, and The Wonder of Water. A non-scientist would have no trouble following and understanding either book.

Each of them provides the reader with fascinating information on almost every page as they examine two commonplace phenomena in our environment, fire and water, and explain that if those two phenomena didn't have precisely the properties they do, and if everything that relies on them didn't have precisely the structure it has, life would be either very much diminished, or even impossible. Certainly living things as complex as human beings would be impossible.

In Fire-maker, for example, Denton reflects upon all the properties of planet earth that have to be just right for the phenomenon of fire to exist and then recounts all the physical characteristics of human beings that have to be just as they are for us to be able to use fire. He then examines what human culture would be like were we or the earth even slightly different such that fire could not be made or harnessed. It all just leaves one shaking one's head in amazement.

Here are a couple of related videos that'll give you an idea of what the books are about:

The more we learn about the world in which we live the harder it is to think that it's all just a marvelous coincidence that everything just by coincidence has precisely the properties it does.

For those who may have a stronger background in science and wish to probe more deeply into these matters, I recommend an earlier book by Denton titled Nature's Destiny.

The Madman

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a man before his time. He was an atheist who saw clearly that atheism entailed far more than just the "death of God." Nietzsche saw that when modern men pushed God out of their lives they created a vacuum, an emptiness from which meaning, morality, and hope had all been swept out.

The "murder" of God meant that man was left to create his own meaning, his own morality, and to learn to live without hope. Man's existential predicament would inevitably lead him to despair.

Nietzsche foresaw all this, but most men of his age did not. In their exuberance and rejoicing over their "assassination of God" and the liberation they were sure their deed had brought them, they failed to grasp that when God "died" with Him died any hope of transcendent purpose and any solid ground for right and wrong.

Nietzsche expressed this failure in a parable he included in his book The Gay Science. It's called the Parable of the Madman:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers.

But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition?

Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?

Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

The madman carried a lantern in the daylight because darkness was imminent. Man has become unmoored, like the earth unchained from the sun. Cold despair settles upon us as we plunge in all directions, adrift in nothingness. We are haunted by the sense that all is becoming colder.

Nietzsche's lantern-carrying madman is an interesting and perhaps intentional counterpoint to another lantern-carrier depicted c.1854 by the artist Holman Hunt.

Hunt's lantern-carrier, unlike Nietzsche's, did not bring despair, but hope. He did not wipe out the horizon we use to navigate through life but rather gave life direction and meaning. Nor did he set us adrift in an infinite nothingness, but set our feet on the solid ground of objective, transcendent reality:

We might suppose that Nietzsche's lantern-carrier was driven mad by the consequences that he foresaw following upon the murder of Hunt's lantern-carrier.

Hating Those Who Resist Evil

Dennis Prager has a very insightful piece at HotAir.com in which he claims that people hate those who fight evil more than they hate those who do evil. He also offers an explanation as to why this perversity exists.

He begins by recounting his experience as a young man in high school at a time when communism was the greatest plague ever to beset human civilization. He writes that despite communism's obvious evil it astounded him that, "a great many people -- specifically, all leftists and many, though not all, liberals -- hated anti-communists far more than they hated communism."

To those born after say 1975 the history of communism may be a bit murky so Prager offers a summary of the horrors it inflicted upon the world:

Because of my early preoccupation with good and evil, already in high school, I hated communism. How could one not, I wondered. Along with Nazism, it was the great evil of the 20th century. Needless to say, as a Jew and as a human, I hated Nazism. But as I was born after Nazism was vanquished, the great evil of my time was communism.

Communists murdered about 100 million people -- all noncombatants and all innocent. Stalin murdered about 30 million people, including 5 million Ukrainians by starvation (in just two years: 1932-33). Mao killed about 60 million people. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) killed about 3 million people, one in every four Cambodians, between 1975 and 1979. The North Korean communist regime killed between 2 million and 3 million people, not including another million killed in the Korean War started by the North Korean communists.

For every one of the 100 million killed by communists, add at least a dozen more people -- family and friends -- who were terribly and permanently affected by the death of their family member or friend. Then add another billion whose lives were ruined by having to live in a communist totalitarian state: their poverty, their loss of fundamental human rights, and their loss of dignity.

You would think that anyone with a functioning conscience and with any degree of compassion would hate communism. But that was not the case. Indeed, there were many people throughout the non-communist world who supported communism. And there was an even larger number of people who hated anti-communists, dismissing them as "Cold Warriors," "warmongers," "red-baiters," etc.

This is still true today, amazingly, but today there's yet another evil roaming the world, militant Islam, and the same bizarre hatred of those who oppose it can be found everywhere:

At the present time, we are again witnessing this phenomenon -- hatred of those who oppose evil rather than of those who do evil -- with regard to Israel and its enemies. And on a far greater level. Israel is hated by individuals and governments throughout the world. Israel is the most reviled country at the United Nations as well as in Western media and, of course, in universities.

This hatred for Israel has always struck me as irrational and inexplicable, but it's ubiquitous. Here's Prager:

Israel is a liberal democracy with an independent judiciary, independent opposition press, and equal rights for women, gays and its Arab population (20% of the Israeli population). Its enemies -- the Iranian regime, Hamas and Hezbollah -- allow no such freedoms to those under their control. More relevantly, their primary goal -- indeed, their stated reason for being -- is to wipe out Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. Hamas and Hezbollah have built nothing, absolutely nothing, in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively. They exist solely to commit genocide against Israel and its Jews.

Prager concludes by offering a possible explanation for this human tendency to hate those who resist evil more than those who perpetrate it, and I encourage you to read the rest of his column. His explanation is probably correct, but I think, too, that another factor in the explanation is that there exists among much of humanity a kind of moral sickness that blinds people to what is right and true.

After all, anyone who can look at the historical facts relating to the crimes of communism or the depravity of militant Islam and somehow defend them really is morally purblind.

Atheism's Suicide Problem

There's an interesting article at the HuffPost written by a very "evangelical" atheist named Staks Rosch in which Mr. Rosch argues that depression and suicide are prominent problems among atheists. He states that,

Depression is a serious problem within the greater atheist community and far too often, that depression has led to suicide. This is something many of my fellow atheists often don’t like to admit, but it is true. I know a lot of atheists, myself included, would all like to believe that atheists are happier people than religious believers and in many ways we are. But we also have to accept the reality that in some very important ways we are not.

Rosch's diagnosis of the problem, however, seems a bit off to me. He writes:

There are of course many valid reasons why atheists are sometimes more prone to suicide than religious believers. Interestingly enough, one of those reasons is religious believers themselves. We live in a world dominated by people who often fervently believe ancient superstitions and who many times demonize, harass, ostracize, and disown those who lack belief in those ancient superstitions. Atheists on the receiving end of this treatment are understandably stressed and isolated. They often experience anxiety and depression as a result.

This may be true in Muslim cultures, but I have a difficult time believing in our post-Christian, secular West - Europe and North America - that atheists experience much persecution from Christians. And even if they did the kind of mistreatment they receive is as nothing compared to the horrific persecution of Christians at the hands of atheists throughout the twentieth century. Yet we don't read of persecuted Christians as having had a suicide problem.

I think Rosch is closer to the mark when he writes this:

Imagine you are a young person who has just come to the realization that God is imaginary. You have just realized that everything your religious tradition and your parents have taught you is make-believe. Your whole world has just come undone and for the first time in your life, you now have to wrestle with the great existential questions of life on your own and without any support networks. What does it mean to live a meaningful life without a supernatural deity? Without an afterlife to live for, what is the purpose of life?

If a sensitive, intelligent young person comes to the realization that all of our thoughts and emotions are just collisions of chemicals in our brains, that all of our griefs and joys, sufferings and pleasures are ultimately extinguished in death, that all of our hopes, dreams, and ambitions are destined to amount to ephemeral satisfactions at best, that our lives are just meaningless flickers in a vast meaningless universe, then it's little wonder that they'd ask themselves why they should go on living when their lives are filled with hopelessness, pain, and rejection.

This is why the atheist character Kirillov says in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, "I don't know how anyone can know that there is no God and not kill himself on the spot."

Rosch, however, demurs. He writes:

As a community, atheists should be reminding each other about the wonders around us. It is far too easy to get lost in our day-to-day struggles and problems. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, life moves pretty fast sometimes and if you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you just might miss it. We only have one life. There are no do-overs and no magically perfect kingdoms awaiting us when we die. This is it. Life’s too short to waste. If your life sucks, work to make it better… if not for you, for those who come after you. Again, there is a vast cosmos out there and we are links in the chain of human achievement.

Unfortunately, this is not much consolation for the person experiencing the existential angst he talks about in his article. In the first place, the more one reflects on the wonders around us - life, the starry heavens - the more one feels either completely forlorn or drawn closer to the Creator of those wonders.

The more closely one studies life and the heavens the more these wonders cry out that they're not a just a fortuitous cosmic fluke - they're intentionally designed.

Secondly, why on earth should anyone who believes that after this life there's nothing but annihilation care about the state of the world after they die? The happy talk about being "links in the chain of human achievement" is just so much whistling past the graveyard.

Thirdly, Rosch seems implicitly to be making the moral claim that pure egoism - caring only about one's own happiness - is wrong, but what grounds does he have for making any moral claims at all? If there's no objective moral authority then morality reduces to nothing more than subjective preferences. Rosch can say that he doesn't like it when people don't care for those who come after, but why should anyone think they should govern their life according to what someone else likes or dislikes?

To the extent that atheism has a suicide problem - I'm taking Rosch at his word that it does - it does so because it simply cannot offer people the spiritual resources to help them cope with the existential predicaments of life. Nor can it provide satisfying answers to the most pressing metaphysical questions of life. Young people in pain who think to peer into their souls find, if God's not there, that all they can see is a huge aching emptiness.

That discovery is almost inevitably a recipe for despair.

Three Pounds of Wonder

This seven-minute video from the John 10:10 project illustrates the breathtaking complexity and capability of the human brain. It is astonishing what this organ does, and personally, it's also astonishing that anyone still thinks that something like this could somehow arise through sheer chance and blind mechanical processes.

The creators of the video write this:

The human brain has been called the most complex structure in the universe and every moment of every day, it controls each movement we make, thought we have, and word we speak. In this visually compelling short video, stunning computer animation and cutting-edge imagery will transport you inside a realm of unimaginable wonder. We have been blessed with a gift that not only makes life on Earth possible, it also opens the door to a personal relationship with the Creator of the heavens and the Earth.

See what you think:

Over Half a Million Felons

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has released a report that should alarm every American and cause us to question what Kamala Harris has done in her three years of responsibility for border security.

According to an article by Kevin Downey, Jr. at PJ Media there are currently an estimated 7.4 million non-detained illegal immigrants living in the U.S.A. who entered the nation since the Biden-Harris administration took over. Over half a million of these have convictions or impending charges, including rape and murder, but they were not detained.

The breakdown of these criminals is deeply disturbing and one wonders why the media, even as biased as it is, is not holding the Biden/Harris administration accountable.

The illegal immigrant criminals walking around our neighborhoods and schools include:

• 62,231 convicted of assault
• 14,301 convicted of burglary
• 56,533 with drug convictions
• 13,099 convicted of homicide
• 15,811 with sexual assault convictions
• 2,521 with kidnapping convictions
• 1,845 with pending homicide charges
• 42,915 with assault charges
• 3,266 with burglary charges

"As of July 21, 2024, there were 662,566 non-citizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket—13,099 criminally convicted MURDERS," Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) declared. "Americans deserve to be SAFE in our own communities." As Downey asserts, it's almost as if other nations are emptying their prisons and sending their criminals to the U.S.

The report comes as the nation's headlines are filled with atrocities that illegal immigrants committed, including:

• The brutal two-hour rape and murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray
• The arrests of five illegals for raping children on Nantucket Island
• The rape and murder of Rachel Morin, mother of five
• The rape of a ten-year-old boy in Mississippi
• The rape of a 13-year-old girl in Queens, N.Y.
• The rape of a 15-year-old disabled girl near Boston
• The rape of a child under 13 years old in Michigan
• The rape of a 10-year-old girl in Ohio
• Then there are these three cases of people raped and/or murdered by illegals.

You can find links to all these cases at the PJ Media article. Downey writes that you can go to your favorite search engine and type "raped by illegal immigrant" and then pick a state. You'll be nauseated by the sexual assaults and murders that illegal immigrants — who border czar and possible next president Kamala Harris welcome into the nation — committed.

It's not clear from the article that all of these felons came in during the reign of the current administration but it's probable that the vast majority did and it's also the case that the current administration has done very little, if anything, to get them out.

Having shown so little interest in keeping these people out of our communities over the past four years one has to wonder what the statistics would look like four years into a Harris administration.

Wishful Thinking

Naturalism is the view that everything about us, our bodies and our thoughts, our brains and our mental sensations, can all be explained by, or reduced to, physics and matter. Nobel-prize winning biologist Francis Crick, in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis, describes the view this way:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’

Nobel-Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg describes the implications of his naturalism as follows:

...the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature ... we even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years.

And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

The twentieth century mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell pretty much agrees with Weinberg:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Note that both Weinberg and Russell see clearly that their view leads either to the Scylla of nihilism or the Charybdis of despair. The only way to avoid these bleak consequences is through "wishful thinking," by which is presumably meant the belief that naturalism is wrong. Why that belief should be thought to be "wishful thinking," though, is hard to understand since there are very good reasons for thinking that naturalism is indeed wrong.

In any case, naturalism is itself not a product of scientific analysis. There's no preponderance of evidence in its favor. It's simply a metaphysical preference embraced by those who can't abide the notion that theism might be true.

Nevertheless, that aversion to theism is so strong that it beguiles brilliant people like Crick, Weinberg and Russell into wrapping their arms around a view of life that drains it of all hope, meaning, and moral significance.

When centuries from now historians look back at this period in our cultural story, I wonder if they won't think how odd it is that anyone would have preferred that naturalism be true rather than that it be false.

Socialism Made Simple

Conservative politicians and talk show hosts frequently level the accusation that Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and pretty much the rest of the Democratic Party elite are socialists. The charge is either true or not far from 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 the public's understanding I offer this allegory 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 play video games instead 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 the socialism metaphor 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 do well enough to suit them 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, they're only C's.

When the professor redistributes the points 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?

Translate this into economics and you have socialism.

This short video makes the same point differently:

What the Third World Owes to Missionaries

I find myself often referring in conversation with friends to Rodney Stark's excellent book titled How the West Won. Like all his books HWW is history that reads like a novel. He argues in the book that all of the progress we've enjoyed in the world since the medieval period has had it's genesis in the West.

His theory, to my mind convincingly defended, is that progress only occurred in areas with high levels of personal liberty, low taxation, and strong property rights. To the extent these were absent, as they have been in most parts of the world throughout history, progress died in the crib, as it were.

He also argues that the crucial soil for progress was a Judeo-Christian worldview in which the universe was seen as an orderly, law-governed, rational product of a personal, non-arbitrary God. Where this belief was absent, as it was everywhere but Europe, science and technology, medicine and learning, either never developed or were never sustained.

Along the way Stark punctures a host of myths that have become almost axiomatic on the left but which are at complete variance with the historical facts. He makes a strong case for the claim that capitalism and even colonialism have been blessings, that the fall of Rome was one of the single most beneficial events in world history, that the "Dark Ages" never happened, that the crusades were not at all the rapacious ventures by murderous Christians of gentle, pastoral Muslims we've been told they were, that historical climate change had many salubrious effects on Western progress, that there was no scientific "revolution" but rather a continual and accelerating unfolding of scientific discovery that began at least as far back as the 13th century and probably earlier.

I urge anyone interested in history to get a copy. Stark includes a lot that he covered in earlier works, but much of it is new and what isn't new bears repeating anyway.

An example of something that's both myth-busting and new was Stark's discussion of the work of Robert D. Woodberry.

Woodberry's research makes it clear that much, if not most, of the progress made around the world is due to the work of Western missionaries who labored a century or more ago.

Here's what Stark writes about the role missionaries played in making life better for millions:

It has long been the received wisdom among anthropologists and other cultural relativists that by bringing Western technology and learning to "native peoples," the missionaries corrupted their cultures, which were as valid as those of the West....But to embrace the fundamental message of cultural imperialism requires that one be comfortable with such crimes against women as foot-binding, female circumcision, the custom of Sati (which caused women to be burned to death, tied to their husbands' funeral pyres), and the stoning to death of rape victims on the grounds of their adultery.

It also requires one to agree that tyranny is every bit as desirable as democracy, and that slavery should be tolerated if it accords with local customs. 

Similarly, one must classify high-infant mortality rates, toothlessness in early adulthood, and the castration of young boys as valid parts of local cultures, to be cherished along with illiteracy. For it was especially on these aspects of non-Western cultures that modernity was "imposed," both by missionaries and other colonialists.

Moreover, missionaries undertook many aggressive actions to defend local peoples against undue exploitation by colonial officials. In the mid-1700s, for example, the Jesuits tried to protect the Indians in Latin America from European efforts to enslave them; Portuguese and Spanish colonial officials brutally ejected the Jesuits for interfering. Protestant missionaries frequently became involved in bitter conflicts with commercial and colonial leaders in support of local populations, particularly in India and Africa....

A remarkable new study by Robert D. Woodberry has demonstrated conclusively that Protestant missionaries can take most of the credit for the rise and spread of stable democracies in the non-Western world. That is, the greater the number of Protestant missionaries per ten thousand local population in 1923, the higher the probability that by now a nation has achieved a stable democracy. The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other pertinent control variables, including gross domestic product and whether or not a nation was a British colony.

Woodberry not only identified this missionary effect but also gained important insights into why it occurred. Missionaries, he showed, contributed to the rise of stable democracies because they sponsored mass education, local printing and newspapers, and local voluntary organizations, including those having a nationalist and anticolonial orientation.

These results so surprised social scientists that perhaps no study has ever been subjected to such intensive prepublication vetting....

Protestant missionaries did more than advance democracy in non-Western societies. The schools they started even sent some students off to study in Britain and America. It is amazing how many leaders of successful anti-colonial movements in British colonies received university degrees in England - among them Mahatma Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya....

Less recognized are the lasting benefits of the missionary commitment to medicine and health. American and British Protestant missionaries made incredible investments in medical facilities in non-Western nations. As of 1910 they had established 111 medical schools, more than 1,000 dispensaries, and 576 hospitals. To sustain these massive efforts, the missionaries recruited and trained local doctors and nurses, who soon greatly outnumbered the Western missionaries....

[Woodberry's] study showed that the higher the number of Protestant missionaries per one thousand population in a nation in 1923, the lower that nation's infant mortality rate in 2000 - an effect more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP per capita. Similarly, the 1923 missionary rate was strongly positively correlated with a nation's life expectancy in 2000.

These missionaries battled every kind of pestilence, hardship, and deprivation. They were often murdered or died from disease, all in an effort to make life better for people living in miserable circumstances, while leftist academics, who never made life better for anyone, sit in their comfortable, air-conditioned offices, foolishly condemning those who did for being "superstitious" and "cultural imperialists" who imposed their values on idyllic societies that would be better off if left alone.

Some might call these academics intellectually arrogant, or even stupid, but if nothing else they certainly display a moral blindness.

Disillusioned

Loyal Democrat activist Evan Barker expressed her disillusionment with a party that no longer represents the values she once loved in an essay at Newsweek. Her disillusionment came to a head when she attended the Democratic National Convention last summer:

Initially, I was thrilled to attend this rite of passage for every political operative. But once there, wandering amidst the glitz and glam, imbibing the gloss and schmaltz of it all, I couldn't escape a sinking feeling. I felt submersed in a hollow chamber whose mottos were "Brat summer" and "Joy"—totally out of touch with regular, every-day Americans and their pressing needs; instead, the most elite people in the world chanted in unison that "We're not going back!"

I found myself feeling disenchanted, lost, sad, and alone. As someone who has given her life to Democratic politics, it was devastating. But if I'm being honest, it wasn't totally surprising.

Disgusted with the constant begging for money from Democrat billionaires she moved from being a moderate Democrat to being a progressive, but this shift didn't help:

These realizations pushed me from moderate Democrats to progressive candidates who rejected corporate PAC money, embraced a higher minimum wage, endorsed universal health care, and criticized the Party's corporate wing. But when you're working with progressives, you get a front-row seat to how the establishment beats and batters candidates out of step with the party line.

So my progressives lost. A lot. And it was always to the same old, tired playbook of dark money from super PACs pouring in, or major Democratic arms like the DCCC and DSCC putting their thumb on the scale, endorsing the anointed candidate early instead of letting the people choose. This is how they blocked Bernie [Sanders].

But even the progressives are part of the problem now. They were once focused on policies that improved people's lives, promising to be unbought and uncompromisable. But after the summer of 2020, that rhetoric all but faded away. They've become compromised by the social justice language and divisive identity politics that now dominates the entire Democratic ecosystem.

Perhaps the most shocking of all is how the Democrats have embraced Bush-era foreign policy to become the party of war. Instead of rebuilding the working class communities that have been hit hardest by their neoliberal trade policies, they've spent $175 billion funding the war in Ukraine.

It was the cherry on the cake that Vice President Kamala Harris has been proudly touting an endorsement from Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney!

Toward the end of her column Barker writes this:

Here's the sad truth: The Democratic Party has lost its way entirely. They mostly speak to the college educated, the urban and affluent, in their language. Their tone is condescending and paternalistic. They peddle giveaways to the college-educated like student loan forgiveness plans that disproportionately help their base, snubbing the majority of the country without a four-year degree, and then offer no tangible plans for true reform.

The flip-side of this is that the policies they do endorse - higher taxes, more spending, more regulations, more illegal immigration, etc. - are guaranteed not only to not help, but to actually harm the very middle class that Democrats claim they care about.

I wonder how many Evan Barkers there are out there, disgruntled with a party that seems to have embraced a far-left ideology alien to the values and concerns they grew up with. However many there are, I very much doubt that many of them will vote for Trump - Barker doesn't say who she'll vote for - but neither will they be very excited about getting their friends and family to vote for Harris.

Personal Identity and Teleportation

Imagine that you're a crew member of the Starship Enterprise and are voyaging to another galaxy. Imagine, too, that you're a philosophical materialist who believes that all that exists is matter and energy.

When you arrive you're teleported to the surface of a planet. Unlike the transporter on Star Trek, however, in the process we're describing your body disintegrates on the Enterprise and is instantly reassembled out of completely different atoms on the surface of the planet.

Star Trek Teleporter

Assume that the reassembled person has all the memories and knowledge that you did before being disintegrated. Is the reassembled person (RP) really you?

If materialism is true, it's hard to see how it could be since RP is made of completely different material stuff than you were.

If you say that the material stuff has the same form as it did before being disintegrated you're adopting a kind of Aristotelian/Thomist view of the soul, which materialists would find offensive.

If you say that you have a mind that survives the disintegration process then you're again renouncing materialism because you're positing the existence of an immaterial substance, i.e. a mind or soul, that's an essential part of your being.

So, what is it that makes RP the same person as you? Memories? If it's memories how many of your memories must you retain in order for RP to be you? Every day we lose many of our memories. Can you remember word-for-word a conversation you had yesterday or the day before? Probably not.

Nor can you remember much about yourself from ten years ago, so what percentage of your memories must you retain for RP to be you? If memories give us our personal identity then an amnesiac or an Alzheimer's sufferer would be a different person than before losing his or her memory.

Besides, it's not clear in any case that our memories are material or physical. Perhaps the brain stores electrons or chemicals on neurons which somehow get translated into a recollection, but those electrons aren't the memory itself any more than an inflamed nerve is identical to the sensation of pain.

When you remember your mother's face you have an image of her face, but the image is not electrons or chemicals in neurons. It's arguably something immaterial.

Perhaps you might say that you and RP are the same person because the genetic code inscribed on your DNA would be the same in both of you, but identical DNA would only mean that RP was a clone of you. It doesn't mean that RP would actually be you.

It seems that the materialist has to assume that you have ceased to exist and that RP is not you but a new person similar to you. Either that or they need to acknowledge that materialism needs to be rejiggered somehow.

Maybe, though, there's another option. Maybe materialism is just false and there's something immaterial about us that makes us who we are. Perhaps we have a soul that bestows upon us our identity and which is unaffected by the teleporter.

If so, you and RP might well be the same person but with two distinct bodies.

Plant Predators

One of the perplexities of modern evolutionary theory is how structures, systems, and abilities evolved that are completely superfluous to an organism's survival. Natural selection, according to the theory, acts upon genetic variations, favoring those that suit the organism for its environment and culling from the population those which don't.

But nothing in the theory explains, or at least explains well, biological extravagance, notwithstanding that we see such extravagance all around us.

Some while ago Evolution News ran an essay that discusses three examples of biological phenomena that far exceed anything that would have been necessary for fitness. The three are the Venus Flytrap, the stripes on a zebra, and the prodigious memory capability of the human brain. Here's what they said about the Venus Flytrap:

New work by researchers in Germany, published in Current Biology, shows that this plant can count! The team's video, posted on Live Science (see below), shows how the trigger hairs inside the leaves generate action potentials that can be measured by electrical equipment.

Experiments show that the number of action potentials generates different responses. Two action potentials are required to close the trap. When closed, the plant starts producing jasmonic acid. The third spike activates "touch hormones" that flood the trap with digestive juices. The fifth spike triggers uptake of nutrients.

The struggling insect will trigger some 50 action potentials. The more they come, the more the trap squeezes tighter and tighter, as if knowing it has a stronger prey. The squeezing presses the animal against the digestive juices, also allowing more efficient uptake of nutrients.

"It's not quite plant arithmetic, but it's impressive nonetheless," says Liz Van Volken­burgh of the University of Washington in Seattle. "The Venus flytrap is hardwired to respond in the way that's now being described," she says.

Wayne Fagerberg at the University of New Hampshire in Durham agrees. "Obviously it doesn't have a brain to go 'one, two, three, four'," he says. "Effectively, it's counting. It's just not thinking about it."

In our experience, "hardwired" things that can count and activate responses are designed. This elaborate mechanism, involving multiple responses that activate machines on cue, seems superfluous for survival.

The Venus flytrap has photosynthesis; it can make its own food. The argument that it needs animal food because it lives in nutrient-poor soil is questionable; other plants, including trees, do fine without animal traps.

Here's a video that shows the Venus Flytrap in action:

How did such an astonishing ability, not just the ability to capture and digest prey but also the ability to count, ever evolve through blind, purposeless processes in a plant?

The trap mechanism is exceedingly complex and also completely gratuitous, but the digestion of the prey itself requires extensive modifications and genetic changes, all of which would have been unnecessary for the plants' survival and pretty much useless until they were all in place.

This kind of engineering requires foresight, and foresight, as biochemist Marcos Eberlin notes in his book by that title, is not a trait possessed by blind, impersonal Darwinian processes. It requires a mind.

Pascal on Hearts and Minds

Ever wonder why people who disagree with us are only infrequently persuaded by the presentation of our case despite the obvious (to us) superiority of our arguments? Maybe it has something to do with our demeanor. Here's the 17th century genius and polymath Blaise Pascal on that very topic. "[All] men in the world," he wrote, "are almost always led to believe not by proof but by agreeableness."

Pascal wrote that there are two doors to the soul, the mind and the heart, but that few enter solely through the door of the mind. He writes that, "[People] are introduced [to belief] in large numbers through the whims of the will, without the counsel of reasoning." In other words, most of our beliefs are based upon our desires, biases, prejudices, etc. We believe that which appeals to our subjective feelings, not our objective reason.

He adds that, "...whatever the point about which one wants to convince someone else, one must be attentive to that person: one must know his mind and heart, what principles he accepts, what things he loves....So that the art of persuasion consists as much in pleasing as in convincing, given the extent to which men are governed more by caprice than by reason!"

"The heart," he's famous for having said, "has reasons which reason can never know."

The door to the mind lies behind the door to the heart. If the latter is closed the former is often inaccessible.

Thus, if our mode of disagreement is angry, humorless, arrogant, and insulting we can be sure we'll gain few converts to our views. Such behavior closes the door of the heart. On the other hand, humor, kindness, and humility often cast wide the door to a person's heart. They often gain us a hearing even among those otherwise undisposed to listen to us, but once the door to the heart has been open, the door to the mind is also more likely to be set ajar.

At that point we need to be well-supplied with facts and able to deftly employ reason if we hope to pry open that door even wider.