We Didn't Start the Fire

The Washington Post has an article in which senator Ted Kennedy and his Democratic colleagues explain why judge Janice Rogers Brown is unsuited for the federal judiciary:

Kennedy and others recited the most controversial of Brown's and Owen's statements and rulings. For instance, Brown said in an April 2000 speech, "where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. . . . The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining, and virtue contemptible."

You might think that judge Brown, an African American woman, shares a lot of common philosophical ground with Alexis de Tocqueville and other luminaries in the pantheon of great thinkers in political theory, and that such an individual would be an asset on the federal bench. Such a presumption, however, would put you at odds with Senator Kennedy and his cronies who have probably never heard of Tocqueville, much less read him, and who fervently wish to deny her the opportunity to serve precisely because she says things like this.

This is small-mindedness of the first magnitude. Because this judge believes that big government saps local initiative, a belief which one would think is empirically obvious to all but the most obtuse observers, the liberals are outraged. In their indignation that anyone would have the temerity to challenge the benefits of governmental micro-management they plan to filibuster her nomination, which will force the Republicans to change the rules in the senate to stop the filibuster and allow for a vote on her nomination on the senate floor. This in turn will provoke the Democrats, they've assured us, to shut down the nation's business.

Democrats are so obsessed with defeating George Bush's agenda that they're willing to sacrifice the welfare of the nation to accomplish it. This may turn out, however, to be an act of political self-immolation. If the Republicans do the right thing, stick to their principles, and stand resolutely behind the President's nominees, the Democrats' irrationality may ignite a blazing auto de fe which will reduce them to minority status for a generation. If so, it'll be fun to watch. No doubt they'll fuel the pyre themselves with never-opened volumes of Democracy In America.

Addressing Blasphemy

Little Green Footballs directs us to this story out of Pakistan:

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani man accused of desecrating the Koran was shot dead Wednesday after being chased by an angry crowd.

Ashiq Nabi, in his thirties, was accused of being disrespectful to Islam's holy book and had been in hiding since Monday, a senior police official said.

"Today, a mob spotted him and shot him dead," said Mazahar ul Haq, police chief of Nowshera town, about 100 km (62 miles) west of the capital, Islamabad.

Blasphemy, including desecrating the Koran, is a capital offence in deeply Islamic Pakistan and carries the death sentence, but convictions have always been turned down by high courts because of a lack of evidence.

Witnesses said the man was chased through fields and climbed a tree to get away from an angry crowd of up to 500 men. When he refused to come down, someone shot him dead, they said.

Human rights activists want the blasphemy law to be struck off the books saying it is often abused by people to settle personal disputes or religious rivalry.

Indeed. While we all pause a moment to celebrate multicultural diversity perhaps someone can explain to us again the moral equivalence of all cultures.

Sider and Osteen

Christianity Today has an interview with Ron Sider that should be required reading for everyone who identifies him or herself as an evangelical Christian. Sider has for thirty years or more been calling Christians to live lives consistent with the Gospel, to eschew the materialistic excess of our culture, to care for the poor, and to share in each other's sufferings. The CT interview is well worth reading.

By contrast, I'm currently reading Joel Osteen's best-seller Your Best Life Now, and although I don't question Osteen's sincerity, and I certainly don't question his success (He's taken a church from 7000 members to close to 30,000 in about six years, if that's a measure of success), I really wonder whether his concept of God's will for our lives is accurate. According to Osteen God wants us to be materially successful and wealthy and He yearns to shower us with miracles great and small. Osteen believes that being aware of "God's favor" confers some special status on us that gives the believer who is conscious of it a sort of immunity to troubles which afflict those who fail to claim God's favor. Osteen seems to claim a special skill at divining the mind of God, insisting several times on every page that he knows what God wants, thinks, wishes, wills, and is going to do for those who claim His favor.

I have a difficult time accepting all of this. I don't know that God particularly wants us to be wealthy so much as that we be faithful. There's no Biblical precedent for thinking that wealth should come with one's status as a child of God, but there is Biblical warrant for expecting that persecution and other afflictions will beset us.

Nor do I think God summons up supernatural interventions to secure for us a parking space at the mall, as Osteen informs us God did for him. How must Osteen's claim that God answered his prayer for a parking space sound to a mother who has prayed her eyes out for a dying child to be made well only to have God not grant the request? Miracles are not trivial events dispensed by God like candy thrown from the divine carriage to poor waifs in the street. They are momentous and purposeful, at least those recorded in the New Testament are, and we have no reason to think that God works miracles more promiscuously today than He did then.

Osteen is surely correct in urging us to maintain a positive outlook on life, but his theology would be alien to people like Dietrich Bonhoffer who wrote The Cost of Discipleship, his portrayal of the Christian life seems coarsely materialistic, and he makes God, whether intentionally or not, into a cosmic Santa Claus.

Ron Sider seems to us a much more authentic voice on the matter of how Christians should live their lives. We recommend him to our readers.

Killing Innocents

Richard John Neuhaus asks good questions about whether it is ever right to take innocent life in a piece called Speaking About the Unspeakable in the March issue of First Things. After spending a few paragraphs on the topic of torture (See our commentary here), he writes:

There is a related development that has also not received the attention it would seem to deserve. It is a generally accepted moral maxim that it is always wrong to deliberately take innocent human life. Yet after September 11 it is the policy of our government to shoot down hijacked airplanes, thus killing the innocent passengers, if there is reason to believe that, as in the case of the World Trade Center, the hijackers intend to use the plane as a weapon. One can, of course, stretch the rule of "double effect"-the distinction between what is directly willed and what is only indirectly willed-but it is a stretch that teeters on the edge of simplistic intentionalism.

Father Neuhaus is calling, in this brief essay, for more attention to be paid to these matters by Christian ethicists and moral theologians, and his plea is certainly timely, as we noted in our comments on his post on torture.

The moral agony involved in the scenario Fr. Neuhaus offers for our consideration is perhaps mitigated somewhat by the fact that the passengers on the plane will likely die in any event. The question is whether they will be killed by crashing into a skyscraper at the hands of the terrorists or by crashing into the earth at the hands of an Air Force pilot. It is a choice fraught with anguish, certainly, but if there is reason to believe that the hijackers will murder even more people, and the only way to stop them is to shoot down the airliner, then it seems that shooting it down is the morally right thing to do. Even so, the morally right thing, in a case like this, seems almost heinous.

A more vexing question, though, is whether it is ever right to deliberately target innocent civilians in a time of war. It is vexing because the occasion for it arises with much greater frequency than does the occasion for shooting down hijacked airliners and the temptation to do it must be very strong on at least some of those occasions. Although targeting civilians violates just war theory, it has been done by virtually every nation ever to fight a war in modern times, including the United States.

The moral dubiousness of the Hiroshima bombing, to take but one example, does not derive from our use of a nuclear weapon, but rather from the fact that we deliberately targeted the civilian population for death. More people died from our use of conventional ordinance in the incendiary raid on Tokyo than died from our use of a fission bomb at Hiroshima, but both raids targeted civilians, and that's what makes them morally problematic. Had we dropped the bomb on the Japanese fleet out at sea or on massed troops on Iwo Jima, there would have been little reason to question the decision (In hindsight, of course, we can see that using the weapon crossed a threshold that might have been better left uncrossed), but if there was adequate justification for the wholesale incineration of civilians in Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, I for one don't know what it was.

There may be situations in war in which intentionally killing non-combatants may be for some reason necessary (although I can't think offhand what such circumstances would be), but we should never allow ourselves to return to the WWII mind-set which permitted us to kill innocent children and women with so little distress in our own souls. President Truman is said to have stated that he never gave the use of the bomb a second thought once the decision to use it was made. If that is so, it's a very difficult thing to understand, and very troubling.

Christians have written much about just war theory, but, as Fr. Neuhaus suggests, perhaps there is a need for them to write much more.

Looking For the Big Win

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail has more on the battle at Camp Gannon that we cited in a post a couple of days ago. Here's an excerpt:

Marines responded to the attack by deploying their "Rapid Reaction" force and calling in air assets; "The unit summoned F-18 fighter jets and Cobra helicopter gunships; the Cobras fired machine guns and Hellfire missiles at what an after-action report described as vehicles transporting weapons." Al Qaeda cannot maintain the initiative against such flexibility and firepower, and were forced to break contact, suffering heavy casualties while failing to achieve their objective. It is no wonder the communiqu�s issued by al Qaeda provided little details on the assault, as there is very little to tout.

According to the Washington Post, "19 insurgents were killed and 15 were wounded during 24 hours of fighting." The size of the assault force is estimated between 40 to 100 fighters (the high number likely representing the support teams), putting the casualty figures at anywhere from 34 to 85%. These are stunningly high numbers.

Al Qaeda devoted significant resources to this assault, and the massing of force at the company level requires time, training, effort and material. The fire truck used in the assault was known to have been missing for months; this vehicle was husbanded for a significant attack. These resources were sacrificed as Camp Gannon has strategic significance to the insurgency.

The fact that the insurgents are using frontal attacks in relatively large numbers suggests that they believe they must gain a significant battlefield victory to reverse the psychological flow of momentum which has favored the Iraqi security forces and the coalition troops since the January 30th election.

Their hope, apparently, is that a major defeat of the Americans will re-energize their sagging morale and make them look again like heroes and winners in the eyes of a populace which they have badly alienated by their indiscriminate murders. As long as the insurgents were killing Americans the citizenry viewed them either positively or with indifference, but as the civilian casualties of their suicide bombs piled up, the Iraqi people have grown very hostile toward them, especially since so many of the insurgents are now foreigners.

A big win would help them, but they'll have to do much better than their last several efforts.

Environmental Health

Earth Day approaches (Friday) and much of the news about the environment is good. Wetland acreage has been increasing over the last decade, as has forested land. Indeed, forests in the U.S. grew by almost 10 million acres in the 1990's.

The arctic is warmer than it was in 1970, as anyone who has seen the receding glaciers in Alaska might surmise, but it is colder than it was in 1930. Also air quality continues to improve with pollution levels at their lowest since monitoring began in the 1950's.

This is all very encouraging, but we'd feel much better if rampant development and immigration were brought under control in this country and if habitat erosion in the southern hemisphere were reversed. Even so the environmental picture in the U.S., at least, is much brighter than it was in the 1970's.

Go here for a fuller report.

Diane Knippers, 53

Diane Knippers, one of Time magazine's 25 most influential evangelicals, died this past Monday of cancer at the age of 53. There is more on her passing here.

Smells Like Liberal Thuggery

The Weekly Standard has a fine piece by Jeffrey Bell on the Tom DeLay contretemps to which is attached the pungent aroma of partisan politics. Some highlights of Bell's piece:

The truth is that Tom DeLay is a special target because he is the first legislative power broker to be an authentic Red State conservative. He is an unhyphenated Reaganite: militantly pro-life and pro-values on social issues, a pro-growth tax cutter on economic issues, and an unapologetic, spread-American-values interventionist abroad. In the years since the GOP's congressional realignment victory of 1994, no other GOP leader in either the House or Senate fully fits this description.

Since the 2000 election and the accompanying Red State/Blue State polarization, Red State conservatives have grown in strength in tandem with the alternative Red State media: talk and Christian radio, conservative bloggers, Fox News, and all the rest who have put older, Blue State media on notice that they are no longer capable of unilaterally defining the national debate.

DeLay is the most important of a small but growing group of conservative leaders who are willing and able to operate without permission or praise from Blue State media. The fact that Hastert, DeLay, and their allies have maintained unbroken operational control of the House, never losing a significant floor vote in the four-plus years since Bush became president, has (to put it mildly) opened the door for other ambitious leaders to consider doing the same, either on selected issues or across the board.

If DeLay goes down because of overseas trips and/or fundraising practices that have never caused the slightest political problem for anyone else, the lesson to other Red State leaders will be clear. The four-year House winning streak, so widely taken for granted among conservatives, will not long survive DeLay. That is why Democrats and Blue State media (despite some half-hearted efforts to depict DeLay as a GOP albatross) so fervently desire his career to end as soon as possible.

The Democrats are trying to kneecap DeLay for doing what many of his colleagues of both parties do. The hypocrisy of their attempt to eliminate a powerful political opponent in this fashion really does give off a stench.

Choking the Chinese

Wretchard at Belmont Club has an interesting analysis of China's plans and strategic concerns for the next couple of decades. He concludes that, despite its bluster, it is unlikely that China will launch an assault against Taiwan anytime soon.

The risk for China is not so much that the U.S. would intervene directly, but rather that we, or even the Taiwanese, would be able to block the flow of oil to China which would cause that country to collapse after about a month. China's oil reserves would last only thirty days - perhaps fifty days by 2010.

As long as China's access to oil depends on keeping a series of maritime chokepoints open the Chinese are vulnerable to the small Taiwanese submarine fleet. China's growing dependence upon imported oil, and the ease with which the Taiwanese could shut it off make, in Wretchard's opinion, an attack on Taiwan unlikely, at least in the near term.

Belmont Club's analysis makes a lot of sense, but read the whole thing and decide for yourself. Let's hope he's right.

Pope Benedict XVI

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was named Pope Benedict XVI today. Here is an excerpt from his homily at the Mass for the election of the next pontiff a couple of days ago:

How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking... The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth.

Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4:14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and "swept along by every wind of teaching," looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.

He appears to be a man keenly aware of the corrosive effect modernity has had on the Christian Church in general and Catholicism in particular. If so, he will be a worthy successor to John Paul II. Would that a few such as they could be found among the leaders of mainline protestantism right now.

The whole homily can be read here. You'll have to scroll down.

What Baghdadis Believe

Arthur Chrenkoff has a report and commentary on a recent poll taken of 778 Baghdad residents. The results were published in the April 18 edition of Iraqi Arabic newspaper Almidhar. Baghdadis were asked:

Do you support the pull out of foreign troops?

At once - 12.56%

According to a future timetable - 81.80%

Do not know - 5.64%

Has the security situation improved since the start of the new government?

Yes - 55%

No - 35%

No change - 10%

Chrenkoff's associate Haider Ajina writes:

"Most of us read, heard and saw the media report of the April 9th demonstrations in Baghdad. Most of the U.S. media portrayed it as a massive anti American demonstration in the streets of Iraq. I noticed, however, from Iraqi Arabic newspapers that most the demonstrations were against terrorism and calling for Saddam's trial and hanging (all these signs were in Arabic).

I called my father in Baghdad to confirm this and he confirmed it. My father then confirmed that Al Sadr had asked his followers to demonstrate for the withdrawal of foreign troops, he also said that this group was very small and almost insignificant compared to the rest who were calling for Saddam's trial and hanging and those against terrorism.

My father said the Iraqi media reported the number like this 'about 200,000 demonstrators of which 8,000-10,000 were Al-Sadr and Sunni supporters' (strange bed fellows). He also said that when he listened to the Iraqi elected officials (on live T.V.) in the assembly, that every one (every one including those Sunnis initially opposed to the elections), every man and woman assembly member, reiterated the importance of foreign and specifically U.S. troops staying in Iraq till Iraq is ready to take over its own security. Most of them expressed their thanks for the troops being there and freeing Iraqis from Saddam. This I did not read, hear or see in any U.S. mainstream media outlet.

"These are the people Iraq elected, asking us to stay and thanking us. The poll shows only 12% want us to leave at once. This makes a complete mockery of the mainstream media coverage of the demonstrations. As my wife told me when she heard the coverage on CNN: 'Haider you are going to get mad when you hear this', and I am still mad. Forgive me for rehashing this point. I feel it really needs pointing out. Iraqis are grateful for what we did and continue to be grateful for us being there."

The lesson here is, of course, that we should be skeptical of everything we see or hear in the MSM. They've a profound interest in discrediting Bush's Iraq policy and have demonstrated that they're not going to make him look good by publishing and broadcasting news from Iraq that shows that policy to be succeeding. The news must be unfavorable or it simply gets spiked. And they wonder why they're losing audience.

Thanks to Instapundit for the tip.

A Few Good Men

Go here to read a fascinating account of how a couple of Pennsylvania Marines thwarted the attack on Camp Gannon in Iraq last week in which 21 insurgents were killed and no Americans were seriously injured.

Speaking About the Unspeakable

Richard John Neuhaus asks good questions in a piece on torture called Speaking About the Unspeakable in the March issue of First Things. He writes:

Sanford Levinson who teaches law at the University of Texas has edited a book from Oxford University Press, Torture, with sixteen reflections on the subject. They range from the don't-talk-about-it school to the talk-about-it-only-to-condemn-it view, to a variety of discussions of when torture is permissible and impermissible....Among the more interesting contributions is one by Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Posner notes that "torture" lacks a clear definition in international agreements and American law. "Almost all official interrogation is coercive, yet not all coercive interrogation would be called 'torture' by any competent user of the English language, so that what is involved in using the word is picking out the point along a continuum at which the observer's queasiness turns to revulsion."

There is ... a continuum of circumstances in which most people, rightly or wrongly, would make an exception to the general prohibition of torture. The most commonly cited exception is that of "the ticking bomb" in which there is reason to believe that a suspect knows the location of a nuclear weapon planted in a large city which, if it explodes, will kill thousands of people. In this book and elsewhere, almost all the parties to this discussion feel compelled to address "the ticking bomb" circumstance. Posner says he agrees with (Alan) Dershowitz that "if the stakes are high enough, torture is permissible." He adds, "No one who doubts that should be in a position of responsibility."

The assumption held by many, however, is that torture is intrinsically evil and is therefore absolutely wrong. Even moral subjectivists will sometimes argue that torture is absolutely wrong until they realize the logical awkwardness of their position. In any event, causing pain is not intrinsically evil. If it were then the surgeon who performs a painful operation would be malevolent. What makes torture wrong is not the pain it inflicts but rather the motive or reason for inflicting it.

Torture carried out for amusement, for its own sake, or for punishment is a great evil and should be banished from the earth, but torture to save lives is of a different moral order altogether. Just as all killing isn't of the same moral quality, neither is all causing of pain the same. Just as some killing may be morally justified, so, too, may some instances of causing pain. The justification lies in the purpose for the act.

Neuhaus goes on to say that:

In all this, I am struck by the paucity of serious discussions by Christian moral theologians and ethicists. In these pages I have said, "We dare not trust ourselves to torture." I believe that but acknowledge that it is not sufficient. How do we address these questions of what in fact is happening in circumstances in which conscientious Christians seek moral guidance, and how can we do this without falling into the pits of relativism, proportionalism, consequentialism, and related errors? In the ticking bomb instance, does the duty to protect thousands of innocents override the duty not to torture?

The answer to Neuhaus' question, I think, has to be "yes". Not only in cases where thousands of lives are at stake but also in cases where only a single life hangs in the balance. Consider this entirely plausible scenario: A young girl has been kidnapped and imprisoned in a torture chamber or buried alive by her captor who is subsequently caught. He acknowledges that he is the girl's abductor but will not tell police where she is. He will tell them only that she has just a few days of food, air, and water left before she dies. If this were your daughter would you fault the police if they tortured the man to get the information from him needed to save the girl's life? Indeed, if this were your daughter would you refuse to let the police use such methods on her behalf if they came to you and asked for your assent? If so, why? Is the comfort of a child molester and killer more important than saving your daughter's life?

Most of us don't like to ask ourselves such questions. They make us feel too uncomfortable. Yet unless we do ask them our opinions on this subject remain inchoate. We may well find ourselves thrust into a real ticking bomb scenario in the not too distant future. The bomb may be a nuclear device in a major city. We'd be wise to have done some thinking about this issue before that day arrives.

Rampant Nitwitism

Campus Magazine Online's 2005 Campus Outrage Awards are out. Sterling examples of political correctness run amok on our college campuses, the awards are hilarious in their stupidity but terribly sad in the toll that PC takes on individual lives and what it portends for intellectual freedom in this country.

Here, for example, is the account of the second place winner which Viewpoint thinks may well have deserved top honors:

At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Economics Professor Hans Hoppe received disciplinary sanctions for making an economically verifiable argument that homosexuals engage less in long-term financial planning than heterosexuals because they typically do not have children. One of Hoppe's students, Michael Knight, filed a complaint leading to a yearlong battle between Hoppe and the University (which Hoppe eventually won). Knight accused Hoppe of "stereotyping homosexuals...When the door closes and the lecture began [sic], he needs to make sure he is remaining as politically correct as possible."

In an interview with Professor Hoppe by the Collegiate Network, Professor Hoppe believes he lost a year of his life to the entire affair. The University's Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity Officer affirmed the complaint by Knight and recommended that Hoppe receive a reprimand and be suspended without pay for one week. A grievance committee made up of one student and Hoppe's faculty peers was held on November 18, 2004. The committee upheld the original grievance and recommended that Hoppe be reprimanded and forfeit any merit pay for the current academic year.

On February 9, 2005, Hoppe received "a non-disciplinary letter of instruction" from Raymond W. Alden, III, the university's Executive Vice President and Provost, affirming the decision of the grievance committee, stating that Hoppe had created "a hostile learning environment" in his classroom, and instructing Hoppe "to cease mischaracterizing opinion as objective fact in the educational environment." However, nine days later, the university's president, Dr. Carol Harter, released a statement in which she acknowledged that professors "are entitled the freedom to teach theories and to espouse opinions that are out of the mainstream or are controversial...."

Nowhere in the statement did Harter apologize to Hoppe for what university officials put him through, nor were any individual university officials singled out for criticism.

We have said it before, but it bears repeating. No one should be permitted to serve in any capacity on a college or university campus, or to graduate from any such institution, without having read, discussed, and digested John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. It is the perfect antidote to the rampant nitwitism and intellectual tyranny that afflicts our institutions of higher learning.

The Wolphin and the Hominids

Scientists have found that an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin has bred with a false killer whale to produce a hybrid referred to as a "wolphin".

Although false killer whales and Atlantic bottlenose dolphins are different species, they are classified within the same family by scientists.

Scientists identify a species in terms of whether members of the two groups can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. If they cannot, like cats and dogs which cannot interbreed, or horses and donkeys which can interbreed but whose offspring (mules) is infertile, they are said to be reproductively isolated and are therefore regarded as separate species.

If this "wolphin" is fertile, however, then either the concept of species loses a lot of its meaning or we must allow that at least some kinds of whales and some kinds of dolphins are really the same species.

A revision of the concept of species would have interesting implications for human evolution. There are numerous fossil hominids which have been placed in disparate species on the basis of morphological differences which may or may not warrant the separation. Morphology, after all, is a precarious criterion for taxonomic distinctions. All the domestic dogs around the world, from Chihuahuas to Great Danes, are members of the same species.

If the various hominids were indeed interfertile then the rationale for placing them in different species disappears. As it is, the only rationale for separating them is that paleontologists assume that they have evolved over time one from the other, and that, being separated by vast amounts of time, they must have been reproductively isolated.

If, however, it were to turn out that they were all members of the same species it would certainly make life difficult for evolutionists. They would then be confronted with a relatively abrupt speciation event in which ape-like hominoids transitioned to Homo sapiens while leaving very little evidence of intermediary forms.

The story of human evolution, like evolution in general, is far from settled.

Sarah Lunde

Another little girl has been raped and murdered by a registered sex offender, a man who has committed sexual assault and rape on previous occasions:

David Lee Onstott, 36, was charged with first-degree murder in Sarah Lunde's death after confessing Saturday, Hillsborough County Sheriff David Gee told reporters. He had once dated her mother and unexpectedly showed up at the family's trailer home after the girl returned from a church trip April 9.

Sarah let Onstott into the house when he came looking for her mother, Kelly May Lunde, in the predawn hours of the next day, Gee said. After getting into a verbal fight with Sarah, he put her into a choke hold and killed her, Gee said.

Onstott had been previously convicted of a rape, but his father, David Onstott Sr., has said his son wouldn't hurt the girl. Investigators found Sarah's partially clothed body in an abandoned fish pond Saturday. Gee said Onstott "went to great effort to keep her body from being discovered."

Sarah's 17-year-old brother came home early April 10 to find the front door wide open and his sister gone. He told detectives that Onstott came by shortly after, and took a half-empty beer bottle before leaving the house in a rural community about 20 miles south of Tampa. Both Sarah's brother and mother initially assumed Sarah had gone to a friend's house. She wasn't reported missing until April 11.

Doris Fontana, the mother of Sarah's best friend, said that Sarah had told her she didn't like Onstott. "We felt it was him all along. He had no business being there. He hadn't been there in months," she said.

Before Gee announced the charges, her relatives and her church "family" turned out in droves to tearfully mourn the loss of the girl who'd found a safe haven at First Apostolic Church. Sarah almost never missed Sunday morning services at her beloved church.

Among the mourners were Mark Lunsford, whose daughter Jessica was found dead last month after she was kidnapped from their Citrus County home, and Roy Brown, whose daughter Amanda was murdered in 1997 by convicted child molester Willie Crain.

"People asked me why did she come here, why did she spend her time here," said Matt Fontana, the youth minister at the church. "Because she found love here...Now she's in heaven."

Sherry Cook, who with her husband founded the rural church more than two decades ago, said Sarah rarely missed church services. The girl's life seemed to revolve around the church's youth group, and she had spent her last day at a church function.

Sarah had started coming to the church three years ago on her own. No other members of her family attended with her, church leaders said. So determined was she to make it to church that Sarah would often call two or three families to arrange for a ride; they'd all show up to get her.

Fontana said other members of Sarah's youth group were taking the news of her death hard. "I'm trying to stay composed so they stay composed," he said. "They think only bad things happen to bad people."

Standing at the church's altar and surveying the crowd that included about 20 of Sarah's relatives, Fontana told the mourners that more than anything Sarah had wanted to bring her friends and family to the church she so loved. "It's ironic that not until she goes to be with the Lord that she got her wish," Fontana told the congregation.

If our courts won't put these predators in prison and keep them there the next best thing is for people to know who they are. FoxNews has posted a link to the Megan's Law site that lists all registered sex offenders in the nation. You can search the database by zip code or county. It might surprise you what you'll find.

A search turned up seven offenders living in my zip code and over 250 in my county. If you click on the person's name you'll be given some information about them, including a photo. If you have young children you might wish to see if any of these gentlemen (and a few ladies) are living in your neighborhood.

Not all molestors are repeat offenders, I suppose, but virtually everyone who kills is. Many of them testify to the fact that just as an alcoholic is never cured of his alcoholism, neither are sex offenders, especially those who target children, ever cured of their "addiction". If they're going to be allowed to live among us it's worth knowing who they are.

Just Do It

Bob Novak reports that the Republicans have enough votes in the senate to shut down the Democrats' practice of filibustering conservative judicial nominees:

WASHINGTON -- Republican leaders count only two or three GOP senators who will vote against the efforts to end, by a straight majority vote, filibusters on confirmation of judicial nominations.

Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island will not support this move, and they are likely to be joined by Sen. John McCain of Arizona. That would mean 52 senators would go along with the parliamentary maneuver attempting to end filibusters on judges. Only 50 are needed.

The only Democrat who might possibly join this effort is Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska. But Bush will not press him to break party discipline if his help is unnecessary.

The GOP plans to change the rule in the senate that the Democrats had exploited since 2000 to launch "virtual" filibusters of the president's judicial appointments. The rule actually only applies to legislative bills, but the Democrats extended it to include judicial nominations, which meant that, once a filibuster was declared, sixty senators had to vote for cloture in order to get a floor vote on the nominee. Since the Democrats hold 45 seats it was almost impossible to get the sixty votes necessary to end the filibuster. Thus, by employing this tactic on Bush's judicial nominees the Democrats essentially arrogated to themselves the ability to decide the ideological complexion of all future judges.

McCain's reason for not supporting the rule change, which the Republicans have every right to enact, is that he fears that someday the Republicans will be in the minority and need the filibuster to block excessively liberal Democratic nominees.

The surest way to realize the senator's fear of impending minoritydom, however, is to fail to act like a majority party. If the GOP isn't going to act like they belong in the senate they can't expect the voters to be enthusiastic about keeping them there. The purpose of being in the majority is to use the power it grants to make our nation stronger and more just. Yielding to the will of senate lefties on a matter as important as who sits on the Supreme Court and the federal bench is precisely the wrong way to accomplish those goals.

We urge the Republicans to act like the majority party and to do what it takes to get the president's nominees approved. If the roles were reversed there can be no doubt that the Democrats would use every watt of their political power to appoint judges who possess the proper ideological predilections. The Republicans have the constitutional authority to change the rule and they have a duty to future generations to do so. Just do it.

Andrea Dworkin, 1946-2005

Andrea Dworkin passed away on April 9th after an unspecified illness, according to this summary of the driving passion of her life, rescuing women from the depredations of men and the bondage of marriage:

On April 9 the National Organization for Women (NOW) paid tribute to its longtime member, the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who had died earlier that day at the age of 58. Dworkin authored the 1974 book Woman Hating, a polemic whose objective, she explained, was "to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family, [and] in its most hideous form, the national state." The New York Times quoted her saying the following: "One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man"; "Marriage . . . is a legal license to rape"; "The hurting of women is . . . basic to the sexual pleasure of men."

Possibly she is now in a place where she is free from masculine oppression and safe from the dreaded effects of testosterone. Perhaps she is at peace.

A more sympathetic obituary of Dworkin can be found here.

Captured by the Bamboozle

Our Daily Philosophical Quotation service recently forwarded this one from The Fine Art of Baloney Detection by astronomer Carl Sagan:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge - even to ourselves - that we've been so credulous.

If anyone is qualified to speak on bamboozling an audience it is the author of the astonishingly hubristic claim that "the universe is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be." Why Sagan ever thought that a scientist, speaking as a scientist, should make such a blatantly unscientific assertion he never to our knowledge said. His insistence that reality consists, and has always consisted, solely of matter and energy has the ring of a religious affirmation to it, and it is fair to suppose that Sagan believed it, not on the basis of evidence, but because he wanted it to be true. He was a metaphysical naturalist, an outspoken atheist, who promoted his worldview with unrestrained gusto and who reveled in his vision of a world purged of the supernatural.

He's right, though, that people reach a point in their lives when they're captured by the bamboozle. We each acquire so much psychological inertia in our believings, we invest so heavily of ourselves in our convictions, that we ultimately reach a point of no return after which it is nearly impossible for us to change our minds. We become so enamored of an idea, so comfortable with it, that we don't want it not to be true. Indeed, we sometimes cannot conceive of it not being true. At this stage we have probably already passed the point where it became too painful to acknowledge that we've been taken in.

In the passage quoted above, Sagan probably has in mind, inter alia, religious believers, but one wonders if he could not as easily be talking about himself. Was Carl Sagan himself beguiled, captured, by a naturalistic account of reality that is inherently fraudulent? As an astronomer, he of all people should have been aware of the burgeoning body of evidence being compiled by his colleagues which indicated that the universe is almost unbelievably fine-tuned. He must have known that many scientists in his field were remarking with awe upon the numerous signs of intentionality and foresight that filled the cosmos. There are, it turns out, literally hundreds of facts about the universe discovered in the last several decades which, had they been otherwise than they are by nearly infinitesimally small amounts, the universe either would not have existed at all or it would have been utterly unsuited for living things.

Of course, astonishing precision and enormously high improbabilities are not conclusive proofs that naturalism is a mistake, but it certainly must count as evidence that should provoke doubt in the mind of an honest skeptic. Those who doubt, however, don't make the sort of claim quoted above, a claim which requires a level of dogmatic certainty found only in the staunchest of true believers. Sagan didn't seem to have any doubts whatsoever that man is a purely material being in a purely material universe which is ontologically solitary and unique. If he did have doubts, they were evidently too painful for him to acknowledge. It probably would have dismayed him beyond endurance to think that he might have been so incredibly credulous.

Carl Sagan died in 1996 at the age of 62. The irony is that if he was wrong, perhaps he's now realized it. If he was right, though, he'll never have had the satisfaction of knowing it.

The Center For Naturalism, Pt. II

On April 10th we posted commentary on claims the Center For Naturalism (CFN) present on their web site where they seek to clarify and promote the fundamental tenets of naturalism and to tease out their implications for modern man.

CFN embraces a deterministic view of human volition, a view that all of our behavior is caused by our strongest motives, and that free will is an illusion. They state, for instance, that:

Since on a naturalistic understanding, persons are not self-made, but owe their successes and failures to the conditions into which they were born and developed, major social and economic inequalities cannot be justified on the basis that individuals strongly deserve their status.

Nor, however, can these inequalities be condemned. On the naturalist view, they are neither right nor wrong. They just are. Social inequalities, like everything else, are simply the product of the conditions in which society has emerged.

But if it is true that all our choices are determined, if indeed all of our successes and failures are the result of factors over which we have no real control, why does CFN assert the following:

Because naturalism shows our deep connection to the world, lessening ego-driven acquisitiveness and self-preoccupation, it prompts concern for others and for those who will succeed us on the planet.

Naturalists like those at (CFN) assume that everyone will agree with them that acquisitiveness and self-preoccupation are bad, and that concern for others is good. Yet why, if naturalism is true, should anyone assign value to these things at all? Concern for others, especially those who haven't been born yet, is neither good nor bad. In a Godless universe it's simply a personal preference, an expression of one's taste. CFN suggests that there is some sort of moral meaning in their claim that naturalism prompts concern for others, but in a world without God there is no moral meaning. There's no morality at all. Neither good nor evil have any existence.

They also write that:

Seeing our deep connection to nature in every respect can supply the basis for a mature, fulfilling, and cognitively consistent quest for personal growth and meaning.

The problem here is that if death is the end of all personal existence there really can be no ultimate meaning in our lives. On the assumption of atheism, meaning is at best ephemeral and at worst illusory. Everything man does is doomed to perish, all that he seeks to build are just so many sand castles at the edge of the surf, fated to be washed away at the next tide. We're born, we suffer, and we're annihilated. It's all pointless. There's no more meaning in our individual lives than there is in the life of a solitary fly, nor can there be unless physical death is not really the end of our existence.

Naturalism as a guiding philosophy can help create a better world by illuminating more precisely the conditions under which individuals and societies flourish.

Naturalism does not have the sort of record that engenders confidence in its claims to possess the key to human flourishing. Almost all of what is great in Western culture - its music, art, and much of its literature; its charitable and educational institutions; its hospitals and orphanages; its democratic forms of government; its concern for the oppressed and for human rights; even the work of its seminal scientists, was inspired directly or indirectly by Christian theism.

What cultural achievements, on the other hand, have been specifically contributed by atheistic men and women inspired by their naturalistic worldview? What cultural achievements can atheism point to as unambiguous contributions to "human flourishing"? Totalitarian communism? Darwinian survival of the fittest? Post-modern nihilism? The drug culture of the sixties? Gangster rap and punk rock? The art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano?

The unfortunate fact is that naturalism, so far from assisting human flourishing, actually stifles it. Its fruits are the Gulag, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Tiananmen Square, and the Holocaust. What's more, such fruits are inevitable when man is reduced to a mere flesh and bone machine with no soul nor anything about him that participates in the divine. The naturalist worldview affords meager support for the concept of human dignity and thus no solid basis for human rights. Rights, without transcendent sanction, are arbitrary and transient. They do not inhere in persons, they are mere words on paper which endure only so long as it pleases those who have the power to rescind them.

To paraphrase George Orwell, if you wish to picture the future in a world in thrall to naturalistic materialism imagine a boot smashing a human face, forever.