Justice for Hasan Akbar

Here's an update on the case of Hasan Akbar, the soldier who in the early days of OIF killed two of his fellow soldiers and wounded fourteen in Kuwait:

FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) - An Army sergeant was convicted Thursday by a military jury of premeditated murder and attempted murder in a grenade and rifle attack that killed two of his comrades and wounded 14 others in Kuwait during the opening days of the Iraq war.

Hasan Akbar, 34, now faces a possible death penalty, which the same 15-member jury will consider at a hearing that begins Monday.

Prosecutors say Akbar told investigators he launched the attack because he was concerned U.S. troops would kill fellow Muslims in Iraq. They said he coolly carried out the attack to achieve "maximum carnage" on his comrades in the 101st Airborne Division.

The verdict came after only 2 1/2 hours of deliberations following seven days of testimony in the court-martial - the first time since the Vietnam era that an American has been prosecuted on charges of murdering a fellow soldier during wartime.

There's more on the story at the link.

Liberal Legerdemain

It's always fun to watch the liberal media in action in much the same way that it's fun to watch a card cheat pull off his amazing sleight of hand in the service of his skulduggery.

PowerLine has a fine analysis by Dafydd ab Hugh of the recent ABC report of Henry Hyde's comments about the Clinton impeachment in which Hyde is charged in the headline with saying something he clearly doesn't say. The headline reads (or did read, since it has since been modified) that Clinton impeachment was retaliation for Nixon, says retiring congressman.

Here's Dafydd's commentary on what Hyde actually said:

A transcript of a video report that appeared on an ABC affiliate makes a rather startling claim. Upon careful parsing, however, there appears to be an awful lot of gravy for so little pot roast. Here is the screaming headline:

Clinton impeachment was retaliation for Nixon, says retiring congressman by Andy Shaw.

By the time we get [to the story], an element of doubt has begun to creep in:

Republican Congressman Henry Hyde made some surprising comments Thursday on the impeachment hearings of President Bill Clinton. He now says Republicans may have gone after Clinton to retaliate for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.

Note how "was retaliation" has transubstantiated into "may have" been retaliation. Doubt and certainty are locked in an epic battle for all time (like the two guys in the Star Trek episode). But reading a bit further, doubt starts to get the upper hand:

The veteran DuPage County congressman acknowledged that Republicans went after Clinton in part to enact revenge against the Democrats for impeaching President Richard Nixon 25 years earlier.

In part? How much part? One part principle to three parts revenge? Or one part revenge to four parts sloe gin? And at last, if we persevere long enough, we finally come to the actual words that Hammerin' Hank Hyde actually used to Mr. Shaw:

Andy Shaw asked Hyde if the Clinton proceedings were payback for Nixon's impeachment.

"I can't say it wasn't, but I also thought that the Republican party should stand for something, and if we walked away from this, no matter how difficult, we could be accused of shirking our duty, our responsibility," said Hyde.

Well! It's certainly hard to imagine a stronger indictment of Republican perfidy than that! The sudden upthrust of principle after all renders utterly absurd the next paragraph... which makes it quite plain that Mr. Shaw began with his conclusion and worked backwards to his evidence, then forgot to work forward again and bring his snarky commentary into line with the best quote he could get out of old Henry:

Hyde's comments reflect what Democrats have been saying for years about the Clinton impeachment. It will be interesting to see what happens when Hyde's comments hit the national media.

Yes siree... for years and years Democrats have insisted, against an army of naysayers, that the Republican Party should stand for something and shouldn't walk away from its responsibility to impeach Bill Clinton. By golly, I think the Dems deserve a round of applause and perhaps a lump of sugar for finally proving their case!

No sermon would be complete without its homily; no symphony would seem finished without a grace note. Shaw understands the requirements of his chosen profession, so he finishes out with the following:

Hyde's style will be missed in Washington, as well as his sense of civility, even though a lot of people will not miss his rigid ideology.

PowerLine adds this observation:

Somehow I have a feeling the "rigid ideology" at work here is Andy Shaw's. Turns out he was the one that introduced the concept of "payback" for Nixon's impeachment--a mere 25 years earlier--and Hyde responded politely, while making the point that the impeachment issue was one of principle. What a scoop!

As we mentioned above, the media lefties are a real caution. They never let the facts get in the way of their prejudices nor of a good column. Having discovered that which eluded the alchemists of old, they have the uncanny ability to transmute the base metal of "I can't say that it wasn't" into the precious journalistic gold of a scandalous admission. These media David Copperfields can make juicy stories appear right out of thin air. Their skillful prestidigitation is enough to take one's breath away. You can't help but admire it.

CFN Offers Lousy Trade (Pt. III)

This is the third in our series of posts on the Center For Naturalism's (CFN) statement of beliefs as found on their web site. The previous two posts can be read here and here.

CFN makes a number of assertions which seem problematic. Let's begin with this one:

[B]ecause it discounts the existence of the soul and survival after death, naturalism increases the value we place on this, our only life, and the world we inhabit now. Such values support an environmental ethic of wise use, sustainability, and population control that will keep the earth habitable for future generations of all creatures.

The problem with this is that the metaphysical view called naturalism renders all values arbitrary. The naturalist, who believes that this life is all there is, can offer no reason why one shouldn't be a nihilist and reject all values. Nor can they offer a reason why one shouldn't embrace egoism and place one's own selfish interests and pleasures above all else. Why would either be wrong? Why not try to get as much from the earth while we can and let future generations fend for themselves? What is it about naturalism that impels us to care about our descendents? If death is final, there is no reason whatsoever why anyone should care what happens to the world after one's own demise. The only way a naturalist could gainsay this would be by referring to some objective standard of morality, but such standards do not exist if naturalism is true.

CFN also states that:

Because naturalism doubts the existence of ultimate purposes either inherent in nature or imposed by a creator, values derive from human desires and preferences, not discoverable absolutes. To the extent that there is a shared human nature, values are common across cultures, but to the extent cultures differ, so will values. There is no finally correct way to behave, nor are there finally justifiable goals, but only the desires and intentions that currently constitute us, all of which may change as human nature and cultures change. Although values do not have a foundation outside ourselves, we cannot escape having them, since they constitute us as motivated creatures.

We can't help having values just like we can't help having preferences in flavors or colors or music, but it doesn't follow that these preferences are in any way morally significant or binding on ourselves or others. All values in a naturalistic world are ultimately arbitrary and subjective. There is no right or wrong, there are only differences in how people feel about certain behaviors. CFN acknowledges here that naturalism is incompatible with any non-arbitrary morality. It, in fact, offers no basis for any morality whatsoever.

They go on to claim that:

A naturalistic understanding of the causes of criminality helps undercut retributive attitudes favoring the death penalty and punitive prison conditions, while building support for alternative sentencing and policies that address the conditions which generate crime and recidivism. Realizing that but for the luck of circumstances, any of us could be standing in the criminal's shoes, generates compassion for offenders as well as for victims.

However, consideration of the criminal's crime often generates deep contempt and a desire for retribution. Why is the feeling of compassion to be preferred to the feeling of contempt or hatred? Why does CFN arbitrarily favor mercy over retribution? In a naturalistic world there is no basis for choosing between them. If one man prefers compassion and another prefers retribution, neither is right and neither is wrong. For CFN to assume that one is good and the other evil is totally unwarranted on the basis of CFN's assumptions about the world. The folks at CFN are here simply revealing that they would like to turn their subjective preferences into universal social policy.

CFN tries hard to mask the unremitting bleakness of a naturalistic worldview by wrapping it in pretty paper, but the attempt is doomed to fail as soon as one starts to examine the package closely. Naturalism will never be able to supplant Christianity because Christianity is the source of all that makes life meaningful, beautiful, and endurable (See here).

Naturalism would take this source away and offer nothing in its place except a barren and sterile nihilism. Some trade.

Modern Barbarians

The religion of peace recently held a conclave in Tehran. Here's part of the report of the proceedings:

More than 400 men, women, and children gathered at a meeting in Tehran on Wednesday to pledge their commitment to carry out suicide bomb attacks against both Israelis and Americans in Iraq. "Some 440 volunteers, most of them women, signed up today," said Mohammad Ali Samadi, spokesperson for the Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement.

Ah, yes. The word woman in fundamentalist Islam is evidently just another word for having nothing left to lose. Where are the macho Iranian men? Aren't they eager to give their all for Allah? How many Iranian mullahs, we wonder, are prepared and eager to make the same sacrifice they are enjoining upon their women and children? The mullahs' message to the faithful is let's you and him fight.

The ceremony... included the showcase of video footage depicting Israeli soldiers being killed in suicide attacks....

It is apparently totally appropriate in Islam to encourage children to watch such gruesome images and to urge them on to murders of their own. In this country that would be child abuse. Of course, it should be considered child abuse in Iran as well, except that they're so blinded by their religious fanaticism and hatred that all they care about, their only goal in life, is to kill people who don't share their religion. We would do well to keep in mind that these people are striving mightily to build the ultimate suicide bomb.

Each of the group's 400-plus new recruits -- some of whom donned headbands with the inscription 'there is no God but Allah' -- were confronted with a difficult choice: to train for suicide attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq; to train for suicide attacks against Israelis; or to assassinate British author Salman Rushdie, the author forced into hiding after the late Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Muslims to kill him.

One wonders which of those options was most attractive to the attendees. Our hearts and prayers go out to Mr. Rushdie who once asked, "What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." For his freedom of expression Rushdie has spent the last fifteen years, and may spend the rest of his life, hiding from those who think the best way to deal with distasteful opinions is to kill the person who voices them.

Once more now with conviction, repeat after me: All cultures are equally "valid". No cultural narrative is superior to any other. All cultural norms are relative.

Mysterious Corpses

The media have provided only sketchy explanations of the mysterious discovery of dozens of bodies found floating recently in the Tigris river in Iraq.

California Yankee tries to make sense of the reports and in the process tells us a couple of things we didn't know:

First there were reports that as many as 200 people were being held hostage in the mixed Sunni-Shia village of Madain. Iraqi government security forces backed by US troops arrived in strength on Monday. They encountered no resistance and found no trace of hostages or hostage-takers. There followed articles that the hostage reports may have been exaggerated.

Yesterday there were reports that 50 bodies had been pulled from the river. This of course was thought to confirm the original hostage story. The BBC reports that the story is even more complicated. The 50 plus bodies didn't show up all at once:

They said they had started to appear in the al-Suwayra stretch of the Tigris nearly two months earlier, on 27 February. On the first three days, 27 bodies were retrieved, while during and after the supposed hostage crisis only six corpses were pulled from the river. But in the 26 days between 26 March and 20 April, there was a steady flow of cadavers. A total of 33 were retrieved during that period, an average of just over one a day.

The police statistics said that of 60 bodies 56 were men, two women and two children. Fifty-three had died of gunshot wounds, five had their throats cut and two were beheaded. Only seven of the corpses were identified by relatives. So the identity of the bulk of the victims is still not clear. It's not known whether the victims are all Shia Muslims, abducted and murdered by Sunni militants. The killing may not have been one-sided. We may never know.

It sounds as though these unfortunates may have been victims of a war that's being waged within the war. They may well be victims of clan and tribal retributions for offenses which perhaps have little or nothing to do with the larger struggle in Iraq.

From John Hathaway

Ya gotta luv this guy...

From the link.

It is against such a backdrop that the euro price of gold should surpass the trading range of the past two years. A breakout in euros will serve notice to the market that gold is not a subset of the weak dollar play. Once it has crossed this threshold, gold will begin to attract capital from assets parked in all currencies and asset classes including commodities and high yield credits, the two most recent investment bubbles. The bull market in gold, which commenced in August of 1999, will shed its stealth mode. Its pace will quicken and become difficult to ignore. We stand at the end of the beginning of the first leg in a multi year bull market in the metal. The significant accumulation that has occurred during the past five years will not yield easily to the sharply higher prices that lie ahead, because those price gains will be spurred by financial market developments that make gold's appeal quite obvious, even to its detractors.

Kudos to John Ruiz Dempsey

It's about time somebody takes a stand against a system designed to impoverish and enslave the citizens of a country. Obviously someone is sick and tired and isn't going to take it anymore.

Visit this link for details.

Stifling Intellectual Inquiry

Richard Neuhaus has an excellent little essay on the Intelligent Design/ Darwinism debate in the April issue of First Things. Here are a couple of paragraphs of an article that should be read in its entirety:

That evolution is a theory is a fact, unless somebody has changed the definition of theory without notifying the makers of dictionaries. The "search for knowledge" and "the pursuit of science," one might suggest, will suffer grievously if we no longer respect the distinction between theory and fact.

To argue that skepticism about the theory of evolution is inadmissible if it is motivated by religion is simply a form of antireligious bigotry. It is a fact that many devout Christians, many of whom are engaged in the relevant sciences, subscribe to the theory of evolution. It is also a fact that some scientists who reject religion also reject evolution, or think the theory highly dubious. That is the way it is with theories.

To simply equate evolutionary theory with science is a form of dogmatism that has no place in the pursuit of truth. The problems with that approach are multiplied by the fact that there are such starkly conflicting versions of what is meant by evolution. The resistance to the theory is almost inevitable when it is propounded, as it often is, in an atheistic and materialistic form.

Atheism and materialism are not science but ideologies that most people of all times and places, not just "red state" Americans, deem to be false. Proponents of "intelligent design" and other approaches, who are frequently well-certified scientists, contend that their theories possess greater explanatory power.

Some school boards have very modestly suggested that students should know that evolution is not the only theory about the origin and development of life. What they want students to know is an indisputable fact. There are other theories supported by very reputable scientists, including theories of evolution other than the established version to which students are now bullied into giving their assent.

On any question, the rational and scientific course is to take into account all pertinent evidence and explanatory proposals. We can know that the quasi-religious establishment of a narrow evolutionary theory as dogma is in deep trouble when its defenders demand that alternative ideas must not be discussed or even mentioned in the classroom. Students, school boards, and thoughtful citizens are in fully justified rebellion against this attempted stifling of intellectual inquiry.

On the matter of taking into account all pertinent evidence and explanatory proposals one often hears the objection that if we are going to be fair in introducing alternative explanations into the classroom we will have to give time to a menagerie of ideas from pantheistic to animistic creation stories and everything in between. This is, of course, a transparently disingenuous attempt to justify continuing the monopoly enjoyed by the materialistic explanation.

The fact is there are not an indefinite number of alternative explanations which would have to be accommodated. There are precisely two genuine options in this debate. Life either arose by purely mindless, mechanistic processes, or it's appearance involved some degree of intelligent input. These two disjuncts exhaust all the possibilities. Nothing else need be discussed.

Nor is it correct to assert that one of these alternatives is a scientific hypothesis and the other is religious. They are both metaphysical explanations. Neither of them is ultimately provable or disprovable by any empirical test. If one is to be excluded they should both be excluded, if one is to be presented in public school classrooms they should both be presented in public school classrooms. There is no reason why the materialist theory should be privileged over it's competitor.

This is all that most people who are trying to get Intelligent Design acknowledged in high school biology classes are asking. They wish to see students genuinely challenged to think through the two contrasting theories and be allowed to decide for themselves which one best accounts for the evidence. Do living things show indications of having been intentionally designed or do they instead appear to have resulted from mindless, purposeless physical laws plus serendipity?

The guardians of the entrenched materialist orthodoxy know very well which possibility will have the greatest intellectual and philosophical allure for students, and that's precisely why they are so determined to prevent the comparison.

Recognizing Stroke

A friend passed this along and I thought it was worth sharing with our readers:

Susie is recuperating at an incredible pace for someone with a massive stroke all because Sherry saw Susie stumble which prompted her to ask Susie to perform the critical three tasks listed below.

This literally saved Susie's life. Suzie was unable to do any of the three so Sherry called 911. Even though Suzie had normal blood pressure readings and did not appear outwardly to be having a stroke, as she could converse to some extent with the Paramedics, they took her to the hospital right away.

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms. Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking the person to perform three simple tasks:

1. Ask the individual to SMILE.

2. Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.

3. Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE.

If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, call 911 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

After discovering that a group of non-medical volunteers could identify facial weakness, arm weakness and speech problems, researchers urged the general public to learn the three tasks.

They presented their conclusions at the American Stroke Association's annual meeting last February. Widespread use of this test could result in prompt diagnosis and treatment of the stroke and prevent brain damage.

The chances are good that someone we know, or we ourselves, will someday suffer a stroke. Recognizing the symptoms could make all the difference in the extent to which the victim recovers.

Yet Another Travesty

The consumer price index for last month was .6%. The CPI is a measure of inflation of the U.S. dollar. In other words, it means that on an annualized basis, we are losing 7.2% purchasing power of every dollar we earn.

I could rant with megabytes of tirade about this but in order to save bandwidth I have opted for a quote from one who articulated this travesty more succinctly than I ever could...

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does no exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'

Ayn Rand

And who will declare our account overdrawn? The rest of the world who has been accepting U.S. dollars that we print at our leisure in exchange for their goods and services.

Ok, so at this rate a dollar next year is going to buy 7.2% less goods and services than it would today or, to look at it another way, it will cost $1.08 to purchase the same goods and services next year as a dollar would buy today. And that's if the rate of inflation doesn't rise further! What is one to do? As Ayn Rand said above, the destroyers seize gold...and so should you. I've posted this link before to Dr. Alan Greenspan's now infamous dissertation and it seems more relevant today than ever.

Govern yourselves accordingly.

The Relativization of Truth

David Klinghoffer, writing at NRO, laments that no Jewish leader is articulating the pernicious evils of relativism like Joseph Ratzinger did in his homily the other day prior to being elected pope:

On Monday, as the cardinals were about to enter upon the awesome task of choosing a new pope, Ratzinger delivered a sermon that sounded a striking call to resist relativism and secularism....Ratzinger powerfully insists that there is...truth and that his church is in possession of it.

His words, which will become famous, are worth contemplating: "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 toward 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."

It's one of the melancholy facts about Jewish life in modern America that the closest thing we have to a leading moral authority, representing us as Jews to the world, is not a rabbi or any spiritual exemplar. Rather, ... it is most likely to be someone from one of the anti-defamation organizations, most likely Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League.

As Foxman himself has said, "It is pure arrogance for any one religion to assume that they hold 'the truth.'" Presumably this would apply to Judaism too.

Alas, the ADL's viewpoint is all too commonly encountered in our community, as I have been reminded from the very recent personal experience of publishing a book that argues for the truth of Judaism. Although my book, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, a history of the Jewish-Christian debate about Jesus, can be seen as a critique of Christianity, I've found that in speaking to mixed groups of Jews and Christians, it is often the Jews who take umbrage at being told their religion is true while the Christians genially accept that is entirely appropriate for a Jew to argue in this way.

What's going on? Only that Christians, including traditional Catholics like Joseph Ratzinger, perhaps more than many Jews today, appreciate the deepest assumption that our two religions share: the assumption that there is a truth out there, a singular truth, to be found and embraced.

The belief that there "is a truth out there" is a decidedly un-postmodern notion. In the po-mo world truth has been relativized to one's cultural and social circumstances so that what is true for people in one cultural setting is not necessarily true for people in another. Perhaps the greatest danger of this is that if it applies to cultures it also applies to individuals. In other words, once we abandon the idea of "truth out there", i.e. objective truth, truth becomes intimately personal. It becomes a matter of whatever is true for me, whatever has purchase on my commitments.

When truth, particularly moral truth, has been subjectivized no one's truth is any better than anyone else's because there is no longer a standard to which we can compare them. When no one's moral truth is better than any one else's everyone's morality is equally "valid". At that point we have moral paralysis. All moral disputes reduce to matters of personal taste or preference. Nobody's wrong if everybody's right. If that is so, however, then none of us can say that the holocaust was evil, or that rape, or child molestation, or chattel slavery are evil. The most we can say about those horrors is that we don't like them.

When morality is subjectivized there is no reason why we should care about society, or virtue, or the well-being of others. There is no reason why we shouldn't adopt a thoroughgoing egoism, an ethic of putting our own interests first all the time. And if egoism is a legitimate way to live one's life then so too is the philosophy of might makes right. If I can impose my will on another to achieve my interests there is no moral reason why I should not do so even if my doing so brings harm to the other person.

In other words, the relativization of truth leads to a moral hell, a war of every man against every man, a world where we can trust others only to do what's in their own interests. That's the world we'll create if secularism ever prevails completely in this country. Indeed, it's the world we find today in much of our social experience. Pope Benedict XVI obviously sees this. It's a shame that more religious leaders in more Christian and Jewish churches and synagogues don't.

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.