Political Philosophy For Autodidacts

For anyone interested in pursuing an education at home in political philosophy Dr. Greg Forster offers a wonderful annotated reading list of the most important works in the field. Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost hosts Dr. Forster's piece. Don't overlook the comments from readers at the end.

Great News From Afghanistan

Afghanistan has come an astonishing distance since the spring of 2002. We don't hear about this part of George Bush's historic humanitarian mission on the evening news, of course, unless there's a setback to report, but the story that we're not told is truly a testament to the goodness of the American people, this administration, and the resilience of the Afghan people.

There are other nations chipping in to do good works, of course, but none of their efforts would have materialized, or even been possible, were it not for the work of the Bush administration and the efforts and sacrifice of the American military. The only historical analogy we can think of to what we've undertaken in Afghanistan and Iraq is the Marshall Plan in Europe after WWII. No other nation in history has a record like that compiled by the United States since 1945.

You can read about it here.

The Left's Selective Reverence

Viewpoint has stated that although we believe the media outrage over shabby treatment of the Koran in our detention camps amounts to unwarranted hysterics, nevertheless, our troops should show the Koran respect, not so much for the book itself, which many scholars have determined is probably a plagiarized Old Testament, but out of respect for people around the world who revere it.

Even so, we have to wonder why liberals are so beside themselves over this issue. As a caller to the Glenn Beck program pointed out this morning, when Andres Serrano placed a crucifix in a jar of urine and incensed many Christians, the Left yawned and called it art. When another "artist" defiled a picture of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung Christians who complained were called narrow-minded xenophobes.

Now we read of several dubious cases where there may have been irreverent treatment of a Koran and the Left is thrown into high dudgeon. Why is this? The Left, being predominately skeptics and atheists, don't give a fig about the Bible much less the Koran. Nor do they care about the sensibilities of religious believers whom they largely regard as rubes and dolts. At least they don't care about the sensibilities of Christians, why should they care about those of Muslims?

The only reason for their loud ululations over the fact that a Koran may have been "defiled" is that these allegations present themselves as a club with which to beat the administration over the head. They are so bereft of weapons with which to fight their ideological campaign against Bush and Co. that they'll grasp at anything that offers itself, no matter how flimsy the tool and no matter how cynical, hypocritical, and dishonest using it makes them look. And they think we should vote for them to run the country.

T-Shirts

A friend passes along the "Best T-shirts of the summer":

So Many Men, So Few Who Can Afford Me

I Fought the Lawn and the Lawn Won

I Suffer Occasional Delusions of Adequacy

God Made Us Sisters, Prozac Made Us Friends

If They Don't Have Chocolate In Heaven, I Ain't Going

At My Age, I've Seen It All, Done It All, Heard It All. I Just Can't Remember It All

My Mother Is A Travel Agent For Guilt Trips

I Just Do What The Voices Inside My Head Tell Me To Do

If It's Called Tourist Season, Why Can't We Hunt 'em?

Princess, Having Had Sufficient Experience With Princes, Seeks Frog

No, It Doesn't Hurt (on a "well-tattooed gentleman")

(on the back of a passing motorcyclist) If You Can Read This, My Wife Fell Off

I Used To Be Schizophrenic, But We're OK Now

Veni, Vedi, Visa: I came. I Saw. I Did a Little Shopping

What If The Hokey Pokey Really Is What It's All About?

I Didn't Climb to the Top of the Food Chain to Be a Vegetarian

Top Ten Most Harmful Books

Human Events has surveyed a number of Conservative intellectuals and asked for their nominations for the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. This is the result.

I can't say that I agree with all of the selections, and indeed I haven't read all of them myself, but I have to object to the inclusion among the honorable mentions of two of my very favorite works. The first is John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. I'm surprised that Conservatives, who often have a libertarian streak in them, would find it offensive. The second is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring which probably did more to galvanize action to save from extinction species like the Peregrine Falcon, Osprey, Brown Pelican, and Bald Eagle than any other single piece of writing in the last fifty years.

Most of the rest of the selections with which I'm familiar, however, do indeed belong in this rogue's gallery, with the possible exception of Origin of Species which is for the most part unexceptional in its evolutionary claims. In Origin, Darwin pretty much limited himself to evidence for micro-evolutionary change which even most anti-Darwinians do not dispute. The harm done by Darwinism is, in my opinion, more a consequence of the subsequent development of the theory, especially its metaphysical aspects, than of what is put forth in Origin.

The only other change I might make is to put Nietzsche's works at the very top of the list.

North American Bureau of Al-Jazeera

The headline reads: Gitmo Koran Was Splashed With Urine.

That'll get the Muslims worked up into a frenzy, which is apparently what the media hope for. Why else run the headline or the story which follows?

The facts of the story reveal how absolutely ridiculous and trite both of them are.

It turns out that a guard went outside to relieve himself and urinated too close to an air vent. The air drew the urine into a shaft and sprayed a few drops of mist onto a prisoner and his Koran. There was no evidence of any intent on the part of the guard.

The MSM is so desperate to get something, anything, to vindicate Newsweek's egregious "flushing down the toilet" fiction, that they'll sink to any level to fabricate the sense that real abuse is widespread in our prisons. Maybe we should just start referring to the MSM as the North American Bureau of Al-Jazeera.

God's Politics

Democracy Project has a thorough and fairly ascerbic critique of Jim Wallis' book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. The review is too lengthy to reproduce in its entirety here, but it should be read by anyone who thinks that Jim Wallis is really seeking a "third way" in American politics. According to DP Wallis' position is that the Left is almost completely right except on abortion, and the Right is almost completely immoral and unChristian. In other words, Wallis' third way is for everyone to become Left-wing Democrats save with respect to abortion, but his prescriptions for actually ending abortion are apparently obscure:

So what does he want Democrats to do to make abortion rare? Moderate and moderate some more. Does that mean a ban on partial birth abortion? Wallis is silent. Parental notification? Silence again. A 24-hour waiting period. Silence. A ban on federal funding of abortions? Silence. Overturning Roe v Wade. Deafening silence. Returning the issue to political debate and the state legislatures? Total silence. Detailed information on the potential physical, emotional, and spiritual harm caused by abortion. Mum's the word. Stringent limitations on health of the mother exceptions. Not a word.

DP hammers away at Wallis' fondness for driving in the far left lane of the ideological highway, a proclivity apparent in the tendentious wording of much of what he writes. For example:

Jim Wallis is forever setting up straw men and offering false choices. "Oh really," I kept muttering to myself as I came across this or that line. "We are all diminished when our social life is reduced to the survival of the fittest" (as if that is the world according to those on the right). Or the Democrats need to, there he goes again, "moderate" their position on abortion "without criminalizing an agonizing and desperate choice" (as if jailing women is at the top of the pro-life wish list). Or the GOP is "wrong" to see religious issues "solely" in terms of "individual moral choices and sexual ethics" (solely?). Or the Christian Right is led by "theocrats," such as those ever-ready (and increasingly irrelevant) bogeymen, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and theocrats have a "fatal attraction" for violent solutions. (In truth, Falwell is as close to being a theocrat as, well, as Jim Wallis.)

Or, it is wrong to resort to "purely military solutions" (purely?). Or it is "mean-spirited to blame gay people for the breakdown of the family" (as if those who oppose gay marriage are unaware or otherwise unwilling to call attention to the myriad reasons for the collapse of the family).

Or, with Iraq occupied the Bush administration "now intends to control the rest of the world too" (must be that those neocons have been listening to the theocrats on the subject of violence -- or is it the other way around). In any case, such immoderate statements made in the name of moderation are more than moderately astounding.

Or, those who believe that "there is nothing we can do about poverty" are those who take comfort from Christ's reminder to his disciples that the "poor you will always have with you." Nothing?? Really?

There is much, much more to this review at the link and those likely to read Wallis' book or who are themselves interested in the mesh of politics and Christian faith would do well to give it a look.

If you would like a review which offers a more sympathetic treatment of God's Politics than Democracy Project does you can find a good one here.

Certain of Their Own Infallibility

Charles Krauthammer writes a fine essay in defense of certainty. The heart, but by no means all, of his piece is here:

The Op-Ed pages are filled with jeremiads about believers--principally evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics--bent on turning the U.S. into a theocracy. Now I am not much of a believer, but there is something deeply wrong--indeed, deeply un-American--about fearing people simply because they believe. It seems perfectly O.K. for secularists to impose their secular views on America, such as, say, legalized abortion or gay marriage. But when someone takes the contrary view, all of a sudden he is trying to impose his view on you. And if that contrary view happens to be rooted in Scripture or some kind of religious belief system, the very public advocacy of that view becomes a violation of the U.S. constitutional order.

What nonsense. The campaign against certainty is merely the philosophical veneer for an attempt to politically marginalize and intellectually disenfranchise believers. Instead of arguing the merits of any issue, secularists are trying to win the argument by default on the grounds that the other side displays unhealthy certainty or, even worse, unseemly religiosity.

Why this panic about certainty and people who display it? It is not just, as conventional wisdom has it, that liberals think the last election was lost because of a bloc of benighted Evangelicals. It is because we are almost four years from 9/11 and four years of moral certainty, and firm belief is about all that secular liberalism can tolerate.

Do you remember 9/11? How you felt? The moral clarity of that day and the days thereafter? Just days after 9/11, on this very page, Lance Morrow wrote a brilliant, searing affirmation of right against wrong, good against evil.

A few years of that near papal certainty is more than any self-respecting intelligentsia can take. The overwhelmingly secular intellectuals are embarrassed that they once nodded in assent to Morrow-like certainty, an affront to their self-flattering pose as skeptics.

Enough. A new day, a new wave. Time again for nuance, doubt and the comforts of relativism. It is not just the restless search for novelty, the artist's Holy Grail. It is weariness with the responsibilities and the nightmares that come with clarity--and the demands that moral certainty make on us as individuals and as a nation.

Nothing has more aroused and infuriated the sophisticates than the foreign policy of a religiously inclined President, based on the notion of a universal aspiration to freedom and of America's need and duty to advance it around the world. Such liberationism, confident and unapologetic, is portrayed as arrogant crusading, a deep violation of the tradition of American pluralism, ecumenism, modesty and skeptical restraint.

Well put. Krauthammer might also have mentioned that it's not really certainty that contemporary skeptics disdain, for they themselves are filled to overflowing with it. They are so certain that they are in the right politically, for example, that they are willing to go to any lengths to defame, discredit, mock and ridicule those with whom they disagree in order to crush all opposition and to insure that their views prevail. This is not the behavior of people cognizant of their own fallibility and at pains to maintain a modicum of intellectual humility.

No, it isn't certainty to which our Leftist elites object. What they find deplorable is the substance of those matters about which religious conservatives are certain. The maddening offense of religious conservatives is that their certitudes are in conflict with the certitudes of the secular Left. This the elite finds quite insufferable. They cannot abide that anyone would have the temerity to entertain a sense of certainty about matters so out of harmony with what they themselves are certain about.

Review of <i>Unspeakable</i>

Yesterday we posted a meditation on forgiveness which was triggered by a few lines in a new book by Os Guinness on the problem of evil. The post wasn't intended to be a review, but if the reader would like one an excellent overview of the book can be found here.

Did They Or Didn't They?

Now we're really confused. First we were told that Saddam was working on WMD in Iraq, then we were told that, ha, ha, Bush lied, there's no evidence that Saddam was working on WMD. Now we're told that tons of stuff that could be used to make biological and chemical weapons and banned missiles have been moved out of the sites where they'd been located prior to OIF:

UNITED NATIONS - U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday.

Now which is it? Did Iraq have material that could have been used for WMD, or didn't they? Will somebody please get the story straight.

The Modern Sisyphus

Viewpoint has argued several times over the past year that any ultimate meaning to life is contingent upon there being a God. Now columnist Dennis Prager addresses himself to the same theme in his series on Judeo-Christian values:

As I have noted on occasion, there are three values systems competing for world dominance: Islam, European style secularism/socialism and Judeo-Christian values. As the competition in America is between the second two (in Europe, Judeo-Christian values are dying while Islam is increasing its influence), my columns on Judeo-Christian values have concentrated on differences between Judeo-Christian and secular values.

Perhaps the most significant difference between them, though one rarely acknowledged by secularists, is the presence or absence of ultimate meaning in life. Most irreligious individuals, quite understandably, do not like to acknowledge the inevitable and logical consequence of their irreligiosity -- that life is ultimately purposeless.

Secular and irreligious individuals raise two immediate objections:

1. Irreligious people, including atheists, are just as likely to have meaningful lives as any religious person. They need neither God nor Judaism nor Christianity nor any other religion to have meaning.

2. Secular and irreligious are not the same as atheistic; many secular individuals believe in God and therefore whatever meaning accrues from having a belief in God, they, too, have. They do not need religion or Judeo-Christian values to give their lives meaning.

The first objection denies a fact, not a subjective judgment: If there is no God who designed the universe and who cares about His creations, life is ultimately purposeless. This does not mean that people who do not believe in such a God cannot feel, or make up, a purpose and a meaning for their own lives. They do and they have to -- because the need for meaning is the greatest of all human needs. It is even stronger than the need for sex. There are people who lead chaste lives who achieve happiness, while no one who lacks a sense of purpose or meaning can achieve happiness.

Nevertheless, the fact that people feel that their lives are meaningful -- as a parent, a caregiver, an artist, or any of the myriad ways in which we feel we are doing something meaningful -- has no bearing on the question of whether life itself is ultimately meaningful. The two issues are entirely separate. A physician understandably views his healing of people as meaningful, but if he does not believe in God, he will have to honestly confront the fact that as meaningful as healing the day's patients has been, ultimately everything is meaningless because life itself is. In this sense, it is far better for an individual's peace of mind to be a poor peasant who believes in God than a successful neurosurgeon who does not.

If there is no God as Judeo-Christian religions understand Him, life is a meaningless random event. You and I are no more significant, our existence has no more meaning, than that of a rock on Mars. The only difference between us and Martian rocks is that we need to believe our existence has significance.

Now to the second objection, that you don't need religion or Judeo-Christian values, just a belief in God or, as is more popular today, in "spirituality" to imbue existence with meaning. Theoretically, one can posit the existence of the God of Judeo-Christian religions without actually believing in any of those religions or in any of their holy works. There is, however, some absurdity in believing in the God made known through texts whose authenticity one rejects. "I believe in the God made known to the world solely through the Old Testament but not in the Old Testament" is not logically compelling.

Whatever the logical inconsistencies or theoretical arguments in either direction, the fact remains that while secular individuals can believe that their own lives have meaning, secularism by definition denies that life has meaning. The consequences have been devastating to mental health and to social order.

Among these have been increased unhappiness and depression, increased reliance on drugs and numbing entertainment to get people through life, moral confusion, belief in nonsense (such as Marxism, fascism, communism, male-female sameness, pacifism, moral equivalence of good and bad societies, and much more), and perhaps most ubiquitous, political meaning as a substitute for religious meaning.

Given that the need for meaning transcends all other human needs, its absence must create havoc individually and societally. In government, secularism is a blessing; but most everywhere else it is not.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus compares human existence to the everlasting punishment imposed by the gods on the mythological Sisyphus whose sentence for rebellion against the deities was to push a stone up a hill only to have it roll back down. He had to do this over and over, forever. Camus says that human existence is every bit as futile, meaningless, and mind-crushingly absurd. And yet, he writes, "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a human heart. One must imagine that Sisyphus is happy."

Actually, it is extremely difficult to imagine Sisyphus happy in such circumstances. Indeed, it is easier to imagine him on the verge of total insanity. A man suffering life without significance, without meaning, without hope for eventual release is a man teetering on the brink of madness.

Camus is right in his comparison of life without God to the existence Sisyphus was made to endure. If there is no God then life surely is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", as Shakespeare put it.

Camus is wrong, however, when he urges us to imagine Sisyphus as happy. To the extent that the modern Sisyphus is content it is because he has not allowed himself to consider the full implications of his naturalistic worldview. He refuses to permit the consequences of his atheism to obtrude into his thoughts lest he be forced to confront the sheer senselessness of his being and that of all humanity. To face honestly the fact that in the final analysis nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters is to weave dizzyingly on the precipice of a spiritual and psychological abyss that only the most intrepid, or nihilistic, atheists dare approach.

Semper Fi

Our country has lost a fine leader. Ilario Pantano has chosen to resign from the Marine Corps. After the hell he and his family were put through over the last year for defending himself in a stressful situation in Iraq, who can blame him?

There's lots of background on Pantano and his story here.

Kit Jarrell indicts both the military and the media for having grossly mishandled the Pantano case. She writes:

The Corps took one of their own - an officer who had served proudly and with distinction - and crucified him on the cross of political correctness, in a society where too many are more concerned with how we look to the world than how safe we are. His accusers were sloppy and unbelievable at best, and at worst they were simply malicious; determined to ruin a career and a man who was so much more than they would ever be. The case itself was flimsy on all counts - no real eyewitnesses, conflicting statements. Even prosecution witnesses ended up sounding like advertisements for the defense.

She concludes with this:

It could be argued that Pantano's resignation "lets the bad guys win", but I think that happened a long time ago. It happens every time the media slants their reports on the war. It happens every time a military recruiter is barred from a campus. It happens every time we bend over backwards to please the collective globe while leaving ourselves defenseless. It happened the minute someone listened to Sgt. Daniel Coburn.

And yet, the Pantanos that remain in the Marines; the Air Force; the Navy; the Army all fight on; hoping that when and if it is their turn to fire their weapon in the defense of our nation that they do not find themselves at the mercy of a disgruntled sergeant who couldn't even be trusted to lead his squad.

The idea that it could happen again is horrifying. The idea that it happened at all is the tragedy.

The rest of her essay is a blistering indictment of Pantano's accusers and the way the whole thing was dealt with by the Marines. Its worth reading.

Is Zarqawi Dead?

Adnkronos International has this report on Abu Al-Zarqawi:

Baghdad, 2 June (AKI) - The Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq - died on Friday and his body is in Fallujah's cemetary, an Iraqi Sunni sheikh, Ammar Abdel Rahim Nasir, has told the Saudi on-line newspaper Al-Medina. He claims that gunfights which broke out in Fallujah in the last few days involved militants trying to protect the insurgency leader's tomb from a group of American soldiers patrolling the area.

During a telephone conversation from the city of Fallujah with the Saudi newspaper, Nasir said al-Zarqawi was taken there after being injured in the city of Ramadi around three weeks ago, and may have been treated by two doctors who had worked with his aides in Baghdad. He said the two doctors had stopped a serious hemorrhage in al-Zarqawi's intestines, but that after his condition worsened last week, the militant died on Friday.

Nasir adds that in his will the insurgent leader left the order that no funeral should be held for him and the right to announce his death should be left to the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden.

The Al-Medina newspaper reports that it also called the headmaster of a school in Fallujah, who preferred to remain anonymous, but confirmed that many people in the city were aware of the fact that al-Zarqawi had recently been taken to the city.

Sheikh Nasir's claims appear to correspond with reports several weeks ago that al-Zarqawi had been injured and taken to Ramadi hospital for emergency treatment, and with messages on the Internet talking of two Arab doctors accompanying him. Al-Zarqawi was reported to have been seen at the hospital on April 27. The hospital's director told an Iraq-based newspaper that US troops later surrounded and raided the entire building, searching for the Jordanian militant.

Only two days ago, an audio message attributed to al-Zarqawi was posted on the Internet, in which he assured his followers that he had only been lightly injured. Following the message, the US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned countries neighboring Iraq not to give any medical assistance to al-Zarqawi. "Our current theory is that he is in Iraq," he said. "Were a neighboring country to take him in and provide medical assistance or haven for him, they obviously would be associating themselves with a major linkage in the al-Qaeda network, and a person who has a great deal of blood on his hands," Rumsfeld continued. "And that's something that people would want to take note of."

How reliable this report is is hard to say, but as Bill Roggio at Winds of Change points out there is no doubt that right now forensics experts are examining the alleged remains to determine whether Zarqawi has indeed passed on to be with his 72 virgins, whom, we expect, will all be fat, ugly, and covered with pustules.

Unspeakable

Os Guinness has written a fine book on the problem that evil poses to both believers and unbelievers and the responses to evil offered by each of the three families of faith: eastern, naturalistic, and Judeo-Christian. The book is titled Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror.

Guinness touches a lot of bases and says many worthwhile things about the topic that anyone can read with profit, but one thing in particular puzzled me. Guinness holds to the view that one person may forgive another of a serious offense even though the other neither seeks nor desires that forgiveness. It is possible, in other words, to have forgiveness without reconciliation. Guinness suggests that as long as the "forgiver" doesn't seek redress for the offense, as long as he doesn't hold a "grudge", then he has forgiven the offender.

I guess my problem is that I'm not sure what "forgiveness" means given Guinness' view of the matter. Let me illustrate the difficulty: John does Dave a grave injustice. John is unrepentant and is not interested in Dave's forgiveness. Dave nevertheless says that he forgives John. He treats him with a modicum of courtesy, even behind his back, and seeks no revenge or redress for the hurt. Even so, he no longer respects nor likes John. Their friendship has been irreparably sundered, and Dave doesn't wish to have anything to do with John in the future. Whenever he thinks about the situation he cannot help but think that John is guilty of an offense even though he doesn't insist that John make any compensation. They go their separate ways.

In what sense, then, has Dave actually forgiven John? In other words, can there be any meaning to forgiveness if the forgiveness is not accepted and if there is no reconciliation?

If one man forgives another man's debt then all record of the debt is wiped away, but if Dave forgives John, in Guinness' understanding of the word, then there is no wiping away of guilt, only a decision not to press for retribution. So, is forgiveness just a refusal to seek recompense, which is what Guinness seems to say, or is it something more than that? If it's more, then exactly what is it?

It seems to me that forgiveness entails the restoration of a relationship to at least some semblance of the status quo ante, just as in the case of debt forgiveness, but I don't see how this is possible apart from some measure of reconciliation.

I've always thought of forgiveness as a transaction. One party offers it, and the other accepts it. Until it has been accepted there is no transaction even if the offer still holds. God, for example, holds out forgiveness to everyone, but only those who accept it can receive it. If this is not the way God's forgiveness works then classical Christianity has an interesting problem: People God has forgiven will nevertheless find themselves suffering eternal punishment because, though they've been forgiven, they've never accepted that forgiveness and are thus not reconciled to God. Yet if hell is a consequence of sin and all sin has been expunged from the ledger (because it has been forgiven), why will there be anyone in hell? Indeed, what is the substantive difference between forgiveness and no forgiveness?

This quibble notwithstanding, Unspeakable is an excellent read and can be ordered here. Viewpoint recommends it to anyone interested in the phenomenon of modern evil.

George Mikan, 1924 - 2005

George Mikan has died at the age of 80 from complications from diabetes. Perhaps no player in the history of basketball had as much of an impact on the game as he. There is a fine column on his life and his many contributions to basketball here. He was by all accounts an outstanding man.

Bleak Prospects

Ron Brownstein of the LA Times does the math and concludes that there's not much chance that the Democrats will retake the Senate in 2006.

Brownstein points out that there are more red states than there are blue states. Republicans hold 44 of the 58 red state senate seats and Democrats hold 28 of 36 blue state seats (six seats are in "swing" states). Moreover, the Dems are defending more seats in 2006 than is the GOP. The Republicans thus have more potential for gains than do the Democrats.

Of course, it might be asked why the Democrats should even worry about recapturing the majority as long as there are Republican senators like John McCain and his merry band who do everything possible to allow the Democrats to control things even when they're in the minority.

At any rate, there's a lot more interesting analysis in Brownstein's article. Incidentally, if he's correct and the Republicans hold on to, or even increase, their lead in the Senate, we expect a flood of editorials in liberal newspapers calling for amending the Constitution to allow for proportional representation in that body just as is done in the House. It rankles many Leftists that even though New York's senators represent more people than do the senators of many western states put together, each state gets two senators in Washington regardless of the population of the state. Thus a minority of small-state citizens can effectively neutralize the will of a large-state majority.

Call it "minority rights", of which senate Democrats should actually approve since they keep invoking the concept in order to justify the filibuster. Of course, the difference is that the right of small states to have the same number of senators as large states is fixed by the Constitution. That document is silent about any alleged rights of a minority political party.

Beslan Terror Trial

The only surviving terrorist who participated in the Beslan massacre was put on trial yesterday and pleaded not guilty. Unfortunately for him there are witnesses. Pictures and details can be found here.

Amnesty's Buffoonery

Amnesty International, which distinguished itself last week with singularly ridiculous allegations against the United States and a positively moronic suggestion that other countries arrest president Bush and his top officials, describes itself as nonpartisan. The following information is taken from an article in the Washington Times:

Irene Khan, Amnesty's secretary-general, compared the U.S. detention center at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where more than 500 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members are held, to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's "gulag" prison system.

Ms Khan has evidently never read Solzhenitsyn's One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch nor his monumental Gulag Archipeligo. If she had she would have been far more reluctant to make such a completely asinine comparison of the conditions which existed in the Gulag to those which prevail in the relative country club that is Guantanamo.

At the same time, William F. Schulz, Amnesty's executive director, issued a statement calling Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top administration officials "architects of torture." Mr. Schulz suggested that other countries could file war-crime charges against the top officials and arrest them.

It now transpires that the top leadership of Amnesty International USA contributed the maximum $2,000 to Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign. Federal Election Commission records show that Mr. Schulz contributed $2,000 to Mr. Kerry's campaign last year. He also has contributed $1,000 to the 2006 campaign of Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Moreover, Joe W. "Chip" Pitts III, board chairman of Amnesty International USA, gave the maximum $2,000 allowed by federal law to John Kerry for President. Mr. Pitts is a lawyer and entrepreneur who advises the American Civil Liberties Union.

Amnesty International's Web site states it is "independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government."

Indeed. It only opposes the officials of those governments which have freed more people from tyranny in the last five years than have ever been freed by any nation in the entire history of the world.

Perhaps Amnesty should add to its governing principles not only freeing people from the oppression of political tyrants but also freeing the rest of us from the insufferable oppression of it's own buffoonery.

A Jewish Anti- Christian Defamation League

Christianity Today has an interview with Don Feder who is president of an organization of Jews formed last month which is committed to defending Evangelical Christianity from it's cultural despisers. This is an historically unprecedented undertaking on the part of religious Jews, and their aims and rationale for it are encouraging. At one point in the interview Feder says this:

Christians by and large aren't being attacked because Catholics believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation or because some evangelicals believe in the Rapture. They're not being attacked on theological grounds. They're being attacked on moral grounds. They're being attacked because they object to same-sex marriage; they object to abortion on demand; they support public displays of the Ten Commandments; they support voluntary school prayer or a moment of silent meditation at the beginning of the school day; because they want judges to interpret the Constitution rather than using the Constitution to legislate from the bench; because they object to, you might even say they were outraged by, what happened to Terri Schiavo. Christians are the last remaining obstacle to the triumph of secular humanist values. And that's why we say that if Christians fail, America will fail.

There's much in this piece that we found fascinating, especially Feder's response to questions about why he and others started the organization as well as his thoughts on Christian proselytism of Jews. Give it a look.

Moral Retards

He writes about the "logical impossibility" of "religion without fanaticism." In his essay, Religion & Morality: A Contradiction Explained, he opines that "humanity would be better off without religion," which he characterizes as "social poison," because believers are "susceptible to extreme forms of hatred and violence." He also calls religious believers "moral retards" and says they are "incapable of moral action."

He writes: "American Christians like to think that religious violence is a problem only for other faiths. In the heart of every Christian, though, is a tiny voice preaching self-righteousness, paranoia and hatred. Christians claim that theirs is a faith based on love, but they'll just as soon kill you. For your own good, of course." He then belittles religious believers "whose devotion is moderate," saying they "are only cowardly fanatics," not brave enough to "foment their own kind of holy war."

Who is he? His name is Timothy Shortell and he's just been named to chair the Sociology Department at CUNY's Brooklyn College. There's much more about Shortell and his radical Left politics here.

His claim that religious believers are incapable of moral action is a statement that only someone totally oblivious to cultural and social history could make. It is also philosophically inane. It is, after all, only religious believers who can even speak in moral categories. For the atheist there can be no morality. Shortell refers to himself as an "ubermensch", Nietzsche's term for the man who is beyond good and evil. Having adopted a Nietzschean attitude toward morality, it is disingenuous, if not fatuous, of him to pretend that he's morally superior to Christians or to pass moral judgment upon anyone. If, as we've argued many times, there is no God then there is no morality. There are just things that people do, some of which are preferred by some people over others.

If "moral retards" there be, among them are those who assert that one can have Christian moral principles without the Christian God.