Symposium on Torture

A number of Christian thinkers have been invited to participate at Evangelical Outpost in a symposium on the question of the use of torture:

"Torture is not always impermissible," argues Charles Krauthammer in "The Truth About Torture", his provocative essay in The Weekly Standard. "However rare the cases, there are circumstances in which, by any rational moral calculus, torture not only would be permissible but would be required (to acquire life-saving information). And once you've established the principle, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all that's left to haggle about is the price. In the case of torture, that means that the argument is not whether torture is ever permissible, but when--i.e., under what obviously stringent circumstances: how big, how imminent, how preventable the ticking time bomb."

The "truth" about torture is an issue being widely addressed throughout the country, yet our sense is that the Christian intellectual community has been relatively silent on this important issue. We believe a symposium of this nature could significantly aid and inform the Church and the wider culture and help provide clarification on the principles involved in judging this practice. In order to open the dialogue we have asked several leading Christian ethicists and opinion journalists to respond to Dr. Krauthammer's article and to address the questions: "What is the truth about torture from a Christian worldview? Is torture ever allowed? And if so, under what conditions and circumstances?"

The symposiasts include: Darrell Cole, John Jefferson Davis, Daniel Heimbach, Mark Liederbach, Kenneth Magnuson, Albert Mohler, Richard John Neuhaus, and Robert Vischer and their essays can be found here.

Kinsley's Anti-Torture Argument

It looks as if the McCain amendment on torture has unstoppable momentum. Evidently, our intrepid Congressmen and women are scared to death of being seen as even remotely in favor of being mean to terrorists. But as I've written on several occasions recently it's a mistake to embrace a prohibition on cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment without clarifying exactly what cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment are. Without guidance on this matter American interrogators are going to be very reluctant to aggressively question detainees, and consequently innocent people are going to die.

There should indeed be laws governing the treatment of prisoners, but to ban absolutely anything that could be construed by a sufficiently clever or creative lawyer as cruel or degrading is to needlessly jeopardize peoples' lives. Even so, Michael Kinsley disagrees and asks some thoughtful questions of those who believe, as I do, that laws against torture should not be absolutized. For starters, he poses this scenario:

What if you knew for sure that the cute little baby burbling and smiling at you from his stroller in the park was going to grow up to be another Hitler, responsible for a global cataclysm and millions of deaths? Would you be justified in picking up a rock and bashing his adorable head in? Wouldn't you be morally depraved if you didn't?

Tough question, of course, but ethical conundrums which rely upon situations that can't possibly occur in the real world are singularly unhelpful in clarifying important issues. In the real world there simply is no possible way anyone could know what Kinsley posits, so he's proposing an impossible state of affairs and then asking what one would do. There's no way to answer the question.

Or what if a mad scientist developed a poison so strong that two drops in the water supply would kill everyone in Chicago? And you could destroy the poison, but only by killing the scientist and 10 innocent family members? Should you do it?

This scenario, or one like it, is much more plausible than the first and indeed has occured frequently since 9/11. We have a chance to kill a high-value terrorist murderer but certain of his innocent family members may be killed as well. Would it be wrong to do it? Not necessarily. If this is the only practical way to get the terrorist and as long as the deaths of his family are incidental to the attack on the terrorist then, although it would be tragic, it would not be immoral. It would be to a pacifist, of course, but I don't believe Kinsley to be a pacifist.

Or what if an international terrorist planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan, set to go off in an hour and kill a million people. You've got him in custody, but he won't say where the bomb is. Is it moral to torture him until he gives up the information?

Yes, of course, provided that no more pain is applied than what is necessary to elicit the information. Even John McCain agrees with this. He just wants to make it illegal and say it'd be acceptable, in an instance such as Kinsley proposes, to break the law.

Indeed, it's a strange aspect of McCain's proposal that almost everyone who has talked about it, including John McCain himself, and most recently Colin Powell, have said that, although there should be no exceptions to the ban on torture, there are circumstances which would make violating the law against it the right thing to do, and that the person who breaks the law in those circumstances should expect that the law will take them into account. In other words, they're saying, torture is not always wrong, but we should pretend that it is. This is a rather unsatisfactory way of looking at the matter. Kinsley himself admits the inadequacy of this position:

But what about [the ticking time bomb] conundrum? Will you eschew torture even when a few minutes of it, applied to a very bad person, would save a million lives? One answer is that the law wouldn't really be enforced in such an extreme situation....Surely [though] every law should at least aspire to be enforced. Or-an even more modest standard-a law should not depend on unenforceability for its very justification. Furthermore, a law expresses a social norm even apart from its enforcement. If the hypothetical situation ever arises, something will happen. What do we want that something to be?

But back to Kinsley's main argument:

If you would torture to save a million lives, would you do it for half a million? A thousand? Two dozen? What if there's only a two-out-of-three chance that person you're torturing has the crucial information? A 50-50 chance? One chance in 10? At what point does your moral calculus change, and why?

Good question, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be done to save even a single life. Nevertheless, his question about uncertainty is more difficult. It's not without analogs, however. We face the same problem with capital punishment. Just as in legal cases in which a man may be sentenced to death, we have to be as sure as we can be that the person being interrogated actually possesses the information needed to save lives. Sometimes we may be wrong, but we must do everything practical, given the circumstances, to insure that we're not.

Kinsley continues with his cross-examination:

What about someone wholly innocent? It's hard to imagine a situation where someone who refuses to supply life-saving information could be considered "innocent." But it's not impossible [i.e. suppose the terrorist is unbreakable under pressures applied to his person, but he has a child he dearly loves...] In this cold, hard world, allegedly facing a challenge greater than any the civilized world has faced before, would you torture an innocent individual for five minutes [if it would make the terrorist talk] in order to spare a million innocents from death?

No. The position taken here at Viewpoint is not utilitarian. The utilitarian would argue that the pain sufferered by a single individual is outweighed by the good of saving the lives of the many and therefore the infliction of the pain is the right thing to do. This is unacceptable. The Biblical command to do justice is a morally binding absolute, and if justice means anything, it means that you don't willfully and intentionally harm innocent people, even if it's to accomplish some great good.

If you say yes, [it's okay to] go ahead and torture an innocent person, you have pretty much abandoned the various exquisite moral distinctions that eased your previous abandonment of an absolute ban on torture. But if you say no, [because] my own moral hygiene, or my country's, forbids the torture of an innocent individual, even if the indirect but predictable consequence is a million human deaths, you are more or less back in the camp of the anti-torture absolutists whose simple-minded moral vanity you find so irritating.

Kinsley errs here in confusing the absolutes in question. Just as there is a vast moral gap between murdering an innocent child and executing the thug who murdered her, so, too, is there a vast moral gap between absolutizing torture and absolutizing justice. The presumptive reason for banning torture is that in the usual case it is either uncompassionate or unjust, but in the instance of using pain or degrading treatment on someone who plans to cause the deaths of others, in order to prevent those deaths, it would be uncompassionate or unjust to fail to do so.

Having said that, I should add that I see no objection to deceiving a terrorist into mistakenly believing that his loved one is being tortured if this were the only way to elicit life-saving information from him. Such a tactic, however, would probably be prohibited as "inhuman" under McCain.

Finally, it should be noted that liberals, who scoff at the slippery slope argument when it comes to gay marriage, who fondle nuances like Midas fondled gold, who disparaged Ronald Reagan twenty years ago for having a too simplistic view of the world, and who otherwise abhor absolutes, are now, when it comes to torture, embracing the slippery slope argument, disdaining nuance, and reveling in simplistic absolutes. If the subject matter weren't so somber it'd be funny.

The Only Alternatives: ID or the Multiverse

Physicist Leonard Susskind has written a book titled, Cosmic Landscape: String theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design in which he seeks to explain away the fine-tuning of the universe by offering the hope that there are something like ten to the 500th power universes out there all with different laws and constants so that one of them just has to be like ours. He suggests that there really are only two options: The existence of zillions of universes, so many that we cannot comprehend the number (To get an idea of the size of the number there are only ten to the 80th atoms in the whole of our universe), or there is only one universe and it was intentionally designed by a cosmic intelligence.

New Scientist runs an interview with Susskind by Amanda Gefter. She asks him:

Gefter: So even if you accept the multiverse and the idea that certain local physical laws are anthropically determined, you still need a unique mega-theory to describe the whole multiverse? Surely it just pushes the question back?

Susskind: Yes, absolutely. The bottom line is that we need to describe the whole thing, the whole universe or multiverse. It's a scientific question: is the universe on the largest scales big and diverse or is it homogeneous? [i.e. Is it many universes or just one, Viewpoint] We can hope to get an answer from string theory and we can hope to get some information from cosmology.

There is a philosophical objection called Popperism that people raise against the landscape idea. Popperism [after the philosopher Karl Popper] is the assertion that a scientific hypothesis has to be falsifiable, otherwise it's just metaphysics. Other worlds, alternative universes, things we can't see because they are beyond horizons, are in principle unfalsifiable and therefore metaphysical - that's the objection. But the belief that the universe beyond our causal horizon is homogeneous is just as speculative and just as susceptible to the Popperazzi.

Gefter: If we do not accept the landscape idea are we stuck with intelligent design?

Susskind: I doubt that physicists will see it that way. If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent - maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation - I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world. But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature's fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.

Nuclear physicist David Heddle responds:

Susskind's answer shows that his book should be subtitled String Theory and the Possible Illusion of Intelligent Design. He has done nothing whatsoever to disprove fine-tuning. Nothing. He has only countered it with a religious speculation in scientific language, a God of the Landscape. Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, he tells us that we should embrace the String Theory landscape, not in spite of its ugliness, but rather because of it. Physics should change its paradigm and sing praises to inelegance. Out with Occam's razor, in with Rube Goldberg. Out with reductionism, in with lots of free parameters. Why? Because if we don't (according to Suskind) there really is no way to explain the fine-tuning, except by Intelligent Design. He even likens, in his last sentence quoted above, those physicists who search for the antithesis of his landscape, a simple, beautiful fundamental theory, to IDers.

I think he is correct. For a fundamental theory that predicted all the constants would be a "win" for ID-it would destroy the only real threat to cosmological ID: multiple universes with varying laws of physics.

The subtext (at times explicit) in Susskind's book is that fine-tuning is real, in the sense that our universe really does exist on a knife's edge, so much so that it demands attention. The only possible way that it is an illusion is if our universe is but one of many. To save materialism, Susskind argues that we must explain this fine-tuning, and his landscape [i.e. that there are zillions of universes] has the best chance of playing the role of a white knight.

Susskind's argument demonstrates the desperation of materialists who wish to escape the conclusion that there is an intelligence behind the cosmos. He is willing to jettison the criteria of testability, falsifiability and Occam's razor and accept on faith, without any evidence, that there exits a nearly infinite number of other worlds. With so much cosmological variety, he believes, one of those other worlds just has to possess the extraordinary complex of features required to support life. Thus our universe is not so extraordinary after all.

Susskind's interview makes it plain that the battle over Intelligent Design is not one between science and religion but rather between two different philosophical views of the world. Susskind says that our universe certainly appears to be intricately well-ordered and planned for living things, but that any apparent purpose and intention woven into the parameters of the universe are simply illusions. Given the fact that so many universes exist, he asserts, the existence of one as improbable as ours becomes much less astonishing.

The intelligent design theorist counters that the only evidence we have tells us that this universe is the only one that exists. It tells us that our world is singular, unique, and alone and that this is in any event the most parsimonious hypothesis. Thus we think we see purpose and intentional engineering in the fabric of the cosmos because it's really there, and the only reason one would have for failing to accept this conclusion is an a priori metaphysical commitment to atheism which is not a very scientific approach to the search for truth.

Should anyone question why everyone seems to agree that the universe at least appears to be deliberately fine-tuned we commend either or both of the following: Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by Stephen Barr and Nature's Destiny by Michael Denton.

Time's POTY

Of all the people in the world who have done magnificent things for humanity in the past year Time couldn't find any to surpass Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono for their person of the year!? They announce their award with this silly bit of nonsense:

For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are TIME's Persons of the Year.

See Michelle Malkin for some worthy alternatives.

In addition to Malkin's suggestions we would have liked to have seen consideration given to our military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pope John Paul II, The Iraqi soldiers and police, George Bush, Condaleeza Rice, or the U.S. Coast Guard crews who rescued so many along the Gulf Coast after Katrina.

We don't wish to sound like we're disparaging the Gates' or Bono for the contributions they've made, but in terms of making an impact on the world in 2005, none of them, especially Melinda Gates, has done what any of the above have done. We think Time is just trivializing their award in an attempt to be politically correct and to avoid giving credit to either the Bush administration or anything remotely associated with it.

Christian Beliefs II

Why place the authority of Scripture next after belief in God in order of logical significance to a Christian's set of beliefs? The existence of God is something which presents itself to us through natural revelation, through the world and our experience in the world, but apart from special revelation, i.e. the Bible, none of the claims of Christianity have any grounds for belief. Extra-biblical sources offer only scant mention of the existence of Jesus let alone anything about him of religious significance. All we would have to rely upon would be an oral tradition that would be expected to be distorted over centuries of time and hence of exceedingly dubious reliability.

So, unless the Bible, or at least the New Testament portion of it, is held to be authoritative in the life of the individual and of the church there is very little reason to believe any of what Christians do, in fact, believe. There is, apart from what's contained in the New Testament, nothing we can know that is unique to Christianity. This is, of course, why skeptics are at such pains to discredit the historical relaibility of the New Testament. They realize that in doing so they strike at the heart of Christian faith.

What, then, does the New Testament tell us that is of vital and essential importance to a Christian understanding of the world? Most fundamentally it tells us that man is burdened by a kind of spiritual affliction. It teaches us that we're out of harmony with God, alienated from him, and headed for cosmic ruin. There is about us some sort of fatal flaw that we have inherited from our earliest progenitors, something philosopher Alvin Plantinga has suggested might be called trans-world depravity, that influences us to often choose evil rather than good.

How this has come to be the Bible doesn't make precisely clear but that it is the case that man often chooses evil is abundantly confirmed by our daily newspapers.

The story we glean from the Bible goes something like this, if I can be permitted to fill in some gaps with speculation: God is characterized as, inter alia, the perfection of love. Love "desires" something to give itself to, to lavish itself upon, and so God created the world, and specifically mankind, as objects of His love, much as parents create a child to love.

God wished to live in a maximally fulfilling love relationship with man, but such a relationship requires that love be both freely given and freely requited. God could have created us in such a way that we had no choice but to love Him in return, but that would have been to create us as robots. It would have been like programming the screen saver on your computer to flash the message "I love you" over and over. Thus, God made us free to choose to love Him or not, and in so doing He bestowed upon us the essential element of our humanity and the sine qua non of our dignity, our freedom.

Our relationship to God is like the relationship of a bride to her husband. God institutues marriage between a man and a woman for many reasons but one is to illustrate for us our relationship to Him and to remind us of it every day.

Man has used this freedom badly and unwisely, however, and in so doing has alienated himself from God. The Bible suggests that we're like an unfaithful bride whose husband comes home to find her cavorting with His worst enemy. We have demanded our autonomy. As a race, we've made it plain that we don't wish to be tied down to Him. Our infidelity has alienated us from God, the source of our life, and consequently death is our fate - both physical death and eternal separation from the source of life, the source of all that is good in our existence. This is what it means to be "fallen."

Yet, though broken-hearted and crushed by our continued betrayals, God has not abandoned us. Throughout the ages He has continued to woo us, to cajole us, to try win our love back to Him.

"But," the skeptic will object, "You've given no reason, no proof, why one should believe this story or the Bible that contains it."

That's true. I haven't, nor could I. There is plenty of evidence that suggests that, at the very least, the Bible is correct in its significant historical affirmations, but the evidence is not dispositive. It doesn't amount to a logical proof. Someone who wishes to withhold belief will certainly be able to find reasons to do so.

The fundamental question is this: Do we trust the Biblical witnesses to be writing the essential truth, or don't we? If the narrative I've traced resonates with us, and if we are not already dead set against the Christian worldview, then perhaps we're willing to give the Biblical witnesses the benefit of the doubt. If we are totally opposed to the Christian story, however, if it would upset us beyond our endurance were it to be true, then we simply won't accept their testimony. Whether we accept it or not, though, is not a matter of intellect, it's a matter of the heart. It's a matter of whether we would be delighted or disappointed to discover that the story of man's redemption as related in the Bible is true.

The Christian desires it to be true and finds the evidence sufficient to warrant his confidence in it. There's no point in trying to convince someone who doesn't wish it to be true that it is, since such a person's objections are not intellectual but emotional or psychological. At any rate, for the remainder of this series on basic Christian beliefs we'll simply follow the Christian assumption that the Bible is reliable in conveying truth about God's plan to win us back to Him. The next thing we need to understand about that plan is that our physical death is not the end of our existence.

What's Heaven Like

Boston College philosophy professor and popular writer Peter Kreeft addresses himself to 35 questions commonly asked about heaven. Even if you don't agree with everything he says his answers will still make you think.

On the matter of heaven, by the way, we never tire of recommending C.S. Lewis' little novel The Great Divorce.

The Fruit of Cultural Relativism

They won't be celebrating the joys of multi-cultural diversity in Australia any time soon, nor in Sweden, we wouldn't think:

In Australia this week amidst anger over an Islamic man's rape conviction and the bashing of two Aussie life savers, working-class locals erupted in a rampage of anger and brawling in some of the worst racial riots in decades. But there is more to the story than is being repeated in the American mainstream media....

Four days after he set foot in Australia, the rape spree began. And during his sexual assault trial in a New South Wales courtroom, the Pakistani man began to berate one of his tearful 14-year-old victims because she had the temerity to shake her head at his testimony.

But she had every reason to express her disgust. After taking an oath on the Qur'an, the man - known only as MSK - told the court he had committed four attacks on girls as young as 13 because they had no right to say "no." They were not covering their face or wearing a headscarf, and therefore, the rapist proclaimed: "I'm not doing anything wrong."

MSK is already serving a 22-year jail term for leading his three younger brothers in a gang rape of two other young Sydney girls in 2002. In his own defence, he argued that his cultural background, was responsible for his crimes. And he is right.

In some parts of Pakistan, sexual assault - including gang rape - is officially sanctified as a legitimate form of enforcing the social value system. One village council recently ordered that five young girls should be "abducted, raped or murdered" for refusing to be treated as chattel. The girls were aged between six and thirteen when they were married without their knowledge, to pay a family debt.

And when Mukhtar Mai's 12-year-old brother was alleged to have committed an offence in a small Pakistani farming village, the village council ordered that his sister be gang-raped. So, she was taken to a hut where four men repeatedly assaulted her. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan there were 804 cases of such officially orchestrated sexual assault in 2000, and 434 of these were gang rapes. And if that isn't bad enough, the victims of these atrocities are then expected to commit suicide because rape victims bring irreparable shame upon their family.

So as MSK committed his acts of rape while visiting Australia, he was simply perpetuating his own cultural heritage. He hails from a society where officially sanctioned sexual violence is commonly employed as a means to enforce the subservience of women. And this is where two fundamental tenets of the modern Left clash: the irresistible force of cultural relativism collides with the immovable object of gender equality. But in the 21st century it is the latter that must prevail.

The laissez faire attitudes of cultural relativism are unacceptable in modern society. Female genital mutilation is not some quaint tribal custom that we are bound to respect: it is barbarism, pure and simple. Yet many Western leftists habitually excuse these crimes against women in order to maintain political solidarity with their allies in the Islamic world. After all, it would be tough to make common cause with Muslim groups in the antiwar movement if Progressives began to criticize the practice of polygamy.

But along with Islamic immigration to the West have come Third World value systems regarding the treatment of women. We must not be seduced by the false tenets of cultural relativism into a toleration of forced marriages, officially sanctioned rape, and honour killings. Australia's unique brand of multiculturalism confers both rights and obligations: while cultural and linguistic diversity are to be cherished, every Australian must subscribe to a single standard of human rights. Australians must forcefully repudiate the corruption of the multicultural idea that would condone crimes against women and support jihadism.

And it's not just Australia. Read this chilling report from Sweden. The phenomenon of Muslim rape in Western countries appears to be one of those stories that the MSM would rather not tell, but which seems to be busting out all over.

Who Will Rid Us of This Madman?

Recapping Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for the destruction of Israel and his denial of the holocaust, Charles Krauthammer writes this:

To be sure, Holocaust denial and calls for Israel's destruction are commonplace in the Middle East. They can be seen every day on Hezbollah TV, in Syrian media, in Egyptian editorials appearing in semiofficial newspapers. But none of these aspiring mass murderers are on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons that could do in one afternoon what it took Hitler six years to do: destroy an entire Jewish civilization and extinguish 6 million souls.

Everyone knows where Iran's nuclear weapons will be aimed. Everyone knows they will be put on Shahab rockets, which have been modified so that they can reach Israel. And everyone knows that if the button is ever pushed, it will be the end of Israel.

But it gets worse. The president of a country about to go nuclear is a confirmed believer in the coming apocalypse. Like Judaism and Christianity, Shiite Islam has its own version of the messianic return -- the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam. The more devout believers in Iran pray at the Jamkaran mosque, which houses a well from which, some believe, he will emerge.

When Ahmadinejad unexpectedly won the presidential elections, he immediately gave $17 million of government funds to the shrine. Last month Ahmadinejad said publicly that the main mission of the Islamic Revolution is to pave the way for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam.

And as in some versions of fundamentalist Christianity, the second coming will be accompanied by the usual trials and tribulations, death and destruction. Iranian journalist Hossein Bastani reported Ahmadinejad saying in official meetings that the hidden imam will reappear in two years.

So a Holocaust-denying, virulently anti-Semitic, aspiring genocidist, on the verge of acquiring weapons of the apocalypse, believes that the end is not only near but nearer than the next American presidential election. (Pity the Democrats. They cannot catch a break.) This kind of man would have, to put it gently, less inhibition about starting Armageddon than a normal person. Indeed, with millennial bliss pending, he would have positive incentive to, as they say in Jewish eschatology, hasten the end.

Negotiations to deny this certifiable lunatic genocidal weapons have been going nowhere. Everyone knows they will go nowhere. And no one will do anything about it.

Well, no one in Europe or on the American Left is likely to do anything, that's for sure. Whether no one at all will do anything remains to be seen this March.

AFR

From the folks at Americans for a Free Republic:

Could a full convertible gold standard be legally implemented in today's world with the amount of paper currency that has been floated by the Fed throughout the 20th century? No, it couldn't. But tomorrow's world is going to be radicalized beyond our conventional imaginations of today. America's almighty dollar could possibly go the way of the Argentine peso. That is how serious the mess is that we are in. Would the call for a new money system free from government manipulation resonate with voters in the midst of such a disaster? It certainly would; but we will need to have strong, articulate voices manning the megaphones to explain why and how.

The great majority of economists in our government and in our colleges today will naturally attempt to deny the necessity of such a step, becoming almost apoplectic upon hearing that the utilization of gold money is being advocated. They will go to great lengths to try and convince their audiences that the economy's money supply must be continually inflated via the Federal Reserve in order to produce growth. But this is totally erroneous! America's productive growth during the 19th century was spectacular, and there was no Federal Reserve pumping unconvertible paper money into the system at all.

For example, the Consumer Price Index decreased by 30% from 43 to 30 between the years 1800 and 1913 (an average of 1/4 percent per year). This was because the money supply of this time, being tied to gold, was next to impossible to expand with a printing press in excess of the growth of goods and services. As a result, there was no upward pressure on prices.

In contrast, today we no longer use gold as money, but paper printed by the Federal Reserve as it sees fit. As a result, the Consumer Price Index increased by 1,663% from 30 to 529 in the years 1913 to 2000. This was because the money supply was created at a far faster rate than the production of goods and services -- all of which should tell us quite clearly that government money managers are not reliable and never will be, and that a fiat paper money system will never be stable. [The above percentages are taken from The World Almanac 2002, p. 103.]

When the above figures are combined with other vital 19th century statistics, we readily see that the Keynesian claim of "growth needing inflation" is a fallacy. During the 19th century due to the dollar being backed by gold, we enjoyed gently deflationary prices (the beneficial kind of deflation) and yet also rapid economic growth of all goods and services. America's GDP increased over 500% in just the years 1870 to 1913, averaging 4.3% annual growth, and real wages for the workingman tripled. In comparison, we average about 2.5% annual growth today, real wages are stagnant, and we are plagued by inflationary prices brought on by the Federal Government's relentless monetary expansion, with a possible gargantuan credit collapse now looming ahead to balance our government created excesses. [These figures are taken from The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, Fairfield Publishers, 1960, pp. 91, 141, 409, 413.]

The Keynesian claim of monetary inflation being a requisite for healthy economic growth is thus totally in error. So also is its claim that only with government control over the currency and banking system can we have "stability" in our economy. Growth will take place very nicely without government inflation of the money supply; and what's more, it will be real growth, not the frenzied, speculative, boom-bust kind of growth our Great Society dreamers have given us. As for stability, how can any logical observer of the 20th century claim that the Fed's inflationary monetary policy has given us stability? Yet this was the publicly announced reason for the Fed's creation in 1913. It was going to be the great "stabilizer" of the banking system and our economy. Yet it has brought us precisely the opposite.

The reason the collectivists throughout the country oppose the stable monetary policy of a gold-backed system is because they know their ever-expanding welfare state is tied directly to Keynesian inflationary policy. Without the ability to egregiously inflate the money supply year after year, the vast panoply of big government programs could not be financed because American citizens would not pay for such fiscal extravagance with taxes. Without such welfare programs, the collectivists' egalitarian dream of a Great Planned Society, regulated and manipulated from Washington, is dead.

The future of America lies in ending the Keynsian inflation-deflation cycle. This requires the restoration of a gold-backed money system. The answer to so many of our problems would come if we would just end excessive monetary inflation by the Fed. Prices of goods and services would stop relentlessly rising. Excessive labor union demands would subside. Capital formation would increase. True prosperity would result. Poverty would shrink at a faster pace. Yet life would churn at a more moderate and predictable pace. The elderly would be able to keep the security they worked for. Jobs would stop leaving America for third world countries. And we could all get off this infuriating treadmill of never quite catching up with our bills. In general, life would again be stable, productive, and free rather than the speculative, frenzied, Washington managed economy that has evolved under the whip of collectivist-liberal ideology.

It's interesting to note that in the last 80 years, the economic cycle of boom and bust has been experienced and seemingly accepted as the natural order of things. I wonder how long the American people will continue to be sheared like sheep by the money masters.

The following, from the same link, sounds almost radical but given that this country was established as a republic and not a democracy (pdf), it's actually quite appropriate.

But such a flat tax must be a REAL flat tax, not the imposters put forth by the likes of Steve Forbes and Dick Armey. These two attempts to promote a flat tax were no answers at all because of their huge personal exemptions ($36,000 for a family of four). They would greatly increase the amount of people who pay zero taxes, and thus the amount of people who have infinite demand for government services. This type of "tax reform" is totally assinine. If we wish to shut down the inferno of government growth and spending, then we must truly shut down the PROGRESSIVE RATES that are causing its relentless expansion, which means all voters must pay the same rates, which means no exemptions!

As sure as the sun will come up tomorrow, however, liberals will attack any genuine "equal rate tax" as unfair to the poor people. So if a floor is to be established under which no one will have to pay the tax, i.e., an exemption for those under the poverty level, then a provision must be included in the tax bill stating that those who are exempted from paying are to also be excluded from voting. Remember we are trying to restore a RESPONSIBLE electorate and legislature. This cannot be done if voters get their services free. All who vote must pay the tax period! This is the only way they will act responsibly. This is human nature. After all, we deny children the right to vote. Why do we do this? Because they are not mature enough to vote responsibly. The same principle applies to men and women who are exempt from taxes; they will never vote responsibly. They will possess "infinite demand" for government services.

The entire AFR website offers some important reading and I encourage you to visit.

Just A Coincidence?

From the link:

On March 23, 2006, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will cease publication of the M3 monetary aggregate. The Board will also cease publishing the following components: large-denomination time deposits, repurchase agreements (RPs), and Eurodollars. The Board will continue to publish institutional money market mutual funds as a memorandum item in this release.

So the Fed is going to begin hiding vital statistics from the US people and the rest of the world about a critical measure of our money supply. It's bad enough that there isn't anything "federal" about the Federal Reserve as it isn't a branch of the federal government but, rather, a privately held institution. And to make matters worse, some of the "owners" of that private institution are banks outside of the US. And they have no "reserves" to speak of. The Federal Reserve is kind of like that little guy behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. Do a search on the internet of "Wizard of Oz Federal Reserve" for some interesting reading.

Ah, but I digress. The question is, what else of international importance is scheduled to occur on or about the same time as the discontinuation of the Fed's reporting of M3?

If we remember back to this article from November we read that Iran is scheduled to begin trading oil for euros on their newly established Iranian Oil Bourse - IOB.

So the Fed's last report of M3 just happens to be the week prior to the first day of trade on the IOB? If countries like Japan and China and other Asian countries with their trillions of U.S. dollars no longer need them or require less of them to buy oil - does anyone suppose they might begin a wholesale liquidation of their U.S. Bonds (the primary instrument where foreigners 'store' their U.S. dollars)?

If foreigners begin wholesale liquidation of U.S. debt obligations, the Fed would have no recourse but to print the dollars necessary to redeem them and this would necessarily imply an absolutely enormous expansion of our money supply - which would undoubtedly be captured statistically in M3 or its related reporting.

What Sort of God Are We Talking About?

This caught our attention recently:

A new Gallup survey released today finds that four decades after the "God Is Dead" controversy was first noted, Americans retain a strong belief in a higher power. Some 94% think God exists.

Only 5% feel God "does not exist" -- and even most of them "are not sure" of that. Exactly 1% are certain there is no God. But how strongly do the believers believe? Nearly 8 in 10, in fact, say they are "convinced" God exists, although Gallup does not ask them why that is.

Conservatives are more likely to be convinced than liberals (87% vs. 61%), women a little more likely than men (82% vs. 73%), and residents of the South more than those in the East (88% vs. 70%). Surprisingly, some 61% of those who seldom or never attend church are nevertheless convinced that God exists.

The poll sampled 1,002 national adults, Nov. 17-20.

If a space alien were to observe our culture would he not think that Gallup got the numbers backward? It would be interesting to know what god it is that most Americans believe exists. Dionysius? Bacchus?

A poll like this is less meaningful than it could be if it does not provide some idea of what sort of god the respondents are saying they believe exists.

An Interview With Richard Dawkins

BeliefNet has an interview with Richard Dawkins. Here are some of the more provocative portions:

Interviewer: What are your thoughts about the despair some people feel when they ponder natural selection and random mutation? The idea of evolution and natural selection makes some people feel that everything is meaningless--people's individual lives and life in general.

Dawkins: If it's true that it causes people to feel despair, that's tough. It's still the truth. The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside. If it's true, it's true, and you'd better live with it.

Interviewer: Is atheism the logical extension of believing in evolution?

Dawkins: They clearly can't be irrevocably linked because a very large number of theologians believe in evolution. In fact, any respectable theologian of the Catholic or Anglican or any other sensible church believes in evolution. Similarly, a very large number of evolutionary scientists are also religious. My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

Actually, Dawkins draws a much stronger correlation between evolution and atheism in a speech he gave last Fall. You can hear what he had to say about the incompatibility of evolution and theism here.

The fact is that almost all of the more prominent writers on evolution say the same thing Dawkins says, i.e. that an understanding of evolution leads to atheism. It's obvious that evolution is a trojan horse for getting atheism into our schools and as such teaching it clearly violates the separation of church and state. The desire on the part of people like Dawkins to have evolution taught in schools is really an ill-disguised attempt to brainwash our children with atheistic materialism.

Does the foregoing sound a little extreme? Does it sound a bit laughable? If your answer is no, it sounds about right to you, then what justification is there for teaching evolution in schools? If your answer is yes, the assertions in the previous graph are absurd, then why is the same argument not considered absurd if we insert Intelligent Design in place of evolution and theism in place of atheism?

Interviewer: If you had to name top sources for optimism and hope in a naturalistic or materialistic worldview, what would they be?

Dawkins: I think there is something glorious in the universe, in contemplating the Milky Way galaxy, in contemplating the fact that this is only one in billions of galaxies, contemplating the fact that at the beginning of the 21st century, humanity really has gone a very long way toward understanding the universe in which we live and the life form of which we are a part. I find that a truly inspirational thought.

Here's another inspirational thought that follows from Dawkins' worldview: We're born, we look at the stars, and we die. So what's the point? For Dawkins' answer go back to the interviewer's first question and Dawkins' reply.

Dawkins says the following, and then the interviewer asks him about it:

Dawkins: Then there's the added fact that it is the only life we're ever going to get. Don't kid yourself that you're going to live again after you're dead; you're not. Make the most of the one life you've got. Live it to the full.

Interviewer: You've criticized the idea of the afterlife. What do you see as the problem with a terminally ill cancer patient believing in an afterlife?

Dawkins: Oh, no problem at all. I would never wish to disabuse or disillusion somebody who believed that. I care about what's true for myself, but I don't want to go around telling people who are afraid of dying that their hopes are unreal.

Funny, we thought he'd just done pretty much exactly that just prior to the interviewer's question.

Stop and Think

The editors at National Review urge us to stop and think about what we are doing in adopting the McCain amendment and its blanket ban on "torture." Here are some key paragraphs in their editorial:

So, what is torture? Under CAT and U.S. law, it is the infliction of "severe pain or suffering." Bush critics like to ignore the word "severe" and pretend that subjecting a detainee to any pain is torture. It is not. While most people instinctively know what they consider torture - fingernails pulled out, electric shocks, beatings - defining what rises to the level of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment is a trickier question. What, then, do McCain and his colleagues think of those methods that aren't included in the manual but don't necessarily constitute CID?

That's the key question. Given the way the debate is now playing out, if McCain's amendment becomes law it will be interpreted as banning almost every coercive interrogation technique. In dealing with captured terrorists, we will then be able to apply only methods formulated to deal with conventional soldiers in a different sort of conflict than the one that faces us now. This is folly.

The most constructive path forward would be for Congress to put aside legalisms and empty phrases and work its way through interrogation practices, starting with the least controversial. Is dietary manipulation "cruel"? Are cold rooms? Is sensory deprivation? Is being made to stand for hours? How about an "attention grab," i.e., shaking a detainee? Sleep deprivation? A belly slap? We think these methods would all pass muster in any rational debate, provided they are applied within reason (there is a difference between standing for two hours and twenty hours).

Then Congress could make its way to the most aggressive techniques, such as water-boarding, which simulates drowning. It has reportedly been effective in breaking high-level al Qaeda detainees within seconds, but is a practice with which most people would be uncomfortable. It is at least close to the line of what constitutes torture, and is certainly "cruel" in almost every circumstance.

But circumstances matter. Even some of the most fervent backers of McCain, including McCain himself, say we should torture someone in a ticking-bomb scenario, where saving a U.S. city depended on doing so. Such scenarios are unlikely in the extreme, but there are other exceptional cases that are more probable: for instance, the capture of a top-level al Qaeda operative who may have knowledge of a coming attack or know the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

To deal with such cases, the president should be able to sign a finding - on the model of a finding authorizing an assassination - to use an extraordinary method like water-boarding. The definition of CID depends on context. While water-boarding may be unacceptably cruel if applied to 69,990 of the roughly 70,000 people we've detained since the war on terror began, there are perhaps ten top-level captives in whose cases water-boarding doesn't "shock the conscience," to employ the phrase often used in defining CID. Requiring presidential authorization in these cases would ensure accountability while shielding from criminal exposure the agent charged with obtaining information that could save lives.

The use of water-boarding and stress positions, etc. is unacceptably cruel only if the measure is used for wicked ends, i.e. to punish, to amuse, to inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. This is what torture is throughout most of the world, and this is why it is evil. Harsh measures employed, however, to save lives and which cease the moment they are no longer necessary is in a completely different moral category. Indeed, to conflate them is to commit the fallacy known as undistributed middle: Because two acts share a common feature they are considered to be in all important moral respects the same. Thus the execution by the state of a serial killer is often claimed to be morally identical to the crimes committed by the killer because in both cases someone is being killed. This is silly, of course, but it is, unfortunately, a common error.

To be sure, we need to be more vigilant than we have been in preventing the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading practices, such as occured at Abu Ghraib, but we should not prohibit the use of what are called "harsh measures" altogether without defining precisely how it is we are constraining ourselves. We need to know exactly what we mean by words like "cruel", "inhuman", and "degrading" before we tell the world that we will not resort to them. Is it cruel or inhuman to deceive a terrorist into thinking he's going to die when in fact he's not? Is it degrading refuse to allow a detainee unsupervised lavatory privilege?

We must also allow for the use of extraordinary measures in extraordinary circumstances. To say that we would never, ever use a particular method of interrogation like water-boarding no matter what the exigencies might be, is both foolish and immoral. It is foolish because although the technique is terrifying it causes no real harm and it is immoral because it places a higher premium on the welfare of a murderer than it does on the lives of his victims.

Lionizing a Killer

FrontPageMag has an on-scene photo shoot by Zombie.com of the protests which accompanied the execution of Tookie Williams. Anyone who may have been leaning toward clemency for Williams may be deeply troubled by the behavior and allegiances of some of the people who hold that position, and anyone who feels any sympathy for Williams should be sure to look at the photo of the young woman he killed.

No Joy in Demville

The festive spirit and euphoria of the Iraqi people at being able to vote for their government in a meaningful election is displayed all over Iraq (see here, here and here). Smiles and waves are everywhere as the people ignored the threat of violence and filled the streets to walk to the polls.

At home, however, it's rather a different story. The sourpuss Dems look like they've bitten into an aspirin. They know they have to express satisfaction that things have gone well, but it's just not in their nature to be happy with a George Bush success. So on Hardball tonight Bob Schrum, a synecdoche of the liberal response to the day's events, mumbled lip service to the accomplishment that the elections represent and quickly moved on to warning that the real measure of success will be what happens in the months ahead.

The Dems say this everytime something good happens in Iraq. Like the illusory "puddles" on the highway on a hot day, however, we never seem to arrive at the "months ahead." If Iraq is a stable democracy by this time next year, and a force for peace in the Middle East, the Democrats will still be saying that Iraq may be a haven for freedom now, but what matters is whether it will still be a democracy twenty years from now.

Chris Matthews kept demanding on his show that Pat Buchanan and other guests tell him whether the president's strategy was really going to work, as if any mortal could actually know such a thing. How can anyone say that it will all be like the Garden of Eden in Baghdad this time next year? No one knows that. What we do know, though, is that things are moving in the right direction and that despite the constant wailing and teeth gnashing by the Howard Deans and Harry Reids and the MoveOn.orgs, every benchmark that the Bush administration has set for Iraq has so far been met.

The Democrats are in an awful predicament. Having cast their lot in opposition to Bush on Iraq, if that tragic nation succeeds the Dems will suffer a grievous political setback yet they certainly can't be seen hoping that Iraq fails. So, they have to keep cautioning the American people that as good as it appears to be going in Iraq, it's not really all that good. They have to hope that they convince enough voters that doom is just around the next bend as long as Bush is in the White House and Republicans control Congress. Of course, the next bend, like the months ahead, never arrives and eventually the American people are reminded of the story of the boy who cried "wolf" and the Democrats will be cast into the political outer darkness of irrelevancy. It's a just desert for people who have sought to undermine the president on a matter as absolutely crucial as Iraq.

Christian Belief I

On Monday we posted a piece on the essential beliefs held by Christians and remarked that we would be elaborating on some of those over the course of the next two weeks. I'd like to briefly consider the first of them today.

The most fundamental belief in Christianity, of course, is the conviction that God exists, but this claim means different things to different people. A recent poll shows that 94% of Americans believe that God exists, but it's not clear that these people all share the same concept of God. For example, is the God one believes exists intimately involved in the world or is He/It remote, indifferent, and impersonal? Is God just the universe, or some part of it, or is God a transcendent being which created the universe and cannot be identified with any aspect or combination of aspects of it?

Christianity has historically answered those questions by affirming that God possesses, at a minimum, the following attributes:

1. Personality: I.e. It is appropriate to refer to God as He. It is the case that God is self-aware and aware of the world in which we live. He cares about this world and cares about us. It makes sense to speak or pray to God because it matters to Him.

2. Transcendence: God is other than the world of space/time and matter and not identifiable with it.

3. Extraordinary potency: His power is at least great enough to have created the universe and to work out His will in it. He may be more powerful than this and, indeed, may be able to do anything which it is logically possible to do, but He is at least this powerful.

4. Extraordinary knowledge: God knows at least enough to have created the universe and to work out His will in it. His knowledge may be greater than this in that He may know everything that it is logically possible to know, but His knowledge is at least this great.

5. Eternality: God has no beginning and no end.

6. Moral perfection: God always acts in the best interest of His creation. He is the exemplar of Love and is the source of all moral categories and understanding.

7. Omnipresence: There is no place in creation, either spatially or temporally, where God is not.

8. Ultimate causality: God is the source of all that we can possibly experience. He is the creator and sustainer of the universe. The entire cosmos is ultimately contingent upon Him.

When Christians assert the existence of God they are claiming that a being with at least these attributes exists. Many Christian believers may not be able to articulate this concept of God off the top of their head, but if they were to be shown the list they would surely agree that these qualities accurately describe what they mean by God.

In any event, nothing else about Christianity (or anything else in the cosmos and in life, for that matter) would make any sense whatsoever were not the case that God exists. This is the foundational theological belief for theists in general and Christian theists in particular, and everything else is based upon it and flows from it.

PC Dunderheads

FoxNews.com offers up a few samples of that bane of modern society, the perpetually aggrieved citizen who takes umbrage at the possibility that someone, somewhere might be enjoying his or her life. These Gestapo-like enforcers of the PC orthodoxy keep a wary look-out for anyone who might show the slightest hint of having fun or doing good on the tax-payers dime, lest what they are doing have about it the foul odor of the incendiary R words - Religion and Racism:

A Christmas charity drive by some elementary school kiddies in Bellevue, Wash., has been axed after some parents complained that the "Giving Tree" with colored mittens all over it was a symbol of Christianity that has no place in public schools, according to KOMO-TV.

The tree at Medina Elementary School, described as a nondescript coil of silver with a star on top, had mittens as decorations with the ages and sex of prospective gift recipients along with some suggestions about what they wanted for Christmas.

When a parent complained that the tree was too Christian, the school covered the star on top with a bow to appease the parent but it wasn't enough. So the principal put the mittens on other secular symbols of the season - a sled, a snowman, a 'regular' tree and a plain old counter.

---------------------

The success of the Narnia movie is bringing the usual C.S. Lewis critics out of the woodwork - especially anti-Christian zealots who object to its allegory and allusions to Christianity.

The Associated Press, in an analysis of Lewis' Christianity, points out that Americans United for Separation of Church and State criticized Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for offending the Constitution by choosing "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" for his state's annual student reading campaign.

"This whole contest is totally inappropriate," said Barry Lynn, the group's director. "This would be like asking children to watch the movie 'The Passion of the Christ' and to write an essay with the winner getting a trip to Rome."

Oh, and Polly Toynbee of the UK's Guardian today says "Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion."

-------------------

A schoolgirl in the UK claims she was tossed out of school because she refused to remove a small crucifix necklace, reports the Daily Telegraph.

Sixteen-year-old Sam Morris says she was sent home from Sinfin Community School in Derby for breaking a school policy that bans jewelry. Her mother complained about the rule, claiming it is unfairly enforced because Sikh students are allowed to wear karas because it is required by their faith.

A school official defended the policy by saying Christianity doesn't require its adherents to wear crosses, but the Sikh faith does. "We have to be understanding," he said. "We live in a multi-faith society."

-------------------

The Toledo Blade quotes a high school principal as "quickly correcting himself" when he accidentally says his school has a Christmas tree up:

"Oh, it's a holiday tree," he corrects himself when questioned about end-of-year decorations. "We try to respect everybody's beliefs," he said. "The music department does a Christmas concert. Well, actually it's a holiday concert."

The anecdote comes in a roundup about how local schools have in recent years been sliding away from use of the C-word and opting for the more neutral "Holiday" instead.

A student at a high school in Missouri creating a giant calendar for the hallway was told by a teacher that Christmas tree imagery was off-limits, according to the Springfield News-Leader, and that only winter themes could used.

This follows news about an e-mail sent out to fine arts teachers across the district who were preparing for an assembly to be held later this month. The e-mail stated: "This is just a reminder that we agreed to have a winter assembly on December 8th at 9:00 in the HPER. This assembly will display the talents of your students and can include holiday themes, but not direct references to Christmas or the birth of Jesus."

And here are a few more examples of PC stupidity compliments of Tongue-Tied:

Third-graders in Madison, Wisc. won't be allowed to ring bells to raise money for the Salvation Army as they have in the past because one parent complained about the kids helping a religious-based charity, according to The Capital Times.

Students from Chavez Elementary have for years helped out the red kettle brigade during the Christmas season, along with hundreds of students from around the county. For some, it qualifies as part of their community service obligation.

Principal Howard Fried said the school administration stood down immediately when faced with the complaint. "When the objection was raised, the administration downtown told us, in no uncertain terms, not to allow it," he said.

-------------------

Black men, says a writer in the London Times, will think twice before seeing the new King Kong movie because the story "feeds into all the colonial hysteria about black hyper-sexuality" and "touches the raw nerve of the Darwin-based association between black men and apes."

The filmmaker, Peter Jackson, used the same hackneyed stereotypes in his Lord of the Rings triology, so Kong's racism comes as no surprise to writer writes Kwame McKenzie. In those films, he says, "the most fearsome baddies were big black and just a bit too Maori looking, the good guys - well white."

Mr. McKenzie says the folks who do movie ratings should look for negative racial stereotypes in addition to sex and violence.

-------------------

A UK author who said during a radio interview that it might not be such a hot idea to allow homosexual men to adopt young boys during a radio interview found herself under investigation by local police for her "homophobic incident," according to the Daily Telegraph.

Children's rights campaigner Lynette Burrows took part in a panel discussion about the UK's new civil partnerships act on a regional BBC program. During the course of the discussion she said placing boys with homosexual fathers was as risky as placing girls with two heterosexual men.

Scotland Yard said a member of the public complained of Burrows' homophobia and police are obligated to follow-up on such "priority crimes." No charges were filed.

We marvel that the average IQ is around 100 when we reflect that there are so many people, especially among the multitudes of liberal bureaucrats, whose IQ must approximate their age.

Reply to Critics of <i>Icons</i>

We noted a week or so ago that Intelligent Design: The Future was posting Jonathan Wells' response to critics of his book Icons of Evolution. Parts 1 through 5 are now up and can be read here.

On the subject of ID CafePress.com has a great selection of apparel with Intelligent Design motifs. Check it out here. Click on Browse Designs in the left margin for other offerings.

Sex and Christmas

Carol Platt Liebeau raises a pertinent question about our attitudes toward sex and religion in public places:

One of the most difficult tasks of a democracy is deciding which messages are suitable for universal consumption in the public square - especially when it comes to sex and religion.

Americans are bombarded with sexual images year-round. In October, Victoria's Secret introduced mall floor displays, titled "Backstage Sexy," featuring bare-bottomed mannequins in provocative poses and suggestions of bondage. Billboards advertising sex shops, strip shows and "gentlemen's clubs" appear alongside highways. Women's magazines at checkout counters offer graphic sex tips. Television is rife with innuendo and more. The FM airwaves are saturated with musical paeans to lust. When it comes to sex in the public square, envelope-pushing is the order of the day.

The graphic images, sights and sounds offend many religious, cultural or social conservative Americans. Some even voice outrage, but to little lasting effect.

That's because American "tastemakers" - elites in the media and the courts - have shaped a libertarian social consensus. That an advertising campaign, television program or song transgresses traditionalist values is irrelevant. Americans have decided, for better or worse, that one group's sensitivities cannot govern what is available to others. The traditionalists must avert their eyes from what offends them lest their sensibilities infringe on others' freedom of expression.

Contrast the treatment of sex in the public square with that of religion. A 2003 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll found that 96% of Americans celebrate Christmas. About 90% recognize Christmas as the birthday of Jesus Christ, according to a 2000 Gallup poll. These are substantial majorities, larger than the number of citizens who feel proud to be American (84%), higher than support for the war on terror only five months after Sept. 11, 2001 (93%), and greater than the percentage of Americans who believed that Elvis Presley was dead as of 2002 (88%).

Even so, in recent years, people who want to celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday avoid overtly religious allusions in the public square, lest a stray reference to the birth of Jesus somehow offend either nonbelievers or non-Christians.

The result has been a strait-laced self-censorship that would be derided were it applied to matters of sex rather than faith: Last year, a mayor in Massachusetts apologized for having identified the city's "holiday party" as a "Christmas party." In Denver, a religiously themed float was barred from participating in the city's December "parade of lights."

This year, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino briefly considered renaming the city's Christmas tree - an annual gift from Nova Scotia since 1917 - as a "holiday tree." Retail clerks are instructed to wish their customers "Happy Holidays" or to offer "Season's Greetings." Seasonal music on the radio is merrily (and almost exclusively) secular - much more "Frosty the Snowman" than "Joy to the World." Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus have supplanted angels, wise men - and, of course, the baby Jesus - as Christmas' most visible icons. Would anyone be surprised to hear a modern classic reissued as "Rocking Around the Multicultural Celebration Tree"?

All these measures spring from a laudable aversion to giving offense, and the impulse that prompts them is a tribute to the nation's history of religious tolerance. But nonbelievers or non-Christians are not being forced to celebrate Christmas (much less profess belief in Jesus' divinity). So it's worth wondering: In a nation founded on religious principles, why should spiritual messages be tailored to the sensitivities of nonbelievers, while sexual messages are not similarly constrained for the sensibilities of traditionalists?

If there's a standard for deciding what content is appropriate for the public square, surely it should be uniformly applied. At the very least, we should rethink a status quo that presumes religious messages will elicit the kind of indignation once reserved for the crude sexual messages that pass without comment (or censure) today.

Liebeau makes an interesting point here. If a traditionalist takes umbrage at the hyper-sexualization of our public spaces he or she is called a prude and told to just not look. Advertisers, shock jocks, and television studios have the right to free speech, and if you don't like it, that's tough, just don't listen.

Yet many of these same intrepid champions of libertarian morality grow suddenly meek and timid when it comes to offending anyone who might be a dissenter from the majority view of Christmas. We need to be inclusive, they say. We need to make everyone feel welcome in our malls, they insist. We can't turn people off to the products we advertise by inserting a religious message, we're told. No, we suppose not. We can place billboards in the public square that tell our young people that sex (or alcohol, or both) are great ways to spend the holidays, but we'd never dream of insulting the gods of secularism by displaying religious symbols or music in our stores at Christmas time. Wrong message. Bad for business. Don't want to offend. Separation of Church and commerce, or something.

We suggest that Christians might take a page from the secularist playbook. When next we are asked what we plan to do over the holidays we should reply that, well, among other things we intend to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. If our interlocutor winces at the brazen vulgarity of our plans we should simply reply, hey, if you don't like what I say then don't listen to me say it.

The Worst Idea Ever

Sometimes very smart people say the most ridiculous things. Peter Watson, the author of Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention is the latest example. He was interviewed last weekend by Deborah Solomon for the New York Times Magazine. At one point the interview goes like this:

Solomon: "What do you think is the single worst idea in history?"

Watson: "Without question, ethical monotheism. The idea of one true god. The idea that our life and ethical conduct on earth determines how we will go in the next world. This has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history."

With one short sentence Mr. Watson shows himself to be a most unserious intellectual. The single worst idea - worse, mind you, than the idea of totalitarian fascism which was responsible for over 10 million deaths in the 20th century; worse than the idea of totalitarian communism which was responsible for over 100 million deaths in the same century; worse than the idea that man is just a brute animal which should live for his own pleasures, an idea responsible for millions of wasted and shattered lives - is the idea that there is a transcendent, personal God who enjoins us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

The worst idea in history is the idea that there is a non-arbitrary, non-subjective ground for human rights, dignity, morality, and meaning. The worst idea ever is the idea that there is a basis for believing that we are more than a pile of atoms, just so much dust in the wind.

The worst idea ever is an idea that has inspired the building of hundreds of universities, hospitals, and orphanages. It's an idea which fueled, or gave birth to, numerous charitable organizations, the women's and civil rights movements, the abolition of slavery, the rise of modern science, and it's an idea which has inspired, in addition to a multitude of other benefits to mankind, much of the greatest art, literature and music ever produced by human effort.

Nevertheless, the sage Prof. Watson sees it as "without question" the single worst idea in human history. Has he ever asked what the benefits of atheism have been? Atheism or atheists gave us the holocaust, the forced famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, the Gulag, the Cambodian killing fields, the rape of Nanking and a myriad of contemporay sociological dysfunctionalities like pornography, drugs, and gangsta' rap. But it's the idea that there is a God who judges the crimes of men that Mr. Watson abhors. With all his learning one has to wonder if Mr. Watson has never read Tocqueville.

Solomon: "But religion has also been responsible for investing countless lives with meaning and inner richness."

Watson: "I lead a perfectly healthy, satisfactory life without being religious. And I think more people should try it."

Mr. Watson responds to the objection that belief in God has invested millions of lives with meaning by testifying that he himself doesn't need such belief. What he needs is not the point, of course. The fact is that millions of people's lives have been enriched, directly or indirectly, by belief in God and for Mr. Watson to ignore this fact is to make himself intellectually frivolous and irrelevant.