Cui Bono?

Bill Roggio assesses the reports from Iraqi bloggers, the military, and news outlets and concludes that the threat of civil war in Iraq is abating. The Iraqi people are evidently calming themselves enough to ask of the Golden Dome mosque bombing, cui bono? There are lots of possibilities: Iran, "Mookie" al Sadr, Sunni insurgents, but the answer keeps coming up al-Qaeda. No one else, as Roggio points out, really benefits from destroying the mosque - no one except al-Qaeda, of course, which has been trying to foment civil war in Iraq for two years.

Al-Qaeda is indeed the obvious villain in this piece, but what's obvious is, unfortunately, often irrelevant when there's an excuse for disciples of the religion of peace to take to the streets to kill each other.

An Aussie Churchill

Where can we find politicians like this here in America? The following is the last part of a speech given recently by Peter Costello, Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia and likely heir to Prime Minister John Howard:

The Australian Citizenship Oath or Affirmation tries to capture the essence of what it means to be Australian, it reads as follows:

"From this time forward [under God] I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect and whose laws I will uphold and obey."

To be an Australian citizen one pledges loyalty first:- loyalty to Australia. One pledges to share certain beliefs: democratic beliefs; to respect the rights and liberty of others; and to respect the rule of law.

There is a lot of sense in this pledge. Unless we have a consensus of support about how we will form our legislatures and an agreement to abide by its laws - none of us will be able to enjoy our rights and liberties without being threatened by others.

We have a compact to live under a democratic legislature and obey the laws it makes. In doing this the rights and liberties of all are protected. Those who are outside this compact threaten the rights and liberties of others. They should be refused citizenship if they apply for it. Where they have it they should be stripped of it if they are dual citizens and have some other country that recognizes them as citizens.

Terrorists and those who support them do not acknowledge the rights and liberties of others - the right to live without being maimed, the right to live without being bombed - and as such they forfeit the right to join in Australian citizenship.

The refusal to acknowledge the rule of law as laid down by democratic institutions also stabs at the heart of the Australian compact. The radical Muslim Cleric Ben Brika was asked in an interview on the 7.30 Report in August last year:

"But don't you think Australian Muslims - Muslims living in Australia - also have a responsibility to adhere to Australian law?"

To which he answered: "This is a big problem. There are two laws - there is an Australian law and there is an Islamic law."

No, this is not a big problem. There is one law we are all expected to abide by. It is the law enacted by the Parliament under the Australian Constitution. If you can't accept that then you don't accept the fundamentals of what Australia is and what it stands for.

Our State is a secular State. As such it can protect the freedom of all religions for worship. Religion instructs its adherents on faith, morals and conscience. But there is not a separate stream of law derived from religious sources that competes with or supplants Australian law in governing our civil society. The source of our law is the democratically elected legislature.

There are countries that apply religious or sharia law - Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind. If a person wants to live under sharia law these are countries where they might feel at ease. But not Australia.

And the citizenship pledge should be a big flashing warning sign to those who want to live under sharia law. A person who does not acknowledge the supremacy of civil law laid down by democratic processes cannot truthfully take the pledge of allegiance. As such they do not meet the pre-condition for citizenship.

Before entering a mosque visitors are asked to take off their shoes. This is a sign of respect. If you have a strong objection to walking in your socks don't enter the mosque. Before becoming an Australian you will be asked to subscribe to certain values. If you have strong objections to those values don't come to Australia.

We need to be very clear on these issues. There are some beliefs, some values, so core to the nature of our society that those who refuse to accept them refuse to accept the nature of our society.

If someone cannot honestly make the citizenship pledge, they cannot honestly take out citizenship. If they have taken it out already they should not be able to keep it where they have citizenship in some other country.

Of course this is not possible for those that are born here and have no dual citizenship. In these cases we have on our hands citizens who are apparently so alienated that they do not support what their own country stands for.

Such alienation could become a threat to the rights and liberties of others. And so it is important to explain our values, explain why they are important, and engage leadership they respect to assist us in this process. Ultimately however it is important that they know that there is only one law and it is going to be enforced whether they acknowledge its legitimacy or not.

It will be a problem if we have a second generation - the children of immigrants who have come to Australia - in a twilight zone where the values of their parents' old country have been lost but the values of the new country not fully embraced. To deal with this we must clearly state the values of Australia and explain how we expect them to be respected.

I suspect there would be more respect for these values if we made more of the demanding requirements of citizenship. No one is going to respect a citizenship that is so undemanding that it asks nothing. In fact our citizenship is quite a demanding obligation. It demands loyalty, tolerance and respect for fellow citizens and support for a rare form of government - democracy.

People will not respect the citizenship that explains itself on the basis of the mushy multiculturalism I have described earlier. We are more likely to engender respect by emphasizing the expectations and the obligations that the great privilege of citizenship brings. We have a robust tolerance of difference in our society. But to maintain this tolerance we have to have an agreed framework which will protect the rights and liberties of all. And we are asking our citizens - all our citizens - to subscribe to that framework.

I do not like putrid representations like "Piss Christ". I do not think galleries should show them. But I do recognize they should be able to practice their offensive taste without fear of violence or a riot. Muslims do not like representation of the Prophet. They do not think newspapers should print them. But so too they must recognize this does not justify violence against newspapers, or countries that allow newspapers to publish them.

We are asking all our citizens to subscribe to a framework that can protect the rights and liberties of all. These are Australian values. We must be very clear on this point. They are not optional. We expect all those who call themselves Australians to subscribe to them. Loyalty, democracy, tolerance, the rule of law: values worth promoting, values worth defending. The values of Australia and its citizens.

I'm almost tempted to emigrate to Australia just to be able to vote for this guy.

Liberal Theology

Janet Howe Gaines specializes in the Bible as literature in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico, and teaches Hebrew. Her account of the story of Jezebel as told in the Bible can be found here.

How bad was Jezebel? The Deuteronomist uses every possible argument to make the case against her. When Ahab dies, the Deuteronomist is determined to show that 'there never was anyone like Ahab, who committed himself to doing what was displeasing to the Lord, at the instigation of his wife Jezebel' (1 Kings 21:25). It is interesting that Ahab is not held responsible for his own actions.(8) He goes astray because of a wicked woman. Someone has to bear the writer's vituperation concerning Israel's apostasy, and Jezebel is chosen for the job.

It would almost be humorous if it wasn't so sad. Ms Howe Gaines seems to think that the "Deuteronomist" has an axe to grind regarding Jezebel and apparently misses the point that the "Deuteronomist" was inspired by God and communicated what God would have us to know. While the "Deuteronomist" may be the "writer", it is God who is the author.

This is another example of how liberal theology questions, criticizes, and distorts the Word of God because it offends one's sensibilities. At the link above Ms Howe Gaines attempts to portray Jezebel in a different light. Oh, if it were so but the reality is that God, through Elijah proclaimed she would be eaten by dogs and little would be left of her because of her actions.

It may be that Ms Howe Gains might simply be a frustrated, liberated, feminist desperately trying to posit another perspective of Jesebel in an effort to rewrite history or you may have other reasons to question my position, but before you reach a conclusion, I'd suggest you consider the wisdom of E.W. Bullinger's work regarding those who undertake "higher criticism" in his Numbers in Scripture where he says this:

Heb 4:12
kptikos- (kritikos) " (critic)"

This is the origin of our word "critic." The Greek word is kritikos and "critic" is merely the English spelling of the Greek word, which is transliterated. It means able to judge or skilled in judging; and then , simple a judge, but always with the idea of his ability to judge. kptikos appears only in Hebrews iv. 12, where it is translated " a discerner," Heb 4:12 For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

The whole passage relates both to the written Word, which is a sword ( Eph.vi.17 ): and to the living Word ( Christ), who has a sword.

The structure of the two verses distinguishes between God and his word:-

A 12. God it is whose Word is so wonderful.

B 12. What his word IS ( Living, powerful and a harp sword).

C 12. What his word DOES ( piercing and dividing asunder, etc,).

B 12. What his word IS ( a skilled judge).

A 13. God who is omniscient.

[My note: The above is what is called a structure. It is an outline of sorts that may take different forms. The entire Bible can be mapped as a structure with smaller structures being found within the larger ones. The topic makes for a fascinating study and often is quite useful in determining the context and meaning of a passage.]

Here we have in A and A, God the omniscient one; and in B, C and B we have his word. And we learn that the Word of God is a judge now, so wonderful that it distinguished between the thoughts and the intentions of the heart and judges them. The Master Himself bares witness that the same Word will be our judge there after---John xii.48, "He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day."

What a solemn truth, And how much more solemn, when man now dares to take this one word "critic" or " Judge," Which God has thus, by His only once using it, appropriated to His Word, and applied it to himself, And what is it that man is going to judge? Why the every word of God! thus making himself the judge of that Word which is to judge him! If the word kritikos were of frequent occurrence, and used of various things or persons, man might perhaps be led to look on himself as a judge of some one of them. But God has used it only once, and He has thus confined it to one thing--- His Word. Therefore it is a daring presumption for man to transfer the word to himself. Not only does man do this, but he calls his work " higher Criticism."

Now there is a criticism which is lawful, because it judges not God's Word, but man's work as to the manuscripts; this is called Textual Criticism , which is quite different thing. But this " Higher criticism, is nothing but human reasoning; It is nothing more than the imagination of man's heart---those very thoughts and intentions which the Word its self judges!

What confusion! What perversion! and what folly! for the further man's criticsm departs from the domain of evidence and enters on the sphere of reason, the " higher" he calls it!

That is to say, the less like a skilled judge he acts, the higher he exalts his judgement! Poor man! Oh that you would submit yourself to this Word For it must either judge you now in this day of grace, and give you conviction of sin; or it will be your judge in the last day, when every mouth will be stopped, and you will be " speechless" and " without "excuse."

God has given us a message through this account of Jesebel and it is sad that it can be so difficult for some people to accept it. Perhaps Ms Howe Gaines will explain her rationale to God when she meets him. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10:31) and I suspect people who play fast and loose with the Scriptures, much to their dismay, will come to that realization.

Thought For Today

From E.W. Bullinger's Numbers in Scripture

Where there are more wills than one, there can be no peace, no rest. There must necessarily be conflict and confusion. This is the secret of all disturbance in families, parties, and nations.

We sometimes hear of a "Dual Control," but it is a fiction. It exists only in words, not in reality! This is the secret of rest for the heart now-"One will." As long as there are two wills there can be no peace. As long as our will is not subject to God's will, we cannot know what rest is.

This is where the Lord Jesus, as man, found rest in the midst of His rejection. In Matthew 11, John the Baptist doubts, vv. 2, 3; the people of that generation reject Him, vv. 16-19; the cities which saw His mightiest works do not believe, vv. 20-24. Then we read in the next verses (25,26), "AT THAT TIME Jesus answered and said, I THANK THEE, O FATHER, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes, EVEN SO FATHER; for so it seemed good in Thy sight." And then turning to his weary servants, the subjects of similar trials and disappointments, He says, "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest."

In other words, rest is to be found only in subjection to the Father's will. This is the secret of present rest for our souls. This is the secret of Millennial peace and blessing for the earth.

How simple! and yet what strangers we are to this rest! How the Lord's servants are rushing hither and thither to find this great blessing, and yet do not enter into it! Why is this? It is because we do not believe that His will is better than our own? If we were occupied with the Lord instead of with ourselves, with the Blesser instead of with our "blessing," we should soon have such a sense of His grace and glory and power as would convince us that His will is better than ours; and then, instead of being busy with ourselves and enquiring how we are to give up our will, we should see that His is so good that we really loathe our own, and desire only His.

This blessing is not gained by any "act of surrender" or "act of faith," but our own will simply vanishes in the contemplation of his will as we see it to be all-gracious and all-good.

Man's modern methods all begin at the wrong end. They begin with ourselves, they occupy us with ourselves, and hence the failure. The Divine method puts "God First," and thus the end is assured.

It is when our hearts are so before God and so with God, that we learn the wondrous wisdom of His way, and the perfection, sweetness, and blessedness of His will. We yearn to possess it, we long for it, and desire to come into its joy; and our own will vanishes without an effort, and without our knowing it, until we discover afterwards what has happened by a happy experience.

In Millennial days this will be the blessing of the whole earth. For in that day there shall be one King, one will, "one Lord, and His name one."

What a spiritual giant.

The Dems' '08 Nominee

Who's Hillary's competition for the Democratic nomination in '08? Dick Morris says it's going to be Al Gore:

Gore has three things going for him: A perception that he was robbed of the White House and Hillary's possible stubbornness in continuing to back the war. The third thing? The weather. As the evidence of global climate change impresses everyone who doesn't work at the White House, Gore looks more and more like a man whose time may have come.

We don't know whether to laugh or cry.

The Murder of Ilan Hamili

Ilan Halimi was buried Thursday in France. Here's what happened:

Halimi was found dying, covered with burns and cuts, on Monday February 13. He had been kidnapped three weeks earlier, after a Muslim gang sent a blonde to seduce him. Halimi had agreed to meet with her after meeting in a chat room. Immediately after his abduction his mother went to the police, saying he was kidnapped by anti-Semites. Sources in the community said three Jewish youngsters had managed to escape similar abdications in recent months.

The police told Halimi's mother, Ruth, to stop all telephone connection with the kidnappers, as a way of forcing them to use electronic mail, which was traceable. The police did not know that during the five days in which the kidnappers tried in vain to contact Halimi's family, Halimi suffered terrible torture. One of the kidnappers said, "We put our cigarettes out on him because he was a Jew."

A few days after Halimi was found, the Paris public prosecutor, Jean-Claude Marin, told the media that the murder was a criminal event, and "no element of the current investigation could link this murder to an anti-Semitic declaration or action."

The reports about Halimi in France did not mention that he was Jewish. Halimi's family was livid. His mother accused the authorities of ignoring the anti-Semitic factor. "Had Ilan not been Jewish, he would not have been murdered," she said. She was widely quoted in the French media, and the authorities began to retreat.

On Tuesday French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that "the murder had anti-Semitic motives." "They kidnapped and murdered him because he was Jewish - in their words, the Jews have money," he said.

This coming Sunday a huge procession in his memory is scheduled to take place in Paris. Jewish organizations, French political parties and anti-violence groups are to join in the demonstration.

It seems that it is human nature to enter a state of denial about serious threats to one's safety and that of one's family. Even as the hyenas circle the herd the gazelle graze nervously in hopes that the killers will pass them by.

Caroline Glick finds this phenomenon rampant in the governments of both France and Israel and is deeply disturbed by it. The civilized world is being challenged by Islamism to defend itself, and in too many quarters the response is to cower and to pretend there is no threat.

This timidity only emboldens those who are even now circling their psychologically weakened prey, darting in to take a nip, wearing it down, draining away its will to live. When the hyenas sense that the West has lost its will to fight for its civilization they will surge upon it, rip it to pieces, and gorge themselves on its remains.

The murder of this young Jewish man at the hands of French Muslim kidnappers is not just a horrific atrocity, it is a synecdoche for the future the Muslim world envisions for the West. Ilan Halimi and others, like Theo Van Gogh, are just the first drops of the approaching storm.

Strange Bedfellows

This news strikes us as a little odd (subscription may be required). The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest organization of scientists:

...appealed for the help of mainstream religion in its quest [to quash Intelligent Design], arguing that religion and science were not incompatible. Many religious leaders had stated they saw no conflict between evolution and religion, noted the AAAS. "We and the overwhelming majority of scientists share this view."

And there's this:

Eugenie Scott, the director of the National Center for Science Education, told a weekend news conference it was time for the faith community to "step up to the plate," The Times of London reported. She said the idea one is either a Christian creationist or an atheist is believed by many people.

If we're reading this correctly the scientific community, or at least the portion of it committed to a Darwinian view of life, is trying to enlist churches and religious organizations in an effort to persuade their members that when Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett et al. declare that evolution is absolutely incompatible with religious belief they don't know what they're talking about. Indeed, The AAAS and Ms Scott seem to think that if religious folk would simply understand that Dawkins and Dennett speak only for most biologists, not all of them, and if the religious leadership would just get on board with the Darwinians, the dim-witted masses would eventually be confused enough to go along.

Why do the AAAS and the NCSE feel the need to do this, anyway? Aren't the arguments that the scientists themselves muster in favor of materialistic evolution persuasive enough? Are they tacitly admitting that they're losing ground, or failing to gain it, and, in desperation, they must seek to make allies of the very organizations that they in fact regard as their foes?

Whatever the case, we can be sure that if Eugenie Scott and her colleagues thought for one moment that they were sweeping the field there would be no appeals to the "faith community" to do anything except get out of their way.

A Wonderful Story

If you haven't heard the story of Jason McElwain yet, read about him here and watch the video. It'll make your day.

This Just In...

Congressman Ron Paul is preparing legislation that will compel the Fed to continue publishing M3, and plans to introduce the bill in the Financial Services committee later this month.

And why not? The Federal Reserve is a private institution. There's nothing "Federal" about it as it is owned by major financial institutions in this country as well as in foreign countries. And they have no "Reserves" to speak of. The U.S. Treasury controls Fort Knox.

The Federal Reserve should be transparent in terms of its actions and anything less is not acceptable. Apparently Ron Paul agrees.

You can read about it here.

It will be interesting to see how this effort turns out.

Premature Hysteria

The media appear delirious over the possibility of civil war in Iraq. Everywhere we turn we're told the Iraqis are "on the verge" of a full scale collapse into war between Shia and Sunni. This may be, but, as usual, the media is long on hysteria and short on analysis. For the latter we need to turn to the blogosphere where Bill Roggio breaks down the criteria for civil war. He lists the following indicators:

1) The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance no longer seeks to form a unity government and marginalize the Shiite political blocks.

2) Sunni political parties withdraw from the political process.

3) Kurds make hard push for independence/full autonomy.

4) Grand Ayatollah Sistani ceases calls for calm, no longer takes a lead role in brokering peace.

5) Muqtada al-Sadr becomes a leading voice in Shiite politics.

6) Major political figures - Shiite and Sunni - openly call for retaliation.

7) The Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party and Muslim Scholars Association openly call for the formation of Sunni militias.

8) Interior Ministry ceases any investigations into torture and death squads, including the case against recently uncovered problems with the Highway Patrol.

9) Defense Minister Dulaimi (a Sunni) is asked to step down from his post.

10) Iraqi Security Forces begins severing ties with the Coalition, including:

Disembeddeding the Military Transition Teams.

Requests U.S. forces to vacate Forward Operating Bases / Battle Positions in Western and Northern Iraq.

Alienates Coalition at training academies.

11) Iraqi Security Forces make no effort to quell violence or provide security in Sunni neighborhoods.

12) Iraqi Security Forces actively participate in attacks on Sunnis, with the direction of senior leaders in the ministries of Defense or Interior.

13) Shiite militias are fully mobilized, with the assistance of the government, and deployed to strike at Sunni targets. Or, the Shiite militias are fully incorporated into the Iraqi Security Forces without certification from Coalition trainers.

14) Sunni military officers are dismissed en masse from the Iraqi Army.

15) Kurdish officers and soldiers leave their posts and return to Kurdistan, and reform into Peshmerga units.

16) Attacks against other religious shrines escalate, and none of the parties make any pretense about caring.

17) Coalition military forces pull back from forward positions to main regional bases.

As Roggio notes, as of yet none of these things have happened, and the media's hysteria is thus appallingly, but unsurprisingly, premature.

Muslim Logic

A Danish newspaper prints cartoons which offend the delicate religious sensibilities of the Islamic faithful and frenzied Muslims the world over burn ... American flags.

Muslim terrorists, probably from al-Qaeda in Iraq, blow up an ancient and revered mosque in Samarra and outraged Muslims the world over burn ... American flags.

Apparently to be a Muslim requires of one a superhuman capacity for cognitive contortionism.

Father Coyne

Father George V. Coyne, the director of the Vatican Observatory, gave a talk recently in which he displayed an unforgiveably deficient understanding of the basics of Intelligent Design. The text of his lecture can be found here. In his abstract he remarks that:

I would essentially like to share with you two convictions in this presentation: (1) that the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, while evoking a God of power and might, a designer God, actually belittles God, makes her/him too small and paltry....

This, of course, is simply and inexcusably wrong. Intelligent Design evokes no God at all, much less a God which it belittles by making too small or paltry. Critics of ID insist on repeating this allegation every chance they get, but they cannot point to anything in the technical literature of ID where a prominent spokesperson has said that ID evokes God. We hope the good Father went to confession after this speech to purge himself of his sin of bearing false witness.

He goes on to ask:

How did we humans come to be in this evolving universe? It is quite clear that we do not know everything about this process. But it would be scientifically absurd to deny that the human brain is a result of a process of chemical complexification in an evolving universe. After the universe became rich in certain basic chemicals, those chemicals got together in successive steps to make ever more complex molecules.

What is scientifically absurd is Father Coyne's display of blind faith in the ability of blind, mechanical processes to produce the most amazing structure we know to exist in the universe. It's true we don't know everything about this process, so why does Father Coyne suggest that the brain is solely the product of chemical processes which, in his telling of it, rather magically "got together" to form this organ? How, if we don't know everything, can he a priori rule out intelligence as being a factor?

Finally in some extraordinary chemical process the human brain came to be, the most complicated machine that we know.

Yes. This might be called the fairy godmother style of science writing. Mother Nature waves her magic wand, and presto, there's the brain. All it took was a few chemicals, some pixie dust, and a lot of time and there you have it. No intelligent guidance is necessary, just random mutation and the mysterious powers of natural selection. Coyne makes it sound so easy, yet no one has any idea how mindless, purposeless forces could ever have achieved such a miracle. They just "know" that they did.

Do we need God to explain this? Very succinctly my answer is no. In fact, to need God would be a very denial of God. God is not the response to a need.

This is the sort of nonsense that gives theologians a bad name among sensible people. In any event, no IDer ever said that we do need God to explain it. They've only claimed that it is inexplicable apart from intelligent input. They do not insist that the intelligent agent is God. Nevertheless, Father Coyne resolves to make this a lecture on theology so let's look at his theology:

We should not need God; we should accept her/him when he comes to us.

One wonders what the fathers of the Church would have to say about such a ludicrous statement. If God exists, He is, inter alia, the ontological ground of all being. If God exists, and Father Coyne believes that He does, then we "need" Him because should God cease to will our existence we, and the world we inhabit, would simply go poof. God is the glue that holds all things in being. For a Catholic priest to assert that we "should not need God" is, at best, bizarre.

But the personal God I have described is also God, creator of the universe.

Where did that come from? The "creator of the universe"?! The God "we shouldn't need" is the creator of all that is? The God who plays no role in the origin of life or the emergence of the human brain is nevertheless essential to the existence of the whole cosmos? He planned it all out, evidently, designed it, as it were, down to the last detail, but He has no role to play in evolution, and it demeans Him to say that He does? Why does father Coyne feel it necessary to claim that God is the creator of the world, but think that it's necessary to exclude Him from any role in the development of the brain?

If this is the current state of theological thinking in the Catholic Church today Pope Benedict has his work cut out for him. Somebody please forward the Director of the Vatican Observatory a copy of the works of Thomas Aquinas.

Dubai or Not Dubai. That's the Question.

Good arguments can be found on both sides of the controversy surrounding whether we should allow the United Arab Emirates to own any part of any of our seaports. For those interested in reading up on the arguments Rich Karlgaard has links to what he titles the best takes on both sides of the debate. Go here to check them out.

The True Heirs

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has done it yet again. This time he's posted an excellent piece in defense of the thesis that modern materialists are not the true heirs of the enlightenment and that it is actually the "neo-creationists" who should lay claim to that pedigree. He writes:

Whatever else might be said about the Enlightenment, it's rather obvious that the advocates of intelligent design are the philosophical heirs to the period's natural theology. For anyone to claim that materialism is the true progeny of that period is laughably misguided and a sad example of the decline in liberal education. Anyone with even a basic grasp of intellectual history should see where the truth lies. While they may not be direct descendents of that period's thinkers, these "neo-Creationists" could certainly be considered the illegitimate children of the philosopher and deist Voltaire.

The attempt to found science on atheistic materialism is not a new development. During the Enlightenment, atheists often championed the idea that the universe could have been created without a Creator. The French philosopher Voltaire, for one, was quite aware of that point of view - and rejected it thoroughly.

Read the rest of his fine essay at the link.

Potpourri Rant

Muhammad Cartoons. As a result of the now infamous printing of Muhammad cartoons, many people have been killed, property has been destroyed and million dollar bounties have been set by Muslim clerics for the death of those responsible for their printing. Interesting enough, the Koran says that no image of God shall be created as it would interfere with the spiritual relationship of the believer with God. Fair enough, the Bible suggests the same thing. But the Koran says nothing of images of Muhammad. So what we have is mindless maniacs killing and burning with no foundation for their actions.

The Dubai debacle. President Bush has refused to enforce the Constitutional mandate of the Federal government to protect our borders. One only has to look at the sad state of affairs regarding the border of Mexico to realize this. Now he insists on giving a company in Dubai authority to operate ports on the east coast. Hello? Interestingly enough, Bush has not vetoed a single spending bill while in office yet he threatens to veto any legislation to thwart this event. The bigger question is why the US isn't able to operate its own ports, but that might be an issue for another post.

If it is the case that we want to reward Dubai for allowing us to utilize their air strips for our interests in the Middle East it seems to me that typically, we offer financial aid to countries for being allowed to operate out of their air strips. I seem to recall offering Turkey billions to use theirs.

It's ironic that the Constitution mandates protection of our borders as the primary responsibility of the Federal government. Most if not all other responsibilities are/were delegated to the individual states, except for trade agreements with foreign countries, etc.

Given this lunacy, it's just a matter of time before Bush outsources airport security to Al Quada or Hamas.

Iran oil exchange in euros and discontinuance of M3. On March 20 Iran is scheduled to open an oil exchange that will accept euros for oil. Only days later, the Federal Reserve will discontinue publishing the M3, a measure of the growth of U.S. dollars. It's difficult to believe these events are unrelated and just a coincidence.

The latest Treasury offering:

"It was a terrible auction," summed up one trader at a U.S. primary dealer. "The bid-to-cover stank, the indirect bid was bad."

Looks like our foreign benefactors are starting to have second thoughts about investing in the U.S., and small wonder.

All of the above makes this link all the more prescient.

That this article is making mainstream news is an indicator that the first of three phases of the gold bull market has come to an end and the second phase is about to begin.

The first phase is what is known as the stealth phase where the smart money starts establishing a position in a market. This can last for years before the general population gets wind of the opportunity. Note that the bull market began in 1999 when gold hit a bottom of $252.

The second phase is when the investing public catches on and starts acquiring a position driving prices much, much higher and lasts the longest of the three phases. Articles in the mainstream press and Internet fuel this.

The blow-off phase is when the taxi drivers, shoe-shine guys, and trash collectors are telling you about their positions in the market. Prices go vertical. Personally, this is the time I would start easing out of my position.

Lastly, in case you had any doubts about what an American company would do for profits, visit this link.

In the United States, Cisco is known (among other things) for building corporate firewalls to block viruses and hackers. In China, the government had a unique problem: how to keep a billion people from accessing politically sensitive Web sites, now and forever.

The way to do it would be this: If a Chinese user tried to view a Web site outside China with political content, such as CNN.com, the address would be recognized by a filter program that screens out forbidden sites. The request would then be thrown away, with the user receiving a banal message: "Operation timed out."

Great, but China's leaders had a problem: The financial excitement of a wired China quickly led to a proliferation of eight major Internet service providers (ISPs) and four pipelines to the outside world. To force compliance with government objectives, to ensure that all pipes lead back to Rome, they needed the networking superpower, Cisco, to standardize the Chinese Internet and equip it with firewalls on a national scale.

According to the Chinese engineer, Cisco came through, developing a router device, integrator and firewall box specially designed for the government's telecom monopoly. Cisco also appears to have offered a significant initial discount in the price of the firewall boxes.

As a result of this, many Chinese have been arrested and imprisoned simply for seeking the truth. They will either rot in jail or be executed and their organs harvested and sold. Yet we hold China as a favorite nation trade status.

People running companies like Cisco turn my stomach. They're no worse that those at IBM who sold technology to Germany to track the Jews prior to our involvement in World War II. Their only motive is profit, no matter what the consequences.

514 Heretics

Over 500 scientists with Ph.Ds have signed a statement expressing their dissent from Darwinian evolutionary theory:

The Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement reads: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

The list of 514 signatories includes member scientists from the prestigious US and Russian National Academy of Sciences. Signers include 154 biologists, the largest single scientific discipline represented on the list, as well as 76 chemists and 63 physicists. Signers hold doctorates in biological sciences, physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, computer science, and related disciplines. Many are professors or researchers at major universities and research institutions such as MIT, The Smithsonian, Cambridge University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the Ohio State University, the University of Georgia, and the University of Washington.

And these are just the scientists who are willing to go public with their doubts. It may be that they are but the tip of the scientific iceberg. So much for the silly claim that all scientists accept the Darwinian paradigm and that there's no debate about it in the scientific community.

Jonathan Witt at Intelligent Design the Future chastises the New York Times for their clumsy attempts to pooh pooh the significance of the dissenters. See also this critique of the Times' report. Does anybody actually trust these people any more to be fair, accurate, and objective?

Ruse/Dennett

On Monday we linked to an e-mail exchange between Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett, both atheistic evolutionists strongly hostile to Intelligent Design. It's worth emphasizing one paragraph of the correspondence written by Ruse to Dennett:

I think that you and Richard [Dawkins] are absolute disasters in the fight against intelligent design - we are losing this battle, not the least of which is the two new supreme court justices who are certainly going to vote to let it into classrooms - what we need is not knee-jerk atheism but serious grappling with the issues - neither of you are willing to study Christianity seriously and to engage with the ideas - it is just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil, as Richard claims - more than this, we are in a fight, and we need to make allies in the fight, not simply alienate everyone of good will.

Quite an admission, that. Coming from such an eminent authority it is guaranteed to produce outrage and shock among the faithful, and to shake the confidence of any whose confidence in naturalism is already unsteady. It will also have a salutary effect on those in the academy who might be leaning toward ID but who at present feel too much professional pressure and intimidation to risk coming out publically in its favor.

Dembski had Ruse's permission to print this exchange, but we wonder whether Ruse had Dennett's permission to give it to him. If not, there could be serious umbrage brewing among the disciples of Charles Darwin, and this, sadly, even before the warm afterglow of Darwin Day fellowship has faded away.

Gumbel and Race

Bryant Gumbel, who is an African American television personality, recently had this to say about the Winter Olympics:

So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention.

Hmm. Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose there was a meeting of, say, African American mathematicians, and some conservative white reporter doing a story on the convention made the comment:

So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest intellects, despite a paucity of whites that makes the meeting look like an NAACP convention.

What do you suppose the media reaction would be? Would the reporter be allowed to keep his job? I suggest that that reporter would probably find himself, like Larry Summers, out of a job. My point is not to suggest that Mr. Gumbel is a racist or that his comment is inappropriate. I don't know whether he's a racist, and I don't believe, actually, that there was anything wrong with what he said. My point is simply to point out the racial double standard in our society. Blacks are permitted to say almost anything about racial differences without being seriously criticized, but if whites make similar remarks it could cost them their jobs and their careers. Summers came under fire at Harvard for making perfectly reasonable remarks about gender, not about race, but the principle is the same.

This situation is not only unjust, it's absurd. All it does is exacerbate ill-feeling among white males toward minorities and women. It's time to agree that whatever is appropriate or inappropriate to say of one race or gender should be appropriate or inappropriate to say about another. Neither race nor gender should be taboo subjects, nor should any race or either gender be granted a position of privilege, preference, or deference in the public discourse.

Let's stop criticizing and destroying people because they make perfectly sensible, even if sometimes mistaken, statements just because those statements don't meet the stringent standards of our hypersensitive social thought police.

Al-Qaeda Gambles on Civil War

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail analyzes the Golden Mosque bombing and points his finger at al-Qaeda in Iraq. Interestingly, there are suspects in custody, and no doubt strenuous "interrogations" have begun to determine who's behind the attack.

The attempt to drag Iraqi's Shiites and Sunnis into a bloody civil war intensifies. The dome of the Shiite Al Askari Mosque in Samarra, or Golden Mosque, has been destroyed by a well planned and well executed commando-style raid of insurgents dressed as Iraqi police. According to CNN, "A group of men dressed like Iraqi police commandos set off explosives." It appears suspects are now in custody, "Ten people -- all dressed as Iraqi police commandos."

The likely culprit is al-Qaeda in Iraq, or groups underneath the newly created Mujahedeen Shura Council. Zarqawi has desired a sectarian war between Shiites and Sunnis since his entry into the conflict, as he clearly stated in his letter to Osama bin Laden. al-Qaeda in Iraq has gone to through great pains of late to deny this, and will very likely not take credit in such an overt attack on the Shiite faithful. Silence and uncertainly will play into their hand, and feed conspiracy theories on who committed such an act. But the nature of the target and the sophistication of such an attack undeniably points to al-Qaeda. The detained "commandos" will be thoroughly interrogated, and the FBI will likely be called in to determine the nature of the charges used to destroy the dome.

You can read the rest of Roggio's post here.

Can't We Be More Like Europe?

Liberals like John Kerry and Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Ginsberg frequently point to Europe as the model the United States should emulate in our laws and cultural attitudes. It is unclear, though, how long this Euro-infatuation will continue in light of this sort of thing:

Right-wing British historian David Irving pleaded guilty yesterday to denying the Holocaust and was sentenced to three years in prison, even after conceding that he wrongly said there were no Nazi gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Irving, handcuffed and wearing a blue suit, arrived in court carrying a copy of one of his most controversial books -- "Hitler's War," which challenges the extent of the Holocaust. "I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz," Irving told the court before his sentencing. He faced up to 10 years in prison. He also expressed sorrow "for all the innocent people who died during the second world war."

But he insisted that he never wrote a book about the Holocaust, which he called "just a fragment of my area of interest."

"In no way did I deny the killings of millions of people by the Nazis," testified Irving, who has written nearly 30 books. Irving's lawyer immediately announced that he would appeal the sentence. "I consider the verdict a little too stringent. I would say it's a bit of a message trial," Elmar Kresbach said.

Irving, 67, has been in custody since his November arrest on charges stemming from two speeches that he gave in Austria in 1989 in which he was accused of denying the Nazis' extermination of 6 million Jews. He has contended that most of those who died at concentration camps such as Auschwitz succumbed to diseases such as typhus rather than execution.

The court convicted Irving after his guilty plea under the 1992 law, which applies to "whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media."

Irving's trial came amid new debate over freedom of expression in Europe, where the printing of unflattering caricatures of the prophet Muhammad has triggered deadly protests worldwide.

Now, we have no sympathy for holocaust deniers, but we do have a lot of sympathy for a free press and the free exchange of political ideas. Apparently, European courts do not. We will wait patiently for those liberal champions of the bold maxim which proclaims a willingness to fight to the death for another man's right to say that which is despicable, to come out foursquare in defense of Mr. Irving. They'll arrive on scene, we are sure, to carry the free speech fight to its enemies just as soon as they can emerge from hiding from the Mohammedans whose death threats have made the prospect of actually having to expend one's life in the battle for journalistic freedom seem uncomfortably likely.