The Book Of Job

I think fewer books in the Bible have challenged the reader more to understand the Divine message to be had than the book of Job. The Book of Job by Ethelbert W. Bullinger goes a long way to remove the mystery and confusion. It's available at Amazon.com but way too expensive as it is out of print and people that have it are sharking it for obscene prices. I picked it up for $11.00 a couple weeks ago. If anyone is interested in the book, I'd suggest waiting until another used book vendor offers it for sale at a reasonable price. I recently saw it offered here for $13.75 but don't know if it's still available.

From the book:

As the lost son confessed "I have sinned". As Joseph's brethren acknowledged "We are verily guilty". As David said "I have sinned against the Lord". As Isaiah confessed "I am undone...unclean". And as Daniel declared "my comeliness was turned into corruption". So must Job be brought to say, "I am vile. I abhor myself. I repent in dust and ashes".

This is the end of the Lord for the Lord Himself must be the teacher of this Divine lesson. Man may be used by God to bring it about but God alone can be the bringer near of His own salvation, and the bestower of his own righteousness.

All this is quite apart from mere "religion," as such. Job was religious, just as the heathen may be "very religious". Religion is the attempt of man to become righteous by morality and ordinances, but, the moment God produces a broken heart and a contrite spirit, the sinner is lifted completely out of the region of religion, and becomes the possessor of the "righteousness of God" Himself.

The book of Job, therefore, as we have said, is the illustration and the spiritual enlargement of the oldest lesson in the world as first taught in Gen. iv. 1-5. It is an object lesson which exhibits before our eyes the Divine answer to man's great question - the question of this book: "How shall mortal man be just with God?"

...

The first time the Lord God speaks to man after the Fall, He sets forth in his brief question, "Where art thou?" the lost and helpless condition of man. This is the first great lesson which man has to learn; and his attempt to answer this great question is that which forms the first step in his attainment of true "wisdom".

The first question of the Bible is intended to reveal to man his lost condition; and when he has discovered this, he asks the first question in the New Testament, intended to express this conviction, when he cries "Where is He?" (Matt. ii. 2) Where is the Savior whom Thou hast provided for lost sinners? Where is the Savior whom Thou has given and sent?

Unless we recognize this, as the "end" and design of the book, we shall never understand it, or learn the lesson for ourselves.

Simpleminded in Seattle

According to Betsy at Betsy's Page the Seattle Public Schools employ a person with the title of Director of Equity and Race Relations. Among this individual's duties, evidently, is the task of enlightening the taxpayers of the district as to the true nature and definition of racism. The Director's definition, distilled to its essence, is simply this: Something white people are guilty of. She words it rather differently, but what she says amounts to the same thing:

The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society."

This is the sort of addle-pated nonsense a Director of Equity churns out to justify her paycheck? What is "equitable" about this definition?

Question: If a poor white is oppressed by a wealthier black who hates whites because of their race, would the black be racist? Answer: No, because the black belongs to a racial group that is socially and economically inferior to the group to which the white belongs. Thus no matter how much power an individual black wields over an individual white, and no matter how much he uses that power to harm the white, he is innocent of the taint of racism because he is a member of the virtuous race of blacks who are untainted by the original sin of racism.

The Director of Racial Equity also assays to develop a taxonomy of racism for those of us who may not understand the sociological arcana involved. Cultural racism, for instance, is:

Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as "other", different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

Is it racist to point out that this might be the dumbest thing ever to be written on the subject of race? Madame Director of Equity and Race Relations manages to cram more stupidity into a single paragraph than one might have thought humanly possible. To take just a couple of examples:

It is cultural racism, by her definition, to be oriented toward the future, to pay into a retirement account, to show up for work every day and on time in order to secure a paycheck at the end of the week, to save for one's children's college education or a new house, to discipline oneself with regard to the pleasures of food, drink, and/or sex in order to secure the long term benefits of a healthier body and a more stable marriage. If this is racism, and if only whites are racist, it's no wonder the African American community is in such desperate condition.

It is cultural racism, we're given to understand, to value the rights of the individual. Madame Director of Equity and Race Relations should spend an evening or two with Atlas Shrugged, but assuming that she would not be inclined to read Ayn Rand - a white woman, after all - she might at least look around the globe at those societies which promote the collective over the individual and take note of what kind of communities they are. She might do well to compare predominately white nations built on the concept of the importance of individual rights versus non-white nations which are not, and ask herself which she would prefer she and her children live in.

It is cultural racism, the lady avers, to define one form of English as the standard for all citizens. Madame Director would do well to undertake a study of the countries of the world that have the greatest and the least social cohesion and assess whether there doesn't seem to be a correlation to language in these societies. In nations in which there are a plurality of languages there is often stultifying economic inefficiency and deprivation as well as cultural division. One of the surest ways to isolate people from each other, after all, is to encourage them to speak different languages. The best way to unify people is to give them a common tongue. Madame Director defines as racist the desire that we, as disparate races, be as unified as we can be through a common language. Very odd.

It is cultural racism to identify only whites as great writers or composers. One wishes Madame Director would give an example of someone who actually does this with regard to contemporary artists. If her complaint is that people tend to consider only whites to be great composers of classical music, or great writers prior to, say, 1920 perhaps that's because only whites were composing music during the classical era and writing literature prior to 1920 (with the exception of W.E.B. DuBois). Would it constitute cultural racism to say that historically only whites were great mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, or philosophers if only whites were doing this sort of work before the twentieth century?

One last question: Why are the Seattle taxpayers paying good money to employ someone as a Director of Equity and Race Relations in the first place, especially if the person employed is doing more to damage race relations than she is to help them?

Out of the Closet

Last Fall an accomplished geneticist at Cornell named John Sanford came out of the closet. Having harbored doubts for some time about what he calls the "Primary Axiom" of biology (i.e. neo-Darwinism) he could no longer keep his skepticism to himself. Braving the howls and execrations of his peers he has written a book (Genetic Entropy & and the Mystery of the Genome, 2005) wherein he lays out his doubts about the ability of Darwinian mechanisms to explain human genetics. He also discusses the path that led him to his apostasy. Here's a portion:

In retrospect, I realize that I have wasted so much of my life arguing about things that don't really matter. It is my sincere hope that this book can actually address something that really does matter. The issue of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going seem to me to be of enormous importance. This is the real subject of this book ....

Modern Darwinism is built on what I will be calling "The Primary Axiom". The Primary Axiom is that man is merely the product of random mutations plus natural selection. Within our society's academia, the Primary Axiom is universally taught, and almost universally accepted. It is the constantly mouthed mantra, repeated endlessly on every college campus. It is very difficult to find any professor on any college campus who would even consider (or should I say - dare) to question the Primary Axiom ....

Late in my career, I did something which for a Cornell professor would seem unthinkable. I began to question the Primary Axiom. I did this with great fear and trepidation. By doing this, I knew I would be at odds with the most "sacred cow" of modern academia. Among other things, it might even result in my expulsion from the academic world.

Although I had achieved considerable success and notoriety within my own particular specialty (applied genetics), it would mean I would have to be stepping out of the safety of my own little niche. I would have to begin to explore some very big things, including aspects of theoretical genetics which I had always accepted by faith alone. I felt compelled to do all this - but I must confess I fully expected to simply hit a brick wall. To my own amazement, I gradually realized that the seemingly "great and unassailable fortress" which has been built up around the Primary Axiom is really a house of cards.

The Primary Axiom is actually an extremely vulnerable theory - in fact it is essentially indefensible. Its apparent invincibility derives mostly from bluster, smoke, and mirrors. A large part of what keeps the Axiom standing is an almost mystical faith, which the true-believers have in the omnipotence of natural selection. Furthermore, I began to see that this deep-seated faith in natural selection was typically coupled with a degree of ideological commitment - which can only be described as religious. I started to realize (again with trepidation) that I might be offending a lot of people's religion!

Read the rest of Sanford's account of his backslide from the one true faith here.

The True Believers

Richard John Neuhaus at First Things (subscription required) notes that in the introduction to the book From the Gulag to the Killing Fields by Paul Hollander there appears a list of eight ways in which all extremist groups, whether of the right or left, are similar. All extremist mass movements are typified by the following beliefs or attitudes:

1. Extreme hostility toward "outgroups." You are either for us or against us and any dialogue or civil conversation with the "enemy" is betrayal.

2. Complete submissiveness to "ingroups." Our party and its leaders are to be supported without question. Criticism of our side is breaking ranks and breaking ranks is treason.

3. All relationships are subordinated to the criterion of what will advance the "cause."

4. The most important thing to know about the world is that it is divided by the conflict between them and us.

5. Purely theoretical ideas which do not serve the cause are to be repressed.

6. The extension of sentiment is a sign of weakness.

7. We and our group can only survive by the manipulation of others, who are there to be manipulated.

8. The triumph of our cause will result in a harmonious world without conflict.

Communism and Naziism exhibited most or all of these traits in the twentieth century and together they made that period the most murderous in all of human history. Islamo-fascism exhibits the same traits today, and, if it is allowed to thrive, it'll do to this century what the Marxists and Nazis did to the last, or worse.

Iraqis Are Safer Than Americans

Iraq is in chaos. Death and destruction are everywhere. It's the most dangerous place on the planet. That's the message we have drilled into us every day by the American media. Things may not be quite as the media reports them, however. Andrew Walden at FrontPage Mag has the data:

Iraqi civilian death statistics compiled by Rep. Steve King, R-IA, indicate that, contrary to the impression made on the evening news, Iraq actually has a lower civilian violent death rate than Washington, D.C., and pre-Katrina New Orleans. Iraq is also substantially safer than several foreign countries. After seeing media coverage of Iraqi violence King said: "I began to ask myself the question, if you were a civilian in Iraq, how could you tolerate that level of violence. What really is the level of violence?"

King calculates an annualized Iraqi civilian death rate of 27.5 per 100,000 based on U.S. military and independent statistical sources.

Ironically, Venezuela has 31.5 violent deaths per 100,000 - 14.5 percent higher than Iraq.

Venezuela is not alone in suffering at the hands of left-wing dictators or wannabe dictators: Columbia, hounded by leftist narco-guerrillas, every year loses 61.7 of its citizens to violence per every 100,000.

South Africa, led by an increasingly corrupt African National Congress loses 49.6 per 100,000 to violent deaths every year. In Jamaica-ruled for decades by the socialist People's National Party-it is 32.4.

In Russia, as the Soviet system disintegrated, the count of violent deaths-outside the Gulags-soared. In 1998 there were 30.6 homicides per 100,000 population. Three years after end of Saddam's socialist dictatorship Iraq is actually more peaceful than was Russia seven years after the end of socialist USSR.

But high murder rates are not limited to overseas leftist-ruled countries.

In Washington, D.C., it is 45.9 violent deaths per 100,000. This means civilians living in Washington D.C. .... are 63.5 percent less safe than Iraqi civilians.

Other American cities with higher violent civilian death rates than Iraq include:

Detroit: 41.8 per 100,000

Baltimore: 37.7 per 100,000

Atlanta: 34.9 per 100,000

St. Louis: 31.4 per 100,000

The American city with the highest civilian death rate was New Orleans before Katrina-with a staggering 53.1 deaths per 100,000-almost twice the death rate in Iraq.

Hudson makes the point that the foreign countries with high death rates are all ruled by leftists and the American cities with such terrible rates are all governed by Democrats. Be that as it may, it will come as a surprise to most Americans that an Iraqi is safer in his city than an American is in his. Who'd have thought that would be the case after watching the evening news.

Bio-Machines

Here's a cool site for anyone interested in cell biology. The thumbnails link to animations of the operation of several different molecular machines. I don't know which is more incredible, the structure and function of these nano-machines or the fact that there are people brilliant enough to figure them out.

Most incredible of all (literally) is that these bio-machines are the product of nothing other than blind, purposeless forces.

Thanks to Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Giving the Church a Black Eye

With Pat Robertson in full voice the Church doesn't need any more nitwits feeding ammo to its detractors, but evidently that's exactly what has recently emerged. It's a sad day for the Church if things are as Jonathan Hudson at Talk to Action claims them to be here. In a follow-up post Hudson says:

A top aide to mega-church pastor Rick Warren is advising the makers of a children's video game in which characters kill New Yorkers while shouting "Praise the Lord." When children tire of converting or killing New Yorkers, they can switch sides and command the demonic armies of the AntiChrist, and kill the conservative Christians. The real-time strategy game, slated for release in October 2006, is based on the best selling series of Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The web site of Left Behind Games states the involvement of Mark Carver on its Advisory Board. This web-based marketing tool also highlights his role as Executive Director of Mr. Warren's Purpose Driven Church. What appears to be going on here is an old-fashioned business practice called "endorsement by association."

We await pastor Rick Warren's (author of The Purpose Driven Life) response to attempts to associate him and his ministry with what is apparently a truly execrable video game.

Santorum's Slide

A recent Rasmussen poll shows incumbent Rick Santorum slipping well behind challenger Bob Casey in the race for the Pennsylvania senate seat, and people are wondering why. There are several reasons which come to mind, not the least of which is that Pennsylvania is a blue state which is nevertheless pro-life. In other words, a pro-life Republican running against a pro-choice Democrat will attract a lot of pro-life Catholic Democrats, but Casey is also pro-life and that neutralizes much of Santorum's cross-over appeal. Casey will get pro-life votes that Santorum would otherwise have received if any other Democrat were running.

Another major factor in Santorum's decline is that he's only getting the support of 67% of Republicans. This is an astonishing figure, but it makes sense when we remember that Santorum endorsed liberal Arlen Specter in his primary race against conservative Pat Toomey in 2004. This angered a lot of conservatives and convinced them that Santorum is not a reliable political ally. Later, Santorum voted against Tom Coburn's bill that would have substantially reduced a lot of wasteful and unnecessary spending and this further antagonized those Republicans who pay attention to such things.

There's not much Santorum can do to win the allegiance of pro-life Democrats, but he can woo back disaffected Republicans. He's only got five months to do it, though, so he better get started.

The Second Fifty

John T. Miller at NRO has been swamped with more suggestions for conservative themed rock songs, and he lists the latest recommendations here. The top fifty can be viewed here.

I think the second group may be even better than the first although I was disappointed that I didn't see Where Did Our Love Go by the Supremes or Cat's in the Cradle by Harry Chapin on the list. Maybe they don't qualify as classic rock.

Advice For Hugo

Lowell Ponte has an outstanding article at FrontPage Mag which lays out for the reader precisely what sort of man Hugo Chavez is and where he's taking Venezuela. After Iran, and perhaps North Korea, Venezuela under Chavez is perhaps the most troublesome country on the globe. Ponte explains why. His essay is an education. Here's a piece of it:

Democracy has ended in Venezuela, replaced by blatantly rigged elections and strong-armed Chavista mobs and spies in the streets. Venezuelans now face the presence in their midst of perhaps 20,000 of Castro's secret police and an epidemic of soaring violence and crime committed by keftist thugs who know the regime seldom makes arrests for the robbery and murder of bourgeois victims. Caracas, reports The Times of London, "now has the world's highest murder rate per capita."

Chavez has turned Venezuela into a police state in which the press is intimidated and vague new "Social Responsibility" sedition laws make it a crime to criticize the government. Those who speak out or sign petitions challenging Chavez's dictatorial rule and his "Bolivarian Revolution" are blacklisted and risk losing their jobs or becoming targets of government harassment and mob attacks.

Hugo Chavez now rules by decree and via a rubber stamp legislature and judiciary. He has indicated he might not step down when the Constitution's term limits would end his presidency. This May he said he might seek "indefinite" re-election, i.e., the de facto position of "dictator for life," through a referendum.

Like Napoleon, Chavez wants no other gods above himself. He has expelled Christian missionaries from Venezuela, putting Cuban "teachers" in their place to proselytize for the pagan religion of Marxism. In this predominantly Roman Catholic country he has called this church's leadership a "tumor." Venezuelan Cardinal Rosalio Castillo Lara accused Chavez of leading the country towards dictatorship.

But Catholic "Liberation Theologians" and others on the religious ultra-Left have treated socialist Chavez like "Saint Hugo." One poster popular with Chavistas depicts Hugo Chavez as a holy figure riding at the side of an approving Jesus Christ. And Chavez seems to delight in his Marxist "Cult of Personality."

This wouldn't threaten us as greatly if Hugo Chavez were imposing his egomaniacal Marxist dictatorship on a poor Third World nation. Venezuela, however, is the fifth largest oil producer in the world and a major supplier to the United States.

We have two words of advice for Mr. Chavez which we hope he'll take under advisement: Manuel Noriega.

Preserving the Progressive Vision

Thomas Sowell sets the record straight about the alleged glories of the sixties and explodes more than one progressive shibboleth about those pivotal years. The short version is that the fruits of the sixties were, despite the mythology clung to by those responsible for that chaotic decade, for the most part thoroughly rotten. Sowell's essay is worth reading in full:

In Shelby Steele's new book, "White Guilt," he mentions an encounter with a white liberal who fiercely defended the welfare state programs and policies of the 1960s. "Damn it, we saved this country!" he all but shouted. "This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend."

Before we turn to facts, we need to understand the vision. This is a vision of the world more precious than gold. To those who believe it, this vision is a treasure beyond price because it is also a wonderful vision of themselves -- and they are not likely to give it up for anything so mundane as grubby facts.

For those liberals who lived through the 1960s, that was often also the springtime of their youth, increasingly treasured as a memory, as the grim realities of old age settle down upon them today. It is expecting an awful lot to expect them to consider any alternative vision of the world, especially one that shatters the beautiful picture of themselves as wise and compassionate saviors of society. But what are the facts?

While liberals may think of the 1960s as the beginning of many "progressive" trends in American society, cold hard facts tell a very different story. The 1960s marked the end of many beneficial trends that had been going on for years -- and a complete reversal of those trends as programs, policies, and ideologies of the liberals took hold.

Teenage pregnancy had been going down for years. So had venereal disease. Rates of infection for syphilis in 1960 was half of what it had been in 1950. There were similar trends in crime. The total number of murders in the United States in 1960 was lower than in 1950, 1940, or 1930 -- even though the population was growing and two new states had been added. The murder rate, in proportion to population, in 1960 was half of what it had been in 1934.

Every one of these beneficial trends sharply reversed after liberal notions gained ascendancy during in the 1960s. By 1974, the murder rate had doubled. Even liberal icon Sargent Shriver, head of the agency directing the "war on poverty," admitted that "venereal disease has skyrocketed" even though "we have had more clinics, more pills, and more sex education than ever in history."

Liberals looking back on the 1960s take special pride in their role on racial issues, for civil rights laws and the advancement of blacks out of poverty. Those riots that threatened to tear the country apart were race riots -- and supposedly the liberals saved us all. But what do the facts show?

Both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans voting for their enactment than the percentage of Congressional Democrats. You can check it out in The Congressional Record.

As for black economic advances, the most dramatic reduction in poverty among blacks occurred between 1940 and 1960, when the black poverty rate was cut almost in half, without any major government programs of the Great Society kind that began in the 1960s. Liberals love to point to the rise of blacks out of poverty since 1960 as proof of the benefits of liberal programs, as if the continuation of a trend that began decades earlier was proof of how liberals saved blacks.

As for saving the country from riots, the facts show the direct opposite. It was precisely when liberals were in power that riots rocked cities across the country. There were never as many riots during the two presidential terms of Ronald Reagan as during one term of Lyndon Johnson. Even during the 1960s, riots were far more common and deadly in liberal bastions like New York City than in Chicago, where the original Mayor Daley announced on television that he had given his police orders to "shoot to kill" if riots broke out.

Daley was demonized for saying such a thing, even though Chicago did not have the loss of life suffered in liberal cities where mayors pandered to grievance-mongers and pleaded for restraint. In other words, the net effect was that Daley saved lives while liberals saved their vision.

The hardest thing for a person to face is the truth that everything they've believed in their whole life is wrong. Liberals will never admit that so far from moving this country forward, their policies and prescriptions during the 1960s plunged us into a twenty year dark age from which we didn't begin to recover until Ronald Reagan became president in 1980. The period from JFK's assassination in 1962 to 1980 was, aside from the Civil War, perhaps the most socially destructive era in our history, and it was, not coincidentally, simultaneously the highwater mark of radical liberalism.

David Frum's book How We Got Here: The 70's: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life - For Better Or Worse is an excellent account of the devastating effects of the ideological commitments of the left during the latter half of the American dark ages.

Two Years Old

Recently I noticed that Viewpoint went online in May 2004 which makes last month our two year anniversary and I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you to all of our readers for continuing to visit our site.

The idea of Viewpoint was conceived one day as brother Dick and I sat with the rest of our siblings in a hospital waiting room while our mother was recovering from a surgical procedure. In a diversion from the weightier matters of the moment I suggested that a forum on the internet where intelligent commentary by him could be easily accessed was something to be considered.

I possessed the technical know-how to make the website happen and he possessed the ability to articulate the issues that confront us on a daily basis. And Viewpoint was born.

I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that the success of Viewpoint is totally due to the tireless efforts of Dick who, without a support staff to gather relevant information, continues to publish timely, cogent, and articulate content that challenges the intellect of our viewers. Aside from my occasional rants, Viewpoint reflects our world and universe as Dick sees it. And I'm happy to have been a part of making that possible.

Thanks, bro.

Best American Novel Contest Update

With 3500 votes having been cast Powerline's Best American Novel contest shows Huckleberry Finn in the lead so far. You can still vote for your choice here (The poll is in the far right margin of the page).

Match Point

Summer is a good time to get caught up on the books I wanted to read during the school year and the movies I wanted to watch. One of the latter is Woody Allen's Match Point. Allen often gives the viewer's intellect something to chew on in his films, and I generally enjoy his stuff, even if it sometimes is gratuitously salacious, as Match Point is.

Match Point is really a conflation of Allen's earlier Crimes and Misdemeanors with Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The main character, Chris Wilton, is a British Raskolnikov, a Nietzschean Uber Man who faces a problem quite similar to that faced by Martin Landau in C&M. A woman with whom he has been having an affair threatens to spill the beans to his wife.

At the outset of the story Wilton observes that "It seems scientists are confirming more and more that all existence is here by blind chance; [there's] no purpose, no design." Allen returns to the idea of life being just a matter of chance or luck several times throughout the movie and ties it together brilliantly at the end.

In the same conversation another character opines that, "Despair is the path of least resistance." To which Wilton responds, "I think that faith is the path of least resistance."

Chris Wilton is a modern man for whom religious faith is never considered except once and then only to be dismissed with derision: A man who lost both legs subsequently found Jesus, Chris tells us. To which Chris' brother in law-to-be responds "Sounds like a poor trade."

But by the end of the movie Wilton is himself in despair, having, like Raskolnikov, drunk deeply of the cup of his nihilistic convictions. It is only incredible good luck that saves him from utter ruin. He recognizes that, given his disdain for faith, his life is meaningless and that there is no justice in the world:

"It would be fitting if I were apprehended and punished. At least there would be some small sign of justice - some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning."

But for Chris life is without purpose, meaning, or justice, and consequently there's no moral obligation, either. All is chance, sheer luck. So it is for modern man without God. If God is dead, as he is for the Chris Wiltons of the world, then life is a great yawning emptiness that nothing can fill. It is day after day of meaningless, grindingly pointless existence. It is the life of Meursault in Camus' The Stranger.

Chris' wife chirpily proclaims that she doesn't care, she loves life anyway, but she is a woman who thinks little about anything beyond how to get herself pregnant. She plays Marie to Wilton's Meursault.

Wilton turns out to be indeed incredibly lucky (the movie's very clever ending is based on this), but one wonders whether his luck has saved him or whether it has condemned him to the hell of existing without purpose or meaning.

In Hannah and Her Sisters Allen says that he "doesn't want to go on living in a Godless universe. The only thing we can know for certain is that life is meaningless." Allen seems to have spent a career wrestling with the modern predicament. He doesn't want to believe there is a God, but he finds it difficult to live with the existential consequences of unbelief. Man has to believe in something, but if there is no God there's nothing worth believing in.

Follow Up

Ben Stein offers up a great article on corporate malfeasance that dovetails nicely with my post from the other day.

From the link:

Isn't there ever enough for you guys? You're already rich in every single case. You already have immense corporate perks. Isn't that enough? Do you also have to steal?

...

This country is at war. It's an outrage that while we're at war, executives who are already fabulously rich are stealing and are at liberty. America is humiliated by its brightest and most ambitious looting it, while its young men and women die for it.

Reactionaries at the ACLU

The ACLU is all for free speech, or so we have been told. It turns out, though, that this is only true when the speech is such as is deemed acceptable to the membership of the ACLU, even if the dissenting voices are directors on the ACLU's governing board:

The ACLU has always been a strong First Amendment advocate, but the pro-abortion group is planning to toss aside the free speech rights of its board members after some of them criticized the group for supporting a Congressional abortion bill that would unfairly target pregnancy centers. The ACLU joined leading pro-abortion organizations last month in backing a measure that would threaten to shut down pregnancy centers that abortion advocates say deceive women because they don't do abortions.

Members of the ACLU board gave various media interviews saying they disagreed with the groups decision to support the bill and say the board should have been consulted. Now the pro-abortion group is asking for board members to remain silent and not give public interviews about such disagreements.

An ACLU committee has proposed new standards for its board members and says they should no longer speak to the media and be mindful of the financial costs of public disagreement. "Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement," the committee proposes, according to a New York Times report.

Nat Henthoff, a former ACLU board member who is pro-life and a nationally syndicated columnist, told the Times: "For the national board to consider promulgating a gag order on its members -- I can't think of anything more contrary to the reason the ACLU exists."

"I find it quite appalling that the ACLU is actively supporting this," board member Wendy Kaminer told the New York Sun in an interview shortly after the ACLU supported the bill. "I think this is precisely the kind of legislation we should be opposing, not supporting."

"I am troubled by the assumption in the legislation that abortion services, as a matter of linguistics and a matter of law, cannot include discussing with a woman why she shouldn't have an abortion," Kaminer said.

This is rich. Someone needs to explain to idealists like Hentoff and Kaminer that, contrary to their fervent asseverations, many leftists simply don't see free speech as a good in itself. It is only a good insofar as it can be used to weaken the social fabric that has held this country together for 200 years. It is certainly not prudent, in their view, to so liberalize speech that it be a potential impediment to the work of the ACLU itself as it seeks to undermine the institutions of this nation. Such a freedom would be, well, reactionary.

Putting the Cart Before the Horse

William Dembski quotes this astonishing passage from a speech given this spring by uber-Darwinist and atheist Daniel Dennett:

The late Steve Gould was really right when he called Richard and me Darwinian fundamentalists. And I want to say what a Darwinian fundamentalist is. A Darwinian fundamentalist is one who recognizes that either you shun Darwinian evolution altogether, or you turn the traditional universe upside down and you accept that mind, meaning, and purpose are not the cause but the fairly recent effects of the mechanistic mill of Darwinian algorithms. It is the unexceptioned view that mind, meaning, and purpose are not the original driving engines, but recent effects that marks, I think, the true Darwinian fundamentalist.

How can such heartless culling produce the magnificent designs that we see around us? It seems just about impossible that such a simple mechanical sieve could produce such amazing design in the biosphere.

Francis Crick called Orgel's Second Rule. "Evolution is cleverer than you are."

Again and again evolutionists, molecular biologists, biologists in general, see some aspect of nature which seems to them to be sort of pointless or daft or doesn't make much sense - and then they later discover it's in fact an exquisitely ingenious design - it is a brilliant piece of design - that's what Francis Crick means by Orgel's Second Rule.

This might almost look like a slogan for Intelligent Design theory. Certainly Crick was not suggesting that the process of evolution was a process of intelligent design. But then how can evolution be cleverer than you are?

What you have to understand is that the process itself has no foresight; it's entirely mechanical; has no purpose - but it just happens that that very process dredges up, discovers, again and again and again, the most wonderfully brilliant designs - and these designs have a rationale. We can make sense of them. We can reverse-engineer them, and understand why they are the wonderful designs they are.

It would help us to understand how this is possible if we could break all this brilliant design work up into processes which we could understand the rationale of, without attributing it to the reason of some intelligent designer. [In other words, it would help if there were a shred of evidence for Darwinian algorithms having the creative power that Dennett attributes to them. -WmAD]

These processes are arms races. Not just arms races between armies of intelligent people, but arms races between trees, and between bacteria, and between any form of life you want to name. We can watch an arms race generate more and more design, more exquisite solutions to problems, in ways that are strikingly similar to the more intelligently (but not very intelligently) guided arms races that give us the metaphor in the first place.

Of all the species on the planet, Homo sapiens, is exceptional: it is the only species that has evolved that can understand that it's one of the fruits on the tree of life.

It's hard to read this without getting the feeling that Dennett is trying with all his might not to admit that living things certainly appear to be intelligently designed. Indeed, were it not for Dennett's a priori committment to atheism he would probably not even bother to engage in such a laborious struggle. He gives the game away in this paragraph where he tries to convince us that a blind, mecahnical process is even more brilliant, more ingenious, than the most clever of human engineers:

What you have to understand is that the process itself has no foresight; it's entirely mechanical; has no purpose - but it just happens that that very process dredges up, discovers, again and again and again, the most wonderfully brilliant designs - and these designs have a rationale. We can make sense of them. We can reverse-engineer them, and understand why they are the wonderful designs they are.

Dennett's confidence that, despite all appearances to the contrary, living things are not really intelligently designed rests upon his confidence that there is no intelligent designer. In philosophy this sort of thinking is called begging the question, or less technically, putting the cart before the horse.

Best American Novel

Any literature enthusiasts out there? Powerline is taking a poll on the greatest American novel. They have twenty one nominations and directions for voting here. I am sorry to admit that I have only read about half of them so I don't feel qualified to vote. If I were to vote on the one's I've read, however, I think I'd have to pick Moby Dick first and Uncle Tom's Cabin second. They were both, in different ways, very powerful reads.

No. The Da Vinci Code is not on the list.

A Rogues' Gallery

If Stuart Taylor at National Journal were playing horseshoes almost every sentence of his essay about the Duke lacrosse team would be a ringer:

My rogues' gallery does not (in all probability) include any Duke University lacrosse player. That's because the available evidence leaves me about 85 percent confident that the three members who have been indicted on rape charges are innocent and that the accusation is a lie. (Some evidence was in my April 29 column; some is below.)

The gallery does include more than 90 members of the Duke faculty who have prejudged the case, with some exuding the anti-white racism and disdain for student-athletes that pollutes many college faculties.

The gallery also includes former Princeton University President William Bowen and civil-rights lawyer Julius Chambers. They went out of their way to slime the lacrosse players in a report on the Duke administration's handling of the rape scandal -- a report that is a parody of race-obsessed political correctness.

Many members of the national media have published grossly one-sided accounts of the case while stereotyping the lacrosse players as spoiled, brutish louts and glossing over the accuser's huge credibility problems.

Then there is Mike Nifong, the Durham, NC, district attorney who is prosecuting the case. In addition to the misconduct detailed in my April 29 column, he has shielded his evidence (if any) from public scrutiny while seeking to keep the rape charges hanging over the defendants by delaying any trial until next spring....

....Am I prejudging the case myself? Yes, in that I have not yet seen all of the evidence. And yes, in that there could be an innocent explanation for the recent arrest of the cabbie by rape-case investigators under a two-and-half-year-old, apparently frivolous shoplifting warrant.

But when a petty-tyrant prosecutor has perverted and prolonged the legal process without disclosing his supposed evidence, and when academics and journalists have joined in smearing presumptively innocent young men as racist, sexist brutes -- in the face of much contrary evidence -- it's not too early to offer tentative judgments.

I'll start with Houston Baker, a Duke professor of English and of African and African-American studies. In a public letter dated March 29, he assailed "white ... male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech" and "sport their disgraced jerseys on campus, safe under the cover of silent whiteness." He all but pronounced them guilty of "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white, male privilege loosed amongst us" against a "black woman who their violence and raucous witness injured for life." And on he raved, oozing that brand of racism which consists of falsely smearing decent people as racists.

If you're interested in this case you should read the rest of Taylor's piece at the link. It's the best single article on this episode that I've seen.

Why We Must Stop Illegal Immigration

The Heritage Foundation has released a study on "low-skill" immigration that concludes that it will substantially raise welfare costs and poverty levels. They recommend the following:

1. The influx of illegal immigrants should be stopped by rigorous border security programs and strong programs to prevent employers from employing illegals.

2. Amnesty and citizenship should not be given to current illegal immigrants. Amnesty has nega�tive fiscal consequences and is manifestly unfair to those who have waited for years to enter the country lawfully. Amnesty would also serve as a magnet, drawing even more future illegal immigration.

3. Any guest worker program should grant tem�porary, not permanent, residence and should not be a pathway to citizenship. A guest worker program should not disproportionately swell the ranks of low-skill workers.

4. Children born to parents who are illegal immi�grants or to future guest workers should not be given citizenship status. Granting citizen�ship automatically confers welfare eligibility and makes it unlikely the parent will ever leave the U.S.

5. The legal immigration system grants lawful permanent residence to some 950,000 per�sons each year. This system should be altered to substantially increase the proportion of new entrants with high levels of education and skills in demand by U.S. firms. Under current law, foreign-born parents and siblings of natu�ralized citizens are given preference for entry visas. The current visa allotments for family members (other than spouses and minor chil�dren) should be eliminated, and quotas for employment- and skill-based entry increased proportionately.

Meanwhile, LaShawn Barber links us to Politics of Prudence which notes that a Columbuia University study found that over a 5-year period it would cost $340 billion to accomodate illegals, but only $206 billion to deport them.

LaShawn also dug up an editorial from the Gulf Times, a Qatar newspaper. Read this excerpt:

The estimated 1.1 million illegal immigrants currently in the nation's public school system cost taxpayers' $9.6 billion every year in an attempt to educate them (despite the illegal immigrant community's epidemic-scale dropout rates). The 2.2 million children of illegal immigrants in America, often referred to as "anchor babies" to ensure the parents can stay, add an additional $20 billion to that tab.

In California, the 2004-05 state budget spent $9,811 per pupil in the classroom. An estimated 425,000 illegal immigrants in the state's classrooms during that period cost taxpayers' more than $4bn - a figure that does not include the "anchor baby" population in the classroom.

More than 40,000 illegal immigrants jammed California's prison system in 2004, costing taxpayers $1.5 billion in tax funds not reimbursed by the federal government.

In one of the cruellest jokes played on the American taxpayers, illegal immigrants are allowed to claim children living back in Mexico and qualify for the earned-income tax credit that traditionally has helped the American poor (my emphasis).

These numbers are just the tip of a fiscal iceberg that government officials have slammed the American ship of state into - and now they are striking up the band and rearranging the deck chairs.

Americans hear the mantra every day that without illegal immigrants working in jobs that citizens are too lazy to do, everything from a clean hotel room to a head of lettuce would skyrocket in price.

A day without a Mexican - the refrain now goes - would literally lead to the collapse of the American economy. To the contrary, a year without the crushing weight of millions of illegal immigrants on communities and their budgets just may save the American working and middle class.

Yet there is precious little discussion of how a family of six Mexican nationals living in Pomona, California, who soak up nearly $40,000 annually in taxpayer funds just to educate their four children, is contributing more back into the economy. Consider even if the primary wage-earner in this family grossed $35,000 annually, a fortune back in Mexico, most of that income is likely to be off-the-books and under-taxed.

But education is only one part of the social services system meant for at-risk and in-need Americans that illegal immigrants have drilled into: heath-care costs and subsidised housing are two other areas where the crushing cost of illegal immigration is destroying the system.

It is arguments like this that have convinced many Republicans that George Bush, whatever his merits in fighting the GWOT, simply cannot be counted on to do the right thing to preserve this nation from the tsunami that is washing across the Rio Grande. Neither can about a dozen Republican senators and virtually all of the Democrats. That's why some are taking it upon themselves to raise the money and undertake the construction of a border fence.

If you'd like to help construct that fence go here.