On Love

Gideon Strauss has a lovely little meditation on love at Comment. For those who enjoy reading love stories will also enjoy reading Anne Dayton's essay on stories she loves.

RLC

Hillary and Hardball on SNL

Saturday Night Live spoofs Hillary Clinton and Hardball's Chris Matthews. It's a funny and revealing bit since it captures so well the idiosyncracies and personalities of both of them. It's a bit surprising, though, that SNL would poke fun at Hillary, who is something of a liberal icon, but maybe the parody is indicative of the displeasure of the left-wing base with Hillary's persistant refusal to disavow her vote for the Iraq war.

At any rate, be advised that the SNL skit does not elide or ignore Hillary's (alleged) legendary temper or uninhibited use of vulgarity.

RLC

Ten Myths About Atheism (Pt. VII)

Sam Harris' seventh of what he considers to be myths about atheism is the belief that:

Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.

Harris explains, sort of, that:

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely - because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

Of all of Harris' alleged myths this is perhaps the strangest.

First, he apparently confuses emotional experience with spiritual experience. Spiritual experience is based upon an encounter with the transcendent, not upon our biochemistry. Atheists deny any transcendent reality beyond nature and therefore ab defino deny the possibility of spiritual experience.

Second, I don't know anyone who has given the matter any thought who believes that a transformed life proves that Jesus is the "sole savior of humanity." There are many who believe that their experience confirms Jesus' reality and his love for them as individuals. There are many for whom their encounter with Christ has been convincing evidence that they are saved from spiritual death, but His status as the unique savior of humanity is information most Christians glean only from Biblical revelation, not from spiritual experience.

Third, of course no one can be logically certain that Jesus rose from the dead. Indeed, no one can be certain of much of anything other than the Cartesian certainty of their own existence. Spiritual experience, however, may give the individual a kind of psychological assurance that Jesus still, in some sense, lives and that assurance exists in a state of mutual reinforcement with the historical testimony concerning the events surrounding Jesus' death and subsequent resurrection.

But, more to the point, what does any of what Harris writes have to do with refuting the claim that atheists are closed to spiritual experience? Harris seems to simply deny the myth and then spend his time criticizing unrelated Christian beliefs.

For our previous posts on Harris' "myths" see part I, II, III, IV, and V and VI.

RLC

Sandy Berger, Secret Agent Man

This'll make you laugh. PowerLine has the winner of Bill Bennett's "Sandy Berger Lies" song parody contest. Go here, scroll to the bottom and click on the audio. It's pretty funny.

RLC

Trashing Dawkins

H. Allen Orr has a lengthy and very thorough review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion in the New York Review of Books. Like every reviewer of this book that I've read, Orr pretty much trashes Dawkins' effort:

Despite my admiration for much of Dawkins's work, I'm afraid that I'm among those scientists who must part company with him here. Indeed, The God Delusion seems to me badly flawed. Though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist, I'm forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he's actually more an amateur. I don't pretend to know whether there's more to the world than meets the eye and, for all I know, Dawkins's general conclusion is right. But his book makes a far from convincing case.

Orr explains his particular objections in the review. Check it out if Dawkins' ideas are of interest to you.

RLC

Whatever Works

Philosopher Philip Quinn of Notre Dame argues that it's morally permissable to lie to defeat the creationists as long as one feels a twinge of conscience while doing it. I know, you're skeptical that a philosopher would actually promote such a morally dubious strategy. Well, read what he says for yourself at Telic Thoughts and tell me if there is any other plausible interpretation of his words.

The link to Stephen Jones that you'll find at Telic Thoughts is also revealing. Jones argues that several prominent scientists deliberately misled the court in the Dover Intelligent Design trial when they testified that ID is not science. It is common knowledge among scientists and philosophers that what constitutes science, i.e. the demarcation question, is an unresolved, and probably unresolvable, problem. Thus, to testify that ID is not science, or not even good science, was to do precisely what Quinn condones.

It seems that the Darwinian strategy for combating ID is to do whatever it takes to win. If their arguments aren't persuasive enough to carry the day then just make stuff up.

RLC

Making Iraq Work

There is no more fertile a mind in politics than Newt Gingrich's and no politician with a more scintillating record for achieving success in governing in difficult circumstances than Rudy Guiliani. The two team up to present what they think to be the recipe for standing Iraq on its economic feet.

RLC

Ten Myths About Atheism (Pt. V and VI)

We continue our critique of Sam Harris' Ten Myths About Atheism with a look today at numbers 5 and 6. Harris claims that the following assertion is a myth:

5) Atheism has no connection to science.

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God - as some scientists seem to manage it - there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

Harris words this myth rather tendentiously. Of course, there is a connection between atheism and science because science employs a methodology which assumes naturalism. It is thus easy for someone already disinclined to believe in a personal God to have that disinclination continually reinforced in his/her work. The point is that there is no logical nexus between atheism and science. One can be a scientist without having to forfeit one's theistic beliefs. We could just ask Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Faraday, Boyle or dozens of other great thinkers from the classical era of science.

Harris also disputes the following:

6) Atheists are arrogant.

When scientists don't know something - like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed - they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

Well, I don't think this is quite true. From which fact of science, after all, do atheists draw their opinion that there is no God, that the cosmos is not designed by an intelligent creator, or that we are not made in the image of God? When Harris claims that scientists don't pretend to know things that can't be known he creates a problem for himself inasmuch as a lot of scientists and people like himself who write on science pretend to know that there is no purpose to the universe's existence, that those first self-replicating molecules he mentions arose through purely naturalistic processes, and that there is no God, but none of these are things that can be known.

If Harris really wants to demonstrate his intellectual honesty and lack of arrogance, he could start by admitting that he really has no idea whether the universe has a purpose or not, or whether an intelligence was behind the emergence of the first bio-molecules, or whether God exists or not. He could admit that his atheism is not based upon any clincher of an argument but is actually based upon little more than his preference that God not exist.

Such admissions would be a gratifying display of both honesty and humility, but I don't expect that we'll hear those words pass his lips anytime soon.

For our discussion of his first four "myths" go here and follow the links.

RLC

Knowing God

I came across this interesting and challenging observation in Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament by Christopher J.H. Wright.

The people of God as a whole will be characterized as a community who know Him. Now if we go on to ask what it means to know God, Jeremiah allows us no sentimental feelings of private spiritual piety. He is absolutely clear. To know God is to delight in faithful love, justice and righteousness, as God himself does (9:24). More than that, it means not only to delight in such things, but actually to do righteousness and justice by defending the rights of the poor and needy - that is to know God. Jeremiah defines the knowledge of God in one of the most challenging verses in the Bible.

"Your father (i.e. Josiah) did what was right and just.
He defended the cause of the poor and needy and so all went well.
Is that not what it means to know me?" declares the Lord. (Jer. 22:15-16)

M100

This is a Hubble photo of spiral galaxy M100 which is similar in form to our Milky Way. Our sun, and hence our earth, are located in one of the relatively clear spaces between the spiral arms. This, according to Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards in Privileged Planet, is extremely fortunate since were it not the case the heavens would have been obscured from view by the dust and consequently modern science, which was contingent to a large extent on astronomical observation, would probably never have developed.

It's also possible that had our planet been located almost anywhere else in the galaxy higher life forms could not have arisen. If earth were embedded in one of the arms of the spiral the amount of debris, radiation, and gravitational effects to which it would have been subjected would have created an extremely harsh environment for living things.

Read Privileged Planet or Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee for more on the amazing fortuitousness of the location of the earth in space.

RLC

Journalistic Malfeasance?

You've no doubt heard the news that for the first time ever the majority of women are living without husbands. Pundits reflecting on the grim statistic either grieved or rejoiced at what they saw as a sign of the demise of the traditional family. Michael Medved, however, did a little digging and found that there was much less to the story than met the eye:

First, the truth - a truth that is easily accessible from the United States Census Bureau.

According to the most recent available figures (from 2005), a clear majority (56%) of all women over the age of 20 are currently married.

Moreover, nearly all women in this country will get married at one time or another. Among those above the age of 50 (a group that includes the celebrated Baby Boomers of the famously revolutionary '60's generation), an astonishing 94% have been married at one time or another and some 79% are either currently married or widowed.

Even including the younger, supposedly "post-marriage" generation, and considering all women above the age of 30, some 61% are currently married and another 12% are widowed. In other words, nearly three-fourths (73%, a crushing majority) of all women who have reached the tender age of 30 now occupy a traditional female role as either current wives or widows - avoiding the supposedly trendy status of divorced, separated, co-habiting or single.

How, then, could America's "Journal of Record," the New York Times, possibly peddle the ridiculously distorted story that most females now count as unattached?

Reporter Sam Roberts begins his tendentious account with the following declarations: "For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results. In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000."

So how could reporter Roberts read the same census figures that any American can view ("according to a New York Times analysis") and come up with such bizarre conclusions?

It's all based on a fundamentally dishonest decision that Roberts never acknowledges in the entire course of his lengthy article. It turns out that in his analysis he chose to count some 10,154,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19 as "women." It should come as no surprise that this vast group of teenagers (yes, teenagers, most of whom live at home) are officially classified as "single." In fact, 97% of the 15 to 19 year olds identify themselves as "never married." The Census Bureau, by the way, doesn't call these youngsters "women" - it labels them "females" (a far more appropriate designation).

Yet even the ridiculous inclusion of his ten million unmarried teenagers couldn't give Sam Roberts the story he wanted to report - that most American "women" are now unmarried. As a matter of fact, the Census Bureau shows that among all females above 15 the majority (51%!) are still classified as "married."

So the New York Times required yet another sneaky distortion to shave off that last 2% from the married majority, though this bit of statistical sleight-of-hand Sam Roberts had the decency to acknowledge. "In a relatively small number of cases, the living arrangement is temporary, because the husbands are working out of town, are in the military, or are institutionalized," he writes. In other words, in his brave new majority of "women" without spouses, he includes all those thousands upon thousands of wives and mothers who are waiting and praying at home for the return of their husbands from Iraq or Afghanistan.

By arbitrarily removing this 2% of all females (2,400,000 individuals) who are classified as "married/spouse absent" from the ranks of the married, and then designating as "unmarried" his millions of middle school and high school girls who are living with their parents, together with some 9 million elderly widows who have devoted much of their lives to marriage and husbands (42% of all women over 65 are widows), Roberts can finally arrive at his desired but meaningless conclusion that "most women" now "are living without a husbands." Eureka!

There's much more to this story at the link. Medved argues that Roberts has an anti-marriage agenda, and that it was this that animated his original article.

RLC

Stifling Scientific Literacy

The ever-skeptical folks at Uncommon Descent cite an article which, contrary to all the fretting by Darwinians over how intelligent design and creationism will stifle scientific understanding in this country, shows that scientific literacy has actually shot up since 1995. The graph at the link tells pretty much the whole story.

Dave Scot at UD requests readers' assistance in trying to think of what sorts of things happened in the years prior to 1995 that would have caused this acceleration of scientific sophistication. We think it must have been the arrival in Washington of the Clinton administration.

RLC

Hoping We Fail

A recent Fox News Poll asked 900 people a series of questions about Iraq. The replies to question #19 were particularly disturbing. The question asked: Do you personally want the Iraq plan President Bush announced last week to succeed?

Only sixty three percent of respondents said yes, 22% said no, and 15% weren't sure. It's bad enough that one American in five actually wants the plan to fail, but among Democrats 34% said they do not want the plan to succeed and 15% were unsure. Among Republicans the numbers were 11% and 10%.

I confess I simply cannot understand how any American could possibly want the U.S. to fail to bring stability and peace to Iraq. People have tried to explain it to me, but their explanations seem tortured and unconvincing. I think the question whether we want to succeed in Iraq is the defining foreign policy question of our time, and anyone who answers no or unsure to that question, as do almost half of the Democrats in this country, inhabits a moral universe which is terra incognita to me. We simply have no common ground upon which we can carry on a fruitful conversation about this issue.

RLC

Nuclear Gateway

Telic Thoughts has a neat computer sim of the nuclear pore complex. These pores are the gateways through which materials pass into the nucleus of cells. They are much more than simple holes in the nuclear membrane as you'll see in the video.

Before you watch it, though, you must close your eyes real tight and repeat three times: "This is not designed. It happened by chance."

RLC

Hot News

Scott Ott at ScrappleFace breaks this developing story in the U.S. Senate:

(2007-01-18) - Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-NB, today introduced a bill with several of his Democrat colleagues that would cap the number of Republican Senators at current levels and begin negotiations with Democrats for a phased GOP withdrawal from the Senate.

The measure comes as the Senate prepares to debate a Hagel-sponsored resolution opposing President George Bush's move to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq.

"Just as sending more U.S. troops isn't the solution to defeating terrorists in Iraq," said Sen. Hagel, "more Republican senators won't accomplish the party's legislative goals here. Each additional GOP senator simply antagonizes the majority party and makes the Senate a worse quagmire than it already is."

New York Democrat Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton co-sponsored the so-called "cap and yank" measure.

"We admire Chuck Hagel," said Sen. Clinton, "because when he reaches across the aisle, it never seems like a stretch."

You can bet you won't hear about this from the MSM.

RLC

Recent Developments in the WOT

Bill Roggio updates us on progress in the Global War on Terrorists. Here's a summary:

Coalition forces have made some strides in degrading the leadership of the global Islamist movement. Two senior Taliban commanders were captured in Afghanistan, while the Philippine military continues to dismantle Abu Sayyaf's leadership on the island of Jolo. Kenyan officials believe the Islamic Courts' second in command was detained and another killed in an airstrike, while Pakistan is on the heels of an al-Qaeda leader who fled airstrikes in North Waziristan.

Read the details at The Fourth Rail.

Also, Captain Ed has some very interesting stuff on how things have changed of a sudden for the Mahdi army in Baghdad and for the Iranians in Iraq. Read the first post on al-Sadr's Mahdi army and then scroll down to the post on the task force that's been assigned to roll up Iranian operations in Iraq.

RLC

At Least Bush Wants to Win

Jonah Goldberg contrasts the President's plan with the Democrats' non-plan for victory. The Democrats' strategy for Iraq is to wait until Bush announces his plan and then bash it, even when he does what they've said he should do. Here are Jonah's key passages:

...when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid come to a fork in the road, they follow Yogi Berra's advice and take it. On the one hand, they tell the president that they want this war "brought to a close." On the other, they refuse to use their power of the purse to do exactly that, opting instead for a symbolic resolution. It may be the wisest political course for them, but it does a disservice to the nation by making the Iraq debate the equivalent of boxing with fog.

Here we have a president forthrightly trying to win a war, and the opposition -- which not long ago was in favor of increasing troops, when Bush was against that -- won't say what it wants. This is flatly immoral. If you believe the war can't be won and there's nothing to be gained by staying, then, to paraphrase Sen. John Kerry, you're asking more men to die for a mistake. You should demand withdrawal. But that might cost votes, so the Dems don't. And, of course, Kerry, Pelosi and other Democrats were in favor of more troops before they were against it.

In fact Harry Reid and others were actually criticizing the President as recently as a few months ago for not having enough troops in Iraq.

Another Democratic dodge is the incessant demand for a "political solution" in Iraq. "What is absolutely clear to me is there is no military solution to the problems in Iraq, that only political solutions are going to bring about some semblance of peace," Sen. Barack Obama declared. This is either childishly naive or reprehensibly dishonest. No serious person thinks that peace can be secured without a political solution. The question is how to get one. And nobody -- and I mean nobody -- has made a credible case that the Iraqis can get from A to B without more bloodshed, with or without American support.

Saying we need a political solution is as helpful as saying "give peace a chance." Peace requires more than such pie-eyed verbiage. In the real world, peace has no chance until the people who want to give death squads another shot have been dispatched from the scene. It reminds me of the liberal obsession in the 1980s with getting inner-city gangs to settle their differences with break-dance competitions. If only Muqtada Sadr would moonwalk to peace!

Bush came up with the "surge" plan. Will it work? Nobody knows. But the one thing the American people know about George W. Bush is that he wants to win the war. What the Democrats believe is anybody's guess.

For an example of exactly what Goldberg is talking about when he talks about the demand for a "political solution" in Iraq see Jim Wallis' piece at Sojourners.

Chuck Asay weighs in with his own comparison of Bush's plan and that of his political opponents:

RLC

Double Illegals' Wages

Free Frank Warner has what is nothing short of a brilliant idea - double the minimum wage for illegal aliens:

Here's an idea that should appeal to left and right both. Double the minimum wage for all illegal immigrants in the United States.

That is, guarantee them double the minimum wage of American citizens. By setting the minimum wage for illegal immigrants at a handsome $14.50 an hour, several problems would be solved.

Read how this would solve the problems to which he refers at the link. I think he's at least half-serious.

RLC

Land of the Free

This is why people say that it requires constant vigilance to maintain our freedom. The totalitarian impulse is strong and apparently even afflicts meteorologists:

The Weather Channel's most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to "Holocaust Deniers" and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.

The Weather Channel's (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program "The Climate Code," is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their "Seal of Approval" for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.

Read the rest of the article at the link. One would think that people who practice meteorology, of all disciplines, would have been chastened often enough by errant forecasts that they'd be a little less dogmatic and a little more humble than Heidi Cullen appears to be.

Next thing we'll be reading that those who doubt Darwinism should lose their Ph.D.s. (although I think that's already been suggested) and anyone who voted for Bush should have their citizenship suspended (which a lot of people probably already think but haven't yet made bold enough to say).

Anyway, will somebody please mail Ms Cullen a copy of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty? It's the best antidote for what ails her that I can think of.

RLC

The Great Uncommunicator

Dean Barnett at Hugh Hewitt's blog gets it exactly right. President Bush's biggest failure as a president is that he is a terrible communicator. He has failed to make the case for almost anything he's done since September of 2001. When he does address the American people he tends to speak in platitudes and threadbare formulations that no longer gain anyone's attention.

This is such a shame because what he's doing is so important that the American people must be with him on it, and yet the American people have largely given up on him and his agenda. This is as much our fault, in my opinion, as it is his - just because he doesn't make the case for what he does doesn't mean that what he does isn't the right thing to do. Nevertheless, it's still his fault and his greatest shortcoming as a president.

Anyway, read Barnett's essay. He says it much better than I can.

RLC