Unimpressed

My friend Steve links us to an article by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson who puts his finger on one of several existential problems that the atheist needs to confront but rarely does. It's a problem we've discussed often here at Viewpoint and Gerson starts off his piece this way:

British author G.K. Chesterton argued that every act of blasphemy is a kind of tribute to God, because it is based on belief. "If anyone doubts this," he wrote, "let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor."

By the evidence of the New York Times bestseller list, God has recently been bathed in such tributes. An irreverent trinity -- Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins -- has sold a lot of books accusing theism of fostering hatred, repressing sexuality and mutilating children (Hitchens doesn't approve of male circumcision). Every miracle is a fraud. Every mystic is a madman. And this atheism is presented as a war of liberation against centuries of spiritual tyranny.

Proving God's existence in 750 words or fewer would daunt even Thomas Aquinas. And I suspect that a certain kind of skeptic would remain skeptical even after a squadron of angels landed on his front lawn. So I merely want to pose a question: If the atheists are right, what would be the effect on human morality?

Read the rest of the essay to see how Gerson answers his own question. I said above that it's one of several existential problems that the atheist often avoids facing. To read a little bit about some of the others go here.

UPDATE 1: Christopher Hitchens offers a reply to Gerson that completely misses the point.

UPDATE 2: Years ago Wendy's ran television adds which asked the question of their competitors, "Where's the beef?" I'm reminded of these adds as I try to keep up with the flurry of articles asking the anti-theistic writers pretty much that same question. Where's the philosophical meat? Peter Berkowitz is one example of a writer unimpressed with the "new, new atheists." Taking Christopher Hitchens' god [sic]is Not Great as the best of the lot of the recent spate of anti-religious books he does a fine job of exposing the shallowness of the theological and philosophical pools in which these authors, despite their popularity, are wading.

Dinesh D'Souza adds Stanley Fish to the chorus of serious thinkers who find the arguments of the current crop of anti-theists to be worthy of little more than the indulgent smile one might confer upon a child's inchoate attempts at drawing a flower.

I'm sure many more thinkers will be soon rushing to the fray since the books by Dawkins et al. are such easy sport for anyone who has seriously thought about the matters about which they write.

RLC

Report Suspicious Activity? No Way.

Here's a piece of news guaranteed to have steam shooting out of your ears:

Democrats are trying to pull a provision from a homeland security bill that will protect the public from being sued for reporting suspicious behavior that may lead to a terrorist attack, according to House Republican leadership aides.

Rep. Pete King, New York Republican and ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Steve Pearce, New Mexico Republican, sponsored the bill after a group of Muslim imams filed a lawsuit against U.S. Airways and unknown or "John Doe" passengers after they were removed for suspicious behavior aboard Flight 300 from Minneapolis to Phoenix on Nov. 20 before their removal.

"Democrats are trying to find any technical excuse to keep immunity out of the language of the bill to protect citizens, who in good faith, report suspicious activity to police or law enforcement," Mr. King said in an interview last night.

"This is a slap in the face of good citizens who do their patriotic duty and come forward, and it caves in to radical Islamists," Mr. King said. "I don't see how you can have a homeland security bill without protecting people who come forward to report suspicious activity," Mr. King said.

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, Mississippi Democrat and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, initially opposed the legislation for fear it would lead to racial profiling.

Why would they do this? Why would they not want to immunize people from lawsuit who witness suspicious behavior that turns out to be benign? How can the government on one hand urge citizens to be vigilant and report suspicious behavior and on the other tell us that if we're wrong we can lose everything we own in a lawsuit?

It's hard to take Rep. Thompson's racial profiling excuse seriously so what's the real reason? Are the Democrats that beholden to the trial lawyers? Are they in the back pocket of CAIR (Council for American-Islamic Relations)? Whatever the answer it's astonishing that Americans would continue to vote for these people.

RLC

Superman

Michael Yon's latest dispatch from Iraq is riveting reading. Check it out here.

RLC

Recommendation

Byron writes:

Not that my little voice matters much, but I would truly encourage your readers to follow your advice and read the article from First Things (http://wscleary.com/pov/home?month=07&year=2007#3533 Unseen Toll of Illegal Immigration) about illegal workers.

I sometimes find that the conservative voice on this issue, reasonable as it seems, seems nearly unaware of the broader social context, the greed and complexities of the social fabric that permits the daily practices that are people's lives.

This writer was refreshing in showing deep empathy for all involved, I thought, and it was so commonplace and practical a reflection that even those not drawn to the policy debate should read it.

Thanks for the good link.

Illegal immigration is a complex problem which has been allowed to fester and grow worse largely because American employers profit from cheap labor. Linton's essay at First Things does a good job of showing how allowing this system to continue corrupts everyone involved.

RLC

Musharraf's War

Stephen Brown writes at FrontPage Mag of the coming war in Pakistan. What Brown writes about is long overdue. It will be interesting to see whether, and in what manner, U.S. forces get involved in the fighting.

RLC

Just Deserts

Lisa Schiffren at NRO's The Corner cites a piece at FrontPage Mag by John Perazzo that shows how Byzantine things are in Washington. Perazzo convincingly explains that the force behind the sacking of Don Imus was none other than Hillary Clinton, and, if you read Schiffren's summary of Perazzo's column, you can understand exactly why she did it, or, more precisely, had it done.

We're no fans of Hillary, or Imus, for that matter, but he had it coming.

RLC

Back From the Brink

Conservation efforts have brought another beautiful bird back from the brink of extinction. The Lear's macaw of Brazil now numbers around 750 birds, according to this Reuters story, ten times as many as there were twenty years ago. What a beautiful creature. What a tragedy it would have been had they been allowed to succumb to hunters and the illegal exotic bird trade.

RLC

Why Couples Should Stay Together

According to FamilyFacts.org, having grandparents who divorced was associated with having a lower level of educational attainment, a greater likelihood of marital discord, and a poorer quality of parent-child relationship. This association held even if the grandparents' divorce occurred before the grandchild was born.

French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre said that when we choose we choose for all mankind. Well, that may have been a bit of an exaggeration, but the choices we make certainly reverberate down through the generations. Divorce is always a tragedy when children are involved, but a divorce without having made every reasonable effort to make a marriage succeed is especially so. It does the children and grandchildren a great disservice.

HT: Joe Carter

RLC

Fight Them Where They Are

Michael Yon's most recent dispatch from Iraq discusses the very important shift away from alliances with al Qaeda that many Sunni Muslims are making. Sunnis who had once been at war with American troops are now fighting alongside them to rid Iraq of al Qaeda.

This is an important point to note as many war critics refer to the conflict as a civil war and also minimize the role of al Qaeda in Iraq. For now, at least, it's not a civil war. Al Qaeda has become the common enemy in large parts of Anbar and Diyala provinces.

Secondly, if this is so, the argument that we should withdraw from Iraq is undercut. Almost everyone, even among the Democrats, acknowledges that we should be fighting al Qaeda, and that it's better to fight them elsewhere than here. Up till now, however, the President's critics have been claiming that we've not been fighting al Qaeda in Iraq and that we should be placing our resources in Afghanistan where al Qaeda is located and operating.

In fact, we should be fighting al Qaeda wherever they are and clearly they're in Anbar and Diyala.

A recent column by Jack Kelly amplifies Yon's analysis and claims that the U.S. has al Qaeda on the run in Iraq. This is a remarkable claim given the MSM's coverage of the war which portrays Iraq as in a state of total chaos. Read Yon's dispatch and Kelly's column for a completely different picture of what's happening there.

RLC

Behe Vs. The Critics

Biochemist Michael Behe, author of The Edge of Evolution, continues to politely but firmly embarrass his critics at his Amazon blog. So far he has taken on Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne, and Ken Miller and left the corpses of their arguments, such as they are, littering the field.

Behe has accomplished something truly noteworthy. The debate between IDers and Darwinists had pretty much ground to a standstill because Darwinists could always say that, as improbable as the machinery of the cell might be, natural selection working in tandem with random mutation could achieve wonders, and, of course, there was no hard evidence that they were wrong.

The Darwinians believed in the power of NS+RM and the IDers, relying heavily upon intuition and probability, demurred. Now Behe has advanced the argument by showing that, based upon new empirical data, there is good reason to think that a limit exists to how much genetic novelty can be introduced into the genome through random genetic mutation. In other words what hard evidence we have points to there being an edge, or boundary, to how much evolutionary progress can be made through undirected blind processes, and it's not much.

The inference is clear. If complex life, including man, has evolved from metazoan ancestors it can only be because the changes necessary to produce increasing complexity were not blind at all, but were intentional. And if they were intentional they were the product of a mind.

The Edge of Evolution drives yet another nail into the coffin of materialistic, naturalistic Darwinism, and that's why the book is so important and why the critics are so hostile. The hostility is not directed at Behe because he denies evolutionary descent from common ancestors, because he doesn't. It's directed at him because he denies and exposes the materialist religion that underlies the science of so many Darwinists.

RLC

Top Twenty Five Talkers

NewsMax lists the twenty five most influential talk-radio personalities in America. There are a couple of surprises on the list. You can read the critieria which were used to rank them at the link and also see the complete list. Here are the top ten:

1. Rush Limbaugh
   
2. Bill O'Reilly
   
3. Don Imus
   
4. Michael Savage
   
5. Sean Hannity
   
6. Laura Ingraham
   
7. Glenn Beck
   
8. Dr. Laura Schlessinger
   
9. Neal Boortz
   
10. Al Franken
    

It's interesting that only the last of these is a liberal (unless you count Imus as a liberal). Personally, I find Imus, Savage, and Franken very hard to listen to and O'Reilly almost as hard to watch on his tv show. I haven't heard Laura Ingraham's show, but I like her style when I see her on television. Schlessinger doesn't do politics so its hard to compare her to the others.

In my opinion, Rush and Glen Beck are the two best hosts on this list. Hannity is good on occasion, in the rare moments when he's not talking about himself and his other enterprises, when he's not fishing for praise, and when he gives his guests a chance to say something.

RLC

Confirming Jeremiah

The UK Telegraph reports on a fascinating archeological discovery:

The sound of unbridled joy seldom breaks the quiet of the British Museum's great Arched Room, which holds its collection of 130,000 Assyrian cuneiform tablets, dating back 5,000 years.

But Michael Jursa, a visiting professor from Vienna, let out such a cry last Thursday. He had made what has been called the most important find in Biblical archaeology for 100 years, a discovery that supports the view that the historical books of the Old Testament are based on fact.

Searching for Babylonian financial accounts among the tablets, Prof Jursa suddenly came across a name he half remembered - Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, described there in a hand 2,500 years old, as "the chief eunuch" of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon.

Prof Jursa, an Assyriologist, checked the Old Testament and there in chapter 39 of the Book of Jeremiah, he found, spelled differently, the same name - Nebo-Sarsekim.

Nebo-Sarsekim, according to Jeremiah, was Nebuchadnezzar II's "chief officer" and was with him at the siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC, when the Babylonians overran the city.

The small tablet, the size of "a packet of 10 cigarettes" according to Irving Finkel, a British Museum expert, is a bill of receipt acknowledging Nabu-sharrussu-ukin's payment of 0.75 kg of gold to a temple in Babylon.

The tablet is dated to the 10th year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, 595BC, 12 years before the siege of Jerusalem.

Evidence from non-Biblical sources of people named in the Bible is not unknown, but Nabu-sharrussu-ukin would have been a relatively insignificant figure.

"This is a fantastic discovery, a world-class find," Dr Finkel said yesterday. "If Nebo-Sarsekim existed, which other lesser figures in the Old Testament existed? A throwaway detail in the Old Testament turns out to be accurate and true. I think that it means that the whole of the narrative [of Jeremiah] takes on a new kind of power."

There's more at the link.

No doubt this find is causing a bit of squirming among a few Biblical critics who have spent their careers promoting the idea that the Old Testament record is historically unreliable.

HT: Joe Carter

Unseen Toll of Illegal Immigration

Michael Linton writes at First Things about how illegal immigration, and the businesses that rely upon and promote it, corrupt everyone involved.

His is a personal anecdote about a restaurant at which his daughter worked. It's not a story about illegals committing atrocious crimes but rather how the very circumstances under which these men live and work corrodes their moral lives and the lives of those who work with them. It's a good read.

RLC

Modern Ed

Viewpoint readers in college or concerned about the education on offer from many of our institutions of higher ed might want to read Victor Davis Hanson's recent column titled Blissfully Uneducated. He begins with this:

Is "ho"-the rapper slang for the slur "whore"-a bad word? Always, sometimes, or just when an obnoxious white male like Don Imus says it? But not when the equally obnoxious Snoop Dogg serially employs it?

Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the "greatest mistake" in our nation's history?

Because Israel and the United States have a bomb, is it then O.K. for theocratic Iran to have one too?

Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history.

Sometime in the 1960s-perhaps due to frustration over the Vietnam War, perhaps as a manifestation of the cultural transformations of the age-the university jettisoned the classical approach [to education] and adopted the therapeutic.

Instead, our youth for a generation have been fed a "Studies" curriculum. Fill in the blanks: Women's Studies, Gay Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, Chicano Studies, Film Studies, and so on. These courses aim to indoctrinate students about perceived pathologies in contemporary American culture-specifically, race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.

Such courses are by design deductive. The student is expected to arrive at the instructor's own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present-hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance.

The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute "truth," since it is only a reflection of one's own privilege.

Read the whole thing at the link. A lot of people are saying what Hanson is saying - our colleges and universities, or at least too many of them, have abandoned the idea of grounding their students in the knowledge gained by our forebears and have become instead a simulacrum of the communist re-education camps where students are sent to be inculcated with leftist orthodoxies about race, gender, and class.

Perhaps the fate of Antioch College will serve as a salutary object lesson for some of these "schools."

RLC

College Prospects

Students and parents of students might want to read a column my friend Byron wrote for yesterday's local paper. He says a number of interesting things and makes some good suggestions for those preparing for the challenges that college life will present. Here's the heart of his essay:

It has been a hard year for higher education. The massacre at Virginia Tech, the revelations of debauchery that came to light in the fiasco of the Duke rape trial, the reports of widespread cheating at some of our most prestigious schools. The arrest on sex charges of a mid-state professor reminds us of the complexities of navigating the college experience.

Books like "Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess" claim to report "what your college student won't tell you," while memoirs like "Goat" tell of brutal hazing within the fraternity system. Novels like Tom Wolfe's important "I Am Charlotte Simons" tell of the moral confusion amidst the "hooking up" culture of the postmodern campus. In a hipster sociological work, "My Freshman Year," a prof goes undercover posing as a first-year student living in the dorm. She was surprised to hear what the students said, how little they studied, and what they really thought of her tenured colleagues. She was surprised to see the lewd posters un- ashamedly displayed on many girls' doors.

Happily, there are reports that indicate a cultural, intellectual and spiritual renaissance among college students. Wall Street Journal reporter Naomi Riley's "God on the Quad" documents the increase in religious activities on many campuses. Groups like Hillel, the Newman Center and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship are flourishing. Riley makes it clear that such groups help with the often-tumultuous college transition.

Congregations that have cared for their children through high school are thinking about how to equip them to be faithful in what some have described as Babylon U. Locally, at least one church, Asbury United Methodist, has hired a campus worker whose job it is to represent the church to local colleges. With college and technical school enrollments rising, congregations may need to explore partnerships with para-church college ministry organizations and think creatively about ways to maintain an appropriate presence on campus.

A central Pennsylvania campus worker, Derek Melleby, has recently co-written an upbeat book to help Christian students bring their deepest convictions into their college classrooms. "The Outrageous Idea of Academic Faithfulness" is a guide for students that captures, I think, the longing of my confirmation class: to discover a purpose-laden sense of calling for the vocation of being a student. It tells stories of collegians who hungered for intellectual and moral coherence in their young adult lives, an outrageously idealistic sense of making a difference, meshing their faith and their college experience in ways that are exciting and sustainable.

What will become of the 2007 graduates who will leave us next month college-bound?

Some, I am confident, will thrive, holding in fresh ways the values and visions nurtured by home churches, synagogues, schools and community organizations. Let us wish them well. More, let us offer support and encouragement, starting in their freshman year.

Read the whole thing at the link.

RLC

Nobel-Caliber Inanity

If awards were given for pure rhetorical inanity Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams of Ireland would surely be in the running. The other day she delivered herself of the following piece of gentle, peace-prize caliber nonsense:

"Right now, I could kill George Bush," she said. "No, I don't mean that. How could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that." About half the crowd gave her a standing ovation after she called for Mr. Bush's removal from power.

"The Muslim world right now is suffering beyond belief," she said.

"Unless the president of the United States is held responsible for what he's doing and what he has done, there's no one in the Muslim world who will forgive him."

When an audience member told Ms. Williams that Vice President Dick Cheney would become president if George Bush were impeached, she said, "Can't you impeach them both?"

"It's twisted. It's all wrong," she said. "There are so many lies being told. It's hard to be an American and go out into the world right now."

Forget the hypocrisy of a peace-prize winner wishing she could kill someone, that sort of talk is common among the Left and has long ago ceased to surprise or shock us. Focus instead on her implication that the Muslim world right now is "suffering beyond belief" because of George Bush. This is as daft a statement as any that Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers have levelled at him since 9/11.

Exactly where are Muslims suffering? Afghanistan? Are Muslims there pining for the good old days under the Taliban when women were stoned to death simply for talking to a man who wasn't her husband? Iraq? Are Muslims there worse off today than they were under Saddam Hussein who starved, tortured and murdered them by the hundreds of thousands? Gaza? Are Muslims in Gaza suffering, which they certainly are, because of Bush or because of the corrupt butchers of Hamas? How about Lebanon? Is the suffering in that pitiable land due to George Bush or to the machinations of Hezebollah, Syria, and Iran?

Exactly where and how, Ms. Williams, are Muslims suffering because of American policies under Bush? Of course she doesn't tell us because that would require facts, and it's much easier to get a standing ovation if you don't let inconvenient things like facts get in the way of your demagoguery.

Her statement is so incredibly uninformed, so dumb, as to make one wonder whether Ms. Williams knows anything at all about the world for which she presumes to speak.

RLC

Don't Quit Now

The Democrats are increasing the volume on their calls for a withdrawal from Iraq, but as Kimberly Kagin points out in the Wall Street Journal, pulling out now would be to quit just when success is at hand. Of course, as we've argued here before that's precisely why the Democrats are unwilling to wait until General Petraus' progress report is issued in September. The Dems appear to want to do two things: They want to foster the impression that Iraq is a lost cause, and they want us to get out before it becomes plain to everyone that they're wrong.

There's no other explanation for the Democrats' behavior that makes any sense. They have so deeply embedded themselves in the psychology of defeat that to have Iraq turn out well would destroy their credibility with the average American voter for at least a generation. Victory in Iraq would be the worst thing that could happen to the political aspirations of the Democratic party so they demand withdrawal now before victory in Iraq destroys the political credibility of their party.

Read Kagan's entire article. It's an excellent picture of what's really happening in Iraq, and what's happening doesn't look at all like what much of the media is reporting.

While we're on the subject, another thing that doesn't seem to get much mention in the commentary on the war is this: It's becoming increasingly clear that the enemy in Iraq is not comprised to any great extent of Iraqis. The enemy is al Qaida. This doesn't get mentioned much because, I suspect, the critics of the administration have been relentless in faulting Bush for invading Iraq when the real enemy is al Qaida which, we were told, was hiding out in Afghanistan. We were foolish, the argument went, to expend our resources on Iraq when those who declared war on us on 9/11, if not before, were sitting in the mountains of Afghanistan thumbing their noses at us.

Now it appears that the struggle in Iraq is at least largely a struggle of Iraqis and Americans against al Qaida. The tape released by al Zawahiri last week confirms this as does almost every report we read about the fighting. In other words, we are primarily at war with the enemy who attacked us on 9/11, we're winning that war now that we've decided to fight it aggressively, but nevertheless the Democrats and some Republicans want us to quit.

We're like a football team driving down the field with the clock winding down. The team has momentum, they're working their way into field goal range, and just at that moment the coach pulls them off the field and sends them into the locker room. When asked by his stunned players why he did that he tells them that the team has already spent enough energy trying to win, too many players are being injured, and that it's time to go home.

Any coach who did that would be rightly suspected of either having bet against his own team or of having lost his senses. I leave the reader to complete the analogy for him/herself.

RLC

Ali Delivers a TKO

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali Muslim who grew up in the Netherlands and emigrated to the United States, is interviewed on Canadian television by an anti-American Canadian named Avi Lewis. After jabbing at her with most of the left-wing shibboleths about American evils, etc. and suffering the fervently pro-American Ali's gracious but powerful counterpunches, Lewis concludes the session by asking her if she went to a school where she learned all her pro-American cliches.

It was a pretty funny question considering that he sounded in the interview like he learned everything he believes about America from Michael Moore.

Anyway, watch the video. Hirsi Ali is a very impressive woman and she has a very important message for the West about Islam. If she were the model for every immigrant wishing to come into this country I'd campaign for open borders.

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

Killing the Goose

The Bush tax cuts are still producing revenue and lowering the deficit. Here's the story in case you only get your news from the MSM:

The nation's budget deficit will drop to $205 billion in the fiscal year that ends in September, less than half of what it was at its peak in 2004, according to new White House estimates.

The new figure is considerably smaller than original estimates. In February, the White House predicted that this year's deficit would be $244 billion because of stronger-than-expected revenue collections. The deficit hit a peak of $413 billion in 2004 and was $248 billion last year.

The deficit would be much lower, of course, if Congress and the White House hadn't gone on a spending binge over the last five or so years.

Nevertheless, despite the salutary effects of the Bush tax cuts, they're in jeopardy. The Democrats, always quick to take the axe to the neck of whatever goose is laying the golden egg, want to abolish the Bush tax policy, raise taxes, and thereby stifle economic prosperity.

And, for some unfathomable reason, people will still vote for them.

RLC

Blessing and Curse

Paul Marshall discusses in NRO the Hudson Institute's Religious Freedom report. There's much in the report that makes for interesting reading, but in his summary Marshall calls special attention to the following:

Religious freedom [is not] merely a Western preoccupation: It is not confined to any area or continent. Despite the problems in the Islamic world, there are free Muslim countries such as Mali or Senegal. They, together with Japan, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa score better in this survey than do Belgium, France, Germany, or Greece.

While Western Europe is still one of the freest regions of the world, the situation is worsening and most countries score worse on religious freedom than they do for civil liberties in general. The reasons for this - continuing religious discrimination, increasingly aggressive secular ideologies, and an increase in religiously demarcated violence - illustrate and exacerbate the continent's increasing tensions.

This is not surprising given the depressing reports flowing out of Europe lately. Europe is becoming increasingly polarized between a hard-core secularism and an intolerant Islamism. It's ironic that the nursery of Christianity has come to despise the worldview that is responsible for whatever cultural glory it has achieved.

The most egregious persecuting states tend to be either Communist, such as North Korea and China, nationalist, such as Burma and Eritrea, or radical Islamist, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. They also tend to be those that act against U.S. interests. Conversely, those with good records are likely to be good U.S. allies.

Nor is this surprising. Countries whose leaders have respected religious liberty have rarely, if ever, gone to war with each other in the last 200 years.

Religious freedom also correlates highly with other human rights, such as Freedom House's civil-liberty index (.862) and political-liberties index (.822), and with Reporters without Borders press-freedom index (.804). Countries with good religious records also have comparatively little social conflict, remain democratic, and are unlikely to become failed states.

There is strong relation with economic well-being; both of men and women, and religiously based social restrictions on women are one of the major determinants of their economic status. One major reason for this is the strong linkage with economic freedom: Our religious-freedom scores have a correlation of .743 with the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal economic-freedom index. This is more than a finding that rich countries tend to have other good things as well. Religious freedom not only correlates well with positive economic outcomes but also actually contributes toward them since it promotes the accumulation of social and spiritual capital. Good religious policies, good economic policies, and good economic outcomes go together.

Meanwhile, anti-theists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens rail against Christianity. They insist that Christian theism is a blight upon civilization and should be abolished. They argue that teaching children religious dogma is a form of "child abuse." Their hatred clouds their reason and prevents them from seeing the evidence that Christianity has, on balance, been a tremendous blessing to the world and state atheism, especially in the twentieth century, has been a terrible curse.

St. Paul might have had people like our modern anti-theists in mind when, in his letter to the Romans, he talks about those who, "Professing themselves wise...became fools.... [and] exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator."

RLC