Mortal Peril

Rachel Neuwirth at the American Thinker writes a somewhat lengthy but critically important warning to Jews everywhere. They are, she argues, in mortal danger and need to wake up before it's too late.

Read Neuwirth's piece to find out why.

RLC

Nothing Buttery

The debate between materialistic monists and substance dualists regarding the nature of the mind/brain relationship continues apace. Materialism is the view that all there is to us is matter. There is no mind. Mind is to the brain, for the materialist, what digestion is to the stomach. It's just a word we use to describe the function of the brain. Substance dualism, on the other hand, holds that there is, as part of us, a mental substance that is not reducible to matter or brain and which corresponds to what we call mind.

With this in mind (forgive me) Michael Engor addresses the surprising claim made by Yale neurologist Steven Novella that materialism has been proven true by research:

Consider this: if the mind arises entirely from the brain, materialism predicts that there must be a specific material cause for each mental state. That is, a specific mental state must be a specific brain state, nothing more or less. For example, if I am thinking "the White House is in Washington, D.C.", there must be a specific arrangement of molecules and neurons and action potentials in my brain that are the thought itself. In the materialistic paradigm, please understand, matter doesn't just correlate with the thought; matter is the thought.

Materialism is the proposition that all things are material, including thoughts. Every time I think "the White House is in Washington D.C.", there must exist in my brain that exact configuration of matter: 2,433 neurons with x concentration of acetylcholine located in 87,456 dendrites arrayed in a discrete geometrical pattern with action potentials precisely defined. That exact configuration is the thought. If I had a different configuration of matter - any difference - I would have a different thought. If each mental state is a brain state, then this reduction must hold for every thought. This is a straightforward prediction of materialism.

We have a vast knowledge of neuroscience. Yet what is the scientific evidence supporting this most fundamental prediction of materialism - that every thought is reducible at the molecular level to a discrete and unique brain state? There isn't a shred of evidence that any discrete mental state - any specific thought - can be reduced at the molecular level to a unique material brain state. Not a shred.

The notion that the mind is nothing but chemical reactions in the brain may have been plausible a century ago, but in light of modern knowledge of the brain and consciousness that type of simple reductionism, what is sometimes called "nothing buttery", seems quaint. Read Engor's full response to Novella at the link.

RLC

Two Cheers for Stigma

An alarming news story in the Canadian Star points out that there has been a stunning increase in the number of young girls convicted of violent and vicious crimes:

According to a Statistics Canada report last Thursday, the number of females age 12 and up accused of violent crime climbed between 1986 and 2005.

One statistic in particular is worrying. Among girls, says Female Offenders in Canada, the rate at which they're charged for "serious violent crime" has more than doubled, to 132 teens per 100,000 in 2005 from 60 in 1986. Meanwhile, the rate among adult women climbed to 46 from 25 per 100,000.

For young women, that's an alarming leap - and it's been reflected in some shocking news.

From the brutal swarming, beating and drowning death of B.C.'s Reena Virk in 1997 to last fall's torture by Nova Scotia girls of another teen, girls have been accused of bullying, burning and battering.

In Toronto, one girl, aged 16 - but 15 at the time of the incident - was denied bail last week in connection with the New Year's Day slaying of 14-year-old Stefanie Rengel. The motive, according to the judge, was "senseless jealousy."

While Statistics Canada offers no explanation for any of this increase, Silja J.A. Talvi, author of the recently published Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System, writes, "Girls and women enter the criminal justice system with far higher rates of drug abuse, sexual violence, childhood abuse, mental illness, and experiences with homelessness."

As criminologists and others who study female offenders say, violent girls are often the product of violent homes, and subject to much more stress - from sexual abuse, in particular - than boys.

You can read the rest of this disturbing report at the link.

Sadly, this article confirms the crucial role dysfunctional families, especially emotionally or physically estranged fathers, play in producing aberrant offspring. The one commonality between male and female inmates in our prisons is that their fathers in almost every case were either physically or emotionally absent from their lives or physically or emotionally abusive. Kids need good fathers, and a culture in which parents feel free to split up to pursue their own "happiness", or never marry in the first place, is spawning alarming numbers of wretched children.

Perhaps it's time to restore the social stigma that once attached to unwed motherhood and any divorce that wasn't a last resort. There's a danger, of course, in being too censorious, and we certainly don't want to be the kind of cold, merciless society Hawthorne depicts in The Scarlet Letter. On the other hand, the danger to our children posed by the breakdown of traditional views of marriage and family is too serious and too deadly to allow us to continue to treat marriage as though it were just one of many legitimate ways to raise children.

Parents who aren't willing to commit themselves to each other and to their children should not have them, and, if they do, they deserve the opprobrium of a society that cannot afford the personal tragedy and costs these irresponsible, selfish individuals are inflicting upon everyone else.

RLC

Archbishop of Appeasement

Should one laugh at the utter looniness of the Archbishop's suggestion or weep over evidence that in Britain the spirit of Neville Chamberlain lives on:

Dr. Rowan Williams told Radio 4's World at One that the UK has to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system. Dr. Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court. He says Muslims should not have to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty".

The good prelate appears to be excellent raw material for dhimmitude, having mastered the fine art of obsequious self-abasement. What he advocates, capitulating to Muslim pressure and intimidation, is that Muslims be permitted to live under one set of laws and everyone else be required to live under another. This seems an odd way to achieve integration, assimilation and national cohesion.

Moreover, once Islamic courts were legitimized in Britain how long does the reverend bishop think it would be before Muslims were demanding that they be judged in all matters under their law rather than British law? What grounds would the Archbishop have for denying them this privilege? And what if other religious groups demanded exemption from British law? On what grounds would he deny their demands, if he even would?

So far from establishing one set of laws for one group of citizens and another for a different group European governments should be informing their Muslim citizens that if they wish to live under Sharia law they are free to emigrate to an Islamic country but that as long as they live in Europe they'll live under the same laws as everyone else.

RLC

Nincompoopery

I don't know how many Viewpoint readers watch MSNBC's evening lineup, but the programming there ranges from liberal to very liberal. That's okay, in fact it's healthy to have ideological diversity on cable television. Chris Matthews (liberal) and Keith Olbermann (very liberal) offer a counter to conservatives like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly at Fox.

In any event, it's amusing that some of the MSNBC people, given their avid support for left-wing politics, have gotten themselves into trouble with the Clinton campaign twice in recent weeks, not over matters of political substance but because of ill-considered remarks by their anchors.

First Chris Matthews made the comment that Hillary Clinton is where she is only because her husband was a philanderer. Now I happen to think there's a lot of truth to that, but the Clinton campaign was incensed and Matthews dutifully delivered an abject on-air apology. Then came this on Thursday:

A distasteful comment about Chelsea Clinton by an MSNBC anchor Thursday could imperil Hillary Rodham Clinton's participation in future presidential debates on the network, a Clinton spokesman said.

In a conference call with reporters, Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson Friday excoriated MSNBC's David Shuster for suggesting the Clinton campaign had "pimped out" 27-year old Chelsea by having her place phone calls to Democratic Party superdelegates on her mother's behalf. Wolfson called the comment "beneath contempt" and disgusting.

"I, at this point, can't envision a scenario where we would continue to engage in debates on that network," he added.

This was insulting in the same way that Don Imus' comments about the Rutgers girls' basketball team were offensive, and Shuster should be called to account for it. The irony is that Shuster, like Imus, probably didn't know until someone explained it to him why his remark has landed him in hot water.

Here's Shuster making the slur, along with his first apology:

Well. It seems Shuster is surprised that the Clintons got upset that he essentially called their daughter a whore. Can't they take a joke? Is Shuster really that dumb?

Update: Hot Air reports that Shuster has been suspended by NBC.

RLC

The Conservative Strategy

There is, I think, a good explanation for the apparent inclination of many prominent conservatives (Rush limbaugh, Ann Coulter, James Dobson, to name just a few) to abandon the Republican John McCain and let Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama coast to victory in November.

Conservatives feel that they have only one or two cards left to play now that McCain has all but won the nomination. The "Maverick" would be acutely aware that without enthusiastic conservative support he'd have very little chance of defeating the Clinton steamroller or of prevailing against Obama's winsome, if vacuous, political charms. He doesn't just need conservatives to vote for him, he needs them to work for him. He needs them to be excited about winning.

I suspect that conservatives are threatening to sit out an election that offers them a choice between McCain and Hillary/Barack not because they actually will but because they want McCain to think they will, or to at least think that their support for him will be so tepid as to be inconsequential. If he's worried enough that the base of the party will decide to mow the grass on election day he might be amenable to a quid pro quo.

Conservatives are no doubt hoping to extract some guarantees from McCain that he'll appoint Supreme Court justices like Roberts and Alito, that he'll not sign an illegal alien amnesty bill, that he'll sincerely work to secure our borders, that he won't sign legislation that normalizes gay marriage, and that he won't raise taxes. A credible pledge to fulfill all or most of these would go a long way toward mollifying the right and kindling some enthusiasm for his candidacy.

Whether he'd be willing to commit himself to such promises, or whether he would even keep the pledge if he made it, I don't know, but such a strategy is the only thing that makes sense out of the asseverations of some conservatives that they'd sooner see Hillary elected president than vote for John McCain. No conservative who cares about the country can say that and hope to be taken seriously.

RLC

Unremarked Remarkable Fact

It should seem odd, but doesn't, that the media don't show much interest in a couple of significant facts about the primary election campaign: The African-American Barack Obama is scoring heavily among white southern men, and the Mormon Mitt Romney was doing well among Christians before he pulled out and would have done even better were Mike Huckabee not in the race.

Since some in the media believe that the country is chronically and irredeemably racist and that Christians are narrow-minded religious bigots, and since we often fail to see what we do not expect to see, this state of affairs is floating unseen right past their eyes. As is often the case, the things that every liberal just knows to be true about race and religion in the U.S., aren't.

Nevertheless, it's a remarkable fact about where we are as a nation that Obama has such strong support among southern white males and that Romney had strong support among evangelical Christians.

Evidently a lot of Christians recognize that the values a man holds are more important to his qualifications to govern than are the beliefs which give rise to those values, no matter how peculiar and heterodox those beliefs may be. It's a shame that this example of Christian tolerance and good-will isn't getting more attention from the media.

RLC

Endocrine Disruptors

We wrote about this in the course of a review of the Leonard Sax book Boys Adrift in December. It's a very disturbing story given the ubiquitous use of plastic bottles in our society:

BPA is one of many man-made chemicals classified as endocrine disruptors, which alter the function of the endocrine system by mimicking the role of the body's natural hormones. Hormones are secreted through endocrine glands and serve different functions throughout the body.

The chemical-which is widely used in products such as reusable water bottles, food can linings, water pipes and dental sealants-has been shown to affect reproduction and brain development in animal studies.

"There is a large body of scientific evidence demonstrating the harmful effects of very small amounts of BPA in laboratory and animal studies, but little clinical evidence related to humans," explains Belcher. "There is a very strong suspicion in the scientific community, however, that this chemical has harmful effects on humans."

When these plastics were exposed to boiling water BPA leached into the water at high rates:

Prior to boiling water exposure, the rate of release from individual bottles ranged from 0.2 to 0.8 nanograms per hour. After exposure, rates increased to 8 to 32 nanograms per hour.

One question that the article doesn't answer is whether boiling causes the bottle to leach out BPA continuously after the plastic has been heated or whether the leaching only occurs during the boiling. It would also be helpful to know whether and how the "normal" amount of BPA leached by these bottles affects the body.

RLC

Determinists Cheat

An article published in Psychological Science reports the unsurprising finding that people who are persuaded that they're really not responsible for their choices are more likely to cheat than those who believe themselves to be morally accountable. Here's the abstract of the paper:

Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.

Wait until the full implications of secularism finally begin to sink into the public consciousness and people realize that, in a post-Christian world, there is no real right or wrong, only subjective preferences. Cheating on math problems will be the least of our worries.

HT: Uncommon Descent.

RLC

Feedback

A couple of friends write to share some very interesting thoughts on several of the posts that have appeared recently on Viewpoint. Check them out on our Feedback page.

RLC

Muslim Modesty v. Modern Hygiene

Some Muslim female medical students in England are refusing to practice standard hygienic procedures. Citing modesty as their reason they decline to wash their arms to the elbow as is required of all medical practitioners in the U.K.:

Women training in several hospitals in England have raised objections to removing their arm coverings in theatre and to rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands, because it is regarded as immodest in Islam. Universities and NHS fear many more will refuse to co-operate with new Department of Health guidance, introduced this month, which stipulates that all doctors must be "bare below the elbow".

The measure is deemed necessary to stop the spread of infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile, which have killed hundreds.

Minutes of a clinical academics' meeting at Liverpool University revealed that female Muslim students at Alder Hey children's hospital had objected to rolling up their sleeves to wear gowns.

Similar concerns have been raised at Leicester University. Minutes from a medical school committee said that "a number of Muslim females had difficulty in complying with the procedures to roll up sleeves to the elbow for appropriate handwashing".

Sheffield University also reported a case of a Muslim medic who refused to "scrub" as this left her forearms exposed.

Documents from Birmingham University reveal that some students would prefer to quit the course rather than expose their arms, and warn that it could leave trusts open to legal action.

Hygiene experts said last night that no exceptions should be made on religious grounds. Dr Mark Enright, professor of microbiology at Imperial College London, said: "To wash your hands properly, and reduce the risks of MRSA and C.difficile, you have to be able to wash the whole area around the wrist.

"I don't think it would be right to make an exemption for people on any grounds. The policy of bare below the elbows has to be applied universally." Dr Charles Tannock, a Conservative MEP and former hospital consultant, said: "These students are being trained using taxpayers' money and they have a duty of care to their patients not to put their health at risk.

"Perhaps these women should not be choosing medicine as a career if they feel unable to abide by the guidelines that everyone else has to follow." But the Islamic Medical Association insisted that covering all the body in public, except the face and hands, was a basic tenet of Islam. "No practising Muslim woman - doctor, medical student, nurse or patient - should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow," it said.

The long march into the dark ages continues.

RLC

Teddy Roosevelt

"There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of medieval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term.

"If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and public conduct in the public mind."

Theodore Roosevelt, "The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit," Outlook, Dec. 2, 1911.

Teddy should be alive today to witness the inquisition that the dogmatic materialists are carrying out in the nation's universities and courtrooms in the name of science. He'd be speechless.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Backroom Politics

Making the rounds on the net:

RLC

They'll Know We Are Muslims By Our .......

These are the people who can't understand why everyone wouldn't want to embrace their religion and who wish therefore to impose it upon the whole world:

Two women suicide bombers who have killed nearly 80 people in Baghdad were Down's Syndrome victims exploited by al Qaida.

The explosives were detonated by remote control in a co-ordinated attack after the women walked into separate crowded markets, said the chief Iraqi military spokesman in Baghdad General Qassim al-Moussawi.

Other officials said the women were apparently unaware of what they were doing in what could be a new method by suspected Sunni insurgents to subvert toughened security measures.

More than 70 people died and scores were wounded in the deadliest day since the US "surge" of 30,000 extra troops were sent to the capital this spring.

Imagine for a moment that some fanatical sect of Christians did something as depraved as this and no mainstream Christians were heard raising their voices in condemnation. Would it be fair to assume that the mainstreamers really weren't too put out by the atrocity perpetrated in the name of Christ? We cup our ears and listen for the American Muslim community's expressions of outrage and anger over the use of mentally retarded women to murder dozens of innocents in the name of Allah. We listen for them to do more than issue a perfunctory "This is not Islam" press release. We listen for signs that they are announcing an all-out public jihad against any and all who besmirch the name of their prophet with such bestial behavior. But, alas, all we hear is the sound of silence.

I wonder what is the Muslim equivalent of the song that goes: "They'll know we are Christians by our love."

RLC

Religious Heritage Resolution

Atheists have themselves in a fidget over a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives that recognizes America's "rich spiritual and religious history":

The resolution, H.R. 888, resolves to "affirm" the religious traditions that most historians say played a crucial role in America's founding. It calls religious principles and foundations "critical underpinnings" of America's institutions, condemns attempts to remove religion from U.S. history, and designates the first week in May as "American Religious History Week."

The atheists, always with a sharp eye out for signs of the return of the Inquisition, see this as an attack upon them:

"They're throwing 25 million Americans under the bus who don't believe in the Christian faith," Rick Wingrove, the Capitol Hill representative for American Atheists, told Cybercast News Service. "If you have a piece of legislation that favors Christians, what does that say to non-Christians?"

Well, in what sense is recognizing a fact about our heritage a piece of legislation that "favors" Christians? If Congress passed a resolution that affirmed the contribution of women and minorities in American history in what sense would that be "favoring" minorities or throwing white men under the bus? Perhaps we shouldn't expect the arguments of our atheist friends to make too much sense, but still.

There's more on the atheists' objections to the resolution at the link.

Margaret Downey, president of Atheist Alliance International, suggested that her fellow non-believers counter the proposed "American Religious History Week" with "Free Thought Week," which could be legislated in an opposing "Secular History in America" resolution.

Now there's an interesting idea. Let's have a resolution that affirms the contributions made to this country by atheistic ideas and practices. We could start by noting the deaths of the millions who had to fight against atheistic governments of Japan and Germany in WWII and the millions of other Americans who have suffered in one way or another because of atheistic communism. In our own culture we could point in the resolution to the social putridity wrought by the abandonment of traditional Christian morality - the crime, wrecked marriages, wasted lives, toxic entertainment culture, corruption of government at all levels, corporate greed, all of which are consequences of the belief that in the modern world traditional moral sanctions based upon a Christian worldview are no longer viable.

This is a wonderful idea Ms Downey has. I hope she follows through with it so that it can be brought before the public what a glorious heritage atheism has bequeathed us.

RLC

John McCain and Super Tuesday

John McCain is emotionally volatile, sometimes even ugly. He opposed the Bush tax cuts, he opposes increased oil production in the United States, he opposes free political speech, and he favors amnesty for illegal aliens and opening our borders to anyone who wants to come into the country. If he scores big in Tuesday's primary it will be a dark day for the Republican party and an even darker day for conservatives.

McCain would probably be an underdog in the race were Mike Huckabee not attacking Mitt Romney and siphoning votes away from him. Huckabee, by his tactic of running interference for McCain, has lost a lot of respect from people who formerly admired him. Readers who are undecided about McCain ought to read this piece by former Senator Rick Santorum.

I am not prepared to join with those who have said they will not vote for McCain in the general election. Despite his shortcomings, he's still preferable to either Clinton or Obama, but he's not the best option on offer in the Republican primary. Mitt Romney has a much more stable temperament and is more consistently conservative than is McCain. It reflects poorly on the American electorate that so many who call themselves conservative seem to be unaware of this.

RLC

The Ribosome

Casey Luskin finds a bunch of Darwinians, oddly enough, marveling over the irreducible complexity of the ribosome. The ribosome is the structure in the cell which superintends protein synthesis along strands of messenger RNA, and it requires 53 proteins in order to function.

The clip below shows a computer animation of the ribosome mediating the construction of a protein by holding the mRNA in place while the transfer RNA brings amino acids to the assembly point where they are joined into a polypeptide chain.

It really is astonishing, especially to think that this machinery just came about by random chance, but for Darwinians to give even a hint that they think it is irreducibly complex and therefore, by implication, intelligently designed is almost equally astonishing:

RLC

Blue Eyes

Science Daily reports that new research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.

This is an odd report inasmuch as on any view of human origins, whether you prefer Darwin or Genesis, we're all descended from a common ancestor at some point in our lineage. It's still an interesting article, though.

RLC

Sub-Prime Greed

What's fueling the sub-prime mortgage crisis? Apparently, it isn't just that home owners' interest rates were adjusted up, but it's also the fact that some people who took out very low interest mortgages to buy their house then proceeded to take out home equity loans on the house in order to buy things that they wanted. Their cumulative debt is now far more than the house is worth, and they're apparently hoping that the rest of us bail them out.

Instapundit has this note from a mortgage broker:

Speaking as a mortgage broker, I can assure you this is the case in the vast majority of instances. I spoke with a woman today who has a credit report that looks like a train wreck, including a bankruptcy fours years ago and numerous chargeoffs and collections since. Her gross income is less than $850 a week -- but she drives a car with a $700 payment.

She called me up because her adjustable rate mortgage payment is going up. When I told her that the only way she could qualify for a loan is to pay off the car with her mortgage, she threw a fit. Apparently me saving her $500 a month isn't good enough, she wanted to tap her home equity one last time for $30,000 to spend on "home improvements" rather than paying off the car. She then asked if anyone would really check to see if the money went into home upgrades.

This is the behavior that some in our government and media want the rest of us to subsidize. Geez.

RLC

Where's the Line?

My Philosophy of Religion class has been reading an excerpt from Soren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and we had a lively discussion the other day about Kierkegaard's claim that what a person believes about God is not as important as how one believes. In other words, the content of our belief is less significant to God than is the passion with which we embrace Him. God cares much more about having a love relationship with us, Kierkegaard asserts, than He cares about whether we are right about every theological proposition to which we cling.

Many students agreed with this to a point, but they raised the very critical question as to where the line should be drawn. At what point does the importance of what we believe begin to outweigh the fervor of our belief? Surely Kierkegaard does not wish to say that it doesn't matter at all what we believe as long as we believe it passionately. He cannot be suggesting that the intensity of one's devotion to God compensates in His mind for a belief that He is, for instance, pure evil.

It must be borne in mind that Kierkegaard used hyperbole in order to rouse his readers. He was not concerned with writing a theological treatise in which every detail of an argument is followed to its conclusion. He was concerned, though, with the spiritual health of the Danish church which, despite being theologically sophisticated and accomplished, seemed to regard religion with the same sort of emotional detachment as an engineer might have when beholding a bridge. To get a good idea of the sort of cold, clammy Christianity of which Kierkegaard was so disdainful rent and watch Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light. It's a powerful portrayal of exactly the sort of church and clergy which attracted Kierkegaard's scorn.

But my students' question remains. If we agree that within certain bounds the what of belief is less important than the how then where are those limits? At what point does the what become more important than the how? This is not a trivial matter. In a recent article in First Things Avery Cardinal Dulles explores the evolution of the Catholic doctrine of salvation. For centuries Catholic theologians have wrestled with questions regarding eternal life that have puzzled laymen and theologians alike: What is the fate of those who never heard the Gospel? Are all who fail to respond to the Gospel lost? What about those who die without being baptized? Etc.

Many of the solutions advanced by Catholic thinkers seem to me to be tortured in their logic and implausible in their conclusions, but they reflect the profound reluctance among Christians to believe that people who have never heard the Gospel, or who heard but for whatever reason never accepted, are lost forever. Christians have always struggled with the implications of the traditional interpretation of Scripture which is that man is born lost and must accept Christ in order to receive God's gift of salvation. This interpretation, if rigorously followed, seems to foreclose salvation to those who die young, the mentally retarded, those who've never heard the Gospel, and those who may have heard but for psychological, religious or cultural reasons found it too difficult to accept. In other words the traditional interpretation is that eternal life is pretty much God's exclusive gift to explicit Christians.

I thought of this article while my class was debating Kierkegaard. Is salvation just a matter of what we believe? Could it be a matter of how one believes even if one believes wrongly? How wrong can one be before the passionate how no longer matters? Or is salvation a matter of both the what and the how?

Dulles closes his historical excursis with a paragraph bound to displease many who hold to the exclusivist view that only Christians can be saved:

Who, then, can be saved? Catholics can be saved if they believe the Word of God as taught by the Church and if they obey the commandments. Other Christians can be saved if they submit their lives to Christ and join the community where they think he wills to be found. Jews can be saved if they look forward in hope to the Messiah and try to ascertain whether God's promise has been fulfilled. Adherents of other religions can be saved if, with the help of grace, they sincerely seek God and strive to do his will. Even atheists can be saved if they worship God under some other name and place their lives at the service of truth and justice. God's saving grace, channeled through Christ the one Mediator, leaves no one unassisted. But that same grace brings obligations to all who receive it. They must not receive the grace of God in vain. Much will be demanded of those to whom much is given.

I don't know how orthodox is the view in the Catholic Church that even atheists will be saved, but it's an idea that would have very little purchase in most precincts of evangelical protestantism. So the question recurs: Where do we draw the line? If we say that only those who consciously accept Christ and who commit their lives to Him with Kierkegaardian submission and passion are saved then we not only exclude some of those who sit next to us in the pews, but we have a problem with the fact that most people lie along a spectrum of commitment. How much commitment is enough?

We also have another problem in that this criterion would exclude those who die young as well as the mentally disabled and those who lived either prior to the Christian era or beyond it's evangelistic reach. Some might be comfortable with this entailment, but I doubt that most would. C.S. Lewis wasn't comfortable with it which is why, I suspect, he wrote The Great Divorce. He wanted readers to think about salvation more as a yearning of the heart that determines the will rather than simply an intellectual assent to certain theological propositions.

It might be a worthwhile exercise to read Lewis with a group of friends interested in this matter and then return to the question raised by a reading of Kierkegaard: Where do we, if we are faithful to Scripture, draw the line?

One final thought: Surely we should hope that the line encircles more than just those who have explicitly accepted Christ, even if we don't think that it does. Most Christians have friends, family and others whom we care deeply about and who have passed on without, so far as we know, having come to the place where they gave their lives to Christ. It seems to me that if we loved these people we should profoundly hope and pray that despite their failure to embrace the truth God has nevertheless embraced them.

RLC