Rendering Unto Caesar

Here's an ethical problem for our readers to ponder:

A businessman tells a customer that if the customer pays cash for the service he has been provided the businessman will not charge him tax. If the customer pays with a check or credit card the businessman has to charge the tax. Suppose the tax would amount to a significant sum - let's say $100.

Is the customer morally obligated to pay the tax whether he can avoid it or not? Is it wrong for the customer to pay cash in order to avoid the tax? If he would have paid cash in any event should he also volunteer to pay the $100 tax? Can he rightfully justify avoiding the tax by arguing to himself that he will use that $100 to purchase other goods from other merchants that will help them stay in business whereas the state will simply squander the money, perhaps even using it to line the pockets of legislators?

I welcome your responses to these questions, but please include the reasons which support your judgment.

RLC

The Right Stuff

Hot Air links us to an article at Wired which discusses some of the difficulties encountered by intelligence agencies in locating Iran's underground nuclear weapons facilities and some of the technology that's being brought to bear on the problem.

It's interesting reading, but the article goes on to address the problem of how to neutralize the facilities once the tunnels that house them are identified and mapped. There are a number of tools that have been or are being developed in order to accomplish this task including bombs called massive ordinance penetrators (MOPs) which can penetrate 60 feet of solid concrete before detonating.

MOP

There are also other options which rely on finesse rather than brute power:

The MOP may be capable of smashing through a lot of rock, but there are smarter approaches. The U.S. Air Force has developed skip-bombing techniques with bunker busters so that they arrive horizontally and can be aimed precisely at entrance doors. They may not destroy the entire facility, but if all the entrances are wrecked, then nothing can go in or out.

Thermobaric bombs like the BLU-118 "cave buster" have been specifically designed for attacking tunnel systems; the shockwave will travel far underground, going around corners and bends that would degrade normal blast waves. One test showed that it could kill human targets even when the blast had traveled through 1,100 feet of tunnels.

There are also more exotic options, like the Rocket Balls (or more correctly, "kinetic fireball incendiaries") developed for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. A warhead would release a large number of these rubberized balls of rocket fuel; once ignited they bounce around at high speed, spreading out by going through doorways and other openings and raising the surrounding temperature to over a thousand degrees within seconds.

Will Iran give up its nuclear weapons program? If they don't will we try to take it out? If we do what will be the blowback from such an operation? Does Barack Obama have the right stuff to deal wisely with these questions? Let's hope.

RLC

More on Reid Faux Pas

A friend emails me to comment on the post Jumping on Reid, and his thoughts afford me the opportunity to say a little more about the matter. Mike writes:

I think the really horrible point in Trent Lott's statement a few years ago was the reference to the "good old days" before the civil rights movement. Whether said in jest or not, a public statement like this from a senator from Mississippi was legitimate reason for Lott to step down.

Maybe Reid's comments aren't sufficient for his dismissal, but certainly if we wanted to see a senator resign for reasons of poor character and incompetence, Harry Reid would be one of the first on the list.

I wrote back to him:

Mike,

I would agree with you that it would have been reprehensible had Lott said what he said with civil rights in mind, but I have no reason to think that he did. Lot's of people are nostalgic for the "good old days" and mean nothing hurtful by it. The plight of minorities isn't even on their horizon when they use the phrase. I don't have any reason to think Lott was doing anything but trying to make an old guy feel good on his 100th birthday.

I think that our political discourse needs to change from a "gotcha" mentality where all we care about are the politically correct rules of the game to a point where we give people the benefit of the doubt until we have good reason to believe that they're unfit for office. In other words, I think we need a lot more of the Golden Rule in politics.

I believe with you that Reid is unfit to be a senator, much less majority leader, but not because of his comments about Obama. If we don't want people to criticize us unfairly for things we say which may have implications we didn't intend then we shouldn't criticize them when they make the same kinds of statements.

Parenthetically, I just read chapter 5 of Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue, and I have to say that if she's only half right about the way her political opponents tried to destroy her after the 2008 election then there really are some very wicked and contemptible political activists in our society. Conservatives should strive to be nothing like them.

RLC

More on the Hume Affair

Russ Douthat weighs in at The New York Times on the controversy surrounding Brit Hume's advice to Tiger Woods to embrace Christianity. Douthat thinks the outcry over this is a bit ridiculous:

Liberal democracy offers religious believers a bargain. Accept, as a price of citizenship, that you may never impose your convictions on your neighbor, or use state power to compel belief. In return, you will be free to practice your own faith as you see fit - and free, as well, to compete with other believers (and nonbelievers) in the marketplace of ideas.

That's the theory. In practice, the admirable principle that no one should be persecuted for their beliefs often blurs into the more illiberal idea that nobody should ever publicly criticize another religion. Or champion one's own faith as an alternative. Or say anything whatsoever about religion, outside the privacy of church, synagogue or home.

A week ago, Brit Hume broke all three rules at once. Asked on a Fox News panel what advice he'd give to the embattled Tiger Woods, Hume suggested that the golfer consider converting to Christianity. "He's said to be a Buddhist," Hume noted. "I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith."

A great many people immediately declared that this comment was the most outrageous thing they'd ever heard. Hume's words were replayed by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, to shocked laughter from the audience. They were denounced across the blogosphere as evidence of chauvinism, bigotry and gross stupidity. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann claimed, absurdly, that Hume had tried to "threaten Tiger Woods into becoming a Christian." His colleague David Shuster suggested that Hume had "denigrated" his own religion by discussing it on a talk show.

The Washington Post's TV critic, Tom Shales, mocked the idea that Christians should "run around trying to drum up new business" for their faith. Hume "doesn't really have the authority," Shales suggested - unless of course "one believes that every Christian by mandate must proselytize." (This is, of course, exactly what Christians are supposed to believe.)

You can read the rest of Douthat's fine column at the link. The secular left has long wished to eliminate religion from public life and in order to accomplish this they've tried to conflate the constitutional proscription against federal meddling in religious matters with a total secularization of all public spaces. The idea that the federal government must be neutral on matters of religion is subtly extended in the public mind to encompass the idea that no one speaking in public should be religiously partisan.

This is nonsense, of course, but that's the understanding of the place of religion in society that progressives are trying to foist upon us.

Their strategy sometimes seems to involve the following four steps which may be implemented either in sequence or simultaneously:

First, make religious belief seem risible and backward in the eyes of the people. Second, convince them that religious talk, particularly in social settings, is impolite. Next, gradually and imperceptibly persuade people to think that not only is there something vaguely inappropriate about talk involving one's personal religious beliefs but that it's also offensive to people. Finally, encourage people to think that any discourse which offends others is ipso facto hurtful and should therefore be illegal.

This evolution has already succeeded in some European precincts where, for example, it's now considered unlawful hate speech for a pastor to tell his congregation that the Bible considers homosexual behavior to be a sin.

Perhaps one reason so many secularists were outraged by Hume's remarks is that they defied the smooth progress the secularists thought they were making toward their religiously sterile omega point.

RLC

Brewing Upset

A very surprising development, one absolutely critical for the future of President Obama's agenda, if not for health care, is brewing in Massachusetts. On January 19th a special election will be held to fill the seat of the late Senator Ted Kennedy. Until recently it was a foregone conclusion that, with a 3-1 edge in voter registration in her pocket, the Democrat, Martha Coakley, would defeat the Republican Scott Brown.

Now it turns out that Brown, who seems to have come out of nowhere, is clobbering Coakley among independents and is consequently running neck and neck with her overall seven days out from the election (But see this poll for a rather different picture). Moreover, Brown raised an amazing $1 million yesterday alone toward his campaign.

If Brown should win he'll almost certainly vote against Obamacare in the Senate thus killing the legislation (Although the Democrats are not bereft of tricks up their sleeve to prevent that from happening should Brown win). Moreover, a GOP win in a state that hasn't had a Republican senator in decades, coming on the heels of Democrat retirements and defections in Congress and the huge losses in the governors' races in Virginia and New Jersey, will absolutely rock the American political scene. It'd be a tremendous blow to the Democrat party.

The Democrats will surely pull out all stops in order to mobilize their base, including a trip or two to Massachusetts by the President to get Democratic voters excited enough to turn out on the 19th. His entire presidency may well be riding on the outcome of that election.

RLC

Jumping on Reid

When Trent Lott, the GOP Senate Majority Leader back in 2002, made the remark on the occasion of Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday that the country would have been better off had Strom been elected president when he ran in 1948 he was excoriated by the press and forced to resign as majority leader by his party because Strom Thurmond had been a segregationist in the 1940s. Lott wasn't even thinking of that, he was simply trying to say something nice about an elderly colleague, but numerous Democrats, including Mr. Obama, screamed for his head, and so the GOP threw him to the wolves.

In 2007 Virginia Governor George Allen was savaged by the press for calling a heckler "macaca," a word that Allen claims he didn't even know the meaning of and no one else did either (Apparently it's regarded in some parts of the world as a mild insult, like calling someone a monkey). The incident is thought by some to have cost Allen the election in his Senate race against Jim Webb.

Now the victim of the racial insensitivity police is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who, it was reported in a recently released book on the 2008 election, said that Barack Obama was "light skinned" and had "no Negro dialect" and therefore had an electoral advantage. For this indiscretion Reid is apologizing and groveling and being blasted by Republicans.

Indeed, there is poetic justice in this, and I would be happy to see Harry Reid hounded out of the Senate, but not for this. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't know what was so terribly wrong with what Reid said (nor with what Lott or Allen said). It was grossly unfair and puerile of the Democrats, including Harry Reid himself, and the liberal media, to make a big deal about the Republicans' remarks, and it is just as unfair for the Republicans to do the same now to Reid (and hypocritical of the liberal media to be largely quiet about it since they blasted both Lott and Allen night and day over their comments).

Let me be clear (as our President likes to say), Reid is vulnerable to a lot of criticism. The squalid manner in which he bought off senators' votes on the health care bill, his comparison of health care opponents to those who opposed civil rights for blacks, his hypocrisy in condemning Bill Bennett for remarks not unlike his own, his lack of class in his criticisms of George Bush, and his willingness to play fast and loose with the truth on any number of occasions, are all legitimate targets, but I simply don't see why it's racist or "insensitive" or otherwise offensive to note a man's color and his mode of speech. Nor do I see why it's racist to declaim upon how these characteristics could work to a man's political advantage with an electorate that clearly wanted to vote for a black man but perhaps not one who was too black. To be sure, it may, like neglecting to cover a yawn, flout a social convention to say out loud what everybody can plainly see, but I don't see how it's racist or otherwise beyond tolerable.

Perhaps, someone out there, liberal or conservative, will explain it all to me and make the case for why Reid should step down as Majority Leader because of his comment about Obama's hue and speech. Meanwhile, I'd prefer conservatives focus on the man's real liabilities, which are legion. In the present instance, however, the offense wasn't racism, but rather hypocrisy, both on the part of Reid and those who were quick to condemn Bennett, Lott and Allen but give Reid a pass.

Conservatives should avoid acting like children by parsing every syllable a person utters for signs of racism just so they can use the words as a political smear. It's really small-minded and ugly, and besides, it's the sort of thing the Left does.

RLC

Are the Taliban Winning?

Much of the news coming out of the Afghanistan theater suggests that we're losing the war there to a resurgent Taliban. Strategy Page tells us that much of this reportage is the result of the media being "played" by the Taliban whose circumstances may be much more dire than one might think from news reports:

[t]he Taliban had a bad year in 2009, although they managed to play the media well enough to hide a lot of their problems. The biggest defeat for the Taliban was in a continued loss of support by the Afghan people. Opinion surveys have had the percentage of Afghan approving the Taliban going downward for several years, and it's now under ten percent. This is no surprise to anyone living in Afghanistan. The Taliban were always disliked by the majority of Afghans, but now their fellow Pushtuns overwhelmingly hate them as well. This has a lot to do with where the Taliban are operating. That is, mostly in the province of Kandahar, Helmand (where most of the heroin is produced) and Khost. About 80 percent of the violence is taking place in 13 percent of the country, and the Pushtuns in those areas are tired of the Taliban and all their self-righteous violence.

The activity you hear about in the north is usually in those few areas up there occupied by small Pushtun tribes. If the Taliban show up anywhere else (among Uzbek, Turk, Hazara or Tajik people, who dominate the north) they are easily identifiable, and subject to prompt scrutiny by lots of guys with guns. The Taliban not only have to be careful where they go in the north, but in the south as well. An increasing number of southern Pushtun tribes have organized militias to keep the Taliban out of their lands. Often, this is being done with the aid of Afghan or foreign troops. This is what the new American strategy is about, and what all the additional troops are for. Since the Taliban are already restricted to a small area, the new strategy constricts their movement even more.

There's more at the link.

President Obama doesn't like to think in terms of victory, perhaps, but victory is as possible in Afghanistan as it was in Iraq. It just takes a resolute, patient Commander in Chief willing to commit the necessary resources. If the stakes weren't so high it'd be very tempting to say that the fight in those far-off, desolate lands is not worth it, but we must constantly remind ourselves that the Islamists have determined that their struggle against us will be generational. It won't end next year or the year after or even, perhaps, in this century. The fight will go on as long as they're able to mount terrorist operations against the West. They are fanatics whose only purpose in life is to serve Allah by killing infidels. Their war against us will never end until they succeed or they're rendered unable to carry out their "mission."

The day we decide we no longer want to fight is the day we concede victory to those who will destroy us as soon as they possibly can.

RLC

Singer on Moral Duties

Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher who gained public notoriety for his views on the morality of infanticide, has written a book in which he argues that we have a duty to help the poor around the world. The book is titled The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty and an interview with Singer about his book is summarized at The Philosopher's Magazine(TPM).

Throughout the summary we read statements made by Singer like:

[W]e should accept the deceptively uncontroversial-sounding principle that "if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it."

"I and everyone else in similar circumstances ought to give as much as possible, that is, at least up to the point at which by giving more one would begin to cause serious suffering for oneself and one's dependents - perhaps even beyond this point to the point of marginal utility, at which by giving more one would cause oneself and one's dependents as much suffering as one would prevent in Bengal."

"I want to persuade as many people as possible to do something about world poverty."

"Most people can give 50% of their income away. I wouldn't say they can't, it's predictable that most of them won't, but I think in the sense that 'ought implies can', they can."

"If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought to do it."

"If you're thinking ethically you ought to try to take this point of view from which you consider whether you could prescribe the action if you were in the position of all of those affected by it. I think that if you consider the situation of poverty and affluence, if you were really to put yourself in the position of the poor person and the affluent person, and ask yourself whether you could support the view that the affluent person doesn't give anything to the poor, you couldn't."

Put simply, Singer believes we have a duty to help the poor, and his book is an attempt to answer objections to his belief that we should give away far more of our wealth than we do to ameliorate the world's suffering. Perhaps we should but this is a very peculiar claim for someone of Peter Singer's metaphysical commitments to make because Singer is an atheist.

Singer seems to assume that everyone agrees with him that we have a moral obligation to help the poor and that the only question concerns the extent of the help we should give. But the fundamental question, as we have written about often here at Viewpoint, is where does an atheist get the notion that we have any moral duties at all?

Duties and obligations are imposed upon us, either by ourselves or by a higher authority. If the duty to help the poor is self-imposed then how can Singer say that anyone but himself ought to give of their resources? If the duty to help the poor is self-imposed then it is purely subjective and arbitrary and is no more rational, probably less so, than imposing a duty upon oneself to be selfish.

If the obligation to minimize suffering is imposed by a higher authority than our individual selves then we need to ask Mr. Singer what that higher authority is. Could it be the state? If the state is to be our moral arbiter then whatever duty the state imposes is right, but surely Mr. Singer doesn't think this is true. It doesn't take too much imagination to picture a state imposing the duty to commit genocide, as some Islamic states would do if given half the chance and which Germany did do in the late thirties and early forties.

This is one of several fundamental quandaries an atheist finds himself in. The only non-arbitrary, objective authority which has the power and the right to impose moral duties upon us is God. For an atheist to talk about our responsibility to the poor and our obligation to give to them until it hurts is simply nonsense. Unless God wills it, which He does, I have no moral obligation to do anything I don't want to do.

Someone may object and say, "but if you were poor you would want the better off to help you." That's certainly true, but it's no reason at all why I should help others. The objection invokes the Golden Rule and admonishes us to abide by it, but what reason is there why we should? Why should I simply not live by the rule that says "Look out for #1?"

To this question the atheist has no answer, and Singer's moralizing about duties to the poor is at bottom just so much hand-waving.

RLC

El Dorado?

Those readers with an interest in archaeology will find this article interesting. Apparently, deforestation of the Amazon basin has allowed satellites to detect the remnants of an ancient civilization that dates back to 800 A.D. Some archaeologists suspect it may be the remains of the mythical city of El Dorado.

The article doesn't mention this, but I wonder what the ecological implications are for those of us disheartened by the steady loss of the rain forest biome. What I mean is if an entire city, stretching for 150 miles, was carved out of the forest and then reclaimed by the forest when the civilization died, is it possible that portions of the rain forest could likewise recover some of their former beauty and vigor if those parts which have been destroyed in the last century were allowed to regrow?

Perhaps the loss of the rain forest is not permanent. Tragically, though, the extinction of any species which die out because of habitat loss is.

RLC

Sinking Ship

Gary Varvel comments upon the wisdom of the Democrats' plan for adding several million more people to our health insurance system:

A picture is indeed worth a thousand words.

RLC

Thwarting Terror Attacks in Israel

Strategy Page has an interesting article on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in which it's noted that Israel suffered no Islamic terror attacks within its borders in 2009 - the lowest level of Islamic terrorism in Israel since the Palestinians began their current round of violence in 2000.

Several reasons for this respite are the new tactics adopted by the Israelis to defeat the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign as well as their flexibility in adapting to new Palestinian methods:

The Palestinian terrorist groups still say they are going to destroy Israel. But as a practical matter, the current round of Palestinian terrorist violence is over. You can see this by the sharp decline in successful terrorist attacks, and the frequent pronouncements from the terrorists groups that they are going to behave, for a while anyway (until they can figure out how to bypass Israeli defenses).

What the terrorists really want is to avoid any more of the Israeli tactics that shut down their terrorist operations. This included going after terrorist leaders and technical specialists, and either capturing or (failing that) killing them. Raids and air attacks were made against buildings used by the terrorists, and tight security on Israelis borders were instituted. This last measure crushed the Palestinian economy, which put popular pressure on the terrorists to stop their attacks, and promise to keep it that way. That hasn't worked, but Israeli counter-terror techniques continue to.

In addition to these tactics Israel has established a very effective intelligence-gathering network in Gaza that allows them to preempt terrorist designs. Police states like Egypt, Algeria and Syria have crushed indigenous terrorist movements within their borders at great cost to innocent bystanders, but it's much harder for a free and open society to extinguish a terrorist threat.

One question this raises is whether the Israeli people would stand for their leaders forfeiting the relative peace they've achieved in order to launch a risky attack on Iran's nuclear weapons program. Such an attack is almost certain to result in war with both Hamas and Hezbollah. But then war with these radical groups dedicated to Israel's destruction is ultimately inevitable anyway.

RLC

Religious Intolerance

A number of commentators are in high dudgeon over Brit Hume's comment that Tiger Woods should embrace the redemption offered uniquely by the Gospel. Michael Gerson has a fine column in the Washington Post on the reaction to Hume's remark.

Gerson writes:

For this, Hume has been savaged. Post media critic Tom Shales put him in the category of a "sanctimonious busybody" engaged in "telling people what religious beliefs they ought to have." Blogger Andrew Sullivan criticized Hume's "pure sectarianism," which helps abolish "the distinction between secular and religious discourse." MSNBC's David Shuster called Hume's religious advice "truly embarrassing."

Criticism and insults from any of these three should be regarded as an affirmation that one is largely correct, but there's more here than just the prattle of bitter souls. Read the rest of Gerson's column and, meanwhile, let's pose some questions:

1) Would these gentlemen have been outraged had Hume been a Muslim and urged Woods to embrace Allah? Or if Hume were a Buddhist and Woods were not (he allegedly is) would anyone have objected had Hume encouraged Woods to find inner peace in the Buddhist faith? I doubt it. It's Hume's endorsement of Christianity that they find so offensive. Why?

2) Why is it wrong or embarrassing to encourage a man to adopt one's own faith? I can't say for sure, but it seems to me that the only answer to this question is that Hume believes something that they don't and has the temerity to take that belief seriously. If that's indeed what they find so offensive aren't they being awfully small-minded?

3) Why is advising someone to accept a particular religious belief any different than advising someone to accept a political doctrine? All three of these men endorse liberal dogmas everyday and implicitly or explicitly encourage others to accept those dogmas. How is that different than what Hume did?

4) Perhaps what lies at the root of their snit is the unspoken assumption that public figures shouldn't be talking about religion (unless it's Martin Luther King or Barack Obama doing the talking), but why not? What is it about religion, especially the Christian religion, that makes it illicit as a matter for public discussion?

I doubt any of these men that Gerson mentions could give a coherent answer to these questions. Their distaste at Hume's advice and their reaction to it is visceral rather than rational, witless rather than thoughtful. It's very sad.

Hume talks about this episode and the fallout from it in an interview at Christianity Today.

RLC

No More Mr. Nice Guy

Telic Thoughts links us to an essay in The Philosopher's Magazine by atheist Russell Blackford who urges a more outspoken and confrontational atheism. He wants atheists to challenge theistic belief more aggressively, the better to discredit it. Here are some excerpts from his column:

In the 1970s, or even the 1990s, it was possible to think religion had been declawed, and that further challenges to religious philosophies, institutions, and leaders were unnecessary. On this view, all the hard work had been done, and religion was withering away after the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, Darwin, and the social iconoclasm of the 1960s. Against that background, it became taboo to criticise religion in the public sphere; it was widely assumed that religion was retreating, in any event, and didn't need to be fought anymore. Attacks on people's "deeply-held beliefs" even smacked a little of cultural imperialism.

In the academy, bright minds in philosophy turned to other topics. Bright young atheists and sceptics were certainly not steered into philosophy of religion, which looked like an intellectual dead end.

But the situation now looks very different, even in the supposedly enlightened nations of the West. For a start, a revived Christian philosophy is well entrenched within Anglo-American philosophy of religion. More importantly, perhaps, religious organisations and leaders continue to exert social power. All too often, they seek to control how we plan and run our lives, including choices about how we die. At various times, religious lobbies have opposed a vast range of beneficial, or at least essentially harmless, activities and innovations. Even now, one religion or another opposes abortion rights; most contraceptive technologies; stem-cell and therapeutic cloning research; physician-assisted suicide; and a wide range of sexual conduct involving consenting adults. We still see intense activism from the religious lobbies of all Western democracies, and even in relatively secular countries, such as the UK and Australia, governments pander blatantly to Christian moral concerns.

It seems a little odd that Mr. Blackford considers abortion and physician-assisted suicide harmless. One might think that whether they're harmless or not depends upon whether one is doing the abortion or being aborted. In the next paragraph he makes claims that are no less peculiar:

The situation is far worse in the US, where religious conservatives regrouped with dramatic success during the 1970s and 1980s, establishing well-financed networks, think tanks, and even their own so-called universities. Slick attempts are made to undermine public trust in science where it contradicts the literal Genesis narrative; a rampant dominionist movement wants to establish an American theocracy; the recent Bush administration took the country some considerable way down that path; and the election of a relatively liberal president has produced hysteria on the religious right (polling shows that many American conservatives now believe that Barack Obama is the Antichrist). American religiosity is real, and there is nothing subtle or liberal-minded about its most popular forms.

I have to say that I meet a lot of Christians and occasionally read some Christian literature, and maybe I'm not as in tune with what's going on as I should be, but I have never actually encountered one of these "dominionists" who wants to establish a theocracy in the U.S. Nor for the life of me do I see how it is that the Bush administration took us any distance at all down the path to such a state. Nor have I ever seen a poll that shows that "many" American conservatives perceive Mr. Obama to be the Antichrist. But even if all of this were true and amounted to something more substantial than the mental residue of Mr. Blackford's night terrors what does any of it have to do with the basic question of whether or not God exists?

He continues:

When religion claims authority in the political sphere, it is unsurprising - and totally justifiable - that atheists and sceptics question the source of this authority. If religious organisations or their leaders claim to speak on behalf of a god, it is fair to ask whether the god concerned really makes the claims that are communicated on its behalf. Does this god even exist? Where is the evidence?

This is ground I don't think Mr. Blackford really wants to tread. If we're going to be questioning the authority upon which claims in the political sphere are made then Mr. Blackford will have some answering to do as well. For instance, by what authority does an atheist like Mr. Blackford say that we have an obligation to care for the poor and/or the environment, if indeed he thinks we do? If Mr. Blackford thinks it wrong that some in our society don't have health care on what basis does he think it wrong? Indeed, on what authority does he imply that it's wrong for Christians to oppose embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, abortion, and same sex marriage or, for that matter, to promote a theocracy?

Mr. Blackford may not like any of these, but if atheism is true there's no authority by which he can judge any of them to be in some sense morally wrong. In a world without God right and wrong are determined by those who have the power to impose their will on others. Indeed, the only people who have the moral grounds to say that establishing a theocracy would be wrong are theists. The most an atheist can say is that he doesn't like theocracies and hopes we don't get one.

Mr. Blackford concludes with this:

In short, there is plenty of reason to challenge religions and contest their doctrinal claims, not just as an academic exercise, but as a matter of real urgency. Atheists and sceptics should deny the authority of religious organisations and leaders to pronounce on matters of ultimate truth and correct morality. This will require persistent, cool argument, but also moments of outright denunciation or even unashamed mockery of religion's most absurd actions and truth-claims.

We should never flinch from expressing the view that no religion has any rational warrant - that these Emperors really have no clothes - and that many churches and sects promote cruelty, misery, ignorance, and human rights abuses.

Well, I say to Mr. Blackford please do speak out publicly about your atheism. Let's have that debate. Let's examine the authority by which we make moral judgments and the reasons why we believe what we believe. Let's examine the historical record and compare the benefits Christianity has brought to the world against the contributions of atheism. I'm all in favor, but I think Mr. Blackford, once he considers how such a debate would really go, will probably think better of it. Most atheists do.

RLC

Promise-Breaker-in-Chief

C-Span president and founder Brian Lamb sent a letter to the White House last week asking that his television cameras be allowed to film the negotiations taking place between the leaders of the House and Senate who are hammering out a compromise between their two versions of the health care reform bill. He was turned down flat. The negotiations are being held in secret, and no one, least of all the public, is being allowed to see the ingredients being kneaded into this particular legislative sausage.

Not only is this a dismaying abuse of power on the part of the Democrats, it represents yet another of the President's broken promises. At least eight times while he was campaigning for the presidency he promised voters that all negotiations that involve bills affecting the American people will be conducted with transparency and even be televised on C-Span so that everyone can see what's going on. Here's the video:

(If this doesn't work go here)

Now, when it's time to man up and keep his commitment to the American public, the President has nothing to say. Little wonder that fewer and fewer people put any confidence in our president's words. Candidate Obama was apparently no more serious about transparency than he was about not hiring lobbyists, giving citizens time to study every bill before it was voted on, closing Gitmo, withdrawing from Iraq, and not raising taxes on the middle class.

Like many other politicians before him Mr. Obama seems willing to say anything he thinks people want to hear in order to get elected, and then, once in office, he turns out to be just another run-of-the-mill pol. It'll be a long time, I suspect, before another politician campaigns on the promise of hope and change, a phrase that Mr. Obama is sadly turning into a joke.

See Big Government for more on the President's failure to abide by his commitment to transparency.

RLC

Re: Another Blow to Global Warmists

A former student writes to administer a few dope slaps for my post titled Another Blow to Global Warmists. He makes several valid and helpful criticisms. His email is on our Feedback Page and my response follows it.

RLC

David Brooks on Tea Partiers

David Brooks, the erstwhile conservative ensconced at the New York Times, ponders, whilst holding his nose, the political influence of the current tea party-goers. In the course of his essay he notes the growing disdain of the common people for the dogmas tightly embraced by the educated elites:

Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should "go our own way" has risen sharply.

A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy - with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

This is all true except for the incredibly obtuse assertion that the tea partiers are defined by what they are against. This is a libel. These simple folk oppose the things that Brooks lists because they are firmly committed to truth, transparency, life, and constitutionally protected freedoms. It's what they are for that defines them and motivates them to turn out by the thousands to protest the erosion of these rights and values at the hands of a supercilious political class that regards these people, much as Brooks does, as a bunch of rubes.

The tea party crowd do indeed oppose the concentration power in the educated elites, tacitly agreeing with William Buckley who once opined that he'd rather be governed by the first one hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. The educated class is no more moral nor competent than anyone else in this country - they only think themselves to be - and most "tea partiers" recognize that conceit for what it is.

RLC

Short Memories

I was watching MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews the other night, and a Democratic congresswoman made the claim that Cheney's criticisms of Obama's performance in office are unprecedented. No former Vice-President ever maligned the sitting president as has Dick Cheney maligned President Obama.

Well, I had to laugh at the shortness of the congresswoman's memory. Does she not remember former Vice-President Al Gore's famous rant against President George Bush in which he screamed into the microphone that:

"He betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place."

Does she not recall this 2006 speech by Gore in which he all but accused the Bush administration of criminality:

Does she not remember any of Al Gore's other attacks on Bush archived here?

What Cheney is doing, obviously, is defending the Bush administration from the incessant aspersions the President levels against it in almost every speech he gives. Had the Obama administration not felt the need to disparage the Bush White House at every opportunity Cheney would have no doubt been content to remain in quiet retirement on his Wyoming ranch.

Liberals apparently believe that Mr. Obama should be free to slap his predecessors around as petulantly and unfairly as he likes and Bush and Cheney should just sit there and take it.

Well, that's not going to happen. If the Democrats don't like Cheney's outspokenness then they should just do what most other administrations have done, certainly what the Bush administration did, and refrain from taking cheap shots at the people they've succeeded.

RLC

In Over His Head Or Just Tired?

Paul Rahe ponders whether the President is tired or just dispirited by the dawning realization that he's simply not up to the demands of the office to which he was elected:

In a recent puff piece, The New York Times reports that our President is tired. This is not the first such report. Back in May, when he treated England's Gordon Brown so shabbily, the excuse given - according to The Daily Telegraph - was that wrestling with the economic crisis had left Barack Obama too exhausted to be able to focus on foreign affairs.

Barack Obama may be genuinely tired, and he may be depressed as well. He certainly has warrant. In public, he may claim that he deserves a B+ for his first year in office, but the polling data suggests that he has earned a failing mark, and he has to know better.

[I]f Barack Obama harbored any doubts as to whether he was leading his party off a cliff, William Daley - the brains behind the Chicago machine - put these doubts to rest in the op-ed that he published on Christmas Eve in The Washington Post, warning that, if the Democrats did not plot "a more centrist course," they would "risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come."

Rahe writes a very compelling piece, and I commend it to you.

There is much evidence which I think supports the conclusion that Mr. Obama needed a lot more time in government before assuming the responsibilities of the presidency, but, having said that, I think some of the criticism from his opponents on the right, particularly in terms of his prosecution of the war on terrorism, is a bit unfair. I don't think all of it is, a lot of it is warranted, but I do think some of it is petty and childish.

To take a case in point, I tuned in several times the other day to the Sean Hannity radio show, and every time I listened, Hannity, in his characteristic unpleasantly shrill manner, was raking President Obama over the coals because the boxer shorts bomber almost succeeded, and because Obama didn't respond to this would-be attack for several days. This criticism struck me as unfair, trite, and mean-spirited all at once.

People like Hannity sometimes justify hammering away at the President on such minor points by noting that President Bush was subjected to much worse treatment from the Left. Yes, of course he was, but just because the Left often acted like imbeciles for the eight years of the Bush presidency that's not a reason why the Right should do the same now.

When conservatives train their guns on every little slip - no matter how real or imaginary - they lose credibility with those who are not committed to their views (and even many who are). People like Hannity make it inevitable that legitimate criticisms of the Obama presidency will be shrugged off as just more petty "right-wing Obama bashing." Conservatives look hypocritical, for example, when they fume about the Obama administration trying the Nigerian terrorist in a civilian, rather than a military, court after they had said nothing about the Bush administration doing the same thing with the "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid.

Conservatives also make themselves look silly and unserious when they pummel Mr. Obama without extending to him the same benefit of the doubt they would have extended to Mr. Bush. They should avoid exhibiting the same tawdry, mindless behavior we saw from the Left for most of the last decade, and, instead of partisan nit-picking, conservatives should save their fire for things that really matter. It's not as if this presidency hasn't provided enough legitimate targets out there at which to aim.

RLC

Mind and Brains

One of the major objections to the notion that we possess an immaterial mind that somehow works in concert with our material brain is that interaction between two radically different substances is incomprehensible. We can comprehend how one material thing can interact with another because we see it all the time, the materialist says, but how can an immaterial thing like mind cause an effect in a material thing like a brain? Since the dualist cannot explain how this is possible their belief in mind/brain interactionism is thereby believed to be discredited.

As physicist Stephen Barr points out in a book review in the January First Things (subscription only), however, few who pose this objection to dualism stop to ask how it is that anything interacts with anything else. The materialist (one who believes that matter is all there is) assumes that matter can interact with matter, but if you ask a materialist to actually explain the interaction you draw a blank.

The same explanatory problem confronting the dualist confronts the materialist whenever he tries to understand how two material objects interact or how a force like magnetism interacts with matter, or how matter interacts with space. We simply don't know how these phenomena take place.

Barr writes:

Material bodies are made up of electrically charged particles that interact with each other through the mediation of electromagnetic fields: The charged particles affect the fields and the fields affect the particles. By what "means" or "mechanism" this happens physics does not say. It simply says that when electromagnetic fields are present, the charges are, in fact, affected as described by a certain equation; and when the charges are present the fields are affected as described by another equation. In other words, physics posits two types of entities and mathematically describes, but does not otherwise explain, their influence on each other.

Gravity poses the same problem. We have no idea how gravity "pulls" objects toward a massive body, or, for that matter, how a massive body produces gravity in the first place, or even what gravity is. If we fall back on the Einsteinian explanation that gravity is simply the bending of space around a material object then we've simply pushed the problem back a step. How, it can be asked, do material bodies bend space? If space is essentially "nothing" how is it affected by a "something" in its midst?

The materialist has no answer, but that doesn't stop him from believing it nor from disparaging the dualist for thinking that mind and brains interact. Pretty ironic, don't you think?

RLC

Hey, Let's Do Away With Science Class

What do people who are convinced that a just society is one in which there are no disparities between citizens do when faced with such disparities? Consider the plans of a public high school in Berkeley. Distraught over the fact that the achievement of the school's black students is low compared to that of other racial groups and dismayed by the fact that advanced science classes are populated mostly by whites, the Berkeley wiseheads have decided that the best solution is to eliminate challenging science classes.

I know this sounds like something you'd see in a Monty Python skit, but apparently it's true. Thomas Lifson fills us in via a piece at American Thinker:

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

According to the muddled thinking on display at the Berkeley school the best way to help blacks is to limit opportunities for everyone. If one group is performing above average and another below average well, then, there must be institutional racism afoot. Let's make everyone the same by eliminating those courses dominated by whites and in which blacks struggle. If some excel while others languish the righteous approach is to bring everyone down to the level of the least able.

Liberal egalitarianism is rarely so blunt or obvious. Lifson continues:

Aside from the repulsive racism of this move, the broader issue to be considered is whether society is better-served by cutting down the achievers and investing in the stragglers -- or whether everyone benefits from the achievements of those who apply themselves enough to excel. I have no hesitation in saying that I am in the latter camp. How does it benefit anyone to have an America made up of mediocre minds?

I wonder what's next. Are the Berkeley docents going to propose eliminating those sports teams dominated by blacks? Are they going to eliminate math classes in which whites and Asians excel relative to blacks? Are they going to cancel AP courses in general which tend to be disproportionately white and Asian? Perhaps they might carry the logic of their proposal to its conclusion and eliminate school altogether since statistics show black academic achievement in our society lagging well behind that of other groups no matter what the curriculum might be.

The argument might run thus: School just sets blacks up for failure; the failure of one group while others succeed is damaging to the unsuccessful group's self-esteem; therefore let's just do away with academics altogether. This chain of reasoning, would no doubt make perfect sense in certain progressive precincts.

Perhaps you are appalled by the sheer lunacy of what the Berkelians propose but, in fact, it's the sort of thing to which liberal assumptions about race and class frequently lead us.

RLC