Osama's Choice

Yigal Carmon, the president of the highly respected Middle East Media Research Institute, calls our attention to the correct translation of bin Laden's words on the video which was made public last Friday:

The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to "each U.S. state," designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words "ay wilaya" (which means "each U.S. state") to mean a "country" or "nation" other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state. This suggests some knowledge by bin Laden of the U.S. electoral college system. In a section of his speech in which he harshly criticized George W. Bush, bin Laden stated: "Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security."

The Islamist website Al-Qal'a explained what this sentence meant: "This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, 'Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,' it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy.

By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn't treat all American people as if they're the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections."

Another interesting aspect of the speech is the fact that while bin Laden made his specific threat to each U.S. state, he also offered an election deal to the American voters, attempting to influence the election by these means rather than influencing it through terrorist attacks.

In other words, bin Laden joins Kim Jong Il and a host of other tyrants, terrorists, and lesser whackos around the world in telling Americans that it is in our interests to elect John Kerry as our president. Vote for Kerry, the terrorists' choice.

One of the most interesting aspects of MEMRI's analysis is this:

Another conspicuous aspect of the tape is the absence of common Islamist themes that are relevant to the month of Ramadan, which for fundamentalists like bin Laden is the month of Jihad and martyrdom. Noticeably absent from the Al-Jazeera tape was his usual appearance with a weapon, and more importantly the absence of references to Jihad, martyrdom, the Koran, the Hadith (Islamic tradition), Crusaders, Jews, and the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad on the duty to wage Jihad against the infidels. For the followers of the Al-Qa'ida ideology, this speech sends a regressive and defeatist message of surrender, as seen in the move from solely using Jihad warfare to a mixed strategy of threats combined with truce offers and election deals.

This strongly suggests that George Bush's strategy for fighting terrorism is working. Al Qaida is demoralized and hoping to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat by effecting a change in the way the United States is fighting the war against him. Their best hope, evidently, is to get John Kerry elected. Good grief.

Will We Be What We Have Been

Charles Krauthammer refreshes our memories regarding one of the greatest feats of liberation in the history of world civilization. We refer to the victory over the exceedingly repressive regime imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Krauthammer writes that:

In 2001, we had nothing there. What had the Clinton administration left in place? No plausible military plan. Virtually no intelligence. No local infrastructure. No neighboring bases. The Afghan Northern Alliance was fractured and weak. And Pakistan was actively supporting the bad guys.

Within days of Sept. 11, the clueless airhead president that inhabits Michael Moore's films and Tina Brown's dinner parties had done this: forced Pakistan into alliance with us, isolated the Taliban, secured military cooperation from Afghanistan's northern neighbors, and authorized a radical war plan involving just a handful of Americans on the ground, using high technology and local militias to utterly rout the Taliban.

President Bush put in place a military campaign that did in two months what everyone had said was impossible: defeat an entrenched, fanatical, ruthless regime in a territory that had forced the great British and Soviet empires into ignominious retreat. Bush followed that by creating in less than three years a fledgling pro-American democracy in a land that had no history of democratic culture and was just emerging from 25 years of civil war.

This is all barely remembered and barely noted. Most amazing of all, John Kerry has managed to transform our Afghan venture into a failure - a botched operation in which Bush let Osama bin Laden get away because he "outsourced" bin Laden's capture to "warlords" in the battle of Tora Bora.

The liberation of Afghanistan is quite literally an astonishing feat, one that could not have been accomplished apart from force of arms, a fact that those on the left who say that war never settled anything might do well to ponder. Nor could it have been accomplished without extraordinary leadership from the Commander-in-Chief on down. It is almost impossible to imagine this achievement, for which Americans should be extremely proud, having occured under a Kerry administration. Senator Kerry's whole approach to terrorism and his disdain for the military make an expedition such as the Bush team put together in Afghanistan quite unthinkable under a President Kerry.

Krauthammer's essay, which has a lot more to say than the excerpts quoted above, implicitly reminds us of how much is at stake in tomorrow's election. Tomorrow we will decide what kind of nation we will be for the next decade. Will we continue to be the hope of oppressed peoples everywhere as we were under Ronald Reagan and as we have been under George Bush or will we be a nation fashioned after the image of Michael Moore? Will we continue to be the hope of those who live in fear of Islamo-terrorism as we have been under George Bush or will we withdraw from the fray and become a reactive force, as John Kerry has suggested he prefers, rather than the proactive force we have been under President Bush? Will we continue to be a nation that does what is right even if others refuse to join us or will we be a nation which must pass John Kerry's "global test", i.e. get approval from the French, before we can act to oppose terrorism and other threats against our security? Will we be a nation whose president has the endorsement of most of the world's worst tyrants and anti-semites, will we be a nation whose president is the man Osama Bin Laden has recently tacitly endorsed, or will we be a nation whose president is a threat to tyrants and terrorists everywhere? We'll know in thirty six hours.

Why Not Kerry

Saint Augustine speaks in his Confessions of his eagerness to meet and hear the Manichean hero Faustus who had a great reputation for eloquence. Upon finally hearing him explain the Manichean philosophy, however, Augustine was disappointed, not in Faustus' agility with the language, but rather in his ideas. He writes:

"[Faustus' ideas] seemed to me no better merely because [they] were expressed better, nor true because eloquent....[People] thought him wise simply because they liked his speaking....[Yet] a thing was not bound to be true because uttered eloquently, nor false because the utterance of the lips is ill-arranged....plain or beautiful language may clothe wisdom or folly indifferently."

These words come to mind as we reflect upon the political campaign which is heading for its denouement this Tuesday. John Kerry has said much these last twelve months and much of it he has delivered with great oratorical flourish and skill. President Bush, on the other hand, will never be considered to be the second coming of Demosthenes. Even so, eloquence has nothing to do with either truth or wisdom, and we shouldn't be blinded to the import and truth of one's words by the raiment in which they are attired.

To assess whether Senator Kerry has the "Right Stuff" to be president one needs to attend not merely to what he says or how seductively he says it, but rather to what he has accomplished in his public life.

In the early seventies the young John Kerry played a significant role in getting the United States to abandon the South Vietnamese to the armies of Ho Chi Minh resulting in the slaughter or imprisonment of tens of thousands of people who had placed their hope and trust in the U.S. to defend them. John Kerry's efforts to end our involvement in the war included defaming the American military and indirectly making life worse for the P.O.W.s being held in North Vietnam. For his contribution to an eventual N.V.A. victory he has had his photograph placed on a wall of honor in a North Vietnamese war museum.

We may argue about the quality of his judgment, or whether his behavior was actually treasonous or not. But what seems to be beyond dispute is that the North Vietnamese saw him as an ally, or, in Lenin's terms, at the least a "useful idiot", in their struggle against the United States.

Moreover, Mr. Kerry saw that war as a colossal mistake, a tragic blunder, and his prescription was to pull out immediately. Today we're engaged in another war which Senator Kerry regards as a colossal mistake and a tragic blunder. He says that as president he will nevertheless prosecute it until we win, but what in his record gives us reason to believe he's being truthful? If he was right about Vietnam he has no reason to treat Iraq any differently, and if he now thinks he was wrong about Vietnam he has never said so. If personal history is a reliable guide, a President Kerry will pull our troops out of Iraq as soon as he can, and the Iraqi people will be at the mercy of the brutal thugs who circle like hyenas waiting for the opportunity to destroy the Iraqi experiment in freedom and all who have put their trust in America to see that experiment through.

In the eighties Mr. Kerry was elected to the Senate where he compiled a record noteworthy only for it's un-noteworthiness. After twenty years of service he has no significant legislation to his credit, he has served in no real leadership capacity, he amassed a voting record that has placed him among the most left-wing members of the Senate, and his attendance at committee meetings has been abysmal. He voted consistently to raise taxes, diminish the military, and weaken our intelligence gathering capabilities. There is nothing in his tenure in Congress which exhibits the grain of presidential timber, which is doubtless why his acceptance speech at the convention last July doted so lovingly on his Vietnam service and hardly at all on his Senate career.

Since the convention he has spent the campaign blaming George Bush for everything from vaccine shortages to alleged missing explosives in Iraq, as if Bush worked in the lab that produced the vaccine and was himself standing guard at al Qaqaa. His campaign has been marked by charges and allegations which have either a very tenuous hold on, or are completely divorced from, reality. He has faulted "this president" for a terrible economy despite the fact that unemployment is lower now than it was during the Clinton years. He has faulted "this president" for invading Iraq without the blessing of the French, even though the French had been bought by Saddam and nobody could have persuaded them to join the coalition that was about to derail their oil-for-food gravy train. He faulted this president for botching the post-war in Iraq even though the Iraqi economy is strengthening almost daily, Iraqis are on track to hold the first democratic elections in their history in a few months, and 25 million of them are free of state terror for the first time in generations. Moreover, the insurgency in Iraq is in its death throes as the Iraqi military and police gain in competence and numbers and assume the delicate task of killing the Islamo-terrorists without antagonizing the Muslim citizenry.

Mr. Kerry's attempts during the campaign to appear pious and "manly" seem contrived and spurious. He has made it a point to attend church services every Sunday the last few months, but this is in stark contrast to the pattern he has established throughout his adult life. His goose-hunting foray was made risible by his purchase of the required license when he asked a clerk if he could "get me a hunting license here."

He repeatedly gives the impression of being willing to say or do anything in order to squeeze an extra vote or two out of his audience. His eagerness to castigate the President over the al Qaqaa story without knowing whether the reports were true or not is but the latest example of a reckless opportunism that goes back at least to his military days.

The Senator has manufactured crises where no crisis exists. He has accused this administration of blocking stem cell research, of planning to suppress the minority vote, of planning to deprive the elderly of social security, of planning to reinstate the draft, but none of these allegations is even remotely true, or even plausible. Similarly untrue are claims he has made for himself such as the claim to have met with the members of the Security Council for in-depth discussions prior to the invasion of Iraq, a claim flatly denied by the relevant U.N. representatives.

John Kerry himself promises us that he has a "plan" for every ill besetting our polity, but either his plan looks very similar to what the President is already doing, as in his plan for Iraq, or the numbers in his plan don't add up, as in his plan to rollback the Bush tax cut and to use that revenue to pay for all the programs he has promised. Or, most often, the plan goes unarticulated and remains a mystery.

Mr. Kerry can lay claim to only a single qualification for the presidency, if it even be a qualification: He is an eloquent and persuasive speaker. But as Augustine pointed out over 1600 years ago, eloquence has nothing to do with truth. Nor does it have anything much to do with leadership. Like pumice stone which gives the appearance of possessing weight, but which, upon hefting, one is surprised to find so airy, John Kerry's rhetorical graces mask an inner lightness that is totally inadequate for the stresses and tests which lie ahead of our nation.

In these times we need a president who has demonstrated both leadership and character. George Bush is not perfect, but he possesses those two particular virtues in abundance. John Kerry, by contrast, is a "hollow man" who has never evinced either. He offers no compelling reason to elect him and numerous reasons to blanch at the thought of a Kerry presidency. Viewpoint urges its readers not to base their votes on Tuesday upon superficial eloquence but rather upon each man's character and the capacity each has demonstrated to lead us in the continuing war against Islamo-fascist terrorism.

Why Not Kerry

Saint Augustine speaks in his Confessions of his eagerness to meet and hear the Manichean hero Faustus who had a great reputation for eloquence. Upon finally hearing him explain the Manichean philosophy, however, Augustine was disappointed, not in Faustus' agility with the language, but rather in his ideas. He writes:

"[Faustus' ideas] seemed to me no better merely because [they] were expressed better, nor true because eloquent....[People] thought him wise simply because they liked his speaking....[Yet] a thing was not bound to be true because uttered eloquently, nor false because the utterance of the lips is ill-arranged....plain or beautiful language may clothe wisdom or folly indifferently."

These words come to mind as we reflect upon the political campaign which is heading for its denouement this Tuesday. John Kerry has said much these last twelve months and much of it he has delivered with great oratorical flourish and skill. President Bush, on the other hand, will never be considered to be the second coming of Demosthenes. Even so, eloquence has nothing to do with either truth or wisdom, and we shouldn't be blinded to the import and truth of one's words by the raiment in which they are attired.

To assess whether Senator Kerry has the "Right Stuff" to be president one needs to attend not merely to what he says or how seductively he says it, but rather to what he has accomplished in his public life.

In the early seventies the young John Kerry played a significant role in getting the United States to abandon the South Vietnamese to the armies of Ho Chi Minh resulting in the slaughter or imprisonment of tens of thousands of people who had placed their hope and trust in the U.S. to defend them. John Kerry's efforts to end our involvement in the war included defaming the American military and indirectly making life worse for the P.O.W.s being held in North Vietnam. For his contribution to an eventual N.V.A. victory he has had his photograph placed on a wall of honor in a North Vietnamese war museum.

We may argue about the quality of his judgment, or whether his behavior was actually treasonous or not. But what seems to be beyond dispute is that the North Vietnamese saw him as an ally, or, in Lenin's terms, at the least a "useful idiot", in their struggle against the United States.

Moreover, Mr. Kerry saw that war as a colossal mistake, a tragic blunder, and his prescription was to pull out immediately. Today we're engaged in another war which Senator Kerry regards as a colossal mistake and a tragic blunder. He says that as president he will nevertheless prosecute it until we win, but what in his record gives us reason to believe he's being truthful? If he was right about Vietnam he has no reason to treat Iraq any differently, and if he now thinks he was wrong about Vietnam he has never said so. If personal history is a reliable guide, a President Kerry will pull our troops out of Iraq as soon as he can, and the Iraqi people will be at the mercy of the brutal thugs who circle like hyenas waiting for the opportunity to destroy the Iraqi experiment in freedom and all who have put their trust in America to see that experiment through.

In the eighties Mr. Kerry was elected to the Senate where he compiled a record noteworthy only for it's un-noteworthiness. After twenty years of service he has no significant legislation to his credit, he has served in no real leadership capacity, he amassed a voting record that has placed him among the most left-wing members of the Senate, and his attendance at committee meetings has been abysmal. He voted consistently to raise taxes, diminish the military, and weaken our intelligence gathering capabilities. There is nothing in his tenure in Congress which exhibits the grain of presidential timber, which is doubtless why his acceptance speech at the convention last July doted so lovingly on his Vietnam service and hardly at all on his Senate career.

Since the convention he has spent the campaign blaming George Bush for everything from vaccine shortages to alleged missing explosives in Iraq, as if Bush worked in the lab that produced the vaccine and was himself standing guard at al Qaqaa. His campaign has been marked by charges and allegations which have either a very tenuous hold on, or are completely divorced from, reality. He has faulted "this president" for a terrible economy despite the fact that unemployment is lower now than it was during the Clinton years. He has faulted "this president" for invading Iraq without the blessing of the French, even though the French had been bought by Saddam and nobody could have persuaded them to join the coalition that was about to derail their oil-for-food gravy train. He faulted this president for botching the post-war in Iraq even though the Iraqi economy is strengthening almost daily, Iraqis are on track to hold the first democratic elections in their history in a few months, and 25 million of them are free of state terror for the first time in generations. Moreover, the insurgency in Iraq is in its death throes as the Iraqi military and police gain in competence and numbers and assume the delicate task of killing the Islamo-terrorists without antagonizing the Muslim citizenry.

Mr. Kerry's attempts during the campaign to appear pious and "manly" seem contrived and spurious. He has made it a point to attend church services every Sunday the last few months, but this is in stark contrast to the pattern he has established throughout his adult life. His goose-hunting foray was made risible by his purchase of the required license when he asked a clerk if he could "get me a hunting license here."

He repeatedly gives the impression of being willing to say or do anything in order to squeeze an extra vote or two out of his audience. His eagerness to castigate the President over the al Qaqaa story without knowing whether the reports were true or not is but the latest example of a reckless opportunism that goes back at least to his military days.

The Senator has manufactured crises where no crisis exists. He has accused this administration of blocking stem cell research, of planning to suppress the minority vote, of planning to deprive the elderly of social security, of planning to reinstate the draft, but none of these allegations is even remotely true, or even plausible. Similarly untrue are claims he has made for himself such as the claim to have met with the members of the Security Council for in-depth discussions prior to the invasion of Iraq, a claim flatly denied by the relevant U.N. representatives.

John Kerry himself promises us that he has a "plan" for every ill besetting our polity, but either his plan looks very similar to what the President is already doing, as in his plan for Iraq, or the numbers in his plan don't add up, as in his plan to rollback the Bush tax cut and to use that revenue to pay for all the programs he has promised. Or, most often, the plan goes unarticulated and remains a mystery.

Mr. Kerry can lay claim to only a single qualification for the presidency, if it even be a qualification: He is an eloquent and persuasive speaker. But as Augustine pointed out over 1600 years ago, eloquence has nothing to do with truth. Nor does it have anything much to do with leadership. Like pumice stone which gives the appearance of possessing weight, but which, upon hefting, one is surprised to find so airy, John Kerry's rhetorical graces mask an inner lightness that is totally inadequate for the stresses and tests which lie ahead of our nation.

In these times we need a president who has demonstrated both leadership and character. George Bush is not perfect, but he possesses those two particular virtues in abundance. John Kerry, by contrast, is a "hollow man" who has never evinced either. He offers no compelling reason to elect him and numerous reasons to blanch at the thought of a Kerry presidency. Viewpoint urges its readers not to base their votes on Tuesday upon superficial eloquence but rather upon each man's character and the capacity each has demonstrated to lead us in the continuing war against Islamo-fascist terrorism.

It's The Final Countdown

Belmont Club has two excellent posts up. The first is an analysis of the recently released UBL tape. Wretchard at Belmont Club observes:

It is important to notice what he has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is couched in his customary orbicular phraseology he is basically asking for time out.

The American answer to Osama's proposal will be given on Election Day. One response is to agree that the United States of America will henceforth act like Sweden, which is on track to become majority Islamic sometime after the middle of this century. The electorate best knows which candidate will serve this end; which candidate most promises to be European-like in attitude and they can choose that path with both eyes open. The electorate can strike that bargain and Osama may keep his word.

The other course is to reject Osama's terms utterly; to recognize the pleading in his outwardly belligerent manner and reply that his fugitive existence; the loss of his sanctuaries; the annihilation of his men are but the merest foretaste of what is yet to come: to say that to enemies such as he, the initials 'US' will always mean Unconditional Surrender.

In the second post Wretchard teams up with Chester for an analysis of the order of battle shaping up in Fallujah. It looks like there will be an assault sometime next week, probably soon after the polls close, and it doesn't look good for the insurgents. There's good stuff to be found on the military situation in Fallujah at both of these links.

Imposing Our Views Upon Others

A friend recommends this article in Commonweal for readers interested in John Kerry's position on abortion (at least as of today). The article is actually a critique of Mario Cuomo's 1984 Notre Dame speech on the subject which has taken on the authority of holy writ for many Democratic politicians, most notably John Kerry.

The article is authored by Ken Woodward, long time religion editor at Newsweek, and is an excellent analysis of the Cuomo/Kerry argument that one can be personally opposed to abortion, that one can accept the Catholic teaching that abortion is a ghastly crime against human life, and still strive heroically to do everything one can to prevent this offense from being restricted or ended.

There is a link to a reply by Cuomo to Woodward's essay at the end of the piece. In Viewpoint's opinion Cuomo's response, though articulate and tart, falls short of being a satisfactory defense of his position. We'll leave it to the interested reader to pursue the arguments for him or herself, but the general theme of the Cuomo/Kerry apologia is the oft-heard claim that no one has the right to impose his/her morality on another person. This concern, however, being founded on several errors, is quite misplaced.

We'll mention only in passing Woodward's point that it's difficult to name legislation which does not impose somebody's morality upon the rest of society. Everything from desegregation to affirmative action to welfare regulations to environmental regulations to laws prohibiting gambling, prostitution, public lewdness, drug use, capital punishment, bribery, and so on all presuppose moral values that might not be shared by many of those who are subject to the pertinent laws.

Beyond this objection, however, there are a couple of other difficulties with this concern about saddling others with one's moral values or one's religious views. First, it is a concern, oddly enough, that only theists can logically express. If an atheist were to object to a theist that he should not impose his beliefs on others the appropriate reply would be to ask "Why not?"

If the atheist is correct in believing that we live in a world without God then a man has a "right" to try to do whatever he wishes. In a world without God might makes right, so anything one is able to do one has a "right" to do. If the atheist objects to this, he might be asked what it is, exactly, upon which he bases his conviction that I have no right to impose my values. Is it the law? But if I can change the law then that objection fails. Is it that a right to impose one's will upon others robs the other of his worth and dignity as a human being? But in a world without God human worth and dignity are arbitrary and chimerical. They have no real existence in the first place, and even if they did, why would it be wrong to deprive someone of them?

The fact is that the only constraint upon anyone's "right" to do whatever he is able to do is God's proscription, but for the atheist that limit does not exist and for the secularist it is illicit to invoke it. In a Godless universe, or in the naked public square, we are all morally autonomous, free to do whatever we have the power to accomplish.

A second problem with the affirmation that it's improper to seek to impose our beliefs upon others is that the claim itself is a moral assertion. The person who makes it believes that it is wrong to engage in the particular behavior he is condemning. But the problem with this is that he is himself seeking to impose upon others his moral conviction that it is unjust to impose one's moral convictions upon others. In other words, he's violating his own principle in the very act of voicing it. He is attempting to inflict this particular moral principle on the rest of us.

The truth of the matter is that few people who argue that it transgresses some moral standard to impose one's beliefs upon others really believe it deep down. What they believe is that it's wrong to have others foist convictions and values with which they disagree upon them. They have no trouble burdening others with their own values, and that's why Cuomo and Kerry sound so insincere on the question of abortion. They claim to believe that abortion is a sin, but they are prepared to fight tooth and nail to perpetuate it. It is not, mind, that they promise to adopt a stance of political neutrality on the issue. It is that they promise to do everything in their power to see that neither legislatures nor courts nor any expression of the popular will diminishes a woman's right to kill her unborn child.

Surely this is an odd position to take. They certainly wouldn't suffer similar psychological dissonance over slavery. They would hardly say that they believe slavery is an offense against God and man, but since many people disagree with them about this, they promise as President to only appoint pro-slavery justices to the Supreme Court. If such reasoning is unthinkable with respect to the issue of slavery, why is it not equally unthinkable with respect to abortion?

When someone says they don't want to impose their values on others, they're really just trying to walk on both sides of the political street simultaneously. They are tacitly acknowledging that they're really not committed to at least one of the values they claim to hold. If Cuomo and Kerry really believed the Catholic Church's teaching on abortion they would scarcely oppose efforts to end it, much less would they actively fight to keep it legal.

Stories and Non-stories

ABC has in its possession a videotape made by an English-speaking terrorist who threatens an impending attack on the U.S. which will make 9/11 seem insignificant by comparison. ABC has, as of this writing, chosen not to run the tape giving as their reason that it's too close to November 2nd, and that releasing this horrifying threat might have a disruptive effect on the election.

We may interpret this to mean that since the threats will probably drive voters to push the Republican lever on Tuesday, ABC deems it imprudent to show it. If the tape had somehow made Bush look bad, if it was a tape, say, of new abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, does anyone think that ABC's scruples would cut the same way? To see the salient parts of the tape and some analysis of it go here.

Meanwhile, the MSM is full of reports about missing explosives from al Qaqaa. It's hard to understand what relevance this story, which has been known for a year and a half, has for the election. There is no reason to believe that the explosives were looted under the noses of American troops since the logistics involved would be daunting, but even if they were, how on earth would George Bush be culpable? Senator Kerry is trying to wring every drop of campaign advantage he can out of this story, but he's stretching so far he risks incurring a political hernia.

Indeed, if there's any political lesson in the whole al Qaqaa matter it is that Senator Kerry is willing to defame both our troops and the President without having any proof or even strong evidence that his charges are true. This shows a recklessness and indifference to truth that reflects poorly on a man who would be president. It also calls into question (again) his credibility on everything else he has said during this campaign.

The left seems to think that real news should not be reported but non-news should be hyped for a week. It seems disingenuous, but perhaps that's part of the job description for being a member of the MSM or of the Democratic party.

Dick Cheney's Former Company

The news brings word that Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, is being investigated by the F.B.I. Apparently, Dick Cheney's former company, which is Halliburton, may have been awarded contracts improperly. Cheney himself is not under investigation, but it is his former company and he used to be an executive at H-A-L-L-I-B-U-R-T-O-N so he may be implicated.

Halliburton, with which Vice-President Cheney used to be very closely associated, and probably still is, may have overcharged taxpayers for fuel and services in Iraq. There is a suspicion that the Bush administration of which Dick Cheney is Vice-president, of all things, showed favoritism to Dick Cheney's former company, HALLIBURTON!!!

The connection between Dick Cheney and HALLIBURTON is well-known in Washington circles. Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman who may or may not be indebted to Dick Cheney for her job, said the company is cooperating with various investigations, but she dismissed the latest revelation, somewhat naively, as election politics.

Liz Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney who is a former executive at HALLIBURTON, said today on the Glenn Beck radio show that when her father resigned from Halliburton, his former company, he was given eight million dollars in options and other reimbursements (allegations that these were compensation for anticipated favoritism have not yet been proven. Yet.).

Ms Cheney confirmed Beck's report that her father gave the entire sum to charity. The news of this astounding gift will doubtless be soon displayed all over the MSM so that everyone will know what sort of man Mr. Cheney is. Or not.

It's All In the Nuance

John Kerry promises that he would fight a smarter, more effective war in Iraq, but he's having enough trouble simply bringing his vaunted intelligence to bear in the current political struggle. He seems to blurt out whatever strikes him as useful at the moment, which almost always proves embarrassing to him later. He has claimed, for instance, that Bush had banned stem cell research, that he (Kerry) had met with representatives of the U.N. Security Council about the pending invasion of Iraq, that Bush bungled the supervision of explosives in al QaQaa, all of which claims have turned out to be erroneous.

Senator Kerry is undeterred, however, by the fact that he seems so inept at getting the facts right. He staggers from one canard to the next, blithely indifferent to the tenuous relationship any of his yarns have with reality and completely unmindful of what his mendacity tells us about his character.

Today he delivered this piece of historical buffoonery from the stump in Toledo:

"When the Bay of Pigs went sour, John Kennedy had the courage to look America in the eye and say, `I take responsibility, it's my fault," Kerry said, referring to the bungled invasion of Cuba in 1961. "John Kennedy knew how to take responsibility for the mistakes he made and Mr. President, it's long since time for you to start taking responsibility for the mistakes you made."

Let's see. Deposing Saddam, liberating 25 million people from oppression, and resolutely taking the first early steps to establishing democracy in the heart of the Arab world is, in the mind of the Senator, analogous to a president (John Kennedy) getting cold feet prior to the Cuba invasion and sending thousands of Cuban guerrillas to a pointless death because Kennedy decided at the last minute to withhold the air cover they had been promised.

Not only is the Senator's comparison of the Bay of Pigs with Iraq about as perverse as it can be, Mr. Kerry insists upon serving up this sublime specimen of asininity while the votes of the Cuban-American community in Florida, from whose ranks those dead were drawn, hang in the balance. Moreover, he implicitly reminds them that it was the Democratic president that Kerry models himself after whose dithering was responsible for their slaughter.

This may all seem very smart to the liberals who pride themselves on being so much more intelligent than the rest of us. It may even be an example of the Senator's much celebrated nuanced thinking. But, frankly, we don't see how what the Senator said today can be considered anything other than just stupid.

Kerry's Plan For The Draft

No Left Turns has this interesting piece of analysis about the prospects of a draft being reinstated in the next four years, not by a Bush administration, mind you, but by John Kerry:

One of our readers, Vernon Dozier, has offered a comment that deserves to be moved front and center:

Hasn't anyone considered that Kerry would need a draft a lot more than Bush? Bush is very popular among current military personnel (he stands to get 75% to 80% of the military vote), and the various branches are currently meeting recruitment goals. In contrast, Kerry is reviled by about 95% of those who served directly with him because he pissed all over them with false accusations of atrocities merely to promote his own political ambitions. Who the hell would volunteer to serve under such a commander in chief?

In fact, this is very much in line with what I learned today from talking with a student who has friends in the armed forces. It is no secret that the men and women of the military find Kerry despicable, and apparently there are many who say that if he is elected they will not reenlist. Assuming he would be unable to make up for these losses with French and German soldiers, it is at least as reasonable to suppose that Kerry would reinstate the draft as it is to suggest that the president might.

Pass the word. Kerry has a secret "plan" to reinstate the draft. Here it is: Get himself elected as Commander-in-Chief and be so unpopular with the troops that the only way to maintain a viable military at all is to dragoon people into its service.

This theory has the advantage of being much more plausible than the feverish ravings that have been going around left-wing weblogs about George Bush's "secret plan" to restart the selective service.

The Little People

National Geographic has a story about the discovery of a new kind of human, smaller in stature even than modern pygmies, which inhabited the island of Flores in Indonesia until as recently as 13,000 years ago.

These diminutive hominids have been designated a new species, Homo floresienses but the article does not mention the rationale for placing them in a separate taxon from modern humans. The fact that they were very small, about three feet tall, is not in itself sufficient reason for making them a separate species. Great Danes and Chihuahuas are at least as disparate in size as Homo sapiens and H. floresienses, but these dogs are both members of the same species. Usually, biologists consider two groups to be different species if members of the groups cannot produce fertile offspring, and we have no way of knowing at this stage whether H. sapiens and H. floresienses were interfertile.

At any rate, it's interesting that there have been myths and legends for centuries about tiny people having inhabited the islands in the region, but no hard evidence of it has ever been found until now. It causes one to wonder if the Irish legends of leprechauns and other ancient stories of elves might not have had some basis in pre-historical fact. Might these tiny three foot high humans have been at one time much more widespread rather than confined to just the Indonesian archipelago?

How Much Time Do We Have?

A friend passes along an article by Paul Roberts in the current issue of Mother Jones which addresses what is perhaps the most urgent problem of our time, Islamic terrorism notwithstanding. Roberts sounds the tocsin alerting us to the impending oil crunch and warns that it may be closer than had previously been anticipated.

There are things not to like about Roberts' piece, but his larger message is one we can't afford to ignore. Here are a couple of excerpts:

The most alarming symptoms of an energy system on the verge of collapse are found in the oil markets. Today, even as global demand for oil, led by the economic boom in Asia, is rising far faster than anticipated, our ability to pump more oil is falling. Despite assurances from oil's two biggest players - the House of Bush and the House of Saud - that supplies are plentiful ... it's now clear that even the Saudis lack the physical capacity to bring enough oil to desperate consumers. As a result, oil markets are now so tight that even a minor disturbance - accelerated fighting in Iraq, another bomb in Riyadh, more unrest in Venezuela or Nigeria - could send prices soaring and crash the global economy into a recession.

Nor is it any longer a matter of simply drilling new wells or laying new pipe. Oil is finite, and eventually, global production must peak, much as happened to domestic supplies in the early 1970s. When it does, oil prices will leap, perhaps as high as $100 per barrel - a disaster if we don't have a cost-effective alternative fuel or technology in place. When the peak is coming is impossible to predict with precision. Estimates range from the ultra-optimistic, which foresee a peak no sooner than 2035, to the pessimistic, which hold that the peak may have already occurred.

Our current energy infrastructure - the pipelines and refineries, the power plants and grids, the gasoline stations, and, of course, the cars, trucks, planes, and ships - is a massive, sprawling asset that took more than a century to build and is worth some $1 trillion. Replacing that hydrocarbon monster with "clean" technologies and fuels before our current energy problems escalate into catastrophes will likely be the most complex and expensive challenge this country has ever faced.

If oil prices continue to rise there will not be a single aspect of our lives which will not be negatively affected. Even the best scenario only gives us thirty years to switch to some other energy source and to adopt measures for depleting the oil we have less rapidly. It's time to get serious.

The Essential Singer

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has put together a collection of quotes from Peter Singer which give the reader a good sense of why he has become the most controversial philosopher in the United States, if not the world. Carter cautions that the quotes are not placed in context and thus may be misleading, but with that caveat in mind here are a few of the dozen or so he lists:

On the Sanctity of Human Life:

I do not deny that if one accepts abortion on the grounds provided in Chapter 6, the case for killing other human beings, in certain circumstances, is strong. As I shall try to show in this chapter, however, this is not something to be regarded with horror, and the use of the Nazi analogy is utterly misleading. On the contrary, once we abandon those doctrines about the sanctity of human life that...collapse as soon as they are questioned, it is the refusal to accept killing that, in some cases, is horrific.

On The Acceptability of Killing Newborn Infants:

In Chapter 4 we saw that the fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings. This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings. We saw in our discussion of abortion that the potential of a fetus to become a rational, self-conscious being cannot count against killing it at a stage when it lacks these characteristics - not, that is, unless we are also prepared to count the value of rational self-conscious life as a reason against contraception and celibacy. No infant - disabled or not - has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time.

How Buying a New TV is Like Selling a Homeless Kid's Kidney:

In the end, what is the ethical distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and upgrades to a better one - knowing that the money could be donated to an organization that would use it to save the lives of kids in need?

Why Killing Babies and Animals is Morally Equivalent:

The preference, in normal cases, for saving a human life over the life of an animal when a choice has to be made is a preference based on the characteristics that normal humans being have and not on the mere fact that they are members of our own species. This is why when we consider members of our own species who lack the characteristics of normal human beings we can no longer say that their lives are always to be preferred to those of other animals. In general, though, the question of when it is wrong to kill (painlessly) an animal is one to which we need give no precise answer. As long as we remember that we should give the same respect to the lives of animals as we give to the lives of those human beings at a similar mental level we shall not go far wrong.

There are more like these at the site. The reader might also check out our own critique of Singer's ethics with special attention to his lack of a basis for making any ethical pronouncements of any sort. It's titled Animals and Humanism.

All the News That Fits

Senator Kerry continues to add more whoppers to his already impressive repertoire. In addition to his prevarications about secret Bush plans to reinstate the draft, suppress the black vote, and take away social security, to name just a few of his recent flights of fancy, he has added two new fictional claims. He insists now that prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom he met with the members of the U.N. Security Council and held in-depth discussions with them on the crisis, a claim that the representatives of the relevant nations have flatly denied, and he is also currently resurrecting a bit of phony news from the spring of 2003 and presenting it not only as if it is a recent development but also as if it were true.

In fact, it's neither. The allegation he's making is that 380 tons of high explosives were looted from a storage facility in Iraq and that this shows the incompetence of George Bush as Commander in Chief. Actually what it shows is the desperation of the left in general and Kerry in particular to find anything with which they can bamboozle the ignorant to get them to vote for the Democrats.

The fact is that when our troops first arrived at the facility on their march to Baghdad in May 2003 the munitions had already been removed (See Kerry Spot for the details). These explosives, which had been identified by the I.A.E.A. and sealed prior to the invasion, were not there when we arrived. Saddam had probably trucked it to Syria before the outbreak of hostilities. How this reflects on the competency of the president is something Senator Kerry has not yet explained.

Kerry, of course, wants the voters to think that the looting occured after the facility was under our control, but there's no evidence to support this and lots of evidence against. There's also a huge logistical problem involved in trying to move that much material under the noses of the American military. Captain's Quarters has the math involved in undertaking such a heist.

A worse aspect of this is not just that Kerry continues to fault our troops and the President for the missing ordinance, but that the New York Times dusts this story off right before the election in order to discredit Bush.

That's dishonest enough, but there's even worse. CBS, the network that aired Dan Rather's fatuous forgeries a few weeks ago in an attempt to make Bush look like he'd disobeyed orders while serving in the National Guard, was planning to run the story on the missing explosives on October 31st so that the Republicans wouldn't have time to respond to it.

If anyone has demonstrated incompetence in these last months it has been John Kerry and his allies in the liberal media who have shown that they are utterly incapable of telling the truth. They keep trying, like Wile E. Coyote, to destroy the road runner, only to have their stupid lies repeatedly blow up in their faces.

Why anyone trusts either the paper of Jayson Blair, the network of Dan Rather, or the candidate these media outlets endorse to provide them with the truth is perhaps a question only a psychiatrist can answer.

Pacifying Iraq

The Strategy Page offers some fine insight into American/Iraqi strategy for dealing with the insurgency in general and for Fallujah in particular. A few excerpts:

During the April, 2003 invasion, Saddam's enforcers began to flee back to the Sunni Arab homeland, north and west of Baghdad. Those that didn't flee at the sight of advancing American troops, soon left when they realized that the Shia Arabs and Kurds were now hunting down enforcers. By the end of 2003, nearly all of Saddam's thugs were back in places like Fallujah. There, tribal chiefs, long on Saddam's payroll, soon found themselves in the company of many heavily armed Saddam supporters. Guess who started calling the shots? The Baath Party had a plan for what to do if the country were overrun and occupied by an enemy (most likely Iran, but the United States was a possibility as well.) Baath had money, and people who knew how to do terror.

Baath Party operators had been working with criminal gangs, running criminal operations (officially sanctioned, or on the side) and terrorizing the population for decades. The Baath people also knew they had an edge over the Americans, as Baath could, and had, done whatever they wanted to get their way. The Americans, for all their nifty weapons and gadgets, had to operate according to rules of conduct. American troops could not kidnap people to get their children or siblings to carry out attacks. The Americans could not summarily execute anyone who failed in a mission, or refused to do what was asked.

But the Baath Party plan didn't work exactly as expected. The Americans were aggressively recruiting and training new Iraqi security forces. This had to be done from scratch, since no one but Saddam loyalists worked security while Saddam was in power, and all those people were Sunni Arabs whose loyalty was now questionable. But the new government, and coalition police and security experts, persevered. Trying to work out deals with the tribal chiefs didn't work, mainly because Baath and al Qaeda threatened to kill any chief that made peace with the government.

So the government began to shut down the "little Fallujahs" around Baghdad. This was good practice for the Iraqi troops and police. The Iraqis would need all the practice they could get before taking on Fallujah, for that's where those who escaped the Iraqi dragnet, in places like Samarra and many other smaller towns, run to. While the Iraqi and American units flush the thugs out, Fallujah itself is being hit with smart bombs and raids in the suburbs by ground troops.

Sometime before the end of the year, Fallujah will fall, and the Baath Party enforcers, and the al Qaeda terrorists will have to scatter. That will make the bad guys more vulnerable, and less effective. That, of course, is the objective.

The wild card in this prediction, of course, is how much patience the American people have to see this task through to the end. We'll know the answer to that on November 3rd.

Reply To a Friend

A friend writes to voice his displeasure (see Feedback) over Viewpoint's tendency to highlight left-wing depravity and to associate it on occasion with the Kerry campaign. His concern was with our post titled How Low Can You Go. Our reply follows:

You say you don't understand my logic. That makes us even. You say I'm focussing on extremists on the fringe that nobody listens to, and you think it's unfair to associate them with Kerry. I don't know why. First of all, I'm not sure they are on the fringe. The original column implicitly encouraging the assassination of George Bush was in The Guardian which is a mainstream leftist paper in England, and the website which carried those awful "endorsements" of The Guardian's sentiments gets a heck of a lot more traffic than mine does. It's a fairly mainstream site on the left.

You ask why I don't write about the KKK or the skinheads, etc. and connect them with George Bush. I'll tell you what. You give me a site where the wing nuts on the right talk about assassinating Kerry and use the sort of hateful language against him that these people used, and I'll be more than happy to run it. Show me a site where there are haters on the right urging people to vote for Bush, and I'll certainly write about it.

I'm as sickened by the behavior of the KKK and skinheads as you are, but to compare these people to the ones I quoted in the Viewpoint post is to compare apples and oranges. The skinheads are absolutely irrelevant to this election. The sickos on the right really are out on the fringe and are politically isolated. In fact they are scarcely political at all. To the extent that any of them are involved politically they are a negligible voice.

The thugs on the left are not. They are politically active and they are not at all irrelevant. They are trying hard to dehumanize the President, but you can't dehumanize a man without it resulting in some lunatic feeling justified in actually trying to carry out an assassination. Their coarseness is creating a climate in which people feel it's okay to joke about killing someone. It's a short step from that mindset to actually trying it.

I'm surprised you don't join me in pointing out the outrage of this instead of criticizing me for identifying these people with Kerry. Nor do I think that that identification is at all unfair, anymore than it would be unfair to wonder what it is about Bush that attracts neo-nazis to his side, if, in fact, such were the case. If David Duke and the Klan were out endorsing and campaigning for Bush, I'd be appalled. Kerry has attracted endorsements from some of the worst tyrants and killers (Arafat, Kim Jong Il, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, et al) around. It's completely fair to wonder why. It's also completely fair to point out that many of the people he attracts on the domestic side are in some ways just as despicable. I'm sorry you have such a problem with that.

Sounds of Silence

Is it that we haven't been paying very close attention or have the panegyrists of cultural diversity actually grown quiet over the last couple of years? It wouldn't be surprising if the celebrants of multiculturalism are feeling a little embarrassed by reports like this one from the Washington Times and have decided that maybe now is not a good time to be claiming that all cultures are "equally valid" and worth celebrating.

The article is about two young Nigerian women who have been sentenced to death by stoning for having sex. If you guessed that Nigeria must be a Muslim country then you are factually correct even if you are not politically correct. Under the rules established by the PC thought police we should never assume that some inhumane practice implies a provenience among any particular ethnic or religious group unless those groups are white Republican and/or Christian.

Nevertheless, Nigeria is indeed under Sharia Law and this article gives us a vivid idea of what a blessing it would be to reside in a land where Islamic ideas of justice and compassion prevail. Here's the gist of it:

A court in northern Nigeria has sentenced two women to death by stoning for allegedly committing adultery....sex outside wedlock is considered adultery if one of the partners is or has ever been married. If neither partner was ever married, then sex outside wedlock is condemned as "fornication," punishable by whipping.

Apparently these girls are appealing their sentences because they are, through no choice of their own, unmarried, and according to the mercies of Islamic law they should only be whipped for their crime, not stoned.

Perhaps someone reading this might think that Viewpoint is being a little harsh on Muslims. Perhaps Nigeria is an extreme example and maybe it is the case that the vast majority of Muslims find such laws archaic and distasteful. Such a hypothesis, however, would be mistaken.

Sharia is evidently the dream of even "moderate" Muslims. It is their vision for the entire world. It is the Muslim hope that one day all people will be subject to the glories of Sharia. Those who resist will, of course, be eliminated. In support of this admittedly uncomfortable assessment we offer as warrant, courtesy of Belmont Club, a resolution from the Communique of the Thirtieth Session of the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers held in Istanbul last June. Item #62 of the Communique states:

The Conference expressed deep concern over repeated and erroneous attempts to associate Islam with human rights violations, and over the use of television, the radio and the press to propagate such misconceptions. It called for an end to the unjustified campaigns of some non-governmental organizations against a number of Member States, which demand the abolition of Sharia laws and penalties in the name of human rights protection. It affirmed the right of States to uphold their religious, social and cultural idiosyncrasies, which are legacies that help enrich common universal concepts of human rights. It urged that the universality of human rights must not be used as a pretext to interfere in the internal affairs of States and flout their national sovereignty. The Conference also condemned the decision of the European Union to denounce stoning as a penalty and what it calls inhumane punishments meted out by some Member States in compliance with Islamic Sharia.

This statement lends little encouragement to those who would like to believe that Sharia is outside the Islamic mainstream.

The moral and cultural relativists in the West who were so voluble a decade ago have had very little to say of late, as the cruelties and horrors of the Islamic way of life have become more familiar to the average American. It's hard to blame them for shutting up, though, because it must be difficult to credibly assert that all cultures are equally "good" or "valid" when their listeners have evidence like the above story in their hands. The whole project of multiculturalism, of "celebrating the world's diversity," is discredited by the manifest savagery of stoning girls to death for sexual indiscretion, while, it needs to be mentioned, almost never punishing the male. Moreover, the accounts which reach our ears of this sort of barbarism are doubtless merely the tip of the Islamic iceberg.

What is there to celebrate in a culture which thinks that it is good, right, and just to stone to death an 18 year old unmarried girl who had a sexual relationship after her former husband had abandoned her? So far from celebrating such evil we should be deploring it, condemning it, and subjecting it to the ridicule it deserves. So far from mouthing platitudes about how our way of life and our values are no better or worse than those of other people around the world we should be holding in derision those who actually believe such nonsense.

Only an addlepated liberal would deny that there are indeed some ways of life, some values, some religious convictions which are superior to others. A religious ethic which values mercy, compassion, dignity, and life as well as righteousness and justice, towers over one which values only a perverse form of "righteousness" to the exclusion of the other virtues like a sequoia over crabgrass.

To be sure, there is much in American culture to regret and to repudiate, but anyone who really believes, after all we've learned in the last ten years about the Islamic Arab and African world, that our way of life, our highest values, and our religious assumptions are not vastly superior to those of much of the rest of the world needs to spend some quality time with a de-programmer.

"Integrity, Integrity, Integrity"

Investigative journalist Joel Mowbray reminds us that Senator Kerry has made his honesty a centerpiece of his campaign, calling truthfulness "the fundamental test of leadership." He closed the final debate with President Bush by recounting what his mother told him from her hospital bed, "Remember: integrity, integrity, integrity." In an interview published in the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Mr. Kerry was asked what he would want people to remember about his presidency. He responded, "That it always told the truth to the American people."

So, when he told us in that last debate that he "went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable." We assumed there was at least a chance he was telling the truth.

When he said while speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, that he understood the "real readiness" of the United Nations to "take this seriously" because he met "with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein," we had no particular reason to doubt him.

Trouble is, it never happened. Kerry just made it up. Mowbray has checked out the story and reveals how much of an impact Mr. Kerry's mother's dying admonition made on him in today's Washington Times.

How Low Can You Go

If anyone is inclined to spelunk the sewers of left-wing depravity you might, if your stomach can handle it, try a trip to a site called Metafilter which offers a thread of responses to the recent Guardian column by a man named Charlie Brooker which wistfully wonders where Lee Harvey Oswald and other assassins are now that they are "needed". Some samples of their thought:

I'm sure many people, world-wide, have wondered why no one's assassinated the moron yet.

These days, there are a large number of people, myself among them, who are emotionally inclined to think positively of a Bush assassination.

Throughout the debate, John Kerry, for his part, looks and sounds a bit like a haunted tree. But at least he's not a lying, sniggering, drink-driving, selfish, reckless, ignorant, dangerous, backward, drooling, twitching, blinking, mouse-faced little cheat.

It's a humorous column, in short, and if you can't ask for someone deeply unpopular to be assassinated for a punchline, then I weep for humanity.

All his assassination would mean is that I wouldn't have to wait another 30 or so years to piss on his grave.

These are the sort of folks John Kerry attracts. Nice people.

Nine Objections To Christianity

David Wayne at JollyBlogger invites his readers to submit their ten most frequently encountered objections to Christianity. It's an interesting challenge. I can only come up with nine off the top of my head, so if Viewpoint readers, Christians or non-Christians, want to weigh in on this topic feel free to do so via our Feedback Forum.

Here are the nine objections which I've encountered most frequently from non-Christians and which they tend to feel most strongly about. They are also, incidentally, perhaps among the most challenging for a Christian apologist:

1)The difficulty of reconciling suffering with an all powerful, benevolent deity is perhaps the most formidable impediment to belief in God and hence in accepting Christian faith.

2) Christianity, by restricting eternal life only to Christians, is incompatible with a God who allegedly loves all people, and is offensive to those whose deceased loved ones may have been very pious and moral but not Christian. Moreover, it is a belief that few Christians even hold themselves.

3) Christianity is based upon the authority of the New Testament which is historically questionable.

4) Christianity is contingent upon miracles, or at least one miracle, the Resurrection, but belief in miracles is philosophically problematic.

5) Similar to #1, the doctrine of eternal punishment is incompatible with any notion of a just God. Eternal punishment for one's sin, no matter how egregious, is by definition disproportionate to the offense and is therefore unjust.

6) Christians try to impose their morality on others and that, many say, is offensive.

7) Many Reformed Christians hold to a view of predestination that is impossible to reconcile with the notion of human accountability and also with the concept of a just and benevolent God.

8) The Christian creation story is scientifically unsound and the doctrine of original sin is literally incredible.

9) Christianity derives from ancient pagan myths of dying saviors and virgin births. The similarities between these myths and Christianity make it unlikely that Christianity is independent of them.

It might be worthwhile to attempt to tackle some of these objections, if a humble layman might have the impertinence to undertake such a daunting task, in future posts. In fact, Viewpoint has already addressed some of them in past essays. Objection #1, for instance, is discussed here and here, and objection #3 is considered here. If anyone else wishes to take a shot at some of these, either pro or con, please feel welcome.