Metaphysical Ruminations

Today is All Saints' Sunday in the Lutheran Church, a day when, among other things, we pause to remember those who have "gone home" during the past year. In his sermon today our pastor remarked that if we understood what our departed loved ones' life was now like we wouldn't wish that they were back with us.

We might add that if we understood what it means to pass from this world of space-time into "divine time" we might be even less inclined to wish them back.

Imagine the "cosmic" time line as a string draped across a sphere. The string represents all of our time past, present, and future. The sphere represents "divine" time which is in contact with every point on the string so that every moment of our past, present and future are in the present of one who resides in divine time.

That would mean that every event that has happened, or will happen, may well be in the present of those who have passed on. It would follow from this that, as difficult as it may be to conceptualize, our own death, which is future for us, is present to the loved one who has already died. Thus the reunion to which we look forward in our cosmic time is already occuring in divine time. We, in some sense, exist both here and there simultaneously.

More than that. If when one dies all of cosmic time becomes their present, then every death which occurs in cosmic time occurs simultaneously with the one who dies. It is for the dying person not as if they were going on ahead of everyone else but rather as if everyone is leaving this life and being born into this new existence together.

For us here on the string of cosmic time the reunion is still future. For those who depart and enter the sphere of divine time, the reunion we anticipate is in their now. For ages Christians have wondered when Christ is going to return for His Church. If cosmic time stands in relation to divine time somewhat as we've sketched it here then the answer may well be that Christ's coming will be at the moment of our death when all of the cosmic future becomes our present. The eschaton will occur at the moment of our passing and it has occurred at the moment of every death which has ever occurred.

Strange stuff, perhaps, but no stranger than what physicists are telling us about the structure of cosmic space/time and the world of the quantum. Perhaps truth, to borrow from a title of a book by Brian Walsh on a different topic altogether, is stranger than it used to be.

Michael Behe

The L.A. Times has a very good article by Josh Getlin on Lehigh University biochemist and author of Darwin's Black Box, Michael Behe.

The entire article is both fair and interesting, but here are a couple items worthy of special note:

"Behe does not convince me in the slightest," said Michael Ruse, a Florida State University philosophy professor who wrote "The Evolution-Creation Struggle" and is in the Darwinian camp. "But he's a genial, personable guy, and he comes across as a very serious man. I don't think you can dismiss him as a crank. He is a real scientist."

Although most scientists dismiss Behe, they make a big mistake if they try to demonize him, Ruse added: "We tend to think these people favoring intelligent design are all evil people, and they're not. That's the trouble on my side. Our opponents come in different shapes and sizes, and Michael is proof of that."

Some in the media consistently do what Ruse warns against. They seek to portray anyone as a nut who thinks the Intelligent Design people are on to something important. In order to do that successfully, though, they have to mine quotations from laymen and fundamentalist pastors. When people like Behe and Scott Minnich are questioned about ID the media folk are flummoxed. The leaders of the ID movement just don't fit the stereotype of hicks and yokels that the media wants us to believe comprise the movement.

Evolutionary theory, which gained prominence in the 19th century, is based on scientific evidence that life on Earth has evolved through a process of natural selection and random mutations, with no supernatural plan or purpose.

Note the last prepositional phrase. This is precisely why people like the Dover school board members wanted a little balance in the classroom. Those six words are pure religion. There's absolutely no scientific evidence anywhere that life on Earth has no supernatural plan or purpose, nor can there be. Yet statements like this are perfectly acceptable in high school classrooms, but the contrary of such claims is not. The reader will be forgiven if he or she is beginning to think that the battle in Dover is not over the respective roles of science and religion but rather over whether atheism (or agnosticism) will be permitted to remain the official religious view in our kids' classrooms.

Behe has written one of the few books on intelligent design to reach a mass audience, "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," and is finishing a sequel.

That a sequel is on the way is great news. Not only will a follow-up volume enrich Behe, it'll much more importantly, both to him and to us, also enrich the public discourse on a very important issue. We look forward to its release.

It's a Quagmire For Sure

This bit of satire was posted at IMAO.

I've been looking at the news and I have to say that the casualties are really starting to get to me. Victim after hapless victim has fallen to this administration in a conflict that makes no sense. So we have to ask the very important question:

Has the Democrats' War on President Bush turned into a quagmire? Maybe it's time for them to look at reality of the Senate and, if appropriate, start formulating a comprehensive plan for withdrawal.

Since 2000, how many Democratic Senators have been lost to the RNC re-election war machine? Has it been worth it? How many reporters? Mr. Rather? Ms. Mapes? I don't have the Fake But Accurate data on hand, but I'm sure it's a lot.

Sure, there has been a glimmer of light. A two year investigation about outing a CIA operative turned into an indictment. Because of it, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's Chief of staff, was forced to resign. This set back the Vice President's office for two hours until somebody found the Staples Office Supply Catalog. Then all was well. But shouldn't a two year investigation yield a conviction into the actual real charges?

Sure, the Democrats can try to come up with false numbers of hope:like MOST of the Democratic voters were dead AFTER they voted, but the reality looks them in their grim, non-photoshopped faces. The elections numbers tell the story. The Dems are losing this war and it's only getting worse. They are the Ding Dongs on the Michael Moore Plate Of Life.

Can they beat these brave RNC insurgents? Republicans are people who fight with unconventional tactics. They'll remember Democrat's speeches and quote them when it contradicts the current, and opposite Democrat position. They'll ignore polls and do what they believe. And most importantly, they'll never be convinced that either Communism or Barbra Streisand can be a force for good.

The RNC has a lot of religious zealots. People who won't think twice about storming a clinic and carrying out the unthinkable - letting an innocent fetus suffer a cruel and torturous life - never to die again - except when they're old and gray maybe. How do you fight that enemy? Without using bullets of course because gun control is very important. The answer is : they can't.

Sure the Democrats have their own suicide bombers like Howard Dean - but what they really need is leadership. Hillary Clinton (Motto: I don't have an official opinion yet - but I'm sure I'll denounce it.) is a good candidate but she's trying too hard to look Republican.

Harry Reid? This is a war of subtlety and ideas. He has neither. The Clintons do their dirty deeds in the dark. Not Harry. If Harry had Monica Lewinsky, he would have had her right there at the podium, with a big giant Tip Jar front and center for all his Democratic supporters. Even when he calls a private, closed session, he's determined to tell the whole world about it.

Let's face it. The Dems' battle with George Bush has turned into another Vietnam. It's time to give them our support by helping them go home.

We concur. Show your support for the Democrats. Bring them home.

Mistaking Wishes For Evidence

Check The Fourth Rail for a roundup of news on military operations in Iraq. Among the reports was news of a single airstrike on a safehouse at which there was a meeting of a number of leaders of al Qaida in Iraq. The strike killed five of them. The dead are named and their roles are described at the link. The coalition must be getting very good intelligence to be able to hit a meeting like this.

Also in the post was this account of the fate of several Libyan terrorists who came to Iraq to be martyred for Allah:

In Sadah, a Libyan terrorist and five others are killed after being trapped in the rubble of a not-so-safe house. He stated he had a suicide vest on and would detonate it, so the MArines of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment obliged and detonated it for him. The Army Times reports others trapped in the house were Libyans as well: "At least two other men remained trapped in the rubble, shouting religious slogans. Like the apparent suicide bomber, he told the interpreter and Iraqi soldiers they were Libyan and had infiltrated through the Syrian border, which lies less than 10 miles west of Sadah." Three Marines were injured in the combat in Sadah.

Also noteworthy is this:

Elsewhere in Baghdad, two insurgents die in a "work accident" as their car bomb suffered from premature detonation. "Route Irish", the notorious road from Baghdad Airport to the city, has seen a marked decrease in attacks; "Between April and June, 14 car bombs went off along the airport road, called Route Irish by the military. There were 48 roadside bombs, officially known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and 80 small-arms attacks. Sixteen people were killed. In the past two months, there have been no car bombs and nine IEDs. One Iraqi soldier has been killed." The success is chalked up to improving tactics and altering the operations along the route.

In Buhriz, insurgents attacked a Iraqi police checkpoint en masse, and are repelled. Six Iraqi police are killed and ten are wounded, but the insurgents failed to overrun their position. Long gone are the days when Iraqi forces flee the battle; today they stand and fight.

As long as the insurgents had only to worry about fighting Americans they could always hope that we would tire of the conflict and eventually leave. Their thinking probably was that all they had to do was outlast us and Iraq would be theirs. The emergence of effective Iraqi military and police, however, has changed the picture dramatically. Now the insurgents are in a race to get us out before the Iraqis become so proficient that they can no longer see a light at the end of the tunnel. As we have said before, Bush's policy may be too slow, and it may yet fail, but to proclaim that it actually is failing, as many of his critics do, is to mistake wishes for evidence.

Praising Evil

The next time some MoveOn.org type praises the enemy in Iraq as "freedom fighters", as Cindy Sheehan and others have done, they might be directed to this post by Bill Roggio.

The people described in Roggio's piece are not freedom fighters, they're savages, and anyone who attempts to ennoble them by referring to them otherwise is morally complicit in their despicable crimes.

If the al Qaida "freedom fighters" ever prevailed and imposed their Islamist tyranny on the people of Iraq would the Left still praise them? As long as they were still at war with the West, I'm afraid they would. Some on the Left will praise anyone, no matter how evil, who is seeking to kill Americans and destroy America. It's been that way ever since 1917.

What Democrats Believe in

I suppose it's not fair of us to accuse the Democrats of being the party of negativity. It's not, after all, as if they don't support anything. It's not that they lack convictions or a positive plan for America. It's just that they don't want voters to know what it is. Here's a partial list:

Big government, minority entitlements, higher taxes, socialized medicine, gun control, welfare, criminal rights, partial birth abortion, less oil and higher costs for fuel, a weaker military, gay marriage, and abandoning Iraq.

It's no wonder they prefer to just attack Bush rather than talk about what they have planned for America.

The Eurabian Future

Francis Fukyama uses the current riots in France as a springboard for comments on the state of Muslim discontent in Europe in general. Here are some excerpts from his essay:

We have tended to see jihadist terrorism as something produced in dysfunctional parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Middle East, and exported to Western countries. Protecting ourselves is a matter either of walling ourselves off, or, for the Bush administration, going "over there" and trying to fix the problem at its source by promoting democracy.

There is good reason for thinking, however, that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe. In addition to Bouyeri and the London bombers, the March 11 Madrid bombers and ringleaders of the September 11 attacks such as Mohamed Atta were radicalized in Europe. In the Netherlands, where upwards of 6% of the population is Muslim, there is plenty of radicalism despite the fact that Holland is both modern and democratic. And there exists no option for walling the Netherlands off from this problem.

....the Dutch, Germans, French and others all retain a strong sense of their national identity, and, to differing degrees, it is one that is not accessible to people coming from Turkey, Morocco or Pakistan. Integration is further inhibited by the fact that rigid European labor laws have made low-skill jobs hard to find for recent immigrants or their children. A significant proportion of immigrants are on welfare, meaning that they do not have the dignity of contributing through their labor to the surrounding society. They and their children understand themselves as outsiders.

It is in this context that someone like Osama bin Laden appears, offering young converts a universalistic, pure version of Islam that has been stripped of its local saints, customs and traditions.

Two things need to happen: First, countries like Holland and Britain need to reverse the counterproductive multiculturalist policies that sheltered radicalism, and crack down on extremists. But second, they also need to reformulate their definitions of national identity to be more accepting of people from non-Western backgrounds.

Fukyama's article suggests rather obliquely that in order to avoid future ethnic conflagrations either the Europeans must abandon their national distinctives and allow the Muslims to form semi-autonomous Islamic enclaves or the Muslim immigrant communities must abandon their Islamic distinctives and dissolve into the larger European culture.

Fukyama doesn't say this but the former seems a lot more likely than the latter. Muslims have no wish to assimilate into the larger culture. Their goal is to turn Europe, through immigration, into North Africa. The riots are ostensibly the result of disaffected Arabs feeling like they're second class citizens, but that feeling is a natural consequence of rejecting the culture of the land in which they find themselves. If they truly do want to be accepted by the French, Dutch, and German people they have to act as if they wish to belong. As long as they keep themselves culturally isolated they have no one to blame for their alienation but themselves.

The problem is that the harder Europe tries to accommodate Muslim sensibilities the more untenable Muslim demands will become and the more fractious will be the relationships between ethnic Europeans and the Islamic immigrants in their midst. The only satisfactory long term solution is assimilation, and it's very doubtful that that will happen. Unless it does, however, it seems almost inevitable that there will be, before too many years have passed, a low grade civil war in at least a couple of European countries.

Winning Through Weakness

Among the long list of faults the critics of the President find in him are two that seem especially odd. On the one hand, Bush is periodically rebuked for never acknowledging that he's made a mistake, and, on the other, he has been castigated for having dumped Harriet Miers and capitulated to his conservative base in the appointment of Sam Alito.

That he doesn't explicitly admit to having made a mistake is nothing other than prudent. The Democrats who urge him to such confessions do not do so because they wish to offer him consolation and forgiveness. They obviously want to hang the admission around his neck like a millstone and they resent the fact that Bush denies them this little pleasure.

They are wrong, however, to think he doesn't recognize a mistake when he's made one, and the Miers' withdrawal is an example. If it's true that the administration orchestrated her gracious exit, then it is proof that they do indeed recognize their errors and hasten to correct them. Why this should earn them criticism from opponents who demand that the Bushies admit their missteps is unclear.

In any event, they also attack Mr. Bush for recovering from his initial lapse of judgment by doing exactly what he promised his voters he would do during the campaign - pick Supreme Court Justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. After stumbling with Miers, Bush recovered his stride, kept his promise, and was quickly blasted for caving to the radical right, as if the Alito nomination were an unexpected surprise, hastily contrived to appease The Weekly Standard and National Review Online, and not at all what the President has been promising to do all along.

We're told by David Broder and others that this nomination arises from the president's weakness rather than his strength. What nonsense.

Sam Alito is precisely the sort of justice President Bush promised us he'd appoint. If he hadn't wanted to reward Harriet Miers for her faithfulness, Alito would probably have been nominated in her stead. To aver that the President was grudgingly forced to go with Alito in order to placate the right-wingers is to once again misunderestimate the man in the Oval Office.

The Democrats, it may be concluded, view any politician who keeps his word as one operating from a position of manifest weakness.

Singing Out of Harmony

Mike Gene at Telic Thoughts posts the following set of quotes:

"Evolutionary theory says nothing about the existence or the non-existence of god." - Hunter R. Rawlings III, Interim President of Cornell University.

"In other words, religion is compatible with modern evolutionary biology (and indeed all of modern science) if the religion is effectively indistinguishable from atheism." - William Provine, Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University.

"Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist" - William Provine, Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University.

The Darwinians all need to turn to the same page in their hymnals. Evolution is not necessarily incompatible with theistic belief, but not many Darwinians seem interested in stressing the point.

Some, like Provine, Dennett, and Dawkins, adamantly insist that a true Darwinian must be an atheist. We wonder how long it will be before the ACLU begins suing schools for teaching Darwinian versions of evolution in science classes. It is, after all, a "Trojan Horse" for smuggling atheism into schools, and it certainly seems obvious from quotes like the above that there's a religious, or anti-religious, motivation for teaching it.

Blowin' in the Wind

Hadley Arkes does a masterful job in the Claremont Review of Books of taking apart Alan Dershowitz's argument in his Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origin of Rights. Dershowitz sets out in this book to affirm human rights while denying any objective moral truths and any role for God in the establishment of those rights. He has set for himself an extraordinarily difficult task and Arkes skillfully skewers the attempt. He writes:

Professor Dershowitz has taken it, as the thesis threading through this work, that there are in fact no such moral principles that form the ground of our judgments. He claims to find the standards of practical judgment in a mix of considerations he calls "utilitarian," but he emphatically denies that there are "moral truths" that stand behind these judgments. He professes himself to be "(God forgive me) a moral relativist," and a "skeptic" in moral matters. A moral skeptic denies that there are knowable truths. The relativist denies those truths from another angle by insisting that there are no objective truths, only standards that are "relative" to persons and places. "Nevertheless," says Dershowitz, "I believe strongly in the concept of rights." A concept of "rights"-but with no supporting truths that can explain why they are rightful, and why the rest of us should respect them. Hence the puzzle of this book, and the spectacle of a writer jousting with himself.

Dershowitz flatly asserts that "there are no divine laws of morality, merely human laws claiming the authority of God."

From these inauspicious premises Dershowitz attempts to construct his view of rights, but, in Arkes' telling, it is a dismal failure, as it must be. If there is no God then we are solely the product of blind nature shaping us for the survival of our species. It's not possible to derive a right from an impersonal provenience.

The man who protests that "You have no right" is talking nonsense. In a world without God or objective moral strictures, each of us has whatever rights we wish to have. If we have the power to do what we want, if we can do what we will and get away with it, there is nothing to say that we should not. There can be no moral inhibition against doing what we want if there are, as Dershowitz says, no moral truths. Thus, though Dershowitz blanches at the thought, neither the holocaust nor slavery can be judged to be intrinsically wrong.

In the secular stew pot in which he cooks his vision of human rights, the unfortunate truth is that might makes right. Men have the right to do whatever they have the power to do, and that's the end of the matter.

The only way to avoid this conclusion is to agree with John Locke who wrote in his Second Treatise on Government that human rights derive from our status as children of God. No man has a right to harm that which belongs to the Creator. Take God away, however, as Dershowitz does, and the whole notion of human rights is no more than a pile of dust in a wind storm. It simply blows away. Arkes' essay provides the wind.

Thanks to PowerLine.com for the tip.

CBS Poll

A newly released CBS Poll shows President Bush's approval rating at an all-time low of 35%. What the reader might not realize is that the poll was "weighted" so that only 23.8% of the respondents to the poll were Republicans. This is about half of the number of Republicans in the general population. When the libs do a poll they make sure they get the results they want.

Meanwhile, the Rasmussen poll shows Bush at 43%.

Thanks to RealClearPolitics for the links.

Hide Your Daughters

John Hinderaker, a lawyer who writes for PowerLine.com, takes a look at Judge Alito's decision in the strip-search case (Doe v. Groody) that seems to have so offended liberals. As is usual in matters where liberals are outraged there's much less to it than we'll be hearing in the anti-Alito television ads which will soon assail us. Alito's dissent in this case seems to show eminent good sense, which is bound to get him in trouble with the Left to whom good sense is an alien concept.

Hinderaker writes:

Groody was a lawsuit by two "Jane Doe" plaintiffs against four police officers. The plaintiffs claimed that they were illegally searched by the officers, and asked for money damages. The officers moved for summary judgment, arguing that the search did not violate any clearly established constitutional rights. By a two-to-one vote, the 3rd Circuit panel upheld the trial court's denial of the officers' motion to dismiss the case. Alito was the dissenter.

The case arose out of the execution of a search warrant on a meth house. In the affidavit that the officers submitted to obtain the warrant, they noted that when drug dealers see that they are being raided, they commonly hide drugs on the persons of whoever may also be on the premises, hoping that the search warrant won't allow the officers to search them. So, in this case, the officers requested permission to search anyone they found on the premises, not just the drug dealer who was the target of the raid.

The search warrant was drafted by the police officers and signed by a magistrate. It granted the officers' request for a warrant, but didn't specifically say that they could search occupants of the house other than the drug dealer. The officers testified that this was only because the box on the form where they described the premises to be searched wasn't big enough to contain more information, but that they believed that the information in their supporting affidavit was incorporated by reference.

The majority held that the warrant did not authorize the officers to search anyone but the drug dealer himself. Alito disagreed. In my opinion, Alito got much the better of the argument.... [He] wrote:

"First, the best reading of the warrant is that it authorized the search of any persons found on the premises. Second, even if the warrant did not contain such authorization, a reasonable police officer could certainly have read the warrant as doing so, and therefore the appellants are entitled to qualified immunity."

Alito noted that, under the controlling authorities, search warrants "are to be read 'in a commonsense and realistic fashion,'" a proposition with which I think most Americans, and most Senators, would agree.

Liberals' reference to a "strip search" by officers will evoke images of slavering voyeurs gratuitously disrobing a mother and child, so it is important to understand what really happened. This description comes from the majority opinion:

"The officers decided to search Jane and Mary Doe for contraband, and sent for the meter patrol officer. When she arrived, the female officer removed both Jane and Mary Doe to an upstairs bathroom. They were instructed to empty their pockets and lift their shirts. The female officer patted their pockets. She then told Jane and Mary Doe to drop their pants and turn around. No contraband was found. With the search completed, both Jane and Mary Doe were returned to the ground floor to await the end of the search."

Judge Alito made it clear that he was not pleased by the fact that searches of this nature may be necessary. But, as in so many other instances, the problem doesn't arise from gratuitous malice on the part of police officers, it arises from the tactics of drug dealers:

"I share the majority's visceral dislike of the intrusive search of John Doe's young daughter, but it is a sad fact that drug dealers sometimes use children to carry out their business and to avoid prosecution. I know of no legal principle that bars an officer from searching a child (in a proper manner) if a warrant has been issued and the warrant is not illegal on its face. Because the warrant in this case authorized the searches that are challenged - and because a reasonable officer, in any event, certainly could have thought that the warrant conferred such authority - I would reverse."

Every indication is that the officers in this case met the highest professional standards. What did they get for their pains? They got sued. Judge Alito's opinion in Groody is well-reasoned and highly persuasive. There is no reason why leftists should be allowed to use it to cast doubt on Alito's qualifications. On the contrary, it is a good illustration of why we need jurists like Judge Alito on the Supreme Court.

What we'll see on the ads, though, will be hysterical claims that Alito wants to strip search your daughters. It's inevitable. The only thing more pathetic than the ads that the Left'll churn out are the people who'll find them persuasive.

CBS' Foul-Mouthed Reporter

First Howard Dean suggests that the White House is playing "Hide the Salami" with Harriet Miers' qualifications and now CBS' John Roberts delivers himself of this bit of smuttiness:

CBS newsman John Roberts asked White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan if today's appointment of a new nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court amounted to little more than "sloppy seconds, or what?" Among other things this has a rather unfortunate sexual connotation.

After his words turned up on The Drudge Report and elsewhere, the new CBS "blog," The Public Eye, carried a full report and this apology:

"At the morning White House gaggle, I used an unfortunate choice of words in a question to Scott McClellan. Please be assured that there was no perjorative intent to my question. I was merely attempting to reconcile past statements about Harriet Miers with the President's new nominee for the Supreme Court.

"The early morning White House gaggle is an informal, free-wheeling and often irreverent forum, which is not broadcast and generally not publicly available.

"Obviously, my tone this morning was a little too casual.

"As we all experience from time to time, it was one of those 'oops' moments which we wish we could rewind and re-record.

"I apologize to anyone who took offense to my poor choice of words. I can assure you I meant none."

No, Mr. Roberts. What you meant is irrelevant. What you said was crude and degrading, not merely "a little too casual." What is it with you guys on the Left? Haven't you ever heard of class?

The irony here is that the media made a big deal about a private vulgarism directed at Senator Leahy by Vice President Cheney a year or so ago, but they have said nothing about Dean's gross breach of taste on national television, and they're certainly not going to criticize one of their own for his tastelessly salacious metaphor in a public forum.

Good News in Iraq

W. Thomas Smith has an article at National Review Online which should be required reading for anyone who has an opinion on the American effort in Iraq. He points out that all the multitude of positive developments occuring in that country are being ignored by our media so that they can emphasize the difficulties and bloodshed.

The American media seems interested in reporting just one thing: casualties and mayhem. Everything else is off their radar screen because to report it would be to inform the American people that are efforts there are largely successful. It's so irresponsible that it should cost those responsible their jobs, but, unfortunately, it will likely continue as long as Democrats can't be given credit for any success we experience. If the day comes when it looks as though our achievement in Iraq is due to the efforts of a Democratic successor to President Bush, the tone and coverage of the media will spin 180 degrees, Iraq will be touted as a twenty first century Marshall Plan engineered by a latter-day Harry Truman, and the media will transform themselves into the biggest cheerleaders of American involvement in the Middle East.

It's all pretty dishonest and contemptible, but dishonest reporting is the price we have to be willing to pay for a free press.

Bono On Religion

Rolling Stone has excerpts of an interview Jann Wenner did with Bono. In the course of a ten hour discussion at Bono's vacation house on a Mexican beach they got around to talking about his religious views. Bono fans will find the whole article interesting, but his Christian fans will perhaps find the discussion of religion of most interest:

What role did religion play in your childhood?

I knew that we were different on our street because my mother was Protestant. And that she'd married a Catholic. At a time of strong sectarian feeling in the country, I knew that was special. We didn't go to the neighborhood schools -- we got on a bus. I picked up the courage they had to have had to follow through on their love.

Did you feel religious when you went to church?

Even then I prayed more outside of the church than inside. It gets back to the songs I was listening to; to me, they were prayers. "How many roads must a man walk down?" That wasn't a rhetorical question to me. It was addressed to God. It's a question I wanted to know the answer to, and I'm wondering, who do I ask that to? I'm not gonna ask a schoolteacher. When John Lennon sings, "Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes are wide open" -- these songs have an intimacy for me that's not just between people, I realize now, not just sexual intimacy. A spiritual intimacy.

Who is God to you at that point in your life?

I don't know. I would rarely be asking these questions inside the church. I see lovely nice people hanging out in a church. Occasionally, when I'm singing a hymn like . . . oh, if I can think of a good one . . . oh, "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" or "Be Thou My Vision," something would stir inside of me. But, basically, religion left me cold.

Your early songs are about being confused, about trying to find spirituality at an age when most anybody else your age would be writing about girls and trouble.

Yeah. We sorta did it the other way around.

You skipped "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and you went right . . .

. . . Into the mystic. Van Morrison would be the inverse, in terms of the journey. It's this turbulent period at fifteen, sixteen, and the electrical storms that come at that age.

There was also my friend Guggi. His parents were not just Protestant, they were some obscure cult of Protestant. In America, it would be Pentecostal. His father was like a creature from the Old Testament. He spoke constantly of the Scriptures and had the sense that the end was nigh -- and to prepare for it.

You were living with his family?

Yes. I'd go to church with them too. Though myself and Guggi are laughing at the absurdity of some of this, the rhetoric is getting through to us. We don't realize it, but we're being immersed in the Holy Scriptures. That's what we took away from this: this rich language, these ancient tracts of wisdom.

So is that why you were writing such serious songs when you're nineteen?

Here's the strange bit: Most of the people that you grew up with in black music had a similar baptism of the spirit, right? The difference is that most of these performers felt they could not express their sexuality before God. They had to turn away. So rock & roll became backsliders' music. They were running away from God. But I never believed that. I never saw it as being a choice, an either/or thing.

You never saw rock & roll -- the so-called devil's music -- as incompatible with religion?

Look at the people who have formed my imagination. Bob Dylan. Nineteen seventy-six -- he's going through similar stuff. You buy Patti Smith: Horses -- "Jesus died for somebody's sins/But not mine . . ." And she turns Van Morrison's "Gloria" into liturgy. She's wrestling with these demons -- Catholicism in her case. Right the way through to Wave, where she's talking to the pope.

The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt. So the blues, on one hand -- running away; gospel, the Mighty Clouds of Joy -- running towards. And later you came to analyze it and figure it out.

The blues are like the Psalms of David. Here was this character, living in a cave, whose outbursts were as much criticism as praise. There's David singing, "Oh, God -- where are you when I need you?/You call yourself God?" And you go, this is the blues.

Both deal with the relationship with God. That's really it. I've since realized that anger with God is very valid. We wrote a song about that on the Pop album -- people were confused by it -- "Wake Up Dead Man": "Jesus, help me/I'm alone in this world/And a f****d-up world it is, too/Tell me, tell me the story /The one about eternity/And the way it's all gonna be/Wake up, dead man."

Soon after starting the band you joined a Bible-study group -- you and Larry and Edge -- called the Shalom. What brought that on?

We were doing street theater in Dublin, and we met some people who were madder than us. They were a kind of inner-city group living life like it was the first century A.D.

They were expectant of signs and wonders; lived a kind of early-church religion. It was a commune. People who had cash shared it. They were passionate, and they were funny, and they seemed to have no material desires. Their teaching of the Scriptures reminded me of those people whom I'd heard as a youngster with Guggi. I realize now, looking back, that it was just insatiable intellectual curiosity.

But it got a little too intense, as it always does; it became a bit of a holy huddle. And these people -- who are full of inspirational teaching and great ideas -- they pretended that our dress, the way we looked, didn't bother them. But very soon it appeared that was not the case. They started asking questions about the music we were listening to. Why are you wearing earrings? Why do you have a mohawk?

How did you end up leaving that?

I think we just went on tour.

And forgot to come back?

Well, we'd visit. If you were going to study the teaching, it demanded a rejection of the world. Even then we understood that you can't escape the world, wherever you go. Least of all in very intense religious meetings -- which can be more corrupt and more bent, in terms of the pressures they exert on people, than the outside forces.

What draws you so deeply to Martin Luther King?

So now -- cut to 1980. Irish rock group, who've been through the fire of a certain kind of revival, a Christian-type revival, go to America. Turn on the TV the night you arrive, and there's all these people talking from the Scriptures. But they're quite obviously raving lunatics.

Suddenly you go, what's this? And you change the channel. There's another one. You change the channel, and there's another secondhand-car salesman. You think, oh, my God. But their words sound so similar . . . to the words out of our mouths.

So what happens? You learn to shut up. You say, whoa, what's this going on? You go oddly still and quiet. If you talk like this around here, people will think you're one of those. And you realize that these are the traders -- as in t-r-a-d-e-r-s -- in the temple.

Until you get to the black church, and you see that they have similar ideas. But their religion seems to be involved in social justice; the fight for equality. And a Rolling Stone journalist, Jim Henke, who has believed in you more than anyone up to this point, hands you a book called Let the Trumpet Sound -- which is the biography of Dr. King. And it just changes your life.

Even though I'm a believer, I still find it really hard to be around other believers: They make me nervous, they make me twitch. I sorta watch my back. Except when I'm with the black church. I feel relaxed, feel at home; my kids -- I can take them there; there's singing, there's music.

What is your religious belief today? What is your concept of God?

If I could put it simply, I would say that I believe there's a force of love and logic in the world, a force of love and logic behind the universe. And I believe in the poetic genius of a creator who would choose to express such unfathomable power as a child born in "straw poverty"; i.e., the story of Christ makes sense to me.

How does it make sense?

As an artist, I see the poetry of it. It's so brilliant. That this scale of creation, and the unfathomable universe, should describe itself in such vulnerability, as a child. That is mind-blowing to me. I guess that would make me a Christian. Although I don't use the label, because it is so very hard to live up to. I feel like I'm the worst example of it, so I just kinda keep my mouth shut.

Do you pray or have any religious practices?

I try to take time out of every day, in prayer and meditation. I feel as at home in a Catholic cathedral as in a revival tent. I also have enormous respect for my friends who are atheists, most of whom are, and the courage it takes not to believe.

How big an influence is the Bible on your songwriting? How much do you draw on its imagery, its ideas?

It sustains me.

As a belief, or as a literary thing?

As a belief. These are hard subjects to talk about because you can sound like such a dickhead. I'm the sort of character who's got to have an anchor. I want to be around immovable objects. I want to build my house on a rock, because even if the waters are not high around the house, I'm going to bring back a storm. I have that in me. So it's sort of underpinning for me.

I don't read it as a historical book. I don't read it as, "Well, that's good advice." I let it speak to me in other ways. They call it the rhema. It's a hard word to translate from Greek, but it sort of means it changes in the moment you're in. It seems to do that for me.

You're saying it's a living thing?

It's a plumb line for me. In the Scriptures, it is self-described as a clear pool that you can see yourself in, to see where you're at, if you're still enough. I'm writing a poem at the moment called "The Pilgrim and His Lack of Progress." I'm not sure I'm the best advertisement for this stuff.

What do you think of the evangelical movement that we see in the United States now?

I'm wary of faith outside of actions. I'm wary of religiosity that ignores the wider world. In 2001, only seven percent of evangelicals polled felt it incumbent upon themselves to respond to the AIDS emergency. This appalled me. I asked for meetings with as many church leaders as would have them with me. I used my background in the Scriptures to speak to them about the so-called leprosy of our age and how I felt Christ would respond to it. And they had better get to it quickly, or they would be very much on the other side of what God was doing in the world.

Amazingly, they did respond. I couldn't believe it. It almost ruined it for me -- 'cause I love giving out about the church and Christianity. But they actually came through: Jesse Helms, you know, publicly repents for the way he thinks about AIDS.

I've started to see this community as a real resource in America. I have described them as "narrow-minded idealists." If you can widen the aperture of that idealism, these people want to change the world. They want their lives to have meaning. And it's one of the things that the Democratic Party has missed out on. You know, so much of the moral high ground in the past was Democratic: FDR, RFK, Cesar Chavez. Now I suppose it's Hillary's passion for cheaper medical care. And Teddy Kennedy, of course.

Teddy Kennedy? Teddy Kennedy occupies the moral high ground? Geesh. Other than that baffling remark it's an interesting interview.

Thanks to Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost for the tip.

Small is Better

This article in the Christian Science Monitor gives us a peek at what's happening in the Afghanistan front of the GWOT. The article gives two accounts of American engagements against the Taliban - this is the first:

It's mid- morning on June 21, and Lt. Timothy Jon O'Neal's platoon has just been dropped onto a dusty field north of a mud-walled village of Chalbar. Their mission: to check out reports that a local Afghan Army commander has defected to the Taliban and burned the district headquarters, and is prepared to fight.

Within minutes, it becomes clear that the reports are true, and the platoon is in trouble. The radio crackles with Taliban fighters barking orders to surround the Americans. Gunfire comes from the hilltops. Lieutenant O'Neal's men are easy targets. The Taliban have the high ground.

This has been the most violent year here since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. The US Army is moving in smaller numbers to lure the Taliban out of hiding for fights they cannot win. The result: More than 1,200 enemy deaths this year, including high-level commanders. But it is also a strategy with profound risks, and one that may be difficult to sustain in Zabul Province - a region so unstable that commanders call it the "Fallujah of Afghanistan" - as current troops return home, their replacements as yet undecided.

Through interviews with soldiers of Chosen Company, of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the Monitor has reconstructed two recent battles that illustrate how this strategy works, and how it may have weakened the Taliban movement's effectiveness as a military force - for now.

As the Taliban start shooting, O'Neal's platoon scurries for cover. But there's no panic. "They think, without a doubt, they have us outnumbered," recalls O'Neal, a native of Jeannette, Pa., and leader of 2nd Platoon, Chosen Company. "We've got only 23 people on the ground, and I would say the Taliban had over 150 before the day was over."

But O'Neal and his men are not alone. Just to the south, 1st platoon is clearing a village; to the east, the 3rd platoon are marching toward Chalbar. O'Neal's platoon calls for close air support from nearby Apache helicopters. But on the ground, 2nd platoon will have to hold its own, and fight for every inch - uphill.

Much is made about the high-tech gear that US soldiers carry: body armor, rapid-firing machine guns, night vision goggles. But the chief advantage of the US military - especially in a low-intensity conflict, pitted against a crudely trained force like the Taliban - is training and air power.

Taliban fighters, meanwhile, appear to gain courage from numbers, the ability to swarm a smaller enemy unit. A sense of safety in numbers, however, is often the Taliban's undoing if a US platoon can fix an enemy's position long enough for aircraft or other infantry units to arrive. This is the backbone of US military strategy in Zabul, and one reason why the Taliban have lost so many fighters this year.

"We've had a lot of success with textbook tactics, getting the smallest element engaged, and then using other assets to just pile on," says O'Neal. "The Taliban are more willing to engage with us when we have smaller numbers."

Lt. Col. Mark Stammer, the commander at Forward Operating Base in Qalat, is quick to clarify that the US Army is not using small units as "bait."

"I've never sent a squad in as bait," says Colonel Stammer, a native of Redfield, S.D. "I'm sure that it has emboldened the Taliban to attack. But there's no fight where our squads have made contact and lost. Whenever the Taliban fight us, they're decimated."

Darting from boulder to boulder, Sgt. Justin Hormann, a native of Melbourne, Fla., is leading a team of about six men up the hill, just behind 1st squad leader, Staff Sgt. Michael Christian of Montrose, Pa. Above them, about 50 Taliban fighters are raining down a torrent of gunfire with their Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades.

Sergeant Christian reaches a shallow plateau on the hill, and pulls himself up to establish a fire position. Almost immediately, he's shot. He crouches behind a boulder and shouts out, "I'm hit." The Talib who shot him is barely 30 feet away.

Sergeant Hormann can see his squad leader is bleeding and needs immediate help. "When he got hit, they were right in front of us," recalls Hormann, while on break between missions at the Forward Operating Base at Qalat. "He could see the fighter in front of him, but he couldn't see the Taliban who was just alongside him."

Hormann makes a snap decision: He bounds up the hill to give Christian first aid. "I said 'to heck with it.' I just ran up," says Hormann. All around him, Taliban bullets continue to ping off rocks as Hormann applies a tourniquet. Under constant fire, he sets up Bravo team to deliver suppressing fire, while he and Alpha team carry Christian off the hill. At the bottom, he regroups the squad for another assault.

"And then we all went back up the hill a second time," says Hormann, who was recently awarded a Bronze Star with valor for his actions that day. For the next four hours, Hormann and a 10-man ad hoc squad move back up the mountain within 60 feet of the enemy. Only when Pfc. Joseph Lorman of Sloughhouse, Calif., is wounded in the neck and shoulder does Hormann move the squad back down the mountain.

By that time, reinforcements from the 1st and 3rd platoons have arrived. All escape routes are blocked. The Taliban are trapped.

"The fire was extremely close," says O'Neal, who was with a second team providing covering fire lower down the hill. "But toward the end it got dark, so we just ran to the bottom."

As night falls, American AC-130 Specter gunships arrive to engage Taliban fighters who have also decided to make a run for it. By the end of the day, 76 Taliban bodies are counted, and another nine Taliban fighters are captured.

To this day, the men of the 2nd Platoon, Chosen Company, can't figure out what the Taliban were thinking. Were they suicidal? Why did they gather so many Taliban in one place? Did they really think they had enough men to defeat the Americans?

"They called the BBC to tell them they had taken the district headquarters," says O'Neal. "They knew we were going to come."

Go to the link for a desription of the second operation involving our forces.

Sam Alito

The conservative blogosphere is elated and reinvigorated by the president's pick of Sam Alito for associate justice of the Supreme Court. Michelle Malkin has a summary of conservative opinions with lots of links from around the community.

Meanwhile, the Left is taking it bitterly, which is how they take pretty much everything Bush does. They see in the Alito pick the end of an era of liberal hegemony in the courts and the end of their ability to implement the liberal agenda via judicial fiat rather than through legislation. If the Left loses the Courts, and cannot regain the House or the Senate in 2006, their future is bleak indeed.

Democratic Senators have been a little more subdued in their response than have the Lefty bloggers, but their disappointment is manifest. For example Senator Schumer:

"It's sad that the president felt that he had to pick a nominee likely to divide America, instead of picking a nominee like Sandra Day O'Connor that had united America."

And here's Senator Reid:

"I am disappointed in this choice for several reasons. First, unlike previous nominations, this one was not the product of consultation with Senate Democrats. Last Friday, Senator Leahy and I wrote to President Bush urging him to work with us to find a consensus nominee. The President has rejected that approach.

"Second, this appointment ignores the value of diverse backgrounds and perspectives on the Supreme Court. The President has chosen a man to replace Sandra Day O'Connor, one of only two women on the Court. For the third time, he has declined to make history by nominating the first Hispanic to the Court. And he has chosen yet another federal appellate judge to join a court that already has eight justices with that narrow background. President Bush would leave the Supreme Court looking less like America and more like an old boys club."

No mention here by Senator Reid about qualifications, of course, only a lament that the President didn't let the minority pick his Justice for him and the threadbare complaint that Alito doesn't add a diversity of perspectives to the Court. The reasons for Senator Reid's dismay are equally reasons why the rest of us should take heart from this nomination. Even were we not encouraged by what we've read about Judge Alito elsewhere (See Michelle Malkin's site linked above), we'd have to think that anyone who so distresses Senator Reid and the fine folks at the Daily Kos must be good for America.

Understanding Our Moment

Gideon Strauss has an essay at Comment wherein he discerns four challenges facing contemporary Christianity. The four he identifies are those posed by contemporary liberalism, Islam, China, and the emergence of Christianity in the third world.

Here are some excerpts. First are his thoughts on the challenge posed by liberalism:

The most perplexing of these root challenges is also the most immediate to most of us: the challenge of modern liberalism. I am at turns amused and frustrated by my academic colleagues who continue to insist that we live in postmodern times. The suggestion that somehow the spiritual force of modernity has been exhausted and replaced by something altogether different simply does not ring true to what I experience in my own daily work nor to the cultural forces I see at work in the world.

Lest I be misunderstood, this is not a screed against constitutional democracy or a market economy, both of which I belief are blessings to humanity with rich potential for responsible cultural action. Instead, I am concerned about the spiritual power that animates both liberal democracies and capitalist economies. It is a spiritual power that seeks to combine unfettered individual liberty with the commodification and bureaucratic subjugation of all of nature - and that recognizes no law or power beyond or independent of nature.

I am astonished by the power of liberal capitalism to persuade even those whose deepest commitments should predispose them against the libertarian erosion of communal ties and the grasping extension of market logic beyond its proper economic sphere that there is no alternative. Living in a society guided by liberal capitalism is like being submerged in an acid ocean stretching to the horizon - there seems no possible escape, and the very flesh is being eaten off our bones.

Having seen the pragmatic power of liberal capitalism in action up close, in the shaping of the decision-making of marxist politicians in Africa and of evangelical social activists in North America, I am perplexed by the difficulty of figuring out how to live faithfully to the gospel, in every sphere of life, in the smothering embrace of a society that is radically and comprehensively guided by this sweetly destructive force. Given that there is no new found land remaining to which Christians can repair to establish a new city on a hill, how should we now live, in the very midst of this often so seemingly welcoming but yet so profoundly antagonistic social order?

On the Islamic challenge:

What is not at all clear is how Christians should respond to the struggle between modernity and Salafiyyah Islam for global hegemony. I have heard Christians argue that within the context of North America we are more closely cobelligerent with Muslims, against liberal modernity, because of our supposedly shared concern for religion finding a space within a secularist political order, and because of our supposedly shared concern for what is here often term a "social conservative" stance on issues like marriage and abortion. I have also heard Christians argue that within the context of what first Bernard Lewis and then Samuel Huntington has termed the "clash of civilizations," Christianity and liberal modernity are - as the religious expressions of "Western civilization" - closely allied against the global expansion of the Islamic ummah.

Concerning China:

The relationship of China as a geopolitical entity to Christianity as a religion has fascinating and troubling world historical potential. David Aikman, the author of Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power, suggests that China might in this century become substantially Christian, and explores (in an interview with National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez) some of the consequent options:

What would a non-Christian China be like if it became a superpower capable of rivaling the U.S.? Probably dangerous and unpredictable. A Christian China would be far more likely to view its role in the world as containing a global moral responsibility, an "Augustinian" national self-view, if you like.

China presents its own Christians with a cultural challenge very different from that presented by liberal modernity, but perhaps no less perplexing. How does one live within an established social and political order that is at once seemingly tolerant of and fundamentally antagonistic to one's most basic commitments and convictions. For Christians in North America, one additional question is how we relate to Chinese Christians as our co-religionists in a complex geopolitical situation, particularly given the high probability of serious international conflict between America and China in the twenty-first century, predicted by pundits like Robert Kaplan?

Finally, on third world Christianity:

While, from my Christian perspective, the growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is an exciting historical development, this massive shift in religious adherence has as yet resulted in only limited positive social change.

The most obviously troubling problem in this regard is the devastating AIDS pandemic in Africa, which is almost entirely the result of personal sexual practices that are in every respect at odds with a Christian sexual ethic. In the long run, however - if we are to take as an example the slow emergence of Christian cultural influence in western Europe between, say, the deposition of Romulus Augustus as Roman emperor in AD 476 and the crowning of Charlemagne as Imperator Romanorum in AD 800 - it is entirely possible that Christianity will result in a rich cultural flowering in Africa, in every sphere of life.

Strauss offers much more in his article than has been excerpted here and much of what he says is very insightful. It would be good to read the whole thing.

Reformation Sunday

Yesterday was Reformation Sunday in the Lutheran Church and my thoughts turned this weekend to the endpoint the present trajectory of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) seems to be taking us toward. Ideological or theological designators like liberal and conservative often obscure nuance and require qualification, but they are also often useful. The ELCA seems to have fallen into the embrace of theological and ideological liberalism, and many conservatives are just beginning to wake up to the fact that the Church of their youth has been hijacked by a leadership that is moving steadily away from the traditional affirmations of the Faith.

The liberals (or progressives, as they fancy themselves) argue that the Church is called upon to do social ministry, and they are simply responding to that call by waging a decades-long campaign against sexism, racism and imperialism and contending on behalf of gay marriage, abortion rights, and the poor. What Christian, they ask, would or could oppose such causes?

The difficulty is this: There are two ways of looking at our social mandates and responsibilities. Conservatives hold that whatever policies we advocate must be rooted in, and governed by, Scripture. Liberals believe that our policies and support should be shaped by sociological consensus, and if contemporary theory conflicts with the Bible or the theological traditions of the Church then so much the worse for the Bible and tradition.

Thus the Lutheran Church, or at least that part of it represented by the ELCA, struggles against sexism by publishing a new worship book that minimizes references to the masculine in hymns, creeds, and liturgy, and by supporting expansive abortion rights even though all previous social statements of the Church, including the present one, condemn abortion.

It opposes racism by endorsing liberal Democratic approaches to welfare, affirmative action, and entitlement. It will surprise no one if we hear calls for racial reparations arise during future national assemblies.

It condemns imperialism by demanding that Israel tear down the wall that it has erected to protect itself from Palestinian murderers and that the U.S. turn over the global war on terror to the U.N. so that it can be treated as a police matter.

It is, finally, exceedingly sympathetic to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered agenda despite the fact that all sexual norms found in Scripture would have to be abandoned in order to accommodate it. Notwithstanding the Biblical proscription of same sex intimacy, large sectors of the Church, including the leadership, favor the ordination of practicing homosexuals and the blessing of same sex relationships.

This is the direction of the contemporary ELCA, and this is why a growing number of Lutherans are praying for another Reformation (See here, for example). We need, they insist, a Martin Luther for the 21st century to rescue a Church whose membership is in free-fall and whose leadership seems committed to running this once great institution off the cliff of cultural syncretism.

All A-twitter on the Left

It is a measure of the desperation of the Left that they are enormously excited about the indictment of a minor administration figure, of whom no one had ever previously heard, for lying to a grand jury in an attempt to cover up responsibility for behavior which, it turns out, wasn't even criminal.

Now that the indictment has been handed down, we're hearing dark suggestions, based chiefly upon the Left's eternal hopefulness, that somehow this will lead all the way to the top, and they will be able to exorcize from the body politic the Great Satan in the White House.

We doubt very much that the Left will get significant traction from the indictment of the heretofore anonymous "Scooter" Libby, although they will certainly try. They'll attempt anything at this point, so great is their obsession with destroying this president and their hatred of him for his ability to dash their hopes every time they're raised to incandescent levels of intensity.

It'll probably happen again this time, too.