Lost Script

"The average words heard per hour are 2,150 for a professor's children and 1,250 for working-class children in homes with parents. But children of single mothers on welfare hear their mother use only 620 words per hour, according to Ms. Hymowitz. These children find it particularly difficult to thrive in a knowledge-based society. They rarely learn the art of conversation. And conversation, Thomas Aquinas once wrote, is what constitutes civilization. If the church recovers the four-chapter "script" she might once again connect marriage to child rearing; along with playing a part in shaping society."

Mike Metzger of the Clapham Institute talking about the tragedy of young American parents who have lost the connection between child-rearing and marriage.

RLC

Civil Debate

No wonder it's taking so long to get things right in Iraq. This exchange on al-Jazeera is probably being duplicated everyday in the halls of the Iraqi parliament.

HT: Allahpundit

RLC

Fighting al-Qaeda in Somalia

An AC-130 gunship was called in to put an end (hopefully) to the terrors inflicted on Americans and Africans by some very bad men. CBS News has the story. Here's part of it:

The targets included the senior al Qaeda leader in East Africa and an al Qaeda operative wanted for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa.... Those terror attacks killed more than 200 people.

The AC-130 gunship is capable of firing thousands of rounds per second, and sources say a lot of bodies were seen on the ground after the strike, but there is as yet, no confirmation of the identities.

The gunship flew from its base in Dijibouti down to the southern tip of Somalia ... where the al Qaeda operatives had fled after being chased out of the capital of Mogadishu by Ethiopian troops backed by the United States.

Once they started moving, the al Qaeda operatives became easier to track, and the U.S. military started preparing for an air strike, using unmanned aerial drones to keep them under surveillance and moving the aircraft carrier Eisenhower out of the Persian Gulf toward Somalia. But when the order was given, the mission was assigned to the AC-130 gunship operated by the U.S. Special Operations command.

If the attack got the operatives it was aimed at ... it would deal a major blow to al Qaeda in East Africa.

Michelle Malkin has background on the Americans and others killed in the attacks perpetrated by the terrorists targeted of the gunship.

RLC

Wallis on Saddam's Execution

Jim Wallis of Sojourners regrets the execution of Saddam Hussein and argues that it is wrong to resort to capital punishment. He states a number of objections which are pretty much summarized in his last two paragraphs. The first is contained in a quote from the Archbishop of Canterbury:

"I think he deserves punishment, and sharp and unequivocal punishment; I don't think that he should be at liberty, but I would say of him what I have to say about anyone who's committed even the most appalling crimes in this country; that I believe the death penalty effectively says 'there is no room for change or repentance'."

How much horror must a man inflict upon people before the Archbishop and Mr. Wallis conclude that whatever change the man undergoes is insignificant by comparison? Saddam had plenty of "room for repentance." He has been feeding people into wood chippers for decades, gassing children and cutting out tongues and torturing people to death for decades. How much time is enough?

The argument that if we only give him time enough he might repent and be saved is a peculiar one. By extension it essentially calls God unjust because He allows people to perish for eternity, and sometimes even causes their deaths, before they've accepted the gospel. It's even more peculiar when offered by someone of Calvinist proclivities who holds that God foreordains who will be lost and who will be saved before they're even born. If Saddam was elected for salvation then he will be saved no matter what the Iraqi government did to him, and if he is to be lost then he will be lost no matter hjow long he lives.

Wallis concludes his piece with this paragraph:

Saddam Hussein, like other murderers before him, was a violent and remorseless man. But by taking his life, we sink to his level. If we truly believe that all human life is created in God's image, then no matter how distorted that life may become, we do not have the right to take it. We simply should not kill to show we are against killing. It is indeed to prefer revenge over justice.

Let's take this a couple of sentences at a time. The second sentence is, to put it politely, inadequate. To put those who support the legal execution of a mass murderer on the same level as the murderer is morally ludicrous. We do not sink to his level by endorsing his execution but rather we make a profound moral statement, i.e. we tell the world that to take the life of innocent people is the very worst crime one can commit and merits the most severe penalty. It is to tell the world that we value innocent life so much that one who wantonly destroys it will be required to pay the highest price that he can pay, the forfeiture of his own life. Conversely, to refuse to exact the highest penalty from one who has butchered and terrorized innocent people is to implicitly say that the lives of his victims are not so precious that their loss justifies the death of their killer.

The third sentence is a logical confusion. How does Wallis get from being made in God's image to being insulated from ever having to forfeit one's own life? What's the connection between the two? Being made in God's image means having rationality, personality, and a sense of justice, etc. It does not mean that one's life is absolutely inviolate.

The fourth sentence simply asserts a moral preference that hangs unsupported by any reasons. By Wallis' logic we should not incarcerate kidnappers nor fine embezzlers, since we simply should not deprive persons of their freedom in order to show that we are against depriving people of their freedom, nor take money from people to show that we are against taking money from people.

In the final sentence he states that an execution is to prefer revenge over justice. This is perhaps the most incredible claim of the lot. What is it about executing a man who has murdered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that is unjust? How is it unjust to mete out to someone the same as they have done to others? The Christian obligation to be merciful dictates that we don't torture Saddam but it would certainly not be unjust to do so.

Moreover, even if Wallis is right that the Iraqis were motivated by revenge what is it about revenge that is unjust? There is nothing wrong with revenge, i.e. the desire to see someone who is responsible for an evil be made to pay for that crime. Indeed, revenge is an essential component of justice. Without it there is no motivation to punish criminals at all. The only problem with revenge, and why it is generally disapprobated, is that it is sometimes arrogated by individuals. Revenge is a perfectly acceptable motive, however, for the state and indeed Paul says as much in Romans where he tells us that vengeance is the prerogative of God who employs the state as His agent in the world.

RLC

Lefty Laugh-fest

Don Imus and Mike Barnicle yuk it up speculating about the courage/cowardice of Bush administration figures. Unfortunately, their banter is no more funny than it is tasteful.

There's something sad about people who find this sort of exchange humorous. Perhaps it lies in the fact that the attempt to get cheap laughs by viciousness and mean-spiritedness is a mark of very little people who are insecure in their own virtues. If I can be permitted an amateurish psychological speculation, I suspect that most men who mock their betters do so in order to enhance their own self-importance and worth which they subliminally hold in low esteem.

RLC

Nancy Pearcey

Byron links us to this excellent interview with Nancy Pearcey, author of Total Truth and other books. The interviewer questions her on her support for intelligent design and related matters and she gives some of the most concise and clear corrections to common misunderstandings of the topic that I've seen anywhere.

If you're at all interested in this controversy you'll want to check it out.

RLC

Should They or Shouldn't They?

This stunner was in the Times Online:

Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear "bunker-busters", according to several Israeli military sources.

The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open "tunnels" into the targets. "Mini-nukes" would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout. "As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished," said one of the sources.

The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad's assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years.

Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock. However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said.

Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action. Military analysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack.

There's much more on this rumored strike at the link. The question I'd like to pose to our readers is, should Israel go ahead with the attack if the rest of the world is content to let Iran continue to produce nuclear weapons? If not, why not?

RLC

Minimum Wage and Moral Grandstanding

There will be much talk on the news in the weeks ahead on raising the minimum wage. George Will instructs us as to why raising the minimum wage makes no sense, and why it will be raised anyway:

...raising the federal minimum wage is a bad idea whose time has come, for two reasons, the first of which is that some Democrats have a chronic and evidently incurable disease -- New Deal Nostalgia. Witness Nancy Pelosi's "100 hours'' agenda, a genuflection to FDR's 100 Days. Perhaps this nostalgia resonates with the 5 percent of Americans who remember the 1930s.

Second, the president has endorsed raising the hourly minimum from $5.15 to $7.25 by the spring of 2009. The Democratic Congress will favor that, and he may reason that vetoing this minor episode of moral grandstanding would not be worth the predictable uproar -- Washington uproar often is inversely proportional to the importance of occasion for it. Besides, there would be something disproportionate about the president vetoing this feel-good bit of legislative fluff after not vetoing the absurdly expensive 2002 farm bill, or the 2005 highway bill larded with 6,371 earmarks, or the anti-constitutional McCain-Feingold speech-rationing bill.

Democrats consider the minimum wage increase a signature issue. So, consider what it says about them:

Most of the working poor earn more than the minimum wage, and most of the 0.6 percent (479,000 in 2005) of America's wage workers earning the minimum wage are not poor. Only one in five workers earning the federal minimum live in families with household earnings below the poverty line. Sixty percent work part-time and their average household income is well over $40,000. (The average and median household incomes are $63,344 and $46,326 respectively.)

Forty percent of American workers are salaried. Of the 75.6 million paid by the hour, 1.9 million earn the federal minimum or less, and of these, more than half are under 25 and more than a quarter are between 16 and 19. Many are students or other part-time workers. Sixty percent of those earning the federal minimum or less work in restaurants and bars and are earning tips -- often untaxed, perhaps -- in addition to their wages. Two-thirds of those earning the federal minimum today will, a year from now, have been promoted and be earning 10 percent more. Raising the minimum wage predictably makes work more attractive relative to school for some teenagers, and raises the dropout rate. Two scholars report that in states that allow persons to leave school before 18, a 10 percent increase in the state minimum wage caused teenage school enrollment to drop 2 percent.

The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 1997, so 29 states with 70 percent of the nation's work force have set minimum wages of between $6.15 and $7.93 an hour. Because aging liberals, clinging to the moral clarities of their youth, also have Sixties Nostalgia, they are suspicious of states' rights. But regarding minimum wages, many have become Brandeisians, invoking Justice Louis Brandeis' thought about states being laboratories of democracy.

But wait. Ronald Blackwell, the AFL-CIO's chief economist, tells The New York Times that state minimum wage differences entice companies to shift jobs to lower-wage states. So: states' rights are bad, after all, at least concerning -- let's use liberalism's highest encomium -- diversity of economic policies.

The problem is that demand for almost everything is elastic: When the price of something goes up, demand for it goes down. Obviously were the minimum wage to jump to, say, $15 an hour, that would cause significant unemployment among persons just reaching for the bottom rung of the ladder of upward mobility. But suppose those scholars are correct who say that when the minimum wage is low and is increased slowly -- proposed legislation would take it to $7.25 in three steps -- the negative impact on employment is negligible. Still, because there are large differences among states' costs of living, and the nature of their economies, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., sensibly suggests that each state should be allowed to set a lower minimum.

But the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices. Washington, which has its hands full delivering the mail and defending the shores, should let the market do well what Washington does poorly. But that is a good idea whose time will never come again.

Moral grandstanding is a good description of what we can expect to be subjected to from our political leaders over the coming weeks on this issue.

RLC

Ronald Numbers

Steve Paulson has a very interesting interview with Ronald Numbers at Salon Books. Numbers is a historian of science who has written extensively on the rise of creationism. Among historians not involved with either group he is probably the foremost authority on the history of creationism and intelligent design.

Numbers grew up in a strict Seventh Day Adventist family and attended Adventist schools until he went to Berkely to do his graduate work. At Berkely his faith crumbled and he describes himself today as a man with no religious belief, either theistic or atheistic. He himself is an evolutionist, but he is often trashed by other evolutionists because he treats creationists and IDers with respect in his professional writings.

His story is sad on several levels but especially when he talks about the effect his work had on his relationship with his father. While discussing Numbers' book titled The Creationists there is this exchange between Paulson and Numbers:

Paulson: That [the book] must have created trouble for you in your own family of Adventists.

Numbers: It did. And it created trouble for my father, who was a minister. Some church ministers were very harsh with him. Here I was, about 30 or so. They were telling him he had no right being a minister if he couldn't control his son. So he took early retirement.

Paulson: Because of your book?

Numbers: Yes. He was thoroughly humiliated by this.

Paulson: Did he try to talk you out of the book?

Numbers: Oh yes. We had hours and hours of argument. He had a limited number of explanations for why I would be saying this about the prophetess [Ellen White, founder of the Seventh Day Adventists]. One was that I was lying. But he knew me too well, so the only explanation left for him was that somehow Satan had gained control of my mind. And what I was writing reflected the power of Satan. For a number of years, he could not bear to be seen in public with me.

Very sad. Read the rest of the interview at the link.

RLC

Future Tech

For a fascinating glimpse into what military combat might look like in the not too distant future go to Hot Air and watch the top video. It's actually a promotional video produced by Future Combat Systems which, I surmise, is a technology firm working on weapons, communications, and reconnaissance systems.

RLC

The Argument From Fine-Tuning

Joe Carter gives a fine summary of the argument for God's existence based on the fine-tuning of the cosmos. I agree with Carter that this is one of the most powerful of teh arguments for God's existence, even if it doesn't constitute a proof, sensu strictu.

I would caution, though, that the argument does not lead to the conclusion that the architect of the universe is the God of the Bible. Nevertheless, despite this technical shortcoming, the argument goes a long way in clearing away the brush that stands in the way of people accepting that the God of the Bible exists.

If we agree that the design of the universe suggests an intelligence behind the creation we might also conclude that it's reasonable to assume that that intelligence is personal, powerful, and knowledgeable since it has created personal beings and since a great deal of power and mathematical knowledge were required to create the universe. This brings us very close to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. What we cannot infer, however, is that the architect of the space-time cosmos is unqualifiedly good. The existence of suffering prevents us from making that move.

Thus the finely-tuned universe is a compelling reason to believe that there's a creator, but the question whether the creator is identical to the God that Christians have traditionally believed in cannot be settled by reference to the physical creation alone.

Even so, the argument is very powerful. Check out Carter's discussion of it at the link.

RLC

Time Has Come

Michael Ledeen believes that confrontation with Iran can no longer be avoided and, as Machiavelli instructed his Prince, that to delay only works to the advantage of our adversary:

There is no escape from the war Iran is waging against us, the war that started in 1979 and is intensifying with every passing hour. We will shortly learn more about the documents we found accompanying the high-level Iranian terrorist leader we briefly arrested in Hakim's compound in Baghdad some days ago, and what we will learn-what many key American officials have already learned-is stunning. At least to those who thought that Iran was "meddling" in Iraq, but refused to believe that it was total war, on a vast scale.

I have little sympathy for those who have avoided the obvious necessity of confronting Iran, however I do understand the concerns of military leaders, such as General Abizaid, who are doing everything in their considerable power to avoid a two-front war. But I do not think we need massive military power to bring down the mullahs, and in any event we now have a three-front war: within Iraq, and with both Iran and Syria. So General Abizaid's objection is beside the point. We are in a big war, and we cannot fight it by playing defense in Iraq.

You can read the whole piece at the link.

RLC

The Moral Argument

Joe Carter outlines three arguments for the existence of a transcendent moral lawgiver at his blog The Evangelical Outpost. The three are all variations of the same argument - that there must be an objective ground for morality if moral discourse is to make any sense. The versions Carter summarizes are those of Immanuel Kant, C.S. Lewis, and D. Elton Trueblood.

The arguments of these thinkers are not intended to serve as proofs of the existence of God, but they are certainly powerful pointers in that direction. Unless one adopts the position of moral nihilism it's very difficult to evade the force of the reasoning, and the move to adopt nihilism is, of course, a move to forfeit rationality.

Read Carter's summary and see if you don't agree that the moral experience of humans all but demands an either/or choice between nihilism and the existence of a transcendent moral authority.

RLC

Ethical Conundrum

From time to time Christian students express their conviction that the Bible gives answers to all of life's ethical problems. The next time I hear a student say that I hope I remember this story to which I was alerted by my friend Jason:

Until New Year's Day, not even her first name was known. Ashley was a faceless case study, cited in a paper by two doctors at Seattle Children's Hospital as they outlined a treatment so radical that it brought with it allegations of "eugenics", of creating a 21st-century Frankenstein's monster, of maiming a child for the sake of convenience.

The reason for the controversy is this: Three years ago, when Ashley began to display early signs of puberty, her parents instructed doctors to remove her uterus, appendix and still-forming breasts, then treat her with high doses of estrogen to stunt her growth.

In other words, Ashley was sterilized and frozen in time, for ever to remain a child. She was only 6 years old.

Ashley, the daughter of two professionals in the Seattle area, never had much hope of a normal life.

Afflicted with a severe brain impairment known as static encephalopathy, she cannot walk, talk, keep her head up in bed, or even swallow food. Her parents argued that "keeping her small" was the best way to improve the quality of her life, not to make life more convenient for them.

By remaining a child, they say, Ashley will have a better chance of avoiding everything from bed sores to pneumonia - and the removal of her uterus means that she will never have a menstrual cycle or risk developing uterine cancer.

Because Ashley was expected to have a large chest size, her parents say that removing her breast buds, including the milk glands (while keeping the nipples intact), will save her further discomfort while avoiding fibrocystic growth and breast cancer.

They also feared that large breasts could put Ashley at risk of sexual assault.

The case was approved by the hospital's ethics committee in 2004, which agreed that because Ashley could never reproduce voluntarily, she was not being subjected to forced sterilization, a form of racial cleansing promoted in the 1920s and known as eugenics (it was satirized in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby").

However, the case of Ashley X was not made public, and, as a result, no legal challenges were ever made.

Ashley's doctors, Daniel Gunther and Douglas Diekema, wrote in their paper for the October issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine that the treatment would "remove one of the major obstacles to family care and might extend the time that parents with the ability, resources and inclination to care for their child at home might be able to do so."

The paper inspired hundreds of postings on the Internet: many supportive, some disapproving but sympathetic, others furious.

"I find this offensive if not perverse," read one. "Truly a milestone in our convenience-minded society."

It was the critical comments that finally provoked Ashley's father to respond.

While remaining anonymous, he posted a remarkable 9,000-word blog entry at 11 p.m. on New Year's Day, justifying his decision.

The posting includes links to photographs of Ashley, in which the faces of other family members, including Ashley's younger sister and brother, have been blanked out.

"Some question how God might view this treatment," he wrote. "The God we know wants Ashley to have a good quality of life and wants her parents to be diligent about using every resource at their disposal (including the brains that He endowed them with) to maximize her quality of life."

Ashley's father went on to describe how her height is now expected to remain at about 4 feet 5 inches, and her weight at 75 pounds.

Without the treatment, she would have grown into a woman of average height and weight, probably about 5 feet 6 inches and 125 pounds, with a normal lifespan.

The medical profession is divided.

"I think most people, when they hear of this, would say this is just plain wrong," wrote Jeffrey Brosco of the University of Miami, in an editorial. "But it is a complicated story ... you can understand the difficulties. [But] high-dose estrogen therapy to prevent out-of-home placement simply creates a new Sophie's Choice for parents to confront.

"If we as a society want to revise the nature of the harrowing predicament that these parents face, then more funds for home-based services, not more medication, is what is called for."

George Dvorsky, a director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, countered: "If the concern has something to do with the girl's dignity being violated, then I have to protest by arguing that the girl lacks the cognitive capacity to experience any sense of indignity.

"The estrogen treatment is not what is grotesque here. Rather, it is the prospect of having a full-grown and fertile woman endowed with the mind of a baby."

So here's my question: Is what the parents are doing wrong? Is there anything in Scripture which supports a yes answer to that question?

RLC

Why?

President Bush has worked out an agreement with Mexico that would allow illegal aliens who work in the United States and who pay into our social security system to eventually collect social security benefits. This has not been voted into law as yet but one wonders why, when the social security system is in such sorry shape, we are offering to subsidize the retirement of people who broke the law not only to come here but also to obtain a phony social security number. Why is the president rewarding people for breaking the law by allowing them to put a further drain on the benefits U.S. citizens are hoping are there for their own retirement?

This report comes, by the way, on the heels of Governor Schwarzenegger's decision to grant health care insurance to every child in California whether they are citizens or not, and whether they are legal or not.

I suppose there is some reason why Bush and Schwarzenegger feel that it's the right thing to do to take money out of the pockets of people who are here legally and put it in the pockets of those who are breaking our laws, but I confess I don't see what it is. Defenders will say that it's the compassionate thing to do, but it doesn't seem compassionate to essentially take money from the social security checks of elderly people and give it to people whose only claim to it is based on a fraud.

If people through their churches and civic organizations want to help those who have come here in violation of our inmmigration laws they have every right to do that, but for the government to compel its citizenry to sacrifice for illegals makes no more sense than if they decided that we would give every poor person in Mexico free access to our social security and health care systems. Indeed, this policy would be much more compassionate since it would enable people to receive the benefits of being in America without having to undergo the arduous and dangerous trek across the desert to get here.

RLC

The Unheralded War

Every now and then we catch a glimpse of the war against Islamic terrorists that doesn't get much play in the media. Bill Roggio calls attention to our military's involvement in the war being waged by Ethiopia against the Islamic Courts forces in Somalia.

In the course of describing the latest developments in that conflict Roggio states:

The United States has publicly stated its naval forces are actively blockading the Somali coast with assets from Combined Task Force (CTF) 150. "Coalition naval forces are performing boardings on a number of vessels to deter individuals with links to al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations the use of the sea as a potential escape route," notes a CENTCOM press release. The USS Bunker Hill, a Ticonderoga class cruiser which wields the AEGIS Combat System, and the destroyer USS Ramage are engaged in the blockade.

U.S. Special Forces have been rumored to be accompanying Ethiopian and Somali forces on the ground, hunting for senior members of the Islamic Courts, including the three al-Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

The dedicated jihadi in Somalia, as elsewhere, enjoys neither ease nor length of life.

RLC

Ten Myths About Atheism (Pt. II)

With this post we continue our critique of Sam Harris' Ten Myths About Atheism with his second alleged myth. Harris claims the following is not just mythical but also false:

Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

Harris is playing a bit of a shell game here. He slides in the first two sentences from an allegation against atheism and individual atheists to the evils of fascism and communism. He tries to shift the onus away from atheism and onto the nature of political ideology. It's true that these ideologies were very religious but that's irrelevant. It's not fascism which led to the holocaust and not communism that perpetrated the Killing Fields and the crimes committed against humanity in the Soviet Union. Neither ideologies nor religions do anything. It is individual fascists and communists who committed the horrific crimes or the twentieth century and in doing so they were simply carrying to its logical conclusion the basic assumption of atheism.

They believed there was no God and that meant that there is no moral right nor wrong, no eternal consequence for what one does, no reason not to adopt the ethic of might makes right, and no reason to consider others as having dignity and worth. Since they disdained the belief that other people are made in the image of God and loved by God, they therefore concluded that those people have no more rights than do cattle in an abattoir. If one has the power and the wish to kill them there is no moral reason why one should not.

That Hitler, et al. committed the greatest crimes of the century is beyond dispute. That these men were atheists is beyond dispute. That their deeds were wholly consistent with their atheism is also beyond dispute. Thus the myth is not a myth at all. It's a historical reality.

Moreover, even if we were to grant Harris' premise that the responsible agent for the evils of the twentieth century was a kind of religion (fascism and communism), the salient point about this is that these were atheistic religions. Not all religions are bad, but those two were and it could be argued that they were bad precisely because they were, implicitly in one case and explicitly in the other, anti-theistic. Harris, though, clearly seems to think that because some religions are bad therefore they all are, but this is such obvious nonsense that one wonders how an intelligent man could hold that view.

You can read our comment on the first of Harris' ten myths here.

RLC

Post-secular Holland

Who would have thought it? It seems that there may be a religious revival taking place, in Holland of all places, and the revival is not among Holland's Muslims but amongst its Christians. Indeed, Mohammed seems to be having trouble holding on to his followers in the land of tulips:

In spite of this decline of the old religious establishment, however, the century-long wave of secularization seems to have crested, and may even have begun to recede. The Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) finds that the number of self-described Christians stopped declining as early as the beginning of the 1990s. Among the under-20s, the number has started to increase in recent years. If the CBS figures are to be believed, in 2005 a small majority of the Dutch population (52 percent) still called itself Christian. The figures are disputed, however, by another major government research body, the Social and Cultural Planning Agency (SCP).

The SCP uses a stricter definition of religiosity, allowing only those who not only describe themselves as Christians but also belong to a particular church to be counted as "real" Christians. The others, the so-called "fringe Christians," are not attached to a particular church and are excluded from the official head count. Even by the SCP's strict standards, Christians still form a 40 percent plurality among the wider population. Much like the CBS statistic, the SCP's 40 percent figure hasn't changed since the early 1990s.

From both sets of figures, it seems clear that something of a high-water mark for secularization in Holland was set in the last decade.

Islam is already finding itself in a difficult position fighting off another threat, namely that of apostasy. Traditional approaches--honor killings and fatwas--have caused outrage among Holland's general public and political class. That doesn't mean these intimidation tactics won't be effective in the short term--in a recent article in a Dutch political magazine about Islamic converts to Christianity, most sources would talk only on condition of anonymity. But in the long term, they won't work if they don't have the full force of the law behind them (as they do in most Islamic countries). Inevitably, Christian evangelists will try to develop ways of communicating with the Islamic community with a view to converting its members.

Read the whole thing. It's a very interesting article.

RLC

Evading the Questions

Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, is on the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News. The paper's editors recently had a meeting with representatives of the Dallas Muslim community which Dreher reports on here.

Dreher tried to get his interlocutors to answer a set of simple questions, but all he got in reply, according to him, were obfuscations and evasions. The Muslims simply would not deal with the questions to which Dreher, and, I expect, most Americans, would like to hear answers.

According to Dreher, the Muslim spokespersons avoided direct answers to the repeated question of whether the US should live under sharia law which mandates punishments like hand-chopping and stoning, and instead repeatedly challenged the motives of the journalists for asking those questions. They also defended having Muslim youth read the writings of radical Islamists who advocate the imposition of a world-wide Islamic caliphate and retorted to Dreher and his colleagues that the only thing wrong with this is thinking that there's something wrong with it.

The article is both interesting and important, and I urge readers to give it a perusal.

RLC

Distrusting the Times

Why don't people trust the mainstream media to present the news objectively? Well, here's an example of the sort of thing that seems to happen with alarming frequency and which causes people to shake their heads at the apparent willingness of those who present the news to waive journalistic standards when the story supports their ideological preconceptions:

The cover story on abortion in El Salvador in The New York Times Magazine on April 9 contained prominent references to an attention-grabbing fact. "A few" women, the first paragraph indicated, were serving 30-year jail terms for having had abortions. That reference included a young woman named Carmen Climaco. The article concluded with a dramatic account of how Ms. Climaco received the sentence after her pregnancy had been aborted after 18 weeks.

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco's pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the "recently born." A three-judge panel found her guilty of "aggravated homicide," a fact the article noted. But without bothering to check the court document containing the panel's findings and ruling, the article's author, Jack Hitt, a freelancer, suggested that the "truth" was different.

The issues surrounding the article raise two points worth noting, both beyond another reminder to double-check information that seems especially striking. Articles on topics as sensitive as abortion need an extra level of diligence and scrutiny - "bulletproofing," in newsroom jargon. And this case illustrates how important it is for top editors to carefully assess the complaints they receive. A response drafted by top editors for the use of the office of the publisher in replying to complaints about the Hitt story asserted that there was "no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported."

The Times had a story which, they evidently thought, would make the forces arrayed against abortion look very bad and they ran with it without bothering to check its accuracy. With how many other stories have they done the same thing?

The New York Times does deserve some credit, though. The above article was done by their ombudsman, Byron Calame, and appeared in their pages last Sunday.

Read the rest of it at the link.

RLC