Pounding Mookie's Mahdi Army

You'll remember back a month or so ago the Iraqi army attacked the Mahdi army of Muqtada (Mookie) al Sadr in Basra in southern Iraq. You'll also remember that the attack got off to a slow start prompting media critics of the war to pronounce the IA a bunch of complete incompetents. You might be aware, too, how the fighting spread throughout Iraq, especially to Sadr City, a district of Baghdad.

What you are probably not aware of if you get your news from the MSM is the following:

The Mahdi Army suffered a significant blow during fighting against Iraqi and Coalition forces this year, according to an Iraq intelligence report. The heavy casualties suffered by the Mahdi Army have forced Muqtada al Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist political movement, to change his tactics and disband the Mahdi Army in favor of a small, secretive fighting force.

"More than 2,000 cadres from the Mahdi Army leaders were killed recently," an Iraqi intelligence official told Gulf News. "This led to the almost complete collapse of the army," the official said. An estimated 1,300 Mahdi Army fighters "escaped to safe houses in Iran." Muqtada al Sadr currently resides in Qom, Iran, under the protection of Iran's Qods Force.

The Mahdi Army took heavy casualties while opposing the Iraqi security forces in Basrah and the South and against US and Iraqi forces in Sadr City during operations to secure the areas in March, April, and May. More than 1,000 Mahdi Army fighters were killed in Sadr City alone, according to a Mahdi Army commander in Baghdad. Another 415 were killed in Basrah. More than 400 were killed during fighting in the southern cities of Najaf, Karbala, Hillah, Diwaniyah, Amarah, Samawah, and Nasiriyah in late March and early April, according to numbers compiled by The Long War Journal. Thousands more have been wounded our captured.

The setbacks in Baghdad, Basrah, and the South have forced Sadr to turn the Mahdi Army into "a secret military organization," the Iraqi report stated. "The number of members doesn't exceed 150-200, hugely down from the total estimated number of 50,000 in the past two years."

There's much more bad news for the Mookster in this article, but you'll have to go to the link for it. If you have any anti-Bush friends who are feeling a little glum these days share this post with them. It'll cheer them up.

RLC

Support for Torture Growing

Hot Air links to a report titled World Public Opinion on Torture. The report tells us, inter alia, that:

While Americans oppose the use of torture on the whole, the majority endorsing an unequivocal rule against torture is more modest than in other countries and has declined since 2006.

A modest majority (53%) feels that torture should unequivocally not be allowed, while forty-four percent favor an exception for terrorists. Thirteen say torture should be allowed in general.

Support for making exceptions for torture in the case of terrorists has grown among Americans since 2006 (44%, up from 36%), while the majority opposing the use of torture in all cases has fallen slightly (53%, down from 58%).

The arguments for or against an absolute prohibition on torture aside, there's an interesting irony in the above statistics. We live in a country where a majority of people believe that nothing is wrong absolutely and yet a majority also holds that torture is absolutely wrong. It's amusing to listen to secularists, whose position entails that there is no such thing as an objective moral wrong, go apoplectic when confronted with evidence that the Bush administration has employed "harsh measures" in their interrogation of terrorists.

RLC

Loser Letter #6

Mary Eberstadt concludes that until atheists understand the transcendent love that families engender they won't ever be able to persuade Dulls to come over to the Dark si..., I mean the Brights' side. Read her amusing analysis in her sixth Loser Letter at National Review Online.

RLC

Pretzel Logic

Howard Kurtz who is the media reporter at the Washington Post (i.e. he reports on the news media) takes the liberal MSM to task for completely ignoring Senator Obama's "pretzel logic" on the D.C gun ban issue:

Here's how the Illinois senator handled the issue with the Chicago Tribune just last November:

"The campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said that he ' . . . believes that we can recognize and respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and the right of local communities to enact common sense laws to combat violence and save lives. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.' "

Kind of a flat statement.

And here's what ABC reported yesterday: " 'That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator's consistent position,' Obama spokesman Bill Burton tells ABC News."

Inartful indeed.

But even though the earlier Obama quote and the "inartful" comment have been bouncing around the Net for 24 hours, I'm not seeing any reference to them in the morning papers. Most do what the New York Times did: "Mr. Obama, who like Mr. McCain has been on record as supporting the individual-rights view, said the ruling would 'provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.' "

Supporting the individual-rights view? Not in November.

Even the Tribune--the very paper that the Obama camp told he supported the gun ban--makes no reference to the November interview. Instead: "Democrat Barack Obama offered a guarded response Thursday to the Supreme Court ruling striking down the District of Columbia's prohibition on handguns and sidestepped providing a view on the 32-year-old local gun ban. Republican rival John McCain's campaign accused him of an 'incredible flip-flop' on gun control."

So McCain accuses Obama of a flip-flop, and the Trib can't check the clips to tell readers whether there's some basis in fact for the charge?

USA Today takes the same tack:

"In a conference call put together by McCain's campaign, Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said . . . that Obama has been changing his position on the gun issue and said the Democratic senator has done some 'incredible flip-flopping' on key issue."

And? And? That's all we get? He said/he said journalism?

Even if you wanted to maintain that it wasn't really a flip-flop, what about giving the readers the facts?

Facts? Facts?? Since when did the media feel constrained to supply us with facts unless those facts reflect poorly on Republicans or conservatives? The media is not about facts, they're all about creating an image and reinforcing impressions, and the public impression of Obama they want to reinforce is that he's a new kind of politician. if facts get in the way then the facts just get ignored.

RLC

Good News from Iraq

Vito calls our attention to this article in USAToday which really is heartening news:

WASHINGTON - Roadside bomb attacks and fatalities in Iraq are down by almost 90% over the last year, according to Pentagon records and interviews with military leaders. In May, 11 U.S. troops were killed by blasts from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) compared with 92 in May 2007, records show. That's an 88% decrease.

Military leaders cite several factors for the drop in attacks and deaths. They include:

� New vehicles. Almost 7,000 heavily armored Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles have been rushed to Iraq in the last year. "They've taken hits, many, many hits that would have killed soldiers and marines in uparmored Humvees," Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a recent interview. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made obtaining at least 15,000 MRAPs his top priority last year.

� Iraqi assistance. Ad hoc local security forces, known as the Sons of Iraq, have provided on-the-ground intelligence to U.S. forces looking for IEDs, said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, who commanded a division in Baghdad from February 2007 until May. Each member of the security forces earns about $8 per day. Lynch has hired about 36,000 of them to man checkpoints and provide intelligence on the insurgency. He said about 60% had been insurgents.

� Improved surveillance. Lynch said his troops used new security cameras that could see bomb builders up to 5 miles away. "If they're out there planting an IED, we can go whack them before they finish," he said.

Also, Lynch said, the 14-ton MRAPs have forced insurgents to build bigger bombs to knock out the vehicles. Those bombs take more time to build and hide, which gives U.S. forces a better chance of catching the insurgents in the act and then attacking them.

Perhaps the left and other anti-war folk will join with us in rejoicing that American casualties are diminishing. Let's hope it continues.

RLC

N.T. Wright on Colbert

N.T. Wright is one of the best known contemporary theologians and he has written what is perhaps the definitive work on the resurrection of Jesus titled The Resurrection of the Son of God. He has more recently written a book titled Surprised by Hope in which he argues that heaven is not the final destination of those who have eternal life.

Wright recently appeared on the Stephen Colbert show to discuss his book which, of course, is hardly a setting conducive to a serious consideration of his ideas. Nevertheless, here's the interview:

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 8

In chapter 8 of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins continues to pile implausible assertions on top of puerile arguments. He delivers himself of the claim, as an instance, that evolutionists believe in evolution because the evidence supports it and would abandon their theory overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

Now that may be true of him personally, though I very much doubt it, but it's certainly not true of evolutionists as a whole. Consider the famous admission of evolutionist Richard Lewontin who doubtless speaks for many in his camp:

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

That doesn't sound to me like a man particularly open to evidence. When Dawkins insists that absolutist belief systems are a source of evil in the world and that religion is absolutist, he should be reminded of the above passage from Lewontin.

The unmistakable trademark of the faith-based moralizer, Dawkins goes on to assure us, is to care passionately about what other people do (or think) in private. This reprehensible behavior is typical of religious people, especially those who condemn homosexuality and other forms of sexual libertinism.

Whether many Christians really care what others think and do in private I cannot say, but it certainly is typical of many of Dawkins' friends, if not he himself, to care about other people's private thoughts. If a student or faculty member of a high school or college knows all the facts of evolutionary theory but personally disbelieves their truth, many atheistic materialists have publicly admitted that they would, were it in their power, deny them a degree or a tenured faculty position.

We've noted on this blog several examples of Darwinists who care very passionately indeed about what people think in private about evolution. Why is it despicable to concern oneself with what others think in their hearts about sex but not despicable when it is private doubts about Darwinism that must be purged root and branch from peoples' hearts and minds?

Professor Dawkins is at pains in chapter 8 to defend abortion on demand and along the way ridicule religious believers for their opposition to it. He observes that Paul Hill, a Pensacola man who killed an abortionist and his bodyguard in 1994, was driven to his deed by his religious beliefs. By the lights of his religious faith, Dawkins states, Hill was entirely right and moral to shoot the abortionist.

Be that as it may, the irony of Dawkins' complaint here against religion is that by Dawkins' own lights he cannot say, though he does anyway, that Hill was wrong or immoral to shoot the abortionist. Dawkins has to import a theistic understanding and foundation of morality in order to make his case that Hill's act was contemptible because on atheistic grounds there simply is no justification for using the word "wrong" and no reason to think that murder is anything more than an offense against one's own subjective moral preferences.

Dawkins' main justification for killing the unborn, surprisingly enough, is not that they're not human but that, regardless of their humanity, they don't really suffer from being aborted. This is an astonishing argument. If we were to adopt it how could we avoid taking the short step to agreeing that no killing would be immoral as long as the victim didn't suffer? Where would this stop? Infants and the elderly could be put to death so long as it was done painlessly, but there'd be no reason to stop there. Everyone who couldn't defend themselves in a Dawkinsian world would be fair game for the stronger provided the killers did their deed without inflicting pain. Children, the weak and infirm, the poor, all would be vulnerable to Dawkins' enlightened thinking. Dawkins, though he apparently doesn't foresee it, would have us living in a Hobbesian world of war of every man against every man. To follow his logic would be to travel straight back to the holocaust.

Having proffered the stunningly stupid thesis that what essentially makes murder wrong is not that it takes a human life but rather that it inflicts pain, our intrepid philosopher is now prepared to traipse insouciantly on to chapter 9 where he will make the case, or at least attempt to make a case, that teaching children to be religious is a form of child abuse.

RLC

Gun Rights

The Supreme Court has finally ruled on the question of whether the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution applies to private ownership of firearms or whether it applies only to those firearms used in the service of a state militia. In a 5-4 ruling the Court decided that the right to own firearms is not merely tied to membership in a militia but applies to individual citizens. This is, I think, the first time in U.S. history that the Court has ruled on this.

The case involved a District of Columbia law that prohibited residents from keeping handguns inside their homes and required that lawfully registered guns, such as shotguns, be locked and unloaded when kept at home. This ban was found to be in conflict with the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution.

Once again we see the paramount importance of the Supreme Court and who we elect as president to appoint the Justices who serve on it and who we elect to the Senate to confirm them. Justices like those in the minority in this case are much more likely to be appointed by a Democrat president (although, ironically, two of them, Stevens and Souter, were indeed appointed by Republicans) and Justices like those in the majority are much more likely to be appointed by Republicans (indeed all of them were).

Also, we note that whereas Senator McCain has taken a firm position on the 2nd Amendment's reach, Senator Obama has, not surprisingly, equivocated.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Genius Isn't Wisdom

In the course of writing my criticisms of The God Delusion I remarked that we cannot conclude from a man's brilliance in one area of intellectual endeavor that he will prove brilliant in every area or, for that matter, that he'll even be reasonably bright in other areas. Intellectual ability is like athletic ability. A man might be a great basketball player but a terrible swimmer.

Algis Valiunas in The New Atlantis gives us a fine illustration of this phenomenon in a wonderful glimpse of the life and genius of Albert Einstein.

Einstein was perhaps the most extraordinary thinker of the 20th century, but his personal life was heartbreakingly chaotic and his political and philosophical notions were often naive, inconsistent or even incoherent. For example, Valiunas tells us:

In 1935, animated by the Nazi military threat, Einstein reversed his earlier militant pacifism and insisted "no reasonable human being would today favor the refusal to do military service, at least not in Europe, which is at present particularly beset with dangers." Confirmed pacifists must support the concerted action of decent states to foil the warlike designs of the indecent. In August 1939, having been informed by the Hungarian refugee physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner that the Germans may already be working on a nuclear bomb, Einstein famously wrote a letter to President Roosevelt urging that the U.S. government initiate a nuclear program of its own; it took months to see serious action, and Einstein was left out of atomic research during the war, but his letter was a prime impetus for the Manhattan Project.

If pacifism is the correct moral position then one must be a pacifist regardless of the nature of the threat. One cannot be a pacifist with regard to that war but not this one, or be a pacifist regarding wars in which the carnage is in the thousands but not in wars which threaten to kill millions.

Einstein's political thinking was also naive:

In 1953, during the height of the Red Scare, he published an open letter in the New York Times exhorting a Brooklyn schoolteacher subpoenaed by a congressional investigative committee to remain silent: "What ought the minority of intellectuals to do against this evil? Frankly, I can see only the revolutionary way of non-cooperation in the sense of Gandhi's. Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify, i.e., he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short, for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of his country." To do otherwise, he concluded, was to live as a slave.

Valiunas observes:

One can only cringe at the rhetorical bluster, utterly oblivious to the fact that America was facing a potent enemy that kept tens of millions of slaves in the gulag archipelago. Einstein's genius suffered no greater injury than from his lifelong political crusading.

Another example of Einstein's massive intelligence failing to spill over into areas other than math and physics can be found in his philosophical ideas, some of which were incoherent. He was, for example, totally committed to a deterministic view of everything:

"I do not at all believe in free will in the philosophical sense," he declared in the 1930 essay "What I Believe." If he meant by this no more than that we are all creatures and cannot make ourselves anything we want to be, there is little to quarrel with in that. But elsewhere he averred, "Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player."

Having said that, however, he nevertheless also says this:

"The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life."

Valiunas concludes that:

[Einstein] seemed finally to live a riven life, one of spiritual incoherence, denying freedom of choice yet preaching an exigent morality.

What this all teaches us is that we must not be overly impressed when we hear someone who has demonstrated intellectual accomplishment in one sphere of life offering opinions we find disagreeable in some other sphere. When scientists pontificate upon politics or religion, it's best to simply consider the merits of what they say and not put too much weight on whom it is that's saying it.

HT: No Left Turns

RLC

Concessions from the Other Side

A Darwinian materialist and journalist, Gordy Slack, writes about what Intelligent Design theorists get right. He lists four items:

First, I have to agree with the ID crowd that there are some very big (and frankly exciting) questions that should keep evolutionists humble. While there is important work going on in the area of biogenesis (origin of life), for instance, I think it's fair to say that science is still in the dark about this fundamental question. It's hard to draw conclusions about the significance of what we don't know. Still, I think it is disingenuous to argue that the origin of life is irrelevant to evolution. It is no less relevant than the Big Bang is to physics or cosmology.

Evolution should be able to explain, in theory at least, all the way back to the very first organism that could replicate itself through biological or chemical processes. And to understand that organism fully, we would simply have to know what came before it. And right now we are nowhere close. I believe a material explanation will be found, but that confidence comes from my faith that science is up to the task of explaining, in purely material or naturalistic terms, the whole history of life. My faith is well founded, but it is still faith.

Second, IDers also argue that the cell is far more complex than Darwin could have imagined 149 years ago when he published On the Origin of Species. There is much more explaining to do than those who came before us could have predicted. Sure, we also know a lot more about natural selection and evolution, including the horizontal transfer of portions of genomes from one species to another. But scientists still have much to learn about the process of evolution if they are to fully explain the phenomenon. Again, I have faith that science will complete that picture, but I suspect there will be some big surprises.

Will one of them be that an intelligent being designed life? I doubt it. Even if someone found compelling evidence for a designer, for us materialists, it would just push the ultimate question down the road a bit. If a Smart One designed life, what is the material explanation for its existence?

The third noteworthy point IDers make has its roots, paradoxically, in a kind of psychological empiricism. Millions of people believe they directly experience the reality of a Creator every day, and to them it seems like nonsense to insist that He does not exist. Unless they are lying, God's existence is to them an observable fact. Denying it would be like insisting that my love for my children was an illusion created by neurotransmitters. I can't imagine a scientific argument in the world that could convince me that I didn't really love my children. And if there were such an argument, I have to admit I'd be reluctant to accept it, however compelling it appeared on paper. I have too much respect for my own experience.

Which leads me to a final concession to my ID foes: When they say that some proponents of evolution are blind followers, they're right. A few years ago I covered a conference of the American Atheists in Las Vegas. I met dozens of people there who were dead sure that evolutionary theory was correct though they didn't know a thing about adaptive radiation, genetic drift, or even plain old natural selection. They came to their Darwinism via a commitment to naturalism and atheism not through the study of science. They're still correct when they say evolution happens. But I'm afraid they're wrong to call themselves skeptics unencumbered by ideology. Many of them are best described as zealots. Ideological zeal isn't incompatible with good science; its coincidence with a theory proves nothing about that theory's explanatory power.

Actually, the intelligent Design people get a great deal more right than just this, but this is a good start. It's not that Darwinians haven't conceded that ID is on to something before, but they almost always do it grudgingly, tacitly, and between-the-lines. It's nice to see a materialist freely acknowledge that there are very serious problems with the idea of blind, undirected, mindless evolution.

HT: Bradford at Telic Thoughts

RLC

Job Openings

Coalition forces continue to extirpate al Qaeda in Iraq, recently dispatching the emir (leader) of al Qaeda in Mosul:

The emir, who has not been named, was killed after a special operations team from Task Force 88, the hunter-killer teams assigned to take down terrorists in Iraq, stormed a building in Mosul. The commandos opened fire after one of the terrorists attempted to detonate his suicide vest was shot and another reached for a pistol. A woman with the group attempted to detonate the vest on the dead al Qaeda operative.

The takedown of al Qaeda's emir in Mosul is the latest blow to the terror network in the North. Over the weekend, the emir of eastern Mosul and the leader of car-bombing operations in western half of the city were detained. On June 20, Coalition forces detained al Qaeda's security emir in Mosul. His predecessor was captured just two months prior, and his predecessor was captured in February.

Scores of cell leaders, facilitators, weapons smugglers, and fighters have been captured or killed by US and Iraqi forces during operations in June.

There are real opportunities here for up-and-coming young guys with leadership qualities who only want to work a couple of weeks before being retired.

RLC

<i>Kennedy v. Louisiana</i>

The Supreme Court (Kennedy v. Louisiana) has ruled 5-4 that it is cruel and unusual to impose the death penalty when the crime does not involve a death. The case before it was based on the appeal of a 43 year old man named Patrick Kennedy who raped his 8 year-old step-daughter. The liberals on the court ruled that raping a child is not a sufficient evil to warrant taking the rapist's life. According to Anthony Kennedy, whose decisions seem to be growing increasingly difficult to understand, the death penalty is not proportional punishment for the rape of a child.

The logic mystifies me. The five liberal Justices ruled that only if someone is killed is the crime heinous enough to merit the death penalty. Simply destroying someone's life in other ways doesn't. They believe, incredibly, that it would be either cruel and/or unusual to execute a man who wrecked a little girl's life by, say, torturing her, sexually mutilating her, dismembering her, repeatedly sodomizing her, and ultimately paralyzing her if in the end he didn't kill her.

How it could be either cruel or unusual to execute such a monster escapes me, but then I'm not very enlightened concerning the arcana of liberal thinking, I guess. I wonder how the five Justices in the majority would have ruled had their own eight year old daughters ever been subjected to such treatment.

This is why the choice of who we vote for in November is so important. A President McCain may wind up appointing more liberals to the Supreme Court, especially given the Democratic control of the Senate which must confirm his appointments, but a president Obama certainly would. In other words, if Obama is elected we're sure to get a lot more decisions like Kennedy v. Louisiana.

I wish someone in one of the debates coming up would ask the candidates whether they agree with the Court's ruling that enemy combatants captured on the battlefield should be given the same rights as American citizens and the ruling that child rapists aren't really doing enough harm to warrant being put to death. I think I know what McCain would say, but I think Obama would start his familiar tap dance around the question until he had managed to give every possible answer to it.

UPDATE: Senator Obama was indeed asked whether he agrees with the decision and replied that he disagreed with it and endorsed capital punishment in cases such as that of child rape. I applaud him for this but have a couple of questions: Is it not true that he would appoint judges who ruled as did the majority in Kennedy? Will his support on the far left be bummed by his claim to favor capital punishment in at least some cases? Would he have given this same answer were he not running for president? Given his history of standing on both sides of an issue one can't be sure. The best way to tell is to ask him to name a Supreme Court Justice present or past who best models the type of Justice he'd be likely to appoint to the Court.

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

The Inconstant Candidate

The other day we noted that Senator Obama reversed his position on FISA and public financing of his campaign. These switches in position come in the wake of numerous others. Here's a partial list of Obama's recent tergiversations:

• Within a couple of weeks of saying that he could no more disown Rev. Wright than he could disown a member of his own family, he essentially disowned him.
• When speaking to a meeting of American Jews a couple of weeks back, he told them he supports Israeli control of Jerusalem. The next day, trying to placate angry Arab supporters, Obama said "negotiators" should work out the contentious Jerusalem issue.
• He criticized Hillary Clinton for months for voting to list Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Days after Clinton conceded, Obama flipped and said he himself supported the designation.
• Obama repeatedly vowed to meet with various heads of terror states-most notably Ahmadinejad of Iran-"without preconditions." Then he changed his mind: "There's no reason why we would necessarily meet with Ahmadinejad. He's not the most powerful person in Iran."
• In October, he supported NAFTA expansion. In March, campaigning in the Ohio primary, he called for a "reopening" of the trade pact's terms. This week, he called his own primary rhetoric "overheated" and said NAFTA has had a positive effect on the US economy.
• After signaling opposition to nuclear power, he told Democratic governors he's open to expanding it.
• He gave every indication that as president he would start withdrawing troops from Iraq immediately upon taking office but has lately proposed a more gradual withdrawal based on conditions on the ground.

The man is as hard to pin down as Osama bin Laden. Just when you think you know where he stands he turns up somewhere else. Is this the new politics his admirers in the media are swooning over?

RLC

Confused Atheists

The Pew Foundation survey on religion in America turns up some interesting statistics:

Consider this stunner: 21% of atheists and 55% of agnostics say they believe in God. Eight percent of atheists and 17% of agnostics are even certain that God exists. What's up with that? What's more, 10% of atheists and 18% of agnostics pray at least once a week.

I never suspected our local atheist club of opening their meetings with prayer, but maybe they hold hands in a circle, bow their heads, and ask God to bless their proceedings during which they'll all explain to each other why they don't believe he exists.

It could be that the atheists who identify themselves as believers are the non-believers' version of religious liberals. If very liberal protestants are almost atheists, perhaps very liberal atheists are almost protestants.

Anyway, 99% of evangelical protestants and 97% of Catholics say they believe in God, but that means that 1% and 3% respectively do not. Why would an atheist identify him or herself as an evangelical or a Catholic?

There's more: Among atheists 12% believe there's a heaven and 10% believe there's a hell which causes me to ask which they think they're going to inhabit and who's going to see that they get there.

Fifty seven percent of people who belong to evangelical churches believe that other religions can lead to eternal life, and, among evangelicals, 86% believe in heaven. So what's the Good News for the other 14% of evangelicals who don't believe in heaven?

The more someone attends church the more they are likely to be politically conservative and the less they attend church the more likely they are to be liberal. That's not surprising, but this was:

Sixty one percent of evangelicals think abortion should be illegal in almost all cases, but only 45% of Catholics do. Sixty four percent of evangelicals believe homosexuality should be discouraged, but only 30% of Catholics do. Who'd have thought that a minority of Catholics oppose abortion?

There's much more on the results of this fascinating, if rather counterintuitive, survey here.

RLC

Lawyers

Ever wonder why people hold lawyers in such low esteem? Here's a video of a trial lawyer/ state representative speaking on the floor of the Massachusetts State House against mandatory sentences for child rapists.

It makes one wonder who's worse, the molester who rapes the child or the lawyer who wrecks the child's life to get the rapist off. I wonder, too, who's more embarrassed by this video, the man's fellow lawyers or his fellow politicians.

RLC

Loser Letter #5

Mary Eberstadt, alias A. F. Christian, laments all the "total craptacular hoser traitor enemy combatant Loser-lover guys" who are leaving the ranks of the Brights to join the Dulls in Loser Letter #5 at National Review Online.

RLC

Microscopic Clutch

The bacterial flagellum continues to give strict Darwinians migraines. Scientists have recently discovered that the flagellum's rotation is stopped by a protein assembly that acts just like the clutch in an automobile transmission.

"We think it's pretty cool that evolving bacteria and human engineers arrived at a similar solution to the same problem," said IU Bloomington biologist Daniel Kearns, who led the project. "How do you temporarily stop a motor once it gets going?"

Indeed. The whole flagellar assembly is a miniature outboard motor and the filament is disengaged from the motor by a clutch assembly such as intelligent engineers have designed for cars. Yet we are to believe that random genetic mutations occurring relatively quickly in geological time acted in tandem with natural selection to produce this astonishing machine completely without any guidance or intention.

Which came first, you may wonder, the flagellar motor or the clutch assembly? What good would each do the organism if the other didn't exist? If it does no good how was it conserved? If they evolved together how did such a marvel happen unless guided by an intelligent agent?

Never mind. It's impertinent to ask such questions. Just believe what the wise Darwinists tell you and don't be difficult.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 7 (part II)

Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is a rambling, weakly argued polemic against God and religion in which no canard is considered too lame to be trotted out in service to the cause. In the second half of chapter 7, for instance, Dawkins reconstructs the obligatory sad history of religious oppression, conflict and bloodshed. He strongly implies that but for the baleful influence of religion all would be peace and light in the world.

As so often in his book, though, Professor Dawkins tells us only part of the tale, and a small part at that. Let's talk a little bit about what he leaves out, starting in 1915: First there was the Russian revolution (9 million dead), then the Ukrainian famine (15 million), the Nazi holocaust (6 million), the rape of Nanking (300,000) the war in Korea (2.8 million), the cultural revolution in China (40 million), post-war Vietnam (430,000), the Cambodian killing fields (1.6 million), the Rwandan genocide (750,000) These slaughters accounted for the deaths of about 80 million people, none of them had anything to do with religion, but most of them were perpetrated by devotees of an ideology that was explicitly or implicitly atheistic. In other words, the record of slaughter in the name of atheism and by atheists dwarfs that committed in the name of God. Moreover, if we consider not religion in general but only the Christian church the bloodshed which can be layed to the account of Christianity over the last four centuries is vanishingly small, especially compared to the crimes of state atheism.

Dawkins maintains that religion is a significant force for evil because religion, being a human enterprise, is subject to many of the flaws that humans possess, but he fails to recognize that it is the human element of religion that is the problem, not religion itself.

Because there is a widespread consensus about what's right and what's wrong, and this consensus has nothing to do with religion, he concludes that religion is unnecessary for morality. As an alternative to the Biblical commandments he offers a list of ethical rules that reflect what he calls the "moral zeitgeist." Some of the platitudes he serves up are: Always seek to learn something new; live life with joy and wonder; in all things strive to cause no harm. To each of these, however, the question needs to be put, "why?" What obligates anyone to observe Dawkins' rules? They're nothing more than banal expressions of his own preferences about how he'd like to see people live. Observing them or flouting them is neither right nor wrong.

Dawkins naively believes that the moral zeitgeist is moving us forward and that we're making moral progress. Notwithstanding the absurdity of such a claim in light of the statistics given above for the 20th century (which represent, by the way, only a fraction of that century's horrors), it is remarkable for what it reveals about his utter obliviousness to the fact that he has no grounds for calling an evolving moral consensus either progress or regress. It just is.

He assures us that the "zeitgeist," pushed along as it is by people like ethicist Peter Singer, is moving us toward a post-specieist condition where animals will have rights similar to those of human persons. This, Dawkins' enthuses, would be a "natural extrapolation of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women." What Dawkins chooses not to tell his readers is that Singer is the world's most outspoken proponent of legalizing infanticide, which is a "natural extrapolation" from a Darwinian worldview and an example of the progressive direction in which the zeitgeist is moving.

"The manifest progression of the zeitgeist is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good," Dawkins proclaims. In other words, as long as we can agree to follow certain precepts and platitudes who needs God? This is so naive that it seems almost an indignity to respond to it. One of his ethical rules is "Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or species" (Interestingly, he does not prohibit discrimination based upon religion). But why should we not discriminate on the basis of sex or race? Why is such behavior wrong? Why is it wrong to harm another person? Dawkins doesn't tell us because he can't tell us. The Darwinian ethic is might makes right and under such a principle prohibitions against discrimination are ludicrous. Discrimination, or anything else, can only be wrong if we are somehow obligated to treat others with dignity and respect and we can only be so obligated if there is a God.

A big problem for anyone seeking to show that atheists are good folk is the record of oppressors like Hitler and Stalin so Dawkins devotes several pages to explaining how these men and others like them were not influenced to do what they did by their atheism. Their atheism was one thing, their deeds were another. This is a laughable defense given that he was loath to make the same concession to the historical crimes committed by Christians. But even if we allow him the point it's still irrelevant. The question is not whether these men were consciously acting on their atheistic beliefs when they committed their crimes, but rather whether what these men did was in any way inconsistent with an atheistic worldview. The answer to that is no. If atheism is true nothing Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao did is wrong.

Dawkins is offended that anyone would think that an atheist, qua atheist, would commit such atrocities as were recorded by Stalin and Hitler. "Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?" He asks. Again this question muddies the water. Dawkins needs rather to answer the deeper question of why atheistic Marxists felt impelled to slay thousands of clergy and to attempt to wipe out Christianity in almost every country in which they seized power in the 20th century. If atheism is merely the absence of a belief why is it so hostile to believers? Why is it not simply indifferent? The reason is because atheism is indeed an absolutist belief system and it sees Christianity as its most vigorous rival.

Richard Dawkins does not believe in miracles but he should. The fact that a book as poorly argued as The God Delusion has become a best-seller and is making him wealthy is perhaps the most amazing miracle of our young century.

RLC

Kerryesque

Congress has been trying to come up with a FISA bill that will be free of some of the short-comings of its predecessor legislation. The House has now overwhelmingly passed a bill that includes retroactive immunity to telecom companies that may otherwise be liable to lawsuits for helping the government eavesdrop on suspected terrorists.

The left is upset that the immunity provision was included. This puts Senator Obama in a sticky wicket since he supported the bill when it was in the House, but now that his base is aroused and angry he has reversed course and promises now to filibuster the bill that he previously supported.

In other words, as with public financing of his campaign, Obama was in favor of it before he was against it. The senator is sounding like a clone of John Kerry.

Ed Morrissey chronicles Senator Obama's political peregrinations on this issue at Hot Air.

RLC

Man from Nowhere

Michael Gerson spotlights the emptiness of Senator Obama's rhetoric about being "post-partisan" and willing to take political risks to reach across the aisle to work with members of the other party:

Jake Tapper of ABC News asked ... Barack Obama: "Have you ever worked across the aisle in such a way that entailed a political risk for yourself?" Obama's response is worth quoting in full: "Well, look, when I was doing ethics reform legislation, for example, that wasn't popular with Democrats or Republicans. So any time that you actually try to get something done in Washington, it entails some political risks. But I think the basic principle which you pointed out is that I have consistently said, when it comes to solving problems, like nuclear proliferation or reducing the influence of lobbyists in Washington, that I don't approach this from a partisan or ideological perspective."

For a candidate running as a centrist reformer, this is pretty weak tea. Ethics reform and nuclear proliferation are important issues, but they have hardly put Obama in the liberal doghouse. When I recently asked two U.S. senators who are personally favorable to Obama to name a legislative issue on which Obama has vocally bucked his own party, neither could cite a single instance.

Gerson goes on to contrast Obama's blank record of offending his fellow Democrats in order to work with Republicans to the maddeningly frequent instances of John McCain's hobnobbing with the Democrats. He finishes with this:

It is an odd thing when a presidential candidate bases his campaign on a manifest weakness. Rudy Giuliani ran on a platform of foreign policy experience while lacking it completely. Obama promises post-partisanship while doing little to demonstrate it in the Senate. And the independent voters so eagerly courted in this election may eventually ask about Obama the odd but appropriate question: What dogs has this man bitten?

Indeed, what indications are there that Obama has ever displayed any of the political talents and virtues his supporters believe he will bring to the White House? The Senator has come out of nowhere with nothing to commend him except beguiling speeches about hope and unity. He has no record of accomplishment and has never administrated anything much less a great nation. Yet for reasons that appear utterly non-rational, millions of people are prepared to put him in the White House. It's a little unnerving.

RLC