Back to Basics

Much post-election political commentary has focused on the alleged need for the Republican party to "broaden its appeal" to attract the young and minorities and that it needs to abandon stances on issues, like abortion and immigration, that alienate these groups. It also needs to shed its reputation for penny-pinching and loosen up the public purse-strings in order to woo the poor into the party.

All of these recommendations are silly. They amount to saying that if Republicans want to compete with Democrats why, then, they should become Democrats. It amounts to selling their soul for a mess of political pottage, and it wouldn't work anyway. The Republicans have not fallen into disfavor because they hold to the wrong principles. They've fallen from grace because they don't appear to stand for any principles at all.

What Republicans need to do to regain the public's confidence is three things: First, they need to stop running old men for president. Beginning in 1992 with George H.W. Bush Republicans three times run seemingly out-of-touch, superannuated candidates against younger, more charismatic opponents and they've lost every time. The two elections in which they prevailed (2000, 2004) the GOP candidate was the same age as the Democratic candidate. If the Republicans want to get the under 30 vote they're going to have to bend to a sociological reality: Young people love and admire their grandfathers, but they prefer their presidents to be youthful, intelligent, articulate, and energetic.

Secondly, Republicans need to return to their principles. George W. Bush has spent money as though nothing was more abundant and what has it gotten him? He has a popularity rating that can only be measured with sonar and an economy which will probably ruin his presidential legacy.

Republicans need to stand firmly for spending discipline, they need to go cold-turkey on their addiction to earmarks, and they need to stop sounding an uncertain trumpet on social issues. Voters rightly wonder, if their choice is between a genuine liberal Democrat and a GOP knock-off of a liberal Democrat, why not just vote for the real thing? Meanwhile, conservatives stay home in disgust. McCain got five million fewer votes than Bush did in 2004 largely because McCain's record in the Senate failed to inspire confidence among conservatives that he was the genuine article.

Thirdly, and perhaps most crucially, Republicans need to see themselves as educators. George Bush's biggest failing, aside from his economic profligacy and border apathy, was his failure to educate the American people as to why his other policies were right. Whatever the quality of his leadership in the White House may have been, he was often AWOL on the public airwaves when the people needed to be inspired, assured and instructed as to why they should follow him on the course he was setting.

A Republican leadership made up of the same anonymous mystery men who guided the campaigns of Bush the elder, Bob Dole, and John McCain will almost certainly guarantee the party an extended vacation in political Siberia. The reason why so many people were drawn to Sarah Palin and willing to forgive her her short-comings was that she was such a breath of fresh air in her declarations of her convictions. The cavils of a derisory media notwithstanding, those convictions are almost exactly those of the vast majority who comprise the GOP base and, indeed, many Democrats as well. Palin was a resonant trumpet to McCain's dubious kazoo and many people were grateful to her for that.

By all means Republicans should seek to attract those outside the party, but they should do it by promoting conservative principles, not abandoning them, and by selecting younger, attractive advocates for those principles. They need to make the case for their principles with such power and clarity that not even a media fully committed to doing wahtever it takes to neutralize their voices will be unable to prevent the message from eroding popular support from the Democratic ranks.

Just as I was finishing this post up I came across this article by Karl Rove which says much the same things only he says more and says it better.

RLC

Re: Add Congo

My friend Matt writes in response to our post on the Congo titled Add Congo to the List:

Thanks for your recent Congo post, Dick. I had just watched a documentary called The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. A student had bought the rights to show it for her high school culminating project and then let me borrow the DVD. It was unimaginable. Unimaginable. Hundreds of thousands of women and girls and small children gang-raped. Hundreds of thousands!! And their SVU (special victims unit) for the entire country consists of ONE woman with no budget.

The men gang-rape with impunity. And they don't just gang-rape, they then destroy the women's genitalia with rods and poles. It's demonic. Purely demonic. And the few people who can stand to work for justice there have the aura of Christ. I don't know how they do it. The film is also somewhat helpful in explaining the situation in the Congo and how hopeless it is. That's crushing. I'd like to turn to lighter news, but would feel flippant if I did.

Matt also recommends the documentary WarDance which he describes as "the most impressively and artistically crafted of all the films I've seen on Africa, and the most honestly crushing and uplifting film. The others rarely give you stories of hope amidst the horror. I have to believe that's partly because there is no hope, but as Christians we have to believe there is. Wardance leaves room for that."

He goes on to commend another documentary that we've talked about on Viewpoint in the past titled As We Forgive which is an amazing story of forgiveness and reconciliation in Rwanda in the wake of the savage genocide that occurred there in the '90s. Matt notes that it won the academy award for best documentary by a student filmmaker.

I hope that Viewpoint readers will take the time to watch at least one of these films. They're all eye-openers which will doubtless shatter our naive complacency about the world in which we live. I've added them to my Netflix queue.

RLC

Scientific Consensus

Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Views reminds us of a quote from the science fiction writer Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, et al.) who passed away just recently. Crichton gave a speech in which he was very critical of the tendency to cite the "scientific consensus" in order to clinch some debating point:

"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

"Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period....

"I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way."

(Michael Crichton, "Aliens Cause Global Warming," reprinted in Wall Street Journal, November 7, 2008.)

The context of Crichton's remarks was the use of "scientific consensus" in the global warming debate, about which he was a skeptic, but his point applies equally well to the debate surrounding the origin of the cosmos and the origin of life. Dissenters from the consensus are often brow-beaten by the assertion that all "real" scientists believe life evolved by Darwinian processes when in fact that claim is not true and would be beside the point even if it were true.

"Darwinian processes" means that only physical mechanisms have been at work in the creation of the diversity of structures, functions, and operations found in living things. In other words, Darwinian processes (e.g. natural selection and random mutation) exclude any role for mind and intention, and it's simply untrue that all real scientists embrace the exclusion.

Even were it true, however, Crichton's point was that it doesn't mean much. Many if not most great advances in science came about because people who stood outside the mainstream refused to be cowed by the dominant view. This was certainly true of the work of Copernicus and Galileo and even of Darwin himself. It was true of Dalton, Einstein and Le Maitre. The fact that a majority of experts believe something should cause us to respect their theory, but it does not follow that what they believe is correct.

Crichton trenchantly notes in his speech that the club of consensus is usually brandished only when there is a lack of confidence in one's theory. It's a bit like the oft-heard claim that evolution is as well-established as the theory of gravity. This is simply false, and is shown to be false by the fact that one never hears a physicist say that the theory of gravity is as well-established as the theory of evolution. Physicists would never think to make such a claim because it's so obviously laughable.

RLC

Atheist Charities

Richard John Neuhaus on why religious organizations which provide government-subsidized social services should be free to prosyletize:

"The legitimate interest of government is in seeing that the social services for which it contracts are effectively provided, and, if the providers want to tell people why they're engaged in good works, that's their business. It should make no difference whether the providers are faith-based, faith-saturated, or atheists. The last is an academic point, of course, since, for some reason, there are few atheist charities."

Neuhaus is correct, of course, not only about the paucity of atheist charities, for which the reasons are not mysterious, but also about the right of faith-based charities to discuss with their beneficiaries the motivations for their benevolence. It's no business of the state's whether these organizations seek to persuade people to join their fellowship or not. The state's only concern should be whether the services being paid for with tax-payer's money are being duly provided.

As for the dearth of atheist charities, one need only ask why, in a godless world, anyone should care about the poor or the infirm. These people are the losers in the Darwinian lottery and there's no obligation to artificially sustain them. The obligation to care for the poor is imposed upon us only by God, not by nature, and it is out of love for Him that we love those He loves. If God doesn't exist then other people have no claim on our compassion or our purse, and there's no reason for us to not turn a blind eye to their suffering.

Indeed, if God does not exist then Sartre was probably not far from the truth when he noted that hell is other people.

RLC

Either the Multiverse or God

Tim Folger at Discover Online has a great piece on the choice confronting contemporary thinkers about what lies behind the universe's fine-tuning.

For those new to the discussion, fine-tuning refers to the fact that almost every fact about the universe has to be almost exactly what it is in order for the universe to be the kind of place in which higher life forms could thrive.

This means that hundreds of forces, parameters, values, etc. must be set to, in some cases, incredibly precise tolerances in order for the universe to exist at all and to be able to support life.

To take just one example, Hugh Ross invites us in Why the Universe Is the Way it Is to imagine that the universe were an aircraft carrier. If so, then had the mass at the beginning been off so much as the mass of a single fleck of paint, the universe would never have formed. Actually, Ross goes on to say, the tolerance is much less than that. In fact, if the mass of the universe were the same as the mass of an aircraft carrier it would only have to have been off by the mass of a billionth of a trillionth of the mass of an electron for the carrier to be unable to support living beings.

In the Discover article Folger interviews scientists who consider this amazing precision and conclude that there really are only two alternatives. Either the universe was intentionally designed or it's just one of a vast number of worlds which each possess different laws and forces. Amidst so much diversity the existence of a universe like ours, they aver, becomes much more probable:

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multi�verse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn't even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non�religious explanation for what is often called the "fine-tuning problem"-the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

On the other hand, if there is no multiverse, where does that leave physicists? "If there is only one universe," says Bernard Carr, a cosmologist at Queen Mary University of London, "you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don't want God, you'd better have a multiverse."

Precisely. In order to avoid having to admit that there's a God a lot of people are prepared to believe in a near infinite number of universes that they can neither see nor measure nor say much at all about. I daresay that were it not for the fact that the alternative was God, no scientist would be seriously entertaining a theory whose only purpose seems to be to serve as an escape hatch for atheistic materialists.

Folger's article does a fine job of explaining all the relevant ideas and will help you become conversant on an issue which we will no doubt be hearing much more about as science continues to discover more and more examples of the astonishing precision with which our world is engineered.

You might also want to pick up Hugh Ross' book which describes this precision in a fashion very accessible to those with a minimal background in science. It can be ordered by phone from my friend Byron at Hearts and Minds Bookstore.

RLC

Re: Economic Basics

A student of mine named Alison wrote a response to Economic Basics. It's so good I thought I'd post it here, slightly edited:

I have to agree that handouts are not going to do any good in helping the poor. My parents are business owners in Connecticut. They own and operate an orchard, and can only hire seasonal help so you can imagine what kind of people we get for three months every year. They are minimum wage workers and for the most part, they are pretty poor.

Minimum wage in Connecticut is $7.65, which is quite a lot of money to pay someone to stand around and make cardboard boxes, but it is still not enough for someone to live on. Nearly every year minimum wage gets raised, but if you can't live on $7.65 per hour, do you think that you will be able to live that much better on $7.80? It seems doubtful to me, but it is just enough to make my parents consider how they can get by with fewer employees, cutting the number of jobs available.

Then there's the issue of unemployment checks which is totally bogus. These people that my parents hire for one season will go and file for unemployment the day the season ends. It doesn't matter that many of them are mothers who want the summers off anyway and can't work during that time. It doesn't matter that they hardly worked during the couple months for which they were hired. And there's no way out of paying these people for unemployment. There is a huge difference between unemployment for a mature worker who lost his job after 15 years and someone who decided give working a try for a couple months. If we never helped them out in the first place by giving them a way to earn money for a little while, we'd never have to pay the unemployment, but since, as my dad says, he "did them a favor and found some work for them to do," he's being punished.

So again, they make every effort to get by with as few employees as possible. Forcing businesses to pay unemployment to every employee who wants it is stupid and is in no way going to help the plight of the poor. Instead it's going to create more poor because small business owners can't compete and will eventually be added to that list of the unemployed.

Alison says it well. You don't help the poor by making it tough on business. One despairs that the lesson will ever be learned by our politicians in Washington.

Why the GOP Blew it

Libertarians share much in common with both conservatives and liberals. With liberals they share a disdain for government interference in matters of personal life-style and choice - for example, abortion and gay marriage. With conservatives they share a disdain for big government and regulatory interference in markets. P.J. O'Rourke is a libertarian who lists toward conservatism, and he offers a trenchant and funny post-election analysis of the Republican party at The Weekly Standard.

I don't find everything he says congenial, but he certainly hits the nail on the head often enough to make his essay worth passing on.

RLC

Economic Basics

The stock market tumbled sharply in the wake of Obama's election a week and a half ago, and the plunge is being attributed by some to fears that President Obama and the Democratic congress are going to raise the capital gains tax, the income tax, and the minimum wage, all of which would be very hard on businesses that operate on narrow profit margins.

Obama could perhaps reverse the downward economic trend before he even takes office. All he'd have to do is promise that he will not impose any new regulation, tax, or new minimum wage rate on businesses, and will in fact ease existing regulations and taxes on business. If he promised that his administration would fight to extend the Bush tax cuts and reduce regulations, investor confidence in the future of business would likely rise and the market might well recover. As it is investors fear that business is in for some very tough times under a Democratic economic hegemony.

President-elect Obama wants to help the poor. So do most people, but the poor are not helped by handouts and stimulus checks. After they've spent their check they're still poor. The best way to help people struggling to get out of poverty is to free up business to hire the marginal worker, the employee they would not hire if they had to pay high taxes and benefits. If burdens on employers are reduced jobs will become available and those who want to work will be able to find jobs.

But if we do what the Democrats and Obama have promised to do, if we increase the cost of running a business by taxing and regulating, unemployment will continue to rise as businesses retrench and cut back on all but essential expenses. In such an environment the primary employer is going to be government, and we will have become Venezuela.

RLC

Please Focus

Adam Rutherford makes a couple of claims in this video that are simply false, one of which is that teachers who accept intelligent design clearly do not understand evolution.

Actually, Rutherford clearly does not understand intelligent design. If he did he wouldn't talk as if evolution and ID were contraries. ID does not oppose evolution (I wish I had a dollar for every time someone, somewhere has had to say this in response to a confused news article or commentator). ID is in conflict with materialism. It denies the materialist claim that the origin of all biological organisms, structures, systems, and processes can, in theory, be fully accounted for in terms of physical processes and mechanisms.

Materialism asserts that mind is not necessary to account for the design of life. ID claims that any examination of the evidence, unfettered by a priori assumptions of the truth of materialism, would conclude that it is. The materialist claim is philosophical, not scientific. There's no empirical evidence for it. Thus, if ID should not be taught in a science classroom because it fails the test of empirical verification, then so, too, should materialism not be taught and any teacher who insists on teaching it should, by Rutherford's lights, be banished from the classroom.

The materialists make this mistake of so often that I suspect there's more afoot here than a simple inability to understand the ID position or to get it right. The materialist knows that if he can confuse the casual observer into thinking that the conflict is between ID and evolution he can discredit ID by producing lots of evidence for evolution. Once ID has been discredited then materialism prevails by default without having to fire a single shot. In other words, evolution is used as a surrogate for materialism to defeat ID which materialism itself could never do. It's an example of "Let's you and him fight."

The problem with this tactic, of course, is that lots of Intelligent Design advocates believe that the designer of life employed an evolutionary process to accomplish the task. Michael Behe is one notable example. There's an increasing fondness among many IDers for the theory of front-loaded evolution, i.e. the idea that the designer packed the genomic potential for all of subsequent diversification into the genome of the first cell or cells (See the excellent book by the pseudonymous Mike Gene titled The Design Matrix).

It may be that this is incorrect. It may be, as other IDers think, that the designer intervened at certain stages of the evolution of life to tinker with the process.

Not all IDers are evolutionists, some are creationists, but the point is that, contrary to what people like Rutherford would have us believe, there's no contradiction between the concept that there's evidence in the natural world that leads to the conclusion that a mind is responsible for it and the concept that life is a result of descent by modification.

Now if we could just get people like Rutherford to focus on this simple truth long enough for it to sink in we will have advanced the dialogue a considerable distance.

RLC

Add Congo to the List

Meanwhile, Africa continues in its doleful role as the most dysfunctional continent on the face of the globe. You've read about the terrors of being a Sudanese and perhaps you've heard of the crimes of Mugabe in Zimbabwe and how he has devastated that once beautiful and productive land. You've seen movies (Hotel Rwanda, Beyond the Gates) about the genocide in Rwanda and other films (e.g. Blood Diamond) about the horrors of child soldiers in Sierra Leone. You may have seen films such as The Last King of Scotland that give some insight into the thugocracy that afflicts these miserable people and you're also familiar, perhaps, with the ghastly gang warfare that plagues Somalia (see Blackhawk Down).

But have you read about what's happening in the Congo? If you haven't yet succumbed to compassion fatigue you might want to peruse a piece at the McClatchey web site that tells the awful tale: Five million deaths over the last decade, 45,000 refugees dying every month, and on it goes. If you've read one of these stories, you've read them all. Corrupt government, rebel militias, unimaginable cruelty and degradation, impotent U.N. and rampant disease and starvation afflicting tens of thousands of terrified refugees. It's the same awful litany of problems almost everywhere across the continent.

In his book The Bottom Billion Paul Collier suggests that the only way African nations like the ones mentioned above, as well as others like Chad and dysfunctional states elsewhere around the world (such as Haiti) will ever be able to achieve some level of normalcy for their beleaguered populations is via a concerted intervention - political, economic, and military - by the developed world. Of course, that means Europe and the U.S. since no other nation with the resources to help has much of a history of humanitarian concern, and unfortunately, because of the violence the radical Muslim world threatens to inflict as it seeks to establish global Islam, our energies must be diverted elsewhere.

It's such a tragedy to be able to help but to be unable and/or unwilling to commit the resources to do anything effective because radical Islamists have us tied down elsewhere. But even if that weren't the case I doubt that many Americans would have the stomach to send troops into Africa when our national interests are not at stake there. Instead we avert our gaze from the teeming mass of humanity that cries out for rescue from the tyrants and thugs and assuage our guilt at doing essentially nothing by sending a few vials of penicillin and a couple of crates of blankets.

The left deplored European colonialism in Africa as oppressive and exploitative, but the people of Africa were far better off under European rule than they are under the boot of the criminals who terrorize them now.

RLC

Jefferson on Public Debt

My friend Dick Francis passes along a crucially relevant insight from Thomas Jefferson:

"If we run into such debts as that must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses;

And the sixteenth [hour of labor] being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains around the necks of our fellow sufferers;

And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train, wretchedness and oppression."

What would Jefferson be thinking were he alive to witness the last year of bailouts and President-elect Obama's talk of higher taxes to come?

RLC

Has Anyone Seen Bob?

Those readers who have been on a whale-watch know that you can spend a great deal of time sitting patiently over a spot in the ocean where a whale was seen to have "sounded", waiting eagerly for the creature to rise again from the depths and make its grand appearance as it breaks through the surface. Whale-watching and the sometimes long hours of anticipation, waiting for a whale to "breach", came to mind today as it occurred to me that it had been a long time since the junior Senator from my fair state of Pennsylvania has surfaced.

Two years ago Pennsylvania voters tired of incumbent Senator Rick Santorum, one of the finest men to have served in the senate - a man who fought hard on behalf of the poor, the oppressed and the helpless both at home and abroad, a man who also saw clearly the threat posed by radical Islam, but a man tied too closely to President Bush - and chose in their wisdom to replace him with one Robert Casey.

Mr. Santorum is still involved in his various causes, but that election seems to have been the last anyone has heard from Mr. Casey. The newly-minted senator appears to have "sounded" and Pennsylvanians have been waiting patiently and fruitlessly for two years for him to resurface.

Perhaps it's time that someone file a missing persons report on the gentleman and possibly affix his photo to a milk carton or billboard. Who knows but that he's being held hostage somewhere, bound and gagged, until his term expires at which time he'll be trotted out again by the Democrat nabobs to stand for reelection so that he can once again disappear into the briney depths of political anonymity.

RLC

The Butterfly

The other night I watched a lovely French film entitled "The Butterfly". The movie tells a delightful story about a lonely septuagenarian lepidopterist named Julian (Michael Serrault) and a young girl of eight named Elsa (Claire Bouanich) who is pretty much ignored by her mother. The girl lives in the apartment above Julian and attaches herself to the grandfatherly butterfly collector, somewhat to his dismay. She even manages to persuade him to allow her to tag along as he journeys into the French Alps in search of a rare species of butterfly (it's actually a moth, but no matter) called the Isabella. For those who like stories about how relationships develop this movie will touch your heart.

There is a line where Elsa tells the old man an off-color joke which one might wish were not in the film, but aside from this it's a wonderful movie. You might want to add it to your Netflix queue.

RLC

Without God: Concluding Thoughts

So, we are confronted with a choice: Either we believe that there is no God and that consequently our existential yearnings are inexplicable and unfulfillable, a view which leads logically to nihilism, or we believe that there is a God and that we possess those yearnings because they lead us to the source of their satisfaction. They point us toward God. In other words, the existence of God is the best explanation for the data of human existence. The atheist has no good explanation for these yearnings and must take a leap of faith to avoid the nihilism and despair that her worldview pushes her toward. She has to live as if God exists while denying that He does. Many atheists actually repudiate their own naturalism simply by the way they choose to live their lives.

I've sought in this series of posts to defend the claim that the simplest explanation for the nature of the world and the deepest longings and feelings of the human spirit is that they are what they are because they conform to some existential reality. Those profound convictions are most simply accounted for by positing the possibility of satisfaction, but they can only be satisfied if there is a being that corresponds to the traditional notion of God. If theism is correct we can find intellectual and emotional contentment in the hope that the tragic condition of the world and of our lives is only temporary, that death is not the end and that a beautiful future lies ahead.

If God exists then we can assume that He made us for a reason, that there is a purpose to our existence and that we have dignity and inalienable rights as human beings because we are made in the image of God and loved by Him. If God exists then there is a transcendent moral authority which obligates us to respect others, which provides us in this life with an objective standard upon which to base moral judgment and which will ultimately mete out justice. We feel guilt because we're actually guilty. We feel free because we're actually free. We have an identity that endures because that identity exists in the mind of God. If God exists there is a basis for hope of life beyond death and some sense can be made of an otherwise senseless and existentially chaotic world.

The atheist, if he's consistent with his belief that there is no God, finds himself completely at odds in almost every important way with the structure of his own being. He finds himself inexplicably out of synch with his world. He is alone, forlorn, abandoned in an empty, unfeeling, indifferent universe that offers no solace nor prospect that there might be meaning, morality, justice, dignity, and solutions to the riddles of existence. The atheist lives without expectation or hope that any of the most profound yearnings of our hearts and minds can ever be fulfilled. How, then, do we come to have them? Why would natural selection shape us in such a way as to be so metaphysically and psychologically out of phase with the world in which we are situated?

It's possible, of course, that the atheistic answer is correct, that this is just the way things are, and we should simply make the best of a very bad situation. Yet surely the skeptic should hope that he's mistaken. Surely he would want there to be a God to infuse the cosmos with all the richness it is starved of by His absence. Nevertheless, I've never known or read one who held such a hope. It's incomprehensible that some, like philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, actually cling to the fervent desire that there be no God. This is tantamount to wishing, bizarrely enough, that life really is a meaningless, senseless, cruel and absurd joke. Nagel says in his book The Last Word:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Nagel's ability to see his motivations clearly is uncommon and commendable, but his honesty and insight are little compensation for the profound sadness one feels at what he finds in his own heart. How anyone can actually wish the universe to be the sort of place where meaning, morality, justice, human worth and all the rest are vain illusions, is very difficult, for me, at least, to understand.

RLC

Civilian Security Force?

Perhaps Senator Obama meant nothing sinister by the remarks he made in a call to service speech he made at Colorado Springs before the election, but I would like to know what he meant by his call for a national security force as powerful and well-funded as the military. Given the history of such security forces, and the fondness that thugs and tyrants have had for such enforcement mechanisms, it's a little unnerving.

Exactly what does Mr. Obama have in mind?

RLC

<i>Getting it Right</i>

For political junkies who like a little modern history with their politics, especially those who may have some familiarity with the work of the late William F. Buckley and/or National Review (I hope I haven't narrowed the field too much) I'd like to recommend a novel titled Getting it Right. It was written by Buckley about four years ago and it tells the story of the three-way struggle between Ayn Rand, the John Birch Society, and the crowd at National Review for the soul of conservatism.

It's a fascinating account beginning in the 1950s and ending with the Goldwater defeat in 1964. Buckley does a masterful job of allowing Rand to skewer herself in its pages, making her look like the megalomaniacal genius that she was. It also provides a fascinating account of how the John Birch Society got started and how it came a cropper. Along the way you meet many of the key players of the time, including Buckley himself. It's a good read, especially for conservatives eager to bone up on the details of this critical gestation period of American conservatism.

RLC

Things to Come

Quin Hilyer of The American Spectator advises conservatives on what we might expect from Obama's minions and other disciples of Saul Alinsky who will run the government come January. The comments which follow add a few other cautions. It's not pretty and I deeply hope Obama will not do what Hilyer predicts, but I confess I have very little ground for that hope.

Everything he and the Democratic leadership have been saying for the last couple of years conforms to Hilyer's frightening augury. Read the article at the link. It's not long.

RLC

Making a Difference

A student recently mentioned to me that as a science major he thought it a shame that philosophers study stuff that doesn't make any difference in peoples' lives. He was giving me a little dig and said it with a smile.

I returned the smile and told him that actually the questions philosophers deal with are among the most important we can imagine. Questions about God, meaning, morality, justice, human nature, mind and soul, love, etc. These are questions that bear on how we should live and how we can achieve a good life.

I then asked him what string theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, cosmogeny, biogenesis, paleontology, exobiology, much of astronomy, and pure mathematics have to do with most peoples' lives. Not much, I suggested. So why are think the study of these to be somehow more noble or more worthwhile than the study of philosophy? More smiles.

RLC

Jolly Old St. Barack

What was the source of Barack Obama's appeal among the masses? Perhaps it was the conviction that he was really Santa Claus in a business suit:

This isn't just one woman speaking, I'm afraid. Ms Joseph is the whole country - financially troubled state governments, corporations, institutions, individuals - everyone has their hand out and expects everyone else to pay for their gas and mortgage. In American politics it has come to this: If you want to win an election just promise to give more people more goodies than does your opponent.

Ms Joseph's excitement over what she thinks Obama will do for her and the rest of us reminds me of the words attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville: "America will last until the populace discovers that it can vote for itself largesse out of the public treasury."

And then comes the eschaton.

RLC

Working for WALNUT

Hot Air's intrepid correspondent Jason Mattera goes underground yet again, this time to get signers on a petition for ACORN's sister organization WALNUT. WALNUT is petitioning for the right of oppressed peoples to be allowed to vote twice. It's pretty funny. Here's part I. Part II follows:

For more Jason Mattera go here.

RLC