More on the Egnor/Novella Debate

Michael Egnor, a substance dualist, finds himself in the midst of a fascinating debate with materialist neuroscientist Steven Novella.

Substance dualists hold that the world is reducible to at least two fundamental substances: mind and matter. Materialists belive that everything is reducible to matter and that there is no such thing as mental substance.

Novella asserts that Egnor's view that mind is an immaterial entity that plays a role in cognition and consciousness has been discredited by scientific advances in neuroscience:

[Egnor] fails to recognize that this battle has already been fought and lost within the scientific arena...[a]s our knowledge of brain function increases, it is squeezing out any role for a non-material ghost in the machine. A non-material cause of mind is...unnecessary...

Novella believes that mind is just a word that we use to describe the function of the brain, much like we use the word "digestion" to describe the function of the stomach. Here is part of Egnor's reply:

There are six properties generally agreed to constitute the essence of mental states: intentionality, qualia, persistence of self-identity, restricted access, incorrigibility, and free will. Each of these properties of the mind shares a common characteristic - subjectivity, what philosopher David Chalmers has called the "Hard Problem" of consciousness. The 'easy problems' of consciousness are the kinds of problems that neuroscientists routinely deal with; for example, the determination as to which neurotransmitters in the brainstem are associated with behavioral arousal. These are 'easy' because they're tractable, although they can obviously involve some very challenging science. The Hard Problem is something entirely different; it is the problem of subjective experience, of why we are subjects, and not just objects. Why do we experience things?

Philosopher Joseph Levine has termed this epistemological gap between our subjective experience and our inability to explain it using a materialistic understanding of nature the "Explanatory Gap." Levine succinctly observes that we lack an explanation of the mental in terms of the physical.

The dispute comes down to this question: How can subjectivity be explained by objective matter? Subjective experience is the central dilemma in the mind-brain problem. Matter, even brain matter, has third-person existence; it's a 'thing.' We have first-person existence; each of us is an 'I,' not just a thing. How can objective matter fully account for subjective experience? If matter is the complete cause of the mind, how is it that none of the six salient properties of the mind is a property of matter? How exactly does a clump of protein, carbohydrates, and lipids (a neuron) give rise to meaning or to first person experience - using the example of pain, not merely the behavior associated with pain and the reflexes and neural correlates of pain, but the experience of it?

The mind's salient properties are all first-person, not third-person. Not a single first-person property of the mind - not intentionality, qualia, persistence of self-identity, restricted access, incorrigibility, nor free will - is a known property of matter. No one has ever demonstrated a law-like dependence of any subjective property of the mind on any objective property of matter. How could we establish such a scientific relationship? A differential equation quantitatively relating intentionality to intracellular calcium?

Egnor poses a tough challenge to the materialist. How does matter convert photons of energy into the experience of red? How does matter convert vibrations of molecules in air to the experience of sound? Before the materialist can claim victory he needs to be able to give a plausible explanation of how material substance can give rise to the phenomena of subjective experience. Without such an explanation all claims that the issue has been settled seem grossly premature.

RLC

Wright Out, Warren In

Well, this is an interesting development. Barack Obama has selected Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration. I wonder who's going to be more confused by this, the evangelical right who voted heavily against Obama because he stands for many of the things Warren opposes, and because when they look at Obama they see Jeremiah Wright, or the left which put Obama in a position to be elected President and who sees Warren as the reincarnation of Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society.

As of last report, evangelicals were still working through their confusion over what to make of this strange turn of events, but the left has lost no time in expressing their disappointment and outrage.

The Swamp has the immediate reaction of People for the American Way and they're definitely not happy. Ben Smith at Politico says that the gay and lesbian community is furious at Obama over the selection of Warren.

Barack Obama may, in the minds of some of his most ardent supporters, go from messiah to apostate even before he takes office. Of course, this might all be a political ploy to lull Christian conservatives into a sense of complacency, but we can certainly hope that it signals something a lot more significant. Maybe when Obama promised us hope during the campaign what he meant was that it was conservatives who should have hope. Right now liberals are wondering how they can still cling to the tatters of the hope that inspired them during the election.

The rather minor Warren appointment comes on the heels of much more major disappointments to the left. Obama retained Bush's Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, appointed the somewhat hawkish Hillary Clinton to Secretary of State, and chose retired Marine corps general James Jones to be National Security Advisor.

From the perspective of the left this represents very little change and offers very little hope. Of course, this could all change after January 20th. We'll see.

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

Repeat Offenders

The same folks who sell Christmas gift certificates that can be used to pay for an abortion have been found in flagrante delicto against Indiana state law not once but twice by the Mona Lisa Project. The MLP is the work of a pair of college students who've gone undercover into abortion clinics across the country with one of them posing as a thirteen year-old girl who's conceived a child with her fictitious thirty-one year-old boyfriend. The girls secretly film their encounters with PP counselors and others and have released two of the videos so far. They're pretty damning.

The counselors in both of the Indiana tapes flout the law that requires them to report knowledge of statutory rape and encourage the girl to cross state lines to get an abortion so that her mother won't find out about it. Here's the tape of their second visit:

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has much more on MLP's unfolding expos�. It'll be interesting to see if Indiana is going to prosecute Planned Parenthood. In my opinion, the way MLP is doing this, dropping the videos into the public domain at intervals rather than all at once, is going to make it harder for the authorities to just ignore it until it blows over. The more of these videos that are released, and the more widespread the abuses appear to be, if in fact they are, the harder it will be to cover it up and to contain public outrage. The harder it will also be for our legislators to continue to fund PP to the tune of $330 million of your tax dollars every year.

It's almost amusing that these expos�s come on the heels of last spring's hoax in which PP personnel were taped as they clearly encouraged a donation that would go specifically toward aborting black children because we already have "too many of them". What an organization.

RLC

Bumble Had it Right

Kitty Genovese was a 1964 New York City murder victim whose calls for help were heard by dozens of people only a few of whom responded by calling the police. Even though the apparent lack of response was overblown by the media, subsequent psychological studies showed there is indeed something called a "bystander effect" in which people will often refuse to involve themselves in situations where others are in danger.

Whether this is true of people or not, it certainly seems that the cries of the long-suffering Zimbabwean people in Africa have gone pretty much ignored by their neighbors in Africa and around the world.

The African countries of Sudan and Zimbabwe (among others) are festering boils of human cruelty and wretchedness that need to be lanced. There's evidence that other African leaders may finally be screwing up the moral courage to condemn Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe for the disaster he has inflicted on that once beautiful land but not much evidence that anyone in the West is actually going to do anything substantive about it if they don't. FrontPagemag lays out the awful facts:

The 84-year-old Robert Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since the country achieved independence from Britain in 1980. In that time, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) has gone from one of Africa's most admired and successful nations to a failed state of enormous proportions. Now, with a humanitarian crisis raging inside the country, pressure from Africa and abroad is mounting for Mugabe to end his tyrannical reign and spare his country from further misery.

International pressure on Mugabe is long overdue. Zimbabwe's inflation rate is an unfathomable 231 million percent, while unemployment is above 80 percent. Everyone from human-rights activists to opposition-party leaders are routinely abducted and murdered. Most pressingly, a cholera epidemic is ravaging the country. The latest World Health Organization report find 14,ooo cases of cholera infection, and some 800 dead, though some critics call those numbers far too low; meanwhile, millions of sick and impoverished Zimbabwean refugees are flooding into neighboring countries. The UN estimates that this particular outbreak will ultimately kill one in ten Zimbabweans.

Even though some African leaders such as the much respected Desmond Tutu have all but called for African military intervention, other voices are more timid, cautioning against outside involvement that would stir a backlash in the region against "democracy":

The African response, moreover, still leaves much to be desired. Despite the newfound willingness of some African leaders to criticize Mugabe, some African nations are hurriedly distancing themselves from Tutu and Odinga's calls for Mugabe's resignation. Dr. Roger Bate, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is bluntly pessimistic that other African nations will follow through on their calls for Mugabe's overthrow. There is "no chance at all," says Bate, pointing out that many of Mugabe's critics have backtracked since last week's statements, including South Africa's Jacob Zuma. This is unfortunate, because if the African Union or South Africa and other neighboring states did force Mugabe out that "could have a positive effect, driving similar despotic leaders to seek elections and leave power peacefully."

By contrast, foreign [i.e. non-African] intervention to oust Mugabe could have a destabilizing effect. Bate points out that any military intervention on the part of the UN, especially one that involves American or British troops, could "encourage a backlash against democracy." Bate speculates that at some stage during such an incursion, members of the Zimbabwean army would back a breakaway faction of Mugabe's party, who would then "form some kind of power share government in exchange for aid from the West or China."

In the "old days" before we became a kinder, gentler nation much more sensitive to what the rest of the world thought of us, this situation would have been expeditiously handled by simply sending the CIA in to covertly depose the villain. Of course, we can't do that sort of thing nowadays because it would violate international law. So, we sit by and watch helplessly as perhaps millions of people die in agony and misery in order to avoid giving offense to words on paper. When the law protects tyrants and permits genocide then, as Dickens has Mr. Bumble observe in Oliver Twist, the law is an ass.

RLC

Seven Questions

John Fund suggests that had the media spent only half as much energy and resources looking into Obama's connections to Chicago's political machine as they did investigating Sarah Palin we might not have to be addressing possible scandal even before the new President has been inaugurated. Unfortunately, our major media were heavily invested in getting Obama coronated so actually investigating him was out of the question.

Now suspicions are being raised about his connection to the seamy Chicago political scene and the most transparent administration in history has suddenly assumed a Nixonian opacity. Politico states that there are at least seven questions Obama's team needs to answer, and answer soon, if their inauguration is to avoid the odor of corruption.

The seven questions follow. Their rationales can be read at Politico:

1 - Did you communicate directly or indirectly with Blagojevich about picking your replacement in the U.S. Senate?

2 - Why didn't you or someone on your team correct your close adviser David Axelrod when he said you had spoken to Blagojevich about picking your replacement?

3 - When did you learn the investigation involved Blagojevich's alleged efforts to 'sell' your Senate seat, or of the governor's impending arrest?

4 - Did you or anyone close to you contact the FBI or U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald about Blagojevich's alleged efforts to sell your Senate seat to the highest bidder?

5 - Did federal investigators interview you or anyone close to you in the investigation?

6 - When did you and Blagojevich last speak and about what?

7 - Do you regret supporting Blagojevich?

Obama could stonewall, of course, but that would hardly represent the sort of change most of his admirers voted for him to bring to Washington. We'll see by the end of next Wednesday whether Obama is going to really be a different kind of politician or if he's going to be just more of what Chicago often produces.

RLC

Sounds Like a Plan

Bankruptcy is the best option for the Big 3 auto manufacturers and law professor Todd Zywicki explains why in a Wall Street Journal column. He argues that management, labor, and politicians each oppose bankruptcy for all the wrong reasons.

The heart of Zywicki's brief is this:

Chapter 11 exists to allow [a corporation] to continue in business while reorganizing. Reorganization arose in the late 19th century when creditors of railroads unable to meet their debt obligations threatened to tear up their tracks, melt them down, and sell the steel as scrap. But innovative judges, lawyers and businessmen recognized that creditors would collect more if they all agreed to reduce their claims and keep the railroads running and producing revenues to pay them off. The same logic animates Chapter 11 today.

General Motors [is] ... in need of reorganization not liquidation. It needs to shed labor contracts, retirement contracts, and modernize its distribution systems by closing many dealerships. This will give rise to many current and future liabilities that may be worked out in bankruptcy. It may need new management as well. Bankruptcy provides an opportunity to do all that. Consumers have little to fear. Reorganization will pare the weakest dealers while strengthening those who remain.

So why do the Detroit Three managements and the UAW insist that "bankruptcy is not an option"? Perhaps because of the pain that would be inflicted upon both.

The bankruptcy code places severe limitations on the compensation that can be paid to a manager unless there is a "bona fide job offer from another business at the same or greater rate of compensation." Given the dismal performance of the Detroit Three in recent years, it seems unlikely that their senior management will be highly coveted on the open market. Incumbent management is also likely to find its prospects for continued employment less-secure.

Chapter 11 also provides a mechanism for forcing UAW workers to take further pay cuts, reduce their gold-plated health and retirement benefits, and overcome their cumbersome union work rules....

Those Washington politicians who repeat the mantra that "bankruptcy is not an option" probably do so because they want to use free taxpayer money to bribe Detroit into manufacturing the green cars favored by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, rather than those cars American consumers want to buy. A Chapter 11 filing would remove these politicians' leverage, thus explaining their desperation to avoid a bankruptcy.

So, if Zywicki is correct, management doesn't want bankruptcy because it will limit their compensation. Labor doesn't want bankruptcy because they'll be forced to renegotiate their ridiculous work rules and their lucrative benefit packages. Politicians, particularly Democrats, don't want bankruptcy because they're in bed with labor and because they see a bailout as providing a lever to force auto makers to make the cars they want rather than what the American car buyer wants.

Sounds to me like bankruptcy has a lot to recommend it.

RLC

The Multiverse and the Razor

We have from time to time noted that theories of a multiverse suffer from being in stark conflict with the law of parsimony. This is the law that tells us that given several competing explanations for some phenomenon, the simplest explanation that's compatible with the known facts is to be preferred.

Evidently, a commenter at Uncommon Descent has opined that the multiverse theory, the idea that there are, besides our own world, an infinity of universes exhibiting an infinity of laws and parameters, is not incompatible with the law of parsimony. I find this hard to accept, as does Barry Arrington. He explains his reasons here.

Arrington doesn't explain his objection quite as thoroughly as a reader unfamiliar with the multiverse concept might like, but what he's getting at is that any theory that multiplies entities to infinity in order to explain the existence of the unimaginable precision of the fine-tuning of this world is by definition unparsimonious. This is especially true given that there's no evidence of any other universes, much less an infinity of them. All we know is that some versions of string theory allow for them, but we don't even know if string theory is true.

Since the alternative theory is that there is just one world, the world of our experience and the only world we have evidence for, it would seem that that is the simplest hypothesis that fits all the facts and it really is hard to understand how some people justify thinking otherwise.

Anyway, Arrington's post gives us, besides us a bit of unnecessary hyperventilation, a helpful and succinct overview of the law of parsimony, also known as Occam's Razor, and a little background on William of Ockham himself.

Check it out.

RLC

Plan B

The U.S. and Britain have urged India not to go to war with Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai attacks so, according to this report at DEBKAfile, New Delhi has developed a plan B. They've solicited help from Israel to train commandos in quick in/out strikes against terrorist centers and camps in several Pakistani regions. Condaleeza Rice has apparently given tacit approval for such reprisals and the Israelis are currently training the Indian forces.

NATO forces are waging war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in northwest Pakistan and now India will be waging war against various Pakistani terror groups in the southeast. How long can the government in Islamabad ignore all this and still remain stable? At what point does Pakistan have to make a decision to either be a fully committed partner in the war on terror or to side completely with the terrorists? The strip of middle-ground they've tried to occupy for the last ten years is growing increasingly narrow.

RLC

Intellectual Honesty

Anyone who engages in public commentary and debate is often tempted to color facts to better fit his position, to overstate his case, or to do something which might be intellectually not-quite-honest. In a post titled Ten Signs of Intellectual Dishonesty Mike Gene lists ten good rules to follow when participating with others in an exchange of ideas.

Here are three of the ten with his explanation:

Be willing to publicly acknowledge where your argument is weak. Almost all arguments have weak spots, but those who are trying to sell an ideology will have great difficulty with this point and would rather obscure or downplay any weak points.

Be willing to publicly acknowledge when you are wrong. Those selling an ideology likewise have great difficulty admitting to being wrong, as this undercuts the rhetoric and image that is being sold. You get small points for admitting to being wrong on trivial matters and big points for admitting to being wrong on substantive points. You lose big points for failing to admit being wrong on something trivial.

Demonstrate consistency. A clear sign of intellectual dishonesty is when someone extensively relies on double standards. Typically, an excessively high standard is applied to the perceived opponent(s), while a very low standard is applied to the ideologues' allies.

My own experience has been that even when I think I'm doing the best I can to abide by the rules Mike describes I sometimes find myself teetering close to the boundary nonetheless. Luckily, I have friends and students among my readers who are not shy about calling me on it when they think I've transgressed. Sometimes I think they're wrong, but sometimes not.

I think it's wise to keep in mind that none of us is perfect and to watch carefully how we express ourselves in discussions on matters we feel strongly about. I've printed out Mike's Ten Signs of Intellectual Dishonesty and have them posted over my computer. Maybe it would be a good idea for all of us to do that.

RLC

Vindication

Bill shares this video of economist Peter Schiff being made the object of scorn and derision two years ago by cable talk colleagues for predicting exactly what has come to pass in our economy. I hope Obama appoints this guy as one of his economic advisors. I also wonder how much money his antagonists have lost since those financial markets they were so high on collapsed.

I wonder if Mr. Schiff has this video playing in a continuous loop in his home and office. I hope he mailed a copy of it to each of the pompous critics he appeared on these talk shows with. In a just world those shows would play this clip every night. As it is few will remember how right poor Mr. Schiff was and how terribly and foolishly wrong his detractors were.

RLC

Obama's Prescription for Nuclear War

There's not much confidence in this little corner of the blogosphere in Barack Obama's ability to launch a successful foreign policy, and this story in Haaretz does little to bolster our sagging hopes that we might be underestimating the incoming President:

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's administration will offer Israel a "nuclear umbrella" against the threat of a nuclear attack by Iran, a well-placed American source said earlier this week. The source, who is close to the new administration, said the U.S. will declare that an attack on Israel by Tehran would result in a devastating U.S. nuclear response against Iran.

But America's nuclear guarantee to Israel could also be interpreted as a sign the U.S. believes Iran will eventually acquire nuclear arms.

What this seems to mean is that Obama will do little of consequence to prevent an Iran determined to develop nuclear weapons from succeeding. His policy appears to be to leave himself with only one option if Iran employs its weapons against Israel, as it has strongly indicated it will: nuclear war. This strikes most sober observers as a strategy right out of Dr. Strangelove.

It can be summarized this way: Use diplomatic means and sanctions to deter Iran from building nukes, but this will fail, so threaten Iran with nuclear war - which, for religious reasons, they welcome - if they use their nukes against Israel, which, they have assured us, they will.

Of course, to be effective as a deterrent the threat has to be credible, and Iran knows it won't be. Once the Iranian mullahs have nukes they could simply respond to Obama's bluster by informing Washington that nuclear bombs have been smuggled into America and will be detonated in several major cities in the event of an attack on Iran. Whether such bombs have in fact been planted in our cities won't matter. We'd have to assume they were, and there'd be very little enthusiasm in this country for trading Chicago, L.A., and New York for Tehran just because Israel had been destroyed.

Another gambit the Iranians could employ to defuse the threat of American retaliation against Tehran for an attack on Israel would be to send a nuclear missile aboard a ship off our coast and detonate the missile a couple of hundred miles high over Kansas. The resulting electro-magnetic pulse would destroy the United States as a nation, driving us back to the 19th century and creating utter chaos in our social fabric (Use our search feature (search EMP) to view previous posts on the effects such a blast would have).

Given the Iranian options, Obama's threat to nuke Tehran if Iran uses nuclear force against Israel seems either naive or dumb.

To make matters worse, Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, not only wants to place a "nuclear umbrella" over Israel she wants to extend it to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states as well:

Clinton also proposed that the American nuclear umbrella be extended to other countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, if they agree to relinquish their own nuclear ambitions.

Is this administration serious? Who in their right mind would be willing to risk any American city just because Riyadh has been destroyed? Most Americans would regard an attack on Saudi Arabia, the spawning ground of most of the 9/11 terrorists, as condign justice. They certainly wouldn't think we should risk an EMP strike to avenge the deaths of the same people who had been squeezing us at the gas pumps until just last month.

It would be far wiser to avoid all this empty posturing by preventing Iran, by whatever means necessary, from getting nuclear weapons in the first place, but nowhere in the article is this viewed as an option. Ironically, the Obama team seems to have no appetite for the use of military force unless it's catastrophic force.

Meanwhile, our major media seems utterly uninterested in this problem. We're too busy being titillated by reports of scandal in Illinois and the discovery of a murdered child's bones in Florida to bother ourselves with debating how best to avoid nuclear war.

RLC

Fantasy World

The system in this video, passed along by Robert Crowther at Evolution News and Notes, is a good metaphor for the cellular machinery that operates in every one of the trillions of cells in our bodies, and it illustrates nicely the difference between Intelligent Design theorists and Darwinians. IDers would recognize that the sequence of events in the system evinces intelligent conceptualization and engineering. The Darwinians would say that given random mutation, natural selection, chance and enough time, this sort of thing could have developed on its own, and, indeed, has developed on its own billions, if not trillions, of times in living things throughout the evolutionary past.

Maybe a system like this could have developed on its own through purely physical processes with no intelligent input, but if experience rather than mere logical possibility is to be our guide, we have to admit that whenever metal parts are left to the forces of nature, they invariably wind up as scattered rust. Darwinian materialists chide theists for believing in the existence of a divine mind, but one has to wonder which belief is the more fantastic - that a biological system similar to that portrayed in the ad could have happened by accident or that such systems were designed intentionally by intelligent agents.

RLC

A Religious Case for Gay Marriage

The recent issue of Newsweek brings with it a polemic by Lisa Miller urging religious people to drop their opposition to gay marriage. Now there may be reasons out there why Christians and others should end their insistence that marriage remain a union of one man and one woman, but, if so, they've eluded Ms Miller. Her argument is largely irrelevant to the case she wishes to make.

For example, she dismisses Old Testament prohibitions of homosexual sex on the basis that the O.T. prohibited a lot of stuff we don't prohibit today, which is true enough, but then one could make the same argument for tolerating murder. Just because some O.T. prescriptions are not deemed appropriate today (e.g. stoning adulterers, etc.) it doesn't follow that none are.

If this were Ms Miller's only logical lapse perhaps we might simply avert our eyes to avoid adding to her embarrassment, but almost every paragraph of her essay is replete with non-sequiturs and other logical solecisms. Indeed, she seems almost relentless in her determination to offend the basic principles of rational thought. She struggles to derive from assertions like, Jesus wasn't married nor ever mentioned homosexuality, gay marriage is not a term found in the Bible, and Paul had more to say about divorce than about homosexuality, that therefore homosexuality is morally unproblematic.

Yet abortion and euthanasia are never mentioned in the Bible but they're hardly unproblematic. Jesus never mentions child abuse or slavery either, but it doesn't follow that therefore we should feel free to embrace these behaviors today.

Reminding us that scripture is full of instances of polygamy and divorce, Ms Miller avers that the Bible isn't a very good source for instruction on marriage, as if the fact that the Bible recounts the bad behavior of the people who appear in it somehow means that it can't be trusted to offer good rules for living. It's a bit like trying to argue that because the Bible tells us how the poor were often oppressed, we shouldn't attach too much importance to its adjurations to care for the poor and the widow.

She then dismisses Paul's teaching on homosexuality by noting that since a lot of Christians seem to ignore his appeals to shun divorce they may as well ignore his sanctions against gay sex as well. Surely, this woman needs to ask her editor why he let her sound so silly. Are we to assume that because some Christians ignore Jesus' teaching on turning the other cheek that they ought to ignore his teaching on showing compassion to the poor also?

Ms Miller tells us that:

Paul was tough on homosexuality, though recently progressive scholars have argued that his condemnation of men who were inflamed with "lust for one another" (which he calls "a perversion") is really a critique of the worst kind of wickedness: self-delusion, violence, promiscuity, debauchery.

The term "progressive" should alert us to impending danger and indeed it follows close upon. Paul's condemnations of homosexuality, we are told, are really condemnations not of homoerotic sex but of promiscuous, violent, self-delusional sex. But this puts words in Paul's mouth that aren't there, as anyone who actually reads what Paul wrote on the matter (Romans 1: 18-32, I Cor. 6: 9,10) can see.

She then adds this graph:

In his book "The Arrogance of Nations," the scholar Neil Elliott argues that Paul is referring in this famous passage to the depravity of the Roman emperors, the craven habits of Nero and Caligula, a reference his audience would have grasped instantly. "Paul is not talking about what we call homosexuality at all, " Elliott says. "He's talking about a certain group of people who have done everything in this list. We're not dealing with anything like gay love or gay marriage. We're talking about really, really violent people who meet their end and are judged by God."

Mr. Elliott is projecting what he wishes Paul were saying onto what Paul actually wrote. Paul is including homosexuality in a list of sins like adultery and fornication. He doesn't say that it's only promiscuous or violent homosexuals who are transgressing the law, just as he doesn't say that it's only violent adulterers who are sinning. Paul's teaching on homosexuality is that, like adultery, it's a perversion of God's intention for sex just as divorce is a perversion of God's intention for marriage.

"The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own," Ms Miller continues, "that it's impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours."

This, of course, is the standard liberal view of any document that constrains behavior. They say the same thing about the Constitution. It's true that some Biblical rules are culturally conditioned, but there's no reason to think that proscriptions concerning homosexuality are among them. After all, what is different about the modern era's thinking on homosexuality from that of Paul's day? In both eras religious people think it wrong and secular elites don't.

Ms Miller tries her luck with a few other arguments which emerge equally stillborn. She suggests, for example, that because David and Jonathan had a deep love for each other that therefore homosexuality is okay, as if a strong feeling of affection between men somehow not only implies homoerotic sex but validates it as well.

She asserts that the marriage of Mary and Joseph was unconventional and draws from this support for her conclusion that we should therefore embrace other unconventional forms of marriage, like marriage between people of the same gender.

In other words, in Ms. Miller's thinking, the fact that one kind of unconventionality is acceptable, means that all kinds of unconventionality should be acceptable. Would Ms Miller extend her logic to include incestuous or group marriages or other unconventional unions like marrying one's pets? If not, why not?

She also states that the Bible doesn't mention sex between women, but this is correct, if it is correct, only in the technical sense that the Bible never uses the phrase "sex between women." Any fair reader of Romans 1:24-27, however, would conclude that sex between women is exactly what Paul is deploring in that passage.

She argues that since "the Bible was all about inclusion, reaching out to outcasts, togetherness and community" those principles provide warrant for accepting gay marriage, but again her conclusion doesn't follow. The principle of inclusiveness and community provides warrant for reaching out to gays, but it doesn't provide warrant for accepting what gays do any more than reaching out to thieves, alcoholics, drug abusers or prostitutes provides warrant for accepting what they do.

She goes on to cite the fact that we're all God's children, made in his likeness and image, and insists that to deny access to any sacrament based on sexuality is thus exactly the same thing as denying it based on skin color, but Ms Miller clearly hasn't thought this through.

Does she really think that denying the sacrament to someone who has a sexual orientation toward promiscuous behavior, or toward young boys, and consequently acts upon his desires is the same as denying the sacrament to someone based on his skin color? Ms Miller seems to believe that just because we're made in God's image whatever we do sexually is okay. She also seems to think that homosexual behavior is genetically determined just like one's race, but there's no conclusive evidence that this is so. It may be that there's a genetic disposition toward homosexuality but that doesn't mean that homosexual behavior is determined any more than a genetic disposition toward violence or alcoholism preordains that one will be violent or alcoholic.

A priest friend of Ms Miller's believes that if Jesus were alive today (an odd hypothetical for a priest, I should think), he would reach out especially to the gays and lesbians among us, for "Jesus does not want people to be lonely and sad."

No doubt Jesus would reach out to them, but not because they were gays and lesbians but because they were lonely and sad. Moreover, he would urge them, like the woman at the well, the alcoholic, drug addict, the compulsive gambler and everyone else wrestling with some disordered element in their nature to fight to get their life in line with God's will for it. I seriously doubt that he would say that we should celebrate alcoholism just so the alcoholic feels less lonely and more accepted and so that we can all feel warm, liberal and tolerant.

RLC

Softball

Why Chris Matthews' show on MSNBC isn't laughed to scorn just for the absurdity of its name is one of the peculiar mysteries of this political year. The last thing Matthews does with his guests is play "Hardball", unless, of course, the guest is a Republican. On last night's show his guest was Bill Ayers and all Matthews did was pitch marshmallows at him. Watching it, I couldn't help feel that Ayers may have been giving Matthews one of those tingly feelings he's become famous for:

Here's a man whose wife celebrated Charles Manson's murders, was herself implicated in the murder of two policemen, and who is a friend of Michelle Obama. He's a man whose organization (and his wife) set fire to the house of the judge presiding over the trial of black panthers while the judge's wife and young son were inside. He's a man whose organization blinded an innocent man with acid at JFK airport and which included people who spoke blithely of executing as many as 25 million Americans if their revolution ever proved successful. He's a man who as late as 2001 said that he wished he had done more during his terrorist years. He's a man who once sang that he was guilty as sin and free as a bird. And Matthews asked him about none of this.

Nor did the "journalist" Matthews ask Ayers why he hosted Obama's political christening in his home, or what the nature of his relationship with Obama was on the various boards on which they served together. Nor did he ask him about what kind of "educational reform" he's working on in Chicago.

Matthews, the host of the risibly named Hardball, asked not a single question that would make Ayers uncomfortable, not a single question that would enlighten the public on why Ayers' association with Obama is potentially significant. The interview left me puzzling over why he even bothered to have Ayers on the show in the first place. No wonder people tune into talk radio and Fox News rather than MSNBC if they want to actually learn anything.

RLC

Restless Natives

Jason directs us to Politico where it looks as if liberal discontent with our new President is already stirring, and the man hasn't yet served a day in office. The lefties are growing restless with concerns that Obama is backing away from the positions that won him their support in the first place:

Obama insists he hasn't abandoned the goals that made him feel to some like a liberal savior. But the left's bill of particulars against Obama is long, and growing.

Obama drew rousing applause at campaign events when he vowed to tax the windfall profits of oil companies. As president-elect, Obama says he won't enact the tax.

Obama's pledge to repeal the Bush tax cuts and redistribute that money to the middle class made him a hero among Democrats who said the cuts favored the wealthy. But now he's struck a more cautious stance on rolling back tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year, signaling he'll merely let them expire as scheduled at the end of 2010.

Obama's post-election rhetoric on Iraq and choices for national security team have some liberal Democrats even more perplexed. As a candidate, Obama defined and separated himself from his challengers by highlighting his opposition to the war in Iraq from the start. He promised to begin to end the war on his first day in office.

Now Obama says that on his first day in office he will begin to "design a plan for a responsible drawdown," as he told NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday. Obama has also filled his national security positions with supporters of the Iraq war: Sen. Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize force in Iraq, as his secretary of state; and President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Robert Gates, continuing in the same role.

The central premise of the left's criticism is direct - don't bite the hand that feeds, Mr. President-elect. The Internet that helped him so much during the election is lighting up with irritation and critiques.

To be sure most of the left is holding their fire to give him a chance, but they do seem to have their safeties off and their hammers cocked (or is a gun metaphor a little inappropriate for lefties?). Mr. Obama's honeymoon may be one of the shortest ever, and the irony is that it looks like it won't be his political opponents who'll find themselves most at odds with him but rather those who raised all the money and did all the legwork to get him elected.

They're wondering where all the hope and change went.

P.S. Glen Beck said this morning that he saw a bumper sticker in Seattle that read: Obama Is My Co-Pilot. I don't know whether to laugh at the stupidity of this or to tremble at the implications of people investing a complete unknown with Messianic attributes.

RLC

The Perfect Gift

It's long been the case in the U.S. that different groups of people choose to celebrate different aspects of the Christmas story. Merchants, of course, celebrate the giving of gifts by the Maji to the Christ child because the symbolism encourages shoppers to knock themselves out making the cash registers ring.

Secular humanists celebrate the notion of good will toward men even though they're hard-pressed to articulate a cogent reason why anyone should feel all warm and tingly toward anyone, much less complete strangers, in a godless, empty universe.

Christians celebrate the wonder of the creator of the universe becoming one of us in order to sacrifice himself for us in our lostness.

Yet, until now, there's been one aspect of the Christmas story that never gets celebrated - the slaughter of the innocents. King Herod, you'll recall, exercised his sovereignty over the children of Bethlehem by having everyone under the age of two put to the sword so that he wouldn't have to suffer a competitor to his throne.

Now comes word that in what certainly appears to be a celebration of Herod's exercise of his right as sovereign king to choose the deaths of those children, the Indiana Planned Parenthood affiliates are selling gift certificates this Christmas season which can be used for, inter alia, procuring an abortion.

It happens that lots of people are disgusted by this, but I think it's the perfect gift to celebrate that part of the Christmas narrative, Herod's infanticide, which rarely gets much positive recognition. Think for a moment of the happiness these certificates will bring in the days following Christmas. Young, expectant mommies who need to unburden themselves of an unwanted or inconvenient pregnancy will delight in the gift, as will young men on the verge of panic at having sired a child. Abortionists whose skills at ending nascent lives are inversely proportional to the compunctions of their consciences will continue to enrich themselves plying their ugly trade, and Planned Parenthood itself, a business which profits handsomely from dismembering children, will continue to rake in the cash. It won't have been such a happy Christmas for the child itself, but as anyone can tell you, the child is just a blob of tissue and doesn't count.

Indiana Planned Parenthood should be lauded for doing their part to make this an especially blessed and meaningful holiday season and for carrying on a wonderfully Herodian Christmas tradition.

RLC

President -Elect Gump

Its fairly well-known that Barack and Mrs. Obama were plagued by numerous unsavory associations throughout the Senator's campaign for the presidency. You'll remember the bigoted Reverend Wright, of course, and his fellow odd-ball cleric Michael Pfleger, and there were also the former terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn as well as convicted felon Tony Rezko, and don't forget that Palestinian terrorist sympathizer Rashid Khalidi.

Now it seems that Obama is also connected to the corrupt and foul-mouthed Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich who was arrested yesterday for trying to profit from the sale of Obama's Senate seat. There's no evidence that Obama was involved in the matters which precipitated Blagojevich's arrest, but still. Blago and the President-elect evidently go back a long way, and we have to wonder how many more crooks and nuts Obama has been holding hands with over the years.

Like a political Forrest Gump, Mr. Obama keeps turning up in the company of Illinois' most odious characters. One almost expects that by the time he's completed his first term he'll have been found to have had ties to Al Capone and Lucky Luciano.

RLC

For Tanya

One almost has to chuckle at the spate of anti-theist ads littering this year's Christmas landscape. The anti-theists are evidently not content to see Christmas simply secularized, they want to persuade Christians to abandon the celebration altogether. Such a dreary, gray, sterile world they'd have us all live in.

On the other hand, Hot Air links to an atheist at Dizzying Intellect who posts a mild rebuke of his fellow non-believers and adopts the sort of attitude toward those with whom he disagrees that one might wish all people, atheists and Christians, would adopt.

Unfortunately, a commenter at DI named Tanya spoils the mellow mood by displaying a petulant asperity toward, and a sad ignorance of, Christian belief about the afterlife. Tanya writes:

I've lived my life in a more holy way than most Christians I know. If it turns out I'm wrong, and some pissy little whiner god wants to send me away just because I didn't worship him, even though I lived a clean, decent life, he can bite me. I wouldn't want to live in that kind of "heaven" anyway. So sorry.

Tanya evidently thinks that "heaven" is, or should be, all about living a "clean, decent life". Perhaps the following tale will illustrate the sophomoric callowness of her misconception:

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who was deeply in love with a young woman. We'll call her Tanya. The prince wanted Tanya to come and live with him in the formidable city his father, the king, had built, but Tanya wasn't interested in either the prince or the city. The city was beautiful and wondrous, to be sure, but the inhabitants weren't particularly fun to be around, and she wanted to stay out in the countryside where the wild things grow. Even though the prince wooed Tanya with every gift he could think of, it was to no avail. She wasn't smitten at all by the "pissy little whiner" prince. She obeyed the laws of the kingdom and paid her taxes and was convinced that that was good enough.

Out beyond the countryside, however, dwelt dreadful, awful orc-like creatures who hated the king and wanted nothing more than to kill him and his heirs. One day they learned of the prince's love for Tanya and set upon a plan. They kidnapped her and sent a note to the king telling him that they would be willing to exchange Tanya for the prince, but if their offer was refused they would torture Tanya until she was dead.

The king was distraught and told the prince of the horrible news. The prince, all the rejections he had experienced from Tanya notwithstanding, still loved her deeply and his heart was broken at the thought of her peril. With tears he resolved to his father that he would do the exchange. The father wept bitterly because the prince was his only son, but he knew that his love for Tanya would not allow him to let her suffer the torment to which the ugly people would surely subject her. The prince asked only that the father try his best to persuade Tanya to live in the beautiful city.

And so the day came for the exchange and the prince rode atop his horse out of the beautiful city to meet the ugly creatures. As he crossed an expansive meadow toward his enemy he stopped to make sure they released Tanya. He waited until she had fled, oblivious in her near-panic that it was the prince himself she ran past as she hurried to the safety of the city walls. He could easily turn back now that Tanya was safe, but he had given his word that he would do the exchange and the ugly people knew he would never go back on his word.

The prince continued stoically and resolutely into their midst, giving himself for Tanya as he had promised. Surrounding his steed they set upon him, stripped him of his princely raiment, and tortured him for three days in the most excruciating manner. Not once did any sound louder than a moan pass his lips. His courage and resolve to endure whatver they subjected him to were fortified by the assurance that he was doing it for Tanya and that because of his sacrifice she was safe. Finally, wearying of their sport, they cut off his head and threw his body into a pool of offal.

Meanwhile, the grief-stricken king, his heart like wax within his breast, called Tanya into his court. He told her nothing of what his son had done, his pride in the prince not permitting him to use his heroic sacrifice as a bribe. Even so, he pleaded with Tanya, as he had promised the prince he would, to stay within the walls of the wondrous and beautiful city where she'd be safe forevermore. Tanya considered the offer, but she decided that she liked life on the outside far too much, even if it was risky, and she didn't really want to be too close to the prince, and, by the way, where is that pissy little whiner anyway?

Merry Christmas, Tanya.

RLC

Foreign Competition

There have been a lot of forecasts in recent years of the coming American economic senescence. We're hearing that the United States is destined to be eclipsed by China, India, a united Europe and maybe, one can hardly say it without gasping, even Russia. Rod Hunter at The American takes a contrary view. Citing a book by economist Robert Shapiro, Hunter points out that problems each of these would-be competitors faces over the long run are intractable and will act like heavy anchors on the economy of these nations.

Take demographics for example. China, Japan and Europe all have rapidly aging populations which will need to be supported by a shrinking cohort of younger workers. This is really a recipe for economic calamity since either the elderly are going to have to be forsaken or the young are going to be heavily taxed to support them. Either scenario bodes ill for the economic vitality of a nation.

Russia is no threat at all to American economic supremacy since the productivity of the average Russian worker is the same as that of the average Botswanian.

India has little manufacturing, and, like China, has very poor infrastructure which is essential for moving goods and sustaining a vibrant economy. Moreover, the heavy hand of government stifles initiative and flexibility both these economies need in order to thrive.

The United States is poised to avoid all of these problems and others Hunter discusses as well. Read his essay to see why.

Thanks for the tip to No Left Turns

RLC

New York Is Not Mumbai

The attack that shut down the city of Mumbai would never have succeeded in an American city of comparable size - our cops are too well trained and too well armed. So writes Jonathan Foreman in a piece for the New York Post titled Mumbai's Lessons for New York.

What Foreman doesn't mention but which is almost certainly true is that a similar terrorist attack in many places in the U.S. would encounter not only an effective police response but also armed citizens who, unlike those poor Indians, would not be sitting ducks for the terrorists to pick off at their leisure.

Even so, there are other scenarios for terror attacks on our cities to which we are vulnerable and Foreman discusses some of these. Check out his essay here.

RLC