Rules for Radicals

It's been observed that radical leftist Saul Alinsky exerted a formative influence on the thinking of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, so to understand better the minds of the Secretary of State and my president, and those with whom they surround themselves, I recently undertook to read the book for which Alinsky is most famous, his 1971 Rules for Radicals. I confess I had never read it before, but I wish I had, not because it's a particularly entertaining read - it's not - but because it does shed light on the Democratic leadership in general and President Obama in particular. His frenetic urgency, the polarization of the nation he seeks to effect and exploit, the ease with which he says one thing while doing another, can all be traced to the philosophy and tactics Alinsky outlines in his book.

Alinsky, who died a year after his book was published, is very much preoccupied with finding meaning and purpose in life, mentioning the need for meaning at least a dozen times in Rules. For him meaning was found in challenging the establishment, in working for a more "equitable" distribution of wealth, in seizing power from those who have it and using it to upset the old social order.

His book is clearly and unabashedly an updated version of Machiavelli's Prince. Like Machiavelli, Alinsky's guiding ethic is pragmatism - whatever works is right: "My aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and to use it." (p.10)

Nor is he any more concerned with traditional morality than was Machiavelli. To be sure, Alinsky wants to "realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education....," but he never really elaborates on these ideals nor explains why they're goals worth achieving. Nor does he see them as objective absolutes. Instead he says this: "The organizer does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist." (p. 10f)

But if everything is relative then so are the ideals to which the pragmatist aspires, and if they're relative then the decision to value them is purely subjective.

Throughout the course of the book Alinsky says things like:

"Political realists see the world as it is....In this world we are always moral and our enemies immoral; a world where 'reconciliation' means that one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it." (p.13)

"We live in a world where 'good' is a value dependent on whether we want it." (p.14)

"One does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter." (p.25)

"Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times." (p.30)

"With very rare exceptions the right things are done for the wrong reasons...The organizer should know and accept that the right reason is only introduced as a moral rationalization after the right end has been achieved...therefore he should search for and use the wrong reasons to achieve the right goals." (p.76)

The world as Alinsky saw it consists of basically two groups, the Haves and the Have Nots. There's a third group, the Have a Little, Want Mores, but they're essentially an appendage of the Have Nots.

He argues that pacifism is merely a tactic that one must employ, clothing it in religion and morality (p.45), when the other side has the weapons. He quotes Lenin approvingly: "They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet." (p.37f)

His real goal, after all the nods toward justice and equality have been made, is power:

"Power is the very essence, the dynamo of life. It is the power of the heart pumping blood and sustaining life in the body. It is the power of active citizen participation pulsing upward, providing a unified strength for a common purpose. Power is an essential life force always in operation, either changing the world or opposing change." (p.51)

To be successful the community organizer must see himself as something of a God:

"If he or she does not have that complete self-confidence (or call it ego) that he can win, then the battle is lost before it is even begun." (p.60)

"The organizer is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man can reach - to create, to be a "great creator," to play God." (p.61)

"Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society." (p.62)

Alinsky professes to hate dogma but is himself as dogmatic as any officer of the Inquisition about the rightness of what he does.

If it's necessary to discredit and humiliate good people (Joe the Plumber?, Sarah Palin?) then so be it. If it's necessary to misrepresent a situation in order to personalize it and polarize it then so be it:

"The most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule." (p.75)

"Men will act when they are convinced that their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition is are 100 percent on the side of the devil. He knows there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree." (p.78)

"The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues...for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act....An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent; provide a channel into which people can angrily pour their frustrations." (p.117)

"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." (p.130)

The radical must not dither. He must be constant action. There must be a sense of urgency to everything he does or else people will lose interest, or worse, they'll stop to think about whether what they're doing is right. No doubt this is why legislation is pushed through congress before anyone even has the chance to read the bills they're told to vote for:

"[A] conflict that drags on too long becomes a drag....From the moment the tactician engages in conflict, his enemy is time." (p.159)

"There is a way to keep the action going and to prevent it from being a drag, but this means constantly cutting new issues as the action continues, so that by the time the enthusiasm and the emotions for one issue have started to de-escalate, a new issue has come onto the scene with a consequent revival." (p.161)

Saul Alinsky would be very proud of Barack Obama and the current congressional leadership. They certainly seem to have taken his book and its lessons to heart.

RLC

The Greater Offense

With the revelations that Senator John Ensign of Nevada and Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Republicans both, have been engaging in marital infidelities some in the media have found themselves unable to contain their glee at having the opportunity to point out the hypocrisy of members of a party that emphasizes family values being caught in flagrante.

Of course, many Democrats have also been caught with their pants down, but unless their infidelities involved law-breaking it didn't cost them their careers because, well, Democrats don't profess to have high moral standards, or something. Evidently it's not hypocritical when Dems cheat on their spouses because they don't say that one shouldn't do such things.

It's not the infidelity itself, we're told, it's the hypocrisy of touting family values while cheating on one's spouse that makes the Republican offenses so egregious. Okay, but if it were really true that it's the hypocrisy that sends some precincts of the media into transports of pious self-righteousness why do they not likewise slam all those in the Democratic party who demand that we pay our taxes while they avoid paying theirs? Why is a legal, albeit immoral, affair a career-ender for Republicans, but illegal tax delinquency is just a speed bump for Democrats? If hypocrisy is the issue what can be more hypocritical than the man in charge of writing the tax laws (Charley Rangel) and the man in charge of enforcing them (Timothy Geithner) both failing to pay their own taxes? Why is that not a career-ender for these two malefactors?

Is there something about being a person of the left that makes it impossible for them to see their own hypocrisy in pillorying Mark Sanford while giving certain Democrats, whose offenses are not only hypocritical but also illegal, a pass?

RLC

No Taxation Without Reading the Legislation

Once again Democrats have distinguished themselves by voting to pass legislation that few of them have even read. They did the same thing, you'll recall, with the stimulus bill. Doesn't it just astound you that we Americans continue to elect to congress people who are so irresponsible that they vote for bills whose contents are unknown to them? And to think we pay these people a salary and benefits.

That no one who voted for this bill had read it is obvious from the fact that a 300 page amendment was incorporated into an already 1200 page bill at 3:00 a.m. this morning. Apparently, these illustrious personages don't much care what's in the darned thing, they just want to be told by their leadership which button to push so they can get back to their cocktail parties and golf games.

The bill is supposed to be an energy bill, but it's no more about increasing energy than the stimulus bill was about economic stimulus. According to most commentators this legislation will result in a net loss of both (relatively) cheap energy and jobs, will raise the cost of everything we buy, including energy, several thousand dollars per year, and cause hundreds of businesses to move overseas.

All is not lost, though. The bill still has to pass the senate where even Majority Leader Harry Reid said it hasn't got much of a chance. For once I hope Senator Reid is right. Meanwhile, who will deliver us from congresspersons determined to run the ship of state onto the shoals of socialism and sell our children into financial bondage? Where is the modern Patrick Henry who'll stand and demand of our congressional representation, "No taxation without reading the legislation!"?

I should mention that fifty brave Democrats weathered the ferocity of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's arm-twisting and voted against her bill, and eight Republicans apparently committed political hari kiri by voting for it. I suspect that those eight Republicans are going to have the fight of their political lives in 2010. At least one can hope.

RLC

Color Blind

Via Hot Air - a really amazing optical illusion. Check it out.

RLC

Go Ahead, Make My Day

There are reports out of Tehran that Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the man who was robbed in the recent election and whose de-election has sparked so much protest and carnage in Iran, may be arrested for his insolence and sedition. This would be a good thing for two reasons:

First, if Mousavi were to spend the rest of his life in an Iranian prison it would be a much-deserved fate. He approved the kidnapping of the embassy employees during the Carter administration and was instrumental in the deaths of hundreds of American marines and others in bombings in Lebanon in the 1980s.

Former CIA agent Robert Baer explains in Time magazine:

When Mousavi was Prime Minister, he oversaw an office that ran operatives abroad, from Lebanon to Kuwait to Iraq. This was the heyday of Khomeini's theocratic vision, when Iran thought it really could export its revolution across the Middle East, providing money and arms to anyone who claimed he could upend the old order. Mousavi was not only swept up into this delusion but also actively pursued it.

It was Mousavi who appointed Iran's ambassador to Damascus, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, the Iranian caught red-handed planning the Marine-barracks bombing. Mohtashemi-pur also coordinated the hostage-taking in Lebanon. As a reward, Mousavi gave him the Interior Ministry, where Mohtashemi-pur went on to crack down on what was left of democracy in Iran.

And it is not as if Mousavi kept his support for Iran's secret war on the U.S. a secret. In a 1981 interview, he had this to say about the taking of American diplomats in Tehran in 1979: "It was the beginning of the second stage of our revolution. It was after that we discovered our true Islamic identity."

Mousavi is also an advocate of Iran's nuclear weapons program. His arrest and imprisonment is certainly not something that should be regretted.

Not only would having this man incarcerated in Iran's medieval prison gulag be a tiny glimmer of justice for the families of the Americans whose deaths he facilitated, it would also further inflame Iranian young people who see Mousavi not as someone who shares their aspirations of freedom and democracy, so much, but as a symbol of their hopes to be rid of the current regime. His arrest would further destabilize the mullahcracy in Tehran and that, too, would be a good thing.

Unfortunately, for both these reasons, the mullahs will doubtless refrain from arresting him as long as they can avoid it.

RLC

ACES and Jokers

The editors of National Review are decidedly unenthusiastic about ACES (American Clean Energy and Security act) that the Democrats are probably going to bring to a vote today. Here's the summation of the reservations they discuss in their column:

So here are the cards Democrats want to deal us: ACES would impose costs at least ten times as large as its benefits, would not reduce the deficit, and would not really cap emissions. It's a losing hand.

Go to the link to read the details. Also, if you didn't see our link to John Boehner's page that we posted Thursday, you should check it out to understand why this bill is going to result in a huge tax imposed on every American who buys or grows food and who uses gasoline and/or electricity, and why the promise of millions of new jobs is simply smoke blown in our eyes.

RLC

Had Enough

The publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media, Sherman Frederick, explains why he's leaving the Democrat party:

I don't think I could have picked a worse time to go Republican. However, because KXNT-AM radio's Alan Stock revealed my party switch last week, I feel the need to explain.

First, I'm not trying to time anything. Enough was enough. Could stand no more. So, when it came time to renew my driver's license on June 9, I also gave the Democratic Party the pink slip.

I pushed the DMV clerk the paperwork. She shoved it back and said I didn't have to fill out that form if my address remained the same.

"No, I want to change party affiliation."

"Oh," she said. "Had enough of the president, have we?"

"Up to here. I quit."

Republicans offer our only hope in slowing the Obama "change" juggernaut before the America of unbridled optimism and opportunity goes the way of the buffalo. I don't want my great-grandchildren growing up in cradle-to-grave government care, where only the privileged few may afford a car, or own a home, or get non-rationed health care.

The only institution positioned to stop the progression of the Obama welfare state is the Republican Party, coupled with independent-minded Americans like me.

Frederick offers more reasons for his switch at the link. It's unfortunate for the country that he's right about the Republican party being our only realistic alternative to the Democrats. Too many Republicans actually don't see themselves as an alternative at all, but rather as Democrats-lite. Even so, the principles of the party - small government, low taxes, prudent spending, personal responsibility, individual freedom, adherence to the Constitution, respect for life, and caution in our foreign involvements - are still embraced by the majority of its members and are the only realistic hope for rescuing our nation from the serial irresponsibilities of the Obama administration.

RLC

The Stoning of Soraya M.

The same people who shoot young women to death in the streets of Iran have no qualms about stoning them to death either. One such victim of Islamic "justice" was Soraya M. Her story has been made into a film that is scheduled for release tomorrow. The film is titled The Stoning of Soraya M. Here's the trailer:

If it's showing near you, and you see it, let us know what you thought of it.

RLC

Taking Out the Taliban

Fox News showed this video yesterday morning. Note the caution exercised by everyone involved to avoid civilian casualties. Note, too, that being a Taliban is a tough way to make a living:

RLC

Cap and Trade Tomorrow

Congressman John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, has published the following fact sheet on the bill, sometimes referred to as "Cap and Trade," to be voted on in the House on Friday:

Democratic leaders have announced a so-called "deal" to bring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) national energy tax up for a House vote on Friday. Senior Democrats have already started to tout a number of trivial concessions and compromises that made this "deal" possible. But, the fact is, the consequences of this "deal" are no different from the consequences of the initial legislation introduced by Democrats earlier this year. It still amounts to jobs-killing policy that will increase costs for every American and will further harm our economy and American workers at a time when they can afford it least. Following are the Top 10 Facts about the House Democrats' so-called "deal" to bring Speaker Pelosi's national energy tax to the House floor later this week:

1. Speaker Pelosi's National Energy Tax Will Impose a National Energy Tax on Every Single American. If you drive a car, buy food or a product manufactured in America, or have the audacity to flip on a light switch, you'll pay more under Speaker Pelosi's national energy tax. Here's what Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) had to say about the tax: "Nobody in this country realizes that cap and trade is a tax. And it's a great big one." And of course, President Obama agrees, saying that electricity rates will "skyrocket" under this scheme.

2. Speaker Pelosi's National Energy Tax Will Cost American Jobs, Shipping Them Overseas to China & India. According to a study by the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Speaker Pelosi's national energy tax will cost 2.3 to 2.7 million jobs each year, even after the creation of new "green" jobs. It will impose tough new requirements and increased costs on American manufacturers - higher costs that they won't face overseas, in places like China, India, or Mexico. This will cost American jobs in two ways: either domestic manufacturers will move overseas directly, or American companies in energy-intensive industries will be driven out of business by overseas rivals that undercut their prices. These job losses, and their ripple effects throughout our economy, were excluded from an incomplete analysis recently completed by the Congressional Budget Office. The Brookings Institute recently released a report that confirmed a national energy tax would reduce economic growth, increase costs, and kill jobs.

3. Speaker Pelosi's National Energy Tax Will Cause Electricity Bills to "Skyrocket." Speaker Pelosi's national energy tax will increase electricity bills for every American and small business. President Obama even admitted that it would cause electricity rates to "necessarily skyrocket." And Duke Energy, a major utility company that would receive free allowances under the Democrats' plan, has already requested a rate hike of 13.5 percent in anticipation of the energy tax.

Read the rest at the link and contact your congressman. You may not have been aware that this bill was up for a vote tomorrow because the left is trying to focus our attention this week on other matters so that legislators don't have constituents putting pressure on them. Nevertheless, it's a terrible bill that will accomplish nothing except expand the power of government, diminish our freedom, and make us all poorer.

"Don't go gently into that dark night but rage, rage at the dying of the light." Dylan Thomas.

RLC

Re: Body and Soul

There are two excellent responses to our recent post titled Body and Soul on our Feedback page. In the first, Dave links to this video which illustrates how there could be ten dimensions to reality:

The video posits extra dimensions which are just too tiny for us to experience, but it could be that these dimensions are not tiny at all. It could be that they are macro-dimensional, but we lack the cognitive structure to apprehend them. If our minds were structured differently perhaps we could experience these other dimensions, but as it is anything that exists in them is beyond our ability to perceive. The situation could be like our inability to perceive radio waves apart from a device to translate them into something we can perceive, even though these waves are all around us.

Anyway, in the second response Mike offers up a lovely meditation on beauty. He writes:

Once one gives this some thought, it becomes clear that the world we perceive through our five senses sends us some strong hints of a much greater reality. At the core of every perception of genuine beauty, there is a dissatisfaction--an ache for something more. Trying to take in everything present in something beautiful with only our five senses is like holding a shot glass under a waterfall. The experience of perceiving real beauty is simultaneously an experience of longing for something greater than what is perceived; beauty has a trajectory. It is a signpost. And the very character of the longing evoked by beauty is reflective of He to whom beauty points us (He who is the foundation for the reality that cannot be experienced with only five senses).

There's more from both these guys at the Feedback page. Give it a look.

RLC

Terrorism Is a Dangerous Business

Bill Roggio's Long War Journal reports that:

The US carried out its second Predator airstrike inside South Waziristan today. Unmanned Predator aircraft killed more than 65 Taliban fighters in a follow-on attack near the headquarters for Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

The Predator strike aircraft fired three Hellfire missiles as Taliban fighters gathered for a funeral of Khog Wali, a leader in Baitullah's army in South Waziristan who was among six Taliban fighters killed in the first US airstrike earlier today.

Commander Sangeen, a Taliban commander from Afghanistan, was reported to be among those killed in the strike at the funeral. Predators are said to have fired on Taliban vehicles as they attempted to leave the scene of the attack, Dawn reported.

Sixty five terrorists is a lot for a single strike, and apparently there were some big names in the group. President Obama must have signed off on this attack which, in my opinion, earns him some serious credit. The Bush administration had the opportunity to take out a couple hundred Taliban at a funeral two years ago and to their everlasting shame apparently declined. Who knows how many innocents have since lost their lives because those terrorists were spared?

Anyway, I wonder how many mourners will show up at the funerals of the Taliban killed in yesterday's strike. No doubt a lot of condolences will be sent along by email.

Check out Hot Air for more commentary on the missile strike.

RLC

Another One Bites the Dust

Generations of students have been taught that birds descended from dinosaurs and that a particular bird, Archeopteryx, is not only an intermediate species between the two taxa but proof of their evolutionary relationship. Well, now it appears that all those students will have to unlearn that "fact" of evolutionary history. It turns out that there's conclusive evidence that birds did not arise from dinosaurs and that the common ancestor, if there is one, between the two groups is unknown.

This story from Science Daily recounts the bad news for those who for decades have cited Archeopteryx to refute those benighted creationist claims that there are no transitional fossils between dinosaurs and birds:

Researchers at Oregon State University have made a fundamental new discovery about how birds breathe and have a lung capacity that allows for flight - and the finding means it's unlikely that birds descended from any known theropod dinosaurs.

The conclusions add to other evolving evidence that may finally force many paleontologists to reconsider their long-held belief that modern birds are the direct descendants of ancient, meat-eating dinosaurs, OSU researchers say. It's been known for decades that the femur, or thigh bone in birds is largely fixed and makes birds into "knee runners," unlike virtually all other land animals, the OSU experts say. What was just discovered, however, is that it's this fixed position of bird bones and musculature that keeps their air-sac lung from collapsing when the bird inhales.

However, every other animal that has walked on land, the scientists said, has a moveable thigh bone that is involved in their motion - including humans, elephants, dogs, lizards and - in the ancient past - dinosaurs.

The implication, the researchers said, is that birds almost certainly did not descend from theropod dinosaurs, such as tyrannosaurus or allosaurus. The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution.

"For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from," Ruben said. "That's a pretty serious problem, and there are other inconsistencies with the bird-from-dinosaur theories.

"But one of the primary reasons many scientists kept pointing to birds as having descended from dinosaurs was similarities in their lungs," Ruben said. "However, theropod dinosaurs had a moving femur and therefore could not have had a lung that worked like that in birds. Their abdominal air sac, if they had one, would have collapsed. That undercuts a critical piece of supporting evidence for the dinosaur-bird link.

The newest findings, the researchers said, are more consistent with birds having evolved separately from dinosaurs and developing their own unique characteristics, including feathers, wings and a unique lung and locomotion system.

There's more at the link. It's a fascinating thing about the whole evolution/creation debate that it seems like so many of the major discoveries in biology in the past two decades support what creationists have been saying since the 1950s. It must be terribly frustrating for the Darwinians, convinced as they are that creationists are a bunch of scientific simpletons, to see their favorite icons tumbled seriatim from their pedestals into the dustbin of history.

RLC

Apostate from Atheism

The pseudonymous Jenn Q. Public recounts her long march from atheism in an interesting essay at American Thinker. She begins with these lines:

Do you believe in God? Really? And you're willing to admit it in public?

Oops. Sorry, for a moment I slipped back into the arrogant Atheism of my youth.

Before my parents had children, they decided to raise their kids in a secular home. We had gifts at Christmas time and chocolate covered matzoh during Passover, but there was no religion and certainly no God.

When I was in grade school, God was just a kind of nondescript character who popped up in Little House on the Prairie books from time to time. He seemed like a decent enough fellow, but was more or less a bit player who didn't have much to say.

After my grandfather died when I was seven, his Baptist minister lifted me up in his arms and told me, "It's all right, Grandpa's with God now." At that moment, I could feel my dress was hiked up in the back and all I could think about was pulling it back down. But later, I asked around and discovered that God was our Heavenly father, whatever that was supposed to mean.

I figured, who better to ask about my Heavenly father than my earthly father, but when I did he laughed.

He wasn't amused in a "kids say the darnedest things" kind of way. He was laughing derisively at the idea that my mother's family believed in God. And thus began my introduction to Atheism.

There are people who call themselves atheist who are simply nonbelievers, and then there are the big "A" Atheists for whom Atheism is almost a religion. This quasi-religious doctrine isn't neutral on the existence of other religions; rather, Atheism is a virulently anti-theistic creed characterized by sneering contempt for religion and a profoundly dogmatic bigotry toward people of faith.

Want to know how Atheists see the rest of us?

If so, click on the link. It's a good read.

RLC

Transparently Ordinary

Obama acolyte Michael Isikoff of Newsweek expresses dismay and disappointment with his hero:

As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding "secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama's "clean coal" policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged "presidential communications."

The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig's office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a "new era" of openness, "nothing has changed," says David Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. "For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies."

Well, of course nothing has changed. There was never any intention that anything would change. I guess I'm too much of a cynic, but it surprises me that anyone would think that a Chicago politician's promise to make government more open would actually be kept.

Radical activist Saul Alinsky, Obama's tactical mentor, writes about this very matter of saying one thing in order to get power and then doing another once you have it in his book Rules for Radicals. He observes and recommends that once "the Have-Nots achieve success and become the Haves, they are in the position of trying to keep what they have and their morality shifts with their change of location in the power pattern." He goes on to cite historical examples that illustrate the "principle."

The matter of transparency in government is just one example of how President Obama has implemented the tactic endorsed by Alinsky. His rapid-fire passage of the stimulus bill is another. Having promised in the campaign that he would always insure there would be time to carefully consider any legislation he proposed, he pushed the stimulus bill through the Democrat-controlled legislature so fast that no one who voted for it had a chance to even read it.

Barack Obama may be historic in being our first African-American president, but in many other ways he's just an ordinary political opportunist bent on doing whatever's necessary to gain, hold, and expand his power. The sooner journalists like Isikoff realize this the better it will be for all of us.

RLC

Body and Soul

In a post yesterday on the possibility of technological immortality and resurrection, I promised to share some thoughts on the nature of the body and soul. What follows are some random musings on the topic. They're purely speculative of course, but who knows, some of them may be right.

First, I think it very likely that whatever body we have in the next life, and I do believe we will be embodied, it won't be like this one. The bodies we currently enjoy, or are cursed with, are, or appear to be, three dimensional, but it's possible that the next world is more than three dimensional. If so, then we'll look completely different to each other there than we do here, assuming we will be able to perceive the additional dimensions.

To illustrate this imagine what a sphere would look like to inhabitants of a two-dimensional world. In a world in which there is no up or down a sphere would appear to be a straight line, like looking at a sheet of paper edge-on. Of course, this is not at all what a sphere looks like in a three-dimensional world. Likewise, even if we had the same body in eternity that we have now (a terrible prospect for some of us)it probably would not look at all the same.

If such a world does exist then perhaps death is like a character in a movie stepping off the two-dimensional screen to join the people in the three-dimensional theater much like Jeff Daniels does in The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Further, in this body we have five senses but there's no reason to believe that everything that exists is apprehensible with those five senses or that those senses could not be more acute than they are. There could be all sorts of phenomena in our world to which we are totally oblivious because either our senses lack the necessary acuity to perceive them or we simply lack the requisite senses to perceive them.

Consider what the world would look like if we could see radio waves, for example. What colors would they be? What if we had the same powers of smell as a dog? How much different would the world be?

Or imagine a man born blind and deaf walking along a city street. How would he imagine his world? He would be aware of the pavement at his feet the breeze, perhaps, in his face, the smells of the city, but that would be about it. Every now and then he'd be jostled but he would have a very limited notion of what the cause of the jostling looked like. Now imagine that suddenly he acquires both of the missing senses. I think the torrent of sensations that would pour over him would knock him to his knees in wonder and astonishment.

Maybe we are like the man with only three senses, except we have five. Even so, the world may exhibit all sorts of phenomena that we simply cannot experience because our five senses are not adequate to apprehend them all. Perhaps when we die we take on a new body, like the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, and that new body enables us to experience things we could never experience before. Indeed, the bodies we have now may by comparison be no more real or substantial than the shifting arrays of phosphor dots that make up the image of a person on a television screen are like the person watching the TV.

So much for the body. What about the soul? What is soul? I prefer to think of the soul not as a ghost-like thing that resides in our bodies but rather as the totality of information comprising an exhaustive description of who we are. It's every true fact about us - our genealogy, our personal biography, our personality, our infirmities, our vices and virtues, our appearance at every moment of our life - everything. This information is our essence and it's held or stored in the mind of God which makes it eternal, or potentially so.

When we die perhaps God downloads it, or selected parts of it, into some other body, some other vessel, and thus we are reinstantiated. Because our soul is information in the mind of God, it never ceases to exist. It's always in His database, as it were, ready to be downloaded at the next iteration of our bodily existence, and to give us continuity from life to death to life.

Of course, some individuals may never have their essence reinstantiated, or God may even choose to delete it, in which case the person is annihilated. That may be what many religious traditions interpret as hell.

At any rate, because each of us is potentially eternal, each of our lives is infinitely important and meaningful. Because bodily death isn't the end of our existence we have a basis for hope that justice, meaning, and moral value exist and we have a reason for believing that the choices we make in this life really do matter. After all, our eternal destiny may hinge upon them.

RLC

Civil War Animation

Civil War buffs will want to check out this site which features animations of all the major battles. It's often difficult to get a sense of how the warring forces maneuvered throughout an engagement from static diagrams of their positions. This site explains the troop movements in ways that show their complexity and make those movements much more clear. It's pretty cool.

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

RLC

What's Needed Now

Remember back after 9/11 when then President George W. Bush tagged Iran, North Korea and Iraq as the axis of evil? Do you recall the withering scorn to which he was subjected by the left for such an improvident accusation? Well, Iraq has been neutralized but Iran and North Korea are working together to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems and both are among the repressive regimes in the world today. In light of the news coming out of both of these countries Bush's label looks absolutely accurate and his liberal detractors look absolutely foolish, a look to which they've perhaps grown accustomed by now.

On Saturday as Iranian citizens were dying in the streets, our current president went out for ice cream. Yesterday, while Iranians were pleading for his support, he played golf. I have no problem with this, actually, and don't criticize him for it. I only wonder how the liberal wing of the media would have reacted had George Bush done likewise in similar circumstances. Keith Olbermann would have been at his snarly, snarky "Have you no shame, sir?" best. But Mr. Obama unwinds in the midst of a historic crisis and there's nothing but acceptance from the traditional left-wing media.

Anyway, enough about the left's lack of objectivity and fundamental fairness. The more important question is how should the president respond to what's happening in Iran? I understand that he doesn't want to spoil the possibility of negotiating away Iran's nuclear ambitions by offending the Iranian mullahs, but there's almost no chance that those negotiations are going to succeed with Iran any more than they have with North Korea. Nor is there any reason why he can't give a major address and lay out the moral case for why the government should stop killing its people and live up to the basic principles of democracy. Surely, Mr. Obama, of all people, can do this in a non-threatening manner without humiliating the Iranian government.

The president deserved the benefit of the doubt about his relative silence in the first few days after the election, but now that time has passed. That doesn't mean we need saber-rattling. It doesn't mean we need to move a couple of aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf. It does mean that we need moral leadership. We need an international Martin Luther King to stand up for freedom, democracy and the right of citizens to redress grievances in the Muslim world just as Reagan did in the communist world. Islamic nations around the globe, but especially in Iran, need to hear a powerful, landmark speech in defense of basic human rights. Who better than the president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, to provide that leadership and give that speech?

UPDATE: After completing these thoughts I came across this essay by Victor Davis Hanson in which he lists several reasons why Obama should now speak out and several possible reasons why he might not. Read it. It's excellent.

RLC

Technological Immortality and Resurrection

Mike Labossiere has an interesting post up over at Talking Philosophy in which he thinks about Ray Kurzweil's idea that in the future technology will be able not only to keep us alive indefinitely but also enable us to resurrect the dead. Here are a few excerpts from Labossiere's post with some of my comments thrown in:

Oversimplifying things, Kurzweil envisions a future in which humans will be immortal and the dead will return to life. While these are common claims in religion, Kurzweil's view is that technology will make this possible. While some describe his view as a religion, I'd prefer to use a made up word, "techion" to refer to this sort of phenomena. As I see it, a religion involves claims about supernatural entities. Kurzweil's view is purely non-supernatural, but does have most of the stock elements of religion (the promise of a utopian future, immortality, and the raising of the dead). So, it is sort of a technological religion-hence "techion."

I'd want to quibble here with Labossiere. I don't think religion needs to be supernatural at all. Pantheisms, humanisms, and ideologies of various sorts are not necessarily supernatural, but are still religious. Even so, that's not really important to the rest of the post:

In the abstract, technological immortality is quite simple: just keep repairing and replacing parts. In theory, this could be kept up until the end of time, thus granting immortality. Even with our current technology we can repair and replace parts. For example, my quadriceps tendon was recently repaired. I have friends with artificial hips and other friends who gotten tissue and organ transplants. It is easy to imagine technology progressing enough to replace or repair everything.

Technological resurrection is a bit trickier. While we can "jump start" people who have died, Kurzweil envisions something more radical. His view is that we might be able to take the DNA of dead people and rebuild them using nanobots. This, he claims, could create a new body that would be "indistinguishable from the original person." Of course, having a body that is indistinguishable from the original is hardly the same as having the original person back. It would, rather, be a case of having a twin. To recreate the person, his plan is that information about the original (such as things the person wrote and recollections of people who knew them) would be used to recreate the mind of the original.

Turning to immortality, the key question is this: would the identity of the person be preserved through the changes?

This problem is, of course, like the classic ship of Theseus problem: how much of the original can be replaced before it is no longer the same entity? Of course, it is also complicated by the fact that a person is involved and the identity of persons is a bit more complex than that of objects.

Actually this problem already exists since we are constantly replacing cells and tissue throughout our life. None of us is made of the same stuff that comprised us ten years ago. It's very difficult to say how a person in his seventies is the same person as he was when he was five.

Now, for resurrection....True resurrection, as noted above, has two key aspects. First, the original body has to be recreated. If you get a different sort of body, then you have been reincarnated.

This doesn't seem quite right, either. We don't think of butterfly metamorphosis as a kind of reincarnation, but surely the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis with a completely different sort of body than it had as a caterpillar. I don't think our resurrected bodies have to be anything like the ones we have now. They may be, but they don't have to be. (More on this tomorrow)

Second, the original person has to be restored. Locke's view on this matter is that come judgment day, God will recreate our bodies (hopefully at their prime) and place the right consciousness into each body (for Locke, the person is his or her consciousness).

Locke is right about this if we think of consciousness as somehow related to soul. (More on this tomorrow also)

Getting the original person back in the recreated body is the real challenge. Kurzweil does seem to clearly recognize that the method he envisions will not restore the original person. He seems to be right about this. After all, the method he describes relies on "public" information. That is, it depends on what information the person provided before death and what other people remember of him. This obviously leaves out everything that was not recorded or known by others. As such, it will be a partial reconstruction - a new person who is force fed the scraps of another person's life. This, obviously enough, raises some serious moral issues.

On the face of it, Kurzweil's resurrection seems to be morally appalling. That this is so can be illustrated by the following analogy. Imagine that Sally and Ivan have a son, Ted. Ted dies at 18. Sally and Ivan go through all the adoption agencies until they find a baby, Joe, that looks like Ted did. They rename Joe as Ted and then reconstruct Ted's life as closely as possible - punishing the former Joe whenever he deviates from Ted's life and rewarding him for doing what Ted did. Sally and Ivan would be robbing Joe of choice and using him as a means to an end-fulfilling their need to have Ted back. But, they have no right to do this to Joe - he is a person, not a thing to be used to recreate Ted.

The same certainly seems to hold in the situation Kurzweil envisions. To create a human being and force him to be a copy of a dead person is a horrible misuse of a person and a wicked act.

Hmmm. Why is it a wicked act? Why is it wicked to misuse people? Labossiere doesn't tell us. He just assumes we'll agree with him, but why should we? The only way misusing others is wicked is if there is a transcendent, objective moral right and wrong, but there can only be such a transcendent, objective right or wrong if there is a God. Does Labossiere believe in God? He doesn't say, but if he's going to make these kinds of moral claims, he certainly should say.

Anyway, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that although technological immortality is theoretically possible, technological resurrection is not. There's no way technology could, even in theory, recover the original person. It's dangerous to make pronouncements about what's technically possible and what isn't, I know, but a person is the totality of all one's experiences, memories, feelings, intentions, regrets, knowledge, etc. and there's no way that these, once gone, could even in theory be recovered.

Except by God.

RLC

Crisis in Iran

As is usually the case the best coverage of today's events in Iran can be found at Hot Air. Some of the videos require a Facebook account, others require a strong stomach, but just about everything that can be learned about what happened today, including President Obama's decision to go for an ice cream in the midst of it all, can be learned by clicking on the link.

Republicans are calling for Mr. Obama to speak out more forcefully against the Iranian brutality, but forceful words are meaningless unless we're prepared to back them up with forceful action. Otherwise we just look weak and impotent, and clearly Mr. Obama is not prepared to use force in any way against the Iranian government. Before we encourage Mr. Obama to come back from the ice cream parlor and denounce the Iranian thuggery we should think long and hard about what measures we're willing to take should words escalate to action.

On the other hand, as many are pointing out, President Reagan did not stand before the Berlin Wall and simply say "Mr. Gorbachev, this wall is not our problem," but then, keep in mind that no one will ever mistake Barack Obama for Ronald Reagan.

Anyway, word has it that he ordered a cup of vanilla.

RLC