Unnecessary Fall

The New Republic's senior editor John Judis evaluates the Obama presidency, assesses what he thinks are the reasons for Mr. Obama's sinking approval ratings, and concludes that Mr. Obama has too often sounded an uncertain trumpet, compromised too much in his assault on Wall Street bankers, and hasn't been liberal enough in his economic policies.

Judis makes a good case that the President has been inconstant in both his rhetoric and his actions, threatening yesterday to teach Wall Street a lesson and then today not only failing to follow through, but actually rewarding the fat cats he had criticized yesterday. This inconsistency is the mark of a man either unprincipled or unsure of his abilities, and the American people will quickly lose confidence in a leader who lacks confidence in himself:

Obama would periodically criticize bankers after embarrassing revelations-at various times calling the bonuses they gave themselves "shameful" and an "outrage"-but, after hearing complaints about his rhetoric from the bankers, he would back off. At a private meeting on March 28 with 13 Wall Street CEOs, the president, his spokesman Robert Gibbs said, "emphasized that Wall Street needs Main Street and Main Street needs Wall Street." And, in his Georgetown speech, Obama returned to his theme of collective responsibility. The recession, Obama said, "was caused by a perfect storm of irresponsibility and poor decision-making that stretched from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street."

Obama's policy followed the same swerving course as his rhetoric. One week, he would favor harsh restrictions on bank and insurance-company bonuses, but, the next week, he would waver; one week, he would support legislation allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce the amount that homeowners threatened with foreclosure owed the banks; the next week, he would fail to protest when bank lobbyists pressured the Senate to kill these provisions. But, more importantly, Obama-in sharp contrast to Roosevelt in his first months-failed to push Congress to immediately enact new financial regulations or even to set up a commission to investigate fraud.

There's much more in Judis' article to help one understand the failure of this President to provide effective leadership, especially in solving our economic woes. One can quibble with Judis' belief that Mr. Obama should have proposed a bigger stimulus than the $800 billion that the administration settled on, but so much else that he says has about it the ring of truth. If his essay were summed up in a single sentence it might be that Mr. Obama is simply unsuited for the position to which he has risen.

It's good that the folks at The New Republic are beginning to see what was plain to anyone who, in the summer of 2008, was thinking with his head about Mr. Obama and not with his heart.

RLC

The Future of Evangelicalism

Timothy Dalrymple at Patheos interviews historian Rodney Stark of Baylor University on the future of evangelicalism. Actually, the discussion winds up being more of a conversation on the future of "mainline" protestantism, but in any event Stark has some interesting things to say.

He challenges, for example, the notion that the decline of mainline protestant churches began in the 1960s, pointing out that the slide began much earlier and was in full swing in the mid-19th century, especially in Europe. The embrace of Enlightenment deism and theological and social liberalism by those who taught in protestant seminaries eventuated in the production of generations of church leaders who no longer believed the traditional doctrines of the church and who had nothing to offer their parishioners.

Stark comments:

If you take (liberal theologian) Paul Tillich's view of God, in which God is essentially something imaginary, then why do you bother to hold a church service in the first place? If there's nothing there to pray to, why do it? The liberal clergy lost their faith, but they continued to hold church.

The second factor was, when the clergy in the mainline denominations decided that they could no longer save souls -- because there were no souls to save -- they decided that they should save the world instead. They switched from religion to politics, and that was a politics of Left-wing radicalism.

It's fine, of course, to be a Left-wing radical. But it was far out of step with the people in the pews. The people in the pews still believed in God, and the people in the pews did not believe that they needed a socialist government next week. Consequently, they stopped sitting in those pews and started going to other pews.

Beginning in the mid-twentieth century the shrinking mainline churches accelerated and simultaneously evangelical churches which promoted a traditional interpretation of the gospel exploded. Even within the contemporary mainline, Stark points out, the healthiest churches are those led by theologically conservative pastors. Unfortunately, their liberal colleagues don't seem to care much about church growth and survival:

One fellow from the United Church of Christ -- which used to be the Congregationalists -- bragged to me, "It doesn't really matter what the members do. We have endowments that we can live on forever." Well, that's an interesting attitude, but it won't work. They will close down. Many have been living off their real estate for years; they close a church and cash in the property. But in this American market, denominations that cannot bring in new members and support will eventually close. That's the way it is.

The fact is that much of mainline protestantism is deistic and deism has little purchase on the hearts of those who are searching for meaning and forgiveness in their lives. It offers nothing for which one needs a church. It gives one no reason for which to rouse oneself from bed on a Sunday morning. Worst of all, perhaps, it's often hostile to the passionate faith of young believers:

Very early in my career, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I had contact with seminary professors as I was conducting studies. Since I was at Berkeley, a notoriously liberal institution, they were sure that I would be very sympathetic to their problem. So time and again I was told that their greatest challenge and their most important instructional duty was, and I'll quote, "to knock the Youth for Christ crud out of our seminary freshmen."

Well, they were pretty successful at it. They weren't successful at much of anything else, but they did manage to undercut the faith of a lot of their students.

On the question of whether evangelicals have resisted the technological innovations of the last two decades Stark proposes a test:

There's a notion amongst intellectuals that conservative religious people are hostile and uncomfortable with technology, while liberals are comfortable with it. But consider this. If you led me blindfolded into a church, and I didn't know whether it was a liberal or conservative church, then you ripped off my blindfold, I could tell you instantly whether it was a liberal or evangelical church.

Are there hymnbooks in racks on the back of the pews? If there are, it's a liberal church. Conservatives got rid of that stuff long ago, because they know we don't sing real well with our chins on our chests, and we spend too much time leafing through the hymn book. Better to project it up on a screen so that we can lift our chins and sing. It's true almost one hundred percent of the time. The notion that conservatives are Luddites is nonsense.

He also has some interesting thoughts on the question of whether the American church will follow European churches into senescence:

People want to talk about the low levels of religion in Europe, but it was always thus. There were almost no rural churches in the 14th and 15th centuries, at a time when almost everybody was rural. So the question is: How could they have gone to church? The answer is: They didn't. And they faced lazy state churches the whole time.

The clergy in Germany have a labor contract that says that if fewer than five people show up, they don't have to hold services. If I were a preacher in Germany, and I got a check even if I didn't hold church, I'd hold such terrible sermons that no one would come. It's a very effective incentive system for having the church close.

Europeans have always marveled at how religious Americans are, but the reason Americans are so religious is because, in an unregulated situation, all kinds of different churches and denominations will appear, with each one appealing for support. The marketplace will shake these out, so that you will slowly evolve a bunch of pretty effective organizations. The net effect of their efforts will be a relatively high level of public religiousness. Most people will get found and get recruited.

About the only misstep in the whole interview, I think, comes when Stark is asked about evangelicals on the left such as Jim Wallis:

I want to say one thing about the Leftist Christian movement in the 1930s. They were at least consistent. They hated charitable giving. They said it's ameliorative, an attempt to reduce the really sharp pangs of inequality and keep this corrupt system going. So they hated it. If there was good government, they thought, there would be no charitable giving. I suspect that there is still, underneath it all, a lot of that even in Wallis' movement.

The only thing I wonder is why he claims to be an evangelical. Except that he gets much more attention. If he did not claim to be evangelical, he would just be another liberal Christian. But this way, he gets to be the media's favorite evangelical. Martin Marty will invite him to the banquet.

I don't think this is at all fair to Wallis, with whom I have my own disagreements. Wallis is a big government liberal, to be sure, but to tie him to those who disdain personal giving is an allegation that shouldn't be made in the absence of supporting evidence, and Stark offers none.

Otherwise it's a good interview, and there's much else of interest beyond what I've recounted here. Check it out.

RLC

Character Matters

My friend Mike wonders why the NFL is aghast at the behavior of some of its stars but not that of others which in some respects seems just as unseemly. He has in mind specifically the recent behavior of Patriots' QB Tom Brady who, according to a Boston Globe article, got his girlfriend pregnant, broke up with her, and was dating someone else by the time the baby was born.

I suppose this is no big deal to execs who pay women to gyrate mindlessly on the sidelines while wearing next to nothing, but it should be. These people profess to being appalled, as Mike points out, by the abuse to which Michael Vick subjected animals and by the rough treatment to which Ben Roethlisberger subjected young women, but it's also abusive to children to grow up without their biological father present on a daily basis in the home. The fact that such arrangements have become common in American society over the last forty years does nothing to meliorate the harm done to kids by fathers who don't want to take responsibility for their development.

What Brady did violates no law so his is not an offense in the same category as those of Vick or Roethlisberger, of course, but it's very sad that he chose to end his relationship with his actress girlfriend once the two of them had conceived a child. Maybe the NFL poohbahs think that the personal lives of their players, as long as they don't commit any felonies, are none of the league's business, but if they're concerned about the NFL's image then they might encourage a higher level of character and responsibility among their stars.

At the very least, they could stop insulting us by putting women on the sidelines whose only apparent purpose is to promote the sexualization of the sport.

RLC

To Build or Not to Build

Two Muslims, Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah, have written a piece for the Ottawa Citizen in which they question both the need for a mosque near the WTC and the sincerity of those who seek to build it. Raza and Fatah sit on the board of the Muslim Canadian Congress and both have authored books. Raza is the author of Their Jihad ... Not my Jihad, and Fatah wrote The Jew is Not My Enemy, to be released in the fall.

Among the points the pair make in their column are these:

New York currently boasts at least 30 mosques so it's not as if there is pressing need to find space for worshippers. The fact is we Muslims know the idea behind the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation to thumb our noses at the infidel. The proposal has been made in bad faith and in Islamic parlance such an act is referred to as "Fitna," meaning "mischief-making" which is clearly forbidden in the Koran.

The Koran commands Muslims to, "Be considerate when you debate with the People of the Book" -- i.e., Jews and Christians. Building an exclusive place of worship for Muslims at the place where Muslims killed thousands of New Yorkers is not being considerate or sensitive, it is undoubtedly an act of "fitna."

Do they not understand that building a mosque at Ground Zero is equivalent to permitting a Serbian Orthodox church near the killing fields of Srebrenica where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered?

As for those teary-eyed, bleeding-heart liberals such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and much of the media, who are blind to the Islamist agenda in North America, we understand their goodwill.

Unfortunately for us, their stand is based on ignorance and guilt, and they will never in their lives have to face the tyranny of Islamism that targets, kills and maims Muslims worldwide, and is using liberalism itself to destroy liberal secular democratic societies from within.

There's much more on this controversial issue in the column. Give it a look.

I myself have wondered why it is that people like Mayor Bloomberg and a number of liberal commentators seem to think that opposition to the mosque is a symptom of Islamophobia which, as Americans, is beneath us. What they seem to be missing is not whether Muslims have the legal right to build their worship centers, the question is why they would want to do so on this particular spot, a site close enough to the WTC that debris from the airplane crashed through the roof of the building that currently stands on it.

When the Israelis insisted upon their right to build housing in Arab East Jerusalem last year liberals, including President Obama, were outraged because, even though the Israelis had the right to do it, they were being terribly insensitive and provocative, it was said, to go ahead and do it.

Do some liberals actually believe that people need be sensitive to the feelings of others only when the others are Arab Muslims? If the others are the families of firefighters, policemen and capitalist office workers, then is sensitivity no longer such a big deal?

RLC

The Enduring Question

The Philosopher's Magazine is surveying philosophers' opinions on the 50 best ideas of the 21st century. John Cottingham nominates as #9 the renewed interest among philosophers in trying to provide a cogent answer to the question whether life, or anything else for that matter, can have any real meaning or purpose in the absence of God. Cottingham writes:

The current intellectual landscape is exciting because many philosophers are finally, more than a hundred years after Nietzsche and Darwin, seriously addressing the challenge these two giants posed for our human self-understanding. Essentially that challenge is whether we can accept that all our values are merely the result of a contingent chain of events - the series of cosmic accidents and evolutionary pressures that shaped us. In place of the traditional religious idea that our deepest aspirations reflect the source of goodness that gives ultimate value and purpose to human life, the Nietzschean and Darwinian framework concludes that we have to find meaning and value for ourselves. In a godless universe, there are no "eternal" or "ultimate" values, merely whatever temporary goods we can secure from the projects we decide to pursue.

It's perhaps no accident that, against this background, the "God question" is also back on the agenda. Philosophers, to be sure, have always discussed arguments for or against God's existence, but the militancy of the so-called "new atheists" has brought religion to the foreground of debate, not just as a series of abstract academic puzzles, but as a question that lies at the centre of our human search for meaning and value. This makes philosophy more interesting, more connected to the wider concerns of ordinary thinking people, than it has been for some time.

This question does indeed deserve a lot more attention than it often receives. Many nontheists simply assume that life is full of meaning and that they don't need God to confer that meaning. Yet when asked in what sense life can be meaningful if ultimately nothing awaits us but nothingness, both as individuals and as a species, their answers seem less than satisfying.

It's true that in the best of cases (which only a relative few get to experience) we can manage to put our eventual fate out of our minds and occupy ourselves with the projects that fill our days - raising a family, working a job, learning, creating - but when we stop and step back from this activity and ask ourselves what's the point of it all, we realize that there is no point. We realize that our lives are sisyphean and most people just don't want to face up to that unpleasant reality. They avoid the existential pain of the answer by refusing to ever confront the question.

I say that only a relative few get to experience the best case scenario because for most people alive today, or who have ever lived, life has been nasty, brutish and short. Most people in the world have no work to speak of or their work is mind-numbingly tedious. Most people never create anything that lasts. Human life is as ephemeral as the light of a firefly. We're born, we struggle, we suffer, and we die, often due to some meaningless accident, illness, or crime. What's the point?

Even for the lucky few who are able to live a life of relative comfort and productivity the same question lurks in the interstices of their awareness. A man builds a big corporation or a housing development. He drives a nice car, takes nice vacations, eats in nice restaurants and then dies. What's the point? What does it matter that he built houses or made money or wrote books when his life is extinguished?

Perhaps the point is to love others and to have rich relationships, but even if one succeeds in this - and many don't - what do these things mean when everyone we've loved is dead?

I sometimes ask my students to tell me something, anything, about their great great grandparents. Most of them can't. They know nothing about them. It's as if their ancestors were anonymous, as if they never lived. Then I suggest that someday someone might ask their great great grandchildren to say something about their great great grandparents, i.e. my students, and those future descendents will just shrug their shoulders like my students did. It will be as if my students never lived. It's that way for all of us.

So here's the take home message. Our lives can only matter, life can only have meaning, if death is not the end, if what we do in this life somehow matters for eternity. If God exists life may have a point and a purpose, even if we don't have any idea what it is. But if He doesn't exist then we can be certain that our life, as Shakespeare puts it, is nothing more than "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing."

If atheism is right then life is an empty exercise in absurdity. If theism is right then life is, or could be, a richly meaningful prelude to eternity.

RLC

Not So Great Expectations

Byron passes along a study published in the AEI Outlook Series which examines the amount of time students in postsecondary schools devote to studying compared to the amount of time their predecessors in the fifties and sixties spent. The results are discouraging if not surprising. Whereas in 1961 students devoted on average about 24 hours a week to his or her books. Today that figure is 14 hours.

The authors of the paper, Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks consider a number of possible reasons for this decline all of which are plausible, but there are a couple of reasons, one they discuss and one they don't, that I think are surely among the top three or four factors exerting the most influence on students' study habits. Babcock and Marks say this about the first of these:

"A nonaggression pact exists between many faculty members and students: Because the former believe that they must spend most of their time doing research and the latter often prefer to pass their time having fun, a mutual nonaggression pact occurs with each side agreeing not to impinge on the other." Consistent with this explanation, recent evidence suggests that student evaluations of instructors (which exploded in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s) create perverse incentives: "easier" instructors receive higher student evaluations, and a given instructor in a given course receives higher ratings during terms when he or she requires less or grades more leniently. Because students appear to put in less effort when grading is more lenient, grade inflation may have contributed to the decline. Perhaps it is not surprising that effort standards have fallen. We are hard-pressed to name any reliable, noninternal reward that instructors receive for maintaining high standards--and the penalties for doing so are clear.

I think the fear of a bad evaluation by students is one of the chief forces causing instructors to be less demanding. It's not just that there's a concern that bad evaluations will affect tenure or pay or teaching assignments, though there is that, but also that many professors want to be popular. There's a certain amount of ego satisfaction in being rated a popular professor and having students want to take your classes and fawn over you. Rigorous profs, however, are often not very popular. They may be respected but given the choice of taking a course with a tough prof and taking the same class with a less demanding instructor, students will take the easier way out. It's human nature, I suppose, but it can lead to a gradual wearing down of the standards of the more difficult prof.

The second possible explanation, one the authors didn't consider in much detail, is that in their rush to fill their classrooms with bodies schools are eager to appear more congenial to more students which means that they accept weaker students who should not be going to school at all. Schools compete with each other for students, they're eager to appear well-disposed to minorities, they diversify their programs offering degrees for non-traditional students who work full-time jobs and have families, all of which exerts powerful pressure to lower standards to accommodate these folk and to enable them to "succeed."

Perhaps a third reason is that the modern work place has evolved to the point where many employers don't much care what an applicant studied in college. They're only concerned that he/she be educable so they can teach and train the person to perform the job they want done. Thus the pressure to excel in school is diminished. One only need do well enough to be awarded a diploma, and in a healthy job market something will be available to the graduate.

Now that the job market is no longer so healthy it'll be interesting to see whether this has an effect on the seriousness with which students approach their academic work.

RLC

Why So Much Hate?

When I was a callow undergrad in the mid-sixties my lefty profs delighted in smearing conservatives as "haters," pointing to Joseph McCarthy and, inexplicably, Barry Goldwater as though the mere mention of these bogeymen proved their point. They also cited bigots like George Wallace and Bull Connor to press home their case, despite the fact that neither of these men were ideological conservatives and both were, in fact, Democrats. Nevertheless, the charge of "hater" stuck and conservatives spent the next thirty years or more trying to shed the odious label their opponents had successfully pinned to their back.

The left is still at it today, of course, trying to stigmatize anyone with whom they disagree as a racist, sexist, or bigot, but the charge lacks the adhesive power it once had. One reason why is that it's obvious to anyone paying attention that the lion's share of hatred in today's political discourse is on the left. Lefties, or at least many of them, seem genetically predisposed to say and think the ugliest things about those who refuse to accept their view of the world and the internet has exposed this malignancy in their character for all the world to see.

In a recent column Dennis Prager reflects on this sickness and offers some reasons for it. He begins his piece with this:

Perhaps the most telling of the recent revelations of the liberal/left Journalist, a list consisting of about 400 major liberal/left journalists, is the depth of their hatred of conservatives. That they would consult with one another in order to protect candidate and then President Obama and in order to hurt Republicans is unfortunate and ugly. But what is jolting is the hatred of conservatives, as exemplified by the e-mail from an NPR reporter expressing her wish to personally see Rush Limbaugh die a painful death -- and the apparent absence of any objection from the other liberal journalists.

Every one of us on the right has seen this hatred. I am not referring to leftist bloggers or to anonymous extreme comments by angry leftists on conservative blogs -- such things exist on the right as well -- but to mainstream elite liberal journalists. There is simply nothing analogous among elite conservative journalists. Yes, nearly all conservatives believe that the left is leading America to ruin. But while there is plenty of conservative anger over this fact, there is little or nothing on the right to match the left's hatred of conservative individuals. Would mainstream conservative journalists e-mail one another wishes to be present while Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi or Michael Moore dies slowly and painfully of a heart attack?

From Karl Marx to today, the Left has always hated people on the Right, not merely differed or been angry with them.

The question is: why?

Prager is not talking about average people who write nasty letters to the paper - although I think what he says applies just as much to them. Rather, he's talking about those in leadership on both the left and right, who shape the opinions of the rest of us. He's talking about journalists, major bloggers, media personalities, etc. With these in mind he goes on to elaborate on three possible answers to his question.

One possibility that Prager doesn't mention, though, is this: Many people on the left, if not most of them, are secularists; most on the right are not. A person who takes his religious faith seriously will be constrained by it to blunt the sharper edges of his political rhetoric. He'll tend to feel guilty if he allows himself to succumb to the temptation to be mean-spirited or hateful. No such constraints exist among secularists, however. Some may find such sentiments personally distasteful and avoid them, but for many secularists what's right is whatever works. If vile speech packs a punch, if it intimidates one's opponent, if it turns public opinion against one's opponent then not only is there nothing wrong with vile speech, but it's actually the right thing to do.

Conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives, are violating their deepest beliefs when they say or act hatefully. They're behaving inconsistently with the faith they profess. Secular liberals, on the other hand, are acting inconsistently with nothing when they allow the temptation to engage in vituperative discourse to get the better of them. They're violating no fundamental principle and have nothing to feel guilty about.

Given that state of affairs which group can be expected to more often indulge the hateful emotions Prager talks about?

RLC

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Conservative psychologist Robin of Berkeley wonders whether her relationship of thirty years with her progressive partner Jon can survive the Obama presidency:

Sometimes I feel really sorry for my mate, Jon. Thirty years ago he hooked up with a Buddhist, pacifist, Leftist vegetarian. Fast forward a few decades, and he now lives with his worst nightmare: a patriotic conservative who attends church and eats burgers with gusto.

So sometimes I feel bad for him. And other times I want to smack him upside the head.

Take, for instance, the time Jon saw me reading Sarah Palin's autobiography, Going Rogue. After he gasped in genuine shock, he said, snidely, "I'm surprised that she could write a book more than a few pages long."

To which I barked back, "At least she didn't have a terrorist like Bill Ayers write her book for her."

Welcome to my world. I hope it's not your world. Because living together as a progressive and a conservative in the leftest of all places is not for the faint of heart.

Robin has more to say about her "odd couple" relationship at the link, but there's a lesson in this for young people. It really is not a good idea to get serious about someone with whose beliefs about important matters, particularly religion and politics, are both strong and diametrically opposite of your own. Couples who think that their love can surmount such difficulties often find that their relationship is much rockier than they would like it to be.

Robin and Jon have reached an accommodation which she summarizes as "Don't ask, don't tell" whereby certain topics important to one or both parties are just not broached. This keeps the peace, but not being able to discuss matters of real significance hollows out a relationship, putting off-limits much that's of greatest importance to one or both persons.

This makes the relationship shallow and causes conversation between the two to trend toward the superficial and frivolous. Charles Dickens addresses this very problem in David Copperfield when he has Annie Strong reflect on David's misbegotten marriage to the simple, child-like Dora by observing that there's no disparity in marriage like unsuitability in intellect and purpose. Unless the two are united in their most serious purposes and interests and are roughly equal in intellect, their union is going to experience a lot of stress, and they will often find themselves, like David and Dora, growing increasingly distant and isolated from each other.

Robin's is a cautionary tale to any young person contemplating a relationship with someone with whom they share little in common. She's evidently making it work, but many people in such circumstances find their relationship becoming more of a business partnership than a friendship.

RLC

No Doubt About it

Suppose you lived in the early 16th century and someone were to tell you that a static earth and a geocentric universe were indisputable facts. The evidence, after all, is overwhelming: A simple observation of the sky shows the heavenly bodies moving across it; the fact that were the earth moving we should feel a strong wind like we do when we're in a convertible automobile; the fact that when you drop an object it hits the ground directly under the point from which it was released and not ahead or behind you as would be expected if the earth moved while the object was falling.

All this was powerful evidence for pre-enlightenment people that the earth was stationary. It seemed undeniable. The idea that the earth stood still seemed as well-established as any fact about nature could be. And yet it was wrong.

Today, we're often told that Darwinian evolution is as well-established as any fact of science could be. Some writers have even gone so far as to claim that it's as certain as gravity. The evidence for it, we're told by Richard Dawkins, for example, is just so plain and overwhelming that "You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution."

More famously (or infamously) Dawkins also declared that "It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)."

But is that true? Is the evidence for evolution, much less naturalistic evolution, that compelling? At his blog, Darwin's God, Cornelius Hunter argues that the evolutionists' claims to certitude are either misleading, silly, or false. When a scientist or philosopher declaims that evolution is the best-attested fact of science, Hunter observes, they're saying something that is more a statement of faith than of fact:

The claim that evolution is a scientific fact simply is not true. Evolution itself may well be true, but we do not know it to be true with the kind of confidence and certainty evolutionists insist on. I do not know what the truth about evolution is, but I do know what our knowledge about evolution is.

When informed skeptics probe evolutionists about this false claim, it is typical for evolutionists to equivocate on evolution. They will say, for instance, that we observe viruses or bacteria adapting, so therefore evolution is a fact. But all the while, when evolutionists claim their idea is a fact, they have been referring to the origin of all the species. That is a very different claim than the mere adaptation of viruses or bacteria.

In other words, the Darwinian wants us to believe that the evidence is overwhelming that all living things have arisen from non-living chemicals and undergone a long process of transformation culminating in the forms of life we see in our world today. When, however, the Darwinian is asked to present the evidence that such a grand process has occurred, when he's asked to justify the statement that there's no doubt that it has occurred, he adduces such things as the variations in the sizes of finch beaks or the multitude of different types of dogs. These are certainly examples of change, but all they prove is that it's possible to have variability around a phenotypic mean. It's evidence of evolution, to be sure, but it's hardly proof of the assertion that finches and dogs themselves evolved from single-celled organisms, just as the stars moving across the sky is evidence, but not proof, that the earth is at the center of the universe.

The Darwinian sites examples of what's called microevolution, i.e. small variations and changes, as proof that macroevolution, i.e. molecules to man evolution, has occurred. This, though, is like arguing that because a child grows two inches a year that when he's sixty he'll be ten feet taller than he is today.

Anyway, read Hunter's entire post at Darwin's God to get a sense of the bait and switch that's often played by the Darwinians who wish to convince the public that macroevolution is an indubitable fact.

RLC

Rational Consensus

Gil Dodgen at Uncommon Descent offers a nice summary of the debate between Intelligent Design advocates and naturalistic evolutionists:

Some people have concluded that the hideously complex, functionally integrated information-processing machinery of the cell - with its error-detection-and-repair algorithms and much more - is best explained by an intelligent cause. But this idea is only held by superstitious religious fanatics who want to destroy science and establish a theocracy.

That's the consensus of "scientists" in the academy.

The other consensus of "scientists" in the academy is that random errors screwing up computer code can account for everything in biology.

Who is thinking logically here?

Naturalists would reply to Dodgen's question, though, that science doesn't admit of non-material, non-physical causes therefore the first alternative is unscientific and ergo irrational. The second alternative, on the other hand, is materialistic and therefore scientific and therefore rational. Thus, it's more "rational" to believe the equivalent of random errors and blind physical forces over time being capable of generating Windows XP than to think that the genetic hardware and software in living things was designed by an intelligent agent.

A big "atta boy" to whomever can point out the logical blunder(s) in this chain of reasoning.

RLC

Immigration Reform

With all the talk of illegal immigration and what to do about it, perhaps it's time once again to recycle what I think is perhaps the most just, most compassionate proposal for dealing with the problem. None of its elements are new but I haven't seen them all combined into a single plan by anyone.

The Left wants amnesty for illegals, presumably because they believe that once granted citizenship they'd vote Democratic. It's hard to believe, after all, that they'd be favoring amnesty if they thought that millions of new voters would register with the Republicans.

The Right wants to send all, or most, illegal aliens back from whence they came, but this seems neither practical nor compassionate, at least not in the case of those illegals who've been here for years.

I think there's a workable compromise between blanket amnesty and mass deportation. It's a plan that offers something for everyone, and I've been surprised that, despite the obviousness of the solution, no one in Washington is promoting something like it.

The proposal involves two stages:

The first stage would be a federal guarantee that a border fence be built and the border secured. This is the sine qua non of any serious immigration reform. There's no point in painting the house while the ceiling is still leaking. Once our borders are impervious to all but the most dauntless and determined, and once this has been duly certified by a trustworthy commission, then the situation of those already here could be addressed, but not until.

After certification, the fate of those already in the country illegally could be addressed in such a way as to avoid the worst elements of amnesty and yet demonstrate compassion for people desperate to make a decent living. To that end, once the border is secure, I believe Congress would find public support for legislation that allows illegals to stay in the country indefinitely as "guest workers" with no penalty if the following provisos were also adopted and enforced:

1) Illegal aliens would be required to apply for a government identification card like the current green card. After a reasonable grace period anyone without proper ID would be subject to deportation. This would be a one-time opportunity so that aliens entering the country surreptitiously in the future would be unable to legally acquire a card. Anyone in possession of a green card would be free to remain in the country indefinitely contingent upon continued good behavior.

2) However, no one who had entered the country illegally would at any time be eligible for citizenship (unless they leave the country and reapply through proper channels). Nor would they be entitled to the benefits of citizens. They would not be eligible to vote, nor to receive food stamps, unemployment compensation, subsidized housing, AFDC, earned income tax credits, social security, Medicare, etc. They would have limited access to taxpayer largesse, although churches and other charitable organizations would be free to render whatever assistance they wish. Whatever taxes the workers pay would be part of the price of living and working here.

3) Their children, born on our soil, would no longer be granted automatic citizenship (This would, unfortunately, require a constitutional amendment), though they could attend public schools. Moreover, these children would become eligible for citizenship at age eighteen provided they graduate from high school, or earn a GED, or serve in the military.

4) There would be no "chain" immigration. Those who entered illegally would not be permitted to bring their families here. If they wish to see their loved ones they should return home.

5) Any criminal activity, past or future, would be sufficient cause for immediate deportation, as would any serious infraction of the motor vehicle code.

6) There would be no penalty for businesses which employ guest workers, and these workers would be free to seek employment anywhere they can find it. Neither the workers nor their employers would have to live in fear of immigration authorities.

This is just an outline, of course, and there are details to be worked out, but it's both simpler and fairer than other proposals that have been bandied about. Those who have followed the rules for citizenship wouldn't be leap-frogged by those who didn't, and illegals who have proper ID would benefit by being able to work without fear. The long-term cost to taxpayers of illegal immigration would be considerably reduced, immigration officials could concentrate on keeping the border secure rather than harassing employers, trouble-makers among the immigrant population would be deported, and American businesses would not be responsible for background investigations of job applicants. It would also provide incentive for American youngsters to get an education and acquire skills so they don't have to compete for jobs with unskilled immigrants willing to work for lower wages. The one group that would "lose" would be the politicians who wish to pad their party's voter rolls. They'd be out of luck.

Of course, this proposal won't satisfy those who insist that we send all illegals packing, nor will it please those who think the requirements for letting them stay are too stringent, but it seems a more simple, practical, just, and humane solution to the problem than either amnesty or mass deportation.

To be sure, it entails a kind of amnesty, but it doesn't reward illegals with the benefits of citizenship as previous attempts at immigration "reform" would have. The "amnesty" is contingent upon first stopping the flow of illegals across the border and also upon immigrants keeping themselves out of trouble while they're here.

If, however, these conditions for being allowed to work in this country sound too onerous, if illegal immigrants conclude they could do better elsewhere, they would, of course, be free to leave.

RLC

Liberal Fascism

Rachel Duke at the Washington Times relates the story of a young grad student named Jennifer Keeton, a story the main lineaments of which have become increasingly common over the last decade or so:

Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund have sued Augusta State University in Georgia on behalf of a counseling student who claims the university told her to deny her Christian beliefs in order to graduate.

Jennifer Keeton, 24, who is pursuing a master's degree in counseling, said she was ordered to undergo a re-education plan that requires her to attend "diversity sensitivity training," complete additional remedial reading and write papers to describe their effects on her beliefs, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The ultimatum: Complete this re-education plan or be expelled from ASU's Counselor Education Program.

ASU said Miss Keeton's conduct violates the code of ethics to which counselors and counselors in training are required to adhere, including those of the American Counseling Association and the American School Counselor Association.

"It's hard to conceive of a more blatant violation of her right to freedom of speech and her freedom of conscience," said David French, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative-leaning group that defends religious freedom. "This type of leftist zero-tolerance policy is in place at far too many universities, and it must stop."

Ms Duke goes on to remind us in her article of a similar case:

Miss Keeton's case is one of several nationwide in which counseling students have been dismissed from programs or threatened with expulsion because of their Christian beliefs.

One case involves counseling student Julea Ward, who was dismissed from Eastern Michigan University's School of Counseling after she refused to change her beliefs. After a client asked Miss Ward for advice on a same-sex relationship, she asked her adviser on how to help her client because, she said, she couldn't morally affirm such relationships. Miss Ward ultimately referred her client to another counselor. The university dismissed Miss Ward from the program in March 2009. The case is now being litigated in federal court.

In Miss Keeton's case, ASU has threatened expulsion because of the Christian ethical convictions she shares in and out of the classroom, given the proper context, on human sexuality and gender identity.

The good progressive folks who run these universities talk endlessly about tolerance, diversity, and the freedom to believe what one chooses, but they don't mean a word of it. They themselves are narrow-minded bigots who wish to impose a strict uniformity and conformity of thought on their students. So far from aspiring to cultivate a student body comprised of individuals who can think for themselves, their real objective is to compel their students to think the way they tell them to think.

As a friend of mine put it, to modern academics diversity is people who look different and all think the same.

RLC

Dumb Rule

Jason links us to an essay by R.R. Reno who writes at First Things about the epistemological view called evidentialism:

For a long time as a young teacher, I believed the danger of prostituting their minds by believing falsehoods was the preeminent, or even singular, intellectual danger my students faced. So I challenged them and tried to teach them always to be self-critical, questioning, skeptical. What are your assumptions? How can you defend your position? Where's your evidence? Why do you believe that?

I thought I was helping my students by training them to think critically. And no doubt I was. However, reading John Henry Newman has helped me see another danger, perhaps a graver one: to be so afraid of being wrong that we fail to believe as true that which is true. He worried about the modern tendency to make a god of critical reason, as if avoiding error, rather than finding truth, were the great goal of life.

If we fear error too much, and thus overvalue critical reason, we will develop a mind active and able in doubt but untrained to move toward belief, a mentality too quick to find reasons not to nurture convictions.

In my experience, although the modern university is full of trite, politically correct pieties, for the most part its educational culture is cautious to a fault. Students are trained-I was trained-to believe as little as possible so that the mind can be spared the ignominy of error. The consequences: an impoverished intellectual life. The contemporary mind very often lives on a starvation diet of small, inconsequential truths, because those are the only points on which we can be sure we're avoiding error.

We can worry about getting on the wrong train in the foreign train station whose signs we can't read. But we should also worry about dithering in the station too long and thus failing to get on the right train. We could starve to death in that station if we never leave.

If we see this danger - the danger of truths lost, insights missed, convictions never formed - then the complexion of intellectual inquiry changes, and the burdens of proof shift. We begin to cherish books and teachers and friends who push us and romance us with the possibilities of truth.

The life of the mind turns into an adventure. Errors risked seem worthy gambles for the sake of the rich reward of engrossing, life-commanding truths that are only accessible to a mind passionate with the intimacy of conviction rather than coldly can critically distant.

It's hard to believe, but it's doubtless the case that a century after American philosopher William James' devastating rebuttal to the evidentialism of William Clifford university academics still cling to Clifford's timid approach to belief.

Clifford was famous, it may be recalled, for his maxim that "it is wrong always and everywhere, for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Clifford had in mind religious belief, particularly belief in God. In practice evidentialism requires a perpetual suspension of belief even on matters, as James pointed out, when one is confronted with a forced and momentous decision.

James wrote that "this command that we should put a stopper on our hearts, instincts, and courage, and wait - acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true - till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough - this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave."

In the same essay James delivers one of my very favorite philosophical quotes. It's a quote that applies not only to religious skeptics like Clifford, but also to contemporary materialists who wish to keep science free of any taint of any hypothesis that may point beyond matter as the ultimate existent. James says:

"Any rule of thinking that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if these kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

A science, for example, whose methodological rules prevent us a priori from acknowledging the existence of a transcendent intelligence, should such an intelligence really exist and should much of the empirical evidence point to it's existence, is exactly the sort of irrational rule James had in mind.

The goal of any intellectual pursuit should be to discover truth, not to discover the most probable hypothesis consistent with a naturalistic or materialistic worldview.

RLC

Selective Outrage

Political cartoonist Mike Lester discerns a smidgeon of hypocrisy among liberals who fawn over the opinions of Muslims, while finding the same sentiments outrageous should they be held by non-Muslims:

The fact is that in many Muslim countries being gay is indeed a capital offense, as these two unfortunate young Iranians discovered the hard way a couple of years back:

Among many of the devotees of the Prophet there's no religious tolerance, no separation of church and state, gays are executed, and women are treated as property (and brutally dispatched should they displease their families), but it's hard to find much condemnation of any of this among American progressives.
As Lester's cartoon suggests, liberals are courageous defenders of the rights of women and gays as long as there's no risk involved in being so. They bring to mind the vociferous opposition by women's groups to the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in the early nineties. Their dudgeon was ostensibly the result of some putatively inappropriate behavior that occured in the vicinity of the chaste Anita Hill. These same very principled advocates for exploited women, however, suddenly went on vacation when Bill Clinton and other prominent Democrats were accused of far worse than anything alleged against Thomas.

It's not hard to understand why it is hard to take such people seriously.
RLC

Martyrs

Here's a brief piece on one of the ten aid workers, most of whom were Christians, murdered by the Islamist savages in Afghanistan for the "crime" of preaching Christianity. Whether Dr. Little actually, verbally, preached, I don't know, but whether his life, and those of his colleagues, reflected the Gospel I have no doubt:

Tom Little, one of 10 people killed by militants in northern Afghanistan, had spent more than 30 years working in the country, often in harsh and remote areas.

Dr. Little, a senior opthamologist from Delmar, New York, led the team of nurses, doctors and logistics personnel murdered in an attack. The Taliban yesterday claimed responsibility.

He had already been expelled from the country by the Taliban in August 2001, after eight Christian Aid workers were arrested for allegedly trying to convert Afghans to Christianity. He returned with the Christian organisation, International Association Mission (IAM), soon after the Taliban was toppled in November 2001 by US and allied forces.

As a senior member of IAM working with the Noor Eye Institute, Dr. Little trained the former Afghan foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, who yesterday paid tribute: "Dr. Little travelled the length and breadth of Afghanistan, treating thousands and thousands of Afghans."

He supervised eye hospitals in Kabul, Kandahar and Herat, as well as smaller clinics in three towns. IAM has worked in Afghanistan since 1966, longer than any other NGO, and treats around a quarter of a million Afghans every year.

His team trekked, on foot and on horseback, from village to village over two weeks in Nuristan Province, providing specialist eye treatment and healthcare to around 400 people before last week's attack, according to IAM's director, Dirk Frans.

He lost contact with Dr Little last Wednesday, but his death and those of the others were not reported until Friday, when an Afghan member of the team who survived the ambush managed to call. The Taliban yesterday claimed it had shot the "foreigners" because they were "spying for Americans" and "preaching Christianity".

AOL News offers details on some of Dr. Little's colleagues and the kind of people they were:

Dan Terry, 64, was another long Afghan veteran. A fluent Dari language speaker like his friend Little, Terry first came to Afghanistan in 1971 and returned to live here in 1980 with his wife, rearing three daughters while working with impoverished ethnic groups.

"He was a large, lumbering man - very simply a joyful man," said his longtime friend Michael Semple, a former European Union official in Kabul. "He had no pretensions, lots of humility."

In a Web posting, a friend, Kate Clark, recalled that in 2000, Terry was hauled off to jail by the Taliban for overstaying a visa.

"He went off good-naturedly, seeing it as a rare chance to have the time to learn Pashto," Clark wrote on a website. "He was released from prison after a couple of weeks and then re-arrested after the authorities decided he had not served enough days. He arrived back to the prison to cheers from his fellow inmates, who were now newly found friends."

Dr. Thomas Grams, 51, quit his dental practice in Durango, Colorado, four years ago to work full-time giving poor children free dental care in Afghanistan and Nepal, said Katy Shaw of Global Dental Relief, a group based in Denver that sends teams of dentists around the globe.

Grams' twin brother, Tim, said his brother wasn't trying to spread religious views.

"He knew the laws, he knew the religion. He respected them. He was not trying to convert anybody," Tim Grams said, holding back tears in a telephone call from Anchorage, Alaska. "His goal was to provide dental care and help people."

Tim Grams said his brother started traveling with relief organizations to Afghanistan, Nepal, Guatemala and India in the early part of the decade. After he sold his practice, he started going several months at a time.

Khris Nedam, head of a charity called Kids 4 Afghan Kids that builds schools and wells, said Grams and the others were "serving the least for all the right reasons."

"The kids had never seen toothbrushes, and Tom brought thousands of them," Nedam said Sunday. "He trained them how to brush their teeth, and you should've seen the way they smiled after they learned to brush their teeth."

Nedam said the medical group had never talked of religion with Afghans.

"Their mission was humanitarian, and they went there to help people," said Nedam, a third-grade teacher from Livonia, Michigan.

Dr. Karen Woo, 36, the lone Briton among the dead, gave up her job with a private clinic in London to work in Afghanistan. She was planning to leave in a few weeks to get married, friends said.

"Her motivation was purely humanitarian. She was a humanist and had no religious or political agenda," her family said in a statement.

Another victim, Glen Lapp, 40, a trained nurse from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had come to Afghanistan in 2008 for a limited assignment but decided to stay, serving as an executive assistant at IAM and manager of its provincial eye care program, according to the Mennonite Central Committee, a relief group based in Akron, Pennsylvania.

"Where I was, the main thing that expats can do is to be a presence in the country," Lapp wrote in a recent report to the Mennonite group. "... Treating people with respect and with love."

Another victim, Cheryl Beckett, the 32-year-old daughter of a Knoxville, Tennessee, pastor, had spent six years in Afghanistan and specialized in nutritional gardening and mother-child health, her family said. Beckett, who was her high school valedictorian at a Cincinnati-area high school and held a biology degree, had also spent time doing work in Honduras, Mexico, Kenya and Zimbabwe.

"Cheryl ... denied herself many freedoms in order to abide by Afghan law and custom," her family said.

The group's attackers, her family said, "should feel the utter shame and disgust that humanity feels for them."

These amazing people gave their lives to the cause of making others' lives better. The church is full of such incredible individuals even though you wouldn't know it from reading the ugly and ignorant tirades of people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. It's no wonder the Taliban feared them. There's little in the Muslim faith that compares in attractiveness to the self-emptying love they manifested every day, and the beauty of the faith that animates such men and women must be a powerful allure to the people they serve, particularly in contrast to the fear, violence, and oppression that the Islamists offer as an alternative.

Perhaps their murderers were correct, though, in one respect. These aid workers were indeed "preaching" Christianity. St. Francis famously enjoined believers to preach the Gospel without ceasing .... and to sometimes even use words. That appears to be exactly what they were doing. For the sake of the world may God continue to produce people like them.

RLC

Millenials

Byron forwards us an interesting article from Time magazine which discusses the attitudes of the demographic known as the "millenials." According to Time writer Nancy Gibbs:

Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them. The members of the millennial generation, ages 18 to 29, are so close to their parents that college students typically check in about 10 times a week, and they are all Facebook friends. Kids and parents dress alike, listen to the same music and fight less than previous generations, and millennials assert that older people's moral values are generally superior to their own.

Yet even more young people perceive a gap. According to a recently released Pew Research Center report, 79% of millennials say there is a major difference in the point of view of younger and older people today. Young Americans are now more educated, more diverse, more optimistic and less likely to have a job than previous generations. But it is in their use of technology that millennials see the greatest difference, starting perhaps with the fact that 83% of them sleep with their cell phones. Change now comes so strong and fast that it pulls apart even those who wish to hang together--and the future belongs to the strong of thumb.

In some respects the millennials emerge as radically conventional. Asked about their life goals, 52% say being a good parent is most important to them, followed by having a successful marriage; 59% think that the trend of more single women having children is bad for society. While more tolerant than older generations, they are still more likely to disapprove of than support the trend of unmarried couples living together. While they're more politically progressive than their elders, you could argue that their strong support for gay marriage and interracial marriage reflects their desire to extend traditional institutions as widely as possible.

They are also unconventionally conventional. They are, for example, the least officially religious of any modern generation, and fully 1 in 4 has no religious affiliation at all. On the other hand, they are just as spiritual, just as likely to believe in miracles and hell and angels as earlier generations were. They pray about as much as their elders did when they were young--all of which suggests that they have not lost faith in God, only in the institutions that claim to speak for him.

I don't know what to make of all this or the other findings reported by Gibbs, but it's interesting that there's not much distance between the beliefs and values of the young and those of their elders. As I reflect upon that fact I have to say that I really don't know whether that's good or bad.

RLC

Michelle Antoinette

The price tag for Michelle and Sasha Obama's lavish bit of self-indulgence in Spain tops out at $375,000 according to an article in Daily Mail U.K. How much of that will be paid by you and me is unknown, but certainly the plane and secret service expenses will. Moreover, this is Michelle's eighth taxpayer subsidized vacation this summer.

I'm waiting for the left, which would be having a cow had Nancy Reagan or Laura Bush done something like this, to point out the tacky unseemliness of the First Lady's extravagance while so many in this country are hurting. It seems as if the Obamas, who love to spend other people's money on galas and vacations, are tone deaf to how tawdry this all looks to the American people (Go to the link for details and photos of the opulence to which Ms Obama has treated herself.).

As another example of their dissipation, we learn that Mr. Obama employed Marine One, his personal helicopter, to transport him six miles across town to give a speech on the economy the other day. And he has the chutzpah to lecture us about the need to conserve energy and buy electric cars?

Do liberals no longer identify with the common people? Do they no longer empathize with the unemployed family, the family on welfare? I wonder how much empathy Michelle was feeling gliding around Spain with her huge entourage. The Obamas pay lip service to their concern for hurting Americans, but when they conduct themselves like third world oligarchs luxuriating in the perquisites of power they make themselves look like common hypocrites.

It's bad enough that the Obamas are bent on transferring wealth from those who pay taxes to those who don't, but it's quite outrageous that they also seem bent on transferring wealth from those who work to earn it to those like themselves who think they're entitled to it.

As for the beleaguered Americans who must write the checks for the Obamas' voluptuous lifestyle while their homes are in foreclosure and their jobs are drying up - let them eat cake.

RLC

No Rational Basis

Of all the hosts on cable television the worst, in my opinion, is Chris Matthews. Some hosts are pompous and obnoxious (Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly). Some of them are rude (same list). Some of them, despite being intelligent (Keith Olbermann, Bill O'Reilly), seem on occasion, to be astonishingly dim. Chris Matthews fits all three categories - pomposity, rudeness, dimness - and exceeds all his colleagues by comfortable margins in the last two.
I was watching his show, called Hardball, last night (I can only tolerate it for brief periods) as Matthews was grilling a woman about the decision by federal judge Vaughn Walker to strike down California's Proposition 8, a ballot referendum banning gay marriage, which had been approved by a large majority of Californians.
Matthews' interview technique, on this occasion as on so many others, was to ask a question and then, as soon as the guest began her answer, smother the reply with another question, and then another, so that the audience never got to hear a coherent response. The show is exceedingly unenlightening, perhaps deliberately so, and I really can't understand why any intelligent person would watch it regularly. Matthews seems to be psychologically incapable of calm, reasoned discussion with someone with whom he disagrees, and he makes himself look the fool as a result.
The question that Matthews preened himself for badgering the woman with last night was what harm she thought same-sex marriage does and why anyone should feel threatened by it. The answer, of course, is simple, but even if the guest had proffered it, which I don't think she did (it was hard to tell), Matthews really wasn't interested in hearing an answer. He simply wanted to bully the woman and try to make her look foolish and inept to his audience which he must think possesses an average IQ somewhere around room temperature.
Anyone who values marriage and thinks it critical for the health of a society may with justification see same-sex marriage as a threat because it's a giant step toward the collapse of that institution. Here's why: When the sex of the people in a marriage, which had for two thousand years been defined as the union of one man and one woman, is no longer legally enforceable then there's no longer any logical justification for continuing to enforce the number of people in the union. If marriage is a union of people of any sex why not of any number? Indeed, the logic can, and almost certainly will, be taken a step further and the courts will eventually find they have no non-arbitrary justification for thinking that a marriage has to involve people at all. Why not, in an age of animal rights, extend marital rights to animals? Why not permit "blended" marriages between humans and their beloved pets?
Liberals, of course, scoff at the notion that allowing gays to marry would open the door for polyamory or the legalization of marrying one's chimpanzee (or horse, as in Caligula's case), but this simply shows either their disingenuousness or their naivete. People will do whatever they can do. They'll push every envelope they can push, if for no other reason than to achieve notoriety, and the courts will have forfeited the only bulwark that could've prevented the complete disintegration of marriage, i.e. the millenia-old definition of marriage as a union of one man and one woman.
Once that's gone, everything becomes arbitrary. There's no place on the slippery slope to grab a handhold, and the matter of the legal status of marriage will be settled by the whim of whoever is sitting on the federal bench. At that point marriage will collapse into meaninglessness. It'll become whatever people want it to be, and the left will have achieved a goal they've striven for ever since Marx - the abolition of the traditional family and the atomization of society.
It seems a fairly obvious argument, one for which I've never heard a satisfactory rebuttal, or any rebuttal for that matter, other than the rather tepid reply that slippery slope arguments don't amount to a proof. The premise is that no one actually knows whether same sex marriage will open wide the door for the sorts of perversities mentioned above. That's technically true, of course, but the fact is that there'll be nothing in either logic or social momentum to prevent such a denouement. It will all come down to some judge's personal taste and preference, a reality which should give us all pause.
Judge Walker stated in his opinion that there's "no rational basis" for restricting marriage to heterosexuals. I think this is quite mistaken, as I've just argued, but it illustrates what we can now expect in the future. The next judge could easily rule that, similarly, there's "no rational basis" for restricting marriage to just two people, or people unrelated to each other, or people of a particular age, or people at all.
It'd be nice if talk show hosts like Matthews were sincerely interested in considering the actual arguments and the logical precedents being laid down by Judge Walker's ruling. It'd be nice if Matthews hosted a show that clarified these issues for his audience rather than merely using his position as a platform to verbally pummel his guests, obfuscate the issues, and keep everyone in the dark as to the trajectory we're putting ourselves on.

RLC

Good Analogy

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is taking a lot of heat for the crime of exercising common sense on a political issue. The issue, of course, is illegal immigration, and Gov. Brewer is insisting, contra the wishes of the Obama administration, that the law against it be enforced. This defiance of liberal political correctness is too much for most of her ideological opponents to bear, and as a result the left has encircled Brewer, tomahawks aloft, whooping and grunting in the characteristic fashion of primitives about to sacrifice a prisoner of war. One of Gov. Brewer's antagonists is Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver who recently demonstrated that running a basketball team does not require the same intellectual skills as running a state.

In response to Sarver's criticism of the Arizona law Governor Brewer issued this statement:

"What if the owners of the Suns discovered that hordes of people were sneaking into games without paying? What if they had a good idea who the gate-crashers are, but the ushers and security personnel were not allowed to ask these folks to produce their ticket stubs, thus non-paying attendees couldn't be ejected. Furthermore, what if Suns' ownership was expected to provide those who sneaked in with complimentary eats and drink? And what if, on those days when a gate-crasher became ill or injured, the Suns had to provide free medical care and shelter?"

This is, of course, a good analogy to what is happening along our southern border. The same logic may be applied in other cases, too. Why is there a fence around the White House and what would happen to someone who tried to climb it? Why do most people, including most liberals, lock the doors of their homes? What would they do if they came home and found an intruder sitting at their kitchen table availing himself of refrigerator, toilet and television? What if the intruder insisted not only on staying but on bringing his family to enjoy the benefits and screamed in protest if the homeowner objected? How are these situations any different than what's happening on our southern border?

Questions like these, of course, never get answered by those who oppose the Arizona law because even they can see where the answers lead. Instead, people like Sarver try, in effect, to convince us that, even though he would never dream of doing so himself, other people should allow the less fortunate into their arenas without tickets and that it's just unAmerican and churlish to deny them the opportunity to see a game.

As Governor Brewer's rejoinder suggests, many of the arguments against the Arizona law are either stupid or hypocritical. Or both.

RLC

Secularism's Debt

John Steinrucken is an atheist which makes his excellent column at American Thinker a remarkable feat of intellectual objectivity and detachment. Steinrucken argues, correctly in my view, that the future viability of a free society is contingent upon the vitality of the Judeo-Christian belief system. Indeed, the title of Steinrucken's essay is Secularism's Ongoing Debt to Christianity. Here's his lede:

Rational thought may provide better answers to many of life's riddles than does faith alone. However, it is rational to conclude that religious faith has made possible the advancement of Western civilization. That is, the glue that has held Western civilization together over the centuries is the Judeo-Christian tradition. To the extent that the West loses its religious faith in favor of non-judgmental secularism, then to the same extent, it loses that which holds all else together.

Succinctly put, Western civilization's survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends upon the perdurance in our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The heart of his argument is a series of rhetorical questions the answers to which illuminate the crucial importance in modern society of a religious ground for the morals and values which the people embrace:

Although I am a secularist (atheist, if you will), I accept that the great majority of people would be morally and spiritually lost without religion. Can anyone seriously argue that crime and debauchery are not held in check by religion? Is it not comforting to live in a community where the rule of law and fairness are respected? Would such be likely if Christianity were not there to provide a moral compass to the great majority? Do we secularists not benefit out of all proportion from a morally responsible society?

An orderly society is dependent on a generally accepted morality. There can be no such morality without religion.

Those who doubt the effect of religion on morality should seriously ask the question: Just what are the immutable moral laws of secularism? Be prepared to answer, if you are honest, that such laws simply do not exist! The best answer we can ever hear from secularists to this question is a hodgepodge of strained relativist talk of situational ethics. They can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion.

I couldn't help wondering, though, as I read this essay, why Steinrucken remains an atheist. If he's really convinced that God doesn't exist then his support for religion as a moral foundation is, at bottom, an endorsement of a Platonic "Noble Lie," a falsehood that he believes should be foisted upon the masses in order to get them to behave well.

As much as I appreciate the case he constructs and the fine spirit in which he presents it, I cannot agree with him that religion should be honored and encouraged for its practical value irregardless of its truth. A society built upon a lie, after all, is doomed to fail once the people recognize the lie. Steinrucken is right in his analysis of the importance of Christianity for society, but he's mistaken about it's truth. Perhaps, like many atheists before him, he'll soon rectify his error and embrace the truth of Christianity as well as its practical value.

Anyway, the piece deserves to be read in its entirety. There's much more to it and it's all quite good.

RLC