More on King's Letter

In an earlier post I encouraged readers to spend some time on this Martin Luther King day reading his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written to fellow clergymen who had criticized him for leading disruptive, non-violent demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama in the early sixties. In case you don't have time to read the whole thing, I offer here one of my favorite sections of the letter written on April 16th, 1963:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

What King wrote may seem to many of us today to be simple common sense, but to people in the south in the 1960s the argument he laid out in the letter was like an earthquake shaking their conscience and rousing them from an injustice that was all around them but of which many were so habituated that they were insensible to it.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

For sheer rhetorical power Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech is hard to beat, but perhaps his best polemical effort was his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. In terms of sheer moral force MLK's "Letter" is one of the great documents in American history.

On this day when we commemorate his life, It might be appropriate to urge our readers to invest some time reading his message, which he wrote to his fellow clergymen to explain why he, himself a clergyman, was engaged in civil disobedience. It will doubtless do more to help us understand this man than anything else we could do in ten or fifteen minutes.

A copy of the letter can be found here.

I'm sure you'll agree that it was worth your time to read.

American Witch

Jared Loughner is an atheist, truther, and doper. He liked movies, philosophy, and English class. So what was the influence on him that pushed him to murder? Was it his atheism, a trait almost all nihilistic killers share in common? Was it his paranoia, a trait many truthers share in common? Was it the violent movies he watched with his friends?

To listen to Chris Matthews and a host of other media talkers, it was evidently none of these. Rather, it was a graphic that Sarah Palin used that showed crosshairs superimposed on congressional districts targeted for Republican victory. Or it was Michelle Bachman's call for opponents of certain legislative proposals to be "armed and dangerous", i.e. armed with information and dangerous adversaries in the arena of ideas.

This is a wonderful example of what logicians call the fallacy of False Cause: Because A precedes B therefore A must be the cause of B. Every time you breath someone in China dies, therefore your breathing must be the cause of their deaths. It's a pretty dumb argument, but it's what we've heard from liberals over and over again since the shootings a week ago.

There's no evidence that Loughner had ever even heard of Sarah Palin, no evidence that our political discourse was even on his radar screen, but no matter. Palin's "violent" imagery must have played a role in Loughner's demented crime, because, well, we hate Sarah Palin, we need to stop Sarah Palin, so like Orwell's character Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984, everything bad that happens must be blamed on Sarah Palin.

If Loughner had killed his victims two years ago the media talkers and scribblers would be scrambling to outdo each other in coming up with reasons why it was George Bush's fault, but Bush is no longer a threat and Palin is so she can expect to excoriated for anything bad that happens in the nation and perhaps even in the world. It's doubtless just a matter of time before some left-wing website comes up with a way to blame her for the devastating floods they're having in Australia.

I suggested in a post yesterday that Palin is demonized because ideologues bereft of compelling ideas need a devil to hold up to their minions like a pinata for them to take their frustrations out upon. But there's another possibility. Perhaps, buried in our collective psyche is an atavistic fear of powerful women that impels the mob to impute devilish powers to certain of them.

After all, our media is doing to Palin something very similar to what people in the Middle Ages did with women they despised - they accused them of being witches and burned them at the stake. If a woman had cross words with a man and misfortune subsequently befell the man he might allege that she had cast a curse upon him, and if the poor woman couldn't prove that she did no such thing, off to the stake she would go. The contemporary secular left is still living in the Middle Ages. Their logic is much the same as that of those who once accused women of witchcraft. Palin is guilty until proven innocent.

Some on the left have even admitted that there's no evidence that Loughner was aware of anything Palin did or said, but she's held responsible nonetheless for his deed because she has created a climate of "hatred and violence". No one can offer a plausible account of how she has done this, exactly, nor can they show that Loughner was somehow influenced by the alleged climate, but everyone just knows it must be so. In other words, Palin's a modern day witch and needs to be punished.

About the only difference between the treatment this woman receives from the folks at MSNBC and the treatment many women suffered from the mobs of the Middle Ages is that today the law prohibits them from burning her alive.

Devil Incarnate

The more the left tries to demonize Sarah Palin the more grotesque they make themselves look. The lefties at at Politico are all aflutter over Palin's comparison of the liberal slander of conservatives in the wake of the Tucson tragedy to a "blood libel". The reaction on the left was the sort of thing you might see if you threw a snake into a cage full of monkeys.

It was yet another occasion for an irrational, mean-spirited stomping of Ms Palin. Doesn't she know, they sniffed, the historical resonance of "blood libel" (For those like me who had to look it up, it was the charge against Jews in medieval times that they were using the blood of Christian children for certain religious rites)? How dare she apply this term in any other context than the one in which it arose? How dare she insinuate that conservatives are being slandered like medieval Jews? She should be "publicly shunned". Etc.

So Jim Geraghty at NRO did some research and found numerous instances of people on both the left and the right using the term, including Andrew Sullivan who, as if wishing to make himself the very exemplification of hypocrisy, is among those deriding Palin for using it. None of the examples Geraghty cites elicited any outrage from anyone, but then none of the examples involved Sarah Palin. It's just different in the left-wing fever swamps when Sarah Palin says it than when they say it.

It'll be an interesting research topic for future historians and psychologists to explore exactly how it was in 2010 and 2011 that people with impressive IQs became so completely stupid when the topic was Sarah Palin.

Nora O'Donnell of MSNBC sought, on this morning's Morning Joe program, to explain the media fascination with Palin. She said that apart from her extreme (!?) right-wing views it's partly because Palin is a Republican woman which is a political oddity. O'Donnell asserts this despite the fact that currently there are four female GOP governors - twice as many as the number of female Democrats in that office - five women in the U.S. Senate, and two dozen Republican women in Congress. How many Republican women must there be in elective office before Ms O'Donnell thinks they're not unusual?

Mark Halperin on the same program a couple of days ago faulted conservatives like Palin for pushing back against the onslaught of vitriolic rhetoric coming from the left in the wake of the Tucson killings. Halperin opines that conservatives should just "turn the other cheek" when liberals smear them.

Sure. When a conservative woman is accused by liberals of being an accessory to the murder of a nine-year old child and five others she should simply sit there and allow the accusers to defame her in whatever manner they wish regardless of how dishonest and vile it may be. A woman should know her place, the thinking seems to be, and besides, to speak up and refute the accusers will show the world that they're actually either lying or are incredibly stupid. Either way they'll look very bad, and since they're liberals we certainly can't have that.

Jacob Weisberg at Slate.com concedes that conservatives like Palin didn't actually cause the Tucson atrocity, which is certainly kind of him to admit, but they're to blame for it anyway because they oppose Obama's policies, or something like that.

The more important question, though, is why people, especially at MSNBC which is obsessed with the woman, hate Sarah Palin so much. Perhaps it's for the same reason that the Iranians and other dysfunctional states often refer to the U.S. as the Great Satan. They need a devil in order to keep the mind of the rank and file off their abject misery.

Likewise, the left needs a devil in order to focus the hatred of their troops (oops, sorry for the violent metaphor) on something other than their ideas and policy proposals, because liberal ideas simply don't survive the scrutiny they receive when they're the focus of our political discussions. The left can't convince people to vote for them on the basis of their ideas so they seek to turn people's attention instead toward some conservative devil and convince people by sheer repetition how evil the devil is. Now that Bush is gone Palin happens to be the devil closest at hand.

It seems absolutely crazy and irrational, I know, particularly since Ms Palin is neither a declared candidate nor a front-runner for the presidential nomination in 2012, but what other explanation could there be?

Well, maybe there's another. I'll bounce that theory off you tomorrow.

Didn't Take Long

The President himself hit all the right notes in his speech at Tucson last night, but apparently his call to refrain from using the tragedy as an opportunity to seek partisan advantage has gone unheeded by members of his own party. Within hours of the President's address at the memorial service for the slain and wounded, an address in which he wisely admonished us to make sure that our discussions and debates about this tragedy not be "on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle", Democrats were criticizing Republican House Speaker John Boehner for not making the trip to Arizona.

Oh, well. The comity was nice while it lasted.

What's Wrong with this Article?

Princeton philosopher Peter Singer writes a compelling piece at The Philosopher's Magazine urging us all to do more to save suffering children in the third world. There's just one problem.

Before we get to the problem, though, read Singer's lede and his conclusion:

Imagine you come across a small child who has fallen into a pond and is in danger of drowning. You know that you can easily and safely rescue him, but you are wearing an expensive pair of shoes that will be ruined if you do. It would be wrong – monstrous, in fact – to walk on past the pond, leaving the child to drown, because you don’t want to have to buy a new pair of shoes. You can’t compare a child’s life with a pair of shoes!

Yet while we all say that it would be wrong to walk past the child there are other children whose lives we could save just as easily – and yet we don’t. UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, estimates that nearly 9 million children under 5 die each year from causes related to poverty. That’s 24,000 a day – a football stadium full of young children, dying every day (along with thousands of older children and adults who die from poverty every day as well). Some die because they don’t have enough to eat or clean water to drink. More die from measles, malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia – diseases that don’t exist in developed nations, or if they do, are easily cured and rarely fatal....

As people with more than enough, we have a moral obligation to help those who, through no fault of their own, are living in extreme poverty. It’s not hard to do.

Do you see anything wrong with what Singer's arguing here? Here's a hint, Singer is an atheist.

On what conceivable grounds does Singer base his assertion that it would be "monstrous" to ignore the drowning child? On what grounds does he insist that we have a moral obligation to help those living in poverty?

What Singer and other atheists often do is piggyback on the Christian belief that a duty is imposed upon us by God to help the poor. He appeals to that sense of duty, tries to reinforce it and get us to live up to it, but at the same time he rejects the existence of the only being which can be a source of the duty - God.

For thinkers like Singer, allowing the child to drown offends his own personal value system (which is a little odd inasmuch as the man is famous for advocating infanticide), but his value system is an arbitrary set of preferences that apply to no one else unless they, too, choose to have the same preferences. When he says that it's monstrous to allow the child to drown all he's saying is that he doesn't like such decisions and he wishes people wouldn't make them. What he can't say is that the decision is objectively wrong.

When he speaks of a moral obligation we all have to help the poor he's talking nonsense - rather like saying we all have a moral obligation to like blue more than green. If moral values are merely matters of personal taste how could one man's preference possibly be obligatory for another man?

Atheists are somewhat like con-artists. They talk about objective moral values and duties and hope that no one will ever ask them to explain how there can be such things in a world in which there is no transcendent moral authority. Then, having hung these values in mid-air, so to speak, they turn around and chide Christians for believing that moral values are rooted in the Creator of the cosmos.

A famous example of the irrationality of this is the story of atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell who had been expounding his view that there are no objectively binding moral values. Then, mere minutes later, he was fiercely denouncing to his listeners a man he described as a "scoundrel".

It's sheer nonsense to claim that in a world without God anything at all could be morally "monstrous" or that we have an obligation to help people we don't even know. It's disingenuous for a non-theist to employ moral language that only a theist can rationally use. Even so, despite the irrationality of it all, atheists are fond of cloaking themselves in the mantle of reason while lecturing the rest of us on our moral obligations. We shouldn't let them get away with it.

Saving Our Cities

During the 60s and 70s many of our cities devolved into cauldrons of crime, poverty, and terror. Heather MacDonald at City Journal argues, in a column that everyone concerned about the poor and the condition of our cities simply must read, that the decay of our communities and the demoralization of our people were not accidents. They were the result of the adoption by policy-makers of a nest of liberal assumptions about human nature and sociology that the experience of three decades of urban life have amply demonstrated to be manifestly false.

MacDonald opens her column with this:

Conservative ideas are responsible for the two great urban-policy successes of the last quarter-century: the breathtaking drops in crime and in welfare dependency since the early 1990s. You’d never know it from members of the opinion elite, however, who have rarely recognized these successes, much less their provenance.

So let’s recapitulate an epic battle about the foundations of social order, a battle that had not just a clear winner but also a clear loser: the liberal policy prescriptions for cities that many opinion makers and politicians still embrace. New York has been at the center of this battle because so many of the bad ideas that wreaked havoc on cities hatched there. Fortunately, so did many of the antidotes.

What were those bad ideas? MacDonald elaborates:

Liberal urban policy was based on several core assumptions. Number One: multigenerational poverty was the result of structural forces—above all, of rapacious capitalism and racism. It could never be the result of bad decision-making or a deficit of personal responsibility. Number Two: though men were still, alas, required for conceiving a child, they were purely optional for raising one. (Corollary: the role of illegitimacy in creating and perpetuating poverty could never be acknowledged.) Number Three: low-wage work was demeaning and pointless. It was better to receive a monthly welfare check than to labor at an entry-level job. Number Four: crime was an understandable and inevitable reaction to economic injustice and discrimination. (Corollary: the police could not lower crime; only government social programs and wealth-redistribution schemes could.)

Together, these four conceits composed the most dangerous idea of all: that the bourgeois values of order, self-discipline, and respect for the law were decorative afterthoughts to prosperity, rather than its very precondition.

In the balance of the essay, which I would love to post in its entirety if only it wouldn't violate blog etiquette, MacDonald talks about how city governments finally realized that ideas that sounded good in college classrooms had failed in the crucible of real life. After billions of dollars were wasted and thousands of lives lost, liberalism was shown to be an utter disaster.

Whatever you had planned for the next five minutes put it on hold, go to the link, and read MacDonald's article. Nothing could better illustrate why conservatives believe liberal nostrums should be avoided like they were carrying HIV.

Worst of the Year

John Hawkins of Right Wing News presents his annual list of the 40 most obnoxious quotes of the year just ended. Actually "obnoxious" is not an appropriate adjective for some of them. Some are indeed obnoxious, some are even vile, but others are merely dumb or stupid. Others are rather frightening. It's hard to believe the viciousness and hatred that's out there.

Anyway, here are three of my favorites from the "dumb" category:

"My fear is that the whole island [of Guam] will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize." -- Democrat congressman Hank Johnson

"We have to pass the [Health Care Reform] bill so you can find out what is in it." -- Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

"As you probably know, some American politicians and American journalists refer to Washington, DC as the “capital of the free world. But it seems to me that this great city (Brussels), which boasts 1,000 years of history and which serves as the capital of Belgium, the home of the European Union, and the headquarters for NATO, this city has its own legitimate claim to that title." --Vice-President Joe Biden

Here are four that are exceptionally vile:

"I am starting to think that any parent who takes their kids to Catholic churches from now on should lose custody. Taking your kid where you know sex offenders hang out is inexcusable!!!" -- Roseanne Barr

"The medical term for Down Syndrome is Trisomy-21 or Trisomy-g. It is often shortened in medical slang to Tri-g. Is it not perfectly possible that the very name given to this poor child, being reared by Bristol, is another form of mockery of his condition, along with the "retarded baby" tag? And does the way in which this poor child was hauled around the country on a book tour, being dragged out in front of flash photographs in the middle of the night, barely clothed, suggest someone who actually cares for children with special needs, or rather sees them as a way to keep the spotlight on her?" -- Andrew Sullivan

Well, keep it up boys, just keep it up, um except for one thing: you rat bastards are going to cause another Murrah federal building explosion, you are. And then - what is Beck - maybe at that point Beck will do the honorable thing and blow his brains out. Maybe at that point, Limbaugh will do the honorable thing and just gobble up enough - enough Viagra that he becomes absolutely rigid and keels over dead. Maybe then O'Reilly will just drink a vat of the poison he spews out on America every night and choke to death! Because that's what's gonna happen, that's what they are pushing these right-wing, nut case, fringe, militia jerk-wads to doing! -- Mike Malloy

"I know how the "tea party" people feel - the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their "Obama Plan White Slavery" signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads." -- The Washington Post's Courtland Milloy

And here are a few that should make every American clutch tightly their copy of the Constitution because if these people have their way the document will be as irrelevant as the Articles of Confederation:

"There's a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: 'Out. Off. End. Goodbye.' It would be a big favor to political discourse; our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly, in their future." -- Democrat senator Jay Rockefeller

"I tell you what, if I lived in Massachusetts I'd try to vote 10 times [against Republican candidate Scott Brown]. I don't know if they'd let me or not, but I'd try to. Yeah, that's right. I'd cheat to keep these bastards out. I would. 'Cause that's exactly what they are." -- Ed Schultz

"The proper channels have failed. It's time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism. If you're one of those who believe that this is not just necessary but also possible, speak to us. Let's talk about what that mass civil disobedience is going to look like. If you're one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this: We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work. And we be many, but you be few." -- Greenpeace, on their blog

These are the people, sadly, who want to decide how the rest of us should live.

Read the rest of the quotes at the link. For those of a historical bent Hawkins also offers links to similar collections from previous years.

I know it's premature, but the absolute nonsense that was written and spoken by those who, in the wake of the awful tragedy in Arizona, wanted to twist it to their political advantage will surely provide Hawkins with a wealth of material to draw upon next year. Two of my favorites to make the list are former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, who attributed the shooting to attempts to repeal Obamacare, and Congressman James Clyburn who tied the shooting to the Republicans' decision to open the current session of Congress by reading the Constitution.

I know you find it hard to believe that our elected officials could be such dunderheads, but you can check it out here.

Saving Leonardo

Nancy Pearcy is a scholar and writer who has authored several books on science, culture and faith, and has recently come out with yet another volume on the topic of how worldview influences culture. The book is titled Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning, and in it Pearcy outlines how the historical shift in worldview in the West from Christian theism to modern materialism and post-modern nihilism expresses itself in our culture, particularly philosophy, literature, film, and art.

Her overarching theme is the corrosive effect materialism has had on the way artists and thinkers view life and the world. To paraphrase Daniel Dennett this modern view of life is a universal acid that eats away at and destroys everything it touches. The loss of transcendence in Western civilization has been accompanied by a loss of beauty, coherence, and hope in music, painting, and film. When people no longer have anything to believe in the fruits of their imagination reflect only emptiness and despair. Pearcy traces this descent into hopelessness with impressive scholarship.

There are parts of Saving Leonardo that plod a little, but it's beautifully produced with color prints of the paintings she discusses and is so packed with information and insight that the serious reader will be well-rewarded, even if he or she doesn't agree with everything Pearcy says. It would make an excellent gift for anyone, particularly students, interested in the close relationship between the religious assumptions of those who create culture and the art and thought they produce.

Earth from Space

Jason passes along a link to some spectacular photos of earth taken from space. The eight pics appear in the Mail Online. Here's one of the Chinese cities Beijing (upper left) and Tianjun at night:

Check out the rest at the link.

Islam and Darwin

David Klinghoffer shares some brief but interesting thoughts on a parallel between the current state of Islam and the current state of Darwinism. He writes:

I came across a refreshing and illuminating piece on The New Republic website that, in the context of talking about Islam and terrorism, suggested to me a reason for hope in the Darwin debate. In the current culture of science, where the 19th-century materialist Church of Science rules and the congregation bows obediently, what's needed is a modernizing reformation. Doubts about Darwinism are part of that. We can draw a parallel to past reformations in the religious sphere, and future ones.

Most of us in the West agree, for example, that Islam urgently requires a reformation. Some observers see radical Islamism not as the leading edge in Muslim life -- that is, where the religion is going -- but rather as the desperate resistance from within to the modernizing course on which Islamic culture is already embarked and from which there is no turning back. Islamism, in this view, is not the vanguard but a screech of protest in vain.

As the scholar Reuel Marc Gerecht points out, those Muslims most inclined to sympathize with or commit terrorism are not the clerics who are expert in the faith and steeped in its teachings but, instead, laypeople who possess a ruder knowledge of Islamic tradition and who often were radicalized by their contact with the West. Gerecht, a former CIA clandestine officer, writes about sitting with imams and hearing them teach, thinking what a poor preparation for a career in terror Islamic Sharia law actually is.

In the world of science, oddly, it's much the same way. Reading professional scientific journals, you come across far franker talk of holes in Darwinism than you'll ever find in the general-interest media, or on screechy, sarcastic Darwinist blogs aimed at angry laymen and the unemployed (judging from the amount of time commenters seem to have on their hands). Gerecht sees Islamic clerics not as the problem but as a likely feature of the solution when it comes. And it will come. Perhaps the same will prove to be true of scientists -- the real ones, I mean, not the furious bloggers.

Unfortunately, just as the extremists manage to intimidate the moderates in many Islamic communities, so, too, do the more ideological Darwinians, the Darwinians who demand that Darwin not only must entail atheism but also must not be subjected to public challenge, intimidate many of their colleagues who are skeptical of the naturalistic, materialistic paradigm that's being forced upon them.

Nevertheless, there's reason to think that the ideologues cannot suppress the truth forever, either in science or in Islam, and perhaps we'll someday see them both in full retreat in the face of their own colleagues' advance. Maybe.

Ahmadinejad Teetering

DEBKAfile reports that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad may be fighting for his political life, and, given Iranian politics, maybe his physical life as well. Here's the heart of their report:

Our Washington sources report that the White House is keenly watching the infighting and deepening splits in the clerical regime. Opinions vary as to the cause which triggered the crisis, ranging from opposition to the deep slashes Ahmadinejad ordered last month in subsidies for essential consumer goods, to dialectical differences and a straight power struggle. But they all agree that the Iranian president is fighting for his life in a struggle that is approaching a resolution.

Washington sees three major forces ranged solidly against him for the first time:

1. The Iranian parliament, the Majlis, and its powerful speaker Ali Larijani, who has been working to check Ahmadinejad's limitless thirst for power for some time;

2. The generals: Never before since the 1979 Islamic Revolution have the armed forces chiefs taken a hand in Iranian politics. But they are now deeply concerned that Ahmadinejad's policies, including his push for a nuclear weapon, are bringing the country into perils it cannot withstand.

3. Long-time rival, the former president Hashem Rafsanjani, Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council of Iran, the supreme body overseeing the various arms of the regime, is showing signs of recovering from the years of persecution and restrictions placed on the activities of his faction.

It was noticed in Washington this week that supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who habitually praises the president and his works, has stopped mentioning him in his public appearances, probably watching and waiting to see how the internal discord turns out. Also sitting on the fence are the heads of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Ahmadinejad's principle buttress until now. He appears therefore to be fighting for survival singlehanded except for a hard core of the most radical ayatollahs who have backed him through thick and thin.

Assuming that this report is correct and assuming that if Ahmedinejad falls his replacement isn't even worse than he is, this is very good news. The collapse of Ahmedinejad in Iran may lead to a cessation of their nuclear weapons program as well as their meddling in both Iraq and Lebanon. Indeed, it may actually forestall war in the region. Let us hope that the reports are true.

Politically Correcting Mark Twain

When the Smithsonian recently yanked a painting of Christ covered with ants the painting's admirers complained that art shouldn't be held hostage to those it might offend. The purpose of art, we're told is precisely to make us uncomfortable, to offend the orthodoxies which imprison our minds, etc., etc. Those who were upset by this painting and others like it have been derided and disparaged as a bunch of unsophisticated Yahoos.

Now, however, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is being scrubbed of the words "nigger" and "injun" and many, though not all, of the voices who are outrgaed at censorship of literature and thrilled whenever art is used to offend the sensibilities of the hoi polloi, have suddenly gone silent.

Liberals have told us for decades that we shouldn't be afraid of words, at least that's what they said when people objected to the fact that words many consider vulgar and offensive began to fill our movies and novels. They told us that this was simply an accurate reflection of how people talk, a true depiction of life. It's the reality of modern life, and the role of art and literature is, among other things, to represent reality.

Nevertheless, it's now been decided that there really are some words too offensive for people to read and these must be expurgated from our literature. I guess whether a word is too offensive for the printed page actually depends on who is offended by it.

The Yglesias Rule

Within hours of the first news reports of the deaths of six people at a political gathering in Arizona some on the left were seeking to turn the tragedy to ideological advantage.

Matthew Yglesias was quick to finger the culprits ultimately responsible - Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman. Palin had sent out a political flier in which crosshairs were superimposed on Congressional districts of congresspersons Palin hoped to see defeated, and Bachman had once told an audience that she wanted her supporters to be "armed and dangerous".

Of course, both of these were metaphors. Palin was trying to show visually that she had targeted certain politicians for defeat, an expression everyone in politics uses. Bachman was telling her supporters to arm themselves with information so that they'd be "dangerous" to those seeking passage of the Waxman-Markey "Cap and Trade" bill.

Apparently, though, subtle linguistic tropes are lost on people like Yglesias who seems eager to exploit the Arizona tragedy by turning it into an opportunity to score political points. Here's what the Daily Caller tells us about what Yglesias said:

Yglesias blames Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann for creating a political climate in which “violent rhetoric and imagery” apparently incite people to murder.

“A reminder that gun imagery and electoral politics don’t mix that well,” Yglesias opined on Twitter, while referencing a flier published by Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC. In the flier, Palin “targeted,” with crosshairs, 20 House Democrats for defeat.

Yglesias also referenced a Huffington Post article in which Rep. Bachmann reportedly said, “I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to block global warming legislation.

When it was reported that Bachman was grieving over the shooting, Yglesias responded:

“If Bachmann is “stunned and angered” by [this] shooting, why did she call for “armed and dangerous” resistance to Waxman-Markey?”

That sounds ominous, doesn’t it? There’s only one problem: Bachmann clearly was using “armed and dangerous” in a metaphorical and political, not literal and violent, sense. In fact, she quite clearly meant “armed and dangerous” with information, not bullets.

The Daily Caller then goes on to give us the transcript of Bachman's speech which plainly shows the innocuous context in which she used the phrase "armed and dangerous."

This sort of attempt to exploit a tragedy to discredit one's political opponents is as despicable as it is stupid. It's stupid because people like Yglesias would have us believe that all metaphorical language that may in any way be associated with violence is at least partly responsible for any violence that actually occurs.

Yglesias isn't the only guilty party, of course. An Arizona congressman also blames Palin at the Huffington Post and one commentator on Fox News Sunday even suggested that calling one's opponents fascists, nazis, communists, or socialists creates an incendiary climate in which people are more likely to resort to violence. This despite the fact that some, even in congress and the media, describe themselves as proud socialists. If they call themselves that why shouldn't others call them that? And why stop there? Why not include conservative and liberal in the list of pejoratives that should be beyond the pale of politically correct discourse?

Perhaps soon we'll hear calls to abolish any language that makes anyone else mad because it could, after all, lead to violence.

It seems to me, though, that it's at least as reasonable, even more reasonable, in fact, to think that violence such as we witnessed Saturday in Arizona is a product of a culture which glorifies such mayhem on television, in the movies, and in our video games. Of course, if people like Yglesias were to blame those influences for Saturday's murders then they'd have to pass up an opportunity to smackdown their political opponents, and besides, it would offend their friends in Hollywood. It's much easier, and safer, to blame Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman.

So, in the spirit of Mr. Yglesias' concerns, I'd like to propose what might be called the Yglesias Rule of public discourse. Any and all words and phrases that make any allusion to anything that could be remotely construed as violent must henceforth be avoided in our public conversation. Let's ban from our political dialogue all use of words like political massacre, political bloodbath, political enemies, political suicide, battleground states, tortured reasoning, shootout, fight, beating, drubbing, slugfest, murderous, target, foot-soldiers, rhetorical weapons, character assassination, two-edged sword, and a host of others I'm sure readers can come up with.

Any politician or commentator, or more precisely, any conservative like Palin or Bachman, who uses any of these terms must be made to share responsibility the next time some lunatic perpetrates a horrific tragedy. But of course we'll give the President a pass for his famous quip that “If they [the Republicans] bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”. He is a Democrat, after all, and unlike Republicans, when Democrats employ such imagery they don't really mean it literally.

UPDATE: The number of instances of media lefties and others trying to blame this tragedy on Palin and other conservatives is increasing so fast I can't keep up with it. Go here and scroll down for examples.

Meanwhile, for those who enjoy irony, a former classmate of the suspect reports that the guy was a left-wing stoner when she knew him. Well. That sure doesn't fit the narrative.

Readers and Leaders

This little vignette by Karen Spears Zacharias is about pastors, but it could be about anyone in leadership positions of any kind. Zacharais is an author who had this conversation with the manager of a bookstore that carries her work:

I couldn’t tell if he was making a confession or if he was bragging.

The man looked up from the computer screen from where he was surfing the net and announced very matter-of-factly, “I manage this bookstore but I don’t read.”

Why would you tell that to an author?

I try my best to be gracious to people. I didn’t cuss out loud.

“Have you never been a reader?” I asked.

“Nope. Never,” he said.

“How is it you came to manage a bookstore if you don’t read?”

“I’m a pastor,” he said as if that explained everything.

I’d like to tell you he’s the first bookstore manager I’ve met this year who doesn’t read. In fact, he’s the third one. All were men. All had backgrounds in retail. And all three of them are running bookstores that cater to the Christian marketplace. I think there’s a message embedded in there somewhere, but I haven’t decoded it yet.

I can count on one hand the number of pastors I’ve sat under in my lifetime that I know were avid readers. I remember them because their preaching had a depth and a substance that all others lacked. One of my favorites, Dr. Herb Anderson, would quote poetry from the pulpit. That was always a magical moment. It helped that Dr. Anderson lived in a university town. He had a lot of professors in his audience. They expected their pastor to be well-read. But out here in rural America where hardy people live and vote, pastors are more likely to quote a bumper sticker than they are to recite a poem they’ve memorized.

Whether it's leading a church, leading a business, leading a professional sports team, leading a military, or leading a country the people who do it best are often people who read and read widely. Reading is like the weekly trip to the grocery store. People who don't read often have very little to say that's interesting because they've ceased to grow in their own lives and are trying to feed others from an empty cupboard.

Reading good books, like watching good movies, expands one's background knowledge, deepens one's understanding of the culture and the world, and keeps one from becoming intellectually stagnant and superficial. It gives teachers and speakers a richer mine of resources upon which to draw to make one's lessons or sermons more meaningful to those who hear them. The preacher who doesn't read must rely on his personal experience for the material he shares with his listeners, but unless he has led an extraordinary life, these resources are soon exhausted, and he's often reduced to offering his congregants little more than platitudes.

To be a leader of any kind, whether in a school, the church, the military, business, or the government and not be a reader is, in my opinion, to commit professional malpractice. It prevents one from being as effective as he could be, and thus the people who depend upon his leadership benefit less from it than they could have otherwise.

Thanks to Hearts and Minds' Booknotes blog for the link.

Preacher Ed's Old-Time Revival Meetin'

Ed Schultz, in the sort of angry rant that's not uncommon on his show on MSNBC, gives us insight into the left-wing mind-set in America. It sounds, well, hateful, don't you think?

Let's take a deep breath and examine what he says. He begins with this claim:

"It’s all about taking down President Obama."

Maybe so, but what exactly is wrong with that? The Democrats certainly wanted to take down Reagan and both Bushes. If either party is convinced that the man at the top is fundamentally bad for the country, if they believe his policies are ruinous, as the Democrats believed about George W. Bush, why wouldn't they want to make him a one-term president?

"They don’t want to create jobs. They’re not about that at all. And I’ll guarantee you, if you do see the [unemployment] numbers change, which I believe they will, you won’t hear Boehner or any of these new righties give one ounce of credit to the last Congress for fighting like hell for a jobs bill."

Mr. Schultz is basing his assertion that the Republicans don't want to create jobs on the fact that they believe that the Democrats' proposal for creating them is extremely wasteful and ineffective. President Obama inadvertently admitted this himself when he acknowledged after having spent close to a trillion dollars to fund shovel-ready jobs, that there really weren't any shovel-ready jobs to fund. Now the money is gone and no one knows where it went. Why shouldn't such policies be opposed?

And, if the jobless numbers do improve, why should Democrat policies necessarily get the credit? Economists say that recessions have a natural cycle and that joblessness always improves eventually. Moreover, it could be argued that if employers start hiring now it will be in large part because the GOP victory in November gave them confidence that the government would not be raising their taxes and increasing the regulatory burden on them. One cannot conclude that merely because the Democrats passed legislation and several months later unemployment subsides that the improvement in unemployment is because of the legislation.

"This is an ideological war. I say it on camera tonight here on MSNBC. I will fight these bastards every night at 6 o’clock because I know what they’re up against. I know what they want to do. They want to take down American workers. They want to outsource jobs. They want to destroy the American dream."

Well, if the American dream is to achieve a socialized economy where the government dictates every aspect of your life then, yes, I guess Mr. Schultz is correct. But if the American dream is to be able to move from whatever socio-economic class into which one is born up to the class above it, then the biggest threat to that dream is big government socialism and the strongest advocates of big government socialism are in the Democrat party.

"Concentrate the wealth to the top, and control minorities. That’s what they’re about."

This is the standard Marxist class warfare snake oil that the left has been trying to sell in America since the 1920s. When Schultz or anyone else trots out these superannuated canards it sounds as anachronistic as an old-fashioned revival meeting. Perhaps next he'll be shouting that those despicable Republicans have horns, tails, and carry pitchforks and are coming to get you.

Naturalism

A pair of philosophers named Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro have written a fine introduction to the metaphysical point of view philosophers call naturalism. They title the book simply Naturalism, and in a relatively brief but instructive 122 pages Goetz and Taliaferro walk the reader through the major varieties and implications of naturalistic belief and the criticisms to which naturalism is most vulnerable.

Philosophical naturalists hold that nature is all there is, there is no supernature, no God that acts in the world. The world (i.e. the universe) is "causally closed" to any outside intervention. Although it's possible to be a naturalist who believes that nature is god, in actual practice naturalists are invariably atheists.

There are two basic kinds of naturalism, strict and broad, but adherents of both are united in believing that there are only physical causes acting in the world. Whatever minds or souls may be they're ultimately reducible to material stuff.

All subjective experience (pain, pleasure, purposes, etc.) is either illusory or simply the physical consequences of electrochemical events in our neurons, sort of like the light and sound produced by exploding fireworks. There's no immaterial mind or soul that causes our choices. There are no immaterial purposes for which we act. What we do is strictly determined by the chemical interactions occurring in the brain.

For the philosophical naturalist, mind is simply a word we use to describe the function of the brain, just as we use digestion to describe the function of the stomach. Or, to switch metaphors, mind is like photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is not a material structure which exists in the plant but is rather a physical process involving chemical reactions occurring in the chloroplast. If we understand the chemistry of the plant cell we know everything we need to know to understand photosynthesis. Likewise, if we understood the brain well enough we would understand mental phenomena like purposes, beliefs, sensations, even the nature of understanding itself. We are, as Francis Crick once put it, nothing but a pack of neurons.

Throughout the book the authors consider what naturalism has to say about the soul (mind), values, and conscious experience and they offer some very convincing (to me) counter-arguments to the naturalist hypothesis. Perhaps the most persuasive goes something like this:

If all of our conscious experience is explicable in terms of chemistry and physics then if someone knows all the relevant science involved in seeing the color blue they would know what blue is even if they've never seen it. Of course, that's not the case. Imagine a man blind since birth who is a brilliant scientist and manages to teach himself every detail of the chemistry of seeing color. He knows every physical fact about what occurs in the process of vision. Would he then know what blue looks like? Suppose he suddenly gained his sight and the first thing he sees is the sky. Would he know what he was seeing?

The answer to these questions is almost certainly no. Conscious experience consists in more than just the physical facts of brain chemistry. There is something it is like to see blue that cannot be known simply by learning chemistry. There's something more involved in experiencing blue than just chemical reactions. Consciousness and the experiences we have as conscious beings must be more than simply the material processes which occur in the brain.

Perhaps the relationship between brain and mind (or soul) is something like the relationship between a television set and the signal that the set translates into an image on the screen. Our brains are like the tv, but just turning on a tv is not enough to have a picture (conscious experience). We must also have a signal and even though both can exist without the other the image, or conscious experience, can't exist unless both television and signal, brain and mind, are functioning properly and together.

At any rate, I recommend Naturalism by Goetz and Taliaferro to anyone with at least an introductory philosophy course under his or her belt and an interest in gaining a deeper understanding of the consequences of the logic of contemporary anti-theism.

Obama Hate Machine

David Corn is a lefty writer for The Nation and Politics Daily. He wonders in a recent piece whether President Obama will be able to stave off the "right-wing hate machine" which has harried him since his election. Corn writes:

The OHM [Obama Hate Machine] -- led by a wide-ranging collection of conservative media outfits, right-wing bloggers, and GOP partisans -- has already effectively undermined Obama's presidency by propagating lies about his administration's major accomplishments. It tarred Obama's health care reform initiative by falsely claiming it would establish "death panels." It pushed the falsehood that his $787 stimulus package created no new jobs. (The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that legislation created or saved up to 3.5 million jobs.) And don't forget the birthers, who are still yapping that Obama wasn't born in the United States. One recent poll found that 23 percent of Americans believe this (and 20 percent said they didn't know).

Set aside the very good possibility that some or all of what Corn imputes to the conservatives here is true. Assume instead that all of the claims Corn cites are mistaken, or even screwy. Even so, they're hardly "hate". In fact, they seem like pretty tame stuff.

If this is the sort of thing Corn thinks constitutes hate then I wonder what he thinks of this statement about George W. Bush:

"George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. He has mugged the truth-not merely in honest error, but deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly."

This irenic passage was written by David Corn himself in a book he wrote in 2004 titled The Lies of George W. Bush. Trevor Thomas at The American Thinker delved into Corn's book to see what malicious lies Bush told that warrant Corn's calumnious claims. It turns out that they include such atrocities against the truth as:

• "I have been very candid about my past."
• "I'm a uniter, not a divider."
• "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the eleventh."
• "It's time to restore honor and dignity to the White House."

Thomas then decided to look up some of the things that had been said by the left about Bush, just to see how they compared to what's been said about Obama. Here's a sample of what he found:

• "He betrayed this country! He played on our fears! He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure pre-ordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place!" -- Al Gore
• "There has never been an administration, I don't believe, in our history more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda." -- Hillary Clinton
• "President Bush is a liar. He betrayed Nevada and he betrayed the country." -- Harry Reid
• "The situation in Iraq and the reckless economic policies in the United States speak to one issue for me, and that is the competence of our leader." -- Nancy Pelosi
• "This country was the moral leader of the world until George Bush became president." -- Howard Dean
• "No president in America's history has done more damage to our country and our security[.]" -- Ted Kennedy
• "I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history." -- Jimmy Carter
• "The man's father is a wonderful human being; I think this guy is a loser." -- Harry Reid
• "Bush is an incompetent leader. In fact, he's not a leader." -- Nancy Pelosi
• "We will take to the streets right now. We will delegitimize [him], discredit him, do whatever it takes, but never accept him." -- Jesse Jackson
• "I'd say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you've lost your mind." -- John Edwards
• "Regime change! Bush has to go, and we have the power to do it. The officials of the government shall be removed from office for crimes and misdemeanor[.]" -- Ramsey Clark

As Thomas points out these were not statements made by "media outfits and bloggers", they were made by the very leaders of the Democrat party.

The ability of those on the political left in this country to espy the mote in the eye of others but fail to see the log in their own is little short of amazing. When the right criticizes Obama, the left calls it hate. When the left expressed its hatred of Bush, they called it criticism. Before Mr. Corn and others bemoan the tone and tenor of the right's criticism of Mr. Obama they should spend some time reflecting on how they themselves treated Mr. Bush.

Public Employees Unions

In light of allegations that supervisors of New York City's sanitation workers union ordered that snow removal be slowed down as payback for union layoffs and other offenses, calls for the abolition of public sector unions are growing louder:

As John Hinderaker points out at Powerline such unions only gained legal status in the 60s and 70s:

Public employee unions flourish because government is, by its nature, a monopoly. Thus, there is no need for unionized government units to compete against non-unionized units. Moreover, public officials who negotiate with public employee unions generally lack the same incentives that private employers have to keep costs down. The result has been a fiscal disaster, with numerous states and municipalities now going over the waterfall of bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, public employee unions have become perhaps the dominant force in our political life. They extract dues from their members which go to fund the candidacies of politicians who will pay public employees even more money. The unions' ill-gotten clout has created a vicious cycle; at the same time that government units are going broke, public employees are now far better paid than their private sector counterparts, while enjoying better benefits and ridiculous job security.

Not to mention very generous pension plans which the taxpayers, often with very little in the way of a pension themselves, are obligated to sustain. Around the nation a number of cities have had enough and are privatizing services like garbage and snow removal and are saving their taxpayers a boodle.

It's time to privatize. It's also time to make public employees responsible for their own retirement. People who are directly responsible for the death of a newborn infant in New York because an ambulance couldn't traverse the streets that these guys didn't plow surely don't deserve to receive for twenty five years or more a pension close to, or more than, 100% of what they were making when they were working.

Reigniting the Birthers

Hawaii's new Democrat governor, Neil Abercrombie, has decided he's going to put an end to all the speculation about the President's birthplace by producing the long form birth certificate that the "birthers" say is the only way to prove that Obama is really a natural born citizen of the U.S.

Well, we hope he does so that we can put an end to what has been a bizarre chapter in our presidential politics.

We have a president who himself seems unwilling to prove that he really was born in the United States, which, of course, is a condition for eligibility for the office he holds. This reluctance has been like gasoline on the flames of doubt millions of Americans harbor about the man, and now Abercrombie thinks he's doing the President a favor by settling the matter without the President himself having to get involved.

Perhaps he will, but he has really blundered unless he knows with certainty that the birth certificate actually exists. If it turns out that he can't produce it after having boasted that he would the whole controversy is going to come roaring back, and it won't just be a few easily dismissable "fringies" who'll be wondering aloud whether the man in the White House really is an American citizen.

Even Chris Matthews, who often speaks of the President in accents one associates with adolescent girls worshipping their teen idol, and who is at pains to distinguish himself from the "birthers", sounds just like one in this clip:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The issue had pretty much drifted off stage, actually. Why Abercrombie chose to yank it back into the limelight is a mystery unless he knows for sure the certificate exists. If, however, he's just assuming that it does, and it turns out that he can't produce it, he may find himself a leper in the Democrat party and widely regarded as a buffoon on the national stage.

It'll be interesting to see whether Abercrombie actually goes ahead with his boast or whether he suddenly has an epiphany and realizes that if there is no certificate for him to present to the world he will single-handedly and quite unnecessarily have created a very serious problem for the President, the nation, and himself.