Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken, however, the story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities with the movie are purely coincidental, although the similarities with my novel Bridging the Abyss, are not.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. His ex-wife had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into sex-slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was an unimaginable hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the day of his birth she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him.

Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

The Georgia Runoff

There's a lot at stake in the runoff election for two U.S. Senate seats being held January 5th in Georgia. Both of Georgia's Senate seats are being contested, and if the Democrats win both they'll have control of the Senate. The Republicans need to win one of the races in order to keep their majority.

If the Democrats control the Senate they'll have mastery of both Houses of Congress as well as the White House and there'll be very little standing in their way of implementing the most radical political and economic agenda in the history of the country.

So what do we know about the Democrat candidates running for those two seats? Jim Geraghty at National Review offers us a partial glimpse of what candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock stand for.

He first presents some personal info on Ossof and then lists some of his policy positions. He opines that "Ossoff is not a sensible centrist Democrat aiming to win a state that, up until very recently, had been a Republican lock. As the Democratic Party veered to the left in the Trump years, Ossoff followed."

Geraghty then goes on to support that claim by listing the following examples of Ossof's positions on current issues. He provides links for these, but you'll have to go to his column to get them:

• When asked about defunding the police, Ossoff offered a qualified endorsement, “You have to have national standards for the use of force, and yeah, you’ve got to be able to hold individual officers and entire departments accountable, and there also has to be funding for those departments on the line.”
• He supports statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
• He says he “maybe” supports eliminating the filibuster in the Senate.
• He wants to ban “semiautomatic rifles” — including the AR-15, the best-selling rifle in the country — and also insists he will “defend the Second Amendment.”
• He wants a “rapidly phased-in ban on single-use plastics,” which would include bottles, wrappers, straws, and bags.
• On judges, Ossoff says he will only vote to confirm federal judges who pledge to uphold Roe v. Wade.
• On the coronavirus pandemic, Ossoff wants to “implement widespread temperature checks.” (Temperature checks are not a terribly effective way to stop the spread of the virus, as roughly 40 percent of people who catch SARS-CoV-2 will be asymptomatic.)
• He supports “a generous forgiveness program for those struggling to pay off their student loans.”
• He wants the upcoming Congress to investigate the Trump administration’s immigration policy, comparing it to war crimes.
• He believes that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials should not deport illegal immigrants, but instead ensure they’re being paid the minimum wage.
• He supports sanctuary cities.

Warnock, an African-American pastor, may be even further to the left than Ossof. Writes Geraghty:

Warnock supports the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. The church where Warnock was a pastor “roared its approval” when Fidel Castro came to visit in 1995. He dismissed the New York City “workfare” program as a “hoax.”

Demonizing police officers in the name of criminal-justice reform is almost pro forma in Democratic circles in 2020, but Warnock was well ahead of the curve. In a 2015 sermon, Ossoff argued that the police represented a threat to children:

“Our children are in trouble, and it’s often those who are sworn to protect who cause more trouble . . . our children are in danger.” In another sermon that year, he declared, “we shouldn’t be surprised when we see police officers act like bullies on the street . . . You don’t get to be the incarceration capital of the world by playing nice on the streets. You have to work for that distinction.”

Warnock is a fan of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam and is hostile to the state of Israel:

Warnock said the Nation of Islam’s “voice has been important for the development of Black theology.”

What’s more, the pastor really has an axe to grind against Israel. Warnock has compared Israeli control of West Bank to Apartheid South Africa, called Israeli government forces “birds of prey,” called Israel “a land of violence and bloodshed and occupation” run by “clever politicians” who are “racist and vicious,” and compared Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to segregationist George Wallace.

He's also sympathetic to Marxism. Geraghty quotes him:

To be sure, the Marxist critique has much to teach the black church. Indeed, it has played an important role in the maturation of black theology as an intellectual discipline, deepened black theology’s apprehension of the interconnectivity of racial and class oppression and provided critical tools for a black church that has yet to awaken to a substantive third world consciousness.

Geraghty concludes with this note:

Finally, Warnock’s wife accused him of running over her foot with his car during a heated argument days before he filed paperwork to officially seek the office, according to a police report obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Warnock insists it did not happen, and police did not press charges. Warnock and his wife are divorcing.

The policy stances these candidates represent may sound extreme, but I think it's fair to say that they're mainstream in their party. If Ossof and Warnock are elected to the Senate by the citizens of Georgia the United States will look very much different in two years than it does today.

Micro-choreography

One aspect of the argument for the existence of an intelligent engineer who has designed living things is based on the amazing fact that each cell in living organisms is a factory consisting of thousands of biological machines directed and choreographed by information-rich instructions.

Since we have a uniform experience of information (specified complexity) being produced only by intelligent agents, and we have no experience of complex, meaningful information being generated by blind, impersonal forces, it's not unreasonable to conclude that the information in the biosphere is also the product of an intelligent agent.

The following excerpt from a longer video provides an example of the astonishing goings-on in the interiors of every cell in your body. The quality of the YouTube version of the video is not good, but it's good enough.

Some questions we might ask about this include these: How do these molecular structures "know" what operation to perform and where to go to perform it? Where do the instructions (information) come from that direct and coordinate these operations, and how does such a system arise from a blind, mindless process like evolution? Indeed, how did these processes ever arise in the first cells before cells "learned" to reproduce?

After all, natural selection, and thus evolution, doesn't kick in until cells can make copies of themselves. Yet many of these basic processes must already have been in place in the earliest cells or they wouldn't have survived to develop the ability to reproduce.

It's all very mysterious, agnostic physicist Paul Davies even calls it "near miraculous" in his book The 5th Miracle (He can't very well call it an actual miracle because then he couldn't call himself an agnostic), but it certainly seems plausible to believe that this whole system was somehow designed.

In fact, the only way to side-step that conclusion is to rule out design a priori, but why do that unless one's metaphysical commitment to naturalism is so strong that no rival hypothesis can be allowed to creep into one's thinking? If that's the case, though, one should give up any pretense of being an open-minded follower of the evidence wherever it leads.

The Majority Minority Miscalculation

It's often been claimed that whites will find themselves in the minority in the U.S. by sometime around 2045 having been demographically eclipsed by members of black, brown and yellow races. A corollary to the claim is that being thrust into the minority will spell political doom for a GOP dominated by whites.

An essay at The Federalist, however, written by Morris Fiorina of the Hoover Institution challenges this conventional wisdom.

The belief that the "browning of America" entails permanent political exile for white Republican voters and office-holders is based on two questionable assumptions: First, that rising minorities would continue to favor the Democrats in their voting, and, second, that increased Democratic support from rising minorities would not be offset by falling support among the declining white population.

The 2020 election should give pause to those who hold the first assumption. Blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump in record numbers and, although it's true that a more traditional Republican may not have generated as much enthusiasm among this demographic as did the president, the fact remains that many more members of these groups are willing to abandon their traditional fealty to the Democratic party to vote for Republican candidates than ever before. This is especially true among Hispanics.

The second assumption is rendered dubious by the gains Republicans have made in recent years among traditional Democrat loyalists like blue-collar union workers.

But Fiorina's main point is that the projections of a majority of minorities by mid-century are themselves questionable. They're predicated on misleading data culled from the 2010 census.

Question 8 on that census form (and on the 2020 census) asks about Hispanic ancestry. Those who report any Hispanic ancestry on this question are placed into the minority category, regardless of their responses to question 9 which asks the respondent to state their own race.

Fiorina explains:

Non-Hispanics who check the “white” box on question 9 go into the white category, of course — unless they write in anything else. Should they wish to claim, say, an American Indian ancestor (a fairly common impulse), they again fall into the minority category despite their white self-categorization. In both cases, descendants stay in the same category — minority — as the parent, if they acknowledge the parent’s ancestry.

So, someone as white as Senator Elizabeth Warren, and all of her subsequent descendents, would be considered minorities as long as they continue to maintain that they have a single Native American ancestor three or four generations ago. As Fiorina puts it:

The census projections reflect a “one-drop” rule akin to that used in the Jim Crow South. The white category consists only of people who are 100 percent “non-Hispanic white.” If one adopts a more expansive definition of "white," the projection of a majority-minority nation disappears.

If anyone who checks the white box on question 9 were actually to be classified as white the nation would still be three-quarters white in 2060, according to Fiorina. He goes on to say that,

On first hearing about the projected nonwhite majority, many people probably form a mental image that looks roughly like this: 4 whites, 2 Hispanics, 2 blacks, 1 Asian, and perhaps one “other.”

As the preceding discussion explains, however, the picture is much more complex. The majority of minorities will not consist of people who are 100 percent Latino, 100 percent Asian, 100 percent black, 100 percent Native American, or 100 percent Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (the official census categories).

Rather, the majority of minorities will include people of numerous shadings of color.

The United States is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, not only because of the changing relative sizes of the five large groups but also because of the growing internal diversity within each group as the sizes of their [racially] mixed portions swell. Diversity is increasing within individuals as well as among groups.

In other words, what will happen as we approach mid-century is that categories like white, Hispanic, African-American and Asian will be increasingly blurred as inter-racial marriages continue to increase and more citizens are able to claim mixed-race status.

One of the positive benefits of all this is that identity-based politics, at least as it's practiced by the left today, will become increasingly irrelevant as a greater percentage of future generations' racial identity is "all of the above."

One Solitary Life

Most readers of Viewpoint have probably heard the vignette about the enormous historical impact made by the life of Jesus titled "One Solitary Life." It originated in a sermon delivered on July 11, 1926 by pastor and author James Allan Francis who was speaking to the Baptist Young People's Union in Los Angeles.

His message finished with a description of Jesus' impact on the subsequent history of the world, and the concluding excerpt went viral. It received global circulation and is still a powerful yet concise statement of the world-changing effect Jesus' short life has had over the last two millenia.

As we approach the Christmas season it's fitting that we share this three minute film adaptation of Francis' words produced by Illustra Media:

Agreeing with Trump, Voting for Biden

Over the course of the Trump administration there emerged on our political landscape a group of folks who identified as conservatives who were also what came to be called "Never-Trumpers." These were people who metaphorically, and sometimes literally, swore that under no circumstances would they ever cast their vote for Mr. Trump, either in 2016 or 2020.

I suppose these Never-Trumpers are quite satisfied now that President Trump seems to be at the end of his tether, that there seems to be no judicial recourse left to rescue his presidency, but frankly, I don't understand their thinking.

These are people, after all, who claim to be conservative which means that they affirm most or all of the following positions: They are pro-life and opposed to abortion on demand, they believe that the best way to get people out of poverty is to get them jobs and help them build strong families, they believe in free enterprise and free markets, they see the value of lower taxes and shudder at the high tax proposals of their liberal opponents, they ardently desire peace in the Middle East, they cherish religious liberty and freedom of speech, they're (generally) appalled at measures which would create functionally open borders, they loathe radical proposals to expand the number of Supreme Court justices and the number of states in the union and to do away with the filibuster in the Senate.

These are folks, too, who are fully aware that except for the desire for peace in the Middle East, the contemporary Democrat party opposes almost every one of the philosophical principles they embrace.

Nonetheless, the Never-Trumpers refused to vote for the one man who has done more on behalf of implementing those conservative policies and ideas than any president in the last century and a half, and some of them even voted for the Biden/Harris ticket, the most radical major party ticket in our history, because they find Trump's personality so contemptible.

Yet these Never-Trumpers must know that by refusing to help Trump hold on to the White House, by actively voting for his Democrat opponent, they've tacitly abjured all of the policies they claim to hold simply because they consider the man who has been finally accomplishing what conservatives have yearned for ever since the 1930s to be a coarse buffoon.

I don't understand their thinking. We weren't voting on November 3rd for high school Homecoming King. Never-Trump conservatives need to ask themselves, it seems to me, what's more important to them, principle or personality? If it's the latter then it's going to be very hard to ever take these people seriously again.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest (Pt. II)

The previous Viewpoint post argued that sensations like color, sound, taste, fragrance, pain, etc. are not objectively real but are rather the products of the interaction of electrochemical stimuli with the brain/mind complex.

In other words, were there were no perceivers with sensory organs, a brain and a mind there'd be no color, just as there'd be no color if there were no light. We create the sensation of red out of the electromagnetic energy that impinges on our retinas. Red doesn't exist independently of someone seeing it.

But why posit a mind as part of the apparatus responsible for these phenomena of our daily experience? Why not just attribute them to our physical senses working together with our brains?

After all, we know that if a brain ceases to function, as in death, we cease to have sensory experience. Moreover, we know we have brains, we can see them, measure them, observe various parts of them activate on brain scans. But why think we also have a mind that can't be observed, can't be described and can't even be located?

The answer is that the material, physical brain, taken alone, seems to be an inadequate explanation for certain facts about consciousness, among which are the sensory experiences we talked about in the first paragraph above and in the previous post.

The problem is that the brain is material, the processes that occur in the brain are chemical or physical, but the sensations we experience are immaterial. There's no known bridge between an electrical impulse generated between neurons and, say, the taste of sweet. How does an electrochemical reaction among molecules produce the experience of sweetness or the sensation of sound or color or pain?

It's not just that no one knows how these amazing events happen, it's that no one knows how it could happen. A miniature scientist traveling throughout someone's brain while the person was looking at a red car would not see red anywhere in the brain, or the image of a car, for that matter. Where does the red come from? What exactly is it? How does a chemical reaction produce red in a person's brain?

The apparent inadequacy of matter to explain the immaterial phenomena of our experience is one piece of evidence - there are others - that something immaterial is involved in the creation of these phenomena. This immaterial entity is what philosophers call the mind or soul.

Of course, many philosophers, those called materialists, resist the idea that we have an immaterial mind separate from, and in some ways independent of, the brain. They resist the idea because they're wedded to the conviction that all that exists is matter and energy. Their ontology doesn't allow for mysterious immaterial entities that play a role in thinking and experiencing.

Once such entities are admitted, then, the materialist fears, the door will be open to other such mental entities like souls and ultimately, God.

In order to keep the Divine Mind from intruding Itself into the world, the materialist believes, all independent immaterial entities, especially those such as minds which are conscious and intelligent, must be excluded, but then we're left with what seems to be an insoluble mystery. How does a material brain generate the immaterial sensations we experience every moment of our waking lives and what exactly are those sensations?

Answer those questions and you'll win a Nobel Prize.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest (Pt. I)

In my classes we discuss the question of what we mean when we say that something is real. One aspect of the question we specifically address are sensory phenomena like color, fragrance, taste, sound, and so on.

Students often hold the view that these phenomena are objectively real, that sugar is sweet regardless of whether anyone ever tastes sugar, the sky would be blue even if there were never any living things on earth to see it, and a tree falling in the forest makes a sound whether or not there's anyone around to hear it.

But is it true that the phenomena of our senses are objectively real? Consider this description of how music is downloaded to a computer and then transferred to the listener's ear. The description illustrates the point that a piano, for example, doesn't actually make music. The music is made in us by our brains/minds. If there's no ear to hear it, no brain/mind complex to interpret what the ear hears, there simply is no music.

Here's the article's description of the process of recording music for storage on a computer:

• The acoustic waves were picked up by a microphone and converted to electrical pulses.
• The pulses were converted by an analogue-to-digital (A-to-D) converter into numbers representing the frequencies and dynamics of the waveforms.
• The digital signals were compressed by an algorithm into a coded representation storable on an external medium, such as an MP3 file.
• The code was written as magnetic spots on a hard drive according to a storage algorithm that does not necessarily store them in physical order.
• On demand, a read head on the drive reconstructed the bits in their proper sequence and transmitted them as electrical pulses to the central processor.
• The CPU relayed the file to a router, where the file was packetized and sent over the internet to a specified address, possibly traversing electrical wires, the air (radio transmissions), or space via an orbiting satellite along the way.
• The destination site’s router reassembled the packets into a file for storage on a “cloud” server such as YouTube or SoundCloud.
• The website embedded the file’s location in its local server, which you, the listener, accessed by means of touch, using a mouse, keypad, or touchscreen.
• Your computer’s sound card converted the digital signals into audio output through speakers.

Notice that at no point in this process is there the sensation of sound. Nothing is actually heard. The article's description stops here, but if we were to continue the bullet points we could say that,

• The audio output of the speakers consists of waves of energy travelling through the air like waves in a slinky.
• When these strike an ear they're transformed into an electrical impulse that travels along the auditory nerve.
• When that impulse reaches the brain it's converted, in some mysterious, marvelous way that no one understands into the sensation of music.

Until that final event happens there is no music, no sound at all, just electrochemical energy. The music is created by our brain/mind and the relevant sensory apparatus. Sound is a sensation that we experience and without the involvement of a sense there can be no sensation. To insist that sound exists even though no one hears it is like insisting that pain exists even though no one feels it.

And if that's true of sound and pain it must be true of all of our other sensory experiences as well.

And if that's true what would the world be like if we had additional senses, or fewer senses? Why think that the world is exactly the way we perceive it to be, or, for that matter, anything at all like we perceive it to be?

One last question: Why do I refer to the brain/mind? Why not just assume that the brain is solely responsible for the sensations we experience? I'll consider that question on Monday.

The Root Causes of Poverty

In his book titled The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth America’s Poor Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute argues that the primary reasons for poverty in this country are the laws and policies enacted by the government which make it harder for the poor to escape to the middle class.

He talked about this in a 2018 article at National Review Online. He opens with this:

Why are people poor? Conservatives and liberals offer very different explanations.

Conservatives point to a “culture of poverty” and suggest that much deprivation is the result of flawed choices and behavior by the poor themselves. They point to a strong correlation between poverty and a failure to follow the so-called “success sequence”: finish school, get a job, get married, and only then have children. Relatively few people who do those things end up in poverty.

Liberals, on the other hand, say that that is all very well, but choices are always constrained by the circumstances in which people live. Therefore, conservatives are wrong to discount structural factors, such as racism, gender-based discrimination, and economic dislocation, that can help shape people’s choices.

There is truth to both explanations. One can’t strip the poor of agency by treating them as if they were little more than chaff blown by the wind, with no responsibility for their choices. But neither should we ignore the context in which those decisions are made. For all the progress we have made, not everyone starts with an equal opportunity.

Tanner argues that five areas of government policy impede economic and social progress among the poor.

Criminal Justice: Studies show that a criminal record dooms an inmate's children to poverty, and having a criminal record makes it harder to get a job and get married once released, both of which increase out-of-wedlock births.

Tanner cites a 2016 statement from President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers:

Having a criminal record or history of incarceration is a barrier to success in the labor market, and limited employment or depressed wages can stifle an individual’s ability to become self-sufficient. . . . Further, criminal sanctions create financial and emotional stresses that destabilize marriages and have adverse consequences for children.

This is one reason why President Trump's criminal justice reform was extremely beneficial to poor communities and why he received a larger share of the black and Hispanic vote than any Republican candidate in the last sixty years.

Education: Poor children generally find themselves stuck in failing schools. These schools are not failing because they don't receive enough money, rather they fail for a host of socio-economic reasons that indeed may be intractable. The problem is that there are lots of motivated kids languishing in these schools who are essentially being taught nothing. The answer is to give parents a choice as to where their children will go to school.

Tanner writes:

An effective anti-poverty program would break up the government education monopoly and limit the power of the teachers’ unions. One can debate the precise merits of charter schools vs. vouchers vs. tuition tax credits, but, in the end, we must give parents more choice and control over their children’s education.

You'd think that people who talk about social justice would be on board with this, but it's the left which has over the years consistently thwarted attempts to give parents more options in their children's schooling and conservatives who have championed school choice for poor families.

Housing Policy: According to Tanner, government zoning and land-use policies can add as much as 40 percent to the cost of housing in some cities. In places such as New York City and San Francisco, the zoning cost is even higher, at 50 percent or more, and these regulations don’t merely increase the cost of rent which already consumes a big chunk of a poor family's resources; they effectively lock the poor out of areas with more jobs or better schools.

Savings: Tanner asserts that, "Asset tests for public programs punish the poor for saving. And Social Security squeezes out opportunities for the poor to save for themselves. We need to reconfigure a wide variety of current policies to encourage thrift, saving, and investment."

Inclusive Economic Growth: Tanner urges our leaders "to pursue policies such as low taxes, reduced government debt, and deregulation, policies that spur investment, entrepreneurship, and the economic growth that will increase the wealth of our society."

Tanner goes on to add that,

[I]t’s not enough to encourage economic growth if the poor remain locked out of participation in that growing economy. That means we need to eliminate barriers such as occupational-licensing rules, occupational zoning, and the minimum wage.

For example, it's estimated that more than 1,100 different professions (25 to 30 percent of all job categories) require a license in at least one state, from florists to funeral attendants, from tree trimmers to make-up artists. The removal of licensure barriers not only unlocks employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for the poor in low-skill occupations but also lowers prices.

Similarly, occupational zoning can prevent a poor person from starting a small business in his or her home. And minimum-wage laws can block low-skilled workers from getting that first job, and therefore a start on the economic ladder.

Liberals will cheer Tanner's advocacy of criminal justice reform, although it took Donald Trump to actually accomplish it, while conservatives will applaud his remaining four policy recommendations. Unfortunately, nothing in the history of Democrat administrations suggests that any of those will happen in a Biden administration, and, indeed, it was Senator Joe Biden whose crime bill in the 1990s made reform necessary.

The larger point, though, is that government bureaucracy, mandates and general officiousness does more to hurt the poor than to help the poor, which is another assertion that conservatives will register strong agreement with.

Tragically, the poor often keep voting for people who think that the way to eliminate poverty is to enact policies that make it harder for people to overcome it.

Tanner concludes with this:

An anti-poverty agenda built on empowering poor people and allowing them to take greater control of their own lives offers the chance for a new bipartisan consensus that rejects the current paternalism of both Left and Right.

More important, it is an agenda that will do far more than our current failed welfare state to actually lift millions of Americans out of poverty.

It all makes sense to me.

What Do We Mean By Information

One of the most compelling arguments for the existence of a cosmic designer, a God, is based on the fact that there's an enormous amount of information packed into every cell in every living thing in the world. Since information, wherever we encounter it, is the product of a mind and never the product of chance or physical processes, it's reasonable to assume that the information in the cell is probably also the product of a mind.

The argument is especially compelling when we consider the information content of the very first cell, a structure which must've been at least as complex as a computer, which must've been able to metabolize nutrients and replicate itself and which must've emerged before the standard Darwinian processes of mutation and natural selection were operative.

But what is information?

Eric Holloway at Mind Matters helps us get a handle on it. He writes:

We know information when we see it. An article contains information. A photograph contains information. The thoughts in our mind contain information. So does a computer program and so do our genomes.

Yet other things we see around us clearly do not contain information. A handful of toothpicks dropped on the ground does not. Nor do the swirling tea leaves in a cup. Neither does a pair of tossed dice nor a sequence of 100 coin flips. But mere disorder is not the clue. An intricate snowflake does not contain information either.

Can we state the difference between the article and the scattered toothpicks precisely? That’s tricky.

Clearly, complexity is a necessary feature of an entity that contains information—but it is not sufficient.

A monkey pounding on a computer keyboard would produce a complex pattern of symbols, but it's not information, at least not in the relevant sense we find in living cells, such as the genetic code inscribed on DNA.

So, what's needed to qualify as information in this relevant sense? What's the difference between the sequence of letters produced by the monkey and the sequence of letters found in a Dickens novel?

The raw matter of an article is letters and punctuation. If we distribute letters and punctuation randomly on a page, without applying an external pattern, then we get something that is without pattern and uninformative. On the other hand, if we take our letters and punctuation, and arrange them so as to express our thoughts (an external, specified pattern), suddenly the arrangement becomes informative to a reader.

In other words, the sequence of letters produced by the monkey, though complex, doesn't inform. It has no meaning. It doesn't specify a recognizable pattern.

A landscaper who plants flowers in a pattern that spells out "Welcome to Our Town" has created a complex arrangement that specifies a meaningful pattern. It's information. The same flowers strewn randomly around a field may form a complex distribution, but they wouldn't specify a meaningful pattern and therefore do not constitute information.

The DNA/RNA arrangement is extremely complex and specifies a meaningful code responsible for synthesizing proteins. Moreover, it requires the assistance of proteins to aid it in synthesizing the very proteins it requires.

How this amazing ensemble arose apart from the input of a mind is orders of magnitude more mysterious than how the flowers would've spelled out "Welcome to Our Town" without the input of an intelligent landscaper.

Indeed, the only reason for doubting the existence of an intelligent "landscaper" is a metaphysical prejudice in favor of naturalism that leads one to conclude that despite the difficulties of explaining how an information-rich cell could have arisen by chance, we're mistaken to conclude that God did it.

And why are we mistaken? Because we know a priori that there is no God.

This is what's called circular reasoning, and it's not very convincing.

The Fury of the Fatherless

The riots of last spring and summer were unlike anything in the history of our nation. There have been violent riots before, of course, but the organized and sustained vandalism and violence we witnessed last summer is unprecedented.

Mary Eberstadt, in an article at First Things titled The Fury of the Fatherless, claims that the apparently unlimited supply of mayhem-makers requires an explanation, and she offers one, but first she discounts the explanation that's most frequently invoked, that the riots were a reaction against racism.

The fact that rioters who were often white screamed at and spat at black police officers and, in at least one case, even killed a black security guard suggests that the rioters weren't motivated by any sense of sympathy for blacks. Nor, she asserts, do the actual statistics of police violence against blacks support the conclusion that police brutality is the cause.

For Eberstadt the critical factor responsible for the hatred and rage exhibited on our cities' streets this year is due to something more subtle but more insoluble. She writes:

So, here’s a new theory: The explosive events of 2020 are but the latest eruption along a fault line running through our already unstable lives. That eruption exposes the threefold crisis of filial attachment that has beset the Western world for more than half a century. Deprived of father, Father, and patria, a critical mass of humanity has become socially dysfunctional on a scale not seen before.

The riots are, at least in part, a visible consequence of the largely invisible crisis of Western paternity. We know this to be true, in more ways than one.

Six decades of social science have established that the most efficient way to increase dysfunction is to increase fatherlessness. And this the United States has done, for two generations now. Almost one in four children today grows up without a father in the home. For African Americans, it is some 65 percent of children.

Some people, mainly on the left, think there’s nothing to see here. They’re wrong. The vast majority of incarcerated juveniles have grown up in fatherless homes. Teen and other mass murderers almost invariably have filial rupture in their biographies. Absent fathers predict higher rates of truancy, psychiatric problems, criminality, promiscuity, drug use, rape, domestic violence, and other less-than-optimal outcomes.

Eberstadt goes on to argue that fatherlessness leads to a search for father substitutes which is one reason why the homicide rates among blacks are so high. Black homicide is largely a gang problem and gangs are largely a missing father problem. The gang and the gang leader are often father substitutes.

She has more to say about this that's interesting, but her point is that many of those attracted to BLM and Antifa are young people who grew up fatherless and the resentments and bitterness this causes is manifested in the violence we watched on our television screens last summer and probably would have watched again had Biden lost the election.

Moreover, the loss of an earthly father plays a role in the rejection of a heavenly Father. Each generation for the last sixty years has been less inclined to believe that there exists a transcendent, ideal Father. Their experience with earthly fathers has soured them on the notion of a heavenly Father. They can't trust the disappointing earthly version to be there for them, and are thus similarly distrustful of, and disinterested in, the heavenly version.

A further consequence of the lack of a decent father in so many lives is that many of those who've been abandoned by their fathers feel no allegiance or loyalty to their country. Loyalty starts in the family and children of dysfunctional families, or families that have been rent asunder by divorce or other forms of fatherlessness (except when the father was killed or died of natural causes in which case he's often memorialized and revered) have a much harder time developing a sense of loyalty to an abstraction like a nation.

Eberstadt's essay is rather long, but it can be summed up in this sentence: The anger and fury vented by our young in our cities last summer, as well as the increasing secularization among the young that we see reflected in survey after survey, is largely the culmination of our culture's six decades-long minimization of the importance of fathers in the lives of their children.

I think she's right.

The Scientistic Worldview

In Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality the author unabashedly promotes a scientistic view of knowledge. "Scientistic" does not mean "scientific," rather it describes a view based on "scientism" which is the view that science is the only guide to truth about the world and human existence. If a claim cannot be demonstrated empirically, using the tools of science, then it's not something that we can know, and in fact is not something we should even believe.

In Rosenberg's view physics "fixes all the facts" about what is and what can be reasonably believed. This is sometimes called "physicalism."

Not all scientists are scientistic or "physicalists," many of them hold that there are truths about the world that science is not equipped to discover, truths about justice, rights, beauty, and morality, for example, but Rosenberg thinks it's neither good science nor good epistemology to hold beliefs about these things.

Rosenberg is no dummy. He's the chairman of the philosophy department at Duke University and demonstrates in his book a considerable breadth of learning. He also strives to be rigorously consistent. Given his belief that physicalism is the correct way to understand reality it follows that there is no God, no miracles, no soul or mind, no self, no real meaning or purpose to life, no meaning to history, no human rights or value, no objective moral duties - only what he calls a "nice nihilism."

By "nice nihilism" Rosenberg means that nature has fortuitously evolved in us a tendency to treat each other well despite the fact that doing so is neither a moral duty nor morally "right." That, for the one who embraces Rosenberg's scientism, is the only glimmer of light in an unrelentingly dark world and even this little glimmer is beset with problems.

Here's one: If our niceness is the product of impersonal undirected processes then it cannot have any moral purchase on us. That is, it can be neither right nor wrong to be "nice." Some people are and some aren't, and that's the end of the matter.

Evolution has also evolved behaviors that are not "nice." If we're the product of evolution then there's really no way to morally discriminate between "niceness" and rape, torture, lying, racism, etc. All of these behaviors have evolved in our species just as niceness has and we have no basis for saying that we have a moral duty to avoid some behaviors and embrace others.

In other words, on scientism, there are no moral obligations and nothing which is wrong to do.

Rosenberg admits all this, but he thinks that we need to bravely and honestly face up to these consequences of adopting a scientistic worldview and a scientistic worldview, in his mind, is the only intelligent option in a world in which there is no God.

I think he's right about this, actually, and argue in both of my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (See the links at the top of the page) that the consequences outlined in The Atheist's Guide to Reality do indeed follow from atheism. The atheist who lives as if none of these consequences exist is living out an irrational delusion, most likely because he can't live consistently with the logical and existential entailments of what he believes about God.

A belief or a worldview that entails conclusions one cannot live with, however, stands in serious need of reexamination.

Bidenisms

President Trump was roundly mocked by the liberal press for his awkward way of phrasing things. Sometimes the criticism was justified, sometimes it wasn't. Now Mr. Biden appears as though he'll surpass his predecessor in cringeworthiness although in his case our delinquent media will surely choose not to take notice.

Indeed, he's not even in the White House yet and already he's providing plenty of ammo for late night comics, at least those intrepid enough to risk the opprobrium that attaches to making merry at the expense of a liberal Democrat.

Here's an example. Last week Mr. Biden delivered himself of this mathematical head-scratcher:

Christmas is going to be a lot harder. I don’t want to scare anybody here, but understand the facts — we’re likely to lose another 250,000 people dead between now and January. You hear me?

Frightening stuff, to be sure, but on what data was this claim based? Jim Geraghty at NRO took the trouble to do the math:

I am all for taking the virus seriously, but there is such a thing as fearmongering, and precision counts in public statements about a topic as serious as this. The United States suffered about 3,000 deaths from the coronavirus yesterday. There are 27 days left in this awful year. If we lose 3,000 people per day for 27 days, we will see 81,000 deaths. That will be terrible, but that will not be “another 250,000 by January.”

If we are generous and assume Biden meant the end of January, another 3,000 deaths for another 31 days would be 174,000 deaths — still well short of the 250,000 that Biden predicted.

Imagine the hooting from the media if Mr. Trump had said something so ridiculous. As it happened, the talking heads at MSNBC and CNN must've all been on coffee break at the moment Mr. Biden chose to put his mathematical proficiency on display.

Throughout the campaign, candidate Biden promised in so many words that he'd get us out of the pandemic. His administration would do things better. He'd listen to the experts. He'd follow the science. So now that he seems to have been elected what will he do to relieve us of our covid-induced misery? Well, he's going to ask us to wear masks for a hundred days.

That's it? Wear masks? After consulting with all of his experts about what to do about the pandemic and after all his promises to fix the problem the most he offers us is a reiteration of the same advice we've been getting from every fifth grader for the past nine months?

Then there was the bizarre promise to resign from office if he and his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, ever had a serious disagreement:

When we disagree, so far it’s been just like when Barack and I did. It’s in private. She’ll say, "I think we should do A, B, C, or D," and I’ll say, "I like A, don’t like B and C." Like I told Barack, if I reach something where there’s a fundamental disagreement we have based on a moral principle, I’ll develop some disease and say I have to resign.

This was stunning. Why would the president resign if he had a disagreement with the vice-president? Was this some sort of slip of the tongue in which Mr. Biden inadvertently admitted that he's just a figurehead and Kamala Harris is really the power behind the throne? Was it a Freudian admission that the plan all along has been for him to resign so that the far-lefty Ms. Harris could seize the reins of power?

Some say he was joking. Maybe he was, but it doesn't sound like a joke and nobody, including Mr. Biden, was laughing. Watch the video and decide for yourself:

At the rate the president-elect is churning out these Bidenisms the electorate will be chortling so heartily by the end of his first term, if he's still around four years hence, that he'll be re-elected in a landslide just for the entertainment value.

Credit Where It's Due

There's good news afoot regarding the Covid pandemic. Even as cases are spiking and hospitals are once again seeing a surge in the very sick it looks as if a vaccine will begin to be available by the end of this month and most who want it will be able to be vaccinated by spring.

The development of this vaccine in less than a year since the outbreak of the virus is nearly miraculous. Indeed, last spring many thought it would take several years to develop a vaccine, get it approved by the FDA and distributed to the population.

What would've happened to small businesses, already ravaged by lockdowns and reduced customer traffic, if they had to go through all that again for the next several years? Indeed, they are going through it in California.

What would've happened to families already on the edge, emotionally, psychologically and financially, if they had to endure the loss of income and freedom of movement for several more years?

What would've happened to the educational development of our children had they been forced to spend another couple of years on pedagogically inadequate zoom lessons?

To what do we owe this near-miracle?

Surely President Trump and Vice-President Pence deserve a lot of credit, though they won't get it, for their role in establishing Operation Warp Speed, as does the head of that operation, Moncef Slaoui, whose expertise, Dan Henninger notes in a column at the Wall Street Journal, grew out of three decades of work with GlaxoSmithKline.

Henninger goes on to note that,

[T]hey created a public-private partnership that actually worked, in large part by busting through the bureaucratic sludge that normally slows anything.

But though these men deserve our gratitude and admiration the real heroes of the story are the hundreds, or even thousands, of scientists and technicians who labored tirelessly in a pharmaceutical version of the Manhattan Project to bring us a vaccine that will, if all goes well, save hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S. and millions of lives worldwide.

As Henninger notes, these people deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, but they won't get it. The Nobel prizes have become too politicized, and Big Pharma, like Trump, has become so demonized that such recognition of our debt to them by the Nobel committee is unimaginable.

The truth remains, nevertheless, that as hated as they are by the left, many of those haters will owe their health and even their lives to Donald Trump, Mike Pence and the pharmaceutical companies whose brilliant employees gave us the gift of a drug that may allow us all to return to some facsimile of normalcy over the next few months.

In conclusion Henninger says this:

The intellectual, technical and organizational firepower of thousands of men and women employed by pharma is what made these savior vaccines happen in 10 months rather than years. They won’t ask for anyone’s gratitude, but they deserve it.

Yes, they do.

A Christmas Gift Suggestion

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during (a non-covid) football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, and it is, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our sixteen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-size university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the person who's perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It has been said that ideas have consequences and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. It's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reader/reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (see the link at the top of the page) on your Christmas shopping list.

Russia's Miseries

We don't hear much about Russia these days except from those who still stew in the fantasy that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, but these are not happy times in Russia.

Part of the reason for the Russian Bear's current unhappiness are the sanctions imposed on Russia by the Trump administration, the same administration led by the same man who was supposed to be "Putin's lap dog," the same man who was alleged by the more delirious media talking heads to be in cahoots with Russia to sell out the United States.

But there are other reasons for Russia's distress, too. Strategy Page elaborates:

The Russian economy has taken a beating because of low oil prices and Western economic sanctions imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. The Russian advance in Ukraine has been stalled since 2015, after Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine had been seized.

The stalemate in Ukraine has crippled the Russian military since Ukrainian industry was a key supplier of military components.

Russia estimates that the loss of access to Western technology and Ukrainian components cost their military over $25 billion so far. That was the cost of replacing or doing without new components that used Western or Ukrainian tech. Locally made replacements were usually not as effective as what the Ukrainians were providing until 2014....

The most severe shortages occur in key areas. Prominent examples include IBCMs, air-to-air missiles, aviation and engines for warships.

Then there are the Ukrainian made guidance systems used in Russian air-to-air missiles. This includes the infrared (heat seeking) guidance systems for short-range R-73 and medium-range R-27T. These missiles are the main armament for MiG-29, Su-27, Su-30 and Su-35 fighters.

But their military woes are only part of Russia's miseries:

By 2017 Russia was also facing problems with population decline, corruption, an increasingly inefficient police state and an exodus of its best educated and most entrepreneurial citizens. Russia was no longer a great power and, as much as Russians would talk about regaining their superpower economic status, that is not going to happen.

To put it into perspective, consider how smaller (especially in terms of population) countries like Australia managed to pass Russia in GDP. Russia still has six times as many people as Australia but Australia has far less corruption and a much more efficient government and economy. The Australian population is growing and its GDP in 2016 was the same as that of Russia at $1.3 trillion. The Australian GDP was growing at least twice as fast Russia’s.

International economists at the World Bank and IMF (International Monetary Fund) see Russian GDP continuing to fall as long as low oil prices and sanctions remain as they are. In 2013 Russian GDP per capita (person) was $16,000 compared to $7,000 for China. By 2020 both nations will have about the same GDP per capita of about $12,000. These trends are expected to continue for the next few years and Chinese GDP per capita will continue to grow faster than Russia’s.

The Russian people, especially the poor, have suffered awfully for centuries, the worst of which was the twentieth during which century the people groaned under the boot of a draconian totalitarian socialism. Although there's much more private ownership in Russia today freedom is still limited, which is why many of the "best educated and most entrepreneurial citizens" who can go elsewhere to make a life, do it.

It's a shame because the Russian people are often brilliant, their literary output alone is magnificent, and the country is richly endowed with resources. So why can't they manage to achieve something more than a third world economy?

Perhaps part of the reason is that under the old Soviet system so many of the best and the brightest were liquidated and those who survived developed a kind of slave mentality which inhibits economic progress and which may take many generations to overcome.

Do Bad Decisions Cause Poverty?

An interesting piece by Emily Badger at CityLab some years ago cites research that suggests that, contrary to common opinion, poor people are not poor because they make bad decisions but rather they make bad decisions because they're poor. The exigencies of poverty, some research shows, exert such a powerful pull on people that unwise choices are practically inevitable. Here's part of her essay:

Researchers publishing some ground-breaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little [cognitive] bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.

In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.

The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty – or that they ought to be able to lift themselves out of it with enough effort. This research suggests that the reality of poverty actually makes it harder to execute fundamental life skills. Being poor means, as the authors write, “coping with not just a shortfall of money, but also with a concurrent shortfall of cognitive resources.”

I don't know how reliable this study is, but I hope it's conclusions are not true. If they are true then the plight of the poor is almost hopeless. According to the study the poor make unwise decisions because they're poor, but they can't get out of poverty until they stop making unwise decisions. They're caught in a vicious cycle. Indeed, this study provides those living below the poverty line with incentive to just give up.

Badger thinks, though, that taxpayers should give the poor financial independence so they can be freed from the stressors that drive them to make bad choices:

Conversely, going forward, this also means that anti-poverty programs could have a huge benefit that we've never recognized before: Help people become more financially stable, and you also free up their cognitive resources to succeed in all kinds of other ways as well.

Unfortunately, we've already conducted that experiment. Since the 1960s we've spent $22 trillion on the War on Poverty and there are still millions of our fellow citizens living in relative poverty (I say "relative" because poor people in America are only poor relative to their contemporaries in the U.S. Relative to the vast numbers of people who've inhabited the planet throughout history our poor are fabulously wealthy). How much more can, and should, we give and what reason do we have for thinking that we're not now at the point of diminishing returns? When the government subsidizes something we get more of it. That goes as much for poverty as it does for anything else.

Reading Badger's column raises a question: If it's true that poverty makes people choose actions that perpetuate their poverty how do we account for the fact that so many poor people have surmounted their circumstances, especially before there were any social welfare programs in place to help them? Irish and Asian immigrants had nothing but the shirts on their backs when they landed on these shores, and the latter didn't even speak English. Yet many of them, despite suffering brutal discrimination, made the choice to work hard, and they overcame tremendous odds to succeed. Moreover, much of the American population was impoverished during the Great Depression, yet they rose out of it, and still today many are lifting themselves out of poverty and achieving middle class status or higher.

Maybe there's something I'm missing, but all of this taken together causes me to wonder if maybe it's not Ms. Badger and the study she cites that are missing something.

Why Is Bigotry Wrong?

Insistent demands to end racism and bias against women and LBGTQ individuals are rife in our culture, but rarely, it seems, does anyone ask why these bigotries are wrong. on those occassions when it is asked it's sometimes replied that any form of discrimination is morally wrong, but what, exactly, is meant by this is unclear.

Here's what I'm getting at: Let's assume we've all adopted a secular perspective in which either there is no moral authority that transcends human society or, if there is, that that authority should be permitted no role in our secular affairs. Given this assumption what does it mean to say that racism, misogyny and discrimination against LGBTQ folks are wrong? If there's no moral authority how can "wrong" mean anything more than "something some people don't like"? And if that's all we mean then what reason is there for all the outrage? Why not just accept that different people hold different values and let it go at that?

After all, something can be wrong in any meaningful moral sense only if there's an objective moral authority who promulgates an objective moral law and holds people accountable for living according to that law. If no such authority exists, or if any such authority is excluded from our public lives, then racism is little more than a behavior some people practice and some people don't like.

An example of the former is the famous 19th century British evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). Huxley was the man who coined the term "agnostic" to describe his own attitude toward God and was also a firm believer in the Darwinian doctrine of survival of the fittest.

His evolutionary convictions led him to believe that some races were superior to others, and he argued that emancipation of the slaves in the U.S. had doomed blacks who would now have to fend for themselves, a task for which he believed them poorly suited.

Huxley stated that, "no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.”

Huxley's racism was little different than that of his hero Charles Darwin. Writing to the Rev. Charles Kingsley in 1862, Darwin stated,

It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.

Almost twenty years later he offered similar sentiments in a letter to Irish philosopher and political economist William Graham:

Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.

People today would be aghast were they to hear preeminent thinkers voice such bigotry, but the question we should ask is why do we consider views like those of Huxley and Darwin to be morally offensive?

One might answer that they're offensive because they're hurtful, but that answer assumes that it is objectively wrong to hurt others. But why is it? Is it wrong to hurt others because we wouldn't want someone to hurt us? It's of course true that we wouldn't want others to hurt us, but how does that make it wrong for us to hurt others? If we had the power to hurt others with impunity, in what sense would it be wrong to do so?

The secularist has no convincing answers to these questions. He or she has to assume that there is no relevant objective moral authority, that objective morality therefore doesn't exist and that all of our moral judgments are simply expressions of our own personal, subjective preferences, like one's preference for Ford trucks rather than Chevys.

If the secularist wishes to maintain that moral judgments are objectively meaningful then he's piggy-backing on a theistic worldview while all the while insisting that that worldview is either utterly false or irrelevant to morality.

In other words, the moral secularist must behave irrationally in order to assert that racism is wrong. On his own secular assumptions he has no grounds for claiming that anyone or anything is objectively wrong. All he can say is that he doesn't like it.

But how does a Judeo-Christian view of the world provide grounds for affirming that racism and other bigotries are morally wrong? It does so because according to that view all men are created by God in His image and are loved by Him. We are all equal in the sight of God, and God, the creator of the universe, demands that we treat each other with compassion and justice. Moreover, He will hold us ultimately accountable for whether we actually do or do not treat others this way.

To harm others is morally wrong because it violates the objective will, nature and law of God who is the ultimate source of moral knowledge and the ultimate standard of right and wrong.

Only if this is true can racism, sexism and bigotry of any kind be objectively wrong. Only if this is true does our belief that human beings have rights and dignity make sense. If it's not true then Huxley and Darwin were probably right, and we should cease our pretensions of believing in moral right and wrong and the equality and dignity of men and just do whatever serves our own interests and desires.

Of course the decision to follow that road leads to Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust.

How the Media Swayed the Election

Joe Biden's ostensible victory on November 3rd has been attributed by many of Donald Trump's supporters to electoral hanky-panky of one sort or another, some of it illegal, some of it legal but unethical.

An example of the latter is presented in a story by Jordan Davidson at The Federalist in which he cites a study that finds media suppression of certain news stories kept many Biden voters in the dark, voters who claim that had they known of these stories they would've voted for Trump.

Since the number of Biden voters who claim they would've voted for Trump if they'd known information that the media was suppressing totaled some 17% of those who supported the Democrat candidate, it's clear that, in a counterfactual world, one where the media, were honest and objective, Trump would've won.

Here are some of the key points in Davidson's column:

The survey results report that 17 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for the Biden-Harris presidential ticket if they had known about at least one of the eight news stories that were suppressed by big tech and mainstream media outlets.

The survey, conducted online by The Polling Company, ... asked 1,750 Biden voters living in seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) if they were aware of certain issues surrounding Biden, his family, and some of the Trump administration’s successes.

Some of these topics include former Biden staffer Tara Reade and her sexual assault allegations against Biden, the Hunter Biden scandal, VP Nominee Kamala Harris’s extreme liberal voting record in the Senate, the U.S.’s economic jump in the third quarter, millions of jobs added, America’s energy independence, Operation Warp Speed successes, and Trump’s facilitation of multiple peace deals in the Middle East.

Over a quarter of Biden voters said they didn’t know Sen. Harris had the most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2019, and nearly half of all Biden voters polled, 49 percent, said they were unaware of the U.S.’s remarkable economic recovery in the third quarter, doubling the previous record.

One in six Biden voters polled, 17 percent, said they would have changed their vote had they been aware of these stories. The report also found that without even voting for Trump and simply refusing to vote for Biden, “these voters would have handed all six of these states, and a second term, to the president if the news media had properly informed them about the two candidates.”

In Pennsylvania and Georgia, 15 percent of Biden’s voters would have refrained from casting a vote for him. In Michigan, it was 14 percent. In Arizona, it was 21 percent. In Wisconsin, it was 13 percent. And in Nevada, it was 18 percent.

The significant numbers, the report states, “would have moved every one of the swing states into Trump’s column, some by a huge margin.”

This would've given Trump an electoral college win of 311 to 227.

This is a condign indictment of the mainstream and social media, but although it is true that the media have behaved reprehensibly throughout Trump's four years in office, and although it may also be true that had these voters known about these stories the outcome of the election would've been different, I nevertheless have one reservation about this report.

I think it may be a bit of an overreach to conclude that had the media been more honest and professional in their reporting these voters would've known about these stories. The fact is that no matter how much the media discussed these facts it's possible that many voters would still have been oblivious to them because many people simply aren't interested in political news and don't tune in to it.

So, yes, voter ignorance very likely played a role in the outcome of the election and the media certainly played a role in keeping the voters ignorant, but whether an honest media would've been able to educate enough of those who don't take the trouble to be educated to have changed the election results is hard to ascertain.

Even so, when Donald Trump declares that large segments of the liberal media are "the enemy of the people" he has a point. Any organization entrusted by the people to disseminate information but which fails to uphold that trust is doing the country a grave disservice, even if what they do is technically legal.

Davidson has more details at the link.

Liberals and Leftists

Now that it appears likely that Joe Biden and the Democrats will inherit the White House it might be useful to keep in mind the distinctions between "liberals" and "leftists" or, as the latter are often called, "progressives."

President-elect Biden, who was once fairly moderate, has in recent years moved leftward and gained a reputation for being rather liberal/left. His party, however, is dominated by radical leftists who also exert an outsized influence in academia as well as news, entertainment and social media.

Given the dominance of leftist progressivism in the Democratic party and, indeed, in the culture as a whole, it'll be interesting to see how far Mr. Biden allows himself to be pulled toward their positions.

This five minute Prager U. video gives a succinct explanation of what those positions are and highlights the main differences between leftists and liberals:

One thing about these distinctions that should be kept in mind: Many people are liberal on some issues and leftist on others, so there's lots of ideological gray among folks on the left side of the ideological spectrum, just as there is among those on the right.