Common Misconceptions about the Crusades

It's common to hear people cite the Crusades as a terrible debacle and a stain on the history of Christian Europe, and while there definitely were horrible atrocities committed by some undisciplined mobs, especially against the Jews in the Rhine valley of Germany, the history of the Crusades is much more complex than some history textbooks would have us believe.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Crusades, and the belief that they were unprovoked attacks against innocent Muslims who were minding their own business in the faraway Middle East is one of them.

Steve Weidenkopf had an article at Crisis Magazine a few years back titled Crash Course on the Crusades in which he lamented the historical distortions and fabrications about the Crusades in the popular culture. He began his essay with this lede:

The Crusades are one of the most misunderstood events in Western and Church history. The very word “crusades” conjures negative images in our modern world of bloodthirsty and greedy European nobles embarked on a conquest of peaceful Muslims.

The Crusades are considered by many to be one of the “sins” the Christian Faith has committed against humanity, and together with the Inquisition the two comprise the go-to cudgels for bashing the Church.

While the mocking and generally nasty portrayal of the Crusades and Crusaders on the big screen ranges from Monty Python farce to the cringe-worthy big budget spectacles like Kingdom of Heaven (2005), it is the biased and bad scholarship such as Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones (of Monty Python acclaim) that does real damage.

From academia to pop-culture, the message is reinforced and driven home with resounding force: the Crusades were bad and obviously so. The real story is of course far more complicated and far more interesting.

It is worth our time to be versed in the facts and especially to recall the tremendous faith, sacrifice, and courage that inspired the vast majority of the Crusaders to act in defense of Christendom.

Weidenkopf then sought to set the record straight by debunking the following five myths:

• The Crusades were wars of unprovoked aggression.
• The Crusades were about European greed for booty, plunder and the establishment of colonies.
• When Jerusalem was captured in 1099 the crusaders killed all the inhabitants – so many were killed that the blood flowed ankle deep through the city.
• The Crusades were also wars against the Jews and should be considered the first Holocaust.
• The Crusades are the source of the modern tension between Islam and the West.

None of these beliefs, despite being widely held, is true, or at least not the whole truth. I encourage readers to go to Weidenkopf's article and read what he says about each of them. As you might expect, the actual history is much more complex and far less damning of the Crusaders than it has been portrayed by those who wish to grind anti-Catholic axes.

For those looking for an excellent and very readable book on this topic I highly recommend God's Battalions by Rodney Stark and Sword and Scimitar by Raymond Ibrahim.

Infinity As Theological Metaphor

A short piece in the Wall Street Journal by a lawyer named Mike Kerrigan does a lovely job of tying together the mathematical concept of infinity with a couple of theological ideas.

Kerrigan mentions that his son Joe is a senior math major in college and that over dinner recently Joe was discussing the concept of infinity:

He said that between integers—say, 1 and 2—there are infinitely many real numbers, like 1.1 and 1.265. Such thinking scared me straight into law school at his age, yet somehow I grasped it now, if only conceptually.

“Like the Incarnation,” I offered. An instance of the Creator, while remaining fully God and fully man, entering into his creation: the infinite bounded by the finite.

“I suppose,” Joe answered, checking my catechism against his set theory. Then he said something even trippier.

Although whole numbers can be listed out to infinity, the hypothetical list of real numbers is necessarily larger than the hypothetical list of whole numbers. Not all infinities are equal.

Infinity and infinity-plus? Had that notion entered my mind in college, I’d have reclined in darkness with a cold compress on my head. I didn’t get the underlying math but, thinking I understood the broader concept, parried with another analogy: “Like higher and lower degrees of heavenly perfection.”

Long ago I’d accepted how a shotgun shack in heaven’s outermost borough was good enough for a sinner like me. Joe concurred, and when he did, I was relieved.

The rest of the article is an amusing read although you may need a subscription to access it.

In any case, it highlights an interesting point about mathematics - at it's most arcane and abstract it gives us insight into the nature of the Creator.

We gain similar insight in quantum physics where, to take just one example, we learn that the light of our everyday experience behaves as a wave and also as a particle, and which it shows itself as depends on the nature of the observation that we make of it.

It seems paradoxical to think that light can be an immaterial wave and a material particle at the same time, just as it seems paradoxical that God can be God and human at the same time. Yet the former is a truth of physics and the latter a truth of Christian theology.

The nature of light, like infinity, teaches us something very interesting and important about the nature of God.

Necessitists and Contingentists

Philosopher/theologian William Lane Craig writing on Origin of Life researchers:

One interesting thing about origin-of-life research is that scientists tend to divide into two camps on this subject: what I would call necessitists and contingentists.

Necessitists claim that given the laws of nature, the origin of life from chemicals is inevitable. Life is necessary, not in the logical sense, but in the nomological sense, that is, the laws of nature make it unavoidable that life will originate.

By contrast, contingentists maintain that the origin of life is an enormous accident, an event so improbable that it is unlikely to have occurred anywhere else in the observable universe. The sufficient conditions for the origin of life on Earth just happened to come together against all odds.

The contingentists criticize the necessitists as holding to a sort of closet theism: a God has written the origin of life into the very laws of nature. The necessitists accuse the contingentists of making the origin of life into a miracle.

So both sides accuse each other of holding surreptitiously to belief in God—which is the mortal sin in these discussions!

Realizing this distinction between necessitists and contingentists helps us to understand why some scientists speak so confidently about the inevitability of the origin of life from chemicals: they are committed to the view that life is necessary, even though there is no scientific evidence for this claim.

Instead, most researchers recognize that the origin of life on Earth is a highly improbable, singular event.

The Necessitists put their faith in the existence of laws which, as far as we know, have never been discovered whereas Contingentists put their faith in pure chance and serendipity.

If blind faith is belief in something for which there is no evidence then both Necessitists and Contingentists must possess an extraordinary amount of blind faith.

Dissenters from Darwinism

One of the top stories in theoretical biology in 2022 is the growing schism between traditional Darwinian evolutionists and those biologists who are growing increasingly disenchanted with the ability of the standard Darwinian model to explain the data.

The standard model states that all living things have descended from a simple original cell over vast periods of time through genetic mutation, natural selection and genetic drift. But that model is coming under increasing skepticism from within the biological community.

The dissension gained public notice when science journalist Stephen Buranyi did a piece last summer in The Guardian in which he outlined the problems facing the traditional view. David Klinghoffer at Evolution News has a summary of Buranyi's lengthy article which can be read in its entirety here.

Klinghoffer observes that, "The headline from the left-leaning British daily asks, “Do we need a new theory of evolution?” Answer in one word: yes. The article is full of scandalous admissions."

He then adds this quote from Buranyi's column in which he highlights in boldface some of those "scandalous admissions" of which most people in the public and students in the nation's biology classrooms are completely unaware:

Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection….

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.

For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. 

And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance.

But how exactly these processes interact — and whether other forces might also be at work — has become the subject of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”…

[T]his is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline.

“The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up.

Klinghoffer comments:

“Absurdly crude and misleading”? A “classic idea” that “has so far fallen flat”? “A fairytale we need to finally give up”? Scientists locked in a desperate struggle for “professional recognition and status”? What about for the truth?

The problem, at least in large part, is that most scientists work on the assumption of materialism. They cannot, or will not, allow for any explanations that involve non-natural, non-physical forces or interventions. This commitment to materialism was famously articulated by biologist Richard Lewontin:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

As long as the operation of a mind is ruled out a priori biologists are going to struggle to make sense of life. The words of the early 20th century philosopher/psychologist William James come to mind in this context:

A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.

The refusal to allow the possibility of intelligent agency as a biological explanation is a good example of what James was talking about.

Religion, Race and Damar Hamlin

Monday night when Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest during the NFL game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals two things happened that revealed something illuminating about our society:

1. Despite being inculcated with the message that our society is growing increasingly and irreversibly secularized the word "prayer" was on a lot of lips during Hamlin's struggle for life, and many actually turned to it, both on and off the field.

People who never heard of Damar Hamlin before his collapse prayed for him. Despite what people say and how they live, more people seem to actually believe in the existence of a personal God who answers prayer than will admit to it.

Secularism offers no hope to people, and the prayers for Hamlin were, in fact, a repudiation of a worldview that has nothing to offer but hopelessness.

2. Counting hospital staff, team doctors, trainers and EMTs probably a couple dozen people worked feverishly to save the life of this black man. Most, if not all, of them were white as doubtless were a significant portion of the hundreds of thousands who prayed for him.

Will the media note that? They should even though it doesn't fit the prevailing progressive narrative of a deeply racist country filled with whites who are inherently racist just by virtue of being white.

Perhaps our society is not as far gone as some of us have feared and others have hoped.

Hume's Objection

One of the objections to the argument for God's existence based on the apparent design of the universe was first presented by Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776) in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

In Hume's day the argument from design was often couched in the form of an analogy. The way the universe is structured and works is like a great machine and just as machines are the product of intelligent engineers it's reasonable to assume that the universe is also the product of an intelligent "engineer."

Hume disagreed. He argued that when we see a machine we conclude that it was designed by an intelligent engineer because we have knowledge of other machines which we know to have been designed by intelligent agents. The universe, however, is unique. There's no other universe to which we can compare it and therefore we can say nothing about how it came to be.

We can conclude that this piece of lead will melt at 621 degrees F because there are other pieces of lead whose properties have been studied and we are justified in assuming that this piece of lead is like those pieces.

But as far as we know this universe is the only universe there is so we have nothing else to compare it to. It's unique and therefore we are not justified in analogizing it to anything else.

Hume's argument, however, is unconvincing. As Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne writes,

[Hume's] objection has the surprising ...consequence that [scientists] cannot reach justified conclusions about such matters as the size, age, rate of expansion, and density of the universe as a whole (because it is a unique object); and also that [scientists] cannot reach conclusions about the origin and development of the human race (because as far as our knowledge goes, it's the only one of it's kind)....uniqueness is relative to description. Every object is unique under some description.

Indeed, each human being is in some ways unique and thus, on Hume's argument, cannot be analogized to anything else, but this is silly. Every object has properties similar to other objects - size, mass, inertia, etc. - and the universe is an object in many ways similar to the objects it contains.

Like other objects it has size, mass, density, age, temperature, and so on and can thus be analogized to other objects.

When we study the properties of the universe and find that they are fine-tuned with such extraordinary precision that had they deviated from their actual value by the most infinitesimal amounts the universe either wouldn't exist or wouldn't be a suitable haven for life anywhere within it, we're overwhelmed with the sense that this state of affairs cannot be just luck.

To believe it is luck is similar to believing that a roulette wheel that lands on the same number a 100 times in a row did so just by chance.

Nothing else in our experience that has the degree of precision (if anything else does) of the dozens of basic parameters and constants of the universe (e.g. the strength of gravity or the force of electromagnetic repulsion) is ever believed to have arisen by chance. It's existence is always imputed to an intelligent mind.

Thus, contra Hume, it's reasonable to assume that the universe is also the product, not of chance, but of an intelligent mind.

"Hatred Is the Foundation of Our Religion"

In a column at PJ Media Raymond Ibrahim, a historian and expert on Islam, observes that one of the differences between Islam, Christianity and Judaism is that the latter two religions are predicated on love - love for one's God, one's neighbor, even one's enemy - whereas Islam is predicated on hatred for anyone who refuses to accept Islam or who disparages it in any way.

He cites several recent examples of devout Muslims who murdered their own kin because they were insufficiently pious:

Most recently, a 30-year-old Muslim man stabbed his own mother in the throat with a knife in France. After characterizing the incident as an “attempted murder,” local authorities said that the “accused has admitted to the crime,” which he “committed for personal and religious reasons.”

Further underscoring the latter reason — “religion” — the Muslim would-be matricide was heard crying, “Allahu Akbar.”

Two months earlier, also in France, a Muslim man, 25, beheaded his own father, 60, with a knife. When police arrived on the scene, the Muslim patricide was also heard crying, “Allahu Akbar” while fleeing the scene.

That the Muslim men in both of these examples from France deemed it fit to cry Islam’s ancient, jihadist war cry — which literally means “my god is greater than your x, y, z” — indicates that, whatever their quarrel, these Muslim men at least believed that, in slaughtering their parents, they were acting on behalf of or vindicating Islam.

This was certainly the case of another, well-documented case of Muslim parricide. In September 2022, a Muslim man bludgeoned his mother and father to death in Nigeria.

The reason? “My parents don’t like the prophet Muhammad because I adore him, [and] they called me a mad [crazy] person,” Munkaila Ahmadu, 37, explained in a video recorded by police. “[So] I killed them, because they refuse[d] to accept the truth concerning the prophet Muhammad. I killed them because they abused the prophet and their punishment is death — there is no repentance for any person who abused the Prophet.”

He is certainly not alone in such logic. After a Muslim mob stoned and burned to death a Christian college student, Deborah Emmanuel, who was accused of blaspheming Muhammad, a Muslim cleric justified the atrocity by saying, “When you touch the prophet we become mad [crazy] people...Anyone who touches the prophet, no punishment — just kill!”

Showing no remorse whatsoever for murdering his father (70) and mother (60), Ahmadu instead boasted of how “I will [soon] be free because Allah is with the righteous person; that is why I am not worrying over my action...I am now in police custody because, by human thinking, I did a wrong thing but in the sight of Allah and the Prophet what I did is the right thing” (emphasis added).

Is this true? Unfortunately, yes. “Executing” those who “blaspheme” against the prophet of Islam is as old as Islam itself and traces straight back to Muhammad, who was the first to call for the slaughter of those who mocked or called him “mad.”

But even beyond the issue of blasphemy, another of Muhammad’s doctrines — that of al-wala’ w’al-bara’ (which can be simply translated as “love and hate”) — requires Muslims to hate anyone perceived to be in opposition to Islam.

Koran 60:4 is the cornerstone verse of this doctrine. As Osama bin Laden once concluded after quoting that verse: "Such, then, is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred — directed from the Muslim to the infidel — is the foundation of our religion."

Similarly, after citing Koran 60:4, the Islamic State confessed to the West that “we hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers.” As for any and all political “grievances,” these are “secondary” reasons for the jihad, ISIS said:

The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizya and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you (emphasis added).

There's more at the article including citations and links to the claims Ibrahim makes in his piece.

To be sure, not all Muslims harbor such hatred in their hearts for those who don't feel about their religion the way they do, but consider: There are almost two billion Muslims in the world today. If only 10% of them hold to a strict view of their religion that's 200 million people who would eagerly kill you and your family for religious reasons and probably several hundred million more who would not mind seeing it happen even if they wouldn't do it themselves.

Does this intense hatred make prospects for some future rapprochement between Islam and the West, particularly Christianity, an illusory hope? We should certainly hope not. Our hope should be that the majority of the world's Muslims prevail in their wish to live in peace with the rest of humanity, including those who do not hold to their religious beliefs.

For those who enjoy history, or who believe that the conflict between Islam and the West is the product of Western exploitation and oppression, I highly recommend two of Ibrahim's most recent books, Sword and Scimitar and Defenders of the West. They both read like novels, and they're both very enlightening.

Nature, Nurture and the Epigenome

Philosophers, psychologists and scientists have long debated whether our behavior is largely the product of environmental influences (nurture) or mostly the consequence of our genetic make-up (nature). Modern discoveries in biology have confirmed the suspicion of many that it's probably a combination of both.

Research on rats suggests that environment can actually change an animal's genome (the genetic composition of an organism) and thus influence much of its behavior.

The part of the genome that appears to be affected by environmental factors is not the actual DNA, which is the chemical basis for our genes, but rather molecular tags (called methyl groups) that attach along the DNA and act as switches turning certain genes on and off.

These tags are collectively referred to as the "epigenome," and this five minute video explains how it's believed that the environment affects these elements of our genetic make-up.

The mystery, at least it's a mystery to me, still remains how the proteins coded for by our genes translate into behavior. How do strings of amino acids generate a behavior like licking the young, building a specific type of nest or migrating to a specific tree thousands of miles away (as Monarch butterflies do)?

There must be some connection between physical proteins and an organism's behavior, but if it's known I've never seen it explained.

Another mystery is how strings of amino acids can tell cetain types of cells to move to distant parts of the body, or tell certain chemicals in the cell to move to other parts of the cell. To compound the mystery why should anyone think that all these things and many, many more all evolved by chance through a blind, undirected process like Darwinian evolution.

If the Darinians expect us to believe it they ought to give us a possible explanation rather than vague promises that someday the explanations will all be forthcoming.

Champion Prevaricator

Congressman-elect George Santos, a Republican from New York, has a problem, or rather several problems. He's currently being investigated for what amounts to a financial miracle, having become a millionaire virtually overnight.

He's also, it appears, a pathological liar having lied about almost everything of importance in his background. You can read the details here.

His political opponents are enjoying the scandal, of course, but it is amusing to read tweets from very liberal people like Sam Stein, who tweeted on December 22: "Is there any precedent at all to this George Santos situation? Has Congress ever had someone with so many remarkable biographical holes?"

Now this question is amusing because although Stein thinks that Santos' prodigious talent for lying is unprecedented, it's clearly not. The answer to his question is, why, yes, there is precedent. Tom Elliot on his Twitter page lists about thirty biographical lies told by a single politician over the course of his career.

The politician who has amassed this astounding record of mendacity is, of course, the current President of the United States.

Jim Geraghty mentions just seven of the lies Elliot documents in his Morning Jolt column. He writes: A few days ago, Tom Elliott listed all of the tall tales, sketchy claims, likely hallucinations, and outright lies offered by Joe Biden over the years. Among the highlights were Biden’s claims that:

• he was arrested during a civil rights march;
• he spent part of a summer working as a tractor-trailer driver;
• he was arrested while trying to meet Nelson Mandela;
• his son, Beau, was killed in Iraq (Beau Biden passed away after battling brain cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.);
• he graduated “top of his class” in college (he in fact graduated “near the bottom”);
• he hit a 368’ home run in one of the congressional baseball games;
• his first job offer was from an Idaho timber company.

Geraghty provides links to all of these confabulations at his column, and you can find more at the link to Elliot's Twitter page. Reading Elliot's list and comparing it to Santos' record, it's really hard to pick out a champion prevaricator between the two.

Anyway, most politicians lie, of course, but lying on the scale Santos did should disqualify him from serving in a position of public trust. But if that principle applies to Santos, if lying about one's biography is grounds for removal from office, it should also apply to everyone in public office, and especially to the President of the United States.

Repressive Tolerance

There's lots of talk nowadays about "tolerance," although the conversation has morphed quite a bit from what it was just a couple of years ago. It used to be that we were enjoined by progressives to be tolerant of those who disagreed with us, who held political or religious opinions at variance with our own or who adopted a lifestyle that others may have thought immoral.

Now the talk in progressive circles is all about what Herbert Marcuse back in the 60s was promoting as "repressive tolerance." Marcuse argued that tolerance and freedom of speech should not extend to those who hold retrograde political views, views that other groups find offensive or harmful. He insisted that freedom of speech was a subterfuge that elites employed to enable them to maintain power and as such should not be accorded the cherished status that has traditionally been conferred upon it.

In the educational sphere, in particular, Marcuse wrote that measures of repressive tolerance,

...would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.

In other words, if you believe in maintaining a strong military defense, if you believe that America is the greatest country ever to grace the planet, or if you disagree that social security should be increased or perpetuated, you should be denied the ability to voice your views.

This, in good Orwellian fashion, Marcuse labels genuine freedom of thought. He goes on to write that,

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual...the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin...with stopping the words and images which feed his consciousness.

To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media.

So, if tolerance means that people should be allowed to argue against what Marcuse thought to be a better form of life, in his case Marxism coupled with sexual freedom, then those arguments should be repressed. People must not be exposed to well-reasoned arguments if those arguments may be so cogent as to persuade the hearer to reject the ideology of the left.

Marcuse made this case in 1965 in an essay titled Repressive Tolerance, but it's bearing fruit today in social media, the academy, and news organizations like the New York Times where any opinion that wanders beyond the bounds of acceptable progressive orthodoxy is quashed.

One of the arguments that the progressive left makes in support of "repressive tolerance" - which is, ironically, a fascist notion - is based on a misuse of a footnote in philosopher Karl Popper's famous 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. John Sexton at HotAir.com explains that the footnote, which some leftists have seized upon to promote repression of deviant ideas and street violence, is being abused:

[Popper's] idea was pretty simple: If society is completely tolerant, then the intolerant will rule society because there will be no one willing to stand up to their intolerance. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary for a tolerant society to be intolerant toward those who are themselves intolerant.... You can probably see how this plays into certain Antifa arguments about “punching Nazis” and using street violence against the intolerant.

Popper called this the paradox of tolerance: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

Popper added, however, that,

In this formulation, I do not imply...that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

In other words, as long as people are willing to debate and discuss and have conversations about their disagreements, as long as they don't seek to impose their views by violent means, we must insist on tolerance and the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. It's only when people opt for violent coercion that tolerance comes to an end.

Here's Popper:

But we should claim the right to suppress them [those who eschew dialogue and resort instead to force] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

The fascist left, including Antifa, seizes on this as a justification not only for suppressing contrary ideas but also for violence, yet it's pretty clear that Popper was claiming that resort to violence is justified only when the other side refuses to engage in fair debate and chooses instead to substitute "fists and pistols" for reason and logic. It's also pretty clear that it's the extremists on both left and right in our current social landscape who fit the profile of those of whom Popper was speaking.

The extremist rejects argument because at some level he knows that neither facts nor reason are on his side. He senses the rational inadequacy of his position so he rejects reason and rationality rather than give up his position or subject it to rational scrutiny.

The only truth he recognizes is whatever he feels most strongly to be true, and since his feelings are self-authenticating and self-validating there's no point in debating them. He needs only to force you to accept his "truth," and if you refuse then you must be compelled, with violence, if necessary, to submit.

After all, if you disagree with the progressive left then you must be a racist bigot, and you should be silenced or have your face smashed. If you disagree with the extremist right then you must be part of the conspiracy to undermine America and you deserve to get stomped on.

That's unfortunately where we are today in America.

Antony Flew's Conversion

Antony Flew (1923 – 2010) was an atheistic British philosopher, perhaps the most influential atheist in the 20th century. He insisted that one should presuppose atheism until evidence suggesting a God was adduced, but he didn't think any such evidence existed. 

However, Flew was serious about following the evidence, and in 2004 he changed his position, and stated that he now believed in the existence of an Intelligent Creator of the universe. This conversion shocked fellow atheists.

Flew never publicly embraced any particular religion and claimed to be a deist, but keeping with his lifelong commitment to go where the evidence leads, he now believed in the existence of a creator God.

In 2007 a book outlining his reasons for changing his position, There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind was written by Flew in collaboration with Roy Abraham Varghese.

In the book Flew says this:

I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this Universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God. I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source.

Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than half a century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science.

Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature.

When I finally came to recognize the existence of a God, it was not a paradigm shift, because my paradigm remains, as Plato in his Republic scripted his Socrates to insist: “We must follow the argument wherever it leads.”

The leaders of science over the last hundred years, along with some of today’s most influential scientists, have built a philosophically compelling vision of a rational universe that sprang from a divine Mind. As it happens, this is the particular view of the world that I now find to be the soundest philosophical explanation….

The French polymath Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) said four centuries ago that there's enough evidence to convince anyone who's not already dead set against it. Unfortunately, a lot of people today are ignorant of the evidence, in some cases, perhaps, culpably so, and some really are dead set against it.

Fantastic Design (Pt. 2)

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from Your Designed Body, a book that grows more fascinating the deeper I get into it. Today I'd like to post another excerpt in which the authors raise a number of questions that highlight the incredible complexity of bone formation in the human body:

Since bones are made by many individual (and independent) bone cells, building a bone is an inherently distributed problem. How do the individual bone cells know where to be, and where and how much calcium to deposit? How is this managed over the body's development cycle, as the sizes and shapes of many of the bones grow and change?

Surely the specifications for the shapes, their manufacturing and assembly instructions, and their growth patterns must be encoded somewhere. There must also be a three-dimensional coordinate system for the instructions to make sense.

Is the information located in each bone cell, or centrally located and each individual bone cell receives instructions? If each bone cell contains the instructions for the whole, how does it know where it is in the overall scheme? How do all those bone cells coordinate their actions to work together rather than at odds with each other?

As yet no one has answers to these questions. One thing we can expect, though: whoever solves these mysteries will likely win a Nobel Prize - which invites a question: If it takes someone of a Nobel-caliber brilliance to answer such questions, why wouldn't it have taken similar or greater intelligence to engineer it in the first place?

Here's another question: How do bones know when to stop growing? Where is the information located that tells each bone to stop? How is that information turned on and off and how is it translated into chemical signals and how do those signals work?

Furthermore, why is it that the ossicles in the middle ear, the "hammer," "anvil" and "stirrup," are full-size at birth and are the only bones in the body that don't grow as the body grows? How is that unique specification coded and transmitted only to these bones and no others?

And how is all of that produced by an unguided, mindless process like naturalistic evolution?

Fantastic Design

I'm currently reading Your Designed Body by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, MD and came across an excerpt from the book at Uncommon Descent that I thought would be worth sharing.

The book is an impressive catalog of the innumerable design problems that the human body overcomes in order to function. Reading it with any degree of objectivity makes it very difficult to think that the body is merely the result of a long chain of fortuitous accidents over a billion or so years of genetic mutation and natural selection.

Indeed, it takes an enormous effort of blind faith in the ability of impersonal mechanistic processes to convince oneself that the human body came about without any input from a super-intelligent bio-engineer.

Of course, some might reply that it takes an enormous exercise of blind faith to believe that such an engineer exists, but if the preponderance of evidence points to intelligence as the cause of what we see in the human body, if the preponderance of evidence is best explained by an intelligent cause, then the only reason we have for ruling out such a cause is an apriori commitment to metaphysical naturalism.

Setting such commitments aside, the probability that any complex, information-rich mechanism (like the human body) would exhibit the features it does is greater if it is intentionally designed than the probability that these features arose through purely undirected and random natural processes, and since we should always believe what's most probable over what's less probable, the belief that the body was intentionally designed is the most rational position to hold.

Here's the excerpt from pages 49-50:

To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence. This includes…containment, special-purpose gates, chemical sensing and controls (for many different chemicals), supply chain and transport, energy production and use, materials production, and information and information processing.

What does it take to make these work? Designing solutions to problems like this is hard, especially given two additional requirements.

The first, orchestration, means the cell has to get all the right things done in the right order at the right times. The activities of millions of parts must be coordinated. To this end, the cell actively sequences activities, signals various parts about what to do, starts and stops various machinery, and monitors progress.

The second requirement is reproduction. As if being alive weren’t difficult enough, some of the body’s cells must be able to generate new cells. This imposes a daunting set of additional design problems. 

Each new cell needs a high-fidelity copy of the parent cell’s internal information, all the molecular machines needed for life, and a copy of the cell’s structure, including the organelles and microtubules. And it needs to know which internal operating system it should use.

Once these are all in place, the cell walls must constrict to complete the enclosure for the new cell, without allowing the internals to spill out.

Somehow cells solve all these problems. Each cell is a vast system of systems, with millions of components, machines, and processes, which are coherent, interdependent, tightly coordinated, and precisely tuned—all essential characteristics of the cell if it’s to be alive rather than dead.

There remains no plausible, causally adequate hypotheses for how any series of accidents, no matter how lucky and no matter how much time is given, could accomplish such things. 

Presently it even lies beyond the reach of our brightest human designers to create them. Human engineers have no idea how to match the scope, precision, and efficiencies of even a single such cell, much less organisms composed of many cellular systems of systems, each system composed of millions or billions of cells.

One has to be extremely uncurious and intellectually indolent not to be astonished at the incredible complexity and information-level of even the simplest cells in our bodies. And one must be intellectually negligent not to ponder whether it's within the power of unguided and unaided physics and chemistry to produce such a marvel.

I'll have another excerpt tomorrow.

Two Noels for Christmas Eve

I thought it fitting on Christmas eve to post what is perhaps my favorite Christmas hymn. Christmas hymns, or carols, came to be called "noels" by the French based on the Latin word natalis, which can mean "birthday" or "of or relating to birth."

Eventually the word found its way into English in the 1800s and is frequently used today either as a synonym for Christmas carols or for Christmas itself.

As sung by Dave Phelps this noel captures some of the magic, mystery and power of Christmas. I hope you enjoy it and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful, magical Christmas filled with the love, peace and blessings of God:

After you watch, I highly recommend listening to the Bonner family sing O Holy Night. It's spectacular:

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Christmas Magic

Christmas is a magical time, but it's not the trappings of the secular world that make it magical - except maybe for very young children - rather it's the sense of mystery surrounding an incomprehensible idea, the idea of the Incarnation.

The magic is a by-product of the belief that Christmas celebrates a miracle, the Creator of the universe deigning to become one of His creatures so that in the fullness of time He and we could enjoy each other forever.

It's that belief, that hope, affirmed by Christians for 2000 years, that's so awe-inspiring and which fills us on Christmas with an ineffable sense of love and being loved, a sense that makes the whole experience of Christmas Eve tingle with mystery and magic.

The secular, commercial world has drained much of that excitement from the night by pretending that the real source and traditional meaning of the night are irrelevant or that they're something other than what they really are.

People feel they should be joyful at Christmas, but they can't say why. They seem to be trying to manufacture some sort of artificial "Christmas spirit," just like they try to gin up a feeling of near-delirium on New Year's eve.

An analogy: Picture the celebrations of players and fans after winning the Super Bowl or the World Series, but imagine the revelry and rejoicing even though the game hadn't yet been played. It'd certainly seem nonsensical and strange, but this is pretty much what a secular Christmas is like. No "game" has been played, nothing has been won, there's really nothing to celebrate, but the merriment and partying goes on nonetheless. Why?

All the talk of reindeer, ads for cars, beer, and phones, all the insipid "holiday" songs and movies - none of these do anything to touch people's hearts or imaginations. They don't inspire awe. The "joy" seems phony, empty and forced.

Indeed, Christmas Eve is hollow without the message of the Gospel and the conviction that this night is special, not because of the office Christmas party, last minute shopping, or Home Alone reruns, but because it's a night haunted by the presence of God and set apart for the delivery of the greatest gift in history.

One of the things that makes Christmas "good news that will cause great joy for all the people," is that the One who came to dwell among us has made it so that we can break out of the prison-house of meaninglessness and hopelessness that enchains us if all there is to life is being born, enjoying a few good meals, suffering and dying.

Christmas represents the possibility that we can throw off the crushing weight of purposelessness, emptiness and despair that plague modern life. It reminds us that our lives can matter for eternity.

Lovely thought, that, and one of the good things about it is that it's never too late for the transformation to begin. One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's version of What Child Is This on their album Lost Christmas Eve.

The line that I find most poignant and hopeful is when an older man, though dying, finds his life transformed by reflecting on the Christmas story and cries out, "To be this old and have your life just begin!"

Here's Rob Evan of TSO performing the song.

Three Symbols of Christmas

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, because it seems like an attempt by non-Christians to have the celebration without having to acknowledge the historical reason for it.

Every year there are signs and bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to the substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ, but historically it's not the letter X that's being substituted for Christ. Actually, the X is a shorthand for the Greek name for Christ (Christos).

The first letter of the Greek word Christos is Chi which looks like our letter X. There’s a long history in the church of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from the time of its origin, it has signified the opposite of any attempt to avoid naming Christ.

Gr: Christos

The irony is that probably a lot of people do use Xmas to exclude Christ from Christmas and have no idea what the origin of the word is.

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A popular Christmas tradition is to decorate one's home with a "Christmas" tree.

Painting by Marcel Reider (1898)

Modern Christmas trees originated during the Renaissance of early modern Germany. Its 16th-century origins are sometimes associated with protestant reformer Martin Luther, who is said to have first added lighted candles to an evergreen tree. The practice is believed to have spread among Luther's followers in Germany and eventually throughout Europe.

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No doubt the most popular Christmas myth is that of Santa Claus. There's a rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized, sanitized, contemporary version has its origin in Christian history, and specifically in a man named Nicholas.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in Lycia in southern Turkey in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him to love God and taught him the Christian faith from the age of five.

However, his parents died suddenly when he was still young, and Nicholas was forced to grow up quickly.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he desired to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father of three daughters who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute.

Without marriage dowry money, the daughters could be quite likely condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land and upon returning home felt called to ministry. He was subsequently ordained and spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra in Turkey until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly approved him, and he became known for his holiness and passion for the Gospel, becoming a staunch defender of Christian monotheism against the paganism that prevailed at the temple to the goddess Artemis in his district.

Nicholas was imprisoned during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan (313 A.D.). Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was covered with deep bruises.

Bishop Nicholas was said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

There was a widespread belief in those days, promoted by a theologian named Arias, that Jesus was actually a created being, like angels, and not divine. The Council of Nicea was convened by Constantine in 325 A.D to settle this dispute, and the Nicene creed, recited today in many Christian worship services, was formulated to affirm the traditional teaching about Jesus' deity and preexistence.

Nicholas and Arias both attended the council and the story goes that the two got into such a heated dispute over the true nature of Christ that punches were actually thrown. This may be a legendary embellishment, but whether it is or not, it certainly seems inconsistent with our normal image of jolly old St. Nick.

In any case, the actual story of St. Nicholas (Say the words "Saint Nicholas" quickly with a European accent and you'll understand how we got the name Santa Claus) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular modern "fairy tales" surrounding him.

One Solitary Life

Perhaps you've 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 perhaps fitting that we share this three minute film adaptation of Francis' words produced by Illustra Media:

It's a Wonderful Life (and Telescope)

The John 10:10 Project has produced a beautiful short video on the James Webb Space Telescope, and make a connection in the video between the Webb and the famous Capra Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life.

They introduce the video with this:

On Christmas Day 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched into an orbit that would position the instrument more than a million miles from Earth. It was a banner achievement in the history of astronomy for this extraordinary tool of exploration is at least 100 times more powerful than any telescope ever constructed.

Celebrate the holiday season with stunning views of the Webb's first images of deep space--each a breathtaking glimpse at the incomparable power and creative brilliance of God.

Here's the video:

That Hideous Strength

C.S. Lewis was an Oxford scholar of medieval literature, prolific writer and a famous Christian apologist (i.e. defender of the faith). He died in 1963 on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In his novel That Hideous Strength (1945) Lewis writes a "fairy tale," as he calls it, that's a prophetic allegory of the cultural battle we see raging in our own day between the forces of left-wing progressivism/scientism and those who struggle to hold on to the traditional values of family and religious commitment.

In THS Lewis illustrates this struggle by means of a plot by the progressive National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) to take over, first a part of England, and ultimately the whole country and the world. N.I.C.E. is led by men who have embraced a scientistic worldview - naturalistic, atheistic, materialistic, reductionistic, objectivist and purely rational.

As Lewis describes them in a classic work, The Abolition of Man, they're men without chests. They have no heart, no passions. They're men bereft souls who can be pictured as disembodied heads, which is, in fact, how Lewis symbolically represents the leader of N.I.C.E.

N.I.C.E. and the men who run it may seem like fantastically implausible caricatures, but the story should be read as a bi-leveled allegory. On one level it's Lewis' portrayal of the spiritual nature of the battle and on another level it's a portrait of the left's program for crushing their opposition and gaining power, a program that has been employed consistently by the left ever since the days of Karl Marx in the 19th century and perhaps since the French Revolution in 1789 and the ensuing terror.

The Marxists and their progressive allies have throughout this era sought to advance along three fronts. These can be summarized as follows (the summary is taken from Faith and the Arts):

The Four Stages of Cultural Revolution – As described by former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov in the 1970s, these are the stages by which Soviet agents worked to infiltrate and undermine America and other western societies.

1. Demoralization – using pornography and other methods through media, entertainment, education, etc., to break down the moral courage of the people. 
2. Destabilization – By undermining police, courts, borders, etc., to overwhelm public safety and further demoralize the people.
3. Crisis – Build 1 and 2 to the point of a crisis where people resort to rioting or to civil war.
4. New Normal – Declare emergency powers and install the administrative state as a solution for all of the problems which the revolutionary forces have themselves caused.

The Long March through the Institutions – This is a central concept of cultural Marxism. It concerns the strategy of neo-Marxists in America and in other Western societies to overcome the resistance of successful middle-class cultures to the Marxist rhetoric of revolution. Middle-class people tend to be somewhat satisfied with their lives and tolerant of income differences with others.

Cultural Marxists therefore target all of the institutions of middle-class society—church, family, public education, media, the press, entertainment, business, academia, science, law, etc.—in order to create the problems and crises that lead to the imposition of emergency powers and the administrative state. 

Mass Formation – This is an academic concept that has been used for many years to try to understand the mass psychology that appears to be at work in societies like Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany, and Mao’s China, where thousands of ordinary citizens either turned a blind eye to the suffering of their fellow citizens or, in some cases, joined the forces that shamed and tortured them.

The process is based on fear and the desire to survive or escape the threat of suffering. Under these conditions, “normal” people may become callous to the suffering of others. They “go along to get along.” But the result is a complete collapse of genuine religious and moral civilization.

All of these corrosive strategies certainly seem to be experiencing alarming success in our contemporary culture, and Lewis shines a light on them in his depiction of the machinations of N.I.C.E. and the spiritual barrenness of those employed in advancing its cause.

For those who may never have read That Hideous Strength, I'd recommend first reading Abolition of Man and perhaps then perusing brief summaries of the first two novels in Lewis' "space" trilogy Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra before tackling That Hideous Strength.

The story will make more sense if you do.

Why Christians Celebrate Christ's Birthday

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.