To listen to MSNBC and the people who write for the New York Times you would think that nasty, threatening rhetoric was actually invented by tea party conservatives. Never mind that it has proven very difficult to document most of the worst allegations made against tea-party protestors, let's give the Paul Krugmans and Keith Olbermanns of the world the benefit of the doubt and concede that there have indeed been some mean things said about our President and our congresspersons.

After all, some individuals have certainly expressed doubt about Mr. Obama's birthplace and thus the legitimacy of his holding the office of President; people are calling him awful names like socialist; many are so angry with his policies that they're threatening to launch a political "Armageddon" in November and "target" Democrats for defeat; people are portraying the President as the Joker, and they're doing and saying other unimaginable things as well.

All of this, we're given to believe, is a novel development in our politics, a quantum leap in vitriol and hate. Well, hardly. The tea partier rhetoric, such as it is, is the mere cooing of doves compared to what the Democrat rank and file treated us to during the Bush era. For those with short memories we offer this video as a sampling of what Democrat activists were saying in 2004. As you watch ask yourself if the media wouldn't be going off like a Roman candle if every time one of these people said "Bush," or "Left," or whatever, they had actually used the corresponding noun "Obama" or "Right," etc:

When Democrats use hateful rhetoric, well, that's to be expected. It scarcely makes the news, but if conservatives use it then the liberal media Chicken Littles scurry about covering the ears and screaming that they've never heard such terrible things ever in our whole modern history. These people are beyond parody.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Some time ago we did a post based on a remark made by a woman named Tanya on another blog. I thought that as we approach Good Friday it might be worth running the post again, slightly edited.

Tanya's comment was provoked by an atheist at the other blog who had issued a mild rebuke to his fellow non-believers for their attempts to use the occasion of Christmas to deride Christian belief. In so doing, he exemplified the sort of attitude toward those with whom he disagrees one might wish all people, atheists and Christians alike, would adopt. Unfortunately, Tanya spoiled the mellow, can't-we-all-just-get-along mood by displaying a petulant asperity toward, and an unfortunate ignorance of, the orthodox Christian understanding of the atonement.

She wrote:

Tanya evidently thinks that "heaven" is, or should be, all about living a "clean, decent life." Perhaps the following tale will illustrate the sophomoric callowness of her misconception:

Have a meaningful Good Friday. You, too, Tanya.

RLC

A Washington Times article by David Dickson confronts us with some very troubling fiscal facts. According to last Thursday's Congressional Budget Office report President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years - $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected - and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation's economic output by 2020.

The federal public debt was $6.3 trillion when Mr. Obama entered office. It currently totals $8.2 trillion, and it's headed toward $20.3 trillion in 2020, according to the CBO's deficit estimates. This translates to a debt of $170,000 per household in ten years. How in the world does our political leadership think we're going to pay for that? If they were deliberately trying to drive this country over the cliff, as some think is the case, what would they do differently?

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey, in commenting on Dickson's column, offers some historical perspective:

This CBO graph, from Hot Air, pretty much sums up the fiscal predicament the Obama administration has placed us in:

Pretty soon those of us who can remember will be waxing nostalgic for the good old days of the Carter presidency.

RLC

The news outlets are telling us that authorities have arrested nine members of a midwestern group that was planning on murdering policemen.

We can all be glad that these reprehensible people are securely behind bars, but I have a bit of a quibble with the characterization of these criminals. Their organization is frequently referred to as a "right-wing Christian militia." Perhaps this is how they imagine themselves, but for the sake of accuracy it should be noted that it's not clear that they are "right-wing," they are certainly not "Christian," and the proper designation of the group is not "militia," but "terrorist organization."

I hesitate to call them "right-wing," although they may be, because their political views have not yet been brought to light. What we do know of them, however, makes them sound more like fascists. Fascism is an ideology of the left, not the right, and fascists have always been prone toward the trappings of militarism and a lust for violence. Moreover, violence directed toward police has always been characteristic in this country of extremist groups on the left. The "Hutaree" seem, in fact, to be a white version of the fascist, leftist black panthers or black Muslims of the 1960s.

Whatever their political linkages may be, though, they are not Christians religiously. Just because they recite a couple of Bible verses and believe a few dogmas that may be faintly Christian does not make them Christian any more than the Muslim belief in God and an afterlife makes them Christian. Jesus said that not everyone who speaks in his name is a disciple of his but rather it's he who does the will of his Father. Murdering innocent people is not the will of the Father of Jesus Christ. These people may call themselves Christian but, if so, they are CINOs (Christian In Name Only). They are no more Christian than Stalin was a humanitarian. They're even less Christian, as difficult as it is to imagine, than is the Westboro Baptist crowd.

Nor should their organization be called a "militia." To do so is to smear the name of an honorable tradition in American history. These people are not militia men, they're terrorists. Their machinations are indistinguishable from those of any al Qaeda cell and, indeed, they serve much the same purpose. But for the fact that they're United States citizens they should not be tried as criminals in civilian court but rather sent to Guantanamo to be tried by a military tribunal as enemy combatants.

I sympathize with those who are alarmed by our current government, and I agree with Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the founding fathers that a long chain of abuses may at some point prove unendurable, but we are right now very far from that point. We still have the right to vote, we still have the right to speak out against encroachments upon our freedom, we still have the right to undo through peaceful means whatever damage is done to our country through misguided political policies. To decide that there is no other recourse at this juncture than killing, to plan to murder the men and women who are working to protect us every day, as well as their families, is absolutely despicable.

Send them to Guantanamo and let them cohabit with the jihadis there. They have much in common.

RLC

Imagine a movie made by Woody Allen whose script was written by Franz Kafka based on Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and you have the Coen brothers' latest film, a dark comedy titled A Serious Man. The protaganist of the story is a Kafkaesque character (think of Joseph K. in The Trial) living in a world that seems completely inscrutable.

Aside from being a physics professor, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a very ordinary man, but his life is falling apart by the hour. His wife is in love with Gopnik's colleague and wants a divorce, his kids are incessant whiners, his socially inept brother has moved in and won't move out, a student tries to bribe and then sue him for a higher grade, and, as with Job whose enquiries among his friends for an explanation for his miseries were ultimately futile, no one Larry goes to for help has any answers. The more deeply we enter Gopnik's life the more surreal it all becomes. One can't help think that Larry's 1967 midwestern neighborhood is a concoction of the mind of Lewis Carroll, author of the logically bizarre world in Through the Looking Glass.

Larry Gopnik tries valiantly to make sense of it all, he strives to find the meaning in the trials he faces, but he never succeeds. The insanity of his life is invincible. None of the situations which plague him ever gets resolved. His life is absurd, and this seems to be what the Coen brothers' wanted to say in this film. This is the existential burden borne by modern man. His life seems meaningless, nothing is certain (the film makes a point of exploiting the weirdness of the principles of quantum physics), nothing makes sense, nothing is ever resolved. Even the structure of the film bears the stamp of this absurdity. The prologue of the film has nothing at all to do with the main story.

Even so, the movie is very well done and, for the philosophically-minded, very much worth watching (caution: it's R-rated for language, which is as irksome as it is jejunne, and one scene of sexuality). Some scenes are genuinely funny, there are multiple layers of symbolism to contemplate in the film, and those who ponder the point and purpose of human existence will find Larry Gopnik's life an excellent stimulus for reflection.

RLC

There's a scene in the movie Amistad in which the captain of an illegal slave ship orders the crew to push the slaves, all chained together, overboard. The camera filming the slaves falling into the ocean looks up from about thirty feet below the surface, giving the viewer a horrifying underwater perspective of the slaves being drowned by the weight of their shackles.

That searing scene is a metaphor, perhaps, for what's already happening to our economy because of Obamacare. Captain Obama has given the order, first-mate Pelosi has carried it out and already the chains of government control are pulling American corporations underwater.

Here's the Wall Street Journal:

What is that damage? As part of the bill Democrats decided to eliminate tax breaks given to companies that offer prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. As a result AT&T announced yesterday that its profits will be reduced by $1 billion this year due solely to the health bill. Other corporations reporting massive losses include Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks, according to the WSJ article.

Nancy Pelosi told us that we'd have to pass the bill to see what's in it, but that once we did the American people would love it. Maybe, but it's hard to love a bill that puts you out of work or keeps you from getting a job, and any policy which imposes huge costs on employers will have just that result.

When employers are losing money their employees suffer. Either they get laid off or they lose benefits. In either case Obamacare looks more and more like a heavy chain around the ankles of the nation's businesses. Given this burden, it's hard to see how there could be much improvement in the job market anytime soon.

My heart goes out to all the students graduating from college this spring who'll be trying to find a job to pay off their student loans. I wish them well, and I hope that next time they vote they'll attend more carefully to what the candidate will actually do once in office rather than, as so many students were in 2008, being seduced by the color of his skin and the eloquence of his words.

RLC

Those who are opposed to illegal immigration are often rebuked with what some apparently fancy to be a cogent argument. It goes something like this:

There are a number of difficulties with this line of reasoning, but to take just one, when our ancestors arrived the people already here were under no financial obligation to provide them with food, housing, education, and medical care. There was no welfare state. Our ancestors had to make their way by dint of their own industry.

In 1868 Congress ratified the 14th amendment which has since been interpreted to mandate that anyone born in the U.S. is ipso facto an American citizen. Given that Americans have obligated themselves to pay for many of their citizens' needs from cradle to grave, this "birthright citizenship" is an enormous incentive for people to emigrate here illegally, just so their children can enjoy the benefits provided by the beleaguered American taxpayer.

George Will, a Washington Post syndicated columnist, believes that we can no longer afford such magnanimity. He notes that:

All of these children are now citizens entitled to their fair share of "Obama's stash" i.e. our tax dollars. They and their parents are placing an enormous strain on California's fiscal health. Indeed, the costs of illegal immigration are a major reason California teeters on the precipice of bankruptcy.

Will says it's time to end birthright citizenship to people who are here illegally, and that doing so would cool much of the antipathy toward immigration reform. I think he's right. Read his argument at the link. Meanwhile, those who are interested might want to check out our own proposal for immigration reform. If so, go here and scroll down to Addressing Illegal Immigration.

RLC

A reader named Brian passes along a link to a column at the New York Times by Charles Blow which illustrates one of the more troublesome aspects of our contemporary political discourse. Blow writes:

I say this is troubling because Blow, like others, just throws out the charge that the "far-right extremists" have been issuing threats and engaging in acts of violence, but he nowhere documents any of the alleged misconduct. He just expects us to accept his word that it's happening. The charge is made, the media report it, and it becomes common knowledge without anyone ever verifying that it actually happened.

Like those who've accused the right of fomenting hate and of telling lies about health care, I'd like to know what form, exactly do these lies and this hate take, and who, exactly, is doing it? Paul Ryan? Tom Coburn? Facts would be nice, but Blow's not interested in facts. The "narrative" of conservative hate has purchase with his readers, I suppose, so it becomes their truth regardless of the objective facts of the matter.

Meanwhile, the police have indeed arrested a Philadelphia man for threatening to kill a Congressman and his family, but unfortunately for Blow's narrative the threat was directed at an opponent of Obama's health care reform, Republican Eric Cantor, by an apparent Obama supporter.

It's as easy as it is irresponsible to simply assert that there's hatred, violence, and mendacity among the tea-partiers and other conservatives, but unless the charge is backed up by evidence it's little more than a slanderous cheap shot.

Blow goes on in his column to display an alarming lack of political perspicacity as he sheds crocodile tears for the tea-party folks:

This borders on being simple-minded. Conservatives are not frustrated because the perpetrators of incipient socialism are female, Jewish and black. Is Blow completely daft? Who, if they had their way, would the tea-party folk have selected for their president among the four candidates on the major party tickets in 2008? Sarah Palin. Who is one of the tea-party heroes among the GOP caucus? Eric Cantor, a Jew. Who is one of the most admired men in America among conservatives? Clarence Thomas, a black Supreme Court Justice.

Though people like Blow, who see everything through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity, may find this hard to believe, these superficialities are not what stoke conservative anger. What pushes their buttons is ideology. Conservatives oppose Obama not because he's black but because his progressive ideology has brought nothing but economic malaise everywhere it's been implemented. Blow, however, can't seem to get his mind around that simple fact, choosing instead to live by a syllogism that goes like this:

This is a pretty pathetic credo, of course, but the Charles Blows of the world evidently consider it irrefutable.

Brian sums up the piece this way:

The fact is that conservatives long ago got past race and gender. It's time that the progressives caught up.

RLC

The debate over the President's plans to "transform" America have reminded some of the old fable of the ant and the grasshopper. You'll recall that the story goes like this:

The moral, of course, is that we should all work hard and be responsible for ourselves.

The Democrats have revised this venerable tale, however, so that it now reads something like this:

The moral of the story, of course, is that we get what we vote for.

President Obama is determined to make the ants, which comprise about 25% of the population and which pays about 87% of the nation's income taxes, pull the wagon full of grasshoppers which make up about 50% of our nation and pay almost no income tax. On top of that the top 25% will now have to pay the health insurance costs for 30 million people (50 million if they pass amnesty for illegal aliens). Ants are strong. They can carry loads a hundred times their own weight, but they can't carry all those grasshoppers.

RLC

My brother Bill, who maintains our site on his server, sends along some info about Viewpoint's reach. We are apparently ranked number 7,851,667 in the world for traffic (I don't know how many blogs there are around the world. Probably about 7,900,000.). We've also received visitors from over 100 countries since January 1st. Here's the breakdown of countries from which we've had at least ten hits in the last three months:

I don't know what this means, if anything, but I thought it was interesting.

RLC

My friend Byron passes along an email from the left-wing group MoveOn.org demanding that the Republican leadership disavow all hateful rhetoric and violent actions allegedly emanating from the right in the wake of the health care debate.

Now, to the extent that anyone on the right actually threatened anyone in Congress, it's certainly reprehensible. To the extent that some members of Congress were called names, it's disappointing. That said, these people at MoveOn.org make me laugh. They were utterly silent when tea-partiers were being called "tea-baggers" (a sleazy sexual reference) over and over again on MSNBC and elsewhere, but now they're outraged that some tea-partier allegedly called Barney Frank a "fag." They were outraged that a protestor may have called John Lewis a "nigger" last Saturday (though nobody but Lewis seems to have heard it), but were utterly silent when two SEIU thugs called Kenneth Gladney a nigger, knocked him to the ground and kicked him, putting him in the hospital last summer. Gladney, a 130 pound diabetic, was simply handing out flags at a town hall meeting.

The MoveOn.org crowd are beside themselves that congressmen are receiving hate mail and people are turning up outside their houses to protest their health care reform vote, but they uttered not a peep when Sarah Palin and George Bush were burned in effigy and when protestors were gathering outside the homes of AIG executives and menacing them and their families.

Nor did the Left have anything much to say when Alec Baldwin told a late-night television audience that they should all go to the home of the late pro-life Congressman Henry Hyde and stone him to death, him and his family. Nor was the Left moved to object when Julianne Malveux, a television personality, told her viewers that she hoped Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' wife would feed him lots of artery-clogging foods so that he'd have a heart attack and die.

Some of the mail our congresspersons are receiving is no doubt disgusting, but it's like being sent Valentine's cards compared to what people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, et al. are subjected to every day, yet no one at MoveOn has done anything I'm aware of to persuade Democrats to disavow the hate directed at conservatives. Indeed, Chris Matthews once said on a morning news show that he'd like to see Rush Limbaugh blown to pieces like a character in a James Bond movie. Then there was the Nobel Peace Prize winner who told a class of school children that she could kill George Bush. What did MoveOn.org have to say about that? Nothing that I remember. Our President even counts among his friends people who bombed buildings and, in the case of Bill Ayers' wife, Bernadine Dohrn, were implicated in terrorist murder. Yet MoveOn has never bestirred itself to demand that Mr. Obama disavow his violent friends.

MoveOn is indignant that some Democrats' campaign offices were vandalized, but they said nothing when John McCain's campaign offices were trashed. They're irate that a coffin was left in a congressman's yard, but the people who left it were actually conducting a prayer vigil for the congressman, and the coffin was used to symbolize the death of liberty. The Left is angry that people called Bart Stupak and wished he'd drown himself, but this happened before he caved on the health care bill's abortion language. The caller was apparently a Democrat angry that Stupak stood in the way of passing the bill.

I very much regret the turn that our public discourse has taken, but vitriolic attacks are almost exclusively a phenomenon of the Left going back to the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. MoveOn itself has contributed to the degraded tenor of our discourse by sponsoring an ad two years ago that called General Petraeus a traitor to his country.

And now they're in a snit because someone in a crowd of demonstrators may have responded to what seemed to be a deliberate provocation by a group of black congressmen by casting a slur? They're incensed because one of the congressmen was apparently sprayed with spittle from an over-exuberant protestor shouting his demand that congress "kill the bill?" They're upset because a woman called a congressman and told him that a lot of people wish him ill? Talk about straining gnats and swallowing camels.

Go to Hot Air for more on the coffin and supposed spitting incidents. You can witness the heinous crime here at about the 1:30 mark:

What may be most disturbing about the over-the-line rhetoric afflicting our politics is that the liberal media and the Democrats seem to be sensitive to it only when it comes from the right. In defense of the media, though, perhaps there's a legitimate reason for that. Perhaps it's because it's so unusual to find people on the right acting poorly that it's startling and thus newsworthy when it happens. On the other hand, maybe the media simply expects such behavior from the Left and regards it as nothing unusual and thus not particularly worthy of comment.

RLC

David Coppedge places tongue in cheek and chides University of Kansas anthropologist John Hoopes for concluding that the stone spheres he's studying in Costa Rica were intelligently designed:

Coppedge writes:

Every sentence in Coppedge's little satire is taken from arguments that have been used by Darwinians against those who believe that the enormous complexity of the hundreds of molecular machines which perform incredibly sophisticated operations in living cells is the product of blind chance and natural forces. There is no justification, the Darwinian insists, for thinking that these biomachines are the product of an intelligent agent, but simple round rocks, on the other hand, well, they're obviously the work of purposeful artisans.

Pretty funny.

RTG

Philosopher Michael Ruse offers a very odd argument on behalf of the proposition that we don't need God to have morality. Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra he announces that there is no God. He also proclaims that there are, therefore, no grounds for morality. Morality is an illusion, he avers, but, and here's where the argument begins to go seriously awry, he insists we should be "good" anyway. Why? Because natural selection commands it. This is, to say the very least, an unpersuasive claim.

Here's Ruse:

Ruse here assumes that there actually is a "good" and a "bad," but what could they be? Perhaps it is good to promote human happiness, but then why is it bad to promote only my happiness? Why is it bad to be selfish? Is it bad because it hurts others? Well, why is hurting others bad? Is it bad because they don't like it? Why should anyone care what others like?

Ruse again:

This has all the symptoms of a tautology. Ruse says in essence that we should be good because, well, we should be good. We should obey the demands of morality because morality demands that we obey them.

He goes on:

Ruse's argument seems to be that what people call moral behavior is a non-rational illusion but that we should go along with the illusion because it's psychologically satisfying. Well. What if my psychological impulses direct me to exterminate people unlike myself (a very Darwinian possibility), or what if my psychological yearnings induce me to rape, steal, and torture? If these behaviors are a product of my psychology how would Ruse judge them to be bad? Are all psychological inclinations worth following or just some? How do we discern which should be followed and which should not? Neither our psychology nor our genes tell us we should care about strangers. Indeed, they tell us over and over again in a myriad of ways that we should be selfish, so why should we not be?

In any case, Ruse's whole argument is based on a fallacy called the naturalistic fallacy. It's the error of trying to derive an "ought" from an "is." It's the error of saying that because nature is a certain way that therefore it should be that way. It's the error of saying that a behavior must be right if it's found in nature. Most atheists gave up trying to base morality on nature and nature's evolution a long time ago, but since they've nothing else to justify their moral judgments some of them, like Ruse, try every now and then to sneak it back in.

Ruse concludes with this:

If God really is dead, Dostoyevsky reminds us, everything is permitted. There simply are no moral duties. Moral judgments are nothing more than statements about our likes and dislikes. To say that cruelty is wrong is to say only that I don't like cruelty. If morality is subjective, as Ruse claims, then right and wrong are just matters of personal taste. To assert that slaughtering whales is wrong is like asserting that liking anchovies on one's pizza is wrong. To insist that kindness is better than cruelty is like insisting that Coke is better than Pepsi.

Contra Ruse, if God is dead then so is the notion of moral obligation, moral good and bad, and moral judgment. The only way one can hold onto any meaningful morality, the only way one's moral judgments can have force, the only way the claim that some act is morally wrong can have any significance is if there is a transcendent moral authority who has established an objective moral law.

Ruse's essay affords us an excellent illustration of the futility of trying to have morality while rejecting it's only possible foundation.

* Concerning matters of taste there is no dispute.

RLC

Byron links us to an article by Chris Hedges, a leftist writer, who offers us an analysis of Obamacare from the perspective of the far-left. They're not happy campers and they shouldn't be. What the media is calling health care reform is, in Hedges' view, little more than a massively expensive pork barrel project that will wind up helping very few people:

As is sometimes the case the value of the Left is that they often make us aware of problems we might otherwise have overlooked. They were right to call our attention to the need to reform health care. The problem is that their solutions to the problems they diagnose are often awful. In this case Hedges' solution is total government control of health care, a solution which is crushingly expensive and which has worked well nowhere else in the world.

In order to pay for the current plan, Charles Krauthammer predicts, there will by next year be a massive effort to pass a national European-style sales tax. This, if it transpires, would violate another of President Obama's pledges to the American people, i.e. his promise that no one making less than $250,000 would see their taxes go up.

RLC

This is the third in the series of reflections on Joseph Bottum's essay titled Christians and Postmoderns. See here and here for the two previous posts on his essay.

Bottum writes that:

Premoderns are torn between modernity and postmodernity precisely because they share so much in common with both. They bristle at the withering assaults of the postmoderns on the modern belief in objective truth, particularly truth about morals. Yet they are in fundamental agreement with the postmodern critique of the futility of modernity's attempt to ground meaning and truth in the shifting sands of positivism or the scientific method or whatever. They recognize that modernity reduces man to a machine and thus robs him of his dignity and worth and inevitably his human rights.

We live in a tragically empty age, one in which the promises of secular reason to usher in a golden era of enlightenment and knowledge were dashed on the rocks of two world wars and the bloodiest century in human history. Postmoderns rightly ridicule the impotence of reason, it's utter inability to offer human beings meaning or to lead us into a humanist nirvana, but they offer nothing in its place other than subjectivity and nihilism.

We can't go back to the premodern era, of course, nor would many of us want to. Modernity, despite its failures and shortcomings, has made the physical burdens of life immeasurably easier to bear. Perhaps, though, we could, if we really set our minds to it, import the crucial assumptions of the premodern age about the necessity of a transcendent foundation for knowledge, meaning, morals and human nature into our present era.

RLC

A number of strategists, including John Hawkins at Right Wing News, have laid out a simple plan Republicans could follow in 2011 to effectively neuter Obamacare without having to achieve a supermajority in the Senate. They would, though, have to recapture the House.

Here's Hawkins:

Hawkins suggests that if the GOP controls the House they could effectively end Obamacare even without a senate supermajority, and even with President Obama still in office, simply by refusing to fund the bureaucracy that sustains it. Read the rest at the link.

The most important thing, though, is to continue explaining to the American people exactly how this bill will harm Americans as it is implemented, and to convince them through clear, calm argument why it needs to be reversed, and to persuade them that they can help by voting for people in November who'll work to reverse it.

RLC

I had a conversation with my neighbor the other day in which we both agreed that were it not for the fact that we each wanted to be able to vote in primary elections we'd be tempted to register as Independents. Even as I was agreeing with him, though, I was thinking that there really are a lot of good people in the party with which I'm affiliated (the GOP), people that I think are the future both of the party and of our nation, and that perhaps I shouldn't give up on the Republican party just yet.

One of these points of light is Congressman Paul Ryan who has been very impressive throughout the health care debate in arguing that the bill that has just been signed into law is an irresponsible, even disastrous, piece of legislation.

Here's Ryan making his case to Politico's Mike Allen:

Paul Ryan is a nightmare for the Democrats. He's bright and knows what he's talking about. Here's more of Politico's interview with him:

Like I said, he's an impressive guy. People like him are such a refreshing change from the sort of politician who's always walking right on the edge of ethical propriety, who's more concerned with winning than with doing what's right. If the American people ever have their faith restored in politicians it'll be because of men and women like Congressman Ryan.

RLC

You've doubtless heard politicians justify their support for an unlimited abortion license by saying something like this, "I'm personally opposed to abortion, but I wouldn't want to stand in the way of someone else who wanted to have one."

Robert P. George once did a clever riff on this rather odd rationalization. Here's what he wrote:

So here's the exit question: If the "personally opposed but..." argument is adequate justification for allowing a woman to abort for whatever reason she chooses, why is it not also a justification for refusing to condemn the murder of abortion providers?

Just asking.

RLC

I'd like to continue our look at the First Things essay (Christians and Postmoderns) by Joseph Bottum that we began yesterday.

Bottum writes that:

Precisely so. Modernity offers us no satisfying interpretive framework for assigning meaning to the facts discovered by science. It attempts to supply the need for such a framework by interpreting everything in terms of evolutionary development, but the view that each of us is just a meaningless cipher in the grand flow of time and evolution fails somehow to quench our deepest longings. According to the modern worldview there really is no purpose for the existence of anything. The facts discovered by science, as important as they may be for the furtherance of our technology, don't really have any metaphysical significance. Like everything else, they're just there.

I take Bottum to be saying here that modernity, in its death throes, wishes only to finish the business of killing off God, or at least belief in God. Modernity has nothing else to offer. It cannot give answers to any of life's most gripping existential questions. Nowhere in the writings of the anti-theists at large today do we find an answer to any of the following: Why is the universe here? How did life come about? Why is the universe so magnificently fine-tuned for life? Where did human consciousness come from? Why do we feel joy when we encounter beauty? How can we prove that our reason is reliable without using reason to prove it? How can we account for our conviction that we have free will? What obligates us to care about others? Why do we feel guilt? Who do I refer to when I refer to myself? What gives human beings worth, dignity, and rights? If death is the end justice is unattainable, so why do we yearn for it? Why do we need meaning and purpose? What is our purpose?

Ask the Richard Dawkins' of the world those questions and all you'll get in reply is a shrug of the shoulders or a recitation of the historical crimes of the Church. They dodge the question because they have no answer. This is a bit ironic: Neither modern nor postmodern atheism has an answer to the most profound questions we can ask. The only possible answer lies in the God of the "premodern" and this is the one solution to man's existential emptiness that the modern and postmodern atheist simply cannot abide.

More tomorrow.

RLC

The bright side, if you can call it that, is that Americans got what they voted for in the last two elections. In choosing to reward Democrats with power we declared ourselves eager for higher taxes, higher spending, greater debt, bloated bureaucracy, a corrupt political process, and a weaker military. This is, of course, what the Democrat party has stood for ever since the sixties, but they've never had enough political clout to put their most radical ideas into practice. Now they do, and, unless the most recent incarnation of those ideas, Obamacare, is repealed, we'll be paying for it for the rest of our lives.

There've been lots of predictions over the last several weeks of a massive defeat of Democrats in the next two election cycles, given the ugly manner in which they passed an enormously unpopular bill. The party leadership demanded that the rank and file fall on their political swords for the sake of the cause, and many of them dutifully obliged. The voters, we've been assured, will hold them accountable:

Even so, I'm not so sure. A lot can happen in the next two years that may cause hostility toward the Democrats to wane. Here's my prediction, for the little that it's worth: If the economy turns around the Democrats will weather this current storm and their losses in November and in 2012 won't be quite as severe as they're being projected to be. If the economy doesn't improve, however, then resentments over Obamacare will exacerbate the electorate's distaste for Democrat policies, and the party will suffer major losses at the polls, especially this Fall.

In the meantime I think the town hall meetings will afford great entertainment this summer.

RLC

There are in the West three ways to look at the world, three worldviews which serve as lenses through which we interpret the experiences of our lives. Those three worldviews are essentially distinguished by their view of God, truth, and the era in which they were dominant among the cultural elite. We may, with some license, label these the premodern, modern, and postmodern. The premodern, lasting from ancient times until the Enlightenment (17th century), was essentially Christian. The modern, which lasted until roughly WWII, was essentially naturalistic and secular, and the postmodern, which has been with us now for a couple of generations, is hostile to the Enlightenment emphasis on Reason and objective truth.

I recently came across a wonderful treatment of the tension between these three "metanarratives" in an essay written by medieval scholar Joseph Bottum for First Things back in 1994. FT has recently reprinted his article in an anniversary issue (Bottum is now editor of the journal), and I thought it would be useful to touch on some of the highlights.

Bear in mind that although the terms premodern, modern and postmodern refer to historical eras there are people who exemplify the qualities of each of these in every era, including our own. Thus though we live in a postmodern age due to the dominance of postmodern assumptions among the shapers of contemporary thought, there are lots of premoderns and moderns around. Indeed, outside the academy I suspect most people are either premodern or modern in their outlook.

About a quarter of the way into his essay Bottum, writing on behalf of the Christian (premodern) worldview, says this:

The postmodern project is, as Francois Lyotard put it, a suspicion of all metanarratives based on reason. It rejects the Enlightenment confidence that human reason can lead us to truth about the world, particularly truth about the important matters of meaning, religion and morality. Indeed, postmodern thinkers are skeptical of any claims to a "truth" beyond simple empirical facts.

Bottum continues:

In other words, premoderns believe we can have knowledge of God through direct experience apart from reason. As Pascal put it, "The heart has reasons that reason can never know." Moderns believe that knowledge can only come through the exercise of our reason. Postmoderns hold that moderns are deluding themselves. None of us can separate our reason from our biases, prejudices, experiences and so on, all of which shape our perspective and color the lenses through which we view the world. For the postmodern there is no such thing as objective reason or truth.

Bottum again:

Here is an interesting insight. Christians hold in common with modern atheists that there is objective truth, that there is meaning to life, and that there is moral right and wrong. At the same time they hold in common with postmodern atheists (not all postmoderns are atheists, it should be stressed) that none of those beliefs can be sustained unless there is a God. Does this, as Bottum alleges, put Christians closer to postmoderns than to moderns?

More tomorrow.

RLC

Our post last Wednesday on Real School Reform generated a lot of comment, much of it thoughtful. The responses tended to fall into two groups: Those who are taxpayers with children in school and those who are still pursuing an education degree with hopes of some day being a teacher. The former group tended to agree with the basic theme of the post, the latter group tended to be outraged by it. The former group were fairly uniform in saying that they don't want their child in a classroom where the teacher cannot teach. Those in the latter group generally expressed the view that disruptive students should be viewed as a challenge, that it would be reprehensible to just give up on them, and that any teacher who felt that such students should be expelled from school is not worthy of being in the classroom.

To the extent that this second group volunteered the information they were often elementary ed majors, and I certainly did not intend to suggest that I think elementary children should be expelled, unless they are very deeply troubled and a danger to their classmates. My post was directed, though, at a serious problem among high school students, a group with which I've had some experience.

What we need to do as a society, I guess, is have a conversation about what we want our schools to accomplish and what the order of priorities should be. Do we want our schools to be educational facilities? Do we want them to be athletic mills? Do we want them to be social rehabilitation centers? Whatever our highest priority is all else should be subordinated to that goal. If the priority is to give our young people the best education we can provide for them then we need to remove, to the extent we are able, everything that prevents us from achieving that goal.

Taxpayers are paying teachers to be educators, not to be social workers. When a student is chronically disruptive, disrespectful, violent, or threatening, he brings education to a grinding halt, he cheats his fellow students out of a better future, he robs taxpayers of their investment in the school, and he demoralizes good teachers who entered the profession excited about teaching. Such students are the biggest reason our schools have difficulty turning out academically accomplished graduates, and nothing else we do to reform education will make any significant difference until these barriers to academic success are removed from the classroom.

Understand, I'm not talking about a fourth grader who has trouble staying in his seat. I'm talking about the six foot thug who threatens to punch his 100 lb. teacher in her face if she doesn't get off his case. I'm talking about the one or two young men or women in a class who are consistently loud, rude, obscene and insulting to both their classmates and their teachers and who make it impossible for a teacher to present a lesson. I'm talking about the student who has remained unmoved by his teachers' best attempts to help and counsel him about how he can improve his chances at a decent future. I'm talking about the student who has already been suspended three or four times in a school year but whose unacceptable behavior remains unchanged.

When a teacher's day is spent constantly running around the classroom putting out fires that teacher is not teaching. When a teacher's stomach is churning throughout much of her day, when she wakes up every morning dreading her seventh period class, when she checks the absentee roster each morning in hopes that so-and-so is absent that day, she's not going to be nearly as effective as she could be, and her students are inevitably going to be cheated.

A number of readers suggested that teachers of very disruptive young people need to develop strategies for dealing with them. This is the sort of thing students learn to say in their teacher education courses. In real life young teachers quickly learn that very few, if any, of those strategies that sounded so good in their college ed classes actually work. The only strategies many teachers in too many of our schools can hope to develop are strategies for managing their stress and getting them through the day.

Sure, as many readers pointed out, difficult kids often come from dysfunctional homes and can't help being the way they are. That's no doubt true, but it's irrelevant.

One reader, however, responding to a different post said something that is relevant to our original post on school reform. He mentioned that a police chief of his acquaintance once told him that:

Except for calling them predators and animals (though a few of them certainly are) the same statistics pretty much hold for the population of many of our high schools. The good teachers can guide that 10% in useful directions, but few can do much with that 5%.

Even if one or two of them could be helped by school personnel the commitment of time and resources necessary to achieve even the most modest progress is so great that everyone else in the school suffers. That 1% to 5% of students are obstacles standing in the way of schools fulfilling their mandate, and they need to be removed if we're going to be serious about improving the quality of the education the vast majority of our students deserve.

Some readers seemed to think that showing incorrigible students the door was tantamount to condemning them to a lifetime of dysfunction, but why think that? Many people who were unmanageable while in school suddenly grow up when forced to make their own way in the work world or the military. In some cases, getting them out of the school environment is the best thing we can do for them.

If some other alternative can be found for these kids that the taxpayers are willing to underwrite then fine, but there's no reason to think we're doing anyone, including the problem students themselves, any favors by keeping them in school and constantly recycling them through the principal's office. They're not learning anything while they're in school, and they're preventing others from learning, so what's the point?

RLC

Dick Morris argues that Obamacare, which the House is expected to vote on tomorrow, would be fatal to Medicare and consequently to the careers of Democrats who vote for it:

Obamacare would be very hard on the elderly who would, unless Congress acts to forestall the reimbursement cuts (and thus add to the cost of the bill), be forced to buy expensive medical insurance or go without many of the procedures and checkups that Medicare currently pays for. This is enormously ironic inasmuch as Democrats have been Medicare's biggest supporters ever since it was begun back in the 1960s. It's also ironic because killing Medicare is an act of political self-immolation.

The consensus among people who have studied the bill is that Obamacare will result in higher insurance premiums, less access to health care, lower quality health care, higher taxes, and a higher deficit. And none of this takes into account the crushing effect that the adminstration's plans to grant amnesty to twenty million illegal aliens would have on the system.

Morris, who was an advisor to President Clinton, predicts catastrophe in November's elections:

If I were a political cartoonist I think I'd draw a picture of the Roman Coliseum with Congressional Democrats standing en masse in the middle of the arena just before the lions (the voters) are unleashed. The Dems face the emperor, Barack Obama, and with an outstretched arm shout Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant (Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you).

RLC

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga has offered several noted arguments against materialism, i.e. the belief that everything is reducible to matter. Materialism denies the existence of immaterial entities like mind or soul or God. Plantinga's argument here is with theists who embrace a kind of local materialism. They believe in God but they hold that everything in the created universe is ultimately material. Plantinga thinks that this is wrongheaded. He argues that if one is a theist one really should be a substance dualist, i.e. one who holds that everything is reducible to at least two fundamental "substances," matter and mind (or soul):

Elsewhere Plantinga has argued cogently against materialism using other arguments. We'll discuss some of those in a day or so. If you believe you are more than just your body, if you belive that something about you survives your body's death, or if you believe you have free will but don't know how that can be if physical matter is all there is, you'll be interested in what Plantinga says.

RLC

Quinn passes along a Newsweek article that raises a host of difficult ethical questions about suicide. The article describes the work of Dr. Lawrence Egbert, the medical director of a group called Final Exit Network (FEN), a right to die organization. Dr. Egbert is facing criminal charges in two states for advising people with terminal illnesses or terrible pain how they can end their lives. Here's Newsweek's summary of the case which has the octogenarian Dr. Egbert facing over thirty years in prison:

Read the rest of the article and then reflect on the morality of advising suffering people with no real hope of cure, short of a miracle, how they can hasten their death. Here are a couple of questions to get you started:

Do you think Dr. Egbert should be imprisoned (Assuming there's not more to the story than what the article tells us)?

Do you think that people don't have the right to take their own life, under some circumstances? If not, why not? If they do, under what circumstances do they?

If you think people should be able to offer advice and assistance to those seeking to end their pain do you think there's a danger that more and more people will be encouraged to end their life for economic reasons rather than reasons of suffering?

If you oppose helping people end their life why do you think it's compassionate and merciful to have a suffering pet put down but not a suffering grandparent?

RLC

Back in the 1960s there was a famous experiment in which people were encouraged to apply electric shock to a man if the man answered questions posed to him incorrectly. Those applying the electricity thought they really were administering extreme voltages to the "victim" but, in fact, the victim was an actor.

The point of the experiment was to show how easily people will suppress their moral reservations and submit to the will of an authority figure. Instead of refusing to participate many went along with it.

Now my friend Matt sends a video that shows that the French are turning the experiment into a television show:

Apparently, a lot of people think it's okay to cause another person pain as long as an authority figure tells them it's alright. It's no wonder Hitler and others have found it so easy to get the masses to go along with their cruelties. We really are just sheep.

Of course, if our sense of human sympathy is little more than the product of blind, impersonal forces and chance, if human beings are, as we've been told now for three generations, nothing but animals with no soul and answerable to no God, we shouldn't be surprised that our behavior fits that view. Ideas have consequences.

RLC

Over at Telic Thoughts commenter Allen MacNeill, a professor of biology at Cornell, criticizes (see comment at 4:22 p.m.) the claim made by Michael Ruse and other naturalists that morality is just an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to enable us to get along with each other. MacNeill writes that:

I have to say that I didn't read Ruse the way MacNeill did. I understood Ruse to be saying that morality is an illusion. There really isn't any such thing. MacNeill seems to be saying that Ruse is trying to ground morality in evolution. If this is indeed what Ruse is trying to do then I am in complete agreement with MacNeill that Ruse is engaged in a fool's errand. Unless there is a personal transcendent ground for morality there simply isn't any non-subjective, non-arbitrary basis for moral obligation or moral judgment. Certainly, as MacNeill asserts, evolution can't provide one. He and I part company, however, when he goes on to claim that:

This, in my opinion, is a misunderstanding of the attempt to ground morality in God. MacNeill seems to be saying that God is one thing and goodness is another. Some acts, he claims, are intrinsically good independently of God. In other words, God commands us to be kind, for example, because kindness is good in itself and would be good whether God commanded it or not, or indeed, whether God existed or not.

The problem for MacNeill, though, is that he's not coming to grips with the Christian concepts of God and goodness. Goodness, in the Christian view, is not "out there" in some Platonic realm of forms waiting to be accessed by God. Goodness is part of God's very essence. It's an aspect of His nature. It flows from Him like heat and light flow from the sun. Just as heat and light would not exist if the sun didn't exist, so, too, goodness would not exist if God didn't exist. Thus, when God enjoins us to be kind He's not pointing us to some independent form of the good and commanding us to partake of it. Rather He's pointing us to Himself and urging us to be like Him.

Just as logic is woven into the structure of the universe because logic is part of the essence of God, so, too, the moral law is woven into the structure of our hearts because goodness is part of the essence of God.

RLC

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, celebrated their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day yesterday. We are indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating. As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 B.C., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later. Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the gospel and to abolish slavery. Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy, and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages. Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on. For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed. Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own. Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Moslem incursions that arrived a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the goths and vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of atoms. From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish. A legacy from Patrick. It is worth pondering in the wake of St. Patrick's Day what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago. Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGaeil (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you had a happy St. Patrick's Day.

Note: This post was originally written as a guest column for the York Daily Record. It appeared on March 15th, 1998.

RLC

Newsweek magazine argues, in an article by two of its staff writers, that we must fire bad teachers. I don't think anyone outside of the NEA and its affiliates would argue with that, but then Newsweek goes a step too far and lays educational failure in America pretty much entirely at the feet of bad teachers:

So far, so obvious. We hardly needed research to tell us that good teachers can make a real difference for kids, or that the ability to teach is more of an innate talent, strongly correlated to personality, than a learned skill. But then the Newsweek writers say this:

Now surely, incompetent teachers are a problem in many of our schools, but they're not the chief problem, about which more below. I want to note first, though, that most bad teachers reveal themselves long before the five year point mentioned in the article. Many of them are known to be inadequate before they receive tenure, but for a variety of reasons administrators are often reluctant to simply let them go. In other words, to the extent that weak teachers are a problem in our schools it's due more to the failure of administrators who hire them and then afterward fail to cull them from the faculty before they attain tenure.

But the most formidable impediment to successful education, however, is not incompetent teachers. Nor is it lack of funding. It's disruptive, disrespectful students in the classroom. Anyone who wishes to get a glimpse of what it's like in many public schools today should rent the movie The Class. It's a foreign film set in France and subtitled, but teachers who watch it will nod their heads in recognition of the difficulties of teaching in modern urban settings. Others will be astonished that any teacher continues to show up for work in such an environment. Yet The Class captures pretty well the atmosphere that prevails in many classrooms all across this country.

Disruptive students bring learning for everyone in the class to a halt, and too many administrators simply refuse to do anything meaningful to get rid of them. Nor do our courts help this situation by demanding that a district which expels a student pay for alternative education elsewhere. Essentially, the student (I use the term in its loosest sense) squanders the taxpayers' money by making himself impervious to the efforts of his teachers and preventing his fellow students from learning anything, and then the courts and legislatures tell the taxpayers, when the school district has finally had enough, that they still have to foot the bill to place the kid in an alternative school.

The fact is that most teachers today are just as capable, if not moreso, as any who have ever taught in our schools, but they're working in a social milieu much different and much tougher than did their predecessors back in the 50s and 60s. The problems teachers faced two generations ago were not nearly as severe and as intractable as they are today. Moreover, those teachers had support from administrators, parents, communities, and courts that today's teacher can only envy. In many schools when teachers walk into a classroom they're pretty much on their own in dealing with chronically disruptive kids, and if they do try to enlist the aid of an administrator they're often asked, implicitly or explicitly, why they can't control their classrooms on their own.

The way our society dealt with troubled troublemakers in the 50s was to boot them out and let them find a job. The way we deal with them today is to hire a phalanx of teacher's aides, counsellors, police officers, etc., but none of this really solves the problem. The problem is that too many classes are wasted because too many students in too many schools simply don't belong in school, and they make it impossible for even good teachers to teach. When good teachers can't teach they get discouraged and frustrated and often leave the profession, leaving the less talented or less experienced teachers to staff the schools.

If we were really serious about making our schools better places for kids to learn we'd admit that we have a responsibility to teach the students who really want an education. We'd also admit that some students have clearly demonstrated that they don't care about an education and are a serious barrier to the success of those who do. These students should be given their unconditional release so that they can get on with their life's calling of being a burden on society and stop holding back those who want to be a benefit to it.

RLC

Philosopher Mike Almeida offers an interesting argument at Prosblogion against the way our society currently regards the unborn child . It goes like this:

By "textbook person" I take Almeida to mean something like, "A living human being with the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion, and will."

Of course, current law (Roe v. Wade) assumes that this is exactly what happens. At some point in the child's development it suddenly acquires the status of a person with the right to life. The child may be aborted before that point but not after. As Almeida's thought experiment makes clear, however, the current law is based on very dubious logic.

RLC

Rebecca Bynum of the New English Review authors a fine essay titled The Progressive Diminishment of Man. Her piece is reminiscient of C.S. Lewis' Abolition of Man and offers many good insights into the dehumanization of modern man. I have only two minor quibbles with it.

I think she could have been a bit more clear that the problem is scientism not science. She does say this, but the point needs more emphasis, I think, than she gives it. Nor do I think the rejection of the monistic materialism naturalism, or scientism, entails is a sufficient remedy to the problem. In my view nothing short of an explicit acknowledgement that there exists a personal Creator in whose image we are fashioned will suffice to address the "diminishment" Bynum so skillfully exposes.

But these quibbles are insignificant compared to her overall case. Start with these paragraphs:

This is an excellent point. Scientism is the belief that science has all the answers to life's most important questions and any question that science can't answer isn't really worth asking. Yet as Bynum points out, science really can tell us very little. Not only does it not know what a force like gravity or magnetism actually is, neither can it tell us what matter is, what energy is, or how they interact. It can't tell us what a mind is, what an idea is, how we experience sensations like color or sound, what consciousness is, or even what life is. It can not give us a satisfactory explication of moral obligation, it can't tell us what our purpose is or give meaning to life. Nor can it explain why truth matters. It can discover the principles that enable us to build cars, televisions, i-pods, computers, and nuclear weapons, but it can't tell us how these things should be used. We could go on, but I think the point is made. Science can describe what happens when one bit of matter comes close to another, but it cannot tell us much else of importance about life.

Bynum goes on:

By quoting Paul (Acts 17:28) Bynum is apparently tip-toeing up to the suggestion that though the reassertion of the dignity of man and a meaningful universe requires a restoration of the belief in mind (or soul) that in itself is not enough. We need to see the universe as the palette upon which God is painting a beautiful picture. We need to see human beings as being precious in the eyes of their Creator. Nothing less will afford us a basis for thinking man has any genuine dignity or worth. Nothing else can serve as a basis for human rights.

Anything less than a full-blooded acknowledgement of this metaphysical truth will prove ineffectual in restoring man to the exalted status Bynum rightly and eloquently calls us to reclaim.

RLC

Jim Wallis of Sojourners' issues a challenge to talk radio host Glenn Beck to debate him on whether the Bible obligates governments to engage in social justice (i.e. social welfare programs). Beck won't do it, of course, but I wish he would. Wallis is miffed at Beck because Beck has claimed that there is no such mandate in the Bible and that, in fact, the rubric of social justice has been used by fascists, communists, nazis, and socialists of all stripes throughout the 20th century to justify their aggrandizement of centralized power.

Here's Wallis being interviewed by Stephanie Miller:

I'm afraid that Wallis, not to mention Miller, misses the point here. Beck isn't saying that Christians shouldn't care for the poor. What he's saying, I think, is that there's nothing in Scripture that makes such care a responsibility of government. The Biblical imperatives enjoin individuals to help the poor. The Bible leaves it to those individuals to decide whom they will help and how much. Nowhere, as far as I'm aware, do they say that government has the duty or right to take property from one person to give it to others.

When government assumes the responsibility of caring for the poor then such care quickly becomes a right. So the poor have a right to food, education, heating fuel, and now to health care. By what logic can they be denied a right to a house (or at least home insurance), a tv, air conditioning, and a car (or at least auto insurance)? And if they have a right to all those things then their fellow citizens - you and I - have a duty to provide them. Should government be permitted to seize the property you work hard to earn and build in order to provide all these benefits for those who can't, or won't, work for them themselves?

Wallis says yes, Beck says no. I'm with Beck.

RLC

Imagine as you watch this OK Go video that you were told that the system designed for the video had somehow been erected by mindless forces acting by chance and you'll get some idea why so many people just feel intuitively that life is the work of an intelligent Engineer. After all, a single cell in your body is far more sophisticated and carries far more information than this amazing contraption:

Remarkable, no? But I suppose that given a couple million years the parts and the precise arrangement of this system could have accidentally been constructed. I mean, it's possible - in the same way that a bullet fired at random into outer space could possibly hit a dime-sized target on the other side of the universe - and according to a lot of Darwinians, as long as something's possible that's the same as being inevitable.

RLC

Conservatives won a skirmish in the culture wars last week when the Texas school board adopted standards for all public school social studies textbooks used in the state. According to a New York Times report by James McKinley the new standards stress "the superiority of American capitalism, question the Founding Fathers' commitment to a purely secular government and present Republican political philosophies in a more positive light."

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it which makes wonder if the five Democrats think capitalism is not a superior economic system and that the Founders really were thoroughgoing secularists.

McKinley, who seems to be barely able to conceal his own disappointment with the success of the conservative faction on the board, goes on to note that the new standards include a change in "the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported."

The Board also approved an amendment saying students should study "the unintended consequences" of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. The new standards will also mention that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.

The new standards also cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone.

I don't know whether Aquinas deserves more notice than Jefferson, but I do think John Locke does. Jefferson's thinking on revolution was largely influenced by Locke whose Second Treatise on Government provided the philosophical framework for Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.

At any rate, it's a consolation to read that there's at least one influential state determined to do what it can to insure that high school students aren't simply fed a fetid porridge of half truths and untruths about the history of their country. Perhaps other states will be emboldened to follow Texas' example.

Thanks go to Jason, who happens to teach history in Texas, for the link.

RLC

The liberal media have been having a feeding frenzy this past week at the expense of the hapless and strange Democrat from New York, Eric Massa. Mr. Massa, who has resigned his congressional seat, has admitted to participating in "tickle fights" with his assistants, as well as other behaviors most of us might consider somewhat unusual for a fifty year old husband and father. He's also been accused of making unwelcome sexual advances on male subordinates both in Congress and while serving as an officer in the Navy.

So much for the sad story of Eric Massa. What I'd like to focus on is the peculiar response to this episode by the liberal media which has been relishing and abetting the spectacle of this poor man humiliating and debasing himself in nationally televised interviews. They can't seem to get enough of the sordid details. My question for the media progressives, then, is what, exactly, do they consider Mr. Massa's offenses to be that he so richly merits their derision and contempt?

Are they scandalized by his alleged unwelcome gropings and advances? If so, where were they when Paula Jones, Kathleen Willy and Juanita Broaddrick were making the same, or worse, sorts of allegations against President Clinton? Back then the media couldn't do enough to discredit the women who were making the charges and to protect the President from their "slanders." In what significant way is Mr. Massa's behavior any different from President Clinton's? Indeed, it could be argued that it was not nearly as bad. Juanita Broadderick, after all, accused Mr. Clinton of having raped her and Kathleen Willey accused him of having molested her in the Oval Office. All of these women were subsequently subjected to smears, aspersions, and intimidation, and the liberal media happily piled on. Rather like Mr. Massa's friends were said to pile on him to celebrate his fiftieth birthday.

Perhaps, then, it's the homosexual nature of Mr. Massa's advances the media finds so titillating. But haven't they been instructing us for a generation now that gay sex should be looked upon in the same way we view "straight" sex? To ridicule Massa because his frolics were homo- rather than heterosexual is to violate one of the major tenets of 21st century liberal sexual orthodoxy. Why would enlightened liberals be snickering at Mr. Massa's conduct as though it were a degrading perversion, unless, of course, they're hypocrites?

Well, we don't want to think that so maybe the media are amused simply by the fact that this pathetic man is making a public fool of himself. But, again, if that's what has set them all to chortling why aren't they rolling on the floor in laughter over Nancy Pelosi's steady flow of inanities? This woman makes a fool of herself almost every time she opens her mouth. The other day she told us that Congress had to pass the health care reform (HCR) bill so that we could know what was in it. No sooner did we get done scratching our heads over that one than she followed it up with soothing assurances that if the measure is passed those of us who wish to be artists or writers won't have to worry about having to keep a job to pay for our insurance since our neighbors will be required to pay for it for us. Isn't that swell? If you decide to leave your job to go splatter paint on a canvas can you expect your neighbor to buy you your food and gas, and pay your mortgage, too?

Anyway, the liberal media's treatment of Massa is not about his sexual gropings. If it were they would've been outraged by Bill Clinton. Nor is it about the fact that his romps were homoerotic because liberals profess to see nothing wrong with that. Nor is it about his embarrassingly ridiculous attempts to justify his behavior in televised interviews for if it were they'd be scoffing merrily at Nancy Pelosi's vacuous attempts to justify HCR.

No. Under the pretense of illuminating Mr. Massa's ethical and moral transgressions the media is trying to destroy him because, despite being one of the most progressive members in the House of Representatives, he was a "no" vote on HCR. If he'd been a "yes" they would've had scarcely a word to say about his ethical problems, just as they've been loath to say much about Chris Dodd's or Charles Rangel's problems or those of the late Jack Murtha.

Perhaps the best explanation for the liberal media's conduct in this case - other than that, like bullies, they take pleasure in kicking people who are down (vide their delight in exposing every sleazy and harmful detail of Tiger Woods' personal life) - is that, perhaps unconsciously, they want to make Massa look as weird as possible so that the public will come to associate opposition to HCR with total weirdness.

RLC

Kevin Ferris of the Philadelphia Inquirer has penned a helpful summary of what's wrong with the President's plan for health care reform. His column is, in fact, a recap of the points made by congressman Paul Ryan at the Health Care Summit convened a couple of weeks ago by President Obama.

Ferris writes:

Democrat pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen bemoan that their party is committing political suicide by pursuing the great white whale that is their plan for health care reform. Like the insane Captain Ahab, the Democrats' refusal to listen to any other opinion and their obssession with passing the Senate plan will end in them destroying themselves and taking as many of us with them as they can.

Does this sound like anything else you've ever heard of?

Ramirez thinks so:

RLC

Most members of the Baby Boom generation are beginning to realize, if they hadn't already, that their retirement will not be the bowl of cherries they'd planned. Medicare and social security are probably going to be scaled back and retirement funds are worth only a fraction of what they were a few years ago. Factor in inflation over the next ten years or so and there'll be a lot of bitterness toward the people responsible for the Boomers' dashed plans for a pleasantly smooth sail into their dotage.

The Boomers will be angry, to be sure. Many of them already are, which is why we have the Tea Party mobvement. But the group who'll be most furious, according to The Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott, is the children and grandchildren of the Boomers, the group he calls Millenials. Why will they be angry? Because they're the ones who'll be compelled to make up the shortfalls through higher taxes, lower wages and a lower standard of living.

Tapscott describes the Millenials' future:

Upon whom will the Millenials vent their anger and frustration? Tapscott prognosticates that it'll be profligate Progressive Democrats like Obama, Reid and Pelosi who sought to bloat the role of federal control over everyone's life and who borrowed and spent the country into a state of economic servitude to our creditors:

Perhaps this partly explains why we no longer see young people swooning as President Obama dispenses his oratorical flourishes. People in our land of Oz are peeking behind the curtain to catch a glimpse of the wizard and are discovering that the wizard is sadly something of a fraud.

We're justified in feeling bitter at having been duped by the intoxicating campaign rhetoric. It's understandable that people are disillusioned that Barack Obama turns out to be more like Jeremiah Wright than Denzel Washington. Our anger at what the Democrats are doing to the economic health of our nation is completely warranted, but before we submit to bitterness, disillusionment and anger we should pray for these people. Perhaps it's not too late for the horses pulling the wagon of state to back away from the brink of the abyss, or at least, if they're determined to rush headlong over the cliff themselves, to at least unhitch the wagon first.

RLC

Cornelius Hunter finds himself amused at the insistence of the Darwinians that their theory is a fact as well-established as the fact of gravity. I myself have read this claim on occasion and always thought it odd. Darwinism may be true, in the sense that it's certainly possible that things actually transpired in the way Darwinists claim, but the idea is hardly testable. I.e. the insistence that natural processes are sufficient to explain the diversity of life and all the appurtenances of living things is not amenable to falsification.

You can test the existence of gravity a hundred times every day before breakfast but try to imagine testing the truth of the claim that nothing but physical processes generated and diversified life. A Nobel Prize to whoever comes up with a way to do it.

Anyway, Hunter has this to say:

The answer, of course, is that the only live alternative to evolution, or, more precisely Darwinian evolution, is intelligent design and that's a metaphysically repellant option to anyone who has committed his or her life to a naturalistic worldview. It's like waving a crucifix in front of a vampire (no offense intended to my Darwinian readers). People who have invested their lives in a worldview find it just as wrenching to relieve themselves of it as does an addict who tries to kick his addiction "cold turkey." Darwinism is to a naturalist what crack is to an addict. Take it away and their world is thrown into unbearable turmoil and pain. Darwinism must be true, it has to be true. The alternative is just unthinkable.

RLC

Maybe Ramirez read our post yesterday titled Nancy in Wonderland.

Don't laugh, he could have:

RLC

The E-Trade ads are better, but these are still pretty good:

Thanks to Hot Air.

RLC

Wired Magazine has an interview with physicist Sean Carroll in which he discusses his research on the nature of time. His work has led him to conclude that there are other universes, or more precisely, other regions of space that are closed off to our region - a version of the multiverse hypothesis. Carroll is not a theist but when he describes the origin of our space-time as a splitting off from a parent universe he seems to be describing God:

HT: Telic Thoughts

Read the interview to see how Carroll answers the question. One of the things he says that I think he's mistaken about is this:

First, whether the tree makes a sound when there are no observers present depends on whether we define sound as a sensation or as compressions propagating through the air. The falling tree generates compression waves, to be sure, but the sensation of sound is produced by our hearing apparatus, not the tree. Sensations require senses, if there are no senses present there is no sensation, just energy.

Likewise with time in completely empty space. Time requires events, as Carroll acknowledges, but what events would there be in an empty space? If time exists despite the complete lack of events then what is it that's existing? It's not material, it's not energy, it's not a substance of any kind, so what could it be? If it's simply a dimension similar to the three dimensions of space we might wonder whether the idea of time apart from events makes any more sense than the idea of space apart from material objects makes sense.

The interview concludes with Carroll acknowledging that so far his view is merely speculative:

If this is all that his theory is, if there's no way to test it, then in what sense is it science? Why would it be okay to discuss Carroll's ideas in a science class but not the ideas of intelligent design theorists? Is it because Carroll's ideas are not a threat to metaphysical naturalism but the implications of ID are?

RLC

Simon Heffer of the Telegraph U.K. wonders aloud if it's not the end of the road for Barack Obama's presidency. His column opens with this:

Mr. Heffer goes on to suggest that it's not premature to be writing Mr. Obama's political obituary, but perhaps there are a couple of problems with his analysis. First, he seems prone to exaggeration as for example when he states that FOX News "pours out rage 24 hours a day." There are, maybe, two hours of programming a day in which one could say that the network expresses something more than mere displeasure with the Obama administration. To aver that it "pours out rage" is to discredit one's case.

Mr. Heffer also seems to underestimate the fickleness of the American people who, though they may be abandoning Mr. Obama in droves today, might well return to him in droves tomorrow if the economy, despite the President's best efforts, turns around and jobs reappear.

Mr. Heffer also misses the mark somewhat when he notes that:

Mr. Obama's problem, however, is not that he lacks the will to put things right. His problem is that his view of what is wrong and what can be done to fix it are both obfuscated by the left-wing lenses through which he views the world. You can't fix a problem if a) you don't know what the problem is and/or b) you do know what the problem is, but your remedy is greater government control, higher taxes, and deeper debt.

During the Vietnam war the Left hooted in derision when some general justified bombing a village that harbored the enemy by opining that sometimes you had to destroy a village in order to save it. Today the Left's avatar, Mr. Obama, has adopted the same philosophy concerning the country. He seems to believe that he must destroy it in order to save it.

RLC

It's hard to believe that someone who has climbed all the way to the rarified heights of political accomplishment attained by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and who has maintained even a minimum level of consciousness throughout the battles over Health Care Reform that have ebbed and flowed across the nation over the past year would say something as bizarre as Ms Pelosi said yesterday.

In a speech to the National Association of Counties the Speaker intoned:

Isn't this exactly backwards? Shouldn't we know what's in the measure before we pass it? Do the congresspersons who'll be voting on this 2000 page monstrosity of a bill really know what's in it, or are they, too, waiting until they pass it so they can find out? Is there any significant difference between Congress and Lewis Carroll's Wonderland?

Here's the incriminating video of the Speaker articulating her political dyslexia:

It's no wonder Americans think so little of their politicians. The Mad Hatter is more sensible.

RLC

For movie buffs Moviefone lists the 100 best explorations of spiritual or religious themes of all time.

The films don't have to be explicitly religious to make the cut, nor do they have to be made with religious intent. Some of the films are made by atheists. I've only seen about ten of the films on the list myself so I can't judge their choices, but I do heartily agree with the inclusion of several of them. The Ingmar Bergman films, Seventh Seal and Winter Light, certainly deserve to be on it (I would have added The Silence), and I also agree that The Apostle and Man for All Seasons merit inclusion, but I'm really puzzled about the omission of Bella, Lord of the Rings, the Passion of the Christ, and, for that matter, Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth. I also would have added The Hiding Place, and perhaps Namesake, Arranged, and End of the Spear.

On the other hand, I wasn't a big fan of Bergman's Wild Strawberries or Babette's Feast, though I'm probably in the minority on this one, and I have to object, too, to the inclusion of Au Revoir Les Infants which I found disappointing.

Anyway, you can check the list out for yourself here.

RLC

The Mail Online features a poignant, even lovely, piece by Peter Hitchens on his conversion from atheism and his lifelong feud with his brother, Christopher. Many readers will recognize Christopher Hitchens as the brilliant journalist who also has made it his mission to wage a personal jihad against all theistic religious belief. After publication of his book, God Is Not Great, Christopher embarked upon a tour of the United States debating various spokespersons of the Christian faith on the question, Does God Exist. In one of those debates in 2008 he and his brother Peter crossed swords in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Peter's account of their relationship is sad, although it does contain a somewhat happy ending.

In the course of his essay Peter offers some very insightful observations about the weaknesses of the atheist's belief system. After explaining his own long journey back to God he remarks that:

He also emphasizes a point that we have made numerous times here on Viewpoint:

Peter Hitchens gives us an interesting, honest, very human account of alienation and redemption. It's well worth the few minutes it takes to read.

RLC

My friend Matt discusses the interesting relationship between Technology, Excellence and Flow on human happiness. He offers a lot of good insights on the effects of technology and excellence on our sense of well-being and also on the importance of hard work in order to be able to do anything well. Musicians will be especially interested in part 2. Give them a look:

RLC

Yuval Levin at NRO clarifies a bit of confusion that surrounds the current debate over what's called "Obamacare." The House of Representatives is going to vote in a couple of weeks on the bill passed by the Senate on Christmas eve. If the House approves it, it will go directly to the President's desk to be signed into law. All the talk about the bill going back to the Senate for a reconciliation vote is something of a red herring. There will be no need for reconciliation if the House passes this bill because it's the same bill the Senate has already approved:

In other words, any House Democrats who vote for the Senate bill thinking that the Senate will then revisit it to make it more palatable to them, are deluding themselves. Once the House passes this bill there'll be no need for the Senate to do anything. It'll be law.

This puts House Dems who don't want to buck their party but who do want changes made to the bill in the position of having to either vote against the bill, and keep it from becoming law in its present form, or vote for it and trust Obama and the Democratic senators to keep their word that they'll remove some of the more offensive provisions in reconciliation. The House Dems will have to trust that both the Senate and House leadership as well as the White House will work to produce a more moderate bill when in fact all three want a more liberal bill. They have to trust the party leadership even though neither Obama nor the Democrats have anything to gain and much to lose by going through the reconciliation process.

That's a lot of trust to place in politicians.

RLC

Over the weekend I read a book I talked about a little bit last week. The book is titled Son of Hamas and is written by Mosab Yousef the eldest son of one of the founders of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization (though it wasn't founded as a terrorist organization). Yousef became a spy for the Israelis when he was 18 and converted to Christianity shortly after that. It's a fascinating story, but something about it leaves me dissatisfied or maybe curious is a better word.

Yousef never really explains how it was seemingly so easy for him to start working for Shin Bet (the Israeli security service). He was devoted to his father. He admired him and wanted to emulate him yet he betrayed him (His father, as well as the rest of his friends and family, have all since disowned him). He also abandoned his Islamic faith (which his father loved above all else) and embraced Christianity. This spiritual transition was gradual, but nonetheless, for a young Arab living in Ramallah it must have been more wrenching than Yousef makes it appear.

At any rate, there's no doubt that Yousef is a brave man, though he never trumpets his courage, and he certainly saved a lot of lives. Indeed, it was his refusal to assist in the assassination of a group of Hamas terrorists that eventually led to the demise of his career as a spy. Surely his life is at risk now that his story has been published, and, given the sort of people he betrayed, it takes incredible courage to publicly discuss what his former friends and fellow Hamas members will certainly see as treachery.

Indeed, the picture he paints of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations is exceptionally ugly and brutal - their brutality is one reason he offers for accepting the Israelis' offer to work for them. The Palestinian people have much more to fear from their fellow Palestinians than they do from the Israelis.

The Wall Street Journal has a very fine review of the book, and I encourage any readers who are interested in Yousef's story to check it out. The book itself can be ordered at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds. I highly recommend it.

RLC

Last Wednesday we discussed the weakness of the weak anthropic principle as a reply to the argument for a designer of the universe based on the mind-boggling precision of the cosmic parameters. These finely calibrated values are set with breath-taking exactitude to just the values necessary to produce a universe which can sustain life. We mentioned in that post that there's a second more popular rejoinder to the fine-tuning argument for the existence of a designer that's gained a lot of currency in the last decade or so called the multiverse hypothesis (MH).

The MH comes in several different permutations but essentially it acknowledges that though our universe is extraordinarily improbable if it's the result of chance, the probabilities can be raised by assuming that there are a near infinite number of universes, all different in their basic laws. If this is the case, then it becomes much more probable that in all these worlds there will be one like ours, just like it becomes more probable that you will draw an ace from a deck of cards by increasing the number of draws. In fact, if the number of worlds is nearly infinite the existence of every possible world, including ours, becomes a near certainty, and we shouldn't be surprised that such a world exists.

This being the case a lot of materialist scientists who seek to avoid the unpleasant metaphysical implications of a universe that has been designed by an intelligent agent have embraced instead the theory that ours is just one of an untold number of worlds out there.

Unfortunately for the materialists, the MH doesn't help much. Indeed, it winds up making the existence of a designer far more likely than the materialist might have originally feared.

The problems with the MH are many. For instance, it's exceptionally unparsimonious, i.e. it multiplies entities beyond what's necessary to explain the facts of our world. Any theory that posits an infinity in order to explain the existence of the unimaginable precision of the fine-tuning of this world is by definition unparsimonious, especially if the alternative is to posit a single entity - an intelligent designer. This is especially true given that there's no evidence of any other universes, much less an infinity of them. All we know is that some versions of string theory allow for them, but we don't even know if string theory is true.

The MH violates the principle that it's always preferable to accept the theory for which there's evidence over the alternative for which there's no evidence. We have plenty of evidence, of course, that precision and fine-tuning can result from the actions of intelligent agents. But we have no evidence whatsoever either that fine-tuning on this scale of precision can result from sheer chance or that there any universes besides our own exist.

Nor have we any explanation for how these universes have been produced, and no way to test, or falsify, the claim that they exist.

Moreover, it is necessary, to make the argument work, to assume that all the universes are different, but this assumption is itself based on string theory, and, as noted above, we don't even know if string theory is true.

But worst of all for the multiverse proponent trying to escape the conclusion that there's a cosmic designer, is the fact that the MH actually winds up being an argument for the existence of a designer. To see this, assume there are a near infinite number of universes exhibiting a near infinite variety of physical constants, laws, and other states of affairs. If so, then any possible state of affairs would have to exist somewhere among them. The existence of a universe designed by an intelligent being is a possible state of affairs, therefore in at least one of our universes it must be true to say that a designed universe exists. Therefore, a designer exists, and since we know a designer has designed at least one world then, since our world certainly appears to be marvelously designed, it's reasonable to believe that the designer engineered our world as well.

Another way to put this is in the form of a modal argument for the existence of a maximally great being (MGB). If there is a state of affairs among worlds in which every possibility is realized then we can conclude that there must exist an MGB. We can conclude this because it's possible that an MGB exist (it would only be impossible if the concept of an MGB were incoherent), so if the multiverse is a state of affairs in which every possibility is actualized then every possible being must be actualized.

Thus, an MGB exists somewhere in the multiverse, but if a being is maximally great it must exist not just in one part of the multiverse but in every part, otherwise it's not maximally great. Therefore we can conclude that if there are a near infinite number of universes there must exist a maximally great being which designed and created them all.

In any event, neither the weak anthropic principle nor the multiverse hypothesis give the skeptic a safe escape from the conclusion that our universe was intentionally and intelligently engineered for life.

RLC

For those who remember the horror stories about urban crime coming out of Los Angeles a decade or so ago Timothy Egan's post at Opinionator may come as a surprise, or even a shock:

See here for a post on some of the controversy surrounding this aspect of the book Freakonomics

This is a good example of good news/bad news, at least for conservatives, especially black conservatives. Urban crime is trending sharply down - that's good news. It's going down largely because conservatives were right that tough sentencing of criminals would keep them off the street - that's good news. But it's also going down because we're aborting tens of thousands of potential criminals every year, particularly in the inner cities where the population is mostly black.

If you are pro-life, or you are African American, or both - that's not good news. If you fall into one of these categories what do you think about this? Does achieving a more civilized inner city justify the abortion of over a million black and Hispanic babies every year?

RLC

This is the follow-up to the Leonard Susskind video on string theory. In this segment Susskind explains how it is that string theory allows for a near infinite number of possible universes, a fact that some advocates of the multiverse idea have latched on to to justify their belief that these other universes actually do exist. In fact, Susskind himself seems in the video to embrace both the weak anthropic principle and the multiverse hypothesis:

Susskind once admitted that the only alternatives are a multiverse or God. Nothing else can explain the breath-taking precision of the cosmic fine-tuning. I wonder what he'll do if string theory is ever shown to be unworkable.

RLC

Last November I mentioned a fine book by Hunter Baker titled The End of Secularism which explained how the project to secularize the public arena is dying a death of intellectual inanition.

A reader named Bill passes along an article on the same theme written for the New York Times' Opinionator blog by Stanley Fish which he titles Are There Secular Reasons?

Fish draws on a book by professor of law Steven Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, in which Smith argues that the secularist ideal of a public discourse sterilized of any religious premises is doomed to vacuity. It can only accomplish anything by smuggling in metaphysical, or religious, presuppositions "incognito."

Here's Fish writing about Smith's argument:

There's much more of value in Fish's essay, and I thank Bill for recommending it.

One way this "smuggling" occurs, we might note, is that the secularist will make a moral claim to appeal for support among people who agree with the claim on religious grounds, even though the secularist does not himself share those grounds. For example, he might argue that we should not selfishly exploit the planet's resources and Christians will nod their heads in agreement because they believe for religious reasons that selfishness is wrong. It never occurs to many of them, though, to ask the secularist why he thinks it's wrong. Thus, the secularist is able to exclude religious reasons from the public square even though he piggy backs into the square on the shoulders of those reasons.

RLC

Eventually the media will get burned by over-enthusiastic scientists enough times to make them chary about hyping every new fossil primate as a portentous discovery for the evolution of human beings. These stories, it seems, follow a predictable pattern: A fossil is found that generates exuberant media coverage and intemperate claims from the discoverers only to have further study of the find reveal that it's nothing at all special. The original discovery is trumpeted on the front pages and on all the news networks. The more sober assessments are buried somewhere around page ten.

Such is the case, evidently, with "Ida" (Darwinius masillae):

When you just know that Homo sapiens has evolved from more primitive primates then your faith and your zeal will cause you to see confirmation of your belief in the most ambiguous evidence, or even where there's no confirmation at all.

RLC

Somewhere in this story there's a telling moral. Atheists on the San Antonio campus of the University of Texas are encouraging Christians and members of other theistic religions to trade in their holy books in exchange for pornography.

Let's see: Christians offer atheists an answer to all of life's most crucial questions, including the key to eternal happiness, and atheists offer Christians ..... porn. It says something about atheism, I think, that some atheists implicitly hold pornography in the same esteem as Christians hold the Bible. If they don't why is porn for Bibles considered an exchange of equal value? It also says something about the atheist worldview that in it something as degrading to both men and women as is pornography is such a highly prized commodity:

Thanks to Breitbart for the video.

RLC

There's a fascinating story in Haaretz about the son of one of the founders of Hamas who converted to Christianity ten years ago, served for over a decade as an informant for Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, and then fled the region in 2007. Mosab Hassan Yousef is credited with having saved dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lives by passing along information on imminent terror attacks on Israel.

Yousef must have a great deal of courage. He has to know that even though he's now living in the United States he's still a target for Islamist assassins. Nevertheless, his story is about to be published in an article to be released this Friday, and there's a book on his life that's just been released.

Here's an excerpt from the Haaretz piece:

I saw Yousef in a television interview last night and heard him warn us not to fall for the moderate/extremist distinction as applied to Muslims. Muslims are devoted to the Koran and the Koran teaches the use of violence to spread Islam.

This is a point others have made before but perhaps it will have more purchase coming from Yousef. Individual Muslims may not engage in violence themselves, but they don't really oppose the use of violence by other Muslims as long as it's directed at infidels.

RLC

Freddie at L'Hote is an atheist who takes his fellow non-believers to task for being so religious about their unbelief. What he says reminds me of a passage in Eric Hoffer's The True Believer:

Freddie says some interesting things in his post, but along the way he falls into a confusion that is oddly common among those who don't believe in God. To wit, he writes that:

As we have noted on more occasions on this blog than I care to count atheists have no moral or ethical duties. Such duties must be imposed upon one and there's no one, other than themselves, who is in a position to lay such an imposition on anybody if there is no God.

If the individual atheist says that he does indeed place the duties upon himself, that's fine (though arbitrary), but he surely can't bind other atheists to that obligation as Freddie does above.

He goes on to chide Christopher Hitchens for writing, "as if atheists have some duty to oppose religion. [But] the absence of belief and the absence of duty are symmetrical qualities."

Hitchens is spanked for suggesting that is one's duty as an atheist to oppose religion, but Freddie thinks this is wrongheaded. The absence of belief, he avers, entails the absence of duty (a formulation with which I agree), but then what does Freddie mean in the first paragraph above when he talks about the duties his fellow atheists have to extend tolerance and restraint? First he says atheists have duties, now he says they have none. Which is it?

Then later there's this:

If there are no duties, moral or ethical, how or why is anything at all "shameless?" Why, exactly, must it be "fought?" Surely not because it's wrong to insert religion into politics because for the atheist nothing is really wrong. Rather it must be because Freddie doesn't like it, but the fact that someone dislikes something is hardly a sufficient reason, by itself, to fight it.

One wishes that if people are going to insist on touting their atheism they'd at least have the good sense to stop making moral judgments. Or, failing that, at least explain to the rest of us upon what those judgments are based.

RLC

In this video Leonard Susskind, one of the premier theoretical physicists working in string theory, explains what string theory is. It's hard to imagine that the fundamental units of reality might be bits of stuff a billion billion times smaller than a proton:

RLC

The Weak Anthropic Principle has been offered as a rebuttal to the astonishing level of fine-tuning we find in the physical forces, constants, and parameters of the universe. These are calibrated to such fine tolerances that had they deviated from their actual value by as little, in some cases, as 1 part in 10^120 the universe never would have formed and/or life would have been impossible. Robin Collins, author of one of the most notable and accessible arguments for theism based on cosmic fine-tuning, lists the following among the dozens of examples he could have mentioned:

Stephen Hawking offers an example of the response to this cosmic precision that Collins is talking about: "Why," he asks, "is the universe the way we see it? The answer is simple: If it had been different, we would not be here."

What are we to make of such a reply?

Imagine that you have just learned that a complete novice at chess had just won the world championship. As a chess fan you're incredulous and you express your amazement that a rank beginner had beaten all of the world's best players. Suppose you were then admonished that you shouldn't be surprised, really, because, after all, if he hadn't beaten the best players he wouldn't be the world champion.

Wouldn't you think this response somewhat misses the point? The question that screams for an answer is not whether this tyro beat the world's best, we know he must have, but rather how did such a prodigy occur? Was there an illicit design or plot to have these grandmasters lose to the amateur?

Whatever the alternatives wouldn't you be inclined to think that the least plausible explanation was that it was just some sort of freakish coincidence? Yet those who invoke the weak anthropic principle are giving a response to cosmic fine-tuning analogous to those who tell us we shouldn't think there was some sort of thought-out plot behind the beginner's victory at the chess tournament.

We know we're here, and of course we know that the universe, therefore, has to be the way it is. The question is how did such a miracle happen? Was it a result of intention or was it just a happy accident? In terms of plausibility there's no contest between the hypothesis that the universe is intelligently designed and the hypothesis that the universe is the way it is because of serendipity.

Indeed, it's the need to explain this extraordinary fine-tuning that leads many skeptics to embrace the multiverse theory, about which we'll have more to say tomorrow.

RLC

Among the numerous responses to last week's posts on C.S. Lewis' thoughts on the nature of friendship in his The Four Loves (see On Friendship (Pt. I)) was one on a passage in which Lewis makes the claim that friends of the opposite sex cannot long remain friends without the Friendship passing into Eros.

Lewis writes:

Our reader offers the following based on her own experience:

There's a lot of insight in this. People know intuitively that if one member of the couple has an opposite sex friendship with a third party there's cause for alarm. When the person who has the "outside" friendship tries to reassure his/her romantic partner that "we're just friends" that person is either naive or disingenuous. They may be "just friends" now, but the chances are that they won't be for long.

RLC

It was roughly one year ago that Rick Santelli went on a rant on CNBC against government bailouts and called for another tea party like the one in Boston in 1773. Santelli's tirade went viral across the country sparking a movement that continues to grow in strength and depth. Toby Marie Walker is an organizer for the Texas Tea Party and, for the benefit of those who may be wondering what the Tea Party is all about, and for the benefit of those in the media who insist on mischaracterizing it as a bunch of thugs, xenophobes, and quasi-terrorists, lays out in the Washington Times just what the Tea Party is. She writes:

Ms. Walker goes on to note that the Tea Party has a grievance with both Democrats and Republicans. Check it out.

Meanwhile, Pat Buchanan poses the question, "What called the Tea Party into existence?" Here's part of his answer:

Both columns make for informative reading. Meanwhile, Jason sends us this 1948 cartoon that depicts the story of a post WWII tea party:

RLC

Those readers who enjoyed Brian Cox's discussion of the Large Hadron Collider might also appreciate this series of videos on the nature of time. Cox has some fascinating things to say about this enigmatic, but essential part of our lives. This is part one of a six part BBC series:

Cox seems to assume that time is a part of our objective world, but what if Kant was right in saying that time was really a part of our mental apparatus and that apart from a mind, time is nothing? If Kant is correct then time is simply the way we apprehend experience. It's a subjective phenomenon. If there were no minds there'd be no time.

If this is true, though, then it follows that there really was no time before the appearance of minds in the world. There were events, of course, but they were not embedded in any time, at least not the time that our minds impose upon events.

Think of events in the history of the cosmos as frames in a strip of movie film. If we run the movie in "real time" it may take 14 billion years to view everything that occurs in it from the Big Bang to the appearance of mankind. If we speed up the film the events still all occur, and occur in the same relation to each other, but they whiz by twice as fast, or ten times as fast, or virtually instantaneously, depending on how fast we run the tape.

If all this is true then the question of the age of the earth and the age of the universe is moot. The creation event happened, the universe unfolded, and ultimately minds appeared. Those minds look back on the evidence for the evolution of the universe and conclude that had those events been observed they would have taken 14 billion years of the observer's time, but in fact, since they weren't observed (except by God), they happened virtually instantly.

Minds perceive events as forming a "time line" upon which the events reside. The line has a beginning and stretches into the indefinite future. If there were no minds, however, the totality of events would be more like a point than a line.

If time is indeed a subjective phenomenon, like our perception of color, then our sense of vast ages of time having elapsed in the "past" is simply an illusion.

RLC

2010 is a census year and the Census Bureau will be soliciting information about you this year that they have never sought before and which Jerry Day thinks they have no constitutional authority to ask you for. He makes a pretty good case that this year's census is in large part a government intrusion into our privacy that attempts to gather information which is none of the government's business. Give it a look:

Thanks to Ernest for the link.

RLC

One name being mentioned with increasing frequency when the talk turns to the question of who the GOP candidate might be in 2012 is Mitch Daniels. Daniels is the current governor of Indiana and Mona Charen fills us in on his background. Her column should be read in its entirety for what it tells us about the man, but this excerpt might pique your interest:

Having experience in successful governance isn't the only thing attractive about Daniels. Charen goes on to tell us more:

Not only has he governed but he's also run a major business. No wonder they call him the Anti-Obama.

RLC