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Dick and Bill Cleary

Right Wing News, a blog run by John Hawkins, surveyed several dozen conservative-leaning bloggers for the purpose of compiling a list of the twenty greatest people in American history. I didn't have much time to think about my nominees, and I'm sure I missed some who deserve to be included. I'm also quite sure that there are many great people whose work is unknown to most of us, especially to me, and whom, if we knew what they accomplished, we'd certainly want added to the roll.

I also resisted the temptation to list some currently living greats (David Petraeus, Bill Gates, Billy Graham) and limited myself only to those who've passed on. Here are my selections in approximate chronological order:

Who did I miss?

To see the combined results of the survey go here.

RLC

I was in Paris last week and while my wife and daughter visited shops along one of the cobble-stoned streets in Montmartre, I amused myself by watching a guy running a variation of a shell game on the top of a cardboard box. He had three black disks, each about the size of a CD, one of which had a large white spot on the bottom. He laid the disks out on the box and quickly and deftly moved them around, challenging onlookers to pick out the disk with the white spot. Of course it cost twenty Euros to play, and most players lost. They were certain they knew where the marked disk had wound up but they were wrong. Even so, they kept on trying, certain that they could pick out the devilishly elusive white disk.

Running the shell game was illegal. Whenever the police got near an accomplice would yell out and he would grab his disks and run. Even so, I couldn't help admire the skill and dexterity with which he fleeced his patrons.

I was reminded of this "flim-flam" man as I read Pete Spiliakos at No Left Turns who suggests that Mr. Obama is himself just that sort of a trickster. Like my admiration for the Parisian, Spiliakos can't help but marvel at President Obama's genial mendacity and the ease with which he delivers himself of the most outrageous falsehoods. His power to persuade (and mislead), Mr. Spiliakos avers, is not to be underestimated:

The difference, of course, between Mr. Obama and the Parisian sleight-of-hand artist is that although the shell game was an inevitable loser for those suckered into playing, the man running it was doing nothing dishonest. He didn't lie or surreptitiously remove the white disk from the board. He simply moved the disks around so fast that the eye couldn't follow them. The deception was visual. With Mr. Obama, though, things seem to be, at least to Mr. Spiliakos, regrettably otherwise.

Read the rest of Spiliakos' piece here.

RLC

Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting pens for The New York Times' Opinionator blog an examination of Richard Dawkins' atheistic arguments in his book The God Delusion. Like almost every serious thinker who has written on TGD, theist and atheist alike, Gutting finds it long on eloquence and short on compelling, rational argumentation.

Gutting states:

If you're interested in a philosophical critique of Dawkins' argument you might profit from Gutting's offering. Or you could check out our own more extended review of TGD in the Viewpoint Hall of Fame.

RLC

The progressives in the Democrat party continue to exhibit their utter disregard for the spirit of the First Amendment and their inclination toward totalitarian exercises of power.

Most recently Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has called for investigations into those who oppose the building of the New York mosque. One of our most powerful political leaders wants to set government thought police to snooping into the backgrounds of those who have opinions which differ from her own. This smells of abuse of power, intimidation and an attempt to suppress freedom of thought and speech.

According to a report in Politico.com:

This is either stupid or malevolent. What right do politicians have to investigate people for expressing an opinion? What does it matter who's spending money to oppose the mosque? Ms Pelosi wants us to believe that there's a symmetry in this matter where none exists. There's no equivalence between a pro-Hamas Muslim who has expressed anti-American sentiments in the past building a mosque in proximity to the site of 9/11 and the protestations of those who are offended by this project. [For the record, I don't think it's the government's business who is funding either side in this controversy. The mosque shouldn't be built whether it's being funded by Saudi Wahhabis or the estate of Mother Teresa.]

No one in the United States should ever be required to explain to any authority why they hold the opinions they do. No one should ever have their financial records sifted through just because they hold views that the ruling class doesn't like. Ms Pelosi is confusing the U.S. with the U.S.S.R.

We might also, while we're at it, ask her exactly who among the 70% of Americans who oppose the mosque is she going to have scrutinized? Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid has come out against the mosque. Will he be investigated? The families of 9/11 victims are average Americans who oppose the mosque. Will she have government gumshoes looking into their funding?

It's disconcerting to ponder that this woman is third in line to the presidency, but it's good for us to see the predilections of the progressive mindset. In the Orwellian world they inhabit intimidation and coercion of citizens who have committed no crime is a perfectly acceptable tactic. Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms are mere inconveniences, speed bumps on the road to more government control of Americans' lives. The inevitable endpoint of Ms Pelosi's kind of thinking is the tyranny of Big Brother.

She sounds like had she watched the movie The Lives of Others she would've been sympathetic to the East German Stazi.

RLC

If you have little patience with muddled thinking you probably shouldn't watch this video of former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn weighing in on the New York mosque issue. If you do watch it, though, you might be struck by the incongruity of a woman who has acknowledged that she numbers among the people she admires Mao Zedong, the Chinese communist leader responsible for the murders of 50 to 70 million Chinese, blasting opponents of the mosque for "intolerance":

Throughout this segment Ms Dunn refuses to be deterred from her single-minded mission to smear Republicans, even though nearly 70% of Americans, including many Democrats, oppose building the mosque on the proposed site. In her eagerness to make this controversy about Republican bigotry, Ms Dunn makes herself sound foolish. Opposition to the mosque is not simply a matter of being intolerant toward a particular religion -although there's nothing wrong with personal, as opposed to legal, intolerance toward a religion that treats women like chattel, gays like felons, and non-believers like swine. Rather, it's a matter of insensitivity and insult. For people who adhere to the same religion that figured so prominently in the act of mass murder that took place on 9/11 to gratuitously place a facility that honors the religion that motivated the murderers adjacent to the site of one of the greatest crimes in America's history is extraordinarily offensive.

It would be, as we've said before, like Germans building a German heritage center in the shadow of one of their extermination camps at the conclusion of WWII or Japanese Americans building a shrine to Japanese militarism next to Pearl Harbor nine years after the attack on our naval base. It might not have been illegal, but it would've been either a deliberate thumb in the eye or an act of appalling insensitivity. In either case it should not be done.

This, however, is all too complicated for the robotic Ms Dunn whose mind can't seem to wander beyond the bounds of her ideological talking points.

Nothing she says, though, is as ditzy as Mika Brzezinski's baffling comment about peep shows in the neighborhood of Ground Zero. Ms Brzezinski evidently thinks the controversy is really about whether a mosque is more or less insulting to the families of the 9/11 victims than a strip club, and that if we accept the presence of the latter we should accept the former as well. This, however, is to grossly miscast, or misunderstand, the issue. This controversy is not about the relative moral value of Islam and sex shows, it's about whether it's appropriate for those who worship Allah to honor him at the spot where their coreligionists, in Allah's name, committed one of the worst crimes in the history of that violent religion. Unless Ms Brzezinski believes that peep show operators conspired with the Islamist terrorists to bring down the World Trade Towers their proximity to Ground Zero has nothing to do with whether an Islamic mosque should be placed there, too.

This video would have been an occasion for mirth were not the subject so serious and were it not the case that these people occupy positions of influence.

Thanks to the Daily Caller for the video.

RLC

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

Stark comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

Who is thinking logically here?

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

The proposal involves two stages:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

Among many of the devotees of the Prophet there's no religious tolerance, no separation of church and state, gays are executed, and women are treated as property (and brutally dispatched should they displease their families), but it's hard to find much condemnation of any of this among American progressives.

As Lester's cartoon suggests, liberals are courageous defenders of the rights of women and gays as long as there's no risk involved in being so. They bring to mind the vociferous opposition by women's groups to the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in the early nineties. Their dudgeon was ostensibly the result of some putatively inappropriate behavior that occured in the vicinity of the chaste Anita Hill. These same very principled advocates for exploited women, however, suddenly went on vacation when Bill Clinton and other prominent Democrats were accused of far worse than anything alleged against Thomas.

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Of all the hosts on cable television the worst, in my opinion, is Chris Matthews. Some hosts are pompous and obnoxious (Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly). Some of them are rude (same list). Some of them, despite being intelligent (Keith Olbermann, Bill O'Reilly), seem on occasion, to be astonishingly dim. Chris Matthews fits all three categories - pomposity, rudeness, dimness - and exceeds all his colleagues by comfortable margins in the last two.

I was watching his show, called Hardball, last night (I can only tolerate it for brief periods) as Matthews was grilling a woman about the decision by federal judge Vaughn Walker to strike down California's Proposition 8, a ballot referendum banning gay marriage, which had been approved by a large majority of Californians.

Matthews' interview technique, on this occasion as on so many others, was to ask a question and then, as soon as the guest began her answer, smother the reply with another question, and then another, so that the audience never got to hear a coherent response. The show is exceedingly unenlightening, perhaps deliberately so, and I really can't understand why any intelligent person would watch it regularly. Matthews seems to be psychologically incapable of calm, reasoned discussion with someone with whom he disagrees, and he makes himself look the fool as a result.

The question that Matthews preened himself for badgering the woman with last night was what harm she thought same-sex marriage does and why anyone should feel threatened by it. The answer, of course, is simple, but even if the guest had proffered it, which I don't think she did (it was hard to tell), Matthews really wasn't interested in hearing an answer. He simply wanted to bully the woman and try to make her look foolish and inept to his audience which he must think possesses an average IQ somewhere around room temperature.

Anyone who values marriage and thinks it critical for the health of a society may with justification see same-sex marriage as a threat because it's a giant step toward the collapse of that institution. Here's why: When the sex of the people in a marriage, which had for two thousand years been defined as the union of one man and one woman, is no longer legally enforceable then there's no longer any logical justification for continuing to enforce the number of people in the union. If marriage is a union of people of any sex why not of any number? Indeed, the logic can, and almost certainly will, be taken a step further and the courts will eventually find they have no non-arbitrary justification for thinking that a marriage has to involve people at all. Why not, in an age of animal rights, extend marital rights to animals? Why not permit "blended" marriages between humans and their beloved pets?

Liberals, of course, scoff at the notion that allowing gays to marry would open the door for polyamory or the legalization of marrying one's chimpanzee (or horse, as in Caligula's case), but this simply shows either their disingenuousness or their naivete. People will do whatever they can do. They'll push every envelope they can push, if for no other reason than to achieve notoriety, and the courts will have forfeited the only bulwark that could've prevented the complete disintegration of marriage, i.e. the millenia-old definition of marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

Once that's gone, everything becomes arbitrary. There's no place on the slippery slope to grab a handhold, and the matter of the legal status of marriage will be settled by the whim of whoever is sitting on the federal bench. At that point marriage will collapse into meaninglessness. It'll become whatever people want it to be, and the left will have achieved a goal they've striven for ever since Marx - the abolition of the traditional family and the atomization of society.

It seems a fairly obvious argument, one for which I've never heard a satisfactory rebuttal, or any rebuttal for that matter, other than the rather tepid reply that slippery slope arguments don't amount to a proof. The premise is that no one actually knows whether same sex marriage will open wide the door for the sorts of perversities mentioned above. That's technically true, of course, but the fact is that there'll be nothing in either logic or social momentum to prevent such a denouement. It will all come down to some judge's personal taste and preference, a reality which should give us all pause.

Judge Walker stated in his opinion that there's "no rational basis" for restricting marriage to heterosexuals. I think this is quite mistaken, as I've just argued, but it illustrates what we can now expect in the future. The next judge could easily rule that, similarly, there's "no rational basis" for restricting marriage to just two people, or people unrelated to each other, or people of a particular age, or people at all.

It'd be nice if talk show hosts like Matthews were sincerely interested in considering the actual arguments and the logical precedents being laid down by Judge Walker's ruling. It'd be nice if Matthews hosted a show that clarified these issues for his audience rather than merely using his position as a platform to verbally pummel his guests, obfuscate the issues, and keep everyone in the dark as to the trajectory we're putting ourselves on.

RLC

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

I am by nature a cautious man. I tend to see the glass as half empty. I have a strong disinclination to assume that what is true today will be true tomorrow. I'm keenly aware that in the affairs of men there's much that can go wrong and often does. So it is with considerable reservation that I call your attention to a piece by political analyst Mark McKinnon at The Daily Beast that proffers ten reasons why, in his view, the Democrats are "toast" in November. Perhaps it is so, but I'm not going to start pouring the champagne just yet.

With that caveat in mind here are the first three reasons McKinnon gives for thinking that the GOP is going to kick the donkey's butt three months from now:

Read McKinnon's article for the other seven. The ones that surprised me most have to do with the loss of support for President Obama among both minorities and young people. To be sure the erosion among blacks is only about ten percent, but it's indicative of the President's inability to achieve a level of competence as president equal to the quality of his rhetoric as a candidate.

RLC

The Investor's Business Daily is a sober journal not given to political theatrics and overheated rhetoric. Thus it was alarming to find a column in a recent issue that paints the policies of the current administration as unprecedentedly baneful for the nation.

The authors, two former Treasury officials, one an economist and the other a former deputy secretary, make the case that the Obama presidency, with the aid of a Democrat-controlled congress, is dragging the country toward almost certain ruin. They write:

Believe it or not this litany of grievances is only the half of it. Read the IBD column for the rest and perhaps pass it on to those of your friends who swooned as Mr. Obama enchanted the nation, or at least a majority of its voters, with his eloquent promises to "fundamentally transform" America. He certainly is doing that - sort of like killing the goose that layed the golden eggs transformed the society that was home to the goose.

RLC

There's an interesting column at Strategy Page on methods being employed by security personnel in industry and government to prevent serious hackers from accessing their servers. One tactic is to set up pseudo-servers called "honey pots" that attract the attention of the hackers but which, in fact, are recording data on who the hackers are:

Perhaps the next step is to configure the honey pot so that it sends a return message to the hacker's computer informing him that he's now toast and can expect to spend the next twenty years providing tech support for the staff at the federal penitentiary.

RLC

Timothy Larsen relates a couple of anecdotes about the hostility of academics to the Christian worldview and calls for a more systematic study of the phenomenon.

Colleges and universities are hypersensitive to the slightest indication of discrimination against racial minorities and women, they're sharply attuned to the faintest sign that Muslims are being offended, but do they ever try to discover if their Christian students or scholars experience discrimination?

Larsen issues the call for just such an effort:

This sounds like fun. I hope the idea catches on.

One of the anecdotes Larsen recounts is this:

It's unfortunate that the halls of academe are populated by narrow-minded ignoramuses like this pompous English prof who use their power to intimidate young students and to impose upon them an ideological and religious conformity. Even so, the silver lining is that even students who might be inclined to agree with such professor's beliefs are often repelled by their coercion and bullying when they see it applied to their fellow students.

At any rate, Larsen's piece is interesting and reinforces the opinion of many others who've reported similar reactions to student or faculty Christians at their own schools. The comments to this article are worth reading as well. Check it out.

RLC

Terry Jeffrey's new book - Control Freaks - makes the case that freedom and prosperity are in serious jeopardy at this point in our country's history, threatened by a ruling class that devoutly desires to control every aspect of our economic and civil life.

Jeffrey was interviewed by Kathryn Lopez at National Review Online and outlined his case that the current administration and its congressional allies are seeking to curtail our individual freedom and rights in at least seven different essential areas of our lives. Jeffrey tells Lopez:

It's Jeffrey's thesis, and the conviction of conservatives in general, that individual freedom and centralized government exist in a state of tension. As one expands the other must shrink. There has never been a time in history when a burgeoning government actually enhanced individual freedom. The desire for government to "take care of us," called statism or socialism, is the desire to lay our freedom, and thus our individuality and humanity, at the feet of bureaucrats in exchange for the illusion of security. The more the state does for us the less free we will be to say, go, or do as we please. The bigger the state grows the more it stifles creativity, genius, and prosperity. Big states make for small citizens and, to quote John Stuart Mill, a state that dwarfs its citizens finds that with small men no great thing can be accomplished.

The rights we take for granted, the freedoms that have made this country great - the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, the right to life and to personal property are all under assault by a generation of arrogant politicians who believe that they know what's best for us and who believe that rights and freedoms just get in the way of creating a better life for all. So far from being revered by these people the Constitution is seen as an irritating impediment.

Listen, for example, to this woman's second question and to the answer she gets from congressman Pete Stark (D, CA). For Stark and his fellow progressives, there are no constitutional limits on the ability of the federal government to do whatever it wants to do:

Modern political liberals like those who populate the White House and Congress, believe that a just society is one in which people who've worked all their lives to accumulate property can have their wealth seized by the state, with or without their consent, and awarded to those who've done nothing to earn it. That seems to many to be not only an inversion of justice but also an extraordinarily counterproductive way to increase the wealth from which everyone benefits.

Anyway, while we're about the business of talking about books that describe the threat that statism poses to our polity, another example that I must mention is Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny. It's quite simply the best contemporary book on the difference between conservatism and progressivism (i.e. liberalism, statism) that I've read.

RLC

Allen West is just the sort of man we need in Congress. He's a Republican running for the House of Representatives in south Florida against a Democrat incumbent who has stood with Nancy Pelosi on 98% of the votes cast. At the very least West would elevate the level of honor and integrity in the House of Representatives by a couple of orders of magnitude:

If you agree that West would be a fine addition to Congress you can contribute to his campaign here.

Exit question: What's wrong with a military that fines an officer for taking steps to save lives when the steps taken brought no harm to anyone? Details here.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

RLC

David Goldman at First Things Blog informs us that author Anne Rice has renounced, sort of, her Christianity. On Wednesday she posted this on her Facebook Page:

Well. This is certainly a perplexing renunciation. If these are the reasons she can no longer call herself a Christian one has to wonder how deep her commitment was in the first place.

Few Christians, for example, are anti-gay. One is not anti-gay just because one opposes legalizing gay marriage any more than one is anti-youth because one opposes giving 18 year-olds the right to vote.

Nor are most Christians anti-feminist, at least not if we define feminism as the belief that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men, allowing for the physical differences between them. If, though, Ms Rice defines feminism as many modern feminists wish to define it, i.e., as the view that a woman should have the unfettered legal right to destroy her unborn child, well, then, yes, many Christians take exception to that.

In any case, Ms. Rice seems unmindful of the fact that no social force in history has done more to liberate women from oppression than has Christianity. To recant it now because some Christian groups do not ordain women nor support abortion seems to reflect a very pinched view of Christianity's historical influence on civilization.

Moreover, I know of no Christian outside the Catholic Church who is "anti-artificial birth control" - unless Rice is lumping abortion in as a form of birth control - so I don't know why this should be a stumbling block for her either.

She declares that she also refuses to be "anti-Democrat," which is good. A lot of Democrats are Christians (I even know some), so again it's not clear why she should make this a point of contention.

So, too, are a lot of scientists Christians which makes her refusal to be "anti-science" puzzling. Presumably, she doesn't wish to be associated with folks who question the dogma of many atheistic scientists that naturalism gives us a true picture of reality. Naturalism, though, is metaphysics, not science. What Rice seems to be complaining about here is that Christians reject a philosophical worldview that claims that God doesn't exist, and she oddly finds that intolerable.

The same point applies to her refusal to be "anti-secular humanism." Secular humanism is a belief system that maintains that the core miracles of the Christian faith, including the miracle of the Resurrection of Christ upon which the entire belief system of Christianity is based, are frauds and myths.

Thus, Ms Rice appears to be saying that, given her sympathy for views which are inimical to Christianity, and given her shallow understanding of what Christians believe about homosexuality, women, and so on, she can no longer count herself a Christian.

As I said above, one wonders why she ever thought of herself as one in the first place.

RLC

The Edge Foundation held a symposium recently in which a collection of naturalistic scientists and philosophers discussed the topic of morality. From the summary of the proceedings at The Edge's web site, it doesn't seem that very much of importance was achieved.

Most of the participants seemed to agree that we're hard-wired to be moral, but, of course, this is not a new discovery. It's been known ever since at least the first century when the apostle Paul observed that we have a moral law written on our hearts (Romans 2:15).

The crucial question about morality that atheists need to stop sweeping under the rug is how human beings can be obligated by moral sentiments that are nothing more than the product of naturalistic evolution. How, we need to know, can blind, mindless forces like natural selection and genetic mutation impose duties upon us to behave one way rather than another? This question never seems to have come up at the Edge symposium. It's like the 500 pound gorilla in the room whose presence no one seems inclined to acknowledge.

New York Times columnist David Brooks was in attendance at the meeting and notes that Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argued that our moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, Haidt believes, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty.

It's of course true, on the assumption of naturalism, that morality is merely a matter of personal taste. One person feels we should care for the world's poor while another feels we should ignore them and let them die out. One person says we should be faithful to our spouses while another says we should do whatever we can get away with. Who's right? The answer is neither is right. Neither one can say that anyone should adopt a particular attitude toward the poor or toward marital fidelity any more than he can say that we should like sweet rather than sour flavors. Whichever behavior we prefer is right for us but not necessarily right for anyone else. Thus, on Haidt's assumptions, there can be no genuine moral norms, only subjective preferences.

According to another symposiast, Roy F. Baumeister, human nature was shaped by an evolutionary process that selected in favor of traits conducive to new, advanced kinds of social life. Morality, in his view, is ultimately a system of rules that enables groups of people to live together in reasonable harmony.

But if morality is just a system of rules that regulate the behavior of one's group, how do we decide which group is relevant to our behavior? Is our morally relevant group our nation? Our ethnic group? Our tribe? No matter how we decide the question our answer is going to be arbitrary. Each person could answer the question differently.

Furthermore, if morality is about how members of a group live together among themselves then how that group treats other groups has no moral significance. For example, on what grounds could we say that the genocidal attacks of the Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda in the mid-nineties was immoral? If morality is merely a means of regulating intra-group behavior, then murdering members of other groups is not immoral. For that matter, inter-group murder and war would be right if it promoted the overall benefit of the aggressor group?

It was the opinion of Yale psychologist Paul Bloom that a deep sense of good and evil is "bred in the bone." His research shows that babies and toddlers can judge the goodness and badness of others' actions; they want to reward the good and punish the bad; they act to help those in distress; they feel guilt, shame, pride, and righteous anger.

All of what Bloom says could be true, but it's beside the point. The relevant question is whether a hard-wired moral sense can impose any behavioral obligations upon us if it's merely the product of random chance and the laws of chemistry. Evolution bestows upon us a head full of hair, but it cannot obligate us to refrain from shaving it off. Likewise, it may bestow upon us certain behavioral preferences, but it cannot obligate us to honor those preferences.

Moreover, the preferences evolution bestows are notoriously conflicted. Most people think that altruism is good and selfishness is bad, but surely selfishness is our natural condition. We have evolved to be fundamentally selfish, self-centered creatures. How then can that be bad? Likewise with aggressiveness and promiscuity. The natural tendency evolution has instilled in human beings, at least in males, is to be both aggressive and promiscuous. Why then are these things not considered good? To what criterion do we revert to evaluate our inborn behavioral dispositions if the way we are is the way we should be?

Harvard cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher Joshua D. Greene sees our biggest social problems - war, terrorism, the destruction of the environment, etc. - arising from our unwitting tendency to apply paleolithic moral thinking to the complex problems of modern life. Our brains trick us into thinking that we have Moral Truth on our side when in fact we don't, and blind us to important truths that our brains were not designed to appreciate.

But if our moral sense evolved to suit us for life in the stone age and is now obsolete what has taken its place? Greene gives no answer. If, on the other hand, someone suggests that we should submit to the genetic imperatives evolved to suit us for life in the paleolithic the question again is why we should.

Finally, neuroscientist and "new atheist" Sam Harris laments that the failure of science to address questions of meaning, morality, and values provides an opening for the insinuation of religious faith into our corporate life. The silence of scientists on these "big questions," Harris contends, encourages people to turn to religion for answers.

The problem for scientists, though, is that there's simply nothing that science can say about these questions. Science may be able to give us a description of how people behave and maybe can tell us why they behave that way, but it cannot say anything at all about how people ought to behave. It can't say, for example, that we ought to be kind rather than cruel, or that we ought not torture others. By it's very nature science cannot be prescriptive or normative. For prescription we need something more than science. We need a transcendent authority.

Thus the problem for any morality based on naturalistic assumptions about the world is that there can only be moral obligation if there is, in fact, a moral law, and a moral law is only possible if imposed upon us by a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly just moral lawgiver who obligates us on pain of punishment to keep it.

As long as The Edge symposiasts ignore this uncomfortable and ineradicable fact they're not talking about the questions that really matter. As long as society refuses to acknowledge the need for a transcendent moral authority in the lives of its people it will be pulled ineluctably, as if by a kind of gravity, toward the abyss of moral nihilism.

RLC