Readers who are fans of the Beatles may be interested in this video of a 1995 appearance of John Lennon singing his famous "Imagine." Only the small-minded will quibble that Lennon had in fact died fifteen years earlier.

Actually, the message of his song is much more sophisticated in this later rendition than in the 1970's version.

Click on the video to play the song and scroll down to read the lyrics.

Thanks to Byron for the tip.

RLC

A white blood cell chases down an invading bacterium in this fascinating video clip. We might pause to marvel at all the systems and structures which need to be present in this microscopic cell in order for it to carry out its function as a seek and destroy mechanism to guard the body against infection.

It has to have an apparatus that enables it to detect the presence of an invading microbe, it has to be able to distinguish the invader from other cells in the blood stream, and it has to have an apparatus that enables it to home in on its prey and to pursue and ingest it. All of these systems are doubtless very complex, requiring many specialized proteins, all of which require assembly mechanisms and instructions. That assembly, in turn, requires other structures to coordinate the timing and location of the necessary proteins, and all of these things arose blindly and purely by accident, according to the Darwinian narrative.

Well, maybe, but we can hardly help being skeptical. Our credulity can grant to chance and purposeless processes only so much capability before it collapses under the enormous weight the Darwinian view places upon its shoulders. After a while it just seems like we're being asked to believe in a fairy tale.

RLC

Gene Expression poses ten questions to Heather Mac Donald, a conservative writer who has become something of a curiosity since she came out and declared herself an atheist in The American Conservative last summer.

MacDonald is always interesting, even when I think her to be mistaken, and the Gene Expression piece does not disappoint. Give it a look.

We examined the support Ms MacDonald gives for her atheism in the American Conservative essay here and here.

RLC

Nick Bromell, a childhood friend of Scooter Libby, tells us more about himself than he probably intended and also something about his idea of what it means to be a modern liberal. Little of what he says is flattering to either himself or liberalism. Here are some excerpts from a much longer essay:

You'd think that as friends Bromell would at least extend Libby the benefit of the doubt on these issues rather than portraying them so unfairly. No one, for example, denies global warming. What is questioned is the cause, the importance, and the permanence of the rise in the earth's temperature. No one, not even the censorious Mr. Bromell, knows the answers to these questions.

Nor is it homophobia to oppose gay marriage. To compare opposition to gay marriage to racism and anti-semitism is either ignorant, foolish, or dishonest.

Why wouldn't any decent human being hope that his friend would be innocent of the chages and thus acquitted? Why isn't hoping for his friend's acquittal a no-brainer for Mr. Bromell? Is it that punishing people one disagrees with politically is a higher priority for this self-described liberal than the obligations of friendship?

By his own definitions I'd say Mr. Bromell shows himself to be more of a fundamentalist than a liberal. He's not making much of an effort in this article to see Scooter Libby's point of view. His description of a fundamentalist, in fact, sounds very much like a description of his own tone in the first two paragraphs above.

For Mr. Bromell it is nefarious for nations to strive for greatness. It's chauvinistic to think that one's principles are superior to those of others. Mr. Bromell would apparently prefer that all nations remain equal in their shared mediocrity. Rather than getting out in front and pulling others along in our slipstream, if people like Mr. Bromell had their way all nations would be stalled at the same level of achievement as the most laggard third world economic basket case.

In other words, rather than loving his friend unconditionally, he agonizes over whether his liberal principles might require him to hope his friend's life is ruined. This makes liberalism sound more like a fringe fundamentalist religion than a set of political principles.

This is remarkably naive. What terrorists hate about America is the fact that we are not Muslim and that we protect Israel. They hate us, too, because our success, in spite of our being infidels, is an indictment of their own ineptitude and of the religion that has stultified their progress for a thousand years.

Presumably one of those liberal principles is to treat Islamo-terrorists as criminals rather than as a military foe whose aim is to utterly destroy us and our way of life. How long would our liberal principles last if we refused to fight against this threat?

I'm not sure what he's getting at in the preceding paragraph except to admit that liberal principles rest on little more than a subjective preference. If that's what he's saying it's quite an admission. It is an acknowledgement that at bottom liberalism is a non-rational choice that people make simply because it makes them feel good.

Well, then. Why all the anguish over what he ultimately wants. And how would convicting a minor figure really be punishing the Bush administration anyway? Mr. Bromell sounds like a very mean-spirited and vindictive man who comes close to being willing to sacrifice his friend if it will, even in small measure, somehow hurt Bush.

I wonder if his sense of justice wants Bill Clinton's administration held accountable for its blunders and lies? Does he, for example, insist that Sandy Berger be prosecuted for stealing documents from the National Archives and destroying them? Or is that crime justified because it served the interest of Democrats?

Mr. Bromell makes here another confession. Liberalism, at least as he understands it, is inconsistent with the way the world is. The inconsistency, however, is mostly within himself. He wants to see anyone associated with the Bush administration destroyed, but he can't reconcile that with his obligation to love his friend. The problem is more with Mr. Bromell's character, perhaps, than with his ideology.

How is it inconsistent, whether one is a liberal or a conservative, to desire to see justice done while hoping that one's friend is innocent? Mr. Bromell is so blinded by his hatred for Bush that any twinge of human sentiment and common sense that interferes with his desire for punishment seems to him to raise the specter of a contradiction.

Most of the liberals I know are good, kind people who are not at all the obsessed, vindictive Captain Ahabs Mr. Bromell paints himself as being. They would have no trouble loving their friend and praying for his acquittal, even if they disagreed in every neuron in their bodies with the Bush administration's policies. But the liberalism Mr. Bromell displays really is something very ugly.

RLC

Bill Roggio has more than has been reported in the MSM on the recent battle between Iraqi forces and a large insurgent force near Najaf that cost the insurgents at least 250-300 killed and hundreds wounded and captured.

RLC

We linked to this video a couple of months ago, but it's worth doing again for our newer readers. The next time you hear someone insist that life is solely the product of chance and physical law, that it arose through purely mechanical processes acting blindly through trial and error, think of this computer representation of just a couple of the processes that occur constantly in every cell of every human being. Then ask yourself whether the engineering and complexity of these systems is something that could plausibly result from sheer accident, as the Darwinian true believers would have it.

You can read about the technical aspects of producing the video here.

RLC

A Pew Survey of "Generation Nexters" (18-25 yr. olds) reveals that 81% of them believe that getting rich is either the highest or second highest priority of their generation. Fifty one percent rated getting famous as the highest or second highest goal.

The good news in this otherwise depressing result is that if the Nexters are successful in achieving their goals us aging boomers won't have to worry about social security running out. With Democrats in power taxes on the rich are bound to go up, especially those taxes designed to underwrite entitlements like SS and Medicare.

Some reports of distressing shallowness among the young can indeed be cause for rejoicing.

RLC

We've been offering our thoughts on an article by anti-theist Sam Harris at Edge in which he seeks to persuade us that most of what people believe about atheists and atheism isn't true. He discusses in the piece ten "myths" about atheism that he wants to debunk. In this post we'll respond to what he says about myth number 8:

When people state that atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding they are not talking about belief in extraterrestrials. This is a rather droll way to construe the claim. They mean, of course, that atheists believe that there is no existence beyond this one and that there is no reality beyond the material world in which we live. This is the only way to interpret the "myth" that makes any sense, and there is surely no atheist who would deny these assertions.

But the irrelevance of what Harris says aside, how does he know that brilliant extraterrestrials would find the contents of the Bible unimpressive? How could Harris know such a thing unless he knows the Bible is completely false in its claims about God, and how could he, or anyone, know that? It takes surpassing arrogance to claim to know that there is no God and, having insisted earlier in his essay that atheists aren't arrogant, he probably should think better of implying that he's in possession of such knowledge.

Finally, we're left to wonder how, or in what way, Christianity trivializes the beauty and immensity of the universe. Harris enjoys making remarkable claims like this which are apropos of nothing in particular and which he leaves hang in mid-air, unsupported by any evidence or argument. He gives the back of his hand to believers for accepting religious claims on insufficient evidence, but he apparently expects his readers to accept his own claims without the benefit of any evidence whatsoever.

RLC

Suppose that reality actually consists of more dimensions than just the three (four, counting time) that our minds are structured to experience. If so, then the world is, in fact, totally different than it appears to us since we are only perceiving a fraction of a multi-dimensional reality.

In the novel Flatland, written in 1884, Edwin Abbott explored what a two dimensional world would look like to its inhabitants and what three dimensional objects would look like if they invaded a two dimensional world.

The novel helps stretch our imaginations and became a classic. Now it's being made into a movie, the trailer for which can be viewed here.

Woody Allen depicted something similar in Purple Rose of Cairo, in which a character (Jeff Daniels) in the two dimensional world of a film on the movie screen suddenly steps out of the screen and into the three dimensional world of a woman (Mia Farrow) viewing the movie all alone in the theater.

Maybe our existence is like that of the characters on the screen. We think that what we perceive is all there is, while all around us there is a wider world of additional dimensions in which people live, and move, and have their being, and we're totally unaware of it because our minds are unable to apprehend those dimensions.

Perhaps at death we, like Jeff Daniels in the Purple Rose of Cairo, step off the three dimensional screen of this world and into a multidimensional reality that we could no more imagine before we experienced it than a child in the womb could imagine the world that it would be entering when it's born.

Perhaps we are surrounded by, and embedded in, a reality which is so much richer than that which we can experience, but we are totally oblivious to it until we take on a "body" with the senses to perceive it.

As Hamlet says to his companion: "There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Perhaps so.

RLC

Bill Roggio surmises that the attack on American soldiers at Karbala in Iraq was carried out by Iranian commandos. If he's right then the new directive giving American troops the green light to kill or capture any Iranians found in Iraq makes even more sense:

Read the rest of the details that have been made public about this attack at the link.

RLC

Michael Shermer, in reviewing Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion in the journal Science Magazine, closes his review with these surprising words:

What a very odd thing to say of a book which is devoted completely to debunking theism. In what sense is this a book of science? And why is a journal devoted to science publishing a review of what is essentially a book on religion?

Mike Gene at wonders:

Gene sees in Shermer's essay the germ of a trend to expand the definition of science to include anti-religious efforts. The irony of this, of course, is that some of the same people who blanched at allowing Intelligent Design to be taught in public schools because "it's religion, not science" are now calling books on atheism "important works of science."

As Gene says:

I'm sure that the next time the ACLU goes to court to smack down some school's effort to teach students that not every scholar is convinced that mechanical processes are sufficient to explain the complexity of life, Shermer's essay will be presented as evidence by the defense. When the ACLU witnesses testify that ID is not science they'll have a hard time explaining why a book which seeks to promote atheism is considered science by reputable science magazines.

See here for yet another example of a journal ostensibly devoted to genes and chromosomes publishing an article in which the author indulges in amateurish theologizing. Apparently religious articles are suitable for publication in scientific magazines and journals when they argue against the existence of a cosmic designer. If they argue for the existence of a designer then they are completely out of bounds. The Important Work of Science seems now to consist of trying to prove that there is no God.

RLC

Christopher Hitchens at City Journal reviews and builds upon the fine work of Mark Steyn in his book America Alone and concludes his column by offering an eight point plan of his own for dealing with Islamo-fascism. His eight points are these:

Good ideas all. Let's hope that people in the White House and State Department have also thought of them or are at least reading Hitchens and Steyn.

RLC

Anti-theist Sam Harris, whose Ten Myths About Atheism we have been weighing in the balance here at Viewpoint, and Andrew Sullivan, have been having a debate about religion at BeliefNet. I wish Harris were debating someone a little less hostile to traditional forms of Christianity than Sullivan, but their exchange is interesting nonetheless.

RLC

Parents and their student children know that college isn't getting any cheaper, but at many private schools the tuition alone is more than many parents' annual income. Here are some highlights from an article at Forbes.com which discusses the reasons for the high costs:

See here for a listing of the ten most expensive schools.

RLC

Cox and Forkum wonder what the Democrats' strategy for winning in Iraq might be:

This isn't quite fair. They actually do have a strategy which is to bash Bush's strategy every chance they get.

RLC

Steven Pinker has written an interesting, if rather lengthy, essay on the nature of consciousness and the problems researchers in the field are seeking to solve. Pinker is a substance monist, a materialist, who believes that consciousness is explicable purely in terms of brain function. I think he's probably wrong about that but his article is worth reading for the insight it gives into the controversy. Here are a few early paragraphs:

Toward the end he lays his materialist cards on the table:

Having written six pages he apparently gets a little giddy, and allows himself to make the ludicrous suggestion that recognizing that other people have brains like ours makes for a better basis for morality than does belief in eternal life.

We'll have more to say about the last page of Pinker's article tomorrow.

RLC

One of the books listed by George Weigel as among the five best books for understanding Christianity was The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers, O.P. (Catholic University of America, 1995). Weigel says this about Pinckaers' book:

Weigel is, of course, correct about the perception of Christian ethics as dour and negative, but I think this is a stereotype due largely to the fact that too many people have not really thought about Christian ethics beyond a simple perusal of the Ten Commandments.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 22 that the whole ethical teaching of Scripture is summed up in two positive imperatives: We are to love God (Commandments 1-4) and love our fellow man (Commandments 5-10). What can be more affirmative, liberating, and upbeat than that?

Some people object that the Biblical emphasis on sin is negative and oppressive, but this opinion is, I think, based on a faulty view of what sin is. Because we are enjoined by Christ to love, to fail to do so is a moral fault. Any act which is harmful to oneself or another is wrong, or "sin," because it violates the command to love. The Biblical text simply elaborates on all the ways that people do harm and enjoins us to avoid those. It also gives us the "Golden Rule" as a guideline for knowing whether a particular act is just or compassionate.

Thus, so far from being dour and negative, the moral teaching of the Bible is extremely positive. The command to love others expresses itself in at least two ways: The Old Testament emphasizes the need to love by doing justice to others, and the New Testament emphasizes the need to love by showing compassion to others.

Of course, it's not always easy to know the right thing to do in a given situation, and even when we know what's right, it's often not easy to do it. Christian ethics, as laid out in the Bible, is not a strait jacket or a code of law. It's a simple guideline, and it's our responsibility to try to apply that guideline in our existential circumstance as honestly as we can.

It's also often difficult to discern how we can best balance the need for justice with the imperative to be compassionate. Sometimes it seems as if the two conflict and one of the moral responsibilities of the Christians community is to work out how best to resolve that conflict in a particular case. Even so, despite the difficulties, together these two imperatives form an ethical system unsurpassed for its simplicity and beauty.

RLC

Could this be the portrait of our next president?

RLC

College freshman are becoming slightly more ideological according to this study which finds that conservatism, while still not the majority stance among college undergrads, is embraced by more freshmen today than at any time in the history of the survey:

For the students' answers to specific questions see the study at the link.

RLC

Benny Morris tells us what he believes the intermediate future will be for Jews in Israel:

Read the rest of Morris' piece at the link.

And of course it's not just Israel which is at grave risk. Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now threatening to destroy the U.S. and he's working on the nuclear weapons that will give him the capability to do it. If the belief that Saddam had WMD was sufficient reason for the Democrats to vote to topple the leadership in Iraq, how much more convinced must they be that Iran must be dealt with similarly?

RLC

Gideon Strauss has a lovely little meditation on love at Comment. For those who enjoy reading love stories will also enjoy reading Anne Dayton's essay on stories she loves.

RLC

Saturday Night Live spoofs Hillary Clinton and Hardball's Chris Matthews. It's a funny and revealing bit since it captures so well the idiosyncracies and personalities of both of them. It's a bit surprising, though, that SNL would poke fun at Hillary, who is something of a liberal icon, but maybe the parody is indicative of the displeasure of the left-wing base with Hillary's persistant refusal to disavow her vote for the Iraq war.

At any rate, be advised that the SNL skit does not elide or ignore Hillary's (alleged) legendary temper or uninhibited use of vulgarity.

RLC

Sam Harris' seventh of what he considers to be myths about atheism is the belief that:

Harris explains, sort of, that:

Of all of Harris' alleged myths this is perhaps the strangest.

First, he apparently confuses emotional experience with spiritual experience. Spiritual experience is based upon an encounter with the transcendent, not upon our biochemistry. Atheists deny any transcendent reality beyond nature and therefore ab defino deny the possibility of spiritual experience.

Second, I don't know anyone who has given the matter any thought who believes that a transformed life proves that Jesus is the "sole savior of humanity." There are many who believe that their experience confirms Jesus' reality and his love for them as individuals. There are many for whom their encounter with Christ has been convincing evidence that they are saved from spiritual death, but His status as the unique savior of humanity is information most Christians glean only from Biblical revelation, not from spiritual experience.

Third, of course no one can be logically certain that Jesus rose from the dead. Indeed, no one can be certain of much of anything other than the Cartesian certainty of their own existence. Spiritual experience, however, may give the individual a kind of psychological assurance that Jesus still, in some sense, lives and that assurance exists in a state of mutual reinforcement with the historical testimony concerning the events surrounding Jesus' death and subsequent resurrection.

But, more to the point, what does any of what Harris writes have to do with refuting the claim that atheists are closed to spiritual experience? Harris seems to simply deny the myth and then spend his time criticizing unrelated Christian beliefs.

For our previous posts on Harris' "myths" see part I, II, III, IV, and V and VI.

RLC

This'll make you laugh. PowerLine has the winner of Bill Bennett's "Sandy Berger Lies" song parody contest. Go here, scroll to the bottom and click on the audio. It's pretty funny.

RLC

H. Allen Orr has a lengthy and very thorough review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion in the New York Review of Books. Like every reviewer of this book that I've read, Orr pretty much trashes Dawkins' effort:

Orr explains his particular objections in the review. Check it out if Dawkins' ideas are of interest to you.

RLC

Philosopher Philip Quinn of Notre Dame argues that it's morally permissable to lie to defeat the creationists as long as one feels a twinge of conscience while doing it. I know, you're skeptical that a philosopher would actually promote such a morally dubious strategy. Well, read what he says for yourself at Telic Thoughts and tell me if there is any other plausible interpretation of his words.

The link to Stephen Jones that you'll find at Telic Thoughts is also revealing. Jones argues that several prominent scientists deliberately misled the court in the Dover Intelligent Design trial when they testified that ID is not science. It is common knowledge among scientists and philosophers that what constitutes science, i.e. the demarcation question, is an unresolved, and probably unresolvable, problem. Thus, to testify that ID is not science, or not even good science, was to do precisely what Quinn condones.

It seems that the Darwinian strategy for combating ID is to do whatever it takes to win. If their arguments aren't persuasive enough to carry the day then just make stuff up.

RLC

There is no more fertile a mind in politics than Newt Gingrich's and no politician with a more scintillating record for achieving success in governing in difficult circumstances than Rudy Guiliani. The two team up to present what they think to be the recipe for standing Iraq on its economic feet.

RLC

We continue our critique of Sam Harris' Ten Myths About Atheism with a look today at numbers 5 and 6. Harris claims that the following assertion is a myth:

Harris words this myth rather tendentiously. Of course, there is a connection between atheism and science because science employs a methodology which assumes naturalism. It is thus easy for someone already disinclined to believe in a personal God to have that disinclination continually reinforced in his/her work. The point is that there is no logical nexus between atheism and science. One can be a scientist without having to forfeit one's theistic beliefs. We could just ask Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Faraday, Boyle or dozens of other great thinkers from the classical era of science.

Harris also disputes the following:

Well, I don't think this is quite true. From which fact of science, after all, do atheists draw their opinion that there is no God, that the cosmos is not designed by an intelligent creator, or that we are not made in the image of God? When Harris claims that scientists don't pretend to know things that can't be known he creates a problem for himself inasmuch as a lot of scientists and people like himself who write on science pretend to know that there is no purpose to the universe's existence, that those first self-replicating molecules he mentions arose through purely naturalistic processes, and that there is no God, but none of these are things that can be known.

If Harris really wants to demonstrate his intellectual honesty and lack of arrogance, he could start by admitting that he really has no idea whether the universe has a purpose or not, or whether an intelligence was behind the emergence of the first bio-molecules, or whether God exists or not. He could admit that his atheism is not based upon any clincher of an argument but is actually based upon little more than his preference that God not exist.

Such admissions would be a gratifying display of both honesty and humility, but I don't expect that we'll hear those words pass his lips anytime soon.

For our discussion of his first four "myths" go here and follow the links.

RLC

I came across this interesting and challenging observation in Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament by Christopher J.H. Wright.

WSC

This is a Hubble photo of spiral galaxy M100 which is similar in form to our Milky Way. Our sun, and hence our earth, are located in one of the relatively clear spaces between the spiral arms. This, according to Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards in Privileged Planet, is extremely fortunate since were it not the case the heavens would have been obscured from view by the dust and consequently modern science, which was contingent to a large extent on astronomical observation, would probably never have developed.

It's also possible that had our planet been located almost anywhere else in the galaxy higher life forms could not have arisen. If earth were embedded in one of the arms of the spiral the amount of debris, radiation, and gravitational effects to which it would have been subjected would have created an extremely harsh environment for living things.

Read Privileged Planet or Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee for more on the amazing fortuitousness of the location of the earth in space.

RLC

You've no doubt heard the news that for the first time ever the majority of women are living without husbands. Pundits reflecting on the grim statistic either grieved or rejoiced at what they saw as a sign of the demise of the traditional family. Michael Medved, however, did a little digging and found that there was much less to the story than met the eye:

There's much more to this story at the link. Medved argues that Roberts has an anti-marriage agenda, and that it was this that animated his original article.

RLC

The ever-skeptical folks at Uncommon Descent cite an article which, contrary to all the fretting by Darwinians over how intelligent design and creationism will stifle scientific understanding in this country, shows that scientific literacy has actually shot up since 1995. The graph at the link tells pretty much the whole story.

Dave Scot at UD requests readers' assistance in trying to think of what sorts of things happened in the years prior to 1995 that would have caused this acceleration of scientific sophistication. We think it must have been the arrival in Washington of the Clinton administration.

RLC

A recent Fox News Poll asked 900 people a series of questions about Iraq. The replies to question #19 were particularly disturbing. The question asked: Do you personally want the Iraq plan President Bush announced last week to succeed?

Only sixty three percent of respondents said yes, 22% said no, and 15% weren't sure. It's bad enough that one American in five actually wants the plan to fail, but among Democrats 34% said they do not want the plan to succeed and 15% were unsure. Among Republicans the numbers were 11% and 10%.

I confess I simply cannot understand how any American could possibly want the U.S. to fail to bring stability and peace to Iraq. People have tried to explain it to me, but their explanations seem tortured and unconvincing. I think the question whether we want to succeed in Iraq is the defining foreign policy question of our time, and anyone who answers no or unsure to that question, as do almost half of the Democrats in this country, inhabits a moral universe which is terra incognita to me. We simply have no common ground upon which we can carry on a fruitful conversation about this issue.

RLC

Telic Thoughts has a neat computer sim of the nuclear pore complex. These pores are the gateways through which materials pass into the nucleus of cells. They are much more than simple holes in the nuclear membrane as you'll see in the video.

Before you watch it, though, you must close your eyes real tight and repeat three times: "This is not designed. It happened by chance."

RLC

Scott Ott at ScrappleFace breaks this developing story in the U.S. Senate:

(2007-01-18) - Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-NB, today introduced a bill with several of his Democrat colleagues that would cap the number of Republican Senators at current levels and begin negotiations with Democrats for a phased GOP withdrawal from the Senate.

The measure comes as the Senate prepares to debate a Hagel-sponsored resolution opposing President George Bush's move to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq.

"Just as sending more U.S. troops isn't the solution to defeating terrorists in Iraq," said Sen. Hagel, "more Republican senators won't accomplish the party's legislative goals here. Each additional GOP senator simply antagonizes the majority party and makes the Senate a worse quagmire than it already is."

New York Democrat Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton co-sponsored the so-called "cap and yank" measure.

"We admire Chuck Hagel," said Sen. Clinton, "because when he reaches across the aisle, it never seems like a stretch."

You can bet you won't hear about this from the MSM.

RLC

Bill Roggio updates us on progress in the Global War on Terrorists. Here's a summary:

Read the details at The Fourth Rail.

Also, Captain Ed has some very interesting stuff on how things have changed of a sudden for the Mahdi army in Baghdad and for the Iranians in Iraq. Read the first post on al-Sadr's Mahdi army and then scroll down to the post on the task force that's been assigned to roll up Iranian operations in Iraq.

RLC

Jonah Goldberg contrasts the President's plan with the Democrats' non-plan for victory. The Democrats' strategy for Iraq is to wait until Bush announces his plan and then bash it, even when he does what they've said he should do. Here are Jonah's key passages:

For an example of exactly what Goldberg is talking about when he talks about the demand for a "political solution" in Iraq see Jim Wallis' piece at Sojourners.

Chuck Asay weighs in with his own comparison of Bush's plan and that of his political opponents:

RLC

Free Frank Warner has what is nothing short of a brilliant idea - double the minimum wage for illegal aliens:

Read how this would solve the problems to which he refers at the link. I think he's at least half-serious.

RLC

This is why people say that it requires constant vigilance to maintain our freedom. The totalitarian impulse is strong and apparently even afflicts meteorologists:

Read the rest of the article at the link. One would think that people who practice meteorology, of all disciplines, would have been chastened often enough by errant forecasts that they'd be a little less dogmatic and a little more humble than Heidi Cullen appears to be.

Next thing we'll be reading that those who doubt Darwinism should lose their Ph.D.s. (although I think that's already been suggested) and anyone who voted for Bush should have their citizenship suspended (which a lot of people probably already think but haven't yet made bold enough to say).

Anyway, will somebody please mail Ms Cullen a copy of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty? It's the best antidote for what ails her that I can think of.

RLC

Dean Barnett at Hugh Hewitt's blog gets it exactly right. President Bush's biggest failure as a president is that he is a terrible communicator. He has failed to make the case for almost anything he's done since September of 2001. When he does address the American people he tends to speak in platitudes and threadbare formulations that no longer gain anyone's attention.

This is such a shame because what he's doing is so important that the American people must be with him on it, and yet the American people have largely given up on him and his agenda. This is as much our fault, in my opinion, as it is his - just because he doesn't make the case for what he does doesn't mean that what he does isn't the right thing to do. Nevertheless, it's still his fault and his greatest shortcoming as a president.

Anyway, read Barnett's essay. He says it much better than I can.

RLC

Civilian Gun Defense blog carries all sorts of stories about how average citizens everyday use guns to save their lives and the lives of others. Here's a recent example (the permalinks aren't working but this story can be accessed by going to the above link and scrolling down):

Mr. Hancox's neighbors sound as feisty as he does.

Anyway, somewhere in this story there's a lesson or two for those, like Barak Obama, for instance, who would have made it illegal for Mr. Hancox to possess that weapon.

One lesson, perhaps, is that it's always better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

RLC

Damian Ference writes at First Things about the Church of Brunch. Ference tells us that The Church of Brunch is:

Here are some more excerpts:

Ference says that listening to a discussion of the Church of Brunch on NPR he thought of Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood in which the main character starts his own church called the Church of Christ Without Christ. Reading Ference's description of the Church I thought at first that he was describing a mainline protestant congregation.

RLC

NewsMax e-mailed (no link) this piece of analysis by former Clinton advisor Dick Morris predicting an impending civil war in the Democratic party. It looks to Morris like the party is set to do the 1960's all over again:

The result of the 1960's was that Democrats found themselves able to elect only two presidents (including Jimmy Carter who capitalized on the nation's ill-feeling about the Nixon years) in forty years. It will be interesting to see if the Democratic convention in Denver next year reprises the turbulence of Chicago in 1968.

RLC

Yes, there are moderate Muslims. At least one accepts the theoretical possibility. But documentaries like this one which aired on British television cause one to wonder about the robustness of their numbers.

These really are disturbing videos. The sound in the first one may be out of synch, but, if so, stick with it and you'll get the gist of what's happening. This documentary is the sort of thing for which the term "must-see tv" was invented.

RLC

In this the second part of our look at Jim Wallis' response to Bush's proposal for an adjustment in our approach to Iraq, we'll examine Wallis' claim that the war in Iraq fails to meet the traditional criteria of a just war. Because the war is not just, in his reckoning, perpetuating it is therefore criminal.

Wallis writes:

This is simply irresponsible of Wallis. The administration may have been mistaken about the WMD, but so was the entire rest of the world as well as the Clinton administration, all of whom believed Iraq had WMD. Our intelligence indicated they had them. Defectors claimed that he had them. Moreover, Saddam acted just as one would expect a man to act who was trying to hide the fact that he possessed those weapons. It's easy for arm-chair quarterbacks and people who harbor ill-will toward the president to say in hindsight that Bush lied, but it's incumbent on the one who makes that allegation to offer evidence that the president knew that Saddam didn't have WMD but deliberately led us to believe that he did. Wallis finds this simple courtesy too much to ask and offers nothing to substantiate the claim that the president deliberately deceived the American congress (who had access to the same intelligence the president did) and the American people.

Let us suppose, that a president has all the same facts at his disposal that Bush did - the testimony of defectors, the consensus of the world's intelligence community, the current and past behavior of Saddam, and so on. Suppose this president fears that Saddam is hiding his WMD program, but he lacks absolute proof. So he does not act. Subsequently, a WMD, traceable to Iraq, is unleashed on America. What would the Wallis' of the world say then? That the president did the right thing by ignoring all the evidence and refusing to assume the worst? That the president did the right thing by giving a known liar and mass murderer the benefit of the doubt? I don't think that's what they would say. I think they would demand that that president go down in history as having been criminally negligent in performing the duties of his office - and they'd be right to do so.

Wallis continues:

Unfortunately, Wallis doesn't tell us what these serious proposals were or what they involved. We're just left to take his word that they existed and that they were feasible. If he wants us to grant him credibility on this he'll have to tell us what those alternatives were. I'm certainly not aware of any, and I don't think he is either.

Next he asserts that:

Surely Wallis understands that the United States is a sovereign nation. It has the right and the authority to wage war when it feels threatened whether other nations join it in that endeavor or not. Just war theory states that war can only justly be waged by the proper authority, meaning the legitimate government of the nation. It doesn't mean that we must subordinate our sovereignty to a collection of tyrants, thugs, and corrupt nations whose foreign policy vis a vis Iraq was more profoundly shaped by the illegal profits they were making from Saddam than with any desire to do the "right" thing.

Wallis goes on to claim that:

Wallis must know that our military fought the most proportional and discriminating war in history in Iraq. If Wallis is correct that we failed to meet these criteria in Iraq then no war ever has been a just war and invoking just war criteria to criticize Operation Iraqi Freedom is disingenuous.

There was no carpet bombing. Mosques and cemetaries were safe havens. Soldiers often held their fire and put their own lives at risk rather than jeopardize civilians. As for the resulting insurgency and civil war, it is perverse to blame that on the U.S. rather than on the people responsible for it. Moreover, if, as Wallis wants, the U.S. were to pull out of Iraq now, the number of deaths would far exceed the carnage we see in that country today.

Wallis goes on to say that:

No one in the administration as, far as I'm aware, ever made a case that Iraq was an "imminent threat" so it is deceptive of Wallis to put the words in quotes as if he were quoting the administration. Nor did anyone argue that there was a connection between Saddam and the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack. The administration did claim that there was a connection between Saddam and Islamic terrorists and this connection is beyond dispute.

The war in Iraq was unjust; to continue it now is criminal, Wallis concludes, as if fighting to keep a nation from spiralling into a bloodbath and a humanitarian crisis of perhaps unprecedented proportions is a crime.

Wallis the pacifist assumes the role of military expert by warning that Bush's efforts in Iraq have distracted us from the real war against terrorists. He knows, somehow, that we have left ourselves vulnerable by diverting resources to Iraq. He says this notwithstanding the fact that there has been no successful terrorist attack on our soil since hostilities began against Afghanistan five years ago. One might ask Wallis what metric he is employing to assess our vulnerability. What information does he have that warrants this gloomy assessment?

In pondering all the things he says about which he could well be mistaken (and probably is) one wonders: If he is in fact wrong about anything in what he writes, does that make him a liar?

RLC

Sometimes it just seems that the political left is inordinately populated with people who haven't yet grown up and who still display the childish look-at-me narcissism and crudities associated with juveniles. A good example of this arrested development is freshman Wisconsin congressman Steve Kagen who regaled his admirers recently with this account of his bold and audacious exploits in the White House. Mr. Kagen, in his telling of the tale, is quite a hero:

So, this is what passes for humor in liberal precincts. It had us in stitches as we read it. It seems that all the class in this story was exhibited by Rove, Cheney, and Bush. Apparently there was none left over for the intrepid Dr. Multimillionaire.

UPDATE: Now it's looking as if Dr. Multimillionaire made the whole thing up. What a guy. Here's our advice to Dr. Kagen: Don't go on the Colbert show in February.

RLC

Here's a great video at Telic Thoughts that gives a molecule-eye view of DNA packaging and replication. The processes are truly astonishing. Please resist the temptation to think that what you see is all a product of intentional design by an intelligent designer. We know that the appearance of design is purely an illusion and that natural forces acting blindly managed to engineer...oops..., design...oops..., evolve this apparatus completely by accident. We know this because we know there is no intelligent designer, and we know there's no intelligent designer because we can't find an example of something in the natural world that's intelligently designed. Or something like that.

RLC

There have been many great speeches given throughout our history. Washington's Farewell, Lincoln's Second Inaugural and Gettysburg Address certainly come to mind, but none surpasses Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963.

I can think of no better way to honor King's memory than to listen to that speech today.

It should be said, too, that it is a shame that we honor the man with a holiday but disregard much of what he said in this speech. His hope that one day his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, seemed to have died with him, having given way to the racial politics and preferences of the next twenty five years.

At any rate, set aside some time today to listen to King's words, the eloquence with which he delivers them, and the power of their truth.

The speech can be both read and heard here.

RLC

Alan Dershowitz claims that Jimmy Carter has been bought and paid for by Arab money, a specially ironic allegation given that Carter has made similar allegations about the American media being heavily influenced toward pro-Israeli positions by their Jewish bosses. Here's Dershowitz's key passage:

Read the rest at the link, but be warned - it does not flatter the former president.

Meanwhile, fourteen members of the advisory board of the Carter Center resigned the other day because of what they called Carter's "malicious advocacy." In their letter they state that: "We can no longer endorse your strident and uncompromising position. This is not the Carter Center or Jimmy Carter we came to respect and support. Therefore it is with sadness and regret that we hereby tender our resignation from the Board of Councilors of the Carter Center effective immediately."

Tragically, Carter, who I persist in thinking is basically a good man, may exceed Nixon and Clinton in the amount of embarrassment and disgrace he ultimately brings upon himself. The difference is that they did it while still in office.

RLC

It's hard, I think, to read Martin Luther King's Letter From a Birmingham City Jail without arriving at the conclusion that King was inspired by his understanding that the Christian Gospel demands that we do justice to our fellow man. His Christian faith permeated and informed his political thinking, and it would be good for those who argue that religion has no place in the public sphere to reflect on that fact as we observe Martin Luther King Day today.

RLC

Hmmm. President Bush and his associates warn Iran against meddling in Iraq and threaten to stop the flow of men and weapons from Iran and now DebkaFile is reporting unexplained explosions in Iranian cities. Could be nothing, of course.

RLC

Anti-theist Sam Harris, in an article at Edge, attempts to refute what he takes to be ten popular myths about atheism. We've been arguing that so far each of his refutations has failed. Number four does not reverse this unfortunate trend. Harris claims that the following is untrue:

Harris starts out denying the "myth" and winds up confirming it by what he says about evolution. But let's begin not with living things but with the physical structure of the universe itself. Evolutionary selection pressures are irrelevant to the type of universe ours is. There are two fundamental possibilities: Either the universe is the intentional product of an intelligent creator or it is not. If it is not, then its existence is a purely chance event and its structure, as improbable as it is, is also a product of sheer happenstance.

The same is true of the origin of the first life. Darwinian selection acts only on reproducing populations of organisms and would not have been a factor in the emergence of the first "self-replicating" molecules. The chemical combinations that had to occur to create the molecules necessary for life were either intentionally orchestrated or they were completely serendipitous.

Once these molecules had been organized into reproducing protocells natural selection might have acted, but in order to rise above the level of a protocell some form of mutation had to be introduced into the replicating material. The mutation may have conferred a survival advantage and thus the evolution of the new population containing the mutation could have been "directed" by an environment which selects for survivability. But this doesn't help Harris' case. The mutation itself is a random event, indeed Harris refers to mutations as "chance" events above, and without these random, or chance, events natural selection has no genetic novelty upon which to work. In other words, evolutionary progression and diversity are contingent upon an event, genetic mutation, whose occurence is completely random.

So when Harris asserts that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world are not products of mere chance he is incorrect. What he really should say is that diversity and complexity are not solely the products of mere chance, but they are the products of chance. To the extent that genetic mutation plays a role in the Neo-Darwinian scheme, living things certainly are the product of random, serendipitous, stochastic events.

Thus, Harris misleads us when he denies that atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance. They most certainly do, unless they adopt the kind of strong deterministic position (which Harris doesn't discuss) which says that given the original conditions of the Big Bang everything in our universe had to be just the way it is. But Harris, for good reasons, doesn't mention this alternative so neither will we elaborate on it.

Check out our comments on myths 1 through 3 here, here, and here.

RLC

Here are some passages about some guys that are almost certain to cause the Christian reader to pause and ponder their own faith and prayer life.

WSC

True or False: The Iraqis want the coalition forces out of Iraq now. For the answer go here.

True or False: Iraq's Arab neighbors want the coalition forces out of Iraq now. For the answer go here.

The genuine fears of the people whose lives are placed in jeopardy if the Democrats have their way in Washington are apparently of secondary concern to the leaders of the Democrat party and various other anti-war spokespersons around the country who insist we withdraw regardless of the consequences. It doesn't matter that our presence is the only hope the Iraqi people have of ever achieving a secure future for their children. For some reason, never very clearly or cogently articulated, that doesn't enter into the rhetoric of those who want to get out as soon as possible.

The demands for immediate withdrawal remind me of a letter written by the Prime Minister of Cambodia, Sirik Matak, back in the 1970s. The Democratic congress had decided to abandon Southeast Asia to the communists by cutting off funding for the war, just as Democrats are talking about doing today. The American ambassador to Cambodia offered Matik the opportunity to escape. Matik replied in words that should be engraved in a monument and placed on the floor of both houses of congress: "I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular, for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty." Matik remained in Phnom Penh and was brutally murdered, along with a quarter of the country's population, by the Khmer Rouge.

This young Iraqi, photographed by Michelle Malkin in Iraq, speaks for millions of Iraqis and Arabs who know full well that if the U.S. leaves before Iraq is self-reliant it'll only result in war, pestilence, famine, mass murder and torture throughout the region:

See Michelle's blog for an explanation of this pic and more photos from her ongoing embed with the troops in Baghdad.

RLC

Jim Wallis of Sojourners seems to be growing increasingly nastier and strident in his political rhetoric, and in this piece I think he says some things which are really quite indefensible. He writes, for example, that:

This is such a distortion of the President's words and actions that I have to fight the temptation to think Wallis is deliberately misrepresentating the facts.

First, what has the president ever said or done that justifies Wallis' claim that he believes military solutions are "always the best answer," and how does Wallis conclude that Bush "consistently chooses war over politics"? Wallis has to ignore the entire history of our involvement with Iraq from 1990 on in order to say such things. The fact is that Bush only chose war after Iraq continued to violate one U.N. resolution after another, after they tried to assassinate an American president, after they repeatedly fired on our aircraft in violation of the terms of the cease-fire, after they committed mass murder against both Shia and the Kurds, and after they refused to give our weapons inspectors full cooperation, and gave every impression that they were trying to hide illegal weapons.

Second, when did Bush say that "only" military solutions would succeed in Iraq? He's never said that. He's spent the last three years trying to make political solutions work in Baghdad and when they came up short, and force became necessary, Wallis accuses him of only wanting to use force. Of course politics and diplomacy must be implemented, and they have been, but this is not an either/or strategy. There has to be diplomacy and there has to be force to back it up. Otherwise, diplomacy will never work. Wallis seems to think that diplomacy and military force are mutually exclusive so that if we employ one we cannot, and must not, employ the other.

Wallis then quotes an American soldier who is reluctant to go back to Iraq as if to demonstrate that even the military has given up on the war.

Yes. Our soldiers are giving up on the war. That's why enlistments and re-enlistments are higher than ever. That's why the one segment of our population that is most supportive of what we are doing in Iraq are military personnel and their families. That's why Bush consistently gets standing ovations when he addresses military audiences. That's why the one segment of our population that least wants us to cut and run is the military. Wallis ferrets out one or two soldiers who are a little less than gung-ho and offers them up to us as if they are representative of the military as a whole. I'm sure he could have found soldiers in every war we've ever fought who felt the same way as the serviceman he quotes above, but it means nothing.

He goes on in his article to contend that the Iraq war fails to meet the traditional criteria of a just war, and, in the process, makes some very questionable, and very disappointing, assertions. In a day or two we'll consider this part of his argument.

RLC

It's not often that I agree with Andrew Sullivan, but I do on the stupidity of Senator Barbara Boxer's questioning of Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice the other day. I wouldn't, though, call it "vile" as Sullivan does, it was just dumb. I can't do better than one of Sullivan's readers does in explaining why:

We might add that according to Ms Boxer's logic no one in the administration or congress who has children who are not in the military or not in the war zone should be permitted to make any policy that might jeopardize the lives of those who are. I'm sure that if Ms Boxer had a chance to reflect upon her words she'd want to retract them for they certainly don't reflect well on the wisdom of those who voted her into office.

RLC

There's an article by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times on the question of free will and determinism, and Joe Carter, who tips us to the piece, has an interesting discussion of it at Evangelical Outpost. Most interesting are the exchanges with some of his critical readers in the comment section. Check it out.

The question of volitional freedom is important inasmuch as we have to at least assume we are in some sense free if we wish to hold on to a belief in personal moral accountability. If all of our decisions, particularly our moral decisions, are somehow the inevitable product of forces and influences which have acted upon us from before the time we were born then we are nothing more than machines and we bear no more responsibility for those choices than a computer bears for the "choices" it appears to make.

To say that we're free is to say that at any given moment there are at least two genuinely possible futures. If, however, our choices are the product of physical necessity then there can really only be one possible future and the sense that we have a real choice is an illusion. On the other hand, the concept of a free moral choice is difficult to formulate. A free choice cannot simply be something that happens spontaneously. It must somehow be a product of our character and our beliefs, otherwise it would not really be our choice, we would not really be the responsible agent for it. It would just be a random event.

But if the choice is the product of our character and if those virtues which comprise our character have been shaped by those forces and influences that have acted upon us throughout our lives, then how do we escape the conclusion that ultimately the choice we made was, in fact, determined?

It seems that both total freedom and total determinism are incompatible with moral responsibility. Only if there is something about us, like a mind or a soul, that is non-physical and which contributes to our choosings without itself having been programmed by nature can we escape the conclusion that we are merely flesh and bone machines.

Put differently, even though it is difficult to conceptualize the kind of freedom we must have to be morally accountable for what we do, if determinism is true there really is no such thing as morality at all. That is, there is no truth value to claims that we should behave in certain ways, that certain behaviors are right and others are wrong. Words like should and ought only have meaning if there are genuine alternatives involved. Right and wrong only have meaning if there is a genuine choice. Otherwise, a man who wantonly harms another is no more guilty of a moral breach than is a Tourette's sufferer who unwillingly but invariably blurts out obscenities.

So, either morality really exists and we are indeed accountable for what we do, or there is no moral right and wrong and what we do has no moral significance. The only reason we could have for believing the former is a prior belief that there exists a personal God who has woven right and wrong into the fabric of the cosmos and who confers upon us the ability to make genuine moral choices. Even if we cannot explain how we are free, we can, based on our belief in God, maintain that we must, in some sense, be free.

On the other hand, if we are atheistic materialists who hold that there is no personal deity, that there's only matter and energy, then we have no reason whatsoever to persist in the belief that morality is any less illusory than a mirage or a hallucination. Our choices are merely chemical reactions occuring in the brain and those reactions were ineluctably foreordained by the conditions existing at the instant of the Big Bang. For the materialist right and wrong are purely arbitrary conventions based upon subjective preferences and no obligation to observe those conventions can possibly bind us. This is the theme that Dostoyevsky comes back to over and over again in his novels - "if God is dead, then everything is permitted."

If one believes in morality, moral responsibility, and free will then one should be a theist, and if one is not a theist one should, it seems to me, be a determinist and, consequently, a moral nihilist. It is a peculiarity of the contemporary theism/atheism debate that atheists, who should logically be determinists who believe that no one freely chooses what they do and that no one is therefore truly responsible for their choices, actually fault theists for choosing to believe in God.

Our conviction that we are free only makes sense, it can only be an accurate belief about the way things really are, if there is a God. To quote the rock group Rush - I will choose free will.

RLC

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail updates us on the new offensive by Iraqi forces seeking to secure Baghdad:

Read the rest at the link.

RLC

Those of you who have been enjoying the mild winter we've been having are evidently in for a major disappointment:

It was nice while it lasted.

RLC

Robert Samuelson summarizes the ugly facts about the future of social security:

There's more at the link. It is a shame that when Bush proposed a solution to the looming crisis a couple of years back, the Democrats fought him hard on it and the Republicans simply waffled. Bush shrugged, and nothing got accomplished, but the day of reckoning continues to draw closer.

Now that the Democrats control both houses of congress we can be sure they'll come up with a plan to avert the crisis.

RLC

The only problem, in my opinion, with the President's speech last night was that it came last night and not last year. Better late than never, I guess. It seems hard to argue with what he said and what proposed, but I'm sure some will carp at it anyway. The President is right. The consequences of an American failure would be catastrophic for the world and an American success in Iraq would be an enormous benefit for the entire world. Here are some key passages from the speech in case you missed it:

A couple of things jump out at the reader. First, "Mookie" al-Sadr and his merry band of thugs is no longer off-limits. This is wonderful news for everyone except the Shia death squads. Second, Iran and Syria can expect regular visits from the U.S. military. This is also heart-warming news. If we're going to send our young men and women abroad to risk their lives we have a moral obligation to do everything we can to see that they make it home in one piece. To treat Iran and Syria as insurgent sanctuaries is to fail in that obligation. It also guarantees that we'll never succeed in Iraq.

Like a football coach who makes halftime adjustments to unexpected tactics employed by his opponent, Bush is making some much needed changes to meet the challenges we're facing in Iraq. It's too bad he waited as long as he did, but now that he's making them, all Americans should join together in hoping and praying that he succeeds.

RLC

Each of these pillars of dust and hydrogen gas are so vast that they would dwarf our sun. It is in the interiors of such enormous concentrations of hydrogen that astronomers believe stars are formed:

The photo was taken by the Hubble Space telescope.

RLC

Dave Scot at Uncommon Descent introduces us to the Emerald Cockroach Wasp and tells us how it gets on in life. As you read this, which you really must, just for laughs try to imagine someone trying to convince you that there is a perfectly plausible, purely mechanistic explanation for how the wasp's behavior came to be:

Thanks to Wikipedia for the preceding account.

We are confronted here with two alternatives: Either every step of this behaviour was solely the product of perhaps dozens of chance mutations at just the right place in the genome and in just the right order - and that the individuals that had those mutations bestowed upon them fortuitously survived to reproduce - or we can believe that whether mutations and natural selection were involved or not, there must have been some intentionality behind the development of this sequence of behaviors. In other words, whatever the physical processes at work in generating such an astonishing program in the brain of an insect, they were not, by themselves, sufficient to produce that program. The wasp's behavior also requires a mind to account for how it could have arisen in the first place.

Those are the two choices. And the Darwinians, who opt for the first alternative, scoff at those who think a mind must be behind this insect's behavior. Belief in a Designer, they say, is based on a fairy tale. Believing in an Architect of insect behavior is too incredible, they aver. As if the option they embrace were not.

RLC

The third alleged myth in our series (See pt. I and pt. II) on Sam Harris' Ten Myths About Atheism is, he writes, the incorrect belief that Atheism is dogmatic. He goes on to explain:

It's not clear to me what Harris' explanation has to do with the assertion that atheism is dogmatic, but if the reason an atheist rejects the existence of God is because he rejects the doctrine of Divine inspiration of the Bible (or Koran) then the poor fellow seems to have gotten things backwards. Believers don't base their belief in God upon their belief that the Bible is God's word, rather their belief that it's God's word is based on their belief that God exists. Belief in God's existence is prior to belief in the trustworthiness of the Bible. Even were the Bible proven to be a completely human artifact that would demonstrate nothing with regard to whether God exists.

If Harris is going to deny the existence of God he has to show that the classical reasons for believing in God are all false and this arduous feat he wisely does not attempt. The most that Harris can say, it seems to me, is that, for him, the arguments for God's existence are not compelling, and thus, although such a being as God may exist, he personally is not convinced of it.

For New Atheists like Harris, however, this is simply too tepid. What they believe is not just that God may not exist, they assert that, in fact, He does not exist, and they hold anyone who believes He does to be intellectually defective. That seems pretty dogmatic to me.

RLC

Mike Metzger of the Clapham Institute talking about the tragedy of young American parents who have lost the connection between child-rearing and marriage.

RLC

No wonder it's taking so long to get things right in Iraq. This exchange on al-Jazeera is probably being duplicated everyday in the halls of the Iraqi parliament.

HT: Allahpundit

RLC

An AC-130 gunship was called in to put an end (hopefully) to the terrors inflicted on Americans and Africans by some very bad men. CBS News has the story. Here's part of it:

Michelle Malkin has background on the Americans and others killed in the attacks perpetrated by the terrorists targeted of the gunship.

RLC

Jim Wallis of Sojourners regrets the execution of Saddam Hussein and argues that it is wrong to resort to capital punishment. He states a number of objections which are pretty much summarized in his last two paragraphs. The first is contained in a quote from the Archbishop of Canterbury:

How much horror must a man inflict upon people before the Archbishop and Mr. Wallis conclude that whatever change the man undergoes is insignificant by comparison? Saddam had plenty of "room for repentance." He has been feeding people into wood chippers for decades, gassing children and cutting out tongues and torturing people to death for decades. How much time is enough?

The argument that if we only give him time enough he might repent and be saved is a peculiar one. By extension it essentially calls God unjust because He allows people to perish for eternity, and sometimes even causes their deaths, before they've accepted the gospel. It's even more peculiar when offered by someone of Calvinist proclivities who holds that God foreordains who will be lost and who will be saved before they're even born. If Saddam was elected for salvation then he will be saved no matter what the Iraqi government did to him, and if he is to be lost then he will be lost no matter hjow long he lives.

Wallis concludes his piece with this paragraph:

Let's take this a couple of sentences at a time. The second sentence is, to put it politely, inadequate. To put those who support the legal execution of a mass murderer on the same level as the murderer is morally ludicrous. We do not sink to his level by endorsing his execution but rather we make a profound moral statement, i.e. we tell the world that to take the life of innocent people is the very worst crime one can commit and merits the most severe penalty. It is to tell the world that we value innocent life so much that one who wantonly destroys it will be required to pay the highest price that he can pay, the forfeiture of his own life. Conversely, to refuse to exact the highest penalty from one who has butchered and terrorized innocent people is to implicitly say that the lives of his victims are not so precious that their loss justifies the death of their killer.

The third sentence is a logical confusion. How does Wallis get from being made in God's image to being insulated from ever having to forfeit one's own life? What's the connection between the two? Being made in God's image means having rationality, personality, and a sense of justice, etc. It does not mean that one's life is absolutely inviolate.

The fourth sentence simply asserts a moral preference that hangs unsupported by any reasons. By Wallis' logic we should not incarcerate kidnappers nor fine embezzlers, since we simply should not deprive persons of their freedom in order to show that we are against depriving people of their freedom, nor take money from people to show that we are against taking money from people.

In the final sentence he states that an execution is to prefer revenge over justice. This is perhaps the most incredible claim of the lot. What is it about executing a man who has murdered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that is unjust? How is it unjust to mete out to someone the same as they have done to others? The Christian obligation to be merciful dictates that we don't torture Saddam but it would certainly not be unjust to do so.

Moreover, even if Wallis is right that the Iraqis were motivated by revenge what is it about revenge that is unjust? There is nothing wrong with revenge, i.e. the desire to see someone who is responsible for an evil be made to pay for that crime. Indeed, revenge is an essential component of justice. Without it there is no motivation to punish criminals at all. The only problem with revenge, and why it is generally disapprobated, is that it is sometimes arrogated by individuals. Revenge is a perfectly acceptable motive, however, for the state and indeed Paul says as much in Romans where he tells us that vengeance is the prerogative of God who employs the state as His agent in the world.

RLC

Don Imus and Mike Barnicle yuk it up speculating about the courage/cowardice of Bush administration figures. Unfortunately, their banter is no more funny than it is tasteful.

There's something sad about people who find this sort of exchange humorous. Perhaps it lies in the fact that the attempt to get cheap laughs by viciousness and mean-spiritedness is a mark of very little people who are insecure in their own virtues. If I can be permitted an amateurish psychological speculation, I suspect that most men who mock their betters do so in order to enhance their own self-importance and worth which they subliminally hold in low esteem.

RLC

Byron links us to this excellent interview with Nancy Pearcey, author of Total Truth and other books. The interviewer questions her on her support for intelligent design and related matters and she gives some of the most concise and clear corrections to common misunderstandings of the topic that I've seen anywhere.

If you're at all interested in this controversy you'll want to check it out.

RLC

This stunner was in the Times Online:

There's much more on this rumored strike at the link. The question I'd like to pose to our readers is, should Israel go ahead with the attack if the rest of the world is content to let Iran continue to produce nuclear weapons? If not, why not?

RLC

There will be much talk on the news in the weeks ahead on raising the minimum wage. George Will instructs us as to why raising the minimum wage makes no sense, and why it will be raised anyway:

Moral grandstanding is a good description of what we can expect to be subjected to from our political leaders over the coming weeks on this issue.

RLC

Steve Paulson has a very interesting interview with Ronald Numbers at Salon Books. Numbers is a historian of science who has written extensively on the rise of creationism. Among historians not involved with either group he is probably the foremost authority on the history of creationism and intelligent design.

Numbers grew up in a strict Seventh Day Adventist family and attended Adventist schools until he went to Berkely to do his graduate work. At Berkely his faith crumbled and he describes himself today as a man with no religious belief, either theistic or atheistic. He himself is an evolutionist, but he is often trashed by other evolutionists because he treats creationists and IDers with respect in his professional writings.

His story is sad on several levels but especially when he talks about the effect his work had on his relationship with his father. While discussing Numbers' book titled The Creationists there is this exchange between Paulson and Numbers:

Very sad. Read the rest of the interview at the link.

RLC

For a fascinating glimpse into what military combat might look like in the not too distant future go to Hot Air and watch the top video. It's actually a promotional video produced by Future Combat Systems which, I surmise, is a technology firm working on weapons, communications, and reconnaissance systems.

RLC

Joe Carter gives a fine summary of the argument for God's existence based on the fine-tuning of the cosmos. I agree with Carter that this is one of the most powerful of teh arguments for God's existence, even if it doesn't constitute a proof, sensu strictu.

I would caution, though, that the argument does not lead to the conclusion that the architect of the universe is the God of the Bible. Nevertheless, despite this technical shortcoming, the argument goes a long way in clearing away the brush that stands in the way of people accepting that the God of the Bible exists.

If we agree that the design of the universe suggests an intelligence behind the creation we might also conclude that it's reasonable to assume that that intelligence is personal, powerful, and knowledgeable since it has created personal beings and since a great deal of power and mathematical knowledge were required to create the universe. This brings us very close to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. What we cannot infer, however, is that the architect of the space-time cosmos is unqualifiedly good. The existence of suffering prevents us from making that move.

Thus the finely-tuned universe is a compelling reason to believe that there's a creator, but the question whether the creator is identical to the God that Christians have traditionally believed in cannot be settled by reference to the physical creation alone.

Even so, the argument is very powerful. Check out Carter's discussion of it at the link.

RLC

Michael Ledeen believes that confrontation with Iran can no longer be avoided and, as Machiavelli instructed his Prince, that to delay only works to the advantage of our adversary:

You can read the whole piece at the link.

RLC

Joe Carter outlines three arguments for the existence of a transcendent moral lawgiver at his blog The Evangelical Outpost. The three are all variations of the same argument - that there must be an objective ground for morality if moral discourse is to make any sense. The versions Carter summarizes are those of Immanuel Kant, C.S. Lewis, and D. Elton Trueblood.

The arguments of these thinkers are not intended to serve as proofs of the existence of God, but they are certainly powerful pointers in that direction. Unless one adopts the position of moral nihilism it's very difficult to evade the force of the reasoning, and the move to adopt nihilism is, of course, a move to forfeit rationality.

Read Carter's summary and see if you don't agree that the moral experience of humans all but demands an either/or choice between nihilism and the existence of a transcendent moral authority.

RLC

From time to time Christian students express their conviction that the Bible gives answers to all of life's ethical problems. The next time I hear a student say that I hope I remember this story to which I was alerted by my friend Jason:

So here's my question: Is what the parents are doing wrong? Is there anything in Scripture which supports a yes answer to that question?

RLC

President Bush has worked out an agreement with Mexico that would allow illegal aliens who work in the United States and who pay into our social security system to eventually collect social security benefits. This has not been voted into law as yet but one wonders why, when the social security system is in such sorry shape, we are offering to subsidize the retirement of people who broke the law not only to come here but also to obtain a phony social security number. Why is the president rewarding people for breaking the law by allowing them to put a further drain on the benefits U.S. citizens are hoping are there for their own retirement?

This report comes, by the way, on the heels of Governor Schwarzenegger's decision to grant health care insurance to every child in California whether they are citizens or not, and whether they are legal or not.

I suppose there is some reason why Bush and Schwarzenegger feel that it's the right thing to do to take money out of the pockets of people who are here legally and put it in the pockets of those who are breaking our laws, but I confess I don't see what it is. Defenders will say that it's the compassionate thing to do, but it doesn't seem compassionate to essentially take money from the social security checks of elderly people and give it to people whose only claim to it is based on a fraud.

If people through their churches and civic organizations want to help those who have come here in violation of our inmmigration laws they have every right to do that, but for the government to compel its citizenry to sacrifice for illegals makes no more sense than if they decided that we would give every poor person in Mexico free access to our social security and health care systems. Indeed, this policy would be much more compassionate since it would enable people to receive the benefits of being in America without having to undergo the arduous and dangerous trek across the desert to get here.

RLC

Every now and then we catch a glimpse of the war against Islamic terrorists that doesn't get much play in the media. Bill Roggio calls attention to our military's involvement in the war being waged by Ethiopia against the Islamic Courts forces in Somalia.

In the course of describing the latest developments in that conflict Roggio states:

The dedicated jihadi in Somalia, as elsewhere, enjoys neither ease nor length of life.

RLC

With this post we continue our critique of Sam Harris' Ten Myths About Atheism with his second alleged myth. Harris claims the following is not just mythical but also false:

Harris is playing a bit of a shell game here. He slides in the first two sentences from an allegation against atheism and individual atheists to the evils of fascism and communism. He tries to shift the onus away from atheism and onto the nature of political ideology. It's true that these ideologies were very religious but that's irrelevant. It's not fascism which led to the holocaust and not communism that perpetrated the Killing Fields and the crimes committed against humanity in the Soviet Union. Neither ideologies nor religions do anything. It is individual fascists and communists who committed the horrific crimes or the twentieth century and in doing so they were simply carrying to its logical conclusion the basic assumption of atheism.

They believed there was no God and that meant that there is no moral right nor wrong, no eternal consequence for what one does, no reason not to adopt the ethic of might makes right, and no reason to consider others as having dignity and worth. Since they disdained the belief that other people are made in the image of God and loved by God, they therefore concluded that those people have no more rights than do cattle in an abattoir. If one has the power and the wish to kill them there is no moral reason why one should not.

That Hitler, et al. committed the greatest crimes of the century is beyond dispute. That these men were atheists is beyond dispute. That their deeds were wholly consistent with their atheism is also beyond dispute. Thus the myth is not a myth at all. It's a historical reality.

Moreover, even if we were to grant Harris' premise that the responsible agent for the evils of the twentieth century was a kind of religion (fascism and communism), the salient point about this is that these were atheistic religions. Not all religions are bad, but those two were and it could be argued that they were bad precisely because they were, implicitly in one case and explicitly in the other, anti-theistic. Harris, though, clearly seems to think that because some religions are bad therefore they all are, but this is such obvious nonsense that one wonders how an intelligent man could hold that view.

You can read our comment on the first of Harris' ten myths here.

RLC

Who would have thought it? It seems that there may be a religious revival taking place, in Holland of all places, and the revival is not among Holland's Muslims but amongst its Christians. Indeed, Mohammed seems to be having trouble holding on to his followers in the land of tulips:

Read the whole thing. It's a very interesting article.

RLC

Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, is on the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News. The paper's editors recently had a meeting with representatives of the Dallas Muslim community which Dreher reports on here.

Dreher tried to get his interlocutors to answer a set of simple questions, but all he got in reply, according to him, were obfuscations and evasions. The Muslims simply would not deal with the questions to which Dreher, and, I expect, most Americans, would like to hear answers.

According to Dreher, the Muslim spokespersons avoided direct answers to the repeated question of whether the US should live under sharia law which mandates punishments like hand-chopping and stoning, and instead repeatedly challenged the motives of the journalists for asking those questions. They also defended having Muslim youth read the writings of radical Islamists who advocate the imposition of a world-wide Islamic caliphate and retorted to Dreher and his colleagues that the only thing wrong with this is thinking that there's something wrong with it.

The article is both interesting and important, and I urge readers to give it a perusal.

RLC

Why don't people trust the mainstream media to present the news objectively? Well, here's an example of the sort of thing that seems to happen with alarming frequency and which causes people to shake their heads at the apparent willingness of those who present the news to waive journalistic standards when the story supports their ideological preconceptions:

The Times had a story which, they evidently thought, would make the forces arrayed against abortion look very bad and they ran with it without bothering to check its accuracy. With how many other stories have they done the same thing?

The New York Times does deserve some credit, though. The above article was done by their ombudsman, Byron Calame, and appeared in their pages last Sunday.

Read the rest of it at the link.

RLC

This photo of Saturn was taken with the sun directly behind the planet. What astonishing beauty.

RLC

I know it seems as though I write far too much about Messrs. Harris, Dawkins, et al. but they are influential people whose arguments should be taken seriously, even when it's difficult to do so.

Sam Harris has a piece at Edge titled 10 MYTHS - AND 10 TRUTHS - ABOUT ATHEISM about which I can't resist commenting.

Harris writes:

Harris' reply would likely come as a surprise to many atheists in the popular culture and the most philosophical among them, including the scientists.

Consider these quotes from prominent atheists among dozens more that could be summoned:

Consider, too, the sense of meaningless conveyed through the literature produced by atheists like Albert Camus in his book The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, or The Plague.

Even so, all the above is really beside the point, as is Harris' reply to the "myth." The question isn't whether atheists do or do not believe life is meaningless. Anyone can believe anything they'd like. The question is whether Harris' belief that life does have meaning is based on anything more substantial than wishful thinking. After all, if human existence in the aggregate has no meaning it's hard to see how an individual human's existence would be meaningful.

If everything we do is destined to vanish utterly, if we are all alone in the cosmos and when our sun dies nothing at all will be left, what ultimate meaning can there be in our lives or loves? There is no more meaning in human existence, individual or corporate, than there is in the life of an ant in an anthill or a bacterium floating in a swamp. We're born, we suffer, perhaps we have a flash of temporary joy here and there, and then we die. Our lives are nothing more than footprints in the sand at the edge of the surf. When we die all trace of our existence will sooner or later vanish from the earth. It will be as if we never lived, and if there's no difference between having lived and never having lived then living has no enduring meaning, purpose, or value.

Only if we survive for eternity can life be meaningful. Some people tacitly acknowledge this when they say that what we do can live on after us. This reply is an attempt to achieve a kind of immortality, but it ultimately collapses since eventually, in a godless universe, nothing anyone has ever done will remain. Harris is free to believe that love gives his life all the meaning he needs, but it sounds like he's whistling past the graveyard.

There'll be more comment on the other nine myths in the days ahead.

RLC

Bill Roggio gives us a year end round up of the status of the global war against Islamo-fascism at The Fourth Rail. There's lots of good news, but the war against the Islamists is going to take more than just a few years to complete.

RLC

Hugo Chavez is shutting down a television station in Venezuela which air material he deems a threat to his power:

This is not surprising, of course, since it is always one of the first acts of those who aspire to dictatorial power to seize control of the media or to shut it down. It'll be interesting to see how Chavez's fan club among American leftists reacts to this incipient act of tyranny.

Cindy Sheehan and Hugo Chavez: Best Buds

RLC

Why do some people have the feeling that our own Department of State can't be trusted? Well, perhaps one reason is that the State Department seems to have known for years that Yassir Arafat was implicated in the murders of Americans in a terrorist strike in Khartoum in 1973, but they did nothing to publicize it. They did nothing to see that the man be brought to justice. Instead, they were content to let anyone gullible enough to believe that Arafat deserved his Nobel Peace Prize to go on believing it. Captain Ed sums up:

Laer at Cheat Seeking Missiles has a personal connection to one of the victims. Read his post on the murders. Upon reading it one has cause to wonder about the judgment of former President Jimmy Carter.

RLC

Herewith my list (by topic) of the twenty books I read (or reread) in 2006 which I enjoyed the most. I'd be interested in hearing from readers about which books they'd put on their list. If anyone sends such a list (It doesn't need to be twenty. It might be only one) I'd be happy to post it.

SOCIAL/CULTURAL

America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It by Mark Steyn - An absolute must read. Steyn argues that Europe as a cultural entity is doomed. There is no realistic way to reverse the trends that are turning Europe into Eurabia.
State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America by Pat Buchanan - Buchanan builds a powerful case against the current policy of turning a blind eye to immigration from the southern hemisphere, particularly illegal immigration. No one who reads this book will think the same way about immigration as they did before reading it.
White Guilt by Shelby Steele - Every page of this book has at least one gem of a thought about how we have come to be in the racial predicament we're in. The problem, Steele argues, is that whites are so loaded with racial guilt that they have no will to do the right thing and blacks and Hispanics are all too eager to exploit that guilt for their own purposes.
The Evolution/Creation Struggle by Michael Ruse - A sympathetic look at the conflict between two apparently irreconcilable camps. Ruse is partial to the Darwinians but is generally even-handed in his treatment of Intelligent Design advocates.

NOVELS

The Road by Cormac McCarthy - A story of the love between a father and his son as they struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. On a deeper level it seems to be a bleak description of the meaninglessness of modern life.
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown - A page turner similar to the later DaVinci Code. Especially good reading if the reader has been to Rome.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The classic story of a man named Raskolnikov who actually tries to live as a Nietzschean superman. He's a man whose values are what he decides them to be. The novel was apparently Woody Allen's inspiration for both Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - A wonderful story of an elderly man, a pastor, close to the end of his life who had married a younger woman in his congregation and had a son late in his life. The narrative is actually a journal the father is keeping as a letter to his son with the intention of having his son read it when he is older and after the father is gone. Beautifully written.

PHILOSOPHY

Warranted Christian Belief (reread) by Alvin Plantinga - A classic both in epistemology and in Christian apologetics. It devastates both liberal theology and atheistic pretensions to superior rationality.
What Can We Know (reread) by Louis Pojman - An excellent introduction to the issues and problems of epistemology.
Nature, Design and Science by Del Ratszch - An excellent work by one of the best philosophers of science. He considers the nature of science and the nature of various theories of design and argues cogently that science does not, or at least should not, exclude such theories.
Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science by Angus Menugue - A powerful critique of materialistic reductionism, the belief that everything, including mind, is reducible to matter and energy.
Who's Afraid of Post-Modernism by James Smith - Smith sympathetically examines the thought of Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault and finds that, properly understood and despite their shortcomings, there's much in these three post-modern thinkers that Christians can embrace with profit.
Abolition of Man (reread) by C.S. Lewis - Lewis' classic essay in protest of modernity's attempt to deify man which actually has resulted in his dehumanization.

SCIENCE

Privileged Planet by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards - The earth is very likely unique in the universe not only in terms of its ability to sustain life but also in terms of the opportunity the physical properties of the earth offer intelligent inhabitants to make discoveries about the universe.
Life's Solutions: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris - Conway Morris argues very persuasively that evolution repeatedly finds, or converges upon, the same solutions to biological problems and that if the tape were run again something very like the organisms we are familiar with would recur.The interesting point to be made is that it seems that the laws of chemistry and physics impose constraints that force evolution in certain directions, almost as if it had been planned that way.
The Soul of Science (reread) by Nancy Pearcy - A fine, engaging history of the development of modern science and the Christian influence on that development.

BIOGRAPHY

Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis - This is Lewis' spiritual autobiography, and I should have read it long before now.

HISTORY

Nothing Like it in the World by Stephen Ambrose - A history of the building of the transcontinental railroad. A little too heavy on the financial machinations behind this monumental project, but much of the story is otherwise fascinating.
America's Secret War by George Friedman - An enthralling account of the political and military decisions made by the Bush administration from 9/11 through the war in Afghanistan. The Bush people look better and smarter than their critics allow and worse than their supporters would hope.

In my opinion the first two books in the list are the most important, but they were all good reads.

Best wishes for a safe and rewarding 2007.

RLC