The Israelis don't need many more reasons not to trust the U.N. to do the job they're supposed to do in Lebanon, but if they did need a reason maybe this would be it:

So much for Kofi's Kids as disinterested peace-keepers.

RLC

The American Thinker informs us of an article in the Washington Times that suggests that Israel is moving closer to war with Iran:

Go to the link for the rest of the story. Israel apparently believes it has one year to decide either to accept a nuclear Iran or to do what it can to prevent it.

RLC

The "entertainment" left has plumbed new depths in their forthcoming televison docudrama based on the hypothetical assassination of President Bush. I can't imagine a similar series being produced during the tenure of President Clinton. If one were to be aired the outrage from the Democrats would have been incandescent, and rightly so. The more used to the idea of killing a specific human being we become, the more likely someone will take it into his/her head to attempt it.

There was a time when people thought that murdering a president was a topic that decent folk simply would not dream of talking about out of a respect for the value of human life and prevailing standards of taste, and also so as not to incite the crazies. But that time is past. The present-day secular left, never known to be constrained by taste or consideration for the well-being of political figures they despise, or, for that matter, the Biblical mandate to love one's neighbor, seems instead to be positively obsessed with the idea of killing George Bush.

Michelle Malkin offers the documentation here. It's pretty revolting, actually, but the idea behind the new docudrama will doubtless be boffo with the gentle folk at the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground.

RLC

A friend directed me to this article at the very liberal Huffington Post. I hasten to point out that the writer, Russell Shaw, is not endorsing a terror attack on the United States and is at pains to express his own revulsion at such a thought. Nevertheless, his speculations and reasoning seem to draw him, against his will, in the direction of hoping for one and they demand some critical examination. Mr. Shaw writes:

Mr. Shaw is an example of a man so blinded by ideology that he can't see the fallacies in his own argument even though they're as obvious as the noon-day sun.

How does he know, for instance, that a terrorist attack would not have the opposite effect of driving more people toward the GOP? He doesn't. And what makes him put scare quotes around "he's kept us safe" as if he thinks this is an absurd notion? What makes him think that the current administration hasn't kept us safe from terrorist attacks? Have there been any such attacks in the U.S. since 9/11? And where does he get the idea that overturning Roe would result in the deaths of thousands of women? What statistics is he relying on for this conjecture? Further, could it not be just as plausibly argued that overturning Roe would save the lives of millions of babies?

Nevertheless, Mr. Shaw, having demonstrated that he's not interested in something so inconvenient as competing facts, is just starting to gather his rhetorical momentum:

How does he know that granting universal health care would result in "hundreds of thousands of lives" saved? Where does he get that figure? How does he know that the decline in medical effectiveness that has accompanied state-run systems elsewhere around the world wouldn't also occur here with the result that we experience long-term increase in the number of people who die earlier than they otherwise would have?

It could be argued that the expenses incurred by forcing compliance with tougher emissions standards would result in companies laying off thousands of employees and thus thrusting these workers into a poverty which would shorten their lives and that of their children. Mr. Shaw offers no reason for thinking this would be unlikely.

Democrats were in control of the White House throughout the nineties and never made mass transit a priority. Democrats also control the governorships and or legislatures of many states. Do these states have a better and more effective system of mass transit than states controlled by Republicans? It's not clear that Democrats would be any more effective at implementing mass transit systems than would Republicans.

Gun control legislation actually has the opposite effect wherever it is tried (see John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime). The only way to eliminate gun crime is to deny criminals access to guns and the only way to do that is to eliminate guns from the face of the planet. That, of course, will never happen. Moreover, neither of the last two Democratic candidates for president supported gun control, why does Mr. Shaw think the next one will?

Mr. Shaw has no evidence to support the claim that stem cell research could save "millions" of lives. Moreover, there's no law prohibiting private funding of stem cell research now, nor is there a prohibition against federal funding of adult stem cell research. This statement is pure flummery reminiscent of John Edwards' assertion in the last election campaign that if John Kerry is elected president Christopher Reeve would get out of his wheel chair and walk.

Where are the statistics that support his claim that a higher minimum wage cuts down on poverty? Is it not likely that at some point raising the minimum wage will increase unemployment because employers will no longer be able to afford to hire the marginal worker. The higher an employer's costs the fewer employees he will take on and the more expensive his product will be for consumers. Raising costs (wages)is not without it's downside, but Mr. Shaw seems blissfully unaware of the fact.

The most foolish war in our history, Vietnam, was launched by two Democratic presidents, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Shaw's implication that the war in Iraq has increased terrorism is simply not supported by the evidence. We went to war in 2001 in Afghanistan and since then there has been no terrorist attack on our soil. That doesn't mean there won't be in the future, but it certainly lends greater support to the belief that what moderates terror attacks is fighting terrorists in their house rather than ours.

Of course it's possible that a terrorist attack would drive voters to the Democrats, as Mr. Shaw predicts, and it's possible that a Democratic administration would do the things Shaw assumes they would, but then anything is possible. No serious thinker would base an ethical question of this magnitude on mere possibility. It's possible, after all, that if someone burned down Mr. Shaw's house the whole nation would experience rapturous paroxysms of profound joy, but the bare possibility is certainly no justification for the arson.

This question is to "intellectual exercise" what raising a donut to one's mouth is to physical exercise. Nor does his argument rise to the level of a "calculus". It's based entirely upon ungrounded speculation and suppositions. It boils down to this: If the deaths of a hundred innocent citizens could conceivably, maybe, if everything went right and counter to all of our experience, bring about the longer lives of tens of thousands, even millions, of others, it would be moral to allow, or hope for, the hundred to be murdered.

Perhaps the most succinct refutation of this bizarre piece of moral analysis is this: Keeping in mind that the benefits are only possible, and not even close to being demonstrably probable, Mr. Shaw might be asked whether he would be willing to volunteer one of his own children to be one of the terrorists' victims. If, as I would be willing to wager, he would not be at all agreeable to such a sacrifice, even though there may be a slim chance that it might secure a very great good for others, then what makes him think that his suggestion of sacrificing other peoples' children has any "moral validity" at all?

RLC

Well, we're pretty confident you won't find this tune by Pearl Jam on too many Darwinians' ipods:

Go here for the video and here for the lyrics (which are pretty much unintelligible on the video).

This is not the sort of direction, I wouldn't think, that Darwinians want people to think materialistic evolution takes us in.

Thanks for the tip to Uncommon Descent.

RLC

UPI informs of this development at the Vatican which seems to indicate that Rome is soon going to clarify its stance on the ID/Darwinism controversy:

Pope Benedict XVI may reportedly embrace the theory of intelligent design, possibly heralding a fundamental shift in the Vatican's view of evolution.

Philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals are to meet with the pope this week at his summer palace near Rome to discuss the issue, The Guardian reported Monday.

Advocates of the theory argue the universe and living things are so complex they must be a product of intelligent design rather than natural selection. Critics say the theory is a disguise for creationism.

Vatican officials last week announced evolution and creation would be the topics for this year's meeting of the pope's Schulerkreis -- a group consisting mainly of his former doctoral students that has been gathering annually since the late 1970s, The Guardian said.

Pope Benedict raised the issue during the inaugural sermon of his pontificate, saying, "We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution."

HT: Uncommon Descent.

RLC

A friend linked me to this column by Tony Norman in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. According to what Norman has been able to discover the presidential reading regimen is quite impressive. In fact, it seems almost unbelievably impressive:

Well, I'm afraid I'm skeptical, but be that as it may, I wish that somewhere in the midst of his prodigious consumption of the printed word the president would find time to read Pat Buchanan's State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. If he did he would learn the following:

The list goes on. Buchanan's book weighs every aspect of the immigration controversy - the argument that we need the workers, that they will assimilate, and so on - and finds them all wanting. Given the urgency of the topic State of Emergency may well be the most important book of our time, and President Bush would do well to read it. If for no other reason he should read it to discover why many of his supporters are growing increasingly disillusioned with his lack of leadership on this issue and his egregious failure to perform his sworn constitutional duty to uphold the laws of this nation.

RLC

Sunday I posted some comments on an essay by Heather Mac Donald which has triggered a debate among conservatives on the importance of Christianity to a conservative worldview. I'd like in this post to consider the argument she makes in her follow-up piece. Ms Mac Donald notes in this second column that the fundamental question, the "threshold question", is whether Christianity is true. She believes it is not, and the reason she gives is that she believes that the existence of a loving and just God is simply incompatible with the evil that afflicts our world:

In the course of laying out her argument, which she does quite persuasively, she writes many things to which Christians would do well to give careful consideration, but she does not, in my opinion, successfully defend her claim that the presence of evil refutes belief in the Christian God.

In fact, Ms Mac Donald is really attempting two arguments in her paper. One argument is against the inconsistent manner in which many Christians conceive of God's action in the world, an argument with which I concur. The other is an argument that seeks to show that the manifest evil of the world is incompatible with the existence of a God who is loving and just.

The nut of this second argument is found here, I think, where she writes:

Ms Mac Donald is implying that there is a contradiction contained in the conflation of the beliefs that God is able to prevent evil and wants to prevent evil with the manifest fact that evil exists. Actually, this was a popular argument among atheists ever since Epicurus sketched it out over 2000 years ago up until the 1960s when just about everyone finally realized that, in point of fact, there actually is no contradiction. God might well be omnipotent and omnibenevolent and still have a reason, nonetheless, for permitting evil. Such reasons might include a commitment to honor our autonomy and to grant us the freedom necessary to make us more than robots. Or it could be that preventing some evils would unleash even greater evils. There may be other reasons as well which lie beyond our ken, but the point is that as long as it's possible that God have such reasons the argument that His existence is logically incompatible with evil just doesn't work.

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that the God Ms Mac Donald accuses of being able to prevent the train crash, unbeknownst to us cries out in profound anguish as this terrible tragedy unfolds. It breaks His heart to see it happen, to know from all eternity that it is going to happen, and yet, although He could intervene to suspend the laws of nature and prevent it from happening, He is constrained by considerations, perhaps self-imposed, of which we are unaware to let the event unfold. Suppose, too, that the grief God experiences in allowing this terrible tragedy far exceeds that of any experienced by even the family of the victims. Suppose, finally, that God quickly folds those victims into His bosom and embraces them in love and joy forever. Just suppose that something like this happens. If so, would Ms Mac Donald now say that the God of Christianity is a "monster"? Yet isn't this a thoroughly Christian view of the God of the Bible?

It could be, however, that Ms Mac Donald is trying to say something a little less strong than that there is a contradiction between evil and the existence of the Christian God. Perhaps she's making the case that the existence of evil makes the existence of a loving and just God not logically impossible but rather highly improbable. God's existence, she might be taken to mean, is unlikely given the facts she lays out in her essay.

Now the facts that she sets forth certainly must be allowed to count as prima facie evidence against the existence of God, and if these were all the facts there are then we might agree that it seems indeed that God, if He exists, at least appears to be either uncaring and unjust, or capricious, or inscrutable. But there is more to consider here than just the argument based upon the world's horrors before we conclude that the existence of God is unlikely.

Consider the following example. Someone tells you that they know a Chinese man who is over seven feet tall. You, having seen lots of Chinese men, none of whom is much over six feet, are very dubious. But suppose you then learn that this person is a professional basketball player, a center in the NBA. These additional facts might soften your doubt and make you reconsider. The fact that he's Chinese may count against him being seven feet tall, but the other facts would count in favor of it.

Likewise, the existence of so much apparently gratuitous suffering, grief, pain, and terror count, on the face of things, against the existence of the Christian God, but then we should throw into the pot the classical arguments for God's existence - the cosmological and ontological arguments, and Kant's moral argument, for instance - as well as the religious experience of millions of believers, the fine-tuning of the universe which gives every appearance of having been designed, the existential argument that concludes that the existence of God is the best explanation for man's yearning for meaning, as well as for a ground for morality, dignity, human rights, justice, and for his desire to survive his own physical death, etc. We should also stir into the mix the irreducible complexity of some biological structures and systems and the ubiquity of information throughout the biosphere, both of which point prima facie to an intelligent author of life. We should add, too, the implausibility of a naturalistic origin of life and the phenomenom of consciousness. All of these must be counted in support of the proposition that God exists.

We might then reason that if God does indeed exist the testimony of the Scriptures and the internal witness of the Holy Spirit might also count as evidence that this God is both loving and just.

All of these lines of evidence may have explanations other than God, of course, but the point is that the evil we find ourselves surrounded by might also have an explanation other than the one Ms Mac Donald assumes.

She is right that Christians often respond to instances of evil much too glibly and with an unseemly assurance that they understand God's doings, but the shortcomings of some theists is hardly an argument against the existence of God.

One final note. At one point in her essay she writes this:

A believer might ask Ms Mac Donald from whence she derives her notion of justice. If she's correct that there is no transcendent source of moral truth then her concept of justice is perforce a matter of her own subjective preferences. Justice for one person may be, as Plato has Thrasymachus say, merely the interest of the stronger (or the ruler). For another person justice may be treating other people with dignity and kindness. If there is no God there's no way to decide that one definition is better or any more right than the other. The correct definition is simply whichever one Ms Mac Donald likes the best. In other words, if there's no transcendent standard for justice, Ms Mac Donald's last two sentences above are nonsensical.

RLC

The Washington Post has a must-read account by Laura Blumenfeld of an Israeli air-strike against Hamas leadership in 2003. It is especially important that those who suspect Israel of wanton killing of Palestinians read this article all the way to the end.

I wonder if the Palestinians put themselves through the same agonizing moral struggle before they launch their suicide bombers and rocket attacks against the Israelis. It's hard to imagine.

RLC

There's much of interest in this report in the British Daily Mail on a recent poll taken in that country. Here are some of the findings:

My first reaction to this story is surprise that the percentages were as modest as they are. I wonder how many respondents would have answered otherwise but didn't wish to seem to the pollster as being "illiberal".

This just goes to show that even a government bureaucrat can have the scales fall from her eyes if the evidence smacking her in the head hits her hard enough. It has long been an argument in this country that multiculturalism is counter-productively divisive. When we emphasize the things that make us different rather than those things that make us alike we should not be surprised that our communities remain balkanized and suspicious of one another. We should not be surprised, when we tell immigrants that they need not worry about assimilating into the larger culture and adopting the political values of the larger society, that they don't.

Immigration would be a good thing for both the immigrant and his new nation if the immigrant wished to become a full citizen in his new country, but Muslim immigrants too often don't. Their dream - I had an imam tell me this once in so many words - is to replace the constitutions of the countries in which they live with Islamic law. They'll use democratic processes to do this, but once they are successful in achieving political dominance the principles of democracy will be discarded and all law will be based on the Quran. Now there's an unsettling thought.

RLC

Gary Varvel captures pretty well the media's fascination with the "confessed" murderer of JonBenet Ramsey:

Iran is intent on becoming a nuclear power willing to use nuclear weapons against Israel. Tens of thousands of illegal aliens, many of them felons, some of them potential terrorists, are streaming across our southern border. The war in Iraq continues to shape the Middle East in ways that cry out for analysis. And all some of our television stations can talk about, for most of the twenty four hours of their broadcast day, is a ten year old murder case and every detail of the daily existence of a non-entity named John Mark Karr.

Either these cable news channels are staffed by some of the most incredibly shallow people in the country or else they have rightly divined that the country is populated by incredibly shallow television viewers, or both.

RLC

Has George Bush lost his will to fight the war on terrorism? After 9/11 the world shook in Afghanistan and Iraq as the United States rose up to smite its enemies, but a lot has happened in the last three years, and much of it is not good. We are threatened in Iraq by Iranian and Syrian machinations which are carried out with impunity. Moqtada al-Sadr leads Iraq closer to civil war, and we hestitate to neutralize him. Israel has Hezbollah, a terrorist organization which has killed hundreds of Americans, on the ropes, and we vote in the U.N. for an otherwise meaningless resolution that allows them to survive. It has become clear that the administration's war against Islamic terrorism has taken a turn away from an aggressively offensive strategy and seems to have morphed into a strategy of merely keeping the Islamo-fascists at arm's length.

The Iraq experience has certainly sapped the will of many Americans. It is not just the drain on our resources and soldiers' lives and well-being that have taken a toll on our resolve, but also the relentless negativism of the media which has refused to acknowledge that anything worthwhile was being accomplished there.

Now, increasingly, we're hearing military voices which were once optimistic, expressing implied skepticism. We're seeing former supporters of the president's policies start to edge closer to the side of the ship. We're seeing Republican politicians up for re-election who lack the fortitude to campaign as supporters of the president and who instead pusillanimously scurry away from him.

Part of the blame for this must lie with the White House which has been notably incapable of articulating its vision and strategy to the general public in a very convincing way. President Bush is probably the least articulate man to occupy the White House in my lifetime, and he apparently thinks that he does himself little good by trying to take his case to the public on a regular basis. I think this is a mistake. People need to be continually reminded of what the nature of the struggle is, what our goals are, what our strategy and tactics are, and how we are doing in the contest. Instead the president, to his detriment, lets a hostile media frame the debate and pretty much have the floor.

Part of the blame must also lie also with a Department of Defense which has never made a compelling counter-case to those who claimed that we needed more troops from the beginning of the post-invasion period. They seem to think that the criticisms are too uninformed to be worth their notice, but they're not. Millions of Americans would like to know why we didn't send in more troops when it became obvious that Iraq was spiralling into an insurgency. Their curiosity goes unsatisfied.

Finally, part of the blame must lie with a political opposition which has been the insurgents' best tool in their war against the coalition forces. Nothing has degraded the ability of the administration to respond appropriately to events on the ground than the relentless sniping, criticism, and carping of the president's political foes. No matter what the president does it gets distorted and maligned by an adversary media and political party that acts as if they really believe the rhetoric of those who proclaim that George Bush is a greater threat to world peace and safety than are the Islamo-fascist jihadis.

Even so, there are glimmers of hope. The president sounded as determined as ever to continue to fight the war against terrorists in his press conference last Monday. Moreover, it may be that our vote for Res. 1701 was a consequence of our assessment that Ehud Olmert was not interesting in prosecuting the war against Hezbollah and was himself hoping that the U.N. would step in to stop it. If that's so, there would have been no point in the U.S. voting against the resolution to end hostilities.

The next several months will tell us a lot about the president's determination. Will we neutralize or eliminate al-Sadr? Will we hold the Iranians to their claim that they're willing to enter into serious negotiations over their nuclear weapons program? Will we offer full support to Israel when the conflict in Lebanon flares up again? If not, then we can conclude that the aggressive phase of the war against Islamic terror is over and we will have pretty much decided to play rope-a-dope for the last two years of the Bush presidency.

RLC

There's a fascinating debate taking place among conservatives affiliated with National Review surrounding the question of the legitimacy of Christian belief and whether one can be an atheist and still be a conservative. The debate was triggered by this column by Heather Mac Donald in the American Conservative. Michael Novak here and Mac Donald replies to Novak in this thoughtful and challenging essay.

Heather Mac Donald is very bright, very well-educated, and usually right, but I think this is one time when she's not. In her first piece, the one which began the discussion, she makes the error of essentially arguing that because the existence of God is not a sufficient condition for people, and nations, to be moral that neither, therefore, is His existence a necessary condition for morality. She wishes to stress that one need not be religious in order to be conservative. Some of what she says in the column is certainly true, but there are some things, too, from which I must dissent. Here are a couple of examples with commentary.

She writes:

Perhaps this is true, perhaps the moral sense of unbelievers is as secure as that of a theist, but as I've frequently argued here at Viewpoint, most recently here, it doesn't seem likely. Suppose we ask Ms Mac Donald why the golden rule is right in the first place or why anyone should try to see himself in others. Why does she think that these maxims should be embraced? Is it that they're morally right? Granting that I'm being a bit unfair by putting words in her mouth, perhaps the exchange might go something like this:

To put it differently, the skeptic has no grounds for opposing tyranny other than that she simply doesn't like it. She may believe that tyranny is not the best way to produce a happy society, but whose happiness is the skeptic concerned about? The happiness of the masses? Why, on the skeptic's naturalistic assumptions, should the happiness of the masses be privileged over the happiness of the rulers?

Ms Mac Donald's skepticism reduces her moral judgments to arbitrary expressions of personal tastes and preferences. There's no reason why others should find them persuasive unless they share her subjective predilections.

She adds this:

To accept a claim like this, however, we must ignore an awful lot of history. We must turn a blind eye, for instance, to the bitter 20th century fruits of the enlightenment - most notably national socialism and communism with their holocausts, killing fields, and over 100 million dead around the globe.

It's true that in some ways we've become a kinder and gentler people. We no longer practice slavery, we have legal procedures to try to insure justice, civil rights legislation, and extensive welfare systems to care for the poor and the sick, but it's not clear that any of these are particularly due to enlightenment skepticism and considerable evidence to conclude that they emerged out of a maturing Judeo-Christian worldview (Indeed, as did the enlightenment itself). See, for example, the arguments made by Alvin Schmidt in his book Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization.

Ms Mac Donald concludes with this observation:

This is true enough. Too many Christians in this country suffered too few qualms about slavery, the treatment of the Indians, or the use of fission and fire-bombing in WWII (products, incidentally, of enlightenment science). But I would go one step further and say that a secular value system, by removing any transcendent ground for values, makes a system founded on injustice and brutality not only more likely, but also free from any possibility of moral disapprobation.

If Christians act unjustly or brutally they're acting contrary to their fundamental beliefs and principles. If an atheist acts unjustly or brutally he violates nothing other than the arbitrary and subjective standards established by others and which have no moral authority over him whatsoever.

It is the conservatism's' recognition of this which places Ms Mac Donald's views in the minority among her fellow conservatives.

RLC

Tropical storm Ernesto appears to be headed right for ... New Orleans. New Orleanians re-elected Racist Ray Nagin as mayor on Racist Ray's promise that their city will be "a chocolate city at the end of the day", and maybe he'll soon see his prophecy fulfilled. If Ernesto progresses to a hurricane and hits New Orleans, the only people who'll be living amidst the chocolate brown flood waters by next summer will be the people too poor and too helpless to move anywhere else. These people, as we were endlessly reminded by the news media last fall, are primarily African-American.

I'm sure that this time around Mayor Nagin will show more leadership and foresight than he was able to summon last year and make certain that he has enough federal officials on hand to plan for the evacuation, turn the keys in the school busses, and drive those citizens who need transport to safer regions out of town.

Why does he need the feds to do that, you ask? Why can't city officials be mobilized to do what's necessary to assist their taxpayers? Well, when you're busy doing important stuff like turning your city into a racially homogenous community you can't be expected to do little things like plan how to handle an evacuation. That's what the federal government is for.

RLC

We've linked to this site before, about a year ago, I guess, but it's worth another visit. Notice that as you view the earth's position in the Milky Way that it's actually situated between two spiral arms. Guillermo Gonzalez points out in Privileged Planet that this location is absolutely essential not only for intelligent life like us to exist on earth but also for that life to be able to do significant science.

This is because if our solar system were in a spiral arm there would be so much dust and debris in our immediate neighborhood that it would have a chaotic effect on the earth's surface and consequently on any life trying to evolve there. It would also obscure our view of the sky which would have prevented us, if we somehow could have emerged in such an uncongenial environment, from ever really learning anything about our universe. This in turn would have impeded the development of modern physics.

Notice, too, how far earth is from the galactic center (about 27,000 light years). This puts us pretty much in the middle of the galactic habitable zone, a band around the galactic center in which conditions are suitable for life. If our solar system were much closer or much further away from the center, intelligent life would be impossible.

Perhaps we should give thanks to random chance and the laws of physics for accidentally producing such a serendipitous bit of good fortune.

RLC

From another fine piece of analysis by Victor Davis Hanson at National Review Online.

RLC

The New York Times has an article that gives us some insight as to what life in a Muslim country is like for Christian converts:

As the Muslim population of Europe grows and their demands that Islamic law be allowed to govern Muslim communities grow more insistent, it will not be surprising if stories like this start emerging more frequently from "Eurabia".

RLC

Mona Charen at NRO passes along a letter that was purportedly sent to Senator Sarbanes of Maryland and which now seems to be making the rounds on the 'net:

June 7, 2006

The Honorable Paul S. Sarbanes
309 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington DC, 20510

Dear Senator Sarbanes,

As a native Marylander and excellent customer of the Internal Revenue Service, I am writing to ask for your assistance. I have contacted the Immigration and Naturalization Service in an effort to determine the process for becoming an illegal alien and they referred me to you. My reasons for wishing to change my status from U.S. Citizen to illegal alien stem from the bill which was recently passed by the Senate and for which you voted. If my understanding of this bill's provisions is accurate, as an illegal alien who has been in the United States for five years, what I need to do to become a citizen is to pay a $2,000 fine and income taxes for three of the last five years.

I know a good deal when I see one and I am anxious to get the process started before everyone figures it out. Simply put, those of us who have been here legally have had to pay taxes every year so I'm excited about the prospect of avoiding two years of taxes in return for paying a $2,000 fine. Is there any way that I can apply to be illegal retroactively? This would yield an excellent result for me and my family because we paid heavy taxes in 2004 and 2005.

Another benefit in gaining illegal status would be that my daughter would receive preferential treatment relative to her law school applications. If you would provide me with an outline of the process to become illegal (retroactively if possible) and copies of the necessary forms, I would be most appreciative.

Thank you for your assistance.

Your Loyal Constituent,
Pete McGlaughlin

Having passed the immigration bill to which Mr. McGlaughlin refers, our august senators have succeeded in making it even harder to believe that they are the "best and the brightest" of America's political class. Mr. McGlaughlin reveals them for the lightweights that they are. Perhaps one day we'll succeed in making an IQ test a qualification for being elected to Congress.

I hope if Mr. McGlaughlin gets one of the requisite forms for changing his status that he passes one along to me.

RLC

As a followup to yesterday's post titled What is Conservatism? Pt. I let's look at Russell Kirk's classic work The Conservative Mind, in which he lists a number of conservative principles. Here are five of the most important along with a bit of explanation:

1. Belief in a transcendent order or natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. Most conservatives hold that religious belief is the foundation of a just government. It doesn't guarantee that government will be just, but few, if any, governments which explicitly abandon the transcendent order will be just.

2. Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism of most radical systems. Conservatives generally maintain that excellence is achieved by a relative few and that those few should not be held back by economic or social disincentives or other constraints. The attempt to "level" society by, for example, grouping students in schools homogenously, holds back the very best and does nothing to help the slower students.

3. Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless" society. Equality before God, and before courts of law are recognized by conservatives, but in every other sphere inequality reigns. Attempts to conform people to the Procrustean bed of a classless society are harmful to everyone involved and result in a culture in which its most productive members are stifled and repressed. Conservatives embrace an elitism based upon values. Some values are better than others and some ways of living are better than others. The idea of a classless society is as impractical as the idea of a sinless society. As long as some people are more intelligent, more ambitious, more industrious, and more disciplined in their personal lives than others there will be classes, and there should be.

4. Persuasion that freedom, property, and religion are closely linked. No one makes this connection more forcefully than Tocqueville in Democracy in America. No society is free if the people are not free to own property and to worship as they please. Likewise, freedom, for Tocqueville, requires religion, at least the Judeo-Christian religion, as a foundation. Tocqueville writes:

5. Resistance to the idol of change and a trust in custom and tradition. The wisdom of the ages is not to be lightly set aside. Change for change's sake is a foolhardy experiment. Reform is only genuine reform if it takes into account what we have learned about human nature over the centuries. Traditions bind people together and add meaning to their lives. To seek to overturn traditions, as the left tirelessly endeavors to do, is to seek to dissolve the glues that give us cohesion as a society.

Kirk also lists a number of liberal principles among which we might mention these four:

1. Belief in the perfectibility of man and illimitable progress. Conservatives hold to the view that man is fallen, deeply flawed, inherently sinful. Liberals believe that man is inherently good and, to the extent that he is corrupted, he is so by his environment. It is a tenet of the liberal faith that if man could be situated in the appropriate socio-economic environment all social pathologies would disappear.

2. Contempt for tradition. The key to our continued advance is to cast off the shackles of mindless custom. The liberal, confusing social progress with simple change, makes an idol of progress (even to the point of calling himself a "progressive").

3. Political, social and economic egalitarianism. Private property and personal wealth are the chief causes of man's corruption. The former should be abolished and the latter should be redistributed. The existence of socio-economic classes imply that some men are superior to others and should therefore be abolished. Liberalism, despite its emphasis on diversity, leads to a homogenized culture wherein everything is levelled to the lowest common denominator.

4. Complete trust in Reason. Moral truth is not to be found in dusty old tomes nor learned from addle-pated old clergy, but is to be discovered through the application of our intellect. Reason, not revelation, is the key to all the knowledge we need and of which we are capable. Conservatives, by contrast, point to the communist and fascist ideologies of the twentieth century as paradigmatic examples of the sorts of states and outcomes one might expect when man's intellect is given free reign in determining matters of right and wrong.

RLC

This article dates from 2000, but it gives us a lot of insight into Muslim culture. It discusses the practice of "honor killings" and the social pressures placed on families to carry them out. It sounds, quite frankly, pretty depraved. Here's part of it:

There are those who say that what's wrong for us is not necessarily wrong for people living in other cultures. I wonder if they'd say that after reading the above. Any culture which encourages, or even condones, the slaughter of young rape victims or, for that matter, the killing of any young girl for almost any reason, is sick to its core. It's a culture of death. These societies haven't progressed beyond the barbarisms they practiced as a way of life 4000 years ago, and Islam, apparently, hasn't been of much use in helping them to advance beyond their primitive savagery.

HT: Cheat Seeking Missiles.

RLC

It appears that the powers that be in the Vatican have finally wearied of the unfortunate pronouncements of their director of the Vatican Observatory, Dr. George Coyne, who delighted in speaking ex cathedra on the Darwinism/ ID debate in accents that were decidedly out of step with the views of the Church:

We await the inept but inevitable comparisons to Galileo. Meanwhile, you can find more on the cashiering of Dr. Coyne at the link.

RLC

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gives the world his answer to their demands that Iran cease production of weapons grade fissile material:

RLC

Remember those news reports of Israeli missile strikes against Red Cross ambulances trying to ferry injured civilians to hospitals? Turns out that, like the doctored photos, it was made-up news. Michelle Malkin has the details.

It really is incredible that our media and many of our citizens have been prepared to believe everything that the terrorists say. They're completely skeptical of anything the Israelis or our own government tells them, but they're eager to accept anything, no matter how horrible, that a group like Hezbollah claims about the Israelis. These are people who hide behind children, for heaven's sake, and yet they have credibility with a segment of the American public willing to believe the worst about America and its allies.

RLC

Not receiving much attention in the tittering about The Princeton Review's Top Ten Party Schools in the U.S. is their accompanying list of Top Ten "Stone Cold Sober" Schools - a list that parents looking to send their child to a school where they won't become a character in a Tom Wolfe novel might wish to consult.

The top 10 were:

It's good to know that there are still some schools which have high expectations concerning their students' conduct and which resist the trend, to which so many other schools have succumbed, to turn the four years of a student's life spent on their campus into a perpetual bacchanalia.

I wonder, though: Where's West Point?

RLC

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Kahlilzad, has a very informative piece in the Wall Street Journal on the efforts ongoing in Baghdad to stabilize that city and to eliminate the sectarian violence.

Kahlilzad writes:

Read the rest to see what's being done to stop it.

RLC

For those of our readers who have an interest in the philosophical issues surrounding the Darwinism/ID debate there's an excellent discussion with Del Ratzsch, perhaps the leading philosopher of science on this issue, here.

HT: Telic Thoughts

Meanwhile, Darwinians are up in arms over the forthcoming broadcast by D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Church in Florida of a tv special that draws a direct line from Darwin to Naziism. Bill Dembski has some background at Uncommon Descent and also shares a few of his favorite quotes from evolutionists which certainly appear to indict them for clearing the philosophical landing zone for the Nazis' views on eugenics and "survival of the fittest."

RLC

Ross Douthat writes an interesting and rather scholarly column in The American Conservative about the philosophical and historical differences between liberalism and conservatism and the difficulties involved in defining the latter. He concludes the essay with these words:

Mr. Dothat serves us up some meaty fare in this article, but there's more to the meal than this, I think. Conservatism is not merely "standing athwart history and yelling stop" as Bill Buckley famously summed it up. Conservatives, as well as liberals, generally operate from a set of axioms, more about which in Part II tomorrow.

RLC

The two Muslim students booted from a plane the other day when passengers mutinied are expressing their "shock" and "despair" at what happened to them:

No, but it does raise the odds, and who wants to take unnecessary chances? See also this development and this follow-up.

RLC

President Bush's approval rating, which had been dragging along the bottom of the political lake, has perked up recently, and is now hovering around 41%. It's hard to say exactly why this is except that it seems that approval ratings are buoyed not by any particular successes, but rather more by the absence of bad news. There hasn't been too much of this lately, so Bush has recovered the (tentative) approval of most of his GOP base.

Should the bad news continue to remain in hiding Bush's numbers will probably rise to around 47%, almost all of which would reflect his Republican support. If, beyond all precedent for this administration, there should be a string of positive developments taking up space in the MSM his approval rating might even crack the 50% barrier as a few independents sashay in his direction.

If so, we'll have to post guards on all the bridges and high buildings to prevent Democrats from attempting to put an end to their despair, as the object of their animus rises phoenix-like from the ashes of what they thought for sure was his political auto-de-fe.

RLC

There was a time when the ideological left was the champion of the first amendment. This was back a generation or two ago when the perceived threats to free speech came from conservatives who wished to prevent salacious literature and pornography from flooding our culture. When it was the freedom to use vulgar and profane speech and lewd images in our public entertainment and discourse, the left was in full throat demanding that we respect first amendment guarantees of free expression. Statements like these were commonplace:

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise," Noam Chomsky said, "we don't believe in it at all."

"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us," opined Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

How times have changed. Today censorship and speech codes are almost exclusively promulgated by the left, and, of course, it's not pornography they seek to stifle but rather political and religious speech which are clearly protected by the first amendment. Consider the story of two young women at Georgia Tech, Ruth Malhotra and Orit Sklar, as told by themselves:

A few notable exceptions like Nat Hentoff notwithstanding, the secular left, including the ACLU, seems to have lost interest in the old battle cry attributed to Voltaire: "I might hate what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it." It seems instead that they're only interested in defending the Bill of Rights when the protections it guarantees can be used to advance their own ideological agenda.

RLC

Strategy Page gives us a history lesson on how Hezbollah came about and why it wields so much power. Their analysis also discusses Israel's options which SP thinks are limited to two:

The column closes with this:

The whole piece is very much worth reading.

RLC

Does it strike you as weird as it does me that the news media have gone wall-to-wall to give us every detail of the doings of the man who claims to be the person responsible for the death of JonBenet Ramsey ten years ago, including the complete menu of what he had to eat on his plane ride from Bangkok? Yet there has been almost nothing on kidnapped Fox News' reporter Steve Centanni and camera man Olaf Wiig who are still missing in Gaza.

Just when you think that the media couldn't be more shallow, just when you think their priorities couldn't be more perverse, they refuse to conform to your expectations and rush to fill the airwaves with the fantasies of some insignificant epicene psycho. Meanwhile, two men's lives hang in the balance in the Middle East, all but unnoticed by reporters and talking heads who can't be distracted from what they apparently believe to be the really important "breaking news".

Maybe this is unfair. The shows I saw did expend a lot of coverage on Samuel L. Jackson's vulgar dialogue in a movie, no doubt eminently forgettable, about snakes on an airplane. Perhaps that was seen as an important news story as well. Snakes and sickos on airplanes. Lord help us.

In 1961, when there were only three channels, FCC chairman Newton Minnow described television as a vast wasteland. It's added a lot of choices since then, but, notwithstanding the amazing number of options, seems only to have grown more arid.

RLC

Time magazine, which has run eleven issues since 1992 whose covers have been graced with Hillary Clinton's visage, declares her "ready to run" for the presidency in 2008. With eleven covers dedicated to Mrs. Clinton there doesn't seem to be much question who Time will be endorsing if she does.

At any rate, a friend of mine has a cousin who is an air marshall. He related this story to me about an encounter his cousin had with Senator Clinton:

We have to consider the possibility, of course, that the details were not exactly as the air marshall remembered them. On the other hand, if events did unfold as he related them then this says something very unpleasant about Senator Clinton.

It reminds me, in what it reveals of the senator, of the time Senator Kerry scolded and demeaned a secret service agent with whom he accidentally collided on a ski slope. Politicians like Clinton and Kerry profess to care about the "little people", but stories like these raise one's doubts. It seems rather that at least some of our political leaders are so consumed with arrogance and a sense of self-importance that they forget that it is they who are the servants and it is tax-payers whom they serve.

RLC

Juan Williams lends his voice to the chorus of African American writers who are demanding that blacks look at themselves for the causes of black failure in America and look to themselves for the solutions. He writes:

Part of the problem black America faces is that African Americans have been conditioned by liberal political and social philosophy to believe that racism is the cause of all their ills. They've been taught that doing what Williams, Cosby, Shelby Steele and many others are doing is tantamount to blaming the victim. They've been led to think that the problems of the poor can be resolved by throwing more money at them. They've embraced the lies of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s that whispered, like the serpent in the garden, that drugs were liberating and that sex is a form of recreation, that families don't need fathers, that single motherhood is just fine. Their children have languished in sub-standard schools whose educational mission is impeded by teacher unions which in some cases weigh down urban schools with onerous salary and working condition demands and which fight tooth and nail to prevent any form of school choice from being made available to parents.

In other words, modern African-Americans are indeed victims, but not of racism, per se. They are victims of something whose consequences are just as insidious - post-WWII secular liberalism. The sooner blacks shed the chains that have held them in thrall to the Democratic party, and the nostrums that have been foisted upon them for the last forty years, the sooner they will begin to benefit from opportunities which have been for too long unappreciated and unavailed.

RLC

Kofi Annan has demonstrated yet again why his tenure at the helm of the U.N. has been a farce. The other day he criticized Israel for violating the ceasefire by conducting a raid whose aim was to prevent a resupply of weapons from reaching Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah, which, under the conditions of the cease-fire was supposed to disarm, refuses to do so, and Annan says nothing. The Lebanese, who under the conditions of the cease-fire, were supposed to disarm Hezbollah, refuse to do so, and Annan says nothing. The French, who, under the conditions of the cease-fire, which they brokered, were supposed to insert a strong military force into Lebanon, refuse to do so, and Annan says nothing. The U.N. member nations which, under the conditions of the cease-fire, were supposed to contribute 15,000 troops to police southern Lebanon, have been painfully slow to do so, and Annan says nothing.

But let Israel try to protect itself by doing what the rest of the world is supposed to do but won't, and Kofi Annan has no difficulty finding the words to express his displeasure. No wonder so many see the U.N. as little more than a clique of disreputable thugs and buffoons from which civilized nations do well to distance themselves.

RLC

Maybe politicians and security authorities recoil from the horrors of ethnic and religious profiling but evidently the average citizen hasn't gotten the message yet. The British Daily Mail informs us that:

If the two Asian men on this plane were indeed innocent then their inconvenience is unfortunate, but they have no one to blame for it but their fellow male Muslims between the ages of 17 and 40.

See also this brief op-ed at The American Thinker.

RLC

It's one thing for Republicans and conservatives to question whether we're on the right track in Iraq and to start insisting on substantive results, but when people like Joe Scarborough, host of a low-ratings television talk show on MSNBC called Scarborough Country, suggest that "George Bush is an idiot", they have crossed the line of legitimate and civil political disagreement and have joined the ranks of liberals for whom this sort of invective is considered standard discourse.

The Washington Post's Peter Baker reports that:

"as these other people"? How much intellectual depth does that sentence evince?

Scarborough is one of those whom Thomas Paine, surveying the early desertion and disaffection from the ranks of Washington's Continental Army, referred to as summer soldiers and sunshine warriors. They're with you as long as conditions are congenial and the struggle looks promising, but as soon as adversity strikes they slip out of camp.

Machiavelli cautioned his Prince to be wary of those who profess their unwavering loyalty and willingness to give their lives for the regime when dangers were remote, but when the enemy is pounding at the gate and the Prince needs all the help he can muster, he finds these "loyal cadres" to have fled the city.

People like Joe Scarborough, not content to simply critique the president's policy, but wishing also to boost an anemic viewing audience by insulting him in the most demeaning and humiliating way, would have no doubt led the flight from Washington's encampment. What he did was a cheap shot taken for the sake of television ratings and it turned Scarborough Country into an uncivil moral wasteland.

Besides, where does Joe Scarborough get off calling into question somebody else's intelligence?

RLC

Strategy Page assesses the damage wrought by both sides in the recent Lebanon war:

No wonder Hezbollah was content to have a cease-fire. Despite all their bluster about a historic victory they're reeling from the Israeli strikes. Fortunately for them there's a U.N. that can be counted upon to ride to their rescue whenever their fate is looking bleak.

RLC

Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is trailing Democrat challenger Bob Casey by six (47% - 41%) in a three way race. Republican challenger Lynn Swann is trailing incumbent Governor Ed Rendell by 10 (51% - 41%), according to a Strategic Vision poll.

There's time to catch up, of course, and Santorum has been closing the gap, but he is clearly in trouble. All those blue collar, pro-life Catholic Democrats who would have voted for Santorum if he were running against a pro-choice opponent will instead be voting for the pro-life Catholic Democrat Bob Casey this time around.

Pennsylvania's political demographic looks like a big T with Democratic strongholds Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the southeast and southwest corners respectively and the rest of the state tilting with varying degrees of slant toward the Republicans. If Santorum can get good turnout from the T he might be able to offset the big advantage that Casey has in the corners.

As for Swann, he has missed too many opportunities to take advantage of Rendell's biggest vulnerability, his lethargic response to the need for property tax reform, especially after he had originally promised to address it in his first campaign. He might pull off an upset even yet, but political observers in the state aren't betting on it.

RLC

Most Christians wrestle with doubt at some point in their lives, but not Joe Carter. Joe struggles, if that's the right word for it, with certainty. Perhaps, after having read his delightful post on the subject, we might say a prayer that God will send a doubt or two his way so that he can be more like the rest of us mortals.

RLC

If ever you or someone you know is tempted to think that theism is not intellectually respectable you might, on your own or with your friend, reflect on these passages from atheistic philosopher Quentin Smith's Metaphilosophy of Naturalism:

Of course Smith, being an atheist, believes that the theists' arguments are ultimately unpersuasive, but the point is that he also is highly impressed with the quality of thinking that theistic philosophers, primarily Christians, are turning out and laments that his fellow naturalists have not met the challenge very convincingly. It may be that the reason they haven't is simply because there really is no convincing response available to them.

RLC

Debka File has fallen out of favor with bloggers who seem to have grown suspicious of its credibility. It is with some reluctance, therefore, that I link to this article which puts an entirely different slant on the recent war than anything I've seen previously. It's very interesting. Whether it's credible I'll leave to you to decide.

While you're there you might be interested in this news piece which reports that Lebanon is willingly turning a blind eye to Israeli interdiction of Syrian and Iranian resupply efforts.

RLC

A recent Comment article by Vincent Bacote argues that racism still exists in America. His basis for this assertion seems to be that many upscale neighborhoods have few if any blacks living in them and many Christian schools have few black faculty.

Now it may be true that racism is still a problem in American culture - though I'd argue that white racism is no longer a significant barrier to black progress and much of the overt racism that persists in our culture is to be found among blacks - but how Bacote's argument supports this claim is far from clear. The absence of blacks from parts of our socio-economic culture is no more evidence of racism than the dearth of white NCAA basketball players is evidence of racism.

In order to persuade me that racism is behind the lack of black children in the backyards of our toniest communities and the scant numbers of black faces in the faculty yearbook pictures at evangelical schools, I would need to have shown to me evidence that black families who had the means to live in the exclusive neighborhoods were denied that opportunity and that blacks with adequate credentials were denied faculty appointments despite having applied for job openings. Mr. Bacote doesn't do this. He simply points to the absence of blacks and infers that racism must be the cause.

The closest he comes to making a case is when he writes:

I'm afraid that I have long ago grown suspicious of what we might call the argument from personal perception. A man is denied a loan by a bank, say, and he simply assumes that it's because of his race when in fact race may have had not nearly as much to do with it as did his financial history. Another black man is stopped in a white neighborhood by the police. He assumes that his crime is "Driving While Black" and that the cops are racist when in fact they've been told to look for a black man who is reported to have assaulted someone in that neighborhood. These two individuals both perceive themselves to be the "victims" of white racism when actually neither of them were. They then extrapolate from their experience to the conclusion that racism is pervasive when indeed there is no warrant in their experience for such a conclusion. No doubt some people have experienced genuine racism at the hands of both whites and blacks, but I'd like to hear the facts of the case and not just be expected to take it on trust that the episode in question really was motivated by racial animosity.

The question why minorities "remain on the outside" is an important one to answer if that tragic circumstance is ever going to change, but we'll never arrive at a helpful answer to it until we get over the reflexive tendency to blame white racism first.

RLC

Joy at Telic Thoughts points us to this thread at Phyrangula in which we find Darwinians upset that so few Americans embrace the theory of naturalistic evolution. An economist is quoted as saying that:

One of the readers of this blog then asks whether establishing such disincentives is feasible or practical. It never occurs to him/her to ask whether it's moral. Another proposes a societal disincentive on fundamentalists - a breeding ban - and no one seems to take exception to his suggestion:

Instead of calling Dan on his fascism and placing a swastika next to his name, the commenters traipse merrily off on a tangent, giving themselves to the question whether capitalist freedom is better than socialist authoritarianism. Presumably it's difficult, after all, to imagine how a breeding ban could be imposed on Christians in a capitalist system, but not so difficult to imagine how it could be accomplished under a more authoritarian regime.

Pharyngula affords us a very troubling glimpse of atheists engaged in what passes for them as moral discourse.

RLC

Since our inception over two years ago we have maintained that the legalization of gay marriage would end marriage as an institution by opening the door to any union into which any number of people desire to enter. Once the gender of the partners in a marriage no longer matters, we've argued, there remain no logical grounds for thinking that the number of partners matters. Such arguments were greeted with derisory smirks by the likes of Andrew Sullivan and other defenders of gay marriage. It's nonsense, they scoffed, to think that groups of people would be petitioning our courts for the marriage franchise.

Nonsense it may be but now comes word that precisely this is being demanded, not by fringe dwellers but by mainstream thinkers in American culture. Ryan Anderson explains what's happening in the Weekly Standard:

Anyone who cared to could see this coming the day the first gay couple petitioned the courts to be allowed to marry. Perhaps, though, the news is not all bad. Now that the logical implications of gay marriage are out in the open and clear to all but the most obtuse observer, it may be hoped that courts and legislatures which may have otherwise been sympathetic to the wish of gays and lesbians to have same-sex unions legalized will now take pause.

Meanwhile, the "Beyond Gay Marriage" agenda should be publicized far and wide so that the American public understands that gay marriage is not just about gays anymore.

RLC

Federal District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor has ruled the NSA wiretaps to be unconstitutional. Her decision has been appealed and will almost certainly be overturned by an appellate court. Meanwhile, although the Dems are gleeful about the ruling, more sober observers seem to think that it's pretty disgraceful:

PowerLine's lawyers find the decision completely devoid of legal reasoning, sound or otherwise. One of them says:

The Washington Post, no friend of the Bush administration, roasts the decision over a hot flame:

Apparently, Judge Taylor believes that the constitution says whatever she wants it to. It is astonishing to us that the president's political opponents feel so free to claim that he's doing something nefarious by employing these surveillance techniques to protect the lives of Americans when precisely what the law is on the matter is so murky that not even a federal judge can discern what the exact violations of the law are.

That being the case, shouldn't the president be given the benefit of the doubt until the courts finally sort this out and clarify exactly what the law prohibits and what it allows?

Speaking of the delight with which the Democrats have received this decision, Chuck Asay asks a rather pointed question:

RLC

Having cited Strategy Page's analysis the other day in which they argue that Hezbollah suffered a grievous defeat at the hands of the Israelis we offer today a different point of view.

Ralph Peters, for example, claims in the New York Post that Israel lost the first round.

Whether Israel won or lost is not so easy to discern. Certainly quitting the field before any of their stated objectives were met sounds much like a defeat, but if the cease-fire works Israel will have gained one objective which is the security of its northern border. Of course, the cease-fire is very unlikely to work, for reasons Peters enumerates, in which case all depends on how Israel reacts to that. If they temporize and vacillate, as they have under Olmert, then it will be their complete undoing. The rest of the Arab world will catch the scent of weakness and fear and they will pounce like ravenous wolves, ripping the country to bits.

If, on the other hand, they respond with resolve and crushing force against Hezbollah and clear them out, not only of the south but also the Bekaa, the one month war will be seen as little more than a false start.

Hezbollah refuses to disarm, the kidnapped soldiers have not been returned, the U.N. appears to be reverting to form and reneging on their promise of a peacekeeping force, the French are reverting to form and have lost interest. It's just a matter of time until hostilities break out again. Are the Israelis preparing for the inevitable?

RLC

Here's a web-site that offers a funny parody of the movement among evolutionary atheists to refer to themselves as "brights". The first paragraph of their description of Intelligent Design goes like this:

That's about right. If you visit them make sure you check out their piece on the evolution of the bacterial flagellum.

RLC

Rebecca Goldstein recalls with fondness Baruch Spinoza's dream of founding ethics on reason. She concludes her essay with these words:

Well, not exactly. The Founding Fathers valued the virtues that Goldstein and Spinoza praise, but they realized that those virtues cannot ultimately be based upon reason. They can only be based upon the will and nature of a transcendent Creator. Reason can tell us how best to accomplish some goal, but it cannot tell us whether the goal itself is good or right. If one's goal, for example, is to set up a government wherein all men are equal then reason might be able to inform us of the most effective way of going about achieving that goal, but it cannot tell us that the goal itself is any better or more right than establishing a state wherein some men are slaves.

Contra Spinoza the proposition that "each individual is worthy of ethical consideration" is not a law of nature. Nature nowhere imposes upon us a duty to assign worth to other human beings. The ethical law of nature, if there is one, is that each of us should look to our own interests. Nature teaches that life is every man for himself. The only basis anyone has for imputing dignity and worth to others is the conviction that all men are created in the image of God, that each of us belongs to and is loved by God. He demands that each of us respect what is His, the objects of His love. If there is no God, as Goldstein seems to hope, then human beings are no different than cattle, a herd of animals to be manipulated, exploited and slaughtered by whomever has the power and the desire to do so.

Not only must moral value ultimately be grounded in a transcendent God if it is to have any existence at all, but so, too, must our confidence in reason itself. If all we are is material stuff, chemical reactions, then what grounds do we have for believing that our cognitive faculties are reliable? They have evolved to suit us for survival, not to lead us to truth. Sometimes reason produces truth, sometimes it leads to error. What grounds do we have for trusting it if all it is is a series of biochemical reactions occuring in nerve cells in the brain? Unless there is a God who has created us and instilled in us the cognitive apparatus required to discover truth we have no basis for thinking that any belief we hold on the basis of reason is correct. Indeed, in order to argue that reason is trustworthy we have to employ our reason, and thus we must assume the very thing we're trying to prove. The only appropriate philosophy for the materialist is a radical skepticism about everything.

Goldstein wishes to be a skeptic about God but not about reason, but people like her delude themselves if they think that human reason is the key that enables them to shed the chains of theistic belief. Autonomous reason, unanchored to theistic belief, is like a mirage which appears substantial enough until it is approached, at which point it just seems to evanesce. Trust in reason alone, if pursued all the way to the end, winds up in nihilism and despair.

RLC

Strategy Page argues that Hezbollah suffered a serious defeat in its month-long war with Israel:

Michael Ramirez is also a little skeptical of Hezbollah's claims to have won their confrontation with Israel:

Hezbollah's survival of the Israeli onslaught is indeed similar to the survival of other Arab nations whose militaries engaged the Israelis. That the governments of Syria, Jordan and Egypt withstood the Israeli military in the sixties and seventies could be claimed to be "proof" that these nations fought the Israelis to a draw, but that doesn't seem to be an interpretation supported by the fates of their respective armies.

The big question raised by SP's analysis is whether an Olmert government will have the will to reinitiate hostilities when it becomes clear that Hezbollah has no intention of disarming or being disarmed.

RLC

The Guardian reports the shocking news that Darwinism is on the way out in England. Too many students are accepting the notion that God had something to do with their being here. Here are a couple of excerpts from the Guardian article:

Imagine. As soon as a teacher gives a "reasonable hearing" to non-Darwinian accounts, students abandon the Darwinian version. I wonder why that is. There's no wonder, though, why the Darwinians don't want ID taught in American public schools. If it were, within a generation or two Darwinians would be as scarce as passenger pigeons.

HT to Uncommon Descent.

RLC

Tony Blankley has high praise for Pat Buchanan's latest book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. Here are some excerpts from Blankley's column:

I think I have just enough time to purchase it and get it read by Labor Day.

RLC

Word is leaking out that one of the suspects apprehended in Pakistan in the British airliner bomb plot gave up his information under conditions of duress. The liberal Guardian doesn't know what to think of this:

It's hard to tell whether this is an argument for legalizing torture so that when it's done it's done within the law, or throwing out the case against the terror suspects because the information against them was gained illegally. At any rate, it certainly looks as if the claim that torture doesn't work, a different claim, to be sure, than the claim that it is never right, has been refuted in the case of Mr. Rauf.

With regard to the claim of those like Andrew Sullivan, who argue that torture is absolutely, categorically wrong, here's a thought experiment: Imagine that Mr. Rauf's evidence was crucial to uncovering the plot to blow up ten airliners. Imagine, too, that Mr. Rauf could not be enticed to yield his knowledge of the plot through any means other than being subjected to whatever measures the Pakistanis brought to bear. Finally, imagine that the person you love most of all, in all the world, would have been aboard one of those planes. Would you insist that, these hypotheticals notwithstanding, if you had your way Pakistan would not have been permitted to employ the methods they apparently did to persuade Mr. Rauf to talk? A simple yes or no will suffice.

If you answered yes, try this: look your loved one directly in the eyes and tell him or her that.

RLC

This video clip gives us a good insight into the sort of tactics used by modern universities to ensure intellectual conformity on the matter of Darwinian evolution.

Free speech and academic freedom are values cherished only in the event that one's opinions converge with the materialist zeitgeist. Genuine dissent is often crushed by the academic brown-shirts whose pious professions of tolerance and celebrations of diversity are intended only to encompass opinions which flaunt the traditional worldview of whites, males, and Judeo-Christian believers.

The instructor in the video had the temerity to suggest that perhaps one of the strongest acids employed to corrode that worldview is not all that it's cracked up to be. For this heresy the poor woman was led to the academic guillotine.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

I'm glad to see the back of Cynthia McKinney, who did nothing but disgrace the House of Representatives through her sundry lunacies, most notably her asseveration that George Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11, and her assault on a Capitol Hill policeman.

Nevertheless, I find myself in agreement with her about one thing. Open primaries are absurd. It makes no sense to allow voters of one party to select the candidates of the other party. I don't know how many states besides Georgia have open primaries, nor can I imagine what the argument is for keeping them, but they should be banished from our electoral system forthwith.

RLC

Bill Roggio offers his "after-action report" of the Israeli/Hezbollah war. His conclusion is that Israel blew it. We concur. It is especially shameful that the United States, which claims to be at war against terrorists, which lists Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, which has suffered grievously at the hands of Hezbollah terrorists, nevertheless voted for U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 which permits Hezbollah not only to survive, but grants them legitimacy, and allows them to keep their arms. This is no way to fight a war on terrorism.

The Olmert government in Israel is not expected to survive a no-confidence vote and will thus pay the price for its vacillation and timidity. It should. We're afraid that the U.S. will pay a much more severe price for ours.

RLC

Last week we linked to Joe Carter's three part series on Ten Ways Darwinists Help ID. Since then atheistic Darwinian PZ Myers at Pharyngula has undertaken a rebuttal which Carter claims is actually a better argument for Carter's position than his original three posts. He offers his rebuttal of Myers' rebuttal here.

Speaking of the Darwin debates, Telic Thoughts links to a blogger who warns that ID is a leading cause of cancer. TT offers a warning sticker that pro-ID bloggers can post on their sites to caution readers who might carelessly be taken in by the claims of those shameless ID hucksters.

Consider yourselves warned:

RLC

The folks at Junkyard Blog are nothing if not creative. Recall the tune from the old Kinks' song "Lola" and sing along to "Fauxla", a parody of the faked photos from Lebanon run by Reuters and other MSM outlets. Here are a couple of stanzas to get you started:

Clever, isn't it? Sing the rest at the link.

RLC

1. Cal Thomas calls for us to get serious in the war against Islamo-fascism. He says it's time we broke out of the legalistic civil rights mindset that has constrained us for the last forty years.

The war against Islamo-fascism is centuries old and yet completely new. The rules that western states have devised to maximize justice for their citizens so that people could live in safety may no longer work in an age in which the enemy's chief grievance is that you do not share his religion, his chief goal is to kill you and his chief blessing is to die in the attempt.

2. Are we safer now than before 9/11? Of all the nonsensical questions that keep getting asked by media types this has to rank near the top. How can anyone answer it? What would count as evidence one way or another? How could anyone possibly know? As long as there are people out there who wish to kill us, and have the means to do so, then we are not safe. Period.

3. A CNN talking head was discussing the need to eliminate poverty and joblessness among European Muslims in order to eliminate terrorism. Poverty, she averred, breeds hopelessness and hopelessness breeds alienation and alienation breeds terrorism. Unfortunately for this thesis the plotters were all middle class and all had jobs. One pundit noted that some of them lived in nicer homes than did most of the policeman who arrested them. Too many liberals seem locked in the Marxist categories popular during the sixties, and are just unable to grasp that terrorism is not about economics, or land, or American foreign policy. It's about religion and the Islamist desire to conquer the whole world for Islam.

RLC

I'm reluctant to link to this "talk" by comic Ricky Gervais because it's irreverent, vulgar, and it makes fun of beliefs which I have some sympathy for. Even so, it is funny so I'm crossing my fingers and letting you know about it. We have to be able to laugh at ourselves, after all.

Be forewarned that Gervais' language is R-rated.

RLC

Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters explains why he thinks the cease-fire in Lebanon is doomed to be short-lived. He quotes the Times of London:

Ed adds this:

There's more at the link.

RLC

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expresses dismay in his 60 minute interview with Mike Wallace that so many Americans are in prison. Perhaps his surprise is that we don't just execute them like they do in Iran. Consider the following example of Iranian justice.

I can't vouch for this series of photos sent to me by a friend. No documentation accompanied the e-mail which contained them. I will simply tell you what the e-mail claimed which is that the boy in the photos is 8 years old and is being publically punished in Iran for having stolen bread in a market. The punishment consists of crushing his arm. You are cautioned that these photos are very disturbing and may be very difficult to look at. I run them here for the same reason that I think it important that we saw pictures of what the Nazis did to Jews and others in the extermination camps, or that we see the pictures of Negro slaves with scars covering their backs where they were lashed, or that we see pictures of what happens to a fetus in an abortion. Nevertheless, you may prefer to pass them by.

Whether the claims accompanying the e-mail are genuine or not what is being done to this child is barbaric, and the adults responsible for it are primitive savages. Is this the fruit of the religion which has declared war on all other faiths? Are these the sort of people this religion produces? Is this the sort of world that lies in store for our children and grandchildren if we shrink from the threat that these people pose to our civilization? And Ahmadenijad has the chutzpah to chide us for our prison population?

RLC

Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, in their book Rare Earth, note that not only does our earth possess physical properties that may well make it unique in all the universe, our moon is quite special as well. It's not only rare in terms of its size relative to its planet, but it is absolutely essential in a number of ways to the existence of higher life forms on earth.

A large moon with strong gravitational pull is necessary to keep the earth's axial angle stable. If the earth's axis wobbled, as it would if it had no large moon to offset the gravitational tugs of other planets, the earth would experience enormous climatic variations which would make the evolution of higher life forms quite improbable. Moreover, the moon at its formation, pulled away from the earth many of the noxious gases that formed the early atmosphere. If the moon did not exist, for example, the earth would have retained an atmosphere high in CO2 causing a runaway greenhouse effect which would make the earth as uninhabitable as Venus.

A large moon also causes significant lunar tides which enrich the seas with nutrients and help make them more than vast biological deserts. The gravitational influence of our moon also slows the rate of earth's rotation allowing the atmosphere to be placid enough to permit life to emerge on the earth. Finally, a large moon protects the earth from meteorites from elsewhere in the solar system by drawing many of them toward itself.

Guillermo Gonzalez notes in Privileged Planet that the size of the moon is precisely what it needs to be to permit a total eclipse of the sun which allows for the study of the sun's atmosphere. This single fact has been responsible for much of the advance of scientific knowledge over the centuries. The precise fit of moon and sun during a total eclipse allowed early geometric calculations of the size and distance of celestial objects. It also allowed scientists to determine the nature of the sun's composition which has enabled them to determine much about the size and composition of other stars in our galaxy and other galaxies in the universe, including the fact that those celestial objects are rapidly receding from us and that the universe is expanding. This knowledge has enabled us to infer an initial Big Bang origin to the universe, and much else.

All of this simply because the moon is the size it is and the distance it is from the earth.

The moon was believed to be formed in a collision with a Mars-size object which impacted the earth early in its development. This collision probably melted the earth's crust and allowed surface iron to sink toward the core of the planet. This enabled the earth to develop a protective magnetic field and, by removing much of the iron from the surface where it would have bound up any oxygen in the vicinity, it permitted the atmosphere to become oxygenated.

If the material that formed the moon had taken a reverse orbit after this primordial impact, it would have decayed and fallen back to earth. If the impact had occured at a later stage in the earth's development the earth would have been too massive to allow as much material to be ejected, and the resulting moon would have been smaller and less effective.

Remarkably, in other words, this impact had to occur at just the right time, at just the right angle, with just the right force, by an impactor of just the right size and momentum, at just the right spot for a moon of just the right size to form.

What amazing coincidences nature and chance are capable of!

RLC

Readers of a certain vintage will appreciate Michael Novak's somewhat melancholy reflections on his association with Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy back in the late sixties.

He closes with a thought with which probably every believer can identify:

C.S. Lewis notes in Surprised By Joy that believers (and others) often make two mistakes: They first make a state of mind their goal and then secondly attempt to produce it. He might have said that the surest way to miss a feeling of the presence of God in one's life is to seek it directly. If we set out to muster a certain spiritual feeling we usually wind up frustrated and disappointed. As in so many other areas of life, perhaps, the best course is to act as we should and not concern ourselves with feelings. We have all eternity to experience the sense of God's presence.

RLC

Amity Shlaes has written a helpful column on the shrinking deficit and the causes thereof at Bloomberg.com. She writes:

This is all to the good, of course, but the problem is that even if the deficit is just barely above zero percent of GDP the shortfall must be financed somehow and consequently the national debt continues to grow and the interest we must pay on that debt burgeons. Cutting taxes is a good step because it increases revenue, as Shlaes points out, but what we need now is for congress to cut spending so that we can achieve a revenue surplus and begin paying down the debt. Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the White House seem to be bothered by debt.

RLC

Rap: It's not just for gangsta's anymore. Go to Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, click on the video and go to the Tea Party. It's pretty funny.

RLC

There is an incredible statistic contained in the latest Fox News Opinion/Dynamics Poll. When asked (question #10) whether or not the respondent wished the president to succeed, 51% of Democrats answered "no" and 9% weren't sure. This is truly astonishing.

By implication at least 51% of Democrats want the president to fail with his management of the economy, with social security reform, with the war in Iraq, and in the war on terror. Fifty-one percent of Democrats, evidently, would rather see this country mired in abject economic misery, see Iraq spiral into total chaos, and have terrorists committing mass murder in our cities than have President Bush succeed in preventing these calamities.

These people, the majority of Democrats, are either terribly deranged or so unimaginably stupid that they didn't understand the full significance of their response to this question.

RLC

An article by Mark Tooley appears in the Weekly Standard about pastor Greg Boyd, author of The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church, and pastor of 4000 member Woodland Hills Church in suburban St. Paul.

We took a look at the controversy surrounding Pastor Boyd at the end of last month, but the Standard article introduces a couple of additional items that place Rev. Boyd's credibility in question. Mr. Tooley writes that:

Now I don't know how many Native Americans were killed by European colonists and later by Americans, but I'm quite sure it wasn't even close to 10 million. Wikipedia puts the figure of Native Americans killed by whites at around 16,000 (A similar number of whites were killed by Native Americans). It's simply irresponsible for Boyd to just throw around numbers like the ones he uses in order to tarnish the reputations of our predecessors when he has no idea what the actual figures are.

Tooley also notes that:

This is of course ridiculous. Firstly, the man's name was Nicholas, not John. Secondly, despite what Zarqawi said, to believe that he beheaded Berg because of the abuses of Abu Ghraib is risible. Zarqawi beheaded a lot of people who weren't even Americans. What was their connection to Abu Ghraib? Abu Ghraib was just an excuse for him to do what he wanted to do and would have done anyway. Thirdly, to implicitly equate humiliating treatment of terrorist suspects at Abu Ghraib with the butchering of an innocent man, as Boyd does, calling them tit-for-tat, is moral imbecility.

Greg Boyd may be a very effective preacher, but he should take his own advice and keep his politics out of his ministry. He'd save himself a lot of embarrassment.

RLC

Strategy Page has a helpful analysis of what Marxists might refer to as the "correlation of forces" in Lebanon. It's a little dated now that it seems that there will be a cease-fire, but it's interesting nonetheless:

Israel is on the front lines of a war whose battle zone covers the globe. Right now the conflict is raging most obviously in the Middle East, but, as Thursday's revelations indicate, the Islamists are eager to extend the fight to Europe and the United States as well. Let us hope that Israel can eliminate Hezbollah and make at least that theater a little safer for civilized people to dwell in.

RLC

Materialism is the philosophical view that matter is all there is and that everything can therefore ultimately be reduced to, and explained in terms of, material entities. Terry Mirl offers six predictions based on materialism which, assuming that view were true, should eventually be confirmed. If, after a suitable period of time, these predictions have not come to pass, the lack of confirmation should be taken as an indication, Mirl claims, that materialism is false.

His six predictions are quite provocative. If you read them, ask yourself what you think the likelihood is of any of them ever being fulfilled and what the implications of that might be. You can find them at Uncommon Descent.

RLC

Paul Nowak sums up the Israeli position after the recent passage of the U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution:

RLC

Andrew Sullivan has a You Tube video of a comedian who has an interesting, and funny, take on the Muslim view of heavenly rewards for terrorists. Go here and click on the video.

RLC

These remarks by Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese Christian, delivered at the Duke University Counter Terrorism Speak-Out on October 15, 2004, are well-worth our attention today:

HT to Andrew Sullivan.

RLC

Ed Morrissey is mildly optimistic about the U.N. cease-fire resolution unanimously approved by the Security Council this evening. I hope he's right that the resolution works to Israel's advantage, but I have my doubts. Israel has lost a lot of momentum by their on-again off-again incursion into Lebanon. If the Lebanese army fails to disarm Hezbollah and take control of the south as the resolution calls for, and of course it will, it will be enormously difficult for Israel to recover the political will and the military heart to do what they should have done several days ago - drive Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon.

Unless Nasrallah offers another clear provocation, which he'd be foolish to do, world opinion will be solidly against any future attempt by Israel to defeat Hezbollah no matter how much they flaunt the U.N. resolution. A once in a decade opportunity has been squandered by the Israelis and in a year or two we will be right back to the status quo ante. Voting for this resolution is no way for the United States to win a war against terrorists.

RLC

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has put together a series of posts titled 10 Ways Darwinists Help Intelligent Design, and it's quite perceptive. The series is in three parts. Part one is here, part two can be found here and part three is here.

The following is a list of Carter's ten ways. Go to his site to read his explanations of them:

Also, on the evolution/ID front, here's a brief video geared toward kids that succinctly explains the difference between materialist and theistic explanations of the origin of life.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

RLC

Gary Varvel explains why the casualties among Lebanese civilians are "disproportionately" high:

RLC

Not content with having botched, from all appearances, the post-war in Iraq, the Bush administration is now trying to botch the Israeli war against Hezbollah, at least it seems that way if this Jerusalem Post story is accurate:

Any United Nations cease-fire resolution will inevitably allow Hezbollah to survive and insure that more Israeli civilians will die from terrorist rockets in the future. The only solution to Hezbollah's murderous aggression is to eliminate Hezbollah. One might think that if anyone would understand that it would be George Bush. Apparently, however, the Bush administration is of the view that the cause of peace and justice is best served by enabling those who care about neither to continue their assaults on the villages and towns of northern Israel.

The pressure from the White House to stop the Israeli advance is inexplicable. Surely there is no one in the administration who actually believes that if only the Israelis end their military action that Hezbollah will lay down its weapons and live in peace with its Jewish neighbors. Surely this administration recognizes that the only road to peace with terrorist fanatics is to extirpate the terrorists. Why then, do they stand in the way of an opportunity to do just that?

RLC

Canadian journalist David Warren writes that we are in stage two of the clash of civilizations, the war of Islam against the West, and that even many liberals are now rubbing their eyes, rousing themselves from their torpor, and sitting up to take notice. His essay begins with this warning:

The West has three choices in the face of the threat posed by an extremely determined Islamic enemy. It can simply refuse to defend itself and capitulate to the vicious savages that we've seen so much of on grainy al-Jazeera videos; Or, it can try to postpone the inevitable through limited police actions, playing prevent defense while the jihadis move the ball of war inexorably closer to our end zone; Or, we can conclude that we really are at war not just with a rag-tag band of criminals, not just with stateless militias, but with a large portion of the world's population, a population which is not confined to the boundaries of a state but which is diffused throughout the West which it wishes to destroy.

Many of the world's Muslims are committed to world-wide conquest and they're convinced that their moment is now. They may not themselves become suicide bombers or terrorists, but they quietly rejoice whenever one of these succeeds. They hate the West and everything about it, and nothing in their religion prevents them from using or supporting the use of violence to change it.

So what should Western countries do? First, they need to place a moratorium on Arab Muslim immigration. Just as it would have been foolish to allow Germans to immigrate into Britain during WWII it is foolish to allow Arab populations to burgeon throughout Europe and the U.S. Many of these immigrants have no desire to assimilate into the cultures in which they live. They're there not to become English or German, French or Danish. They're there simply to exploit the host country. They hate the culture and its people and those countries are only sowing the seeds of inevitable civil strife by taking them in. They are committing the folly of the Trojans who unwittingly afforded the Greeks the opportunity to slay them all.

Second, the West should close down madrassas and other centers of hate. Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom do not, or should not, confer upon citizens the right to preach violence and sedition. Their religious rights end where others' right to live without fear of being blown to bits begins. The first amendment to the United States' constitution was not ratified in order to protect those whose religion entails the murder of those who don't accept it. A religion which is clearly antithetical to all that is noble and good in the human species, a religion which inculcates hatred and a love of bloody violence, disqualifies itself, or should disqualify itself, from constitutional shelter.

Third, all Arab Muslims who are not citizens should be immediately and permanently deported if they violate the host country's criminal code. There should be zero tolerance for criminal activity among non-citizens.

People will object that all of this is discriminatory since it singles out a particular ethnic group and a particular religion for special treatment. Yes, it does. That's the point. We're in a war for our survival and the enemy isn't the Amish. To pretend that those who wish to destroy us do not belong to a specific ethnic and religious group is absurd. We need to recognize who and what our enemy is and take appropriate steps to prevent them from doing the sorts of things to us that they planned to do to the passengers on those flights from England, what they did on 9/11, as well as in Madrid and London. We can not allow the Islamists to live freely among us and simply hope that our police forces will always be able to thwart their plots to commit mass murder. As long as the Muslim haters have the opportunity they will continue to exploit it to kill our children until finally they sap us of our desire to survive the onslaught.

We must limit their opportunities. We must recognize that we're fighting for the lives of our families and the survival of our civilization.

RLC

On our return trip from Rome recently we flew Delta Airlines and received quite a shock when the third movie of the flight came on. Let me explain by sharing with you the e-mail I sent to Delta Wednesday:

Here's the reply I received today from a Delta representative:

I'm not sure Mr. Rodgers understands the nature of the problem. We did not choose to view the film. The film is shown on screens all through the cabin including a big screen at the front of the coach section. A passenger can block out the sound by not putting on the earphones, but there's no way to block out the visual assault on one's children. If this movie passed muster with Delta's screeners those screeners must have been sub-contracted from the editorial staff of Hustler magazine.

At any rate, if any of you are planning a flight with your family, you may want to bear in mind that Delta's "strict standards" leave plenty of room for some pretty salacious stuff, and when they show it your kids are going to see it whether you "choose" it or not.

RLC

The question that I haven't heard anyone ask on any of the wall-to-wall coverage of the Brits' foiling of the plot to explode bombs inside U.S. bound airliners: Did the British authorities use warrantless eavesdropping surveillance measures? Did they track financial transactions of suspected terrorists? If so, then we will eagerly await the howls of outrage from the British left at such gross invasions of their citizens' privacy.

Speaking of the tv coverage of this story: Do you think that the news anchors at the various networks compete with each other to see which of them can ask the greatest number of dumb questions? Just wondering.

Another question: Has anyone heard anybody in the MSM mention the fact that all the men arrested in this plot were Muslims? Have I missed mention of this fact or is it that 21 mass murderers all happened to Muslims just not considered relevant? I wonder if the media would be equally reticent had the suspects all belonged to opus dei.

RLC

In case you're interested in seeing the movie, Anthony Sacramone at First Things gives Oliver Stone's World Trade Center two thumbs up and claims that the film about 9/11 absolves Stone of the guilt incurred by the making of the execrable Alexander.

RLC

Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project quotes top NBC correspondent Ike Seamans explaining why we can't trust the media coverage of the Israeli war in Lebanon:

There's a lot more on the lopsided coverage of this conflict at the link.

RLC

Matt Drudge cites a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Bernard Lewis, a Princeton scholar who has written several excellent books on Islam. Lewis warns that Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have 'cataclysmic events' in mind for August 22. Drudge says:

We'll see. Lewis obviously thinks Ahmadinejad is a lunatic and he has no difficulty believing that the Iranian president is capable of launching a nuclear holocaust to further his religious dreams. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that if Ahmadinejad gets his hands on nuclear weapons he'll use them.

RLC

I mentioned yesterday that I had just returned from a five day visit to Rome. The city is a place of many wonders for the tourist looking for magnificent art and architecture as well as history and charm. There are important lessons, too, to be teased out from among the ruins and the opulence.

Our hotel was just a block or two from the ancient Coliseum which is something of a focal point of activity. A Metro station is nearby the ancient arena and there are several restaurants across the street so we found ourselves in its shadow every day.

(My wife and youngest daughter dining out on our last evening in Rome)

It was difficult to contemplate this enormous structure, which could seat over 50,000 people, without reflecting upon the events that occured there nearly 2000 years ago. From the time it was built around 80 AD until about 400 AD over ten thousand men were slaughtered in the gladiatorial fights, and countless wild animals - lions, tigers, elephants and the like - were killed in the staged "hunts" which entertained the Romans until the 6th century.

The relentless, brutal killing was accompanied by thunderous roars of approval from the huge crowds of men, women, and, presumably, children excited by the bloodshed and suffering which took place on the floor of the arena beneath them.

(The floor of the Coliseum is mostly gone revealing the chambers underneath where gladiators and beasts were held until they fought.)

It may be difficult to imagine human beings so depraved that they would cheer at a severed arm or head. Yet it's probably not so far from the fascination that people have today for "sports" like extreme fighting and other expressions of human brutality. I read an article just this morning about how children in Uganda are kidnapped by rebels and forced to kill other children by biting off their skin and flesh until the terrified victim bleeds to death. The evil of which men are capable seems boundless.

The gladiatorial contests held in the Coliseum were, like forcing children to bite other children to death, the logical consequence of man's alienation from God. Human nature is bestial and unless it is constantly re-oriented toward the lodestone of divine love its natural tendency will be toward ever-increasing depravity. The Romans knew nothing of true divinity. Their gods were made in their own corrupt image, and thus their amusements included cheering for people to be cruelly dismembered and die.

Roman society, by the time the Coliseum was built, was thoroughly sick and effete because it was not bound by any transcendent moral law. The Romans exulted in their power and moral autonomy and bloodlust was the consequence. Whenever man declares his independence from God, it seems, moral degeneracy eventually follows.

So it was for the Romans and perhaps there's a lesson for us, too, in the ruins of their ancient Coliseum.

RLC

Bill Dembski posts this photo of a "fire rainbow" and wonders how a materialist can account for the human appreciation for beauty. How does random mutation and natural selection explain our sense of wonder and awe at such phenomena?

Dembski writes:

The world is filled with beauty. Why, on Darwinian terms, we should appreciate it as something special, why it should move us, is difficult to imagine. The poet Keats observed that beauty is truth and indeed there is a truth to be discerned in the beauty of a fire rainbow. That truth is that our ability to appreciate beauty such as this is no accident of vibrating atoms and blind forces, but rather the product of a purposeful, intelligent artistic mind which has created us to enjoy the aesthetic richness of the natural world.

RLC

For those of you who enjoy media shenanigans Michelle Malkin has some examples of faked photos - she calls it "fauxtography" - from the war in Lebanon which have appeared recently in the New York Times and U.S. News.

We shouldn't be too derisive of these major news organizations' inability to know when they're being duped. After all, it's not the facts that matter but the "deeper truth" of what's happening at the hands of the Israeli military to the poor people of Lebanon that's important. Any photo which conveys that "deeper truth" is itself truth whether or not the picture was actually staged. At least that's apparently how the post-modernists in the American media see things.

RLC

If U2 lead singer Bono were an American no doubt he'd be a Republican, at least that seems a legitimate conclusion to be drawn from the following Newsmax article:

On the other hand, it's ironic that Bono has urged governments to contribute more and more of their citizens' taxes to Africa while he shelters his own obscene wealth from Ireland's exchequer by shuffling it offshore. He seems to be a very generous man with the money of other people so perhaps, if he were an American, he would be a Democrat after all.

RLC

Catholics and others among our readers might be interested in this amusing interview of William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, by Stephen Colbert.

Something I didn't know: Colbert is evidently a devout Catholic. He's also a funny one.

Thanks for the link to Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent.

RLC

Ramirez asks, and answers, the question: Why are the Israelis' bombs killing civilians?

RLC

Reuters has chosen to pull some nine hundred photos in their file of photographer Adnan Hajj after Little Green Footballs showed that several of his photos from the war in Lebanon were doctored.

Hot Air has links on the story.

There's no reason why Reuters couldn't have seen for themselves that these photos were phony. The photoshopping is pretty obvious, but Reuters ran them anyway perhaps because they show Israel inflicting "disproportionate" damage on Lebanese cities. It's no wonder nobody trusts the liberal media to report either the war in Iraq or the war in Lebanon accurately or fairly.

RLC

Andrew Sullivan sums up an outstanding column by Bernard-Henri Levy on the Lebanese/Israeli war with this observation:

Levy says many good things in his essay, but one of the most important is this:

Unless Israel completely defeats Hezbollah in Lebanon Hezbollah will just grow stronger and more determined to extirpate the Jews in the Middle East.

RLC

My family and I are back from a five day visit to the marvelous city of Rome, and I'm trying to get caught up on what's been happening in the world while I was gone. I scarcely glanced at a newspaper in the past week.

I want to thank Bill for posting on Viewpoint a number of pieces that I had prepared before leaving and for adding a couple of his own.

I haven't been in every major European capital, but I can't imagine a city more beautiful, more full of art, architecture, history and charm than Rome. Perhaps London comes as close as any other city I've ever been in (I've never been to Paris). Tomorrow, when our luggage is supposed to arrive (having been loaded onto the wrong plane at JFK), I hope to share a couple of photos and some reflections on our trip.

RLC

Not long ago I had the opportunity to consider a fascinating question. I was sitting in my Sunday school class when the conversation turned to the concept of altruism - the idea of total unselfishness as a motive for doing something. Then another person in the class posited the question that the "carrot" of eternal life in heaven might influence our motivation to "accept Jesus"* as our Savior and pursue a personal relationship with God. And finally we found our selves faced with the question: is there anything that we do with unselfish motives?

A couple days ago, I finished reading Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis, an autobiography of his conversion to Christianity. In the final pages of the book he says:

As I understand what Lewis is saying, there is a valid, totally unselfish motivation for a personal, loving relationship that involves worship and obedience to God even if there were no promise of eternal life in heaven, even if our existence is finite, simply because God is who He is. Fascinating.

* The following is what I consider (most humbly) to be one of many great rants from E.W. Bullinger's Great Cloud of Witnesses on the subject of "accepting Jesus".

WSC

So there I was the other night in thrall to the taut drama and machinations unfolding in the second season DVD of 24.

Determined to be patient with several gaping holes and other silliness in the storyline, I let myself be caught up in the suspense as terrorists planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Los Angeles and set it to go off "today". The Counter Terrorism Unit led by superhero Jack Bauer is tasked with saving the lives of millions of people.

Well, what should happen but that one of the terrorists who knows where the bomb is located falls into Jack's hands. Time is short and he has to discover the whereabouts of the weapon before it explodes, incinerating everything and everyone within a radius of a couple of miles and spreading a deadly cloud of radiation for hundreds of miles more.

Naturally, the terrorist refuses to talk. Jack cuffs him about the head once or twice but he knows that such measures are futile. He could, of course, employ waterboarding but that seems to be unknown to the script writers and besides it would violate the Geneva Conventions which sagely affirm that the lives of millions of Americans are simply not worth the terror experienced by a single thug who wishes to slaughter them.

So, what does our superhero do? Those of you who are fans will find this to be very old news, but for those of you who have more important things to do on Monday nights than to watch a television show, I shall tell you and then ask a question.

Jack has anticipated his prisoner's reticence and has had, unbeknownst to the viewer, the police in the terrorist's home country (which for some reason is never named) arrest the man's family (two sons and a wife). They bind and gag the hapless innocents in chairs and train a television camera on them. The video feed is uplinked and sent to a computer screen that the prisoner in L.A. can see. Already I can envision Andrew Sullivan and the editorial staff of the New York Times yelling at their televisions that Bauer can't do this, he's flouting the Geneva Conventions, he's a cruel, amoral imperialist pig, he's no better than the terrorists, etc. But it gets worse.

Agent Bauer then tells the prisoner that unless he spills the beans right now about where the bomb is to be found he will order the police in the unnamed foreign country to execute the man's eldest son. The terrorist's resolve is shaken but not broken. Bauer gives the order by phone, and the viewer sees on the computer screen a policeman kick over the boy's chair and shoot twice. The terrorist's family screams, the viewer is stunned, mostly at how little regard Bauer seems to have for the Geneva Conventions, international law, and enlightened moral opinion.

Now Bauer is screaming at the terrorist to tell him where the bomb is or he will order the execution of the youngest boy. The terrorist cannot withstand the psychological and emotional torture any longer. He breaks and gives Bauer the information he needs. The terrorist is then taken out of the room, and the scene focusses on the computer screen where we see the foreign police untying and releasing the man's family, including the boy who was supposedly shot. The whole thing was a set-up, a ruse to deceive the prisoner into thinking that his family was being murdered when in fact they were not.

Now this ploy was certainly a violation of the Geneva Conventions on torture, even if no one was physically harmed (although no doubt both the prisoner and his family were terrified). So here's my question: Given the circumstances, was Bauer justified in deceiving the prisoner in this way?

Is what he did so beyond the pale that it would have been better to allow millions of people to die a horrible death than to lie to this man in such a way as to make him believe that his silence was costing the lives of his loved ones when it really wasn't? An awful lot of people would answer that question with a resounding "yes, it would be better that millions die than that this man have to endure the pain of that awful deception". Certainly the auhors and signatories of the Geneva Conventions would answer this way.

Doesn't that strike you as absurd?

RLC

In the clash of civilizations between the Muslim world and the West the latter enjoys many advantages - technological prowess not the least of them. Nevertheless, the Muslim world has one advantage that may eventually tip the scales in its favor. Muslims fervently believe in life after death and much of the West doesn't.

The secular world, especially Europe, having largely abandoned religious faith a century ago, believes that this life is all there is. The psychological, if not logical, entailment of this belief is that there is nothing that is worth dying for. No matter what principles one holds, if one is dead, the principles are worthless. Since there is nothing to look forward to beyond death, this life must be clung to at all costs because once it's over there's nothing.

Muslims, on the other hand, hold this life cheap. For them it's just a temporary way-station on the road to eternal bliss. Being willing to die to promote their cause of world-wide dominance makes them exceedingly difficult to deal with. Negotiation, which is predicated on people acting in their self-interest, is futile when people who want to live seek to arrive at a modus vivendi with people who believe it in their self-interest to die. Negotiation is predicated on willingness to compromise, but people who believe that God is guiding their every step are generally not willing to yield ground.

A secular democratic society will be tempted to appease, retreat, and ultimately surrender rather than, by fighting, risk war and death. A tyrannical jihadi society will risk everything, including death, in order to prevail. In such a contest the advantage is clearly on the side of those who see death as a passage into a new life. For this reason it may be that secular societies may prove to be no match for global jihad. It may turn out that only societies which also hold to a belief in the transience of this life and the permanence of the next will have the will to resist and withstand the long-term onslaught of the Muslim fanatics.

RLC

A couple weeks ago while attending my Sunday school class the discussion turned to the concept of altruism - the idea of total unselfishness as a motive for doing something. Eventually, someone posited the question that the "carrot" of eternal life in heaven might influence our motivation to "accept Jesus"* as our savior as well as pursue a personal relationship with God. And finally we were faced with the question: is there anything that we do with unselfish motives?

Several days later, I finished reading Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis, an autobiography of his conversion to Christianity. In the final pages of the book he says:

As I understand what Lewis is saying, there is a valid, totally unselfish motivation for a personal, loving relationship that involves worship and obedience to God even if there were no promise of eternal life in heaven, even if our existence is finite, simply because God is who He is. Fascinating.

* The following is what I consider (most humbly) to be one of many great rants from E.W. Bullinger, this time on the subject of "accepting Jesus" .

WSC

Michael Metzger offers some advice at Comment that Christians, especially those who feel very strongly about evangelism, might do well to take to heart.

We don't help a weight-training partner if we load up his bar with too much weight before he's ready to handle it. Metzger relates this obvious fact to Christian witness at the link.

RLC

John Davidson poses the question, "How has Darwinism Persisted?" He believes there to be two reasons in particular which he explains briefly at Uncommon Descent.

I'd like to suggest a third: Darwinism (by which I mean the view that natural processes are sufficient explanations for the origin and diversity of living things) has persisted because it is the opiate of the intellectual elites. It anesthetizes them to the existential pain of a naturalistic world-view which rips all non-arbitrary meaning, morality and significance out of life. Like a drug it gives them a surge of metaphysical pseudo-strength that enables them to cling to an atheistic materialism which might have made sense a century ago but which no longer does. For the man who simply does not want God to exist, Darwinism is a narcotic.

As Richard Dawkins famously wrote, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Unfortunately, the satisfaction that it offers is much like the satisfaction the opium addict gains from his drug. It doesn't really fill the existential emptiness left by the removal of what has been taken away. It merely masks it. Man cannot live without meaning, and atheistic naturalism tells us that ultimately there simply is no purpose to your life or mine. Death is the end. Man is nothing more than an animal with no dignity or worth. Morality is purely subjective. There's no ultimate justice. Love is just a biochemical response. Consciousness is an illusion. Reason is an unreliable tool in the quest for truth.

The intellectual elites are like a bunch of numbed, unhappy addicts sitting around a room seeking to relieve their pain with a fix of materialistic opium, and Darwinism is the best brand on the market. It holds out the allure of an ersatz purpose, incorporating us into the great drama of biological development, it offers us a wafer-thin veneer of meaning by encouraging us to contribute to the well-being of our species. Like those who seek meaning and transcendence in drugs, however, Darwinism ultimately leaves us empty because if we are doomed to perish utterly nothing at all about this life really matters.

Nevertheless, this life is all the atheist has to hold on to. So, like the man dying of emphysema who keeps sucking on his cigarettes, the intellectual elites embrace their Darwinian world-view in hopes that somehow, against all indications, they'll be able to squeeze out of it a few precious drops of meaning for their lives. They're hooked and can't give it up.

RLC

Science and Theology News has an interesting essay on ethics and morality written by Brian Henning, a philosopher at Mount St. Mary's College. Henning seeks to impress upon the reader that "Moral problems do not have indisputable answers existing prior to their solutions that we need only divine and then codify.... Moral laws should not be rejected wholesale, but how their status is conceived should be dramatically revised." He goes on to say that:

Mr. Henning has many good things to say in this piece, but I think he goes too far when he suggests that we should abandon the idea of absolutes in ethics. While it's true that the circumstances surrounding an act usually determine the moral value of the act this is not always the case. In the real world it is absolutely wrong no matter what the circumstances (unless one posits circumstances that would obtain only in the hyperactive mind of philosophers) to beat a child with one's fists, to commit genocide or rape, to commit suicide by driving the wrong way on the Interstate, to torture someone for pleasure, etc.

These acts are always wrong because they violate the absolute commands of Scripture. Those absolutes are found in the Old Testament in Exodus 20:1-17. In this passage God gives the Isaraelites the Ten Commandments. The first four govern our relationship toward God and can be summed up in the imperative to "Love God." The last six are to govern our relationships toward each other and can be summed up in the imperative to "Love others." These are the two great absolutes of Scripture and Jesus Himself affirms this in Matthew 22:36-40 where He responds to a lawyer who asks Him to name the greatest commandment in the Law. Jesus doesn't reply that it is any of the ten, instead He sums up the first four and says that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Then He goes on to say that the second greatest commandment is to love others like we love ourselves. In other words, He sums up the last six.

We may define love not as a kind of feeling but rather treating people with dignity, respect, and kindness. In the Old Testament such actions are considered "justice" and the emphasis in the O.T. is on loving people by doing justice. In the New Testament the emphasis is on loving others by showing them compassion.

So, then, we are called to love God and do justice/show compassion. Any act, such as those specified above, which is unjust and/or uncompassionate violates the imperative of love and is therefore absolutely wrong. Lying, for example, is almost always unjust or uncompassionate, but there are times when, on the contrary, it is both just and compassionate and therefore the right thing to do. The classic example is the case of a family hiding Jews in their home from the Nazis in WWII. The Gestapo comes to the door and informs the householder that they are rounding up all the Jews in the town and they ask whether there are any in the building. It's a lie to deny that there are but it would be both unjust and uncompassionate to answer truthfully.

There are other cases where we might think lying is actually morally right. An undercover operative seeking to infiltrate a terrorist cell must lie to succeed. Would he be wrong to do so?

The serious ethical dilemmas arise in the attempt to balance justice and compassion because sometimes these seem to be at odds. The case of the moral propriety of capital punishment is an example. Justice may demand that a life be forfeit. Compassion demands that it be done in as humane a way as practical even though the criminal may seem to deserve much worse.

At any rate, although Henning is surely correct when he says that most of the time right and wrong must be gauged by the context in which the act occurs, he errs in suggesting that there are no moral absolutes. Such a claim would be true, of course, if there is no God, but if there is a God, and if He has revealed moral truth to us in Scripture, then He has indeed given us absolutes in the commands to do justice and to show compassion.

RLC

Mike Metzger in his Clapham Commentary (free subscription required) pens a fine short essay on the last virtue left in America - the virtue of openness or tolerance.

Metzger borrows from Allan Bloom's classic 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, to make the point that openness as ity is practised in today's culture is really not a virtue at all but a vice. He writes:

Metzger goes on to say that:

In other words, religious beliefs aren't exactly true, or if they are we could never know such a thing, they're simply preferences with which people feel comfortable. Just as people exercise brand loyalty in their shopping or in their political party affiliation, they exercise a loyalty to religions which resonate with their view of the world.

Metzger adds that,

He might have added that one way in which this openness is manifesting itself in today's news is the moral equivalency that people tend to draw between contending forces in the global struggle against terror. Israel, for example, is said by some to be just as bad as its enemies. Israel has killed civilians and caused terrible hardships for the Palestinian people, thus, even though suicide bombings are wrong, they're understandable. This sort of equivalence acts as a salve to the intellect as it enables the individual to feel righteous without having to do any difficult thinking or read any history. To place on the same moral plane people who in acts of self-defense build walls to keep killers out, and in trying to eliminate the killers accidentally harm bystanders, with those who deliberately premeditate the murder of school children on a bus by strapping bombs to other children who are sometimes unaware of the full consequences of what they're doing, is intellectually and morally otiose.

We need to recover the conviction that there is good, there is evil, and there are mixtures of the two. Those who deliberately slaughter innocents in order to achieve power, or to spread their version of religious truth throughout the world are doing evil. Those who seek to make life better for all people are doing good. We need to recover a knowledge of the difference, but we'll never recover that knowledge until we recover a belief in truth and get rid of the oppressive burden of an "openness" that manifests itself as an indifference to truth.

RLC

Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, writes about Ann Coulter at Belief.net. He concludes that she's bad for America, or more precisely, what she stands for is bad for America, but although his criticism of her is fair, it doesn't seem to support such a strong conclusion.

Anyway, read it and decide for yourself.

RLC

An article in a British newspaper offers some clues to the reasons behind certain phenomena of which we've been aware for some time:

We wonder if there are high levels of estrogen in the water in the United States. If so, it would certainly explain a lot. I leave it to the reader to come up with the particular phenomena it would explain on his/her own.

RLC

P.Z. Myers, the militant atheistic Darwinist who holds forth at Pharyngula writes about how much he likes this quote from J.B.S. Haldane:

It's interesting that an atheist can feel free to base his views on the world's issues on his atheism and feel free to proclaim his atheism in public places, but if a politician, like, say, Senator Santorum or President Bush were to publically acknowledge that his opinions and policies are informed by his Christian worldview he would be accused by people like Myers of doing something terribly stupid or insidious.

Haldane thinks he would be a coward were he to refrain from stating his atheistic views in public and presumably Myers agrees. We should remember this the next time a politician gets heat from the secularists among us for being too explicit about his faith.

It's also interesting that it's a point of pride for Haldane/Myers that their science is consciously "atheistic", but let a scientist embrace theistic assumptions such as that the cosmos and/or living things show evidence of intention and intelligence in their design, and people like Myers consider him a crackpot. Yet why should an assumption of atheism on the part of a scientist be any more intellectually estimable than the assumption that one is "thinking God's thoughts after Him" when one is doing science?

To suggest, finally, that a scientific practice which assumes that God is not going to interfere with one's experiments is atheistic is ridiculous. Just because one assumes that God doesn't interfere in the day to day operation of the universe it does not follow that therefore one is an atheist or doing "atheistic science". All scientists, including theists, make the assumption that the regularities of nature will hold at least the vast majority of the time. This certainly does not mean that theists are metaphysical atheists.

RLC

It's part of the received economic wisdom that growth is good and, since development is a means of growth, turning rural spaces into suburban housing, malls, and industrial parks is desirable. Nevertheless, despite the near universal acceptance of this assumption, at least by conservatives, I've never read a convincing argument in support of the proposition that development and the population growth it brings are actually good for a community and, in fact, I've never been able to see how they are.

The arguments I've heard all point to the jobs that are created when a new shopping center or industry moves into an area, but who fills these jobs? When jobs are created they attract people into the community who would not otherwise move there. This generates a demand for housing, the construction of which employs still more new arrivals who require yet more housing. Farmland and natural spaces get gobbled up and turned into lawns and parking lots. Traffic increases, roads must be built to relieve the congestion, and schools and hospitals must be erected to accomodate the new residents.

Moreover, sewers, water and other utilities must be provided. Police and other public employees must be hired. All of this costs money, so taxes go up, crowding goes up, and the native residents of the community wind up with a lower quality of life than they had before all the development occurred except now they have a new shopping mall.

Speaking of growth, our population - expected to cross the 300 million mark this summer - is burgeoning and lots of people say this is a good thing, but it's hard for me to see why it's a good thing. It seems that there really are only two advantages to a growing population: The first is that since Congress has squandered our social security we need more workers to support the elderly "boomers" as they (we) shuffle into our dotage. The second is that it allows us to avoid implementing a military draft by providing a reservoir of young volunteer soldiers to fight our enemies.

Neither of these seem to be worth the cost of an ever-expanding population making ever-increasing demands on an ever-diminshing amount of open space and water. The first reason is a short-term fix that'll eventually wind up in disaster since it requires that every generation be larger than the previous. At some point, however, the whole system will become unsustainable and collapse. The second justification for population growth could be made moot, of course, by a military draft.

In other words, the more people we have the more the quality of American life diminishes and the more stresses we place on resources and the natural environment. We don't need so many people. The advantages of a larger population could be met with far less harm by reforming social security, encouraging families to assume more responsibility for their elderly, and by initiating a mandatory period of public service which would include a military option.

We vote to save what's left of our open spaces and the natural beauty of rural America.

RLC

Skye Puppy has a series of photos that are breathtaking in what they illustrate about the size of the planet upon which we live relative to the cosmos. Look at the photos and then remember that there are billions of stars like those shown in the bottom photo just in our galaxy alone and there are billions of galaxies in the universe (To enlarge go to the link).

Some twentieth century thinkers have cited the immensity of both space and time as an argument for the insignificance of the earth and therefore of man. They gazed at the vastness of the heavens and scoffed at the medieval idea that man is at the center of the cosmos, that somehow it's all here just for us. That idea, though, no longer elicits derision. It's become clear to even the most adamantine skeptic that there's something eerily special about the construction of our universe. It is as if, cosmologist Freeman Dyson once said, the universe knew we were coming.

As for its great size and age, cosmologists note today that, given the fact that the elements necessary for life are forged in the centers of stars by nuclear fusion and distributed throughout space when those stars die in catastrophic explosions, the elements of which life is comprised would not have been available until at least one generation of stars had been born and died. This is a process judged to take billions of years. All through that enormous stretch of time the universe would have been expanding. Thus, by the time it was chemically ready to support living things it had to be very old and consequently very large.

In other words, the cosmos has to be as old as it is and as big as it is in order for us to be here. It's vastness is not a sign of some divine (or natural) profligacy, but, assuming that God chose to use stellar evolution as His means of producing carbon, oxygen and the rest, it is a divine necessity. We may not reside at the geometric center of the universe, indeed there probably isn't such a thing, but we very well may reside at its ontological center. It very well may be that we are the reason that the incomprehensibly huge universe exists at all.

RLC

This article at Science and Theology News caught our eye for two reasons. First the article, then the reasons:

What's interesting about this is, first, if the constants of nature are not constant that means, among other things, that radiometric dating may be an unreliable procedure for determining vast ages. Radiometric dating is based upon the decay rate of radioactive atoms into more stable daughter products. This rate has been assumed to be constant over the age of the universe, but if it hasn't been, if rates are slower today than they were in the past, the values that they yield would show the earth and anything else whose age is being measured to be "older" than they really are. Thus the notion of a 4.5 billion year old earth would have to be revised. If it were in need of sufficient revision it could make the earth too young to have permitted a long, slow evolutionary process. This news would precipitate a real crisis in science.

Second, if string theory is not falsifiable and not "true science", then why is there no outrage over the fact that it's often discussed in public school physics classes? Why is it that there are lawsuits over the teaching of intelligent design in biology classes, ostensibly because ID is not "true science", but one never hears complaints about string theory being taught? Apparently, some non-science is more acceptable in public schools than other non-science. Or, more likely, string theory is not perceived to be a threat to the regnant naturalistic metaphysics that so many objectors to ID have embraced so they don't mind giving it a pass that is arbitrarily denied to other hypotheses that have more profound philosophical implications.

Perhaps, someone should inquire of the current Dover school board, the members of which were elected in part as a protest against the previous board's attempt to squeeze ID into the biology curriculum, whether they permit the teaching of string theory in their physics classes (or, say, the oscillating universe theory in their Earth-Space classes). If so, perhaps there might be grounds here for a lucrative lawsuit.

RLC

Spiegel Online has an op-ed written by a former Israeli peace activist who has been on the road to Damascus, so to speak, and has had the scales fall from his eyes. Here are some excerpts:

In between these paragraphs there's much that's worth reading.

RLC

I thought it might be fun to compose a list of two dozen or so of the best books I've read on topics which lie at an intersection which includes at least two of the three disciplines of philosophy, science, and/or religion. There are a number or works that I omitted because they're either a little too technical or because they made it onto previous lists that I've compiled. There are probably others that I should have included in this list as well, but I thought twenty eight was a good round number:

If readers can suggest other titles that have been helpful to them and would belong on a list of books that connect science, philosophy and/or religion we'll be happy to post the recommendations on Viewpoint.

RLC

Michael Gerson, former speech writer for George W. Bush, has some advice for both parties and both ideologies in this interview at Christianity Today. Here are some excerpts:

Until recently, the Republican Party and Christian conservatives have complained that government is the problem. Is that a view they will likely return to?

I think it's a temptation, but I don't think it's going to happen. One reason is because of what's changed in evangelical political involvement.

I think there are lots and lots of young people, in their 20s to 40s, who are very impatient with older models of social engagement like those used by the Religious Right. They understand the importance of the life issues and the family issues, but they know the concern for justice has to be broader and global. At least a good portion of the evangelical movement is looking for leaders who have a broader conception of social justice. President Bush has provided that in many ways. He ran his initial campaign on education and on faith-based answers to poverty and addiction. And then he's led the international efforts we've undertaken, both on the development and disease side, but also on the spread of human liberty.

You're starting to sound like Jim Wallis!

No, because I also don't think the answers can be found in the Religious Left. I don't think we can minimize some of the traditional issues. I don't believe it's possible to be concerned about social justice without being concerned about the weakest members of the human family. I also think that America can play an active and positive role in the world and that we're not at fault for everything.

Many evangelicals are looking for something that's still developing, if you talk to people like Rick Warren or Tim Keller. One thing that's catalyzed it is probably Africa, where so many young evangelicals I know have spent time. They've seen the needs and the extraordinary kind of spiritual strength that's found in the continent, and they've come away changed.

What challenges do you see for evangelicals who want to broaden the movement's social agenda?

It's probably a long-term mistake for evangelicals to be too closely associated with any ideology or political party. The Christian teaching on social justice stands in judgment of every party and every movement. It has to be an authentic and independent witness. It should have an influence in both parties. I would love to see the Democratic Party return to a tradition of social justice that was found in people like William Jennings Bryan. During that period, many if not most politically engaged evangelicals were in the Democratic Party, because it was a party oriented toward justice.

I don't see much of that now in the Democratic Party. Instead of an emphasis on the weak and suffering, there's so much emphasis on autonomy and choice. And so the party of William Jennings Bryan, the party of Franklin Roosevelt, I'm not sure it exists any more. But it would be good if it did.

Where specifically do you think the Religious Right has gone off track?

Some of it is what I would call baptizing policy recommendations, as if there were a Christian view on tax policy or missile defense. These are questions of prudence and judgment on which reasonable people disagree.

Sometimes the agenda has been important but too limited. The goal is to have a Christian worldview that encompasses domestic and foreign policy, that speaks broadly without essentially trying to claim there's only one Christian view on a variety of issues.

I think there are informed and correct views on tax policy. I don't think there's necessarily a Christian view. But there is a Christian view on human dignity and on the responsibility of government to protect the weak and on making sure societies are not just organized for the benefit of the strong. Those are consistent teachings that have relevance in every time, and they motivate people across the spectrum.

What are the challenges for Christians regarding contentious issues like gay marriage and abortion?

These are the toughest issues in American life. How you argue makes a huge difference. Proof-texting arguments from Scripture or arguments made in a spirit of anger are often counterproductive. I don't think that's been general or uniform, but it's been known to happen. Christians should acknowledge that opponents aren't enemies, that ultimately every person is worthy of respect and tolerance.

The pro-life debate is a case in point: It's a strong principle of Christian teaching and Roman Catholic social doctrine, as well as other sources, that says we as a society have to have solidarity. A test of that solidarity is how we treat society's weakest members. We're all in this together. We should be a welcoming society that includes everyone. The way we argue for that should be through appealing to [people's] aspirations, not to their anger. We should be talking about inclusion, not judgment-this could be very effective.

You can read the rest of the interview at the link.

RLC

We've all heard that the theory of evolution is absolutely essential to understanding all of biology, if not all of science. Indeed, it'd be the end of science, some fear, should any competing theory be taught along side Darwinism in our high schools and colleges. So why, Sal Cordova wonders, are so few college students required to take a course in evolution and why do so many biologists think that evolution as a discipline is "near the bottom" of the scientific pecking order?

Cordova cites the following statements made by respected Darwinian biologists:

"In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics." Jerry Coyne

"There's a striking asymmetry in molecular versus evolutionary education in American universities. Although many science, and all biology, students are required to endure molecular courses, evolution-even introductory evolution-is often an elective. The reason is simple: biochemistry and cell biology get Junior into med school, evolution doesn't. Consequently, many professional scientists know surprisingly little about evolution." Allen Orr

Cordova goes to no less an authority than Ernst Mayr for the reason evolution doesn't get junior into med school:

"Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science...[where] Laws and experiments are inappropriate...Instead one constructs a ... narrative."

So, if Darwinian assumptions are of secondary importance to the work being done by many people working in the biological sciences, why are we so frequently subjected to fearsome prophecies of doom and gloom if public school students are allowed to hear that some scientists believe that intelligence somehow played a role in the ascent of life? Could the fears of the Darwinians be overblown - or maybe insincere?

RLC