Unbelieving Ignorance

Exceptions for Abortion?

Justin Taylor|
October 26th 2012

I assume by now that most readers are aware of the controversy regarding comments by candidate Richard Mourdock, who is running for Senate, regarding rape not being an exception for abortion. In a recent debate, when asked about the issue, he responded:

This is that issue that every candidate for federal, or even state, office faces, and I too stand for life. I know there are some who disagree and I respect their point of view and I believe that life begins at conception. The only exception I have [for abortion] is in that case [where] the life of the mother [is threatened]. I struggled with it for a long time, but I came to realize that life is a gift from God. And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape that it is something that God intended to happen.

President Obama, through a spokesperson, “felt those comments were outrageous and demeaning to women.”

There are many angles to this story, including media ignorance, media malfeasance, political clumsiness, bioethics, and Christian witness.
  Many members of the media pounced on the story, reporting that Mr. Murdock said that rapes were intended by God. Al Mohler has an important commentary on this today. He writes:

The controversy over his statements reveals the irresponsibility of so many in the media and the political arena. The characterizations and willful distortions of Mourdock’s words amount to nothing less than lies.

A couple of liberal writers have recognized the same. See, for example, Kevin Drum’s “Richard Mourdock Gets in Trouble for His Extremely Conventional Religious Beliefs” and Amy Sullivan’s “Why Liberals Are Misreading Mourdock.”

But most seemed to be twisting the candidate’s words and also baffled by the worldview. Get Religion‘s Mollie Hemingway offered some advice to fellow journalists:

If you do these two things — bone up on just the very lowest level basics of Christian teaching on theodicy and meet a pro-lifer and find out what they really think — you might not lead your newscasts with a mangling of the news that some pro-lifers really believe (gasp!) that the circumstances of your conception and birth do not determine your worth and that every single child in the world is created and loved by God. You might learn about this newfangled ancient teaching that God causes good to result from evil.

But Mohler does not think the media, while certainly culpable, is entirely to blame:

At the same time, Mr. Mourdock is responsible for giving the media and his political enemies the very ammunition for their distortions. . . . The debate question did not force Mourdock to garble his argument. The cause of defending the unborn is harmed when the argument for that defense is expressed badly and recklessly, and Mourdock’s answer was both reckless and catastrophically incomplete.

Mohler is right: we must speak with precision, clarity, and compassion on this issue. We must put the question in perspective:

Any reference to rape must start with a clear affirmation of the horrifying evil of rape and an equal affirmation of concern for any woman or girl victimized by a rapist. At this point, the defender of the unborn should point to the fact that every single human life is sacred at every point of its development and without regard to the context of that life’s conception. No one would deny that this is true of a six-year-old child conceived in the horror of a rape. Those who defend the unborn know that it was equally true when that child was in the womb.

Mohler also looks at the broader issue of exceptions:

One truth must be transparently clear — a consistent defense of all human life means that there is no acceptable exception that would allow an intentional abortion. If every life is sacred, there is no exception.
The three exceptions most often proposed call for abortion to be allowed only in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. These are the exceptions currently affirmed by Mitt Romney in his presidential campaign. What should we think of these?

Mohler gives his answer:

First, when speaking of saving the life of the mother, we should be clear that the abortion of her unborn child cannot be the intentional result. There can be no active intention to kill the baby. This does not mean that a mother might, in very rare and always tragic circumstances, require a medical procedure or treatment to save her life that would, as a secondary effect, terminate the life of her unborn child. This is clearly established in moral theory, and we must be thankful that such cases are very rare.
Next, when speaking of cases involving rape and incest, we must affirm the sinful tragedy of such acts and sympathize without reservation with the victims. We must then make the argument that the unborn child that has resulted from such a heinous act should not be added to the list of victims. That child possesses no less dignity than a child conceived in any other context.

What does this look like practically, in everyday conversations?

Scott Klusendorf points out that there are two types of people who ask about rape and abortion: the learner and the crusader. It’s helpful to know who you are dealing with. ” The learner is genuinely trying to work through the issue and resolve it rationally. The crusader just wants to make you, the pro-lifer, look bad.” In both cases, Klusendorf points out, “it’s our job to demonstrate wisdom and sensitivity.”
So when someone says that a child conceived by rape will remind the woman of this heinous crime forever, Klusendorf responds:

That’s an important question and you are absolutely right: She may indeed suffer painful memories when she looks at the child and it’s foolish to think she never will. I don’t understand people who say that if she’ll just give birth, everything will be okay.  That’s easy for them to say. They should try looking at it from her perspective before saying that.  Even if her attacker is punished to the fullest extent of the law—which he should be—her road to recovery will be tough.

He then delicately and gently asks one primary follow-up question:

Given we both agree the child may provoke unpleasant memories, how do you think a civil society should treat innocent human beings that remind us of a painful event? . . .  Is it okay to kill them so we can feel better?

In the course of the conversation, he is trying to get them to see the following:

If the unborn are human, killing them so others can feel better is wrong. Hardship doesn’t justify homicide.
Admittedly, I don’t like the way my answer feels because I know the mother may suffer consequences for doing the right thing. But sometimes the right thing to do isn’t the easy thing to do.

Here are two thought experiments that might help:

Suppose I have a two-year-old up here with me.  His father is a rapist and his mother is on anti-depressant drugs. At least once a day, the sight of the child sends her back into depression. Would it be okay to kill the toddler if doing so makes the mother feel better?

And:

Suppose I’m an American commander in Iraq and terrorists capture my unit.  My captors inform me that in 10 minutes, they’ll begin torturing me and my men to get intelligence information out of us. However, they are willing to make me an offer.  If I will help them torture and interrogate my own men, they won’t torture and interrogate me.  I’ll get by with no pain. Can I take that deal? There’s no way. I’ll suffer evil rather than inflict it.
Again, I don’t like how the answer feels, but it’s the right one. Thankfully, the woman who is raped does not need to suffer alone. Pro-life crisis pregnancy centers are standing by to help get her through this. We should help, too.

Back to how politicians should answer this. Here is Doug Wilson’s suggestion to pro-life candidates:

When a rape results in a pregnancy, this means that we are now dealing with three people instead of two. Two of those three are innocent, and one of them is guilty. Take a case of violent rape. The pro-choice ghouls want to do two things—first, they want to go easy on the guilty one, refusing to execute him, while executing one of the innocent parties for something his father did, and secondly, they want to make out anyone who objects to this arrangement as the callused one.
In the future (as if any of these guys are taking my counsel), pro-life candidates for office need to answer the question in this way: “That is an excellent question, but we have to settle certain things first before we answer it. When a rape results in a pregnancy, are we dealing with three people or two?” And then he should refuse to answer the question until the reporter tells him “three or two,” along with the reasons why. This is how the Lord handled this sort of question.

See also Trevin Wax’s post on what pro-life politicians should say about abortion and rape (as well as his post on the 10 questions you never hear a pro-abortion-rights candidate asked).
But the foregoing doesn’t answer the question about legislation and how to think about these issues in light of our current cultural and political context. It’s here where Mohler’s perspective could get more controversial, especially for those who do not recognize the role of prudence in cultural change and the reality of governance:

We must contend for the full dignity and humanity of every single human life at every point of development and life from conception until natural death, and we cannot rest from this cause so long as the threat to the dignity and sanctity of any life remains.
In the meantime, we are informed by the fact that, as the Gallup organization affirmed just months ago, the vast majority of Americans are willing to support increased restrictions on abortion so long as those exceptions are allowed. We should gladly accept and eagerly support such laws and the candidates who support them, knowing that such a law would save the life of over a million unborn children in the nation each year.
Can we be satisfied with such a law? Of course not, and we cannot be disingenuous in our public statements. But we can eagerly support a law that would save the vast majority of unborn children now threatened by abortion, even as we seek to convince our fellow Americans that this is not enough.
We must argue for the dignity, humanity, and right to life of every unborn child, regardless of the context of its conception, but we must argue well and make our arguments carefully. The use and deliberate abuse of Richard Mourdock’s comments should underline the risk of falling short in that task.

Full of Sound and Fury

Protesting Too Much

We are amused whenever Unbelievers try to make out they are theologians or they have something beyond the comical or the trite to contribute to a religious debate.  They tend, as a herd, to pontificate with loud declamations about what they do not know. 

A Republican candidate for the US Senate has had the temerity to suggest that one should treat with great care and respect the life of an unborn child, even when that child has been conceived as a result of rape.  He has argued that even that conception is of God. 

At this point all Christians who understand the Bible’s revelation of the all controlling power of Almighty God will know immediately what is being referred to and meant.  This is Christian faith 101.
  Christians know the Psalms.  They know the Book of Job.  They know that suffering and calamity comes from evil and wicked agencies–even as it did to Job.  Yet they also know that behind the wickedness of the Accuser is the permissive will of God, the Almighty. 

Moreover, Christians know that the only comfort in life and death, particularly amidst suffering, is to believe that hard and difficult providences also come from God’s hand and are meant for the ultimate good of His people.  When Christians stand in grief around a coffin of a man murdered by contumely thugs the only final comfort is to know and believe that even this, too, has come from God’s hand and by His will.  It is not some random act beyond the control and will of God.  It is not meaningless.  As the old catechism so powerfully puts it:

What is your only comfort in life and death? 
That I am not my own, but belong–body and soul, in life and death–to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.  He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.  He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven: in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. . . .

Rape must always remain a capital crime.  It is a grossly evil act–whether committed by men or women.  However, as a result of rape sometimes a human being in the image of God is conceived.  That human being is innocent of all sin, except that of our first father, Adam.  That human being is not guilty of rape.  Therefore, that unborn child must be treated with the utmost care and respect–otherwise society would be arguing that the sins of one of the parents must be visited upon the child and that child must die, be executed, for the sins of the father or mother, sins of which they are not guilty, but completely innocent. 

What mad and utterly immoral society would punish the child for the gross sins of the rapist parent? 

It goes without saying that victims of rape, having now a child conceived and growing within one’s womb, would always be suffering deeply.  But the only comfort is to believe that out of this terrible affliction, God will bring good.  He will bring comfort, ensuring that this thing, too, is in His hand and will work together for my salvation.  And exactly the same realities apply to the innocent, defenceless human now quickened within the womb.  Do not do evil, that good may come, we are told.  We must take up all such children, conceived through rape, and ensure that the sins of a rapist are not visited upon the innocent child as if he or she were guilty.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

But America Isn’t Jesus 

Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 23 October 2012

The most apropos tweet concerning the debate last night came from John Piper: “Obama: America, the only indispensable nation. Romney: America, the hope of the earth. This does focus our prayers for them.” I want to get to that in a moment, but first let me just affirm the consensus that appears to be developing.

Romney is clearly husbanding a lead, and Obama was trying to catch up. Romney was acting like an incumbent, and Obama was acting like a challenger. Romney was happy to wait out the round in a clinch, and Obama wanted (and needed) a knock out blow that he didn’t get.
Both campaigns clearly know the way things have settled out, and are playing in the same game. At the end of September, the RNC had an 18 to 1 cash advantage over the DNC. I believe that things are in a desperate way for Obama, and he now knows it. He avoided knowing it for so long because he lives inside the bubble that is the leftist media. The whole thing is an example of what Glenn Reynolds calls a “preference cascade,” and which I encourage you to follow up on here.

But, that said, back to Piper’s observation. Both Obama and Romney are clearly civic idolaters — with the one significant difference between them appearing to be that Romney really believes it. Obama is willing to mouth the civic pieties during a campaign, but his actual idols are elsewhere. And so how did we get to the place where Christians prefer the idolater who actually believes in Baal?

Of course, I don’t want to be hyper. If a candidate says that he believes that America is basically a good and decent nation, who would want him to be corrected by some over-scrupulous Christian? “My friend, no one is good but God alone.”

But what we are seeing in these avowals really is religious in nature. One sees how it all works of course, but there is only one problem. America isn’t Jesus.

Sown Seeds

Loathsome Words And Withered Hands

Most of us who are Christians can look back in our lives and discern what we could not at the time–the hand of God Himself.  Things said, books read, people met, or unbidden thoughts that provoked and disturbed.  It is only in hindsight that we can now see the full impact and significant force of these circumstantial events.  We now see that in them God was at work, sowing seeds that one day would spring up to evergreen life. 

Most often these circumstances and events served to disturb, to provoke discomfort.
  Peter Hitchens, raised in a nominally Christian home and sent to a public school, gives us his account of the seeds sown.

There were other things too.  During a short spell at a cathedral choir school . . . I had experienced the intense beauty of the ancient Anglican chants, spiraling up into chilly stone vaults at Evensong.  This sunset ceremony is the very heart of English Christianity.  The prehistoric, mysterious poetry of the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, perhaps a melancholy evening hymn, and the cold, ancient laments and curses of the Psalms, as the unique slow dusk of England gathers outside and inside the echoing, haunted, impossible old building are extraordinarily potent.  If you welcome them, they have an astonishing power to reassure and comfort.  If you suspect or mistrust them, they will alarm and repel you like a strong and unwanted magic, something to flee from before it takes hold. . . .

But above all I had discovered–and strongly feared and disliked–the ancient catechism . . . . (I) was actively angry and resentful at the catechism’s insistence on rules I had no intention of obeying.  By the time I was around twelve, I had a sense, when I encountered this text, of a very old and withered hand reaching out from a dusty tomb-like cavity and seeking to pull me down into its hole forever. 

The dark purity of the seventeenth-century language was also disturbing.  It was the voice of the dead, speaking as if they were still alive and as if the world had not changed since they died–when I thought I knew that the world was wholly alterable and that the rules changed with the times.  Now I am comforted greatly by this voice, welcoming the intervention of my forebears in our lives and in their insistent reminder that we do not in fact change at all, that as I am now, so once were they, and as they are now, so shall I be. . . . The words I found myself particularly loathing formed part of the answer to the question: “What is thy duty towards God?”  They run: “To submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters: to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters . . . to do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to call me.”

This passage well expressed the thing that the confident, ambitious young person dislikes about religion: its call for submission–submission!–to established authority, and its disturbing implication that others can and will decide what I must be and do.  [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2010), pp 26-28.]

While the specific circumstances may differ we suspect that many, if not most, Christians could give similar accounts of the long and painstaking work of God in their lives preparing them to meet Him against Whom they had long been kicking. 

Educators and Education

Modern Imposters and Gargoyles

What the the role and calling of a teacher?  One Trent Kays deigns to give us ordinary mortals the answer.  Trent describes himself as a “writer, teacher, provocateur, activist, consultant, and rhetoric & writing studies PhD student” so we know we are waist deep in the good oil here.  

For some reason Trent’s answer to the question on the role and calling of a teacher has appeared in the NZ Herald.  Why?  No idea.  Maybe the paper thought that his opinions on the matter were of significance.  There is probably some warrant to this notion.  His own promotional page at the University of Minnesota website claims, “He often writes about society, technology, culture, and higher education issues, and he is in the process of founding a new venture dedicated to practical and progressive ideas for changing education.”

Great stuff.  So what progressive pedagogical revolution is about to descend upon us?  Same old, same old.  The same tired old cliches that progressive and post-modern liberals have been prattling on about since Michel Foucault first said, “Well, I’ll be darned!”

Here is Trent in full cliched flight:

Every semester, I enter my classroom with almost zero knowledge of my students’ interests. So as a rhetoric and writing teacher, I ask them to employ that which is most beneficial to them in their lives: discourse.  I want to know what they think, why they think it, and how they see themselves in the elegant mess we call the world. Indeed, it becomes partly my charge to help students understand how their perspectives are relevant to my course.

Discourse.  The most beneficial thing in the lives of students.  Discourse.  What on earth is that?   It’s just the opinions and ideas you happen to have about the world.  So the role of the teacher is to create an environment where people are liberated to express freely what they really think.  Trent again:

The worst thing a teacher can do is tell students what and how to think. According to Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, this type of teaching borders on intellectual violence upon another, and where teaching is meant to be a liberating affair, it becomes one of systemic oppression.  In many circumstances, I tell my students the classroom is a space for learning. It is a space to explore and discover ideas without fear of being dismissed or lambasted.

Great. Diversity.  Freedom.  So we can reasonably expect that some poor student in Trent Kays’s class might feel emboldened to say, “I think that Osama bin Laden was the greatest revolutionary hero of our generation.”  Some of the students would hiss (at least inside), but Trent would be at his encouraging best.  “Great.  Thanks for sharing.  What makes you say that?  Good.  Good.  What you think is important.  Go on–tell us more.”  This is a high class, state-of-the-art, post-modern teacher at work.  

You can imagine how the students feel affirmed and encouraged.  This is the essence of true education, according to our high flying expert:

I tell them their perspectives, life experiences and ideas are equally important to mine and the subject material at hand.  After hearing this, many sit astonished at the idea their opinions are actually going to be heard. Unfortunately, I hear from students all too often that their opinions, perspectives and ideas are secondary to their teachers’ or even not valued. I find this preposterous. Education is about enlightenment and not the subjugation of one idea for another.

Whoops.  Problem!  Old Trent has slipped into a bit of old fashioned Marxian stereotypical pablum.  Folks like Jacques Derrida have been complaining for ages that if a teacher puts his ideas and beliefs upon a student it is hegemonic–it is a tyranny of one mind over another.  It is subjugation. It is exploitation.  But that is only just your opinion, Trent.  Great that you can express your ideas and perspectives.  Good on you.  But it’s preposterous to think that your (teacher) idea is more important than mine, right.  Your Marxist opinions about teaching are themselves a form of subjugation and exploitation because you are trying to impose them upon your students, and upon us (via your article).

But this is nonsense from another perspective as well.  What would happen in Trent’s classroom do you think if a poor student were to have the temerity to opine that homosexuals were perversely immoral?   One imagines that pretty quickly Trent’s classroom would become a place of “systemic oppression” on the unfortunate holder of such an outrageous opinion.

Trent would then be directly contradicting his own professed position.  For he goes on to tell us most definitely that

There is no objective truth because objectivity does not exist; there are only degrees of subjectivity. An opinion without evidence can be truth as much as fact with evidence can be a falsehood.  Facts are socially constructed, and they only exist because humans are willing to define and name them. This act of naming almost always positions one thing as the opposite to another. The bizarre form of dialectic at work here doesn’t negate the issue that humans construct, name and set these things in opposition.

Once again Trent thinks he has escaped the Cretan paradox.  He has not.  Is the assertion, “There is no objective truth” objectively true, or not?  Clearly Trent acts and speaks as though he believes it to be objectively and universally true–he even attempts to offer a rationale for it.  But alas he fails.  He is hoist on his own petard.

Or, again,

But to say that a student isn’t entitled to their opinion is to devalue the student. It is to suggest that the teacher’s way is the right way, and the student is less than the teacher. These are hardly correct.

Trent is oh-so-politely saying that the opinion that “the teacher’s way is the right way, and the student is less than the teacher” is wrong!  That’s precisely what he is also arguing that a superior and enlightened teacher cannot and must not do.  Trent clearly believes his “opinions” are objectively true and must be systemically and violently imposed upon his students.  Ah, yes, as Orwell pointed out, “all the animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” 

We acknowledge that Trent’s views are wildly popular in most modern education circles–which is to say that most pedagogy now resembles a grotesque post-modern, Marxist gargoyle.  It is, so internally contradictory that it will end not with a bang, but a whimper. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

The Legs of Unbelief 

Liturgy and Worship – Exhortation
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 20 October 2012

We cannot be reminded too often of the goodness and grace of God. Unbelief is the perennial temptation, and part of that unbelief is the idea that our unbelief is greater than the purposes of God. No—the legs of unbelief are too short to outrun the goodness and grace of God.

We like to put on airs; we like to believe that we are more important than we actually are. God’s purposes will be done regardless.
If I believe or if I don’t believe, God is not deterred. If I don’t believe Him, then His purposes will redound for His glory (which they were going to do anyway), but if I believe, then His glory will also be for my good, and for my blessing.

For the utter unbeliever, this does not matter at all. But for the believer who worries that his belief is not what it should be, he begins to panic. He knows he believes, but like the man with the demoniac son, he cries out, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” This is where we may take comfort. The legs of your unbelief are too short to outrun the goodness and greatness of God.

We love because He first loved. We believe because He gave us the gift of faith. We rejoice because He filled our hearts with joy. And what God has begun, God will complete.

The Lord is easily pleased, but hard to satisfy. He chides the disciples frequently for being little-faiths. That is not a good thing. And yet, at the same time, He teaches them that mustard seed faith can accomplish great things. One of the things that little faith can accomplish is that it can grow into greater and greater faith.

So do not hesitate to come before the Lord in worship. You have things to be fixed, right? What else is new? You have issues? Then we have no time to lose. Come, let us worship the Lord now.

Creation By Divine Command

The Regular is the Miracle

Christians believe in the God Who is the Cause of all causes.  Here is an excerpt from one of the most comprehensive confessions ever made by the Church, written about four hundred years ago:

God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. (“Of God’s Eternal Decree”, Westminster Confession of Faith 3:1)

Natural causation exists only because God has ordained and commanded all.  But this confession, this aspect of the undoubted Christian faith, has never been understood by materialists and Unbelievers in general.
  To them god can ever only be nothing more than a warranting concept, a bucket if you will, to hold all that we don’t know and understand about natural causes.  As scientific knowledge increases, and our understanding of natural causation grows, the “bucket”, and therefore god, shrinks.   This is known as the “God of the gaps” theory. 

Materialists cling to it like petulant children because the identification of god with all that we are agnostic about is already required by their materialist pseudo-religion. It is the only god their religion allows them to acknowledge.  For them it is always “matter versus God”.  For the Christian it is always “only matter and natural causes because of God”.  Thus, the dichotomy of matter versus God has only and always been a straw man.  When materialists talk of god they always are making reference to an idol–to a god as they have conceived it to be, not to God as He has revealed Himself to be.

Marilynne Robinson reflects on this circumstance.

For almost as long as their has been science in the West there has been a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists amongst us still, vigorous as ever, that if a thing can be “explained,” associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the category of the spiritual.  But the “physical” in this sense is only a disappearingly thin slice of being, selected, for our purposes, out of the totality of being by the fact that we perceive it as solid, substantial. We all know that if we were the size of atoms, chairs and tables would appear to us as loose clouds of energy. [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 9f]

Robinson, of course, is making reference to the astounding discoveries over the last century in particle physics.  It turns out that matter is not “hard” at all.  It is all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  We are all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  Robinson continues:

It seems to me very amazing that the arbitrarily selected “physical” world we inhabit is coherent and lawful.  An older vocabulary would offer the world “miraculous.”  Knowing what we know now, an earlier generation might see divine providence in the fact of a world coherent enough to be experienced by us as complete in itself, and as a basis upon which all claims to reality can be tested.  A truly theological age would see in this divine Providence intent on making human habitation within the wild roar of the cosmos. 

But almost everyone, for generations now, has insisted on a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual.  So we have had theologies that really proposed a “God of the gaps” as if God were not manifest in the creation, as the Bible is so inclined to insist, but instead survives in those dark places, those black boxes, where the light of science has not yet shone.  And we have atheisms and agnosticisms that make precisely the same argument, only assuming that at some time the light of science will indeed dispel the last shadow in which the holy might have been thought to linger.  [Ibid.]

Given what we now are learning about the cosmos and the natural order, the old dualism between matter and spirit is exploding to pieces.  This is not to say that men will cease clinging to it with stubborn ferocity.  It is to say, however, that their intractable stubbornness will be increasingly plain.  The material realm’s testimony to the God who created all things is getting louder and more scintillating as our understanding of the material grows.  The chaotic, wild roar of the cosmos makes the plain, the hard, the ordinary, the predictable, and the regular character of the creation appear comprehensively and utterly miraculous. 

The Cause of our Generation; The Great Shame of our Age

The Apple Argument against Abortion

Peter Kreeft argues from a non-controversial premise to a controversial conclusion:

1. We Know What an Apple Is

Our first principle should be as undeniable as possible, for arguments usually go back to their first principles. If we find our first premise to be a stone wall that cannot be knocked down when we back up against it, our argument will be strong. Tradition states and common sense dictates our premise that we know what an apple is. Almost no one doubted this, until quite recently. Even now, only philosophers, scholars, “experts,” media mavens, professors, journalists, and mind-molders dare to claim that we do not know what an apple is.

2. We Really Know What an Apple Really Is

From the premise that “we know what an apple is,” I move to a second principle that is only an explication of the meaning of the first: that we really know what an apple really is. If this is denied, our first principle is refuted. It becomes, “We know, but not really, what an apple is, but not really.” Step 2 says only, “Let us not ‘nuance’ Step 1 out of existence!”

3. We Really Know What Some Things Really Are

From Step 2, I deduce the third principle, also as an immediate logical corollary, that we really know what some things (other things than apples) really are. This follows if we only add the minor premise that an apple is another thing.

This third principle, of course, is the repudiation of skepticism. The secret has been out since Socrates that skepticism is logically self-contradictory. To say “I do not know” is to say “I know I do not know.” Socrates’s wisdom was not skepticism. He was not the only man in the world who knew that he did not know. He had knowledge; he did not claim to have wisdom. He knew he was not wise. That is a wholly different affair and is not self-contradictory. All forms of skepticism are logically self-contradictory, nuance as we will.

All talk about rights, about right and wrong, about justice, presupposes this principle that we really know what some things really are. We cannot argue about anything at all—anything real, as distinct from arguing about arguing, and about words, and attitudes—unless we accept this principle. We can talk about feelings without it, but we cannot talk about justice. We can have a reign of feelings—or a reign of terror—without it, but we cannot have a reign of law.

4. We Know What Human Beings Are

Our fourth principle is that we know what we are. If we know what an apple is, surely we know what a human being is. For we aren’t apples; we don’t live as apples, we don’t feel what apples feel (if anything). We don’t experience the existence or growth or life of apples, yet we know what apples are. A fortiori, we know what we are, for we have “inside information,” privileged information, more and better information.
We obviously do not have total, or even adequate, knowledge of ourselves, or of apples, or (if we listen to Aquinas) of even a flea. There is obviously more mystery in a human than in an apple, but there is also more knowledge. I repeat this point because I know it is often not understood: To claim that “we know what we are” is not to claim that we know all that we are, or even that we know adequately or completely or with full understanding anything at all of what we are. We are a living mystery, but we also know much of this mystery. Knowledge and mystery are no more incompatible than eating and hungering for more.

5. We Have Human Rights Because We Are Human

The fifth principle is the indispensable, common-sensical basis for human rights: We have human rights because we are human beings.

We have not yet said what human beings are (e.g., do we have souls?), or what human rights are (e.g., do we have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?), only the simple point that we have whatever human rights we have because we are whatever it is that makes us human.

This certainly sounds innocent enough, but it implies a general principle. Let’s call that our sixth principle.

6. Morality Is Based on Metaphysics

Metaphysics means simply philosophizing about reality. The sixth principle means that rights depend on reality, and our knowledge of rights depends on our knowledge of reality.

By this point in our argument, some are probably feeling impatient. These impatient ones are common-sensical people, uncorrupted by the chattering classes. They will say, “Of course. We know all this. Get on with it. Get to the controversial stuff.” Ah, but I suspect we began with the controversial stuff. For not all are impatient; others are uneasy. “Too simplistic,” “not nuanced,” “a complex issue”—do these phrases leap to mind as shields to protect you from the spear that you know is coming at the end of the argument?

The principle that morality depends on metaphysics means that rights depend on reality, or what is right depends on what is. Even if you say you are skeptical of metaphysics, we all do use the principle in moral or legal arguments. For instance, in the current debate about “animal rights,” some of us think that animals do have rights and some of us think they don’t, but we all agree that if they do have rights, they have animal rights, not human rights or plant rights, because they are animals, not humans or plants. For instance, a dog doesn’t have the right to vote, as humans do, because dogs are not rational, as humans are. But a dog probably does have a right not to be tortured. Why? Because of what a dog is, and because we really know a little bit about what a dog really is: We really know that a dog feels pain and a tree doesn’t. Dogs have feelings, unlike trees, and dogs don’t have reason, like humans; that’s why it’s wrong to break a limb off a dog but it’s not wrong to break a limb off a tree, and that’s also why dogs don’t have the right to vote but humans do.

7. Moral Arguments Presuppose Metaphysical Principles

The main reason people deny that morality must (or even can) be based on metaphysics is that they say we don’t really know what reality is, we only have opinions. They point out, correctly, that we are less agreed about morality than science or everyday practical facts. We don’t differ about whether the sun is a planet or whether we need to eat to live, but we do differ about things like abortion, capital punishment, and animal rights.

But the very fact that we argue about it—a fact the skeptic points to as a reason for skepticism—is a refutation of skepticism. We don’t argue about how we feel, about subjective things. You never hear an argument like this: “I feel great.” “No, I feel terrible.”

For instance, both pro-lifers and pro-choicers usually agree that it’s wrong to kill innocent persons against their will and it’s not wrong to kill parts of persons, like cancer cells. And both the proponents and opponents of capital punishment usually agree that human life is of great value; that’s why the proponent wants to protect the life of the innocent by executing murderers and why the opponent wants to protect the life even of the murderer. They radically disagree about how to apply the principle that human life is valuable, but they both assume and appeal to that same principle.

8. Might Making Right

All these examples so far are controversial. How to apply moral principles to these issues is controversial. What is not controversial, I hope, is the principle itself that human rights are possessed by human beings because of what they are, because of their being—and not because some other human beings have the power to enforce their will. That would be, literally, “might makes right.” Instead of putting might into the hands of right, that would be pinning the label of “right” on the face of might: justifying force instead of fortifying justice. But that is the only alternative, no matter what the political power structure, no matter who or how many hold the power, whether a single tyrant, or an aristocracy, or a majority of the freely voting public, or the vague sentiment of what Rousseau called “the general will.” The political form does not change the principle. A constitutional monarchy, in which the king and the people are subject to the same law, is a rule of law, not of power; a lawless democracy, in which the will of the majority is unchecked, is a rule of power, not of law.

9. Either All Have Rights or Only Some Have Rights

The reason all human beings have human rights is that all human beings are human. Only two philosophies of human rights are logically possible. Either all human beings have rights, or only some human beings have rights. There is no third possibility. But the reason for believing either one of these two possibilities is even more important than which one you believe.

Suppose you believe that all human beings have rights. Do you believe that all human beings have rights because they are human beings? Do you dare to do metaphysics? Are human rights “inalienable” because they are inherent in human nature, in the human essence, in the human being, in what humans, in fact, are? Or do you believe that all human beings have rights because some human beings say so—because some human wills have declared that all human beings have rights? If it’s the first reason, you are secure against tyranny and usurpation of rights. If it’s the second reason, you are not. For human nature doesn’t change, but human wills do. The same human wills that say today that all humans have rights may well say tomorrow that only some have rights.

10. Why Abortion Is Wrong

Some people want to be killed. I won’t address the morality of voluntary euthanasia here. But clearly, involuntary euthanasia is wrong; clearly, there is a difference between imposing power on another and freely making a contract with another. The contract may still be a bad one, a contract to do a wrong thing, and the mere fact that the parties to the contract entered it freely does not automatically justify doing the thing they contract to do. But harming or killing another against his will, not by free contract, is clearly wrong; if that isn’t wrong, what is?

But that’s what abortion is. Mother Teresa argued, simply, “If abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” The fetus doesn’t want to be killed; it seeks to escape. Did you dare to watch The Silent Scream? Did the media dare to allow it to be shown? No, they will censor nothing except the most common operation in America.

11. The Argument From the Nonexistence of Nonpersons

Are persons a subclass of humans, or are humans a subclass of persons? The issue of distinguishing humans and persons comes up only for two reasons: the possibility that there are nonhuman persons, like extraterrestrials, elves, angels, gods, God, or the Persons of the Trinity, or the possibility that there are some nonpersonal humans, unpersons, humans without rights.

Traditional common sense and morality say all humans are persons and have rights. Modern moral relativism says that only some humans are persons, for only those who are given rights by others (i.e., those in power) have rights. Thus, if we have power, we can “depersonalize” any group we want: blacks, slaves, Jews, political enemies, liberals, fundamentalists—or unborn babies.

A common way to state this philosophy is the claim that membership in a biological species confers no rights. I have heard it argued that we do not treat any other species in the traditional way—that is, we do not assign equal rights to all mice. Some we kill (those that get into our houses and prove to be pests); others we take good care of and preserve (those that we find useful in laboratory experiments or those we adopt as pets); still others we simply ignore (mice in the wild). The argument concludes that therefore, it is only sentiment or tradition (the two are often confused, as if nothing rational could be passed down by tradition) that assigns rights to all members of our own species.

12. Three Pro-Life Premises and Three Pro-Choice Alternatives

We have been assuming three premises, and they are the three fundamental assumptions of the pro-life argument. Any one of them can be denied. To be pro-choice, you must deny at least one of them, because taken together they logically entail the pro-life conclusion. But there are three different kinds of pro-choice positions, depending on which of the three pro-life premises is denied.

The first premise is scientific, the second is moral, and the third is legal. The scientific premise is that the life of the individual member of every animal species begins at conception. (This truism was taught by all biology textbooks before Roe and by none after Roe; yet Roe did not discover or appeal to any new scientific discoveries.) In other words, all humans are human, whether embryonic, fetal, infantile, young, mature, old, or dying.

The moral premise is that all humans have the right to life because all humans are human. It is a deduction from the most obvious of all moral rules, the Golden Rule, or justice, or equality. If you would not be killed, do not kill. It’s just not just, not fair. All humans have the human essence and, therefore, are essentially equal.
The legal premise is that the law must protect the most basic human rights. If all humans are human, and if all humans have a right to life, and if the law must protect human rights, then the law must protect the right to life of all humans.

If all three premises are true, the pro-life conclusion follows. From the pro-life point of view, there are only three reasons for being pro-choice: scientific ignorance—appalling ignorance of a scientific fact so basic that nearly everyone in the world knows it; moral ignorance—appalling ignorance of the most basic of all moral rules; or legal ignorance—appalling ignorance of one of the most basic of all the functions of law. But there are significant differences among these different kinds of ignorance.

Scientific ignorance, if it is not ignoring, or deliberate denial or dishonesty, is perhaps pitiable but not morally blame-worthy. You don’t have to be wicked to be stupid. If you believe an unborn baby is only “potential life” or a “group of cells,” then you do not believe you are killing a human being when you abort and might have no qualms of conscience about it. (But why, then, do most mothers who abort feel such terrible pangs of conscience, often for a lifetime?)

Most pro-choice arguments, during the first two decades after Roe, disputed the scientific premise of the pro-life argument. It might be that this was almost always dishonest rather than honest ignorance, but perhaps not, and at least it didn’t directly deny the essential second premise, the moral principle. But pro-choice arguments today increasingly do.

Perhaps pro-choicers perceive that they have no choice but to do this, for they have no other recourse if they are to argue at all. Scientific facts are just too clear to deny, and it makes no legal sense to deny the legal principle, for if the law is not supposed to defend the right to life, what is it supposed to do? So they have to deny the moral principle that leads to the pro-life conclusion. This, I suspect, is a vast and major sea change.

The camel has gotten not just his nose, but his torso under the tent. I think most people refuse to think or argue about abortion because they see that the only way to remain pro-choice is to abort their reason first. Or, since many pro-choicers insist that abortion is about sex, not about babies, the only way to justify their scorn of virginity is a scorn of intellectual virginity. The only way to justify their loss of moral innocence is to lose their intellectual innocence.

If the above paragraph offends you, I challenge you to calmly and honestly ask your own conscience and reason whether, where, and why it is false.

13. The Argument from Skepticism

The most likely response to this will be the charge of dogmatism. How dare I pontificate with infallible certainty, and call all who disagree either mentally or morally challenged! All right, here is an argument even for the metaphysical skeptic, who would not even agree with my very first and simplest premise, that we really do know what some things really are, such as what an apple is. (It’s only after you are pinned against the wall and have to justify something like abortion that you become a skeptic and deny such a self-evident principle.)

Roe used such skepticism to justify a pro-choice position. Since we don’t know when human life begins, the argument went, we cannot impose restrictions. (Why it is more restrictive to give life than to take it, I cannot figure out.) So here is my refutation of Roe on its own premises, its skeptical premises: Suppose that not a single principle of this essay is true, beginning with the first one. Suppose that we do not even know what an apple is. Even then abortion is unjustifiable.

Let’s assume not a dogmatic skepticism (which is self-contradictory) but a skeptical skepticism. Let us also assume that we do not know whether a fetus is a person or not. In objective fact, of course, either it is or it isn’t (unless the Court has revoked the Law of Noncontradiction while we were on vacation), but in our subjective minds, we may not know what the fetus is in objective fact. We do know, however, that either it is or isn’t by formal logic alone.

A second thing we know by formal logic alone is that either we do or do not know what a fetus is. Either there is “out there,” in objective fact, independent of our minds, a human life, or there is not; and either there is knowledge in our minds of this objective fact, or there is not.

So, there are four possibilities:

1. The fetus is a person, and we know that; The fetus is a person, but we don’t know that; The fetus isn’t a person, but we don’t know that;
2. The fetus isn’t a person, and we know that. What is abortion in each of these four cases?

In Case 1, where the fetus is a person and you know that, abortion is murder. First-degree murder, in fact. You deliberately kill an innocent human being.

In Case 2, where the fetus is a person and you don’t know that, abortion is manslaughter. It’s like driving over a man-shaped overcoat in the street at night or shooting toxic chemicals into a building that you’re not sure is fully evacuated. You’re not sure there is a person there, but you’re not sure there isn’t either, and it just so happens that there is a person there, and you kill him. You cannot plead ignorance. True, you didn’t know there was a person there, but you didn’t know there wasn’t either, so your act was literally the height of irresponsibility. This is the act Roe allowed.

In Case 3, the fetus isn’t a person, but you don’t know that. So abortion is just as irresponsible as it is in the previous case. You ran over the overcoat or fumigated the building without knowing that there were no persons there. You were lucky; there weren’t. But you didn’t care; you didn’t take care; you were just as irresponsible. You cannot legally be charged with manslaughter, since no man was slaughtered, but you can and should be charged with criminal negligence.

Only in Case 4 is abortion a reasonable, permissible, and responsible choice. But note: What makes Case 4 permissible is not merely the fact that the fetus is not a person but also your knowledge that it is not, your overcoming of skepticism. So skepticism counts not for abortion but against it. Only if you are not a skeptic, only if you are a dogmatist, only if you are certain that there is no person in the fetus, no man in the coat, or no person in the building, may you abort, drive, or fumigate.

This undercuts even our weakest, least honest escape: to pretend that we don’t even know what an apple is, just so we have an excuse for pleading that we don’t know what an abortion is.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor.

Peter Kreeft ends with this postscript:

I hope a reader can show me where I’ve gone astray in the sequence of 13 steps that constitute this argument. I honestly wish a pro-choicer would someday show me one argument that proved that fetuses are not persons. It would save me and other pro-lifers enormous grief, time, effort, worry, prayers, and money. But until that time, I will keep arguing, because it’s what I do as a philosopher. It is my weak and wimpy version of a mother’s shouting that something terrible is happening: Babies are being slaughtered. I will do this because, as Edmund Burke declared, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” 

Deifying Science Has a Cost

Humble Pie

The media and scientific community has been agog and agag at the Italian earthquake scientists convicted of manslaughter.  Whether the conviction will remain standing is not clear: Italy has an automatic appeal system, so it may be overturned. 

The NZ Herald provides a summary of the case:

Defying assertions that earthquakes cannot be predicted, an Italian court has convicted seven scientists and experts of manslaughter for failing to adequately warn residents before a quake struck central Italy in 2009 and killed more than 300 people.  The court in L’Aquila also sentenced the defendants to six years each in prison. All are members of the national Great Risks Commission, and several are prominent scientists or geological and disaster experts.

This judgment provokes reflection on why anyone would for a moment think that earthquake scientists should be held to account for failing to predict an earthquake, let alone convict such scientists of manslaughter.

One probable cause lies in the widespread deification of science itself.
  Scientism, the religion of elevating science to the status of the only, final, certain arbiter and protector of truth, knowledge and fact, has been widely promulgated and prophesied in the West.  Scientists, academics, philosophers openly make such claims, with a straight face.  As G. K. Chesterton said, when a people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; rather they begin to believe in everything.  Every culture requires a final arbiter, an infallible truth or entity of some kind.  When God is rejected, substitutes are elevated and deified.

The six earthquake scientists in Italy failed to do what was expected–to give a certain, infallible word.  In a sense they have defamed the gods–hence their indictment and judgment.

A second probable cause lies in the behaviour of the scientific community itself.  Far too often it has claimed and proclaimed certainty when it is really talking about speculation–often of the wildest kind.  The pronounced certainty about evolution is an apt example.  Whilst some of the more honest evolutionists have admitted that evolutionary theory is really a “just so” story we tell ourselves, most evolutionists vehemently proclaim its infallible and certain truth.  Alleged anthropogenic global warming is another example.  “Official science” has repeatedly claimed and asserted certainty whilst privately scientists admit to all kinds of doubts and criticisms. 

Having got on the high horse of declarative certainty, scientists cannot complain when the public takes them seriously and, therefore, holds them to account when it turns out they were wrong. In the US, however, a scientists’ lobby group is complaining:

In the United States, Michael Halpern at the Union of Concerned Scientists lobby group said in a blog: “This is an absurd and dangerous decision that U.S. officials should rebuke, and Italian President Giorgio Napolitano should overturn.”

But then Halpern goes on to make an excellent point:

“Imagine if the government brought criminal charges against your local meteorologist for not being able to predict the exact path of a tornado,” said Halpern. “Scientists need to be able to share what they know – and admit what they do not know — without the fear of being held criminally responsible should their predictions not hold up”.

The point is that scientists are neither trained nor required to provide qualified advice–advice that discloses the remaining uncertainties, what is not known, and the levels of speculation involved.  In finance, for example, most regulatory regimes require that investment promotional literature include a list of uncertainties which, although now largely reduced to the trite and formulaic, remind readers of risks.  In New Zealand, advertising and promotional references to historical performance require a disclaimer that past returns do not indicate nor predict future returns.  If promoters do not so qualify their language they are liable to prosecution. 

To the extent that official science and scientists have overreached they need to adopt a far more humble and qualified position and consistently disclose what is not known.

The World’s Largest Daisy Chain 

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 18 September 2012

There is an argument against homosexual marriage that I have offered from time to time which has been met with a strange sort of incredulity. It came up again the other night during the Q&A after my debate with Clarke Cooper, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, and so I thought I should jot down a few additional thoughts about it here.

There are two kinds of “beyond-two plurality” in marriage. One is old school — polygamy — and I have argued that it is not possible to argue for homosexual marriage without all those same arguments being available for use by the polygamists later on. As I said in the debate, if you leave the key under the mat, more people than just you can use it.

But the other kind of plurality in marriage is required by bisexuality, and this argument is the one that results in the incredulity . . . as though I don’t know what bisexuality actually is (which was in fact one of the questions in the Q&A). So to get one thing out of the way right at the top, I don’t believe that it is mandatory for a bisexual man to pursue a guy and a girl at the same time. All that is necessary for my argument is that it could entail this, and whether or not it did would be entirely up to the lusts of the person concerned.

If a man is lusting for something, by what principle can we deny him a marital imprimatur for it? By what standard?  If a bisexual man marries in a state that allows him to marry either a man or a woman, this means that he is being forced by that state to choose which side of his sexual identity will be expressed in marriage. The other side of his sexual identity (the way God made him, forsooth!) is being stifled by the narrow-mindedness of the state in question. It may be actually suppressed, or it might still be expressed by cheating, or by getting a tolerant partner who wants an open marriage. But whatever he does, the state forbids a bisexual sexual expression within the confines of marriage. And what I want to know is, where is the hate coming from, man?

There is another implication to this that I did not bring up at the debate because the math would get too complicated, but it bears mentioning here. Given the principles of our new marital logic, bisexual marriage requires at least three people, but it actually opens us up to a lot more than that. Since the math can get convoluted, let’s make it a story problem.

So logic eventually catches up with us, and we have the first state that allows bisexuals to marry. Our long national nightmare is over. So Bob marries both Suzy and George, and everybody’s happy, right? But are Suzy and George married too? It seems that we should allow it, but the fact that Bob is deeply in love with Suzy, and also in love with George, and vice versa, does not mean at all that George and Suzy need to have the hots for one another. But . . . they too are bisexual. Oh, no! This means that Suzy has Bob, but gets to pick Kimberly for her three-way marriage. Kimberly is also bisexual, and she is married to Henry. In the meantime, George has met Megan, the love of his life, girl-wise. Megan is bi also, and she has Gloria waiting in the wings. Still with me?

Now there are certain legal questions, like whether this is going to be a great big globule marriage, with Kimmberly being married, kinda, to Bob and to George, making it a marital orgy, or whether this is actually going to be a chain of discrete marriages. Some may look at this arrangement and see the world’s largest daisy chain, but I see a cash cow for marriage and family attorneys. Follow the money, man.

In the Q&A after our debate, one person said, with dismay, but “that would be cheating!” And it struck me that something else is going on, at least with some folks.

There are three kinds of responses to this argument. The first swallows the reductio — “yeah, sexual liberty means liberty to do whatever the hell you want.” Sleep with whoever you want, and marry whoever you want. As a few simple thought experiments would show — like the experiment above — this would not broaden marriage, but would rather destroy it. And that, incidentally, is the actual point.

The second would be the homosexual activist who does see the force of the argument, but who has enough PR sense to not want video or audio of anybody swallowing the reductio to get out. Somebody would send a copy to the Family Research Council, and they would post it on their website under the headline “See?” Incrementalism means that you don’t reveal your whole agenda at once. This helps account for some of the “bewilderment” when this is raised. Nobody is proposing this, and nobody will propose it, at least until ten minutes after the previous perversion is codified in law.

The third kind of response — and this was the surprise to me — is that of the sentimentalist homosexual. Such a person has bought into all the propaganda about homosexuality being okay, and so has ditched that particular traditional value, but he still clings to another traditional value with real tenacity. He believes in the happy endings of chick flicks as fervently as anybody ever did. He may be a sodomite, but he is also a sap. Same sex is okay, but the number “two” (being necessary to contours of the “true love story”) is absolutely sacrosanct.

This is woven tightly in with the sexual envy directed at heterosexual couples who are truly happy together. Why should they have the happy endings? This is an emotional attachment that some people still have, but the logic of the sexual revolution will deal with it in due course.

“But traditional love stories have always involved just two . . .”  

“Traditional? Right. Like you guys care about that.”

Follow the logic. Do the math. Don’t be like the guy who shot his parents and pleaded for the court to show mercy because he was an orphan.

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

The Glory of the Human Being and His Soul

Marilynne Robinson’s meditation on the power and glory of the human soul is worth reading and re-reading.  The wonder, the glory and the majesty of it all has been lost as modern culture has become imprisoned in its materialist caverns.

Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word “soul,” and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit.  In contemporary religious circles, souls, if they are mentioned at all, tend to be spoken of as saved or lost, having answered some set of divine expectations or failed to answer them, having arrived at some crucial realization or failed to arrive at it.

So the soul, the masterpiece of creation, is more or less reduced to a token signifying cosmic acceptance or rejection, having little or nothing to do with that miraculous thing, the felt experience of life, except insofar as life offers distractions or temptations.

Having read recently that there are more neurons in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way,
and having read any number of times that the human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the universe, and that the mind is not identical with the brain but is more mysterious still, it seems to me this astonishing nexus of the self, so uniquely elegant and capable, merits a name that would indicate a difference in kind from the ontological run of things, and for my purposes “soul” would do nicely.

Perhaps I should pause here to clarify my meaning, since there are those who feel that the spiritual is diminished or denied when it is associated with the physical.  I am not among them.  In his Letter to the Romans, Paul says, “Ever since the creation of the world (God’s) invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”  If we are to consider the heavens, how much more are we to consider the magnificent energies of consciousness that make whomever we pass on the street a far grander marvel than our galaxy?

At this point of dynamic convergence, call it self or call it soul, questions of right and wrong are weighed, love is felt, guilt and loss are suffered.  And, over time, formation occurs, for weal or woe, governed in large part by that unaccountable capacity for self awareness.

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world.  From it proceeds every thought, every art.  I like Calvin’s metaphor–nature is a shining garment in which God is revealed and concealed.  As we perceive we interpret, and we make hypotheses.  Something is happening, it has a certain character or meaning which we usually feel we understand at least tentatively, though experience is almost always available to reinterpretations based on subsequent experience or reflection.  Here occurs the weighing of moral and ethical choice.  Behavior proceeds from all this, and is interesting, to my mind, in the degree that it can be understood to proceed from it.  [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012),  p.8f.] 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Father-Driven Adoption 

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, 19 October 2012

We live in polarized times, and it shows up in many issues. One of the unfortunate consequences of this is that if you say that a particular course of action might have any negative consequences anywhere, you must be against that course of action. You must be an enemy of it. If you think home schooling, for example, could ever end badly, you must be against home schooling. This does not follow, and if the sensitivities of our illogical age  are honored, the results will be increasingly bad.

We have gotten to the point where knowledge that some people flunk math classes is taken as a deep conviction (on the part of the person who knows it) that math classes ought not to be taken. No . .  perhaps a person should enroll in them with an accurate understanding of what it is going to take. Trying to get people prepared is not the same thing as scaring them off.

I say this because I want to urge a central caution about adoption, and I want to do so as someone who honors and respects those who have counted the cost and who have done it right. May their tribe increase, and God bless all of them.

There are numerous other issues that flow out of this one concern, and perhaps I can develop them further some other time. But as I have watched Christian couples adopting children (over decades), I have come to a conclusion, and I would ask every prospective adopting couple to consider this deeply, and here it is. Is the adoption desire and process being led and driven by the father?

This is not the same thing as asking if he is okay with it. This is not the same thing as wondering if he has signed on. I am saying that if the energy for the adoption is coming from the mom, the chances of long-term difficulties in the family are greatly increased. The kind of adoption that is modeled for us in Scripture is an adoption that results in us crying out “Abba, Father” (Rom. 8:15).

It should also be noted that this is not the same thing as checking whether the couple would say that the whole process was driven by the father. In our conservative Christian circles, we know what the appropriate language is concerning headship and submission, and so there are many families where mom runs the show, and yet everybody dutifully keeps up the appearances. So if you were ask them if this were a “father-driven” adoption, the answer would come back “absolutely.” But everybody who knows the family knows that it isn’t true. If we held a conference for men, and we had two registration lines — one for hen-pecked husbands, and the other for men who were not — we might discover that half the guys in the non-hen-pecked line were there because their wives told them to stand in that line. What we do and what we say we are doing are not necessarily the same thing.

Of course I am not belittling or disparaging the important and influential role of the mother — but her role is the same as it is with her natural children. She is the church — the place of nurture, comfort, acceptance. If all that comfort is offered without a decisive and genuine decision from the father, all that sentiment will simply provide abundant raw material for that place to become a place of turmoil. The father’s decision must not be pro forma. He must not be rubber-stamping anything.

He must not be driven in this thing; he must drive. And if he isn’t driving, then don’t go.

Letter From Australia (About Racism)

Recovering Self-Respect

In New Zealand we are afflicted with a form of gross institutionalised racism.  Maori are legally and societally a privileged, higher class position.  Of course this does not mean they are superior in socio-economic terms, nor moral terms, nor in terms of family structures, or compliance with the law.  Rather, it means that as far as the government and the Commentariat are confirmed they are in a position of privilege, far beyond any other people or race.

Imagine two counters before which people line up to secure favours, handouts, support, special consideration, and institutionalised respect from the government and its mammoth tax-extorted, redistributive money spigot.  Each counter has a sign up: the first says “Maori Only”; the second says “All Others”.  Discrimination pure and simple.

The “Maori narrative” where Maori are considered a specially privileged people in all things touched by the Crown and government (which covers just about every human activity except what is performed by the rear end) is universally accepted now in law, education, the courts, the welfare machine, local and central government, offices of state, media, and the Commentariat.  The worst feature of all in this racist narrative and its fruits is the long term damage it does to Maori, let alone to the meaning of fundamental concepts like justice upon which society is constructed. 

Here is an Aboriginal voice from Australia telling it like it is in that country.

27 September 2012

Why I burned my ‘Proof of Aboriginality’

Kerryn Pholi

After a career spent in jobs reserved for Indigenous Australians, Kerryn Pholi has had enough of being a “professional Aborigine”. Far from closing the gap, she now believes these strategies are racist.
I am a person of Aboriginal descent. This is nothing special; all it means is that I could trace my ancestry back to a stone-age way of life more easily, with far fewer steps, than most readers.

When I think about my Aboriginal ancestry, I feel gratitude. I feel gratitude because modernity has given me a life of ease, pleasure and privilege beyond anything an Aboriginal woman in pre-invasion Australia could possibly imagine. As a person of Aboriginal descent, and a female at that, I am grateful that I had the good fortune to be born here in Australia in 1975, and not here in say, 1775.

Perhaps life for my Aboriginal ancestors (the Bundjalung people of what is now northern NSW) had its good points prior to invasion, just as European life around 5,000 BC couldn’t have been all bad … though nobody seems to miss that particular lifestyle much or yearn to have it back.

Perhaps some readers are disgusted that a person with Aboriginal ancestry would be grateful to the ‘white invaders’, given the historical horrors they brought upon ‘my people’. Nonsense; I can feel gratitude for my personal good fortune without needing to be grateful to anyone in particular.

I don’t feel particularly proud to be Aboriginal. No-one likes to see a skinhead thumping his chest and saying he is proud to be white; how is pride in an Aboriginal racial identity any different? And yet in a way I am proud of my Aboriginal ancestors.

Some Aboriginal people say they are proud to be survivors. They are proud to be members of a (somewhat nebulous) racial/cultural group that has survived (sort of) for thousands of years.

I don’t share that perspective, but I have my own version of ‘survivor pride’. The fact that I am here, with a bit of Aboriginal in my genetic mix, means that at some point my Aboriginal ancestors had the wit to take advantage of what was on offer, and so they survived where others did not. I feel pride that my forbears had the sense to discard unhelpful traditions and cultural attitudes, and make the best of their lot for themselves and their offspring.

Unfortunately for me, I did not inherit the smarts of my Aboriginal ancestors. While they were obviously willing to do what they could to make the best of their situation, I simply can’t do it anymore.

I used to identify as Aboriginal, and I have worked in ‘identified’ government positions only open to Aboriginal people.  As a professional Aborigine, I could harangue a room full of people with real qualifications and decades of experience with whatever self-serving, uninformed drivel that happened to pop into my head. For this nonsense I would be rapturously applauded, never questioned, and paid well above my qualifications and experience.

I worked in excellent organisations that devoted resources to recruiting, elevating and generally indulging people like me, simply because other people like me told these organisations that’s what they needed to do to ‘overcome Indigenous disadvantage’.

In these organisations I worked alongside dedicated, talented and highly skilled people – and there may have been room for one more dedicated, talented and highly skilled person if I hadn’t been there occupying a position designated for someone of my ‘race’.

In my years of working as a professional Aborigine, I don’t think I did anything that really helped anybody much at all, and I know that I was a party to unfairness, abuses of power, wastefulness and plain silliness in the name of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘cultural sensitivity’.

Aside from a nagging sense of feeling like a complete fraud, things were reasonably OK until I made the mistake of reading works by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence and Thomas Sowell’s Affirmative action around the world: an empirical study. (Please – stop reading what I have to say right now. Go and read this instead).

After that, I could no longer ignore the fact that my career was built on racism. Not ‘reverse racism’ or ‘positive discrimination’ – just plain racism, of benefit to nobody except a select gang of privileged people with the right genes and a piece of paper to prove it. In other words, of benefit only to people like me.

About 18 months ago I burned my ‘proof of Aboriginality’ documentation (a letter from the NSW Department of Education acknowledging that I was Aboriginal, on the basis that my local Aboriginal Lands Council at that time, circa 1990, had said so). I walked away from the Aboriginal industry for good.

It hasn’t been easy, and I am still working out what to do with myself from here, but it has been rewarding. It feels great to simply identify as a human being, and to work alongside colleagues that only know me as another ordinary wage-slave, and not as a pampered mascot with the power to ruin a career with an accusation of ‘insensitivity’.

It also feels good to do proper work; sitting around a government office essentially being paid to be Aboriginal is both undignified and boring. I miss the money of course, but I don’t miss the racism.

If you are an Aboriginal person with the literacy and media access to be reading this, you are not ‘disadvantaged’; you are one of the most fortunate people on the planet. You don’t need special assistance because you are Aboriginal, you are not owed recompense because you are Aboriginal, nor do you possess special powers to perform tasks that others could not.

To accept preferential treatment on the basis of one’s race – in employment, academe, the arts, the media – is to participate in racism. It does not ‘close the gap’, promote role-models or let you ‘challenge the system from within’.

To genuinely challenge racism we need to stop rationalising our individual self-interest, reject preferential treatment, compete in the open market for jobs, grants and audiences, and accept the financial and career consequences of refusing to be bought.

Kerryn Pholi has worked in Indigenous research and policy in various government agencies and NGOs. View her full profile here.

Hat Tip: Whaleoil

High Opinions of One’s Own Virtue

Personal Reasons for Unbelief

Peter Hitchens spent about fifteen years of his adult life in open sneering rebellion against God.  Then gradually and gently the Hound of Heaven first tracked, then ran him down.  His is a wonderful story of the grace and goodness of the Almighty God to a terribly lost man. 

Hitchens describes his rebellion against God in the following terms:

The fury and almost physical disgust of the Bloomsbury novelist Virginia Woolf at T. S. Eliot’s conversion to Christianity is an open expression of the private feelings of the educated British middle class, normally left unspoken but conveyed by body language or facial expression when the subject of religion cannot be avoided.  Mrs Woolf wrote to her sister in 1928, in terms that perfectly epitomize the enlightened English person’s scorn for faith and those who hold it.
 

I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward.  He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church.  It was really shocked.  A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is.  I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.

Look at these bilious, ill-tempered words: “Shameful, distressing, obscene, dead to us all.”  There has always seemed to me something frantic and enraged about this passage, concealing its real emotion–which I suspect is fear that Eliot, as well as being a greater talent than her, may also be right.

This widely accepted dismissal of faith by the intelligent and the educated seemed then to be definitive proof that the thing was a fake, mainly because I wanted such proof.  This blatant truth, that we hold opinions because we wish to and reject them because we wish to, is so obvious that it is too seldom mentioned.  I had reasons for wanting that proof. . . .

I had spotted the dry, disillusioned, and apparently disinterested atheism of so many intellectuals, artists, and leaders of our age.  I liked their crooked smiles, their knowing worldliness, and their air of finding human credulity amusing.  I envied their confidence that we lived in a place where there was no darkness, where death was the end, the dead were gone, and there would be no judgment.  It did not then cross my mind that they, like religious apologists, might have any personal reasons for holding to this disbelief.  It certainly did not cross my mind that I had any low motives for it.  Unlike Christians, atheists have a high opinion of their own virtue.  [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p.23-5.]

Living Within One’s Means

 Fiddling While Rome Burns

Columnists like Mark Steyn have been repeatedly calling attention to the mammoth threat of the US deficit.  It was bad under Bush’s tenure (the compassionate conservative, you remember); it is not immeasurably worse under Obama’s tenure.  It has been the most signal “accomplishment” of his four profligate years in the White House.  The United States is at the tipping point; it will likely never recover.

Here’s a summary of the problem, from The Weekly Standard:

In the wake of the Treasury Department’s newly released summary of federal spending for 2012, it’s now possible to detail just how profligate the Obama years have been.  Here’s the upshot:  Under Obama, for every $7 we’ve had, we’ve spent nearly $11 (or, to be more exact, $10.95).  That’s like a family that makes $70,000 a year — and is already knee-deep in debt — blowing nearly $110,000 a year.

Of course the numbers are much bigger than that of the average household.

Let’s take a look at the scorecard, based on official government figures.  In fiscal year 2012 (which ended on September 30), the federal government acquired $2.449 trillion in tax revenue and other receipts.  It spent $3.538 trillion — 44 percent more than it had available to spend.  The resulting deficit was $1.089 trillion.

There is a similar scorecard for fiscal years 2009-11.

So in all, under Obama, the federal government has acquired $6.846 trillion in tax revenues and other receipts, and it has spent $10.711 trillion — 56 percent more than it has had available to spend. 

But it gets worse.  The biggest spending increase has yet to come–from legislation already passed by Obama and the Democratic controlled Congress and Senate.

Moreover, Obama has amassed this historic record of fiscal profligacy even before his centerpiece legislation has really taken effect.  If it’s not repealed first, the colossally expensive Obamacare is poised to present grave new challenges to our fiscal solvency — and to our liberty — once it would become a reality on these shores in early 2014.  

The quality of the spend is also very poor.  In the 2011 fiscal tax year, the Federal Government took in $2.303 trillion in tax revenue; it paid out $1.03 trillion on 83 means tested Federal welfare programmes. Forty five percent of tax revenue going out in welfare programmes. As we all know, welfare programmes create a culture of dependency which is almost impossible to eradicate.  The demands and expectations usually go one way–upwards.

Here is a YouTube clip summarising just how bad things are.

If Mitt Romney is elected, he has a huge challenge.  His biggest will be persuading the country to go along with necessary austerities.  If Obama is re-elected the eventual end of America as a super-power would be inevitable. Even lots of Democrats understand this.  But the radical wing of the party is now in control–and Obama has been one of the most radical of all.  His one saving grace is that he has been politically so incompetent as a legislator and working with Congress.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

The Limitations of Kitten Hugging 

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 17 October 2012

Whenever you propose something, as I propose a return to mere Christendom, one of the natural objections people raise is the objection of trajectories — as in, “that’s all very well, but what might this lead to next?” Given this sinfulness of this world, and the genius we have for corrupting everything we touch, this is actually a reasonable question.

What is unreasonable, however, is the way the question is asked. It is posed as though the questioner were standing in a neutral zone, a place with no consequences whatsoever. But whenever we choose, there will be consequences to that choice. This applies to all the choices.
If you stand at a crossroads, it would be wise to consider the consequences of going right. But you must also take into account the consequences of going left and standing still. It would be folly to pretend to yourself that only one of the options had possible ramifications that were negative. If someone opts for that folly, you may be sure that the path that they say we cannot risk will be the path of obedience, doing what God says to do.

You see, if we accept that Jesus is Lord, and that He is the final authority in our civic and public affairs, we might find ourselves, much to the consternation of fair-minded individuals, burning witches and stoning rebellious teenagers. See? We can’t risk it.

Okay. You say that we cannot risk this kind of Christian rejection of secularism, for fear that it might lead to outrages. But what happens if we stay with secularism? Well, it is just possible, for example, that we might find ourselves celebrating as true love the kind of sodomite practices that got the attention of the avenging angel of the Lord for the cities of the plain. We might find ourselves dismembering millions of unborn babies. What if something like that happens?

As Richard Weaver wonderfully put it, ideas have consequences. Moreover, all of them do. One of the most destructive ideas out there is that some ideas are privileged in this regard, and do not have any consequences at all. You have to worry about excesses of fundamentalist zeal if you give an inch to the Christians, but you never have to worry about the excesses of secularism. I can say that we think that we don’t have to worry about such excesses because hardly anybody ever does. And yet, we are living the midst of such pandemoniac excesses. Look at the news, man.

There are two other points to make. If relativism is the case (and secularism is a form of relativism), then anything goes. If relativism is the case, then anything goes, including the worst forms of absolutism. This is why, incidentally, secularism has mounted such a pitiful response to the demands of fundamentalist Islam.
That makes no sense, at least on paper. Why worry about hypothetical fundamentalist Christians who might execute a blasphemer centuries from now, and in the name of resisting this threat make common cause with radical Muslims who are executing blasphemers this very minute?

Where this does make sense is in the fact that the root of secularism is actually a rejection of the Christian faith, and the root of Islam is also a rejection of the Christian faith. Anything but Christianity, and anyone but Jesus. This is the commonality that trumps everything else. This is the hidden tie that binds.

One final point to address is this. I have often argued that Christian parents ought to accept the fact that their job is not to get their children to simply conform to the standard, but rather to get their children to love the standard. If they are failing at this, then they should lower the standard to the point where the whole family can love it together, and then progress together, growing up into a shared love of that standard.

A former student has asked me this: is there not a civil equivalent to this? Is it not the task of the Christian church to bring the outside world into a love of God’s standards for living, and not try to enforce God’s standards of law on a surly and unwilling populace? The answer to this is yes, but with an important qualification.

In the case of parents, there is a limit to how much they can lower the standard. They have the full authority to do that with “house rules,” but they do not have the authority to alter or bend God’s black letter standards. They have the authority to dispense with a 45 minute time of mandatory family worship every day. They do not have the authority to set aside God’s standards on fornication in order to let their teenage son have his girlfriend spend the night in a sleepover.

We are in a similar case. A couple generations ago, when our society acknowledged the general rightness of Christian standards, but did not love them, our task at that time was to call our people back to their love of righteousness. Our task at that time was not to fight for the retention of Sunday blue laws, for example. But now, when we are dealing with high defiance and rebellion, when the cultural center is being dominated by poofter queens, the case is different. We have to testify faithfully to a rebellious generation, and we have to testify that they are in defiance of the weightier matters of the law. This sin that has us by the throat is not a matter of missing tithes from the spice rack.

But we do this because it is effective evangelism, which is what calls people back to love. We preach the law, and we preach the gospel. When we preach the condemnation of Christ and the love of the Lord, we are doing what the early Christians did. We are calling a nation to repentance, which is the only thing that will bring them back to their first love.

We cannot get people back to a love for God by means of sentimentalist kitten hugging. We do it by declaring the wrath to come, and the staggering provision that God has made for ugly and defiant sinners against that day of wrath. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

And this is why I keep going on about the absolute need for regeneration and the cross of Jesus Christ. It is only a work of the Spirit that can give us new hearts. Christian civilization is absolutely necessary, but without those new hearts, Christian standards of civilization are intolerable, as can be easily verified.

The Obamagaffe

Double Standards

We need a new term for the political science lexicon: Obamagaffe.  An Obamagaffe is when a politician verbally makes a substantial error and the Commentariat ignores it.  It’s a useful concept. 

“Candidate X just said he would boil babies in hot oil to reduce inflation.  But this was an Obamagaffe, so no problem there.”  An Obamagaffe is when commentators and media give the benefit of the doubt to the gaffer and does not take an error seriously.  The error is interpreted as a slip of the tongue, an exaggeration, hyperbole, a figure of speech, etc.  After all, to err is human, so it only makes the gaffer more likeable, provided, of course, it is a genuine Obamagaffe.

When Obama does not have his teleprompter as a prop he is well known for his vacuous, convoluted, aimless, long-winded responses.  Often times these are replete with Obamagaffes–errors of fact no-one–at least no-one of any “significance”–takes seriously.
  (In the political science lexicon, the opposite of an Obamagaffe is a Palingaffe.  A Palingaffe is when a ridiculous comment is attributed to a politician or a candidate which they never actually said, but the Commentariat repeats endlessly the story that they did, so that the end result is the same.  A second rate comedienne mimicking Sara Palin declared that she could see Russia from her front porch.  It was a humorous line which was subsequently attributed to Palin as something she literally said, and, therefore, incontrovertible evidence of her stupidity and third-rate education.)

In the recent presidential debate, President Obama delivered the biggest gaffe this campaign so far.  But it serves to make him more likeable and human, like ordinary mortals.  To err is human, right.  In other words, the Commentariat spontaneously judged it to be an Obamagaffe, and therefore not worthy of any serious comment.

Romney and Obama were debating petrol prices.  Obama was claiming that he actively supports more energy production in the US.  Here is Romney’s retort:

The proof of whether a strategy is working or not is what the price is that you’re paying at the pump. If you’re paying less than you paid a year or two ago, why, then, the strategy is working. But you’re paying more. When the president took office, the price of gasoline here in Nassau County was about $1.86 a gallon. Now, it’s $4.00 a gallon.

Pretty reasonable.  Here is Obama’s reply:

Well, think about what the governor — think about what the governor just said. He said when I took office, the price of gasoline was $1.80, $1.86. Why is that? Because the economy was on the verge of collapse, because we were about to go through the worst recession since the Great Depression, as a consequence of some of the same policies that Governor Romney’s now promoting. So, it’s conceivable that Governor Romney could bring down gas prices because with his policies, we might be back in that same mess.   (Emphasis, ours)

This is a monumental Obamagaffe.  The erstwhile law professor is arguing lower petrol prices are likely to cause terrible recessions.  Really.  That’s a profoundly novel economic doctrine.  Wonder if it will win the Nobel Prize?  Oh, wait.  Obama already has one of those.  Sure, for peace, but let’s not split hairs.

Now, we can charitably extend to Obama some sympathy for saying something monumentally stupid in the heat of the debate.  But for the Commentariat not to call it out as stupid, mistaken, wrong, etc  means that the gaffe has been universally judged to be an Obamagaffe.  A free pass for the President by the Commentariat.  Why?  Let the readers decide.

Polling Propaganda

 When the Media Massages the Message

The state of polling operating in the US election is dismal indeed.  Why?  Because media need to generate headlines to sell papers or get viewers.  In election season poll results are essential to do that.  So sub-standard, crummy polls are the order of the day–where “pollsters” call up Aunt Fanny and talk to her Chihuahua, and then record the Chihuahua as a certain Democratic voter.

 Jay Severin, a political campaign operator for over twenty-five years, explains why this is the case:

There are maybe five pollsters in America who could not successfully be sued for malpractice. There is nothing so common and useless in American media/”politics” than inept polls. Worse, it is easy and cheap to produce a “poll,” which hustlers and newspapers (forgive the redundancy), know is obviously inaccurate. Good polls, by good pollsters, are very difficult to produce ad very expensive.

The New York Times doesn’t want an accurate poll; they want the cheapest poll they can report by day-after-tomorrow. They do this by ignoring virtually all the tenets of a good poll in favor of quick/cheap/bad polls – which have an added advantage for the MSM: they are polls guaranteed to yield liberal results.

Why are these polls inaccurate? Of 100 Americans eligible to vote, only circa 1/3 of us turn out. So when you talk to non-voters (2/3 of the sample), you get non-results. But bad pollsters don’t care about that minor detail! They want a headline.  Most of the bad polls we see today are based on voter turn out models of 2008. Why? There has been a national election since then: 2010. Difference is Obama voters turned out/won 2008 – Tea Party/Patriots turned out in 2010.

Bottom line, the majority of polls we see are garbage. Average results of 10 bad polls, know what that yields? One bad average.  The real polling in this – and every campaign – is being done in strictest confidence by top pollsters, at a cost of $1Million+ Per Month! Know what NBC Pays per month for its polling? Same as your electric bill. Think that affects quality of results? . . .

If you want good polls check out Doug Schoen, Scott Rasmussen, or Pat Caddell.

We expect that talking heads and media pundits will be gravely informing us right up until the election that it is “too close to call”.

Media have a vested interest in ginning up the race, telling us how close it is to sell more of its product.  If the market thinks its a done deal, advertising revenue will end up going down as readers and viewers wander off to something else. That is the most benign explanation for covering over the actual polling results.  A more sinister explanation would finger ideological bias toward Democrats.

Here is an example of the current persistent distortion of results–this time from The Washington Post and ABC.

This morning, Washington Post & ABC released their latest poll of the presidential race. Naturally, they find Obama leading Romney by 3 points, 49-46. This is similar to their last poll, which found Obama leading by 2, 49-47.

Similar, but very, very different. Their last poll had a D+3 sample. (An assumption that Democratic voters are going to turn out to vote at a 3 percent higher rate than historically has been the case.  The poll is weighted in the Democrat’s favour.) Today, though, to keep Obama where he was, they had to juice the sample to D+9. So, WaPo’s poll is based on an unrealistic best-case scenario for Democrat turnout, and Obama is still under 50%.

Doom.  In 2008, Democrats enjoyed their biggest turnout advantage in decades. The electorate was D+7. That year, Obama won the election by 7 points. Today’s WaPo poll, against all available evidence, envisions an electorate that is even more Democrat, tipping the scales to give the Dems a +9 advantage. Even then, Obama’s lead is only 3 points, and he is still stuck at the nettlesome 49%.

Keep in mind, the previous poll from WaPo was conducted before the first presidential debate. That was widely seen as a complete disaster for Obama. Even in today’s poll, WaPo finds that, by a 51-point margin, voters thought Romney won the debate. Yet, today’s poll assumes that Democrats will have a 3x greater turnout edge than the previous poll. WaPo and ABC would have you believe that there has been the greatest surge to the Democrat party ever recorded.

A Romney landslide?  Could be.  We recall the talking heads gravely saying that the Carter/Reagan election was “too close to call” right up to the day–and we all know how that turned out.  

The Perfect Reactionary

 The Return of the Imperium

Under President Obama’s direction, the US Federal Government is imposing penalties on any business which does not provide health care coverage for its employees.  It also stipulates that the coverage must include abortifacient drugs and abortions.

Christian churches have objected conscientiously and are suing the Federal Government for violating the consciences and religious freedom of its citizens.  Obama and his coterie disagree.  They argue that what he is forcing people to do has nothing to do with violating their religion. But he dissembles–whether stupidly or maliciously each must decide.

Many, if not most, Christians believe that abortion (in any form) is murder.  The human being being wonderfully nurtured in the mother’s womb has done nothing good or evil; therefore executing the unborn babe (however that babe came to be conceived) can never be justified.  Christians are, therefore, arguing the Obama administration is breaching their First Amendment rights.  (The First Amendment prohibits government from establishing a religion and protects each person’s right to practice [or not practice] any faith without government interference).  Christian seminaries, colleges, schools, hospitals and social services which employ others are caught. 

The Obama administration argues that there is no breach of the First Amendment because that Amendment is restricted to worship (not practice).  In other words, the religious person is prohibited from institutionalising his religion, from practising it, in any sphere of life apart from services of religious worship.  Meanwhile, the hypocrisy of this position is incandescently exposed by the President himself.  He has made no secret, and has publicly boasted, that his religion (which he loosely terms “Christian”) tells him to push his progressive agenda down the throat of everyone. 

So, the US government now has a radically new interpretation of the First Amendment.  The religion of all US citizens may be freely believed and followed, but must be confined to individual (maybe family) and corporate worship.  The religion of the President (his particular perversion of Christianity) shall be imposed on all other spheres of life. 

Justin Taylor profiles the radical threat and intimidation and persecution being faced by Christian businesses in the United States, and by businesses owned by Christians. 

What’s a Christian Business Owner Supposed to Do?

Mark Taylor is president of Tyndale House Publishers in Carol Stream, IL. He recently wrote in World Magazine about the penalties the federal government is seeking to impose on Tyndale in violation of their freedom of religion and right to act in accord with their biblically informed conscience:

My parents founded Tyndale House Publishers 50 years ago as a Christian publishing company. From the very beginning we have published Bibles, and we also publish a wide range of other Christian books. Our corporate purpose is “to minister to the spiritual needs of people, primarily through literature consistent with biblical principles.”
I’ve always thought—in a theoretical way—that I might someday face a situation where the government was asking or telling me to do something that was counter to God’s law as I understood it. If such a situation arose, I hoped I would have the backbone to stand tall and disobey the government mandate. Well, that day seems to have come.

Later in the piece he enumerates the costs to his company:

The HHS mandate became effective for Tyndale House on Oct. 1. If we did not comply, we would be subject to fines of up to $100 per day per employee. We have 260 employees, so the fines could be $26,000 per day. That’s $780,000 per month, and $9.36 million per year—all because our moral and religious compass says that it is wrong for us to provide abortifacient substances or devices under our employee health plan. The federal government is telling us to violate our conscience or pay fines that would put us out of business.

You can read the whole thing here.
Prayers against this ruling, it seems to me, are appropriate, in line with 1 Timothy 2:1-2: “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.” The HHS mandate prevents Christian companies from fulfilling their vocations in godly ways that respect human life and dignity, therefore we should pray that God would move in the hearts of those in high positions so that the government would fulfil its primary calling: the practice and promotion of justice.

Obama is very clear on the nature of evil and sin.

Or as Senator Obama put it when he was asked, “What is sin?”.  Sin he explained, is “[b]eing out of alignment with my values.”  [Cited by Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012),  p. 83]

So, here’s the score.  Obama has a set of values.  In terms of political ideology these require he adopt a secular progressive agenda which necessitates government bringing its version of the Kingdom of God upon the United States.  Not to act according to that agenda would mean violation of Obama’s values.  This, says Obama, would be sin (for him).  Obama is the only one (apparently) who can extend the practice of his religion beyond the private sphere.

But his progressive agenda violates the consciences and values of other citizens (as we see above).  Obama is requiring them to sin–to submit to the Federal Government and do things which are “out of alignment” with their values.  Thus we have now gone precisely back to the situation (mutatis mutandis) that existed in the Roman Empire in the second century.  The Emperor declared that he did not care a fig about what citizens and subjects did in the privacy of their own homes or places of worship.  What he did care about was loyalty of the Emperor and the Empire–which all citizens would show by publicly offering incense to the Emperor and the gods–or face imperial wrath. 

The position of the Obama government on this matter is breathtaking and brazen.  That it could occur in a so-called free country which protects religious freedom by means of the First Amendment to its Constitution is startling.  But the evil here is an ancient one.  Obama is so “progressive” he has acted as the consummate reactionary.  He has gone back to an ancient, evil empire and begun to smear its turds on the faces of free citizens, whom Obama regards as subjects–men and women to be made subject to his “values”, his religion, his version of good and evil. 

 

Letter From America (About Radicals)

The Last Radicals  
Homeschoolers occupy the curriculum  

By Kevin D. Williamson
National Review Online  
October 15, 2012, Issue

There is exactly one authentically radical social movement of any real significance in the United States, and it is not Occupy, the Tea Party, or the Ron Paul faction. It is homeschoolers, who, by the simple act of instructing their children at home, pose an intellectual, moral, and political challenge to the government-monopoly schools, which are one of our most fundamental institutions and one of our most dysfunctional. Like all radical movements, homeschoolers drive the establishment bats.

In the public imagination, homeschooling has a distinctly conservative and Evangelical odor about it, but it was not always so.
The modern homeschooling movement really has its roots in 1960s countercultural tendencies; along with A Love Supreme, it may represent the only worthwhile cultural product of that era. The movement’s urtext is Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, by A. S. Neill, which sold millions of copies in the 1960s and 1970s. Neill was the headmaster of an English school organized (to the extent that it was organized) around neo-Freudian psychotherapeutic notions and Marxian ideas about the nature of power relationships in society. He looked forward to the day when conventional religion would wither away — “Most of our religious practices are a sham,” he declared — and in general had about as little in common with what most people regard as the typical homeschooler as it is possible to have.

“People forget that some of the first homeschoolers were hippies,” says Bob Wiesner, a counselor at the Seton Home Study School, a Catholic educational apostolate reporting to the bishop of Arlington, Va. In one of history’s little ironies, today most of homeschooling’s bitterest enemies are to be found on the left. “We don’t have much of a problem from conservatives,” Wiesner says. “It’s the teachers’ unions, educational bureaucrats, and liberal professors. College professors by and large don’t want students who can think for themselves. They want students they can indoctrinate, but that’s hard to do with homeschoolers — homeschoolers push back.”

He relishes the story of a number of graduates of his program who attended a top-tier Catholic university and enrolled together in theology classes taught by the school’s most notorious liberals. They were of course more conversant with church orthodoxy than were many of their instructors. “The professors hated them. But the kids had fun. The president of that college at that time was trying to clean up the theology department, so when the professors would complain, he would call the students in and tell them to try to be polite — with a wink and a nod.”

One of those liberal professors is Robin West of the Georgetown law school, who wrote a remarkably shallow and evidence-free jeremiad against homeschooling that was published to the journal’s discredit in Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly. More a work of imagination than one of scholarship, the article ignores the wealth of data suggesting that homeschooling is a largely upper-income and suburban phenomenon, and that homeschooled students typically outperform their public-school peers.

West offers a caricature of homeschooling families far removed from reality: “The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner. These families are not living in romantic, rural, self-sufficient farmhouses; they are in trailer parks, 1,000-square-foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots. Their lack of job skills, passed from one generation to the next, depresses the community’s overall economic health and their state’s tax base.”

Education scholar Brian D. Ray, who specializes in homeschooling, found that West’s claims “basically have no foundation in research evidence,” and pointed out to the contrary that “repeated studies by many researchers and data provided by United States state departments of education show that home-educated students consistently score, on average, well above the public school average on standardized academic achievement tests. To date, no research has found homeschool students to be doing worse, on average, than their counterparts in state-run schools. Multiple studies by various researchers have found the home educated to be doing well in terms of their social, emotional, and psychological development.”

The problem is not educational outcomes: Students in the Seton program tend to score on average in the 80th percentile on standardized tests. The problem is that progressives operate as though the state owned children as joint property. Dana Goldstein, writing in Slate, urged her fellow progressives to resist the temptation to homeschool, arguing that the practice is “fundamentally illiberal” and asking incredulously: “Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive?” She went on to argue that the children of high-achieving parents amount to public goods because of peer effects — poor students do better when mixed with better-off peers — meaning that “when college-educated parents pull their kids out of public schools, whether for private school or homeschooling, they make it harder for less-advantaged children to thrive.” She does not extend that analysis to its logical conclusion: that conscientious, educated liberals should enroll their children in the very worst public schools they can find in order to maximize the public good.
The numbers are against them, but West, Goldstein, and like-minded critics still bristle with hostility at homeschooling. There are three related reasons for that.

The first is that progressives by their nature do not trust people as individuals and feel that, whether we are applying for a credit card or popping into 7-Eleven for a soft drink, Americans require state-appointed overseers. If homeschooling weren’t already legal — a happy consequence of the longstanding patchwork of exemptions in state-level mandatory-education statutes — it is highly unlikely that most state legislatures would vote to legalize it. Nine-tenths of American children attend government schools, and most of the remaining tenth attend government-approved private schools. The political class wants as many of that remaining tenth in government schools as possible; teachers’ unions have money on the line, and ideologues do not want any young skull beyond their curricular reach. A political class that does not trust people with a Big Gulp is not going to trust them with the minds of children.

While West would like to criminalize homeschooling — she writes wistfully of the days when “parents who did so were criminals” — others have sought to regulate it out of existence, for instance by declaring homeschoolers’ residences to be public schools and requiring them to meet attendant planning and zoning standards, by installing such things as fire-safety systems, parking facilities, and emergency exits. “The good news is, there are very few people with authority and power who want to end homeschooling,” says Jeremiah Lorrig of the National Home School Legal Defense Association. “They’ve given up trying to outlaw it — and now are trying to control it.”

The second reason for this hostility is that while there is a growing number of secular, progressive, organic-quinoa-consuming homeschool families, there remains a significant conservative and Christian component. The reasons for progressive hostility to conservative Christians are many and complex, but one of them is that, like the homeschool, the church is something outside of government control, a forum that the triple constitutional protections of religion, free speech, and association place beyond the range of Leviathan’s leash. Progressives are by their nature monopolists, and the churches constitute real competing centers of power in society.

A third reason is that the majority of homeschool teachers are mothers. A traditional two-parent family with one full-time breadwinner and one stay-at-home parent is practically built into the model. Goldstein scoffs at that as the “dated presumption that children hail from two-parent families, in which at least one parent can afford (and wants) to take significant time away from paid work,” but of course the model is neither dated nor restricted to religiously conservative red-staters: Liberal enclaves such as Brooklyn and Seattle are full of stay-at-home moms. (Brooklyn, in fact, is a hotbed of crunchy homeschooling.)

Americans are dissatisfied with many things: Congress, insurance companies, Wall Street, the media. Many are dissatisfied with the government schools, too, and homeschooling has given them an opportunity to do something about that, taking matters into their own hands. They could do the same thing with health insurance and banking, as well, were the legal environment liberal enough. As its critics best appreciate, homeschooling is about more than schooling.

The Tea Party and the Ron Paul movement are in some ways the conservative flipside of Occupy, albeit with better manners, more coherent ideas, and higher standards of personal hygiene. They comprise conservatives on the verge of despair at trying to achieve real social change through the process of electoral politics and the familiar machinery of party and poll, with its narrow scope of action, uncertain prospects, and impermanent victories. There is a different model for reform being practiced in more than 1 million American households, by people of wildly different political and religious orientations. Homeschooling represents a kind of libertarian impulse, but of a different sort: It is not about money. Homeschooling families pay their taxes to support local public schools, like any other family — which is to say, begrudgingly in many cases — and the movement does not seek the abolition of local government-education monopolies. (It should.) Homeschooling families simply choose not to participate in the system — or, if they do, to participate in it on their own terms.

And that is a step too far for the Hobbesian progressives, who view politics as a constant contest between the State and the State of Nature, as though the entire world were on a sliding scale between Sweden and Somalia. Homeschoolers may have many different and incompatible political beliefs, but they all implicitly share an opinion about the bureaucrats: They don’t need them — not always, not as much as the bureaucrats think. That’s what makes them radical and, to those with a certain view of the world, terrifying.