Letters to the Editor, December 15, 2010So let me see if I understand this: The Defense Department is proposing to let people who choose to live a homosexual lifestyle serve “openly” in the armed forces (per the Dec. 2 article “DADT study group: Full integration is best”), but won’t allow Christians such as myself the freedom to “openly” share the good news of Christ with our co-workers — as the faith we’ve chosen requires?

DOD officials plan to tell servicemembers who have a problem with those living a homosexual lifestyle to “learn to deal with it,” but they are prepared to counsel and/or slap Christians with paperwork if someone feels “offended” by our witness? Wearing sexual lifestyle choices on your sleeve is OK, but not your faith?

Military chaplains who teach that homosexuality is antithetical to and incompatible with Christianity (which it is) can either muzzle their objections or “leave,” but gays will be permitted to parade their lifestyle choices in front of all?

Bottom line: So I’m free to express myself if I’m a homosexual, but not if I’m a Christian? What disgraceful hypocrisy.

Here’s the truth: I will continue to witness to who I want, when I want and where I want. My commitment to my God supersedes my commitment to the DOD and, if officials are upset about that, then I guess they can “learn to deal with it.”

Department of Defense? More like the Department of Double Standards.

Lt. Col. Stacy L. Maxey
Afghanistan

I feel like writing back to the good colonel and clarifying one or two matters about which there seems to be some confusion.

Dear Col. Maxey;

Regarding your letter of Dec. 15 to the Stars and Stripes, it seems you are offended by the double standard involved in repealing DADT. I’m sure you will be delighted to find out that a fair compromise is easily available that removes all of the issues of double standards between Christians and gays in the military. All we need to do is apply the same standard to both. With the repeal of DADT, the following will be possible:

• If someone asks whether you are a Christian, you will not have to lie and say that you are not, just as gays will no longer have to lie when asked if they are gay.
• If the military discovers that you are Christian, you will not automatically be discharged, just as gays will no longer face immediate discharge upon discovery that they are gay.
• If you are seen openly participating in casual Christian activities, such as going to church or carrying a bible, you will not need to fear immediate exposure and discharge, just as gays who are seen associating with others of the same sex will not need to fear immediate exposure and discharge.
• Any prayers, Bible studies, or other Christian activities which you engage in on your own time, in private, will not be any of the military’s business, just as it is none of the military’s business what homosexual soldiers do in private, on their own time.
• If you have a fellow soldier or superior officer who is pressuring you to engage in homosexual activities against your will, you will have the same freedom to file a complaint as a gay soldier has to complain about a fellow soldier who is pressuring them to engage in Christian activities against their will.
• If a superior officer unfairly penalizes you for failure to engage in homosexual activities, by giving you unfavorable performance reviews, withholding promotion, or giving you punitive work assignments, you will have the opportunity to apply for a redress of your grievances, just as gays will in the case of superior officers who penalize them similarly for failure to engage in Christian activities.
• Military chaplains who advocate Christian conduct, as well as those who advocate homosexual conduct, will be free to speak as their conscience demands when conducting designated services where attendance is voluntary, but may face pressure, reprimands, or even discharge if they abuse their position to advocate Christianity or homosexuality among those who do not wish to participate in such exchanges.

Granted, you may be required by regulations (if not by ordinary courtesy and professionalism) to make certain concessions. For example, to promote team cohesion and unit effectiveness, you may not be allowed to single out certain members of your team for public humiliation and harassment just because they are gay. But even here, the same standard works the other way: your team members will be required not to single you out for public humiliation and harassment just because you are a bigot and/or have chosen a bigoted religion.

You are right: there have been some serious and injurious double standards in the military. I’m sure that with your interest in justice, fairness, and service, you will be delighted now that these double standards are being ended, and the samel rules applied equally to all service members.

Sincerely,

Deacon Duncan.

Since gay people sin against us by falling in love differently than we do, we should punish them by falling in love differently than they do. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth! Let’s see how they like a taste of their own medicine, eh? They want to walk down the street with a same-sex lover? We’ll show them: we’ll walk down the street with opposite sex lovers. Hah! They want to marry same-sex partners? Let ‘em. But we’ll make ‘em pay. We’ll marry opposite sex partners. Legally! Take that, gays! You want to be different from us? Fine, then we’re gonna be different from you. And it serves you right.

Yeah, none of this merciful, New Testament, God-loves-sinners crap. Paul knew how to deal with sinners. Give ‘em old-fashioned Moses-brand justice, and do to them exactly what they’re doing to us, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. 100% Biblical justice, old school. Then everyone will be able to see just how much harm you can do to someone else by falling in love differently than they do.

How can we help such people understand why America is not (and does not want to be) a Christian nation? The other day I though of a parallel that might be helpful: calling America a “Christian Nation” is like calling America a “White Nation.” Yes, there were quite a lot of Founding Fathers who espoused at least vaguely Christian rhetoric, just as there were quite a few who owned slaves. And yes, you can find a lot of early American policies and precedents that favored Christianity, just as you can find a lot that favored white men. And you can even argue that, by “freedom of religion,” the Fathers meant being free to choose whatever flavor of Christianity you like best, just as you can argue that when a slave owner like Thomas Jefferson writes “all men are created equal,” he really means only that all white males are equal, and not that women and/or other races are also equal.

If you’re a white supremacist, you may not see anything wrong with doing any of the above. If you’re a Christian supremacist, then you may see a problem only with the “White Nation” arguments (even though they’re the same as your own, slightly re-framed). And that’s the point. The Christian Nation arguments are Christian Supremacist arguments. They’re a bigoted demand that your religion be publicly and officially acknowledged as supreme above all other religions, just as white supremacists demand that whites be held superior to all other races. And that’s why sensible and fair-minded men and women should oppose all efforts to turn America into the kind of Christian nation that our Founding Fathers came here to get away from.

The Tea Partiers are the intellectual bastard children of Karl Rove and Rupert Murdock (and similar manipulators of public opinion). Bred from the innuendo and suspicion fostered by conservative political strategy, they have grown up unable to trust any authority, even the ones that created them.

The plan was that by using slander and demagoguery, conservatives could control what people believed and how they would vote. It even worked, for a while. But much to their current surprise and dismay, it’s turning out that the victories they’ve bought with their dishonest tactics are victories they’ve charged to a very expensive credit card. And it’s time to pay the bills.

The trouble with rabble-rousing is that you end up with a lot of roused rabble. And in this case it’s a lot of roused rabble with an inherent mistrust of authority. Is it a coincidence that they’re developing a taste for candidates like Sarah Palin and George Bush, whose popularity is based on their lack of “elite” leadership skills? If you don’t trust your leaders, why not put the incompetents in that position, so they’ll be less of a threat, eh?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. There’s no cure short of waiting for the Tea Partiers to realize that denying reality is mostly self-destructive. The question is, can the RNC survive the monster they worked so hard to create?

According to Colson, the DC city council ought to be blamed for the decision freely (if intolerantly) made by the leadership of the Catholic Charities.

On March 3, same-sex “marriage” became legal in the District of Columbia. In connection with the new law, the D.C. Council insisted that, as a city contractor, Catholic Charities had to offer the same benefits to same-sex couples that it did to heterosexual ones.In other words, Catholic Charities had to choose between church teaching and ministering to the city’s neediest residents.

Really, Chuck? Respecting the equality and dignity of all men and women is against church teaching? Because the DC city council isn’t telling anyone in the Catholic Charities that they have to go out and engage in homosexual intercourse. Nor are they denying that the church is legally authorized to preach that homosexuality is a sin, bigoted as that doctrine may be. All they’re saying is that organizations that receive taxpayer dollars must not practice social injustice towards those whose taxes are paying to support them.

It’s really no different than the Biblical teaching of “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” and “Submit yourselves to those in authority over you”—words that were written in a culture that worshiped Caesar as a god and practiced both homosexual and heterosexual cult prostitution. Yes, you may live in a world whose moral standards are different from your own, but you still need to keep up with your social obligations, of which the first and foremost is your obligation to respect the rights of others.

Sadly, this New Testament attitude is once again completely ignored so that Colson and his fellow false martyrs can wallow in self-pity.

There’s no recognition that what the Washington Post called a “bitter debate” between the District and the Archdiocese was, in fact, a profound infringement of religious freedom–an infringement done at the behest of a tiny minority within a tiny minority.

And it’s so unfair to make people respect the human rights of minorities, isn’t it Chuck? After all, if you can’t oppress a tiny minority, who can you oppress?

Nor was there any acknowledgment that these kinds of infringements aren’t limited to government contractors. Ordinary people are being asked to choose between their livelihood and obedience to their faith-like photographers, landlords, and caterers.

You will also search in vain for mainstream media coverage of the indispensible role played by Christian institutions in caring for the vulnerable and marginalized. Almost 25 percent of the world’s AIDS patients are cared for in Catholic institutions alone. Christian hospitals in the U.S. serve a disproportionate percentage of the urban poor.

All we read about, however, is the Catholic Church’s “stubbornness” or “recalcitrance.”

That’s right, Chuck. Because you guys aren’t just being stubborn and recalcitrant, you’re being dishonest. It’s the Catholic Charities who are using their already underpaid workers as expendable pawns, deliberately mistreating them—voluntarily!—for mere propaganda purposes.

Nobody is denying that Catholic Charities has helped some of the DC area’s poor people. No one is even telling them they can’t continue to do so. The only “infringement” limiting the CC’s outreach is the same sort of “infringement” that disallows human sacrifice as a legal religious practice: our religious freedom is limited to those practices which do not cause material harm to others.

But no respectable religion should find that restriction inconvenient. There are plenty of good deeds that do not require us to practice social injustice, intolerance, or other human rights abuses. The Catholic Charities are perfectly free to continue serving the needy just as they always have. It’s their free choice whether to regard the needs of the poor above their desire for grandstanding and displaying their “righteousness” before men.

It may be that their religion does indeed insist that they display profound bigotry and prejudice towards certain minority groups. Shameful as that may be, it is protected by the Constitution, and they have the right to believe and preach that religion all they want. In many ways, it’s preferable that they do, so that the general public will plainly see the depths of their moral depravity. But should there be any sincere desire to do genuine good, the door remains open, as it always has. They are free to continue to serve.

It’s a black mark against Christianity that believers like Chuck Colson would treat basic respect for human rights as though it were such a terrible attack on the Christian faith. Yet that’s the substance of his long, petulant rant. Boo hoo, Christians aren’t being allowed to harm minorities they disapprove of, how unfair. That makes us so mad we’re going to harm our own people as well. So there.

Jesus must be rolling over in his grave.

The people most inconvenienced by the blizzards weren’t the residents of this region, or the senators-it was the proponents of man-made global warming. Scientists and activists insisted that people on this side of the Atlantic ignore the evidence in their driveways and, instead, trust their computer models.

According to Colson, you can disprove global warming just by pointing out that it’s still snowing.

10 years ago, they told us that, on account of the same global warming, “snow is starting to disappear from our lives.” We were told that, because of all that nasty CO2, British children “just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Ten years later, they most certainly do. Not only British children, but children in every state except Hawaii. All of Britain, much of the rest of Europe, and the United States have experienced snowfalls this winter. The data suggests, in fact, that “snow is coming earlier and heavier than it used to.”

Ah yes, “they” told us. Nice to have an unimpeachable source, isn’t it?

Well, first things first: what is global warming? Are we talking about the average temperature going so high that in a mere 10 years snow would stop falling in England entirely? No. Climatologists are concerned about changes in average global temperatures of only a few degrees over many years, not the tens of degrees it would take to prevent frozen precipitation from occurring during England’s winters.

Granted, the original quote seems to have been made by a Dr. David Viner of the University of East Anglia. Colson chose not to cite the article he’s quoting from (perhaps to avoid having people find out that Dr. Viner also predicted occasional heavy snows that “will probably cause chaos” in the next decade or so?), but he is probably right to suggest that such dire predictions are unlikely in the short term. Maybe Dr. Viner was exaggerating or misquoted, but it seems a bit much to claim that global warming will make the snow stop falling any time soon.

But consider what happens if the average global temperature rises only a few degrees, say 3°F. Around where I live that might mean a winter where the temperature hovered around 24°F instead of 21°F (i.e. -4°C instead of -6°C for you metric folks). Too warm to snow? Of course not. But increased warmth can have other consequences…

What Colson is forgetting is that we don’t all have the same seasons at the same time. It’s winter in the northern hemisphere right now, but it’s summer for the other half of the planet. And in the warmer parts of the planet, weather is being driven by a number of factors, including one we call “evaporation.”

Evaporation is what puts water into the atmosphere so that it can return to the surface again as rain or snow. Warmer global temperatures mean increased evaporation, which means more moisture in the atmosphere, which means greater precipitation. If Colson had been watching his weather maps, he might have noticed that these unusually heavy snowfalls did not blow down on the east coast from the frigid reaches of northern Canada. They blew up from warmer regions around the Gulf of Mexico.

Thus, it’s not climatologists who are ignoring the evidence in their driveways, it’s Colson. He even admits it, albeit indirectly and with exaggerated incredulity.

Not only did they tell us that this winter’s weather didn’t disprove their global warming data, they told us that the record snows were caused by global warming. Really!

Um, yes, Chuck, really. As amazing as it may sound to you, people whose experience and expertise lie in areas of science that you don’t understand might just know more about what they’re saying than you on the topic of climatology. One snowstorm doesn’t prove global warming of course, but it’s hardly the refutation of science that Colson makes it out to be!

But Colson’s not stopping there, not by a long shot.

If all of the white stuff hasn’t left you doubting those computer models, maybe Phil Jones can help you. That would be ironic since, until recently, Jones was the director of the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s East Anglia University. He was the keeper of the data upon which the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) based its predictions-data that has been, to put it mildly, called into question.

In an interview with the BBC, Jones acknowledged that there has been no significant warming since 1995. Let me repeat that. One of the world’s leading global warming advocates says there has been no significant warming since 1995. Fifteen years.

That sounds like a pretty damning admission if true. But notice that Colson once again omitted the citation that would let us track down the source of his quote. Could it be that he doesn’t want his readers to find out what Jones really said?

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Notice, the reason Dr. Jones is careful to say that there’s no “statistically significant” warming in the past 15 years is not because he failed to find a warming trend, but because in climatology a 15 year time span is too short. The temperature has been rising at a rate of about a tenth of a degree per decade, but in the interests of accuracy, he’s insisting that we ought to base our conclusions on trends measured over a longer period of time—trends which do show global warming.

That’s rather a different perspective than the spin Colson is trying to put on it, isn’t it? But he’s still not done yet. Here’s Colson’s next observation, based on Jones’ interview:

He also indicated that there is nothing exceptional about the warming the occurred between 1979 and 1995.

Compare this with what Jones actually said:

As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Here are the trends and significances for each period:

Period Length Trend (Degrees C per decade) Significance 1860-1880 21 0.163 Yes 1910-1940 31 0.15 Yes 1975-1998 24 0.166 Yes 1975-2009 35 0.161 Yes

So what Jones originally said was that there are four sizable time periods during which significant warming can be documented and that these trends are not significantly different from each other. Colson tries to make it sound like Jones is saying that there wasn’t any unusual warming between 1979 and 1998, but that’s not what Jones is saying at all.

One caveat: I’m assuming that Colson was making his claim in connection with the above quote from the original interview, though the dates don’t quite match. But perhaps he was referring to this question instead:

D – Do you agree that natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998, and, if so, please could you specify each natural influence and express its radiative forcing over the period in Watts per square metre.

This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system). Natural influences (from volcanoes and the Sun) over this period could have contributed to the change over this period. Volcanic influences from the two large eruptions (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991) would exert a negative influence. Solar influence was about flat over this period. Combining only these two natural influences, therefore, we might have expected some cooling over this period.

This, however, isn’t even remotely like the what Colson claims Jones is saying. Jones is saying that, if manmade causes were not contributing to global warming, we ought to have expected a cooling trend between 1975 and 1998, due to the shading effect of volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere from two major volcanic eruptions. That cooling did not happen. Instead we observed a net increase in average global temperature between 1975 and 2009, per the chart above. So what the hell is Colson talking about?

Colson does do something I’ve never heard a denialist do before. Or at least, he tries to. The one thing I’ve never understood about all this global warming denialism is why all these professional climatologists and researchers would allegedly lie about it. Outside of cartoon villains, people don’t just spontaneously do evil things that involve large amounts of time and effort for no tangible reward. So what’s supposed to be motivating the scientists? Here’s Colson’s slanderous guess:

Why? It’s a matter of worldview.

Activists and scientists have too much invested in human-caused global warming. For activists, it’s the threat by which they can create their version of a better world, and scientists have staked their careers and reputations on the accuracy of those computer models.

Um, right. Only the thing is, Chuck, that there are lots of eager young grad students (let alone all the know-it-all denialists) who would just love to kick-start their scientific careers by coming up with an even more accurate model. If the old scientists were, you know, lying about global warming, that would make it easier for someone to come up with a model that worked better. Almost any car will go faster than one that won’t even start.

Real scientists are always checking each other’s work, and engaging in vigorous, (mostly) friendly competition. Anybody who resorts to fudging his or her results in front of the experts is just setting themselves up for failure. If you’re staking your career and reputation on the accuracy of your computer model, the last thing you want to do is get yourself entrenched in defending an obsolete and inadequate model!

Colson isn’t going to understand this, of course. Defending obsolete and inadequate models is what Christian apologetics is all about, so naturally he assumes that scientists must be doing the same thing. He needs a “worldview” to insulate him from facts that might otherwise lead him to reassess his conclusions, so in his mind that’s what scientists must be doing too.

The result is that conservative Christians like Colson are among the foremost of those who boldly and ignorantly declare that the experts must be wrong and that we must not interfere in the profits of the wealthy merely to prevent environmental disaster. Like Bush ignoring repeated warnings about Saddam’s lack of WMD’s, they proudly and smugly turn their backs on the advice of those who know more about it than they do. Anything else would be a failure to walk by faith. Or something.

Sigh.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I still need to go do some more shoveling.

Seventeen years ago, General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, helped formulate the policy that has come to be known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It allows women to serve in the armed forces, provided that they keep their gender to themselves.Today, Powell is in favor of repealing the policy he crafted and advocated. Well, he was right then, but wrong now.

According to Powell, “attitudes and circumstances have changed” since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was adopted.

Sure, attitudes toward women have changed in the culture at large. But what hasn’t changed is the need for “order and discipline in the ranks,” to use Powell’s own phrase, and the possible impact of allowing openly female people to serve in the armed forces.

That impact was the subject of a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Mackubin Thomas Owens, a “marine infantry veteran of Vietnam.” Owens begins by stating what should be obvious: “Military organizations exist to win wars.”

I say “should be,” because the arguments for repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are all about the status of women in American society and have nothing to do with military necessity.

A big part of winning wars, as Owens writes, is overcoming “the paralyzing effects of fear on the individual soldier.” Military organizations accomplish this through an “ethos that stresses discipline, morale, good order and unit cohesion.” He’s right. These are the things I learned firsthand as a Marine platoon commander myself.

The “cohesion” Owens refers to is strictly non-sexual. Owens says it is the product of what the New Testament calls philia, friendship. In the military, it is the bond “among disparate individuals who have nothing in common but facing death and misery together.”

I might go a step beyond Owens. The bond between men in a sound military unit is more like agape—the love that moves men to sacrifice their lives for their buddies.

When you read accounts of heroism and bravery, what motivated men wasn’t abstract ideals but their love for the man in the next foxhole. They didn’t want to let him down. This bond was beautifully captured in the book Joker One by Donovan Campbell. Campbell, a Christian and a Marine officer, served three tours in Iraq and captured the essential role of philia and agape on the battlefield. He wrote what I discovered when I was a platoon commander: What holds men together is love.

Allowing openly female women threatens this cohesion by raising the possibility of a different kind of love—eros—which is “individual and exclusive.” “All for one and one for all” could give way to “sexual competition, protectiveness and favoritism,” with disastrous military consequences.

Nothing has happened in the last 17 years that makes this less possible or the possible consequences less dire. All that has changed is that many Americans now see everything through the prism of “rights.” For them, sexual rights and personal autonomy trump everything else. Thus, any opposition to changing military policy must be the result of “bigotry” or “misogyny.”

I suspect I’m not alone when I say a military unit which openly celebrates the female lifestyle in the trenches is not a military unit I want to serve in.

Ultimately, the change in circumstances behind the proposed repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” isn’t military necessity, but the weakening of our moral will.

That’s the real difference between then and now.

Well said, Chuck. Clearly, if we want a military that can win wars, we cannot allow openly female soldiers to serve, because once women are admitted into military service (at least, without disguising their gender), then that opens up the possibility that (gasp) eros might taint the pure love that exists between men in a foxhole. And that possibility, of course, will destroy military cohesion and render all soldiers helpless victims to the paralyzing effects of fear.

Of course. Why didn’t I see that before?

Or for that matter, why haven’t we seen it throughout all the decades in which “openly female” women have served in the armed forces?

Based on the Old and New Testaments, the answer is an unmistakable “NO!” God may be a lot of things, but “pro-life” isn’t one of them, by a long shot.

Before we start our survey of the actual texts, there’s one thing we need to be clear about. Which kind of life are pro-lifers supposed to be “pro” about? In Christian theology, a person actually has two lives: their physical, mortal life which ends when the body dies, and the everlasting life of their immortal soul (which by definition never ends). What pro-lifers will tell you is that abortion is wrong because it ends a life, so we’re clearly concerned with life in the materialistic sense here (thus betraying once again the materialistic roots and biases of the pro-life political movement).

How much value, then, does the God of the Bible place on physical, materialistic life? In a conflict between life and free will, to which does He give priority? The first chapter of Genesis does not address the topic, but the second begins to, and the third gives us quite the clearest demonstration possible of God’s preference for free will over pro-life principles.

Here’s Genesis 2:15-17:

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

God already knew good and evil, being omniscient. He clearly did not want His children to know, since He explicitly forbade them to eat the fruit. Why, then, did He think there was any need to create a tree of  knowledge of good and evil? This tree does not appear again anywhere else in Christian lore or scripture; it has no other use. Its sole purpose is to create the opportunity for God’s children to make fatal choices.

Not a perfectly clear-cut case of God giving priority to free will over respect for life, I’ll grant you, but it definitely has pronounced inclinations in that direction. Can you imagine a sincere pro-lifer going up to a troubled, unwed pregnant teen, handing her the business card to the local abortion clinic, and saying, “Now you must not go to this clinic between the hours of 8 and 4 on weekdays and 8 to noon on Saturdays, parking in the rear, phone 727-555-1212 for an appointment, bring a photo ID and your insurance card if any, all interactions guaranteed strictly confidential.”? It’s just not pro-life to create the opportunity for fatal choices and then put it right in front of the chooser’s face. But that’s what God did in Genesis 2.

Genesis 3 is even clearer.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ “

“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

What’s missing from this picture? How about God? Where’s God in all this? Here is Eve, mother of all women, about to exercise her freedom of choice in a way that will be fatal for her offspring. Allow Eve to exercise her freedom of choice, and it’s certain death, not just for one baby, but for all her offspring, and all their offspring, generation to generation. And it’s not just physical death either: according to Jesus, most of Eve’s offspring will lose their salvation as well. Eve is about to make the ultimate anti-pro-life choice.

The pro-life thing to do at this point, assuming you know what Eve is contemplating, would be for you to intervene, deprive Eve of her freedom to choose, and thus prevent the consequent loss of life—and soul! That’s especially true in this particular case, since there aren’t any issues here about Eve being forced to endure an unwanted pregnancy—this is strictly eat or don’t eat.

And God, being divine, most definitely does know what Eve is thinking, and what the serpent is saying. He’s even known about it in advance, just as He knows everything in advance. He’s had more than enough time to slap some gory pictures on a piece of cardboard and a stick, and to situate Himself at the location where Eve and the snake are going to meet to arrange the termination of her immortal innocence.

If God were pro-life, He would have to be there. Anything less is a betrayal of everything “pro-life” stands for. Eve and the snake are about to commit the Ultimate Abortion, not just of one baby’s life, but of the lives of each and every member of the human species (at least eventually). Preventable deaths, every one. If only there were one pro-lifer around to talk Eve out of it! But there wasn’t, because God is pro-choice. He values the woman’s freedom of choice above the lives of her offspring, above even their immortal souls, and therefore He stayed out of it until after the decision was made.

Let’s look at a few more examples, like Genesis 6-10. Here’s an excerpt:

The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.”

This time God isn’t just pro-choice, He’s the abortionist: taking the life of virtually everyone and everything, on account of the choices of man. (Yes, I know Noah and the Ark, but that’s a vanishingly small percentage of those God killed by the Flood, according to the story.) The pro-life thing to do would be to simply prevent man from having the freedom to choose to do all those evil things. Taking away the freedom to choose is what the pro-life movement is all about. But God values freedom of choice too highly to deprive man of it, even though the cost of that freedom is the sudden, violent death of every man, woman, child, baby, beast, and insect on the face of the earth! God is not pro-life.

So God, in the Bible, has a pronounced bias in favor of freedom of choice over respect for life. But does that apply to His followers too? Could this be a case of “Do as I say, not as I do,” a case of God having different moral values than He expects us to? Does God want us to have more respect for life (i.e. fleshly, materialistic life) than He does?

Well, no, not really. There are many cases in the Bible where God calls on His people to impose death penalties for a variety of offenses, from verbal things like cursing the name of God (Lev. 24:16), to things like disobeying your parents (Deut. 21), to picking up sticks on a Saturday (Num. 15). In some cases, God commanded His people to impose the death penalty for things the accused had no control over, like being born (or even just conceived!) as a descendant of the Amalekites (I Sam. 15).

Nor is this absence of respect for life limited to the Old Testament. In Acts 5, for instance, it’s not clear whether God or the Apostle Peter is to be credited (if that’s the word) with immediately slaying an elderly couple who sold some land and donated the proceeds to the church, claiming to have donated the entire sale price when in fact they had kept some for themselves. Granted, Ananias and Saphira were deceptively trying to win some credit they hadn’t earned, but is that sort of thing really a capital offense?  “Respect life” indeed!

Some will say at this point that these examples don’t count. God is wise above all the imaginations of men, and if He did demonstrate a callous disregard for the value of a human life, it’s because it was ultimately destined to bring about the greater good (for values of “good” that are not incompatible with suffering, disease, death, sin, and the eternal damnation of most of God’s children).

But that’s not the point. The point is, what is the real value of fleshly life? Pro-lifers place a much higher value on physical life than God does, if the Bible is correct. Is God wrong about how much a human life should be worth, or are the pro-lifers? Is the pro-life obsession with fleshly life merely a reflection of the materialism at the foundation of their movement?

I’m going to side (roughly) with the pro-lifers on this one. The life of a person should have a much higher value than God gives it in the Bible. That’s not to say that (as materialistic extremists would argue) the person exists from the moment of conception onwards. Far from it: the process of gestation is a process that slowly assembles a person from a large number of component parts, of which the fertilized egg is merely the first and simplest. But once all the pieces are in place, we should value human life too highly to casually toss around death penalties.

The thing that bothered me the most was the emphasis on Christianity. Not that I objected to the faith, of course. I joined in the prayers and the hymns as enthusiastically as anyone else. But I couldn’t help but notice the atmosphere of possessiveness and exclusivity with which the pro-life position was being linked to the religion. It was as if there were a sub-text hiding in the signs and banners people were carrying: “Pro-life is for CHRISTIANS ONLY.”

It bothered me at the time, because the pro-life movement was unlikely to win without the support of a large number of other groups, and yet there was a tangible attitude of not wanting those other groups to join in. There was a certain amount of tolerance for Christian-like religions (Rabbis For Life could be openly accepted for instance), but I didn’t see too many Mormons for Life or (God forbid!) Gays for Life. I even had one pro-lifer tell me frankly and honestly that the only terms on which he would be willing to see America outlaw abortion again would be if the nation first turned to Jesus, so that Jesus could take the credit. Dead babies were something to shout about, but they came in a firm and distant second to the goal of using the pro-life movement to establish the political clout of believers.

Nowadays I see that as a rather more positive aspect of the pro-life movement: their self-righteous exclusivism makes them naturally self-limiting and self-defeating. Considering that they are crusading to dehumanize women, that’s a good thing. And not just women, because if you look at the philosophical basis of the pro-life movement, they’re really dehumanizing us all.

Before I get into that, though, let me just point out in passing that one of the big problems with trying to worship and serve a non-existent God is that you leave yourself open to the political influence of anyone who can do a convincing imitation of what you think the voice of God would sound like if He could talk. And there are any number of people who want your labor, your money, your vote, your military service, and on and on, who are more than willing to tell you what God is urging you to do.

The pro-life movement is a classic example. Back in the early 70′s, Republican strategists hit on the idea of using abortion as a political wedge to drive conservative Christians into the ranks (and coffers) of the party. It was not a particularly Christian issue, but it was a popular superstition, and Christian leaders like Pat Robertson and James Dobson were only to happy to enlist in the Republican crusade and make it a religious issue. In effect, they sold the American Christian church to the Republican party in exchange for some political influence, not realizing that most of the influence was actually flowing the wrong way. (As usual.)

The result is that we have a major Judeo-Christian political movement that manipulates believers into obeying the directives of Republican strategists, and that incidentally dehumanizes humankind in general and women in particular. It’s an unbiblical position, and flows contrary to a lot of what we might call the “spirit” of Christianity, but because God does not show up in real life and the Republicans are willing to take the lead in “relaying” God’s voice in His absence, Christians willingly embrace it as a part of their faith.

Ok, let’s get into the details. The root of the problem here, as in so many other cases, is that we all know that murder is wrong and surgery is ok, but it’s not clear at what point abortion switches from being the latter to being the former. That kind of ambiguity is not the sort of banner the average Joe can rally around. If you’re going to draw a line in the sand, it needs to be a clear, definite line, not a bunch of people sitting around wondering who, if anyone, might have crossed it. So how do you turn this into a black-and-white issue to use as a political tool?

Well, that’s easy, we’ll just say that “life begins at conception.” Sperm + egg = human life and therefore it’s murder if you take that life. The Bible never says anything about life beginning at conception (and in fact declares in Genesis 2 that Man first became “a living soul” when God breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, so there’s reason to believe that breathing marks the point at which God regards us as human souls). But modern Republican leaders of the pro-life movement have declared that conception is what makes us people, and that’s good enough for the rank-and-file pro-lifer.

Notice what we’re saying, though. The nucleic acids of the sperm penetrate the cell wall of the egg, migrate to the nucleus, and recombine in an mundane biochemical reaction just like in every other organism from bacteria on up. There are as yet none of the attributes we normally associate with “soul,” like mind or emotion or will or perception. Nature has just begun construction of the physical, material housing into which these human (and dare I say “spiritual”) characteristics will later take root. But they’re not present yet, at conception.

What we have here, in other words, is an extremely materialistic reduction of what it means to be a person. We’re not beings of soul or spirit, let alone any image of God. We’re fundamentally a mere collection of proteins and amino acids and other materialistic chemicals. Kudos to pro-lifers for acknowledging the materialistic nature of man, and the fact that our true essence and worth is rooted in the physical and material substances of which we are composed. But this takes materialism too far.

The material universe is not just a universe of substances, it is a universe of substances and processes—nouns and verbs. And the verbs are no less important than the nouns. The reason human beings have value and dignity is not just because of the bare physical substances that interact biochemically at conception, as they do in all species. What makes us truly human, in the personal and spiritual sense, are the unique material processes that develop within our bodies once development advances beyond a certain point, the thoughts and emotions and goals and, yes, even the temptations.

These post-conception attributes are what make us human, not the mere substances of the single-celled organism. Philosophically, the pro-life movement is based on a heartless materialism that ignores the verbs and reduces people in general and women in particular to mere nouns. The fertilized egg lacks the processes and capacities that make us uniquely human persons—no mind, no thought, no feeling, no will, no perception, no desire, nothing more than a lowly bacterium would have. And that, pro-lifers tell us, is what it means to be a real, true human being.

This New Materialism flies in the face of the spirituality that pro-lifers allegedly believe in. Ok, not allegedly, they really do believe in it. It’s just that they’re following political leaders who don’t believe, and who could care less about the contradictions you produce in a believer’s testimony when you force him to reduce humanity to a mere chemical formula, and to call that “the whole person.”

But that’s what happen when you try to obey the voice of a God Who isn’t there, and is easily imitated. You become a pawn, a tool, to be deployed and used at will by whoever has the ambition and lack of scruples to pull it off.

Obama wants us to believe that his motivation is to help the small number of Americans who do not have health insurance. Those who have no health insurance will receive better health care from almost any hospital than from having Obama Health Insurance. Our health care system is not perfect, but is still the best in the world. Obama wants to waste something like a trillion dollars to have a single provider. Very briefly, he wants to socialize medicine, to have total control over all health care and the lives of the elderly.

It starts off fairly well. Obama does want us to believe that the goal is to extend health care to those who are falling through the cracks under the current system. But it kind of goes downhill from there. To be fair, it’s not all that dissimilar to what you would hear coming from Limbaugh or Hannity on any given day of the week. It’s distorted, biased, provocative and misleading, but honestly, that’s pretty much par for the course with political rhetoric, right? Let’s keep reading.

A recent statement by Thomas Sowell (Reporter-News, July 29), fits Obama’s actions. “With race — as with campaign finance, transparency and the rest — Barack Obama knows what the public wants to hear and that is what he has said. But his policies as president have been the opposite of his rhetoric, with race as with other issues.”

Therefore, the public believes that Obama wants to destroy anything good our great country has to offer, such as the best health care system, the Constitution and the Supreme Court.

In addition, it has been reported that in the proposed health care plan, illegal aliens will get benefits.

Ok, now we’re starting to fragment a little. One guy claims that Obama is a hypocrite, and therefore Dr. Dukes concludes that “the public believes” that Obama is deliberately seeking to destroy health care, the Constitution and the Supreme Court. Maybe just a leeeeeeetle bit of an overdrawn conclusion, don’t you think? And the offhand cheap shot at illegal aliens? What’s that there for?

But Dr. Dukes isn’t just any wingnut blatherer: he’s a full PhD and a professor at Texas Tech. He’s got an intellect, and has demonstrated his ability to put his mind to good use when he chooses to do so. And yet, certain conditions seem to make him lose it, intellectually. Just a bit, anyway. But nevertheless, he at least tries to build a solid, reasonable case for his views, as when he cites statistics to back up his claims.

The National Center For Public Policy Research offers:

1. Fifty percent (50 percent) of women in Britain and New Zealand diagnosed with breast cancer die from it. By contrast, about one-fifth of American women diagnosed with breast cancer die from it.

2. In England the system decided to halt knee and hip replacements for overweight people.

3. In Australia a man has been on a 90-day waiting period for two years to get surgery to fix his hands, shoulder and ankle crippled by rheumatoid arthritis.

4. In Canada patients have been denied life-saving medicines that are standard treatment in the United States.

The National Center for Public Policy Research, in case you’re not familiar with it, is an organization that proudly declares itself a “conservative think tank.” In other words, these statistics are not being reported by an unbiased source, they’re being published specifically because the Center believes these claims will further a conservative agenda. Let’s take just the first claim as a representative sample.

The Center would like us to believe that in Britain and New Zealand (why those two countries, specifically?) the mortality rate from certain types of cancer is as high as 50,000 per 100,000 people. According to recent data from the Office of Economic Cooperation and Development, the mortality rate isn’t nearly that high. In New Zealand, the mortality rate from cancer in general stands at about 327 per 100,000, or slightly above the United States’ mortality rate of 321 per 100,000. Britain, meanwhile, has a significantly lower mortality rate, at only 253.5 deaths per 100,000. Even if we assume that the statistics for breast cancer are anomalous, and are strikingly worse than the statistics for cancer in general, it is clear that Britain’s health care system is not resulting in needless and preventable deaths from cancer. At best, the Center has cherry-picked its data, and at worst it may have fabricated it entirely.

Is Dr. Dukes deliberately spreading false and misleading information in order to deceive his readers into drawing false conclusions about health care in countries with more modern and civilized health care programs? We can’t say for sure, but it does seem that his biases are making him more prone to accept bad data uncritically and to promote it with an unwise degree of enthusiasm. But wait, we haven’t seen anything yet! Join me as we turn into the spin and begin our spiral downwards.

Obama does not like our Constitution and wants to destroy the Supreme Court. Obama is trying to destroy the effectiveness of the court with Sotomayor, who wants to break up the United States. Gary Kreep, director of the United States Justice Foundation, reports that “Sotomayor is part of the movement seeking to take over the entire southwestern United States, and make it part of Mexico. She was a member of La Raza, which is called a Latino KKK. Sotomayor was selected to destroy the Supreme Court.”

Yes, that’s right. Obama picked a Latina judge to be a Supreme Court Justice because it was all part of a plot to cede the entire southwest of the United States to Mexico! Isn’t that just like a megalomaniacal despot with ambitions of world domination? No sooner do they get elected to the supreme office in the land, but they immediately seek to shrink their area of control, hand over valuable natural and industrial resources, and weaken their base of power. So like Hitler! But we’re in the final, irretrievable death spiral now:

After the election, Obama said our country is no longer a Christian nation and is now a Muslim nation. Obama visits foreign countries and tells them how bad America is.

Please call your representatives and tell them how much you disagree with Obama’s attempt to destroy the best health care system and waste another trillion dollars.

Certification of Obama’s Kenya birth certificate could save our country, health care and avoid “Cap & Tax.”

Our country depends on you.

Yes, by his magical, demonic powers, Obama took an entire Christian nation and *poof* transformed it magically into a Muslim nation! He goes around to other countries and tries to convince them that America is terrible, which is pretty strange, since he is also secretly a Muslim himself and ought to be proud of what he has done with America. Um, yeah, so anyway, he’s trying to destroy health care, and waste a trillion dollars (which we could have spent paying for part of the war on Iraq). And he was born in Kenya (even though his mom was in Hawaii at the time)! Wake up America! Our country depends on you! Write to your congress critters and tell them tooooo… do…. something. Pass a law making President Obama an official Kenyan, or maybe revoke Hawaii’s statehood retroactively, or something. Anything! Halp!!!1!

Doctor Dukes starts off sounding like a reasonable, sane (if conservative) professor, and in the space of a few short paragraphs, launches himself deep into the loonisphere. The man has a mind, yet when confronted with one unpleasant fact—a liberal black man in the White House—he disconnects that mind from the real world, and plugs it into some hysterical and paranoid fantasy world dreamt up by the Limbaughs and Hannities and maybe even the profit-protecting insurance industry executives. And that becomes his new truth. Nothing can change his mind. Obamo delenda est!

A related news story makes it clear that Dr. Dukes is not an isolated case. People from all across the country, but especially from the conservative South, are firmly and unshakably convinced that they know that they know that they know, that Barack Obama was not born a U.S. citizen. As few as 24% of Republicans in North Carolina, for instance, believe that Obama is a legitimate U.S. citizen. The rest either claim to be unsure, or else they are sure (47%!) that he was not born in the US.  They weren’t there at the time. They haven’t a shred of evidence on which to base their conclusions. But they know it beyond all hope of persuading them otherwise, despite the fact that Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate has been published and documented and verified beyond a reasonable doubt (notice I said reasonable doubt). Some 8% of them don’t even believe that Hawaii is a US state.

So here’s the kicker. Let’s suppose we take one of these “birthers,” and arrest them. Let’s tell them that unless they stop telling people that Obama is not a U.S. citizen, they will be convicted of treason and executed. Is there anyone here who has the slightest doubt that, among all the birthers, at least twelve people would take this as absolute proof that the birther accusations were true, and would willingly die rather than sell out their immortal souls to Satan Incarnate? That they would martyr themselves over a baseless slander about a duly elected President?

One of the most popular apologetics is to point to the testimony of the early Christians, and especially of the Christian martyrs, and to say that we cannot possibly impeach their testimony, because they believed it strongly enough to die for it. Yet when we look at the real world, we find that, in fact, it’s not all that hard to find people—even intelligent and educated individuals like Dr. Dukes—who simply plug their brains into an alternate “reality” whenever the real facts violate their cherished beliefs and ideals. The birthers have suffered nothing worse than a lost election, certainly not anything remotely like the public execution of their God, but they’re repeatedly (and vocally) going fricking nuts anyway!

When we read the stories in the New Testament, and we hear about how strong the “faith” of the early apostles and martyrs was, does that really mean they must have had something genuine? Not at all. Just look at the birthers. They have nothing, yet their faith in their dogmas is strong enough, and irrational enough, that death threats would only reinforce their convictions. Evidence doesn’t faze them, reason doesn’t faze them, experience does not change their minds. They know that they know that they know, and nothing outside their own head is important (except to the extent that it can be used to promote their delusional beliefs).

What does it take to explain the New Testament accounts, and the OT stories as well? All we need to suppose is that some people, back in Bible times, were like the people we see in the headlines today. They have faith. They have zeal. And nothing can drown out their witness—not even the truth.

Yet all they have to offer the rest of us is a chance to share in their delusion. Despite the strength of their convictions, the things they say don’t correspond to the things we actually find in the real world. So whether you’re reading the news or reading the Bible, beware. There’s more to the truth than being fanatical enough to die for something.

“Let us pray. Almighty God, today we pray imprecatory prayers from Psalm 109 against the enemies of religious liberty, including Barry Lynn and Mikey Weinstein, who recently issued a press release attacking me personally. God, do not remain silent, for wicked men surround me and tell lies about me. We bless them, but they curse us. Therefore find them guilty, not me. Let their days be few, and replace them with Godly people. Plunder their fields, and seize their assets. Cut off their descendants, and remember their sins, in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

That’s ex-chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt, solemnly and piously asking God to please kill Mikey Weinstein and Barry Lynn and their children (if any), and send them all to hell, unforgiven, for the offense of having published a press release critical of Klingenschmitt.

Yes, that’s right. Daring to criticize Klingenschmitt, and voicing opinions he does not agree with, makes them ENEMIES OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY!!!1!one!

My first thought was that this was an Onion-esque spoof of a self-righteous blowhard, but no, it’s hosted on Klingenschmitt’s own sanctuary of spiritual narcissism, prayinjesusname.org.

Hat tip to Dispatches from the Culture Wars—be sure and scroll down to read the comment from Klingenschmitt’s former supervisor about what it was like working with this guy.

This, too, had unintended consequences. Because sola scriptura effectively isolated the interpretation of the Bible from the centuries of Church Tradition that had previously dictated the intended meaning of the Gospel, Protestants ended up practicing, not just the priesthood of all believers, but the virtual papacy of each individual believer. Any man could tell you that you were wrong, based on his own understanding of the Bible, but as a believer in sola scriptura, you need not listen to him. Your own understanding of God’s Word took precedence, because after all, which are you going to believe: what man tells you, or what God tells you? And this, too, had unintended consequences.

Protestantism began to splinter. Those who were more scholarly interpreted the Bible in terms of grammar and history. The more mystical believers rejected scholasticism and relied instead on the illumination of the Holy Spirit to convey the true meaning of Scripture. Some put more emphasis on divine law, others on divine grace; some on free will and others on divine sovereignty. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Without a God around to resolve the issue of whose interpretation was correct, the various groups had to rely on the force of their own arguments to try and establish what God’s will really was. All too soon, these arguments turned ugly, and began to resort to force of arms as well as force of words. Protestant enclaves formed, minorities were persecuted (even within Protestantism), and full-scale wars broke out. People died, people fled, and no consensus was reached about the true meaning of Scripture.

Exhausted by bloody wars, and enlightened somewhat by humanistic ideals, the West (including the newly-founded United States of America) adopted the principle of religious tolerance, the idea that freedom of religion was a virtue, not a heresy. But this, too, is an idea that has unintended consequences. It’s a good idea, mind you, but it has some subtle implications that have been making themselves increasingly obvious of late.

Implicit in the idea of religious tolerance is the idea that everyone has the right to believe whatever they like. This, in turn, tends to imply that all ideas are of equal worth, and therein lies the rub. If all religions are of equal worth, that means they are all equally false. They can’t all be true, because they contradict each other. And yet we value them and protect them anyway, which implies that they are worthy and meaningful despite their failure to be true. And that implies that truth itself doesn’t really matter as much.

We see this in the rise of postmodernism, and in the peculiarly American approach to evangelical politics. Gay marriage is banned in California through the cooperative efforts of Focus on the Family (a conservative Christian group) and the Mormon church, an unholy alliance that would have been anathema a century ago. We insert “under God” into the pledge of allegiance on the grounds that it’s part of a great “Judeo-Christian” tradition of government reverence, despite the historic conflict between the Jewish idea of God and the Christian concept of Trinity. People band together and cast their votes based on lowest-common-denominator appeals to “universal” religious principles, in blind disregard for the religious differences that led past generations to fight to the death for what they regarded as essential and uncompromising principles.

All this has the unintended consequence of changing America from a democracy to a mediocracy (as in “mediocre”). If all ideas are of equal worth, why shouldn’t I vote for Sarah Palin, or whoever else I feel is the same kind of person as me, with my kind of interests, values, and qualities? Who cares what her actual qualifications are? And conversely, if people are going to vote based on a desire to see their own, “equally-valid” ideas represented in government, why shouldn’t I, as a politician, run a campaign based on appeal to the lowest common denominators, in order to attract the widest basis of support? Who cares what my qualifications are, if all ideas are equally valid.

The result is that we no longer value—and even actively disdain—any kind of superiority of ideas and understanding. “Elite,” which means “superior, and of rare excellence and quality,” becomes a nasty word, hurled at one’s enemies to discredit them. We don’t want good leaders, we want leaders who are just like us. After all, all ideas are of equal worth, so who cares whether anyone is actually right or not?

Religious freedom is an important principle, and needs to be preserved and protected. At the same time, however, we need to address the problem of people’s naive assumption that all ideas are of equal worth. We need to be free to criticize bad ideas, and to point out why they are wrong. We need to value those whose opinions are informed and educated and experienced. We need to pursue “elite” standards of excellence, in politics, and in science, and in all areas of life.

This is not just a question of respecting other people’s beliefs. We need to respect their right to believe what they want, but the price we must pay for religious freedom is that we must also support the freedom of speech that lets us squarely address the flaws in those beliefs when they are unrealistic, wrong-headed, and poorly-reasoned. Yes, it can make us uncomfortable, but the alternative is to endure the relentless degradation and collapse of our society, as people refuse to face the facts, and make political, economic, and military decisions based on wrong assumptions.

All men are created equal, but not all ideas are. We can believe in stupid things if we want, but the price we pay for this freedom is that people can tell us our ideas are stupid, and we have to let them.

President Barak H. Obama.

I just can’t concentrate on my writing today. I knew that Bush would soil his own bedsheets so badly that a Democrat would have to work hard to lose the White House this year. But Mr. Obama seems to be a president beyond anything I dared hope for. The mess Bush has left him is going to be virtually impossible to clean up in only two terms, let alone a mere year, but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have standing outside the Augean stables with a shovel in his hand than Mr. Obama. Which would be rather a cruel wish if it were not for the fact that the rest of us are IN the stables and up to our necks (or worse).

Best of luck to you, sir. You’ll need it. We all will.

Here’s the trick: you can’t embarrass people into admitting that they’re wrong. People who are embarrassed become defensive, and even irrational at times, in order to protect their self-esteem. That’s why the Bush-Quayle ticket did so well after Quayle’s famous “potato/potatoe” gaffe. The press and the media had so much fun mocking Quayle’s apparent ignorance and subsequent ineptitude that people actually started to feel sorry for him. Pity for Quayle became antipathy towards the liberals, who were perceived as being cruel, and Americans, who always tend to root for the underdog, voted their support for poor persecuted bumbler. People make mistakes, and are more sympathetic to others who also make mistakes (other things being equal).

There have been bloggers who have looked forward rather gleefully to the VP candidates debate coming up shortly, anticipating that Palin will babble and say dumb things. Paradoxically, however, she can only improve her party’s chances of victory by coming across as a complete moron, especially if the liberals follow up with prolonged mockery and ridicule. Many people will empathize with Palin, whether because she’s a woman, or because she’s a conservative, or because she’s a Christian, and will see the attacks on Palin as attacks by “them” against “us.” This could win Palin a sympathy vote as well as a defensive us-vs-them vote.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible for Palin to blow it. A mistake that was really bad might do it, but it would have to be a mistake that actually alienates people as opposed to merely being stupid about things most people don’t care about. If she blurted out something about charismatics being the only real Christians, or said that people are poor because they’re too lazy to deserve an income, or something similarly bigoted, then just maybe Mr. and Mrs. Average American would turn against her.

But chances are pretty good that she won’t, and if she is merely incompetent and ignorant, then open mockery of her lack of expertise is likely to produce a backlash of support for the Republican ticket. It has happened before.

I have on two previous occasions written in my blog about the principle of health care provider conscience. Federal law is explicit and unwavering in protecting federally funded medical practitioners from being coerced into providing treatments they find morally objectionable…Today, HHS will file a rule in the Federal Register aimed at increasing compliance with existing federal laws protecting provider conscience. The proposed rule clarifies that non-discrimination rules apply to institutional health care providers as well as to individual employees working for recipients of certain funds from HHS. It requires recipients of certain HHS funds to certify their compliance with laws protecting provider conscience rights. The HHS Office for Civil Rights is designated as the entity to receive complaints of discrimination addressed by the statute or the proposed regulation.

Now, this sounds good to the Religious Right. All the code words are there: this is supposed to be a law designed to allow doctors to deny medical care to women seeking abortions, to gays and lesbians, and to whoever else might be contrary to conservative Christian approval. The problem is, this proposal opens the door to all kinds of abuses that might not be what the Christian supremacists want.

For example, a doctor could decide that diseases are caused by sin and demons, and could legally deny people legitimate medical care in favor of more “spiritual” alternatives like prayer and confession. Or a doctor could uphold an extreme quality-of-life ethic by denying life support to a critically-ill patient. Leavitt’s Loophole could, in fact, open the legal doors for a particularly nasty form of passive euthanasia, by protecting the doctor’s “right” to let a patient die of starvation, dehydration, and oxygen deprivation, with or without the patient’s consent, if in the physician’s personal opinion it would be immoral to allow the patient to continue a pain-filled and hopeless existence.

Leavitt’s Loophole would conclusively settle the Terry Schiavo case, not just for patients as bad off as Terry, but for those who are a lot better off than she was. Passive euthanasia could be effectively legalized, by removing the penalties for doctors denying care, in all 50 states, without a referendum. And the Religious Right is solidly (and blindly) supportive of Leavitt’s Loophole anyway.

Reality-based policies are your best insurance for making sure the laws you pass really serve your best interests. Faith-based government is just a wish and a sigh, and an eventual, inevitable, “oops.”

This is America, a Judeo-Christian nation. Why should any employer accommodate the religious preferences of Muslims? Where is the call for separation of church and state in this situation? If these Muslims are not content with the American holidays that their employers offer, they are free to go back to whatever Muslim nation they came from. And you know what, we won’t miss them or their whining for Islamic religious rights or all their lawsuits.

If you were wondering why it’s important to stand up against Christian Supremacists and to fight for our First Amendment freedoms, this is why. All this nonsense about “respecting America’s historical heritage” and such, is just a smoke screen. The real, practical intent of making America a “Christian nation” is so that the power of government can be used to discriminate against those deemed to be non-Christians. Like Muslims, for instance. Or gays.

The problem with this sort of Christian nation is that it turns democracy into a kind of mob rule, and if you belong to a minority, then brother, it sucks to be you. Except that we’re all members of some minority or other. There are more non-Catholics than Catholics, more non-Baptists than Baptists, more non-charismatics than charismatics. Ultimately, every individual is a minority of one.

Besides, if the government is really going to promote Christian supremacy over other religions, it must first decide what Christianity is so that it knows what to promote. Do conservatives really want the Christian faith to be defined for them by Congress? By Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank?

Christians have been toying with spiritualizing their government for 2,000 years, and in 2,000 years the attempt has never succeeded in improving the spirituality of the state and never failed to corrupt and secularize the religion behind the effort. According to the Pentateuch, it took the Israelites 40 years to catch on to God’s will well enough that they were fit to enter the Promised Land and become His chosen nation. Those ancient Jews were downright prodigies compared to those who still haven’t caught on, despite 2,000 years experience of God refusing to bless the mingling of church and state.

Our founding fathers did catch on, fortunately, which is why the very first amendment to the Constitution is an amendment telling the government to make no law either for or against religion. America has a pretty spotty track record as far as actually respecting that prohibition (as witness the motto on our currency and the theistic interpolation into the Pledge). But that commitment to liberty and to religious neutrality, even though only partially enforced, has enabled us to benefit from the talent and hard work of people from all cultures, faiths, and ethnic backgrounds, and thus to become a great nation.

Sadly, that neutrality has been seriously eroded lately, and we’re paying the price. But we can recover, provided we speak up and stand up to oppose the Christian Supremacy movement wherever it rears its ugly head. State-sponsored (and thus state-defined) religion is a great detriment to any nation, and even believers ought to be eager to keep themselves unstained by it.

It is all about equal rights, the gay “marriage” lobby keeps telling us. We just want the right to marry, like everyone else.

That is what they are telling us. But that is not what they mean. If same-sex “marriage” becomes the law of the land, we can expect massive persecution of the Church.

And therefore the oppression of gays must be allowed to continue unopposed.

Remember how they used to tell us that gays weren’t really being persecuted, and that separate-but-equal “civil unions” were a fair compromise that gave gays the same domestic benefits as an official marriage? Well that was a lie, as Colson explains to us now. Civil unions are not even close to being marriage, and upgrading gay relationships from civil unions to full marriages is going to involve some major and significant differences. Quoting his friend Jennifer Roback Morse, Colson writes:

“Legalizing same-sex ‘marriage’ is not a stand-alone policy . . . Once governments assert that same-sex unions are the equivalent of marriage, those governments must defend and enforce a whole host of other social changes.”

The bad news is these changes affect other liberties we take for granted, such as religious freedom and private property rights. Several recent cases give us a sobering picture of what we can expect if we do not actively embrace—and even promote—same-sex “marriage.”

Clearly, civil unions are nowhere near what legal marriage is, and Christians like Colson want to keep it that way. They’re afraid that if we ever stop discriminating against gays, Christians will lose liberties they’ve been taking for granted. Like the freedom to discriminate against gays. And, according to Colson, these liberties are already under assault.

For instance, a Methodist retreat center recently refused to allow two lesbian couples to use a campground pavilion for a civil union ceremony. The state of New Jersey punished the Methodists by revoking the center’s tax-exempt status—a vindictive attack on the Methodists’ religious liberty.

Hmm, the state revoking a church’s tax exempt status for refusing to allow a lesbian civil union? Oh wait, it wasn’t a church, it was a Methodist “retreat center”—a separate institution affiliated with the Methodists, but not a church in and of itself. And, as the NY Times reports, Colson isn’t telling the whole story here.

Since 1989, Ocean Grove’s beach, boardwalk and oceanfront road have received tax-exempt status under the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Green Acres Program, which was created to encourage use of privately owned space for public recreation and conservation. In its original application for the exemption — which saves the group about $500,000 a year and is up for renewal on Sept. 15, according to Bernard Haney, the Neptune Township tax assessor — the association noted that the properties were open to the public and that the pavilion had been used by outside groups.

Some see an inherent conflict between the association seeking tax-exempt status as a public open space with one state agency while suing another state agency for violating its rights as a private religious group.

Gee, ya think? So here’s a cherished Christian liberty that is being threatened by gay rights: the freedom to defraud the government by claiming to provide open, public access to facilities while simultaneously denying access to groups they disapprove of for religious reasons. Let’s look at the next outrage being perpetrated against those poor, docile believers.

In Massachusetts, where judges imposed gay marriage a few years ago, Catholic Charities was ordered to accept homosexual couples as candidates for adoption. Rather than comply with an order that would be harmful to children, Catholic Charities closed down its adoption program.

Seriously, he said that Massachusetts judges imposed gay marriage. He doesn’t mention exactly which men were forced to marry each other against their will, or which women were ordered to take each other to bed, but perhaps that’s because nothing like that ever happened. And meanwhile, what does this have to do with adoption? Again, Colson fails to tell the whole story.

In compliance with the commonwealth’s so-called antidiscrimination laws, the Catholic adoption agency, Catholic Charities of Boston, has already placed children with same-sex couples over the past 20 years.

The above quote, from a pro-Christian, anti-gay web site (notice the “so-called” in front of the word “antidiscrimination”), shows quite clearly that the Catholic Charities decision had nothing to do with the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts. They have been legally obligated to provide non-discriminatory adoption services for two decades, because of laws passed long before gay marriage was legalized there.

So Christian liberty number two, the freedom to make innocent children pay for Christian bigotry, and to use them as mere pawns in a political struggle over the right to discriminate, is also at risk. Christian liberty number three, the freedom to promote anti-gay prejudice in public schools, is also under attack, in California. Colson, however, mentions this only briefly on his way to Canada, where the next example of anti-Christian “persecution” comes from. (Evidently he ran out of American examples and had to import some from other countries.)

Just north of the border in Quebec, the government told a Mennonite school that it must conform to provincial law regarding curriculum—a curriculum that teaches children that homosexuality is a valid lifestyle. How long will it be before the U.S. government goes after private schools?

Yeah, imagine the government telling a private Muslim school it wasn’t allowed to teach that God wants Jews and Christians to be converted to Islam by force, or killed if they refuse. Christian liberty number four, the freedom to promote intolerance and discrimination through private education, is definitely in danger in America, because of what Quebec is telling Mennonite schools. Next?

Even speaking out against homosexuality can get you fired. Crystal Dixon, an associate vice president at the University of Toledo, was fired after writing an opinion piece in the Toledo Free Press in support of traditional marriage . . . Fired—for exercising her First Amendment rights!

Um, yeah, “support of traditional marriage.” What she actually wrote was that she could never wake up one morning and decide not to be black, but gays (she claimed) can stop being gay any time they want, and therefore do not deserve to have their civil rights protected. If that’s “traditional marriage” then traditional marriage is just a code phrase for discrimination, intolerance, and outright lying.

Now, as to whether this did indeed violate her First Amendment rights, I can’t say. People say stupid stuff all the time, and (as Don Imus found out) sometimes have to bear the consequences of intolerant speech. But as a general, liberal principle, I have to say that Colson finally got one right: the Christian freedom to say hateful and untrue things against gays is indeed at risk and deserves to be protected. What it needs to be protected from, however, is not gay rights, but a more general disdain for individual liberty, as expressed in the First Amendment and as threatened by anti-gay Christians like Dixon (and Colson).

Promoters of same-sex “marriage” seem to go out of their way to target Christian businesses and churches. Their goal, it seems, is not the right to “marry,” but to punish anyone who disagrees with them.

No, Chuck, they’re targeting those who are actively engaged in practicing discrimination and oppression against them. The only “rights” that are being threatened are the “right” to be bigoted, oppressive, and intransigent. If you feel punished whenever anybody won’t let you deny others the same freedoms you yourself enjoy, then perhaps you should be punished. If you can’t take it, then don’t dish it out.

After the California Supreme Court’s infamous ruling that approved gay “marriage” two months ago, pro-family advocates talked endlessly for the need to strengthen the institution of marriage at the national level with a federal amendment.

Last week, pro-family groups finally saw their prayers answered when Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi re-introduced the Federal Marriage Act in the Senate for the first time since it stalled in the House nearly two years ago.

The measure, which reads, “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman,” would effectively outlaw gay “marriage” if it reaches a two-thirds majority approval in Congress.

It would also mark the second time in US history that a Christian-led political movement modified the Constitution to diminish its protection of individual liberty, contrary to the core principles on which this great nation was founded.

Pro-family groups said they were upbeat about the bill, while emphasizing its importance in protecting families.

Notice, they never seem to explain what it is that families are being protected from.

“Children are best served by having both a mother and a father,” said Tom McClusky, vice president for government affairs at the Family Research Council, in a statement.

“To deprive a child of [that] is something that no government should be trying to push,” he added.

Children are also best served by having parents who don’t feed them full of superstitious bunkum about God. If we’re going to amend the Constitution to outlaw sub-optimal child-rearing, let’s start by banning Christianity. But since when do parents have to be perfect in order to have kids?

Not that this has anything at all to do with whether or not homosexuals should be allowed to pick their own spouses, of course. Homosexuals already adopt children, legally, and allowing them to marry would not change this. This is pure smoke-and-mirrors intended to distract attention from the fact that the Anti-Marriage Act is simply spite: an attempt to punish gays for being the wrong thing.

As I’ve said before, the difference between justice and oppression is that justice punishes you for doing the wrong thing and oppression punishes you for being the wrong thing. If you murder someone and go to jail, you’re being punished for doing the wrong thing. This new Anti-Marriage Amendment is a punishment against gays for simply being something that Christians don’t approve of. Our Constitution was designed to protect minorities against just such instances of mob tyranny, and people like Roger Wicker ought to be invited to emigrate to Iran or some other place where God’s law is the law of the land. If you can’t stand freedom, you’re free to leave. Sez I.

Here, for example, is Chuck Colson, fantasizing about What McCain Could Have Said to Ellen Degeneres on the subject of gay marriage.

McCain’s response? “I just believe in the status of a marriage between a man and a woman . . . We just have a disagreement.”

Maybe, given the sensitivity of the situation, that was the best answer Senator McCain could come up with. But suppose the senator and Ms. DeGeneres could talk backstage, away from the glare of TV lights. What could he say to seize the moral high ground? To start, he could discuss the true meaning and purpose of marriage.

Degeneres, of course, should have pointed out that she was not using her disagreement with McCain to try and deprive McCain of the freedom to marry the one he loves. But back to Colson. What is this “moral high ground” he wants to conquer? Quoting Princeton professor Robert George, he says:

[M]atrimonial law reflects a moral judgment. That judgment is that marriage is inherently heterosexual, monogamous, and permanent—a union of one man and one woman. This judgment is based on both the biblical and natural law understandings—that marriage is a two-in-one flesh communion of persons. This communion is consummated and actualized sexually.

If Colson thinks the Bible teaches monogamous marriage, he has not read the Old Testament! King Solomon, for instance, had enough wives and concubines to keep him meeting new people in bed for going on three years. And nowhere does the Bible say anything about polygamy being immoral. Polygamy just went out of fashion. But I digress…

Colson tries to seize the moral high ground by arguing for traditional, heterosexual monogamy, but he soon lapses into confused self-contradiction.

[M]arriage is made real by acts that are reproductive, whether or not these acts result in children. They unite the spouses as a single procreative unit. This organic unity is achieved even by infertile couples. Only a mated pair can be a complete organism capable of human procreation.

So what makes a marriage into a “marriage” is procreation, or at least the physical possibility of procreation, which even infertile couples have even though they lack the physical possibility of procreation. Wait, what? Colson seems to be saying that what makes a sexual experience “reproductive” is not whether it involves any actual reproduction, but whether it involves heterosexual partners. So in other words, his argument is claiming that true marriage requires heterosexual union because only heterosexual union is true marriage. This is called “assuming your conclusion” in Intro to Logical Fallacies class.

I can already hear the arguments your secular neighbors will make: “Okay,” they will say, “that’s your definition of marriage. But why should your views be imposed on everybody else?”

That is when we have to be ready with additional, non-religious arguments for traditional marriage.

Translation: that is why we need to be ready to blow smoke out our posteriors and try and confuse people with secular-sounding goobledy-gook.

For instance, if we expand the meaning of marriage to include same-sex partnerships, on what grounds could we legitimately oppose marriages between three or more people? Or weddings between siblings?

God forbid people today should participate in the kind of marital relationships the Old Testament saints enjoyed, eh? Do tell, let’s hear more about how those so-called Bible heroes were actually promoting immorality and corruption. Hey Mr. Colson, have you ever considered the possibility that it just might not be any of your damn business who someone else marries? You can disapprove of it all you want, but you have no right to oppose (i.e. pass laws against) how someone else chooses to live their life, or whom they choose to live it with. “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” remember? “Inalienable rights,” it says. Look it up.

Since the beginning of recorded history, virtually every society and every major religion has revered and protected traditional marriage. Why? It is the institution that produces, nurtures, protects, and civilizes children. And marriage is the cornerstone of society’s foundational institution: the family.

And therefore we need to pass laws preventing two people from uniting into a married couple, and thus a family. Wait, what? If marriage is the cornerstone of the family, and the family is the foundation of society, why is Colson trying to prevent marriages?

It all goes back to cultural greed. Colson can’t be satisfied with his own religious liberty; his faith demands that he rob other people of theirs. Only by hoarding all the religious freedom to themselves can Christians like Colson reassure themselves that their erratic and vengeful deity isn’t going to pop off a few judgments that—oops, sorry!—blow away True Believers along with the infidels. Having lived so long with faith, and experienced so much of what they piously refer to as God’s “mysterious ways,” they don’t dare entrust their well-being into His care. So they have to be greedy.

The problem is, greed like this can never be satisfied. Success just makes the greedy greedier. Once gays have nothing left to steal, do you think your rights and liberties will be safe?

As Barack Obama broadens his outreach to evangelical voters, one of the movement’s biggest names, James Dobson, accuses the likely Democratic presidential nominee of distorting the Bible and pushing a “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution.

JERUSALEM – Some have been taking issue with largely unnoticed comments made last year by Sen. Barack Obama declaring the U.S. is “no longer a Christian nation” but is also a nation of others, including Muslims and nonbelievers.

The comments have been recently recirculating on Internet blogs.

Don’t you just love that dateline? “And now the latest from JERUSALEM, the land where Jesus once walked…” Is that supposed to lend some kind of special anointing to the story, or what?

Despite whatever special magic you get by reporting from Jerusalem, it’s apparent that the reporter isn’t too good at reading comprehension.

At the speech, Obama also seemingly blasted the “Christian Right” for hijacking religion and using it to divide the nation:

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked. Part of it’s because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us,” he said.

Notice: Obama’s remarks concern a relative handful of men, the leaders of the Christian Right, but the reporter tries to make it sound like Obama is attacking all conservative Christians.

Not to belabor the obvious, but the way you become a leader of the Christian Right is by becoming a leader who mingles religion and politics, i.e. by making religion a political issue and politics a religious issue—in short, by making “sectarian” equal “partisan.” And that’s what has actually happened: a relatively small number of religious leaders have politicized their faith and exploited it to create partisan divisions in the church and in society. So Obama is making a very clear, targeted reference to the specific (and unchristian) actions of a small group of men.

Obama’s remarks actually echo the Biblical injunctions of the Apostle Paul. “If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil. 2:-14). “I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought” (I Cor. 1:10).

Now granted, the Christian faith has always had its divisions and internal struggles, but still, is it really so bad for Obama to aspire to the same kind of unity and cooperation as Paul once endorsed? Christians certainly should not think so, but there’s just one problem. Obama is one of “them,” you see. Whenever one of “them” calls on Christians to follow Biblical injunctions, it’s got to be some kind of trick.

“This won’t play well in the Bible Belt,” commented the [Gateway Pundit] blog in a recent posting.

Still, WND deserves some credit for reporting at least some of the truth about what Obama actually said.

“Whatever we once were, we’re no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers,” Obama wrote in an e-mail to CBN News senior national correspondent David Brody.

“We should acknowledge this and realize that when we’re formulating policies from the state house to the Senate floor to the White House, we’ve got to work to translate our reasoning into values that are accessible to every one of our citizens, not just members of our own faith community,” wrote Obama.

That is pure genius. In pointing out this irreducible foundation of free and civilized society, Sen. Obama has highlighted the active ingredient that once made America great, and might—potentially—make us a decent nation once again.

Christians Launch Campaign against Global Warming Hype | Christianpost.com
WASHINGTON – While it may seem like everyone believes in global warming and the impending catastrophe it will bring, a group of conservative Christians countered that message Thursday by launching a national campaign to gather one million signatures for a statement that says Christians must not believe in all the hype about global warming.

The “We Get It!” declaration, which currently has nearly 100 signers, is backed by prominent Christians including Tony Perkins of Family Research Council, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, award-winning radio host Janet Parshall, and U.S. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

What supporters of the statement seek is to inform Christians about the biblical perspective on the environment and the poor, and to encourage them to look at the hard evidence, which they say does not support the devastating degree of climate change claimed by mainstream society.

Ok, maybe just one comment: are these the same people who claim to be able to see “signs” of the imminent return of Christ? Any bets on which signs we’re going to see fulfilled first?

David Woodward is a political science professor at Clemson University—one who has first-hand experience on how dangerous it can be to speak out in favor of traditional values: He almost lost his job over it.

In 1993, Woodward was asked to testify about the political power of homosexual groups in American life. He agreed to serve as an expert witness for the state of Colorado, which was fighting to defend the recently passed Amendment Two, which made it illegal to give protected status based on sexual orientation.

There, in a nutshell, is the heart of the problem: Christians are not just speaking their minds, they’re using their voice to try and pass legislation that goes beyond mere speech to actual, legalized oppression of those they disagree with.

According to Amendment Two, it’s not merely permissible to disapprove of homosexuality, it’s actually illegal to protect homosexuals from discrimination and oppression. And in a stunning display of Spirit-filled wisdom, it’s also illegal to protect heterosexuals, since that’s a sexual orientation as well. The argument could be made that Amendment Two mandates gay marriage in Colorado, since reserving marriage for heterosexuals alone constitutes giving heterosexuals a special protected status based on their sexual orientation.

Woodward, meanwhile, complains that his support for legalized oppression of minorities brought him some headaches and disapproval. Imagine, people having the nerve to speak out against him just because he spoke out against others! And not just spoke out against them, but worked to help strip them of their legal, civil, and human rights as well. And for that, people said bad things about him? What’s the world coming to?

Homosexuality is not the only issue Americans can no longer speak freely about: Speaking up in support of any traditional belief will earn you attacks from secular elites. “Whether individual, parent, church, or business, Americans holding traditional values are trapped in a ‘whisper zone’,” Woodward and DeMint write, “surrounded by invisible electric fences that threaten to ‘shock’ them if they cross unmarked legal lines.”

Yes, it’s terribly shocking that speaking out against others can result in others speaking out against you, isn’t it? The difference is that right-wing Christians aren’t just speaking, they’re passing laws denying gays the right to marry the person they love. Are secularists passing any laws forbidding Christians from marrying? Are they amending state constitutions to make it illegal to pass laws against denying housing, jobs, and benefits to Christians on the basis of their religion?

No, of course not. Secularists understand the difference between speaking out against something you disapprove of, and passing actual laws denying others equal protection under the law. Or at least they should. And when some group or other goofs up and does try and oppress Christians, other secularists will be right there denouncing it alongside the Christians.

Liberty is a give and take, a balance between divergent interests. If you want the right to free speech, you have to be willing to balance that by allowing others an equal freedom to speak against you, if they so choose. You can’t claim a special right to be protected against criticism for criticizing others, especially when your actions go beyond mere speech to creating a legal environment that intentionally discriminates against minorities.

As the Bible says, you reap what you sow. Christians are sowing intolerance, oppression, and judgment, and their crop is ripening nicely.

[Harris] has this to say about the worst of it:

The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own. The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism.

Such a statement would be alarming to Christians were there not a fundamental logical error involved. One way to grasp that error is to imagine me starting a book with the following:

The most hostile of my communications have come from homosexuals. This is ironic, as homosexuals generally imagine that no lifestyle imparts the virtues of love and tolerance more effectively than their own. The truth is that many who claim to be liberated by alternative lifestyles are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism.

Well, no, Mike, starting a book the way you propose would only expose your foolishness, because it’s plainly not true that homosexuals—or any other rational persons—imagine that sexual attraction to one’s own gender necessarily imparts the virtues of love and tolerance more effectively than attraction to the opposite sex. And they certainly don’t suggest that homosexuality has any supernatural power to impart love and tolerance. The irony that Harris refers to stems directly from the fact that it is true that Christians claim not only that their religion promotes the virtues of love and forgiveness, but that believers have supernatural help in living out that love and forgiveness through the Holy Spirit they claim indwells them. You can’t manufacture a parallel counterexample by inventing silly statements about what homosexuality imparts to homosexuals.

Of course, all groups fail to live up to their ideals from time to time – whether it is Christians failing to show forgiveness or homosexuals failing to show tolerance.

Apparently, Adams assumes that there’s something wrong with expecting Christians to live up to a higher standard just because they claim to be able to do so. That’s fine, that’s fair, as long as we’re admitting that there’s nothing more to the Christian life than a bunch of guys trying to produce “godly” results by their own human efforts. Harris was clearly comparing Christian behavior to the claim of having been supernaturally transformed by Christ’s love, but if God isn’t really part of the equation after all, then Adams is right: we shouldn’t expect Christians to do any better than any other bunch of mortals.

Some would rebut my example by claiming I should expect more hate mail from homosexuals because I criticize that group disproportionately. Harris, on the other hand, wrote a book criticizing people of all faiths with most of the hostile responses coming from Christians.

That logic is flawed and deeply so.

It should go without saying that – even if all of the world’s religions were, in fact, equally loving and forgiving – one should still expect more hostile responses from Christians. This can be attributed to the rather simple fact that Christianity is the world’s largest religion.

Well no, Harris didn’t say “most of the hostile responses,” he said “the most hostile responses.” It’s a question of quality, not quantity. Either Adams misread what he quoted, or he’s deliberately trying to change the subject, but either way he’s rather missing Harris’s point. It’s the degree of hostility that’s remarkable, not the number of responses.

Christianity is indeed flawed because of Christians like me who fail to live up to the ideals of the religion. But Christianity simply cannot be characterized as the religion most hostile to free expression. That contention is simply absurd.

That’s true, but again, Harris didn’t say that Christianity was the religion most hostile to free expression, he said that Christians, who claim to have access to a power that makes better people of them, expressed the greatest hostility towards his book. Adams spends most of his column flailing away at an argument that Harris isn’t making.

Of course, what would a Townhall article be without a paranoid rant that garbles the issues?

Sam Harris contends that his primary purpose in writing Letter to a Christian Nation is to “arm secularists in our society, who believe that religion should be kept out of public policy, against their opponents on the Christian Right.” That is as dishonest a statement as I have read in quite some time.

Were Harris to seek to preserve the Establishment Clause by keeping one particular faith from becoming the “official” state religion his goals would be laudable. Were he to seek to keep religion “out of public policy” altogether his goals would be laughable. But none of this is relevant because Sam Harris seeks neither of these outcomes.

Instead, Sam Harris seeks to make Secular Humanism the “official religion” of each of our fifty United States. And he seeks to turn our public schools into houses of worship for the Secular Humanist religion with compulsory attendance for children funded with compulsory offerings by adults.

Here’s a quick clue for Mr. Adams: Christians, Muslims, Jews, and atheists all inhabit the same objective, material universe and must necessarily live according to the laws governing the causes and effects of things in that universe. The secular, material world, therefore, is the one common denominator we all have in common, which does and should influence our policies and behavior, regardless of what we do or do not believe about other realities. The fact that atheists do not happen to believe in anything outside of the secular universe is irrelevant to the fact that secular reality is the common denominator.

The only way in which a religiously neutral government can implement policies which do not favor one religion over another is to stick to the things that we all have in common, i.e. the secular things, instead of basing our policies on what one group believes that others don’t. It’s not the atheists’ fault if secular reality happens to conform perfectly to their religious beliefs, and indeed, if other religions are at a disadvantage due to their failure to conform to objective reality, well, that’s not the atheists’ fault either.

The observable, verifiable reality we all experience in common is an observable, verifiable reality which ought to be a part of all religions, and not just “secular humanism.” To claim, therefore, that secular policies discriminate against your religious beliefs is to admit that your religious beliefs are not compatible with the common, objective reality that ought to be the basis for all definitions of “truth.”

So in a way, Mr. Adams’s paranoid rant is a concession. He concedes that secular truth and Christian “truth” are at odds with one another, such that the pursuit of secular knowledge and secular policies constitute a conspiracy against the Christian faith. The First Amendment is impossible to obey, according to Adams, to the point that it’s even “laughable” to suggest trying. There’s no way the government could be religiously neutral, and to strive for neutrality is to force people to “worship” secular humanism.

The point is very clear. The only way Christians can protect themselves against the secular influences of people like Harris is to beat him at his own game. Christians must subvert the First Amendment, or God will suffer. After all, it’s not like He could do anything to help. As is the case with Christian love and forgiveness, the only thing Christianity can accomplish is what Christian men do, by their own efforts, on God’s behalf.

At first I thought the Archbishop misspoke.But it turns out, no. He calls this “supplementary jurisdiction” unavoidable. He compared it to accommodating Christians in areas like abortion or gay adoption.

With all due respect to the Archbishop, there is no such parallel. The only thing that is unavoidable here is his failure to see sharia as it is practiced in the real world, as opposed to in seminars.

In a way, Colson is right. Muslims are only asking for Islamic principles to be applied to other Muslims, whereas conservative Christians are trying to get their sectarian principles imposed on everyone regardless of religion. But there are parallels, even if Colson can’t see them.

For example:

In real-world Muslim communities throughout Europe, coercion is so commonplace “that duly-constituted governments there” no longer wield justice among its citizens. The imams do.

David Mills reports, in his book Atheist Universe, that he once tried to organize a protest at a “healing” service in which the Christian evangelist urged diabetics to stop taking insulin and cancer patients to discontinue chemotherapy. When he tried to get support from the local police, however, he found that policeman after policeman not only refused to provide the protesters with any protection, but often threatened to assault them. Christians in America routinely dictate public policy in ways that support and promote Christianity, from adding theistic references to our currency and the pledge of allegiance, to passing constitutional amendments against homosexuals marrying the person they love, to turning a blind eye to harassment and persecution against unbelievers. Islamic law may seem harsh by Christian standards, but if we’re going to allow that one group’s code of behavior and punishment ought to be judged by secular standards, why not apply the same principle to Christianity’s sectarian impositions on our legal system?

And where would the Archbishop draw the line? At husbands beating their wives for wearing Western clothes or maybe stoning a woman accused of adultery?…

[Arabic bishop] Nazir-Ali, whose father had to leave Pakistan after converting to Christianity, told the UK Telegraph that sharia is “in tension” with “fundamental aspects” of Anglo-American law. That is because our “legal tradition” is “rooted in the quite different moral and spiritual vision deriving from the Bible.” This crucial difference seems to have escaped the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The “crucial difference,” which Colson seems to have overlooked, is that Christians no longer practice Biblical injunctions requiring women to be stoned to death for adultery (just as the Bible also demands death by stoning for holding seances, cursing, worshiping other gods, disobeying parents, or gathering firewood on Saturday). And yes, I know all about the “New Covenant,” but let’s not kid ourselves, Christians are pushing for the observance of such Old Covenant passages as the so-called “Ten Commandments.” Say that God’s old laws are unreasonably harsh and cruel, or say that they were just and fair, but it’s pure hypocrisy to brag about our legal tradition being better than sharia because ours is “rooted in a spiritual vision” derived from a Bible that commands the same things the imams are practicing.

The West’s greatest contribution to civilization has been the rule of law, the bulwark of freedom, captured in Anglo-American jurisprudence. Now a ranking religious official proposes compromising that with a theocratic church rule? Please.

Amen, Chuck, amen. Now can we please get the theocratic church rules out of our government?

Last month, the president announced his intention to sell Saudi Arabia some of our most sophisticated weapons. This is a bad idea, and you should let your representative know it right away…

[T]he Saudis do not need this kind of “persuasion.” They already have a good reason: Their oil is controlled by a Shiite minority that Iran, also Shiite, could exploit.

Then there is the nature and actions of the Saudi regime. Defense expert Frank Gaffney, Jr. reminded Washington Times readers this week of what the deal’s proponents hope they will forget: The Saudis are not a “reliable ally” of the United States.

The Saudi government funds and operates “mosques, madrassas, and Islamic centers” in the United States and elsewhere. These institutions spread the Salafist, or Wahabi, version of Islam practiced in the kingdom—the same kind that prohibits the practice of Christianity, that lets girls burn to death rather than letting them exit a burning building in their pajamas.

What’s more, it is the version of Islam that inspires bin Laden and other extremists and seeks to dominate other, more moderate, versions of Islam and destroy non-Muslim nations like ours. Without Saudi petro-dollars, Salafism would be confined to the Arabian peninsula.

We ought to recall also that Saudi Arabia has never recognized Israel’s right to exist. While it is difficult to imagine what good JDAMs would do against al Qaeda or the kingdom’s restive Shiites, it is easy to imagine how they could be used against Israel.

Or us, for that matter. It is common knowledge that Saudi security and intelligence forces contain al Qaeda sympathizers. Saudi intelligence files were found on al Qaeda computers in Afghanistan. It is not a stretch to imagine some of these weapons finding their way into terrorists’ hands and not unreasonable to fear that these weapons might one day be used against us.

But what’s a little terrorism between oil buddies like Bush and the Saudis, eh?

Two leftist organizations have released a study that claims that the Bush administration lied about Iraq. Somehow I think we’ve heard that one before.

And of course, if people have known since 2002 that Bush was not telling the truth about Saddam’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” why, that must mean we’ve already debunked the people who were saying so. Yeah, that’s it, we’ve heard this one before, so it’s OK to ignore. We’ll just assume that it’s been dealt with.

But consider this: If Bush actually knew that Iraq didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction, and yet repeatedly told the American people that Iraq had them, didn’t Bush expect that following the Iraq invasion his deception would be found out?

I have yet to see any evidence that the Bush administration gave any serious thought at all to the real-world consequences of Mr. Bush’s hell-bent drive to conquest. Asking whether Bush wouldn’t have expected to be found out after the invasion is like asking a horny teenager if she didn’t expect to get pregnant from having unprotected sex. Bush’s short-sightedness and failure to consider the consequences are why we are still stuck in a quagmire in Iraq almost 5 years after he blithely declared the mission to be “accomplished.”

If Bush knew anything, it was that being found out wouldn’t matter. He knew he could count on his right-wing, Christian support base to back him up no matter what the facts were. And in that much, at least, he managed to get something right—as D’Souza himself demonstrates.

D’Souza’s version of history would have us believe that Bush was simply making the best decision he could given the intelligence he had at his disposal, just as FDR did when he decided to start the atomic bomb project out of a fear that the Nazi’s might build one first. It turns out that the Nazi’s didn’t really have an atomic bomb, though they were indeed trying to build one, and therefore (according to D’Souza) it makes the situation analogous to Bush’s rush to invade Iraq.

But no one goes around saying, “Einstein lied” or “FDR lied.” They didn’t lie. They used the information they had to make a tough decision in a very dangerous situation.

The difference, of course, is that FDR used all the information and arrived at a careful, reasonably objective decision, whereas it has been fairly well documented that the Bush administration cherry-picked its “intel,” assigned inappropriate confidence to a highly questionable source, and retaliated against those (Plame) whose family members returned intel that cast doubts on the administration’s claims, all the while more experienced members of the intelligence community were trying to get the administration to acknowledge that things weren’t as cut-and-dried as he claimed.

To those leftist pundits who say, “Knowing what we know now, President Bush, why did you do what you did then?” Bush’s answer is, “Obviously I didn’t know what we know now.”

Isn’t the president lucky that he’s got Dinesh D’Souza to put words in his mouth for him? In other words, “The buck stops, um, over there in the intel community, somewhere. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.” But the President clearly did know, or at least had access to information which should have told him, that Iraq had been under embargo since the 1990′s, that its imports and exports were highly scrutinized, that the resources available to Saddam were materially inconsistent with him being able to threaten the United States with a “mushroom cloud.” He knew that there was no information linking Saddam to Al Qaeda in any significant way. He knew that the only real “evidence” he had against Saddam was that Saddam was “evil,” and therefore if he denied having WMD’s, that must mean he had WMD’s.

He knew that his invasion of Iraq was an unprovoked attack against an already-defeated and helpless enemy.

What we’re talking about here is a reckless disregard for the truth, under circumstances that ended up overthrowing another sovereign nation, and causing uncounted loss of human life, violent (and ongoing) disruption of society for millions of innocent people, and a very costly and pointless war that not only is difficult to extricate ourselves from, but that also saps our ability to deal with other, more genuine problems like the Taliban. It really matters very little whether Bush’s false statements were bald-faced, intentional lies or whether they were merely criminally incompetent and negligent. Our born-again, God-fearing president had a chance to listen to the informed and experienced professionals who tried to warn him, and he chose to brand them as terrorist-sympathizers instead of heeding their good advice. Morally and ethically, at least, he is fully responsible for the consequences of his deliberate choices, and no amount of toadying by D’Souza and his ilk can absolve him of it.

So let’s get this straight: If we don’t do what God says, God’s going to punish us by giving us bad leaders. How exactly will we tell?

Good question.

Here’s why Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech is backfiring: Bullies don’t respect their toadies.The speech includes some decent stretches, but it was not, primarily, a courageous plea for religious tolerance and mutual respect. It was, instead, primarily an obsequious bit of sucking up by an outsider hoping to curry favor with the in crowd by parroting their condemnation of other outsiders.

He has some interesting things to say about the fruit Romney is likely to reap from what he is sowing here, especially as a Mormon. Recommended Reading.

Conceit by proxy is a simple 1-2-3 process. First, you take your own values, beliefs, and agenda, and ascribe them to someone else. God works best for this purpose, both because of His assumed authority and because He never spoils things for you by showing up in real life to express an independent opinion.

Second, you swap roles: instead of admitting that you are ascribing your worldview to God, you claim that you are merely obtaining it from God. Finally, you praise God for having such a really, really swell worldview. Of course, this implies that people (such as yourself) who share this worldview are also really really great, BUT you’re not bragging. Oh no, you’re humbly submitting yourself to God and giving God the glory. So even though you’re really bragging about your own values, beliefs and agenda, you’re doing it in a way that allows you to pose as being humbly submissive.

Chuck Colson gives us a good example of this, in a post on townhall.com, ostensibly sharing an inspiring story of Jacob DeShazer, an American ex-POW from WWII who became a missionary and went back to “share the Gospel” with his former captors in Japan.

He remembers, “suddenly . . . when I looked at the enemy officers and guards . . ., I realized that … if Christ is not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel. . . . [M]y bitter hatred . . . changed to loving pity.”…

Learning to love our enemies is so important, something every Christian must strive for. But when we’re fighting deadly enemies, as our nation is today at war, doing so is a miracle—a miracle of restoration and healing that can come only through faith in Christ.

Did you catch that? Jesus, the “divine” proxy for Colson’s own beliefs, values, and agenda, is the sole source of things that Colson admires, like loving your enemies and forgiving them. Those who do not have Jesus in their heart (i.e. those who do not share the same proxy) are naturally evil, cruel, and likely to torture the innocent. Jesus (Colson’s proxy) is purely good, and thus those who embrace the beliefs and values Colson projects onto Jesus are, by implication, good also. And anyone who fails to share the worldview Colson projects onto Christ is by nature bad, cruel, etc.

This is conceit, plain and simple. Other religions preach and practice forgiveness too. Nor does “having Christ in your heart” mean you can’t or won’t be cruel. One of the tortures used by the Japanese against American POW’s, for instance, was waterboarding, an extremely nasty practice that conservative Christian leaders have been curiously reluctant to acknowledge as torture, let alone denounce. Or read Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World for a sample of some of the things Christians used to do to “test” old women suspected of being witches. Was Jesus not in people’s hearts back then? Plus, how many Christian leaders have you heard lately who’ve been inspired by Jesus to proclaim their love for Osama and their forgiveness of 9/11?

Colson’s bragging is just that: bragging. Christians are no more (or less) forgiving than any other group, and like most people they are far more likely to forgive their own (e.g. conservatives) than those they oppose (e.g. liberals). Nor does “having Christ in your heart” make you any more or less cruel than any other group. It just means that when you are cruel, other Christians will claim that you’re not really a Christian. Colson talks as though the “saved” were better than other people, but it’s simple conceit, nothing more–conceit by proxy.

It feels good to boast. It’s very satisfying to stand up and say “My ideals and my opinions are the best there is, and anyone who disagrees with me sucks.” But there’s a social cost for boasting: people look down on you if you openly expose your own conceit. By projecting their beliefs onto an absent-but-still-”authoritative” God, believers get to have their cake and eat it too: they get to boast about their own views, while claiming to act out of pure humility. Plus they get the added benefit of being able to claim that anyone who disagrees with them is not denouncing believers, but God! Small wonder, then, that religion remains popular no matter what science learns about the real world.

A federal appeals court has ruled that a voluntary faith-based prison program that has proven effective in reducing recidivism by half can move forward at an Iowa prison…

The ruling, by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Judges Roger Wollman and Duane Benton sitting as a panel for the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, reversed major parts of a district judge’s earlier ruling.

Meanwhile, at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton has what Paul Harvey calls “the rest of the story,” including a revelation that substantiates my earlier remarks about prison ministries: if they work, it’s because of the people, not because of God.

Despite the triumphalist spin from the WND, the ruling in this case is not a lot of good news for PF. The court found, among other things, that

• the prison was giving discriminatory rewards to prisoners based on professed belief (a classic 1st Amendment violation)
• the Prison Fellowship program was given the authority to issue disciplinary reports on inmates, resulting in prison-imposed punishments
• the court specifically ruled that PF flunked the Lemon test by providing special benefits to certain inmates based on belief
• the court also found that state aid was administered unconstitutionally
• the court explicitly rejected PF’s claim that per diem aid was indirect and therefore not unconstitutional
• the court sent the case back to the lower court

Big-time First Amendment violations going on, and plainly documented. This is going to be trouble for Colson’s group, especially if it ever makes it all the way to the Supreme Court. But there’s a part of this story that I find particularly interesting, and it concerns an inmate who was kicked out of the program despite the fact that he was making significant improvements. Ed Brayton quotes:

For example, in dismissing one inmate, the entire treatment team met and discussed his progress, concluding: “your conduct has been excellent according to security standards, and you are a hard worker. With you as a member you have always completed your work and assignments, however, you are not displaying the growth needed to remain in the program. Your Focus is not on God and His Son to Change you.”

Here we see very clearly two things. First, the improvements we sometimes see in prison programs like PF are the secular result of having a lot of concerned and caring people interacting with prisoners to give them support and guidance in the rehabilitation process. This inmate was responding well to the program, in terms of his improved behavior, despite the fact that his faith, if he had any, was weak at best. He was improving, but God was not part of the process.

The second thing we see is the real reason why people volunteer for PF: it’s not out of a desire to reform convicted criminals, it’s simply a desire to obtain some kind of validation for their own religious beliefs. Despite the glowing praise PF workers heap on the results of their program, if a prisoner comes along who fails to pay them back, by “giving God the glory,” he’s outa here. We don’t care how much he’s improving, if he won’t encourage us in our own religious superstitions, he can go to hell.

Prison Fellowship is not a charitable organization. The people who work there may well be doing some good, but their work is an investment, not a donation. They expect to be repaid, and the payment they demand is that prisoners have to help them prop up their sagging faith. Over all, I’d tend to say that PF may indeed provide some benefit, but their help is built on a shaky foundation, and probably won’t last, as it becomes more and more clear that this is just the work of man.

A proposal in the Massachusetts House of Representatives to ban “corporal punishment” would turn good parents into criminals, according to a family advocacy group leader who battled the same idea earlier this year in California.

“This bill equates loving, corrective discipline with hateful, harmful abuse,” said Randy Thomasson, the president of the Campaign for Children and Families. “Just as California’s proposed spanking ban was stopped cold, [Rep. Jay] Kaufman’s bill should be rejected by lawmakers who respect the sanctity of the home.

Now, let’s be clear first of all that spanking is a form of sexual pain. The buttocks are a secondary erogenous zone, a sexual part of the body. If you saw two little league coaches, and one of them had a habit of squeezing the boy’s shoulders while coaching, and the other had a habit of squeezing the boys’ butts while coaching, which one would raise your suspicions? Why is spanking a prominent theme in many pornographic stories and films? Why is a pat on the backside considered anything from flirtatious to sexual harassment? Why do we have so many euphemisms for the bottom/butt/behind/derrière/etc? Because it’s a sexual zone!

Would it be “loving, corrective discipline” to punish your children by clipping painful clothespins to their nipples? Or by whacking them in the groin? Despite traditional and biblical encouragement of the practice, there is no reason to continue punishing our children by inflicting sexual pain on their bodies, especially sexual pain inflicted by their parents! Other methods work better, and don’t saddle kids with the psychological baggage of parental sexual abuse.

For example, there’s the one-two-three method. You tell the child the rules. If the child breaks a rule, you say “That’s one.” If they break it again, you say, “That’s two.” On the third infraction, you say, “That’s three, time out.” Then the child has to sit in the time-out chair for five minutes. Mom and Dad don’t need to get angry, and in fact, it works MUCH better if Mom and Dad don’t express any particular emotion. Mom and Dad are simply there as the referee: it’s the rules that say the child must obey or get a time out.

Sad to say, when I was a Christian, I felt like it was my Christian duty to spank my kids whenever they stood up in defiance of my God-given authority as a father. (I was taught this in Marriage and the Family class at my Christian college, using Dobson’s Dare To Discipline as a textbook.) Fortunately, we had second thoughts about this whole spare-the-rod thing, due to the negative effect it was having on our kids, and switched to the 1-2-3 method early on. My kids are now excellent achievers, and frequently complimented on their good behavior and remarkable maturity.

As a parent and a realist, I strongly urge all moms and dads not to buy into the barbaric and abusive notion that the “proper” way to discipline your kids is to inflict sexual pain on them. Spanking is sexual, inappropriate, unhelpful, and uncivilized. The 1-2-3 method does a much better job of instilling discipline and self-control in your child, not to mention a more mature understanding of the relationship between choices and consequences. And it does it without anger and without sexual abuse.

Please don’t spank.

Christian pastors from the Houston area say their faith is not affected, nor will the ultimate outcome be changed, by the loss of a monument that contained a Bible in their city…”The fact is that the simple removal of one Bible from a relatively obscure display will not make the Bible less accessible to the people … We trust in a God who will not be silenced by legal decree,” they said.

If they’d just realized that before the government-sponsored Bible exhibit had to be taken to court, Houston area taxpayers could have been spared the expense of a lengthy and pointless legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

All the biologists got together and, inspired by Darwinian writings, embarked on a campaign to sterilize those they perceived as unfit, the campaign known to us as Eugenics. From Eugenics grew other evils, such as Planned Parenthood, Modern Evolutionary Biology, and The Nazis.Or so intoned John West of the Creationist Discovery Institute…

It’s an entertaining and informative read (especially about the Hat Lady), and I’m putting it on the Recommended Reading list. What strikes me most about West’s talk is the way West (and DI in general, and creationists in general) demonstrate such a strong preference for Hitler’s views as opposed to the views of the vast majority of evolutionists and humanitarians.

West’s talk was the now-familiar rant claiming that the Holocaust was a direct result of Darwin’s discovery that new species can evolve from common ancestors via a process of variation and natural selection. Darwin’s discovery, however, is a morally-neutral observation. It says nothing about “inferior” species deserving to be exterminated, and certainly does not say anything about Jews being an “inferior race” that would allegedly be unfit to survive. This has been pointed out (in vain, apparently) many, many times by those who have actual training, experience, and expertise in evolutionary theory.

Hitler, however, did not believe (or did not care) what biologists have to say about evolution. Instead, Hitler adopted the outrageous interpretation that said anti-Semitism had a sound scientific basis, that exterminating Jews (and gypsies and homosexuals) was merely a practical application of evolutionary theory. This is complete nonsense of course. For one thing, there’s no scientific basis for distinguishing between Jews and the rest of the human species, let alone declaring them to be “unfit” for survival. Hitler is simply voicing his own deeply-held prejudices, and applying a thin veneer of “scientificism” by way of rationalizing his groundless and immoral policies.

What’s amazing about West, the Discovery Institute, and creationists in general, is that they all agree with Hitler. Evolutionists say that evolution does not justify genocide or anti-semitism, and Hitler claimed that it does, and the creationists all side with Hitler and reject the expert conclusions of the biologists.

Is there a latent anti-Semitism in creationism? Do creationists really believe that Jews are inherently an inferior race that would deserve immediate extermination if they were not under divine protection as God’s Chosen Race? It would be very easy for them to prove that they are not neo-Nazis under the skin. All they have to do is to admit that Hitler was wrong about evolution, and that there is no sound scientific basis for anti-semitism and genocide.

This is especially important given that Darwin’s theory of evolution is, indeed, a fact. The Discovery Institute’s own Mike Behe and Paul Nelson have admitted that new species do evolve from common ancestors via a process of variation and natural selection, and even the ever-petulant Bill Dembski has waffled at times regarding common descent. Creationists in general have started making a distinction between “microevolution” (what they call evolution within a Biblical “kind”) and “macroevolution” (what they call evolution between Biblical “kinds”). Even the $27million Creation “Museum” has an exhibit showing most modern species evolving from common ark-borne ancestors.

These people are not atheists. They’re not mindlessly kowtowing to the liberal elite educational authorities. They’re approaching the data from the most hostile and denialistic mindframe possible, and they’re still forced to concede that Darwin was correct about the biological processes of variation, natural selection, and evolution of new species from common ancestors. So Darwin was right, and therefore it makes a big deal whether or not you publicly declare your sympathy for Hitler’s doctrines about what ought to happen to Jews if evolution is true.

West also touched on the subject of eugenics, which is somewhat amusing since this is a thoroughly secular ethical issue. Not one word of Scripture or Apostolic Tradition even touches on the possibility of eugenics, let alone denouncing it as in any way unchristian. Christians must approach this issue the same way as anyone else: by a consideration of the consequences, in the light of our natural human sympathies.

Ironically, the Catholic Church has been practicing a form of voluntary eugenics for centuries. Every monk, nun, or priest who takes the Holy Orders also takes an oath of celibacy, effectively removing himself or herself from the gene pool. By its superstitious prejudice against sexual reproduction, the Catholic Church has created an artificial environment that selects against the characteristic of religious piety and devotion. Generation after generation, their most pious and devoted offspring are siphoned off and eliminated from the genetic resources available to the next generation, and today the Church is having trouble finding candidates for the priesthood, monasteries, and convents. Is this purely a social consequence that is entirely unrelated to many generations of selective breeding? Hmmmmm.

Tiny Lebanon baffles outsiders. Even people in the Middle East find its politics confusing.

If Lebanon is so tiny, though, then why should America care? Well, apart from the humanitarian reasons, little Lebanon is farther along a road that many people would like to take the United States.

Lebanon is a state troubled by polarization and sectarianism. In fact, most of the polarization is sectarian. It’s the Jews vs. the Muslims vs. the Christians, with about another 15 significant sects thrown into the mix–and that’s just the officially recognized religions. Mutual suspicion and mutual intolerance have more than once flared up into actual violence, from the odd bombing or kidnapping to outright civil and regional war, as the different sects have fought over whose religion was going to control the government.

And the trouble is that none of these religions have a God who would be willing and able to show up in real life to resolve any of these disagreements over who is right about Him. It’s purely a tribal conflict, each group seeking to enhance its own political (and military) power in order to establish dominance through purely human forces. With a head nod to God, of course. No matter how hard you work to produce the result you want, in the end you claim God did it.

In the meantime, the threat of another civil war looms, as it always has, just over the Lebanese horizon. It’s a sad state of affairs, with no readily available remedy, and it’s a situation that is not entirely inconceivable even in the United States. Many commentators and political leaders are already working to create a similar atmosphere of sectarian polarization, with their talk of a “war” on Christmas (because some people say “Happy Holidays”) and an “assault” on marriage (because some people want to marry partners that Christians don’t approve of).

Don’t get me wrong: we’re a long way from being Lebanon, and I don’t foresee this happening anytime next week or anything. But every step down that road is a step in the wrong direction. We need to change our direction, turn away from sectarian government, and towards greater tolerance and secularism. After all, Lebanon is not that far away.

No matter who becomes the next president of the United States, the American people have already won a great victory – with the total disintegration of the once all-powerful religious right.

The author, Bill Press, goes on to document how the inevitable disintegration of religion-based politics is finally starting to turn the Christian voting bloc against itself, with results that are bad for the Republicans but good for America. Did WND really mean to print that? As peculiar as it seems to put WND on the Recommended Reading list, I have to say it’s an excellent read.

“The incredibly high number of abortions performed on black women in this country has to take a toll not just on the women involved, but also on their families, friends, and communities,” King said. “If African-Americans feel that life will not get better, I have to believe that abortion is feeding into that hopelessness.”

Her reason for drawing this conclusion?

“Children are the future. When you destroy your children, you destroy hope,” Dr. Alveda King, pastoral associate of Priests for Life and the niece of the late civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said in a statement.

Notice it’s not that hopelessness feeds into a reluctance to bring children into a world of poverty and despair. That might suggest that we ought to do something, I dunno, liberal, like addressing the root causes of poverty, injustice, and racial discrimination. No, Christians like Dr. King want us to turn that around and just blame abortion, thus avoiding all that liberal stuff. Deprive black women of their freedom of choice, and that nasty feeling of hopelessness will just magically disappear. Nothing restores an unemployed single mom’s sense of optimism like having another helpless baby to feed and care for.

Sure, that makes sense.

According to Grassley’s office, the Iowa Republican is trying to determine whether or not these ministries are improperly using their tax-exempt status as churches to shield lavish lifestyles.

The six ministries identified as being under investigation by the committee are led by: Paula White, Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, Eddie Long, Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn.

I know a lot of secular bloggers are quite pleased by this and are expressing a certain amount of “Serves them right” and “About time!”-ish sentiments. But I’m going to take Benny Hinn’s side on this one.

I think this is a case of a spiteful religious right going after the top ministries out of sheer jealousy. Let’s take Benny Hinn as a representative of the six ministries under investigation, and Billy Graham as a representative of mainstream Christianity. What’s Benny doing that Billy isn’t? They both claim to speak on God’s behalf in the absence of any visible endorsement by God authorizing them to represent Him. They’re both taking money from people gullible enough to believe that God loves them even though He clearly does not care enough to trouble Himself to show up in real life. And in both cases, the people who are being parted from their dollars are giving willingly (if foolishly).

So what’s the difference? Benny may be enjoying a “lavish lifestyle,” but so what? If God blesses you with a rich reward for your service, what business is it of anyone else’s how you spend your reward? It’s not against the law to be wealthy and self-indulgent in America. So what “crime” is Benny suspected of having committed?

Is Benny guilty of manipulating people’s emotions and motivations with spurious appeals to what God allegedly wants them to do? Every other ministry does the same thing; Benny’s just better at it than they are, and thus more successful. Is Benny deceiving people with ploys like telling them their lack of faith is preventing God from manifesting Himself, or that their motives are wrong and that’s why God’s answer is “No”? That’s a common tactic across all Christian ministries. But most of them aren’t getting rich off it, because most of them aren’t as good at it as Benny.

According to the ECFA, Billy Graham’s organization took in over $131 million in 2006 ($95 million from cash donations alone) and has almost $300 million in net assets. $300 million to support Billy’s efforts to persuade people to believe the same things he does about God. Is anybody telling Billy how to spend his $300 million? Can Billy prove that his theology is correct and that Benny’s is wrong? Billy spends his money on what Billy wants, and Benny spends his money on what Benny wants. So why is one a saint and the other a sinner? If we’re going to “protect” the gullible from Benny, don’t we need to protect them from Billy as well?

As Ed Brayton says, this is going to be an interesting case to watch, because religious people in America have a constitutional right to be gullible and to pay people to deceive them. My assessment is that the parties involved are jealous of the fact that someone else’s Gospel is receiving greater blessings than their preferred Gospel, and are (surprise surprise) turning to the legal/political system to try and “correct” God’s behavior so that the blessings go to the “correct” recipients. That’s just the way things work when your God is an imaginary sock puppet.

Jim Babka sent me a great article from an orthodox Christian source that well understands America’s Civil Religion is not Biblical Christianity. Writing about the tension between America’s civil religion and orthodox Christianity is one of my specialities. In my last post I noted President Bush’s notion that all religions worship the same God “may not be an authentically Christian belief, but it is an authentically American belief.” This article explains the tension in detail…

What a great insight! People who advocate “One Nation Under God” and other such establishments need to be made aware of the fact that what they’re establishing is not Christianity but Civilianity: a pseudo-Christian cult that has the form of godliness but denies its power. For example, when President Bush teaches that all gods are the same God, that’s Civilianity, not Christianity. When Justice O’Connor writes that “under God” in the pledge is merely a historical relic of purely ceremonial deism, that’s Civilianity, not Christianity.

Civilianity as a competing religion seeking to displace Christianity as our national religion. That’s an insight that just might help some of our fundamentalist friends understand why it’s in their own best interests to build up the wall of separation instead of trying to tear it down.

“Well, first of all, I believe in an almighty God, and I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God,’’ he said. “I believe that Islam is a great religion that preaches peace. And I believe people who murder the innocent to achieve political objectives aren’t religious people.

The Christian God is supposed to be a Trinity, one member of which is Jesus. Muslims are strict monotheists who regard Jesus as a prophet who is out-ranked by Mohammed. Can we say at this point that George W. Bush is as good a theologian as he is a president?

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has purchased or rated books by Norman L. Geisler, you might like to know that Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today’s Democratic Party is now available.  You can order yours for just $11.53 ($5.42 off the list price) by following the link below.

Norman Geisler is an evangelical Christian scholar, apologist, and seminary president. Considering that Falwell, Dobson, Kennedy, and Robertson (among others) have sold the Christian church to the Republican National Committee, I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised to see Amazon making the obvious connection.

LINCOLN, Nebraska (AP) – A legislator who filed a lawsuit against God has gotten something he might not have expected: a response.

State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha said he sued God last week to make a point about frivolous lawsuits.

One of two court filings from “God” came Wednesday under otherworldly circumstances, according to John Friend, clerk of the Douglas County District Court in Omaha.

“This one miraculously appeared on the counter. It just all of a sudden was here — poof!” Friend said.

What is particularly interesting about this mysterious filing is that it reveals a hitherto unsuspected side of God’s political viewpoints: He’s solidly pro-choice.

According to the Associated Press, the mystery filing responded to charges of terroristic threatening by saying that:

…blaming God for human oppression and suffering misses an important point.

“I created man and woman with free will and next to the promise of immortal life, free will is my greatest gift to you,” according to the response [from God], as read by Friend.

Free will, of course, means the freedom to choose. According to Genesis 1-3, God created Adam and Eve to have freedom of choice, among other blessings. In fact, contrary to the statement above, freedom of choice was even more important than immortal life, because the Bible says that Adam and Eve already had immortal life, and God decided to put that immortality at risk in order to safeguard their freedom of choice.

Eve is of particular interest in this story. According to Romans 5:12, death entered into the world through the sin of one person. If Eve had not sinned by disobeying God and eating of the forbidden fruit, there would be no death. At the point where Eve is speaking with the serpent, therefore, God has two options: either He can take a pro-choice stand and protect Eve’s right to choose even though this may result in the deaths of her as-yet-unborn children, or He can take a pro-life/anti-choice stand, deny Eve her right to choose, and thus prevent the deaths of her as-yet-unborn children.  Under these circumstances, God clearly regards the woman’s right to choose as being of greater value, and more necessary to protect. He takes the pro-choice option, Eve makes her choice, and as a result her yet-to-be-born offspring are doomed to death.

Some will, of course, protest that this isn’t the same thing as abortion, and I agree. Abortion only affects the offspring’s physical body, whereas the Bible tells us that Eve’s decision not only led to the inevitable physical deaths of all mortal humans, but tainted their souls as well, thus putting them in danger of eternal torment and separation from God, a fate which most men are doomed to suffer. And God still upheld the woman’s right to choose as being more precious.

Frankly, I’m not sure I can be as solidly pro-choice as God. I can’t say that I agree that He picked the right option in Genesis 3. Some choices should be limited on account of the impact they have on the lives of others, and besides, He could have let Eve exercise her free choice by giving her two good options to choose from instead of one good option and one disastrous one. But it’s nice to see that the Bible, at least, is unambiguous about where God stands on the question of a woman’s right to choose. Whatever restrictions mortal men may place on freedom of choice, God supports the freedom to choose, even when lives (and souls!) are at stake.

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries. The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources.

Step one is to persuade the credulous that religion needs government help. Step two is to give government help to the church and get them to depend on it. Step three is to start eliminating people’s access to religious views that are not “on the approved list.” Continue until religious freedom is relegated to a historical footnote.

Earlier this week, the Sonora city council unanimously voted to make their city the 26th in the nation to make a public display of the motto, “In God We Trust.”A campaign to promote the slogan, initiated by Bakersfield councilwoman Jacquie Sullivan in 2002, has had some success in California…

Sullivan pointed out at an August 10 press conference that the displays reflect the importance of faith in U.S. history, but do not violate the Constitution’s ban on the “establishment” or government endorsement of a specific religion…

“Patriotism is love of God and love of country,” Sullivan, explained to a Modesto Bee reporter. “I feel this is one of the most important things going on in our country now. It’s important to retain our national identity.” 

Says a lot, doesn’t it? More, even, than Sullivan intended.

Let’s review, for a moment, what the First Amendment actually says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Notice how Sullivan has slightly “tweaked” the text? It does not say “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a specific religion.” It says that Congress (and via the Fourteenth Amendment, states as well) must not make any law respecting the establishment of religion or preventing free exercise thereof. In other words, the Constitution flatly prohibits what Sullivan explicitly states is her goal: to make religion (“love of God”) into a patriotic duty.

What’s even more muddled about Sullivan’s thinking is that she seems to imply that it’s ok for the government to adopt the official position that one god is as good as any other. Jehovah, Loki, Cthulu, the Flying Spaghetti monster–they’re all equally valid deities as far as the government is concerned. It contradicts the notion that Jesus is the only way to heaven, but hey, that’s the price you pay in order to get a pseudo-constitutional endorsement of religion.

Ironically, as we’ll see in tomorrow’s XFiles Friday installment,  Geisler and Turek make a big deal out of the claim that skeptics and liberals have reduced truth to the idea that all propositions are equally valid. As Sullivan and other Christian supremacists are only too happy to demonstrate, if there is a trend towards making all gods officially equal, Christians have only each other to blame.

A debate called “The Role of Faith & Politics in 2008″ pits Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian who edits the magazine Sojourners, against Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s government affairs arm and host of three syndicated radio programs.

Both men have written pox-on-both-houses books. Wallis, in God’s Politics, argues that the right has hijacked faith and moral values and the left “doesn’t get it.” Land, in The Divided States of America?, says both the right and left have misstated God’s role in America’s affairs.

Jerry Falwell must be rolling over in his grave. When he sold the evangelical church to the Republicans in the 70′s, he made an implicit promise that conservative Christians would never criticize or even seriously question the policies and agendas of the NRC, and he even founded Liberty University to make sure that the next generation of church leaders would be wholly owned by the party. But the disastrous policies of the Bush administration have turned the rank and file of conservative Christians against their political owners and handlers.

Let that be a lesson to the denial-based community. Alethea is God, and cannot be disobeyed. If you think you’re changing Her rules, you’re only setting up your own downfall.

• The peace would be more difficult to win than the war
• The President’s popularity would plummet
• Republicans would lose the support of the middle-grounders, and consequently control of the government
• Conservative Christianity, as exemplified by our godly President, would become more questionable in the eyes of the general public
• Once embroiled in Iraq, the consequences of leaving would be bad enough that we would need to stay regardless of the drain on American lives and resources
• Many Arabs would see America as more of an imperialist oppressor than a benign liberator
• Fundamentalist Islamic groups would find it easier to recruit new members (and new insurgents/terrorists)

And so on. The war in Iraq has continually borne out my expectations, and I only wish I’d had this blog back then so I could have a record of how thoroughly predictible the current state of affairs was. But it’s not too late for my predictions for the rest of the war:

1. The Republicans in general and the Bush administration in particular will never admit that invading Iraq was a bad idea. Instead, they’ll continue to claim that the situation is under control and that victory is just around the corner.
2. The Republicans in general and the Bush administration in particular will never quite manage to define what “victory” would be.
3. Because the consequences of pulling out are bound to be disastrous, the Bush administration will never willingly bring our troops home from Iraq, but will instead insist that victory is just around the corner, and if we just stay the course, everything will turn out right.
4. Americans will stop supporting the war, and begin to demand a pullout.
5. Democrats will sense a political opportunity, and insist on withdrawing US troops from Iraq. Republicans will put up a token resistance, but allow the Democrats to win.
6. The situation in Iraq will deteriorate, over the course of months, weeks, or even days, into open civil war, with a good chance of external interventions by Iran and/or Syria.
7. With the Middle East in turmoil, the price of gasoline will go up significantly.
8. The Republicans will blame everything on the Democrats, claiming that if we had just stayed the course a little while longer, we would have seen that victory was just around the corner, as they had always claimed.
9. Far too many people will believe the Republicans (again), and put them back in power in Congress.
10. Just to go out on a limb, my 10th prediction is that whoever emerges as the new dictator of Iraq will be heralded as the “resurrection” of Saddam, and some Christian eschatologists will identify him as the fulfillment of Revelation 13:3.

Let’s see how well this “prophecy” pans out.

As an exemplary participant in the prison’s faith-based dormitory program, I was selected to be interviewed by the Capitol press corps. As a former newspaper reporter, I longed to expose the corruption of the faith-based program by many inmates, as well as the abuses of some corrections officers…

But my desire to get out of prison alive and on time overruled my inner crusading journalist. So rather than an exposé, I gave the reporters a testimony.

Tom Seibert, a former journalist convicted on drug charges, describes his experiences in the faith-based prison program at Wakulla Correctional Institution near Tallahasee, Florida. Though all participants (inmates) signed a statement promising to uphold a Christian code of conduct, few kept their promise. Instead, tables set up for studying the Bible were used for playing cards. Gangsta rap, not Christian music, blared from the PA system, and inmates weren’t even allowed to watch Christian programs (?!). Misconduct was overlooked by the guards, and chaplains were hard to keep.

It was not unusual to find a razor blade concealed in a Bible.

Most of the officers turned a blind eye, a deaf ear and a dead conscience to this decidedly unfaithful behavior. Inmates housed in other dormitories called ours the “fake-based” dorm, and this was not a misnomer.

New chaplains were periodically hired to oversee the program, and each tried unsuccessfully to impose some semblance of discipline among the “participants.” But the so-called convict code was so deeply entrenched in many of these men that anyone even seen speaking with a chaplain was labeled a “snitch.”

Nor did the guards limit themselves to simply ignoring misconduct by inmates against each other:

Prison inmates at Wakulla and throughout Florida are treated worse than the terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

Officers routinely shout and swear at them. They sleep on skinny mattresses on hard steel bunks with no safety steps or railings. They work outdoors for long hours with little or no protection from the cold, rain, sun and ubiquitous mosquitoes. And they are often forced to quickly consume their meals as if they were in a food-eating contest. This results in mass indigestion and massive food throwaways at taxpayers’ expense.

Yet despite the appalling conditions, Seibert felt compelled, for his own safety and timely release, to give the program only positive ratings while he was still imprisoned there.

I testified how God had sent a parade of chaplains, faith-based volunteers and fellow Christian inmates into my life to demonstrate his infinite love and redeeming grace. I talked about the many edifying religious courses I had taken in the program, such as “Alpha,” “Experiencing God” and “40 Days of Purpose.” I recounted praying and studying the Bible with other inmates who had undergone the same existential transformation as I had.

These men were former addicts, alcoholics, burglars, robbers, drug dealers and child molesters who had found mercy and meaning in their lives by receiving the Lord Jesus Christ as their resurrected Savior.

I concluded by telling the press how the chaplains and church volunteers had generously written letters on my behalf to help me re-establish my writing career as a Christian journalist.

Faith-based programs are all about producing this kind of “testimony,” even if it has to be effectively coerced. Imagine how different this story would be if there actually was a loving God who cared enough to get involved in this kind of ministry, and bless it. Sadly, while faith-based programs are good at producing a superficial appearance of success, those who endure such treatment know how hollow such “results” really are.

What’s emerging, observers say, is a market-based response to popular demand for ways that people of faith can make their voices heard on issues closest to their hearts. And people of faith — especially social conservatives — are seizing what they see as a new opportunity to make a difference.”It’s just a matter of growing up” and adding more sophisticated tools for advancing an agenda, said Ronald A. Simkins, director of the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion & Society at Creighton University in Omaha. “Now, instead of boycotting Disney, they’ll be investing in Fox Family Films.”

Religious conservatives are mobilizing to attach a voice to the cash they have on Wall Street. For example, the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association is for the first time urging its 2.8 million online members to purge their investment portfolios of companies that support a “gay agenda” or “anti-family” practices.

In other words, given enough conservative Christian involvement in capitalistic finance, you could lose your job–even if you yourself are a Christian!–if enough believers with enough combined financial clout are able to drive your employer out of business. All it takes is a perceived insult to whatever believers decide “Christian values” are. The leaders of the conservative Christian movement are flexing their financial muscles today just the way that Falwell and Robertson began toying a few decades ago with political involvement. Big Government has been harnessed by Big Religion, and Big Business is the next item on the agenda.

This is an interesting trend, from an apologetics (or unapologetics) perspective. Why would the “servants of Almighty God” need to work so hard to gain control of secular power sources like business and government, in order to get God’s work done for Him? Yes, that’s right, it’s because God does not actually show up in the real world. He does not do anything. He does not behave as though He Himself believes any of the things that conservative Christians are saying about Him. In His continual and universal absence, the Christian church has no choice but to resort to forces that really do exist, like politics and business, in order to produce any real-world results that they can attribute to their mythical deity.

This is what makes Christian involvement in big business so scary. They’re not going to change course just because the consequences of their actions start to go downhill. (Just look at our faith-based war against Iraq.) This is a survival issue for them. They need to control big business in order to keep their religion on life support. Pulling the plug isn’t going to be an option, so once they’re in, say goodbye to good sense in the business world. It’s not going to be about profits or economics or market forces any more. It’s going to be about maintaining the delusion that a certain imaginary friend is really real. And that’s not going to be good for business.

The unprecedented success at translating expert recommendations into a policy victory is in no small part due to the strategic framing of the initiative. The complexities of this bill were put in terms that policymakers and the public could understand, value, and support. As one backer described: “We quit talking about the virtues of science in the abstract and started talking about its impact on jobs. Everybody understands jobs.”

While this is good news, it illustrates a problem I have with the whole “framing” debate.

The problem I have with “framing,” as an alternative approach to reaching the general public, is that it overlaps a couple of concepts that don’t really belong together: “framing” versus “delivery.” The whole framing debate originally arose out of the observation that some groups were proving to be better at convincing people than other groups who actually had more facts in their favor. “How can we be right,” the latter groups wondered, “and still be losing the debates?” The answer, they concluded, was that the winning groups were better at “framing” their presentation. The implication, in the eyes of some, is that the reality-based groups should give some thought to framing as well.

Framing, however, is not the same as “delivery.” The pro-framing people are generally talking in terms of framing, but their recommendations have more to do with delivery than with the techniques the other guys are actually using to win arguments.  As a result, while the pro-framing folks have some good points, the whole effort runs the risk of misunderstanding what it is that the other guys are really pulling. As good as their ideas are, in the end I expect them to end up back where they started: wondering why the other guys are still winning.

“Delivery,” for the record, is the art of tailoring your presentation so that it is more easily and readily grasped by your target audience. This includes intangibles like showing up neatly dressed and well groomed, as well as more obvious aspects like phrasing your presentation in layman’s terms. This is a good thing, and it’s true that the scientific community has been known to score poorly on their delivery. In the space-race mentality of the 1960′s, the public was willing to overlook a certain amount of scientific eccentricity and jargon, but those golden years are gone. Today’s scientist needs to listen to the recommendations of the PR/marketing types when it comes to how they present their findings, especially when discussing topics like environmentalism and science education.

But framing–as practiced by the other guys–is something entirely different. For example, it has been suggested that scientists (and/or atheists) ought to speak more respectfully of other people’s religious beliefs, in the interests of “framing” their case more effectively. That sounds nice, but that’s not framing. Listen to pundits like O’Reilly or Hannity some time. Listen to the Pat Robertsons and James Dobsons of the conservative framing master class. Are they famous for how mildly and tolerantly they speak of liberals, atheists, and others whose views are different from theirs?

Real framing, the kind of framing that attracted our attention in the first place, is not the sort of practice that harmonizes well with things like personal integrity, tolerance, and respect for the truth. It’s manipulative, deceitful, underhanded, and totally amoral. And these are the characteristics that are giving it the successes that make the rest of us want to jump on the bandwagon and do a little framing ourselves. Only in most cases, we’re not really willing to put ourselves on that level. There’s something distasteful about that kind of cynical duplicity, and rightly so. Honest and enlightened people shouldn’t stoop to this kind of tactic.

So here’s my caveat: practice what you call “framing” if you want to, but be warned that simply dressing nice and smiling aren’t going to give you the results that the real gurus of framing are getting. We can get similar results, but it’s going to take us a lot more work. “Framing,” as practiced by the good guys, isn’t going to be a magic bullet.