Lunar Skeletons

Witty. Thoughtful. Heresy Hunting.

Almost Pythonesque.

I love this little known blog.

FOXNews.com - Hannity & Colmes - Guests and Topics: May 17: “President Bush is scheduled to deliver the commencement address at Calvin College (search), a Christian liberal-arts institution, in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Saturday. So why is a third of the faculty there taking out an ad to protest the president’s visit? It’s a ‘Hannity & Colmes’ exclusive when we talk with two Calvin College professors: Ruth Groenhut and Randall Jelk.”

Why are one third protesting?

The simple answer is because many, if not most, evangelical academics are out of touch with mainstream evangelical thought in America.

This is particularly true of younger evangelical academics. The naive media notion about schools like Calvin is funny, especially since it drives the faculty crazy at such places. They are horrified to be thought Bush-voters and yet cannot escape the stereotypes of their lefty friends who can only remember they exist (as leftists) when they are needed in court cases to put down creationists.

Many, if not most, evangelical academics are more upset about Left Behind than they are the rise of “gay rights.” Do you doubt this? Go read faculty writings at Christian colleges on this issue. Take some time with google and the a good library.

No parent should want (I think) a university with only one point of view. Every Evangelical has a right to think that an Evangelical school will be staffed with people who (broadly) share their world view and roughly mirror the opinions of the pew sitters they claim to serve.

Parents who believe that they are choosing a Christian college because their point of view will be fairly represented need to google their son’s or daughter’s potential professors. They already know their conservative Christian worldview does not get a fair shake in the mainstream academy (when it is even discussed). Will the Christian college do better? The internet allows you, as parent, to see the real point of view that an alum magazine or brochures might want to hide.

A good google will show that (shock!) I am traditional Christian who voted for Bush. It will show that most people in the Biola zip code did the same. It will also show that a substantial minority of Biola students and faculty (some good friends) did not vote for Bush and do not support “the religious right.” That is good. I think the school reflects fairly reasonably the diversity of opinion that is found in the pews of the sort of churches Biola was created to serve. It is good for students from both points of view to “rub shoulders” with those from the other camp.

However, one would anticipate that if a faculty wanted to serve a community, then it would love that community and roughly mirror its values. If not, then it should state that openly and try to convince the folks who want to send their kids to it that this a good thing. What it should not do is recruit right and teach left.

Diversity of thought on areas where Christians disagree is wonderful. In fact, if some Christian colleges want to cater to the twenty percent of Evangelicals who voted for John Kerry, then that is their right. If they wish to be to have political dialogue dominated by the left on campus, then that also is their right.

However, it is not acceptable when parents think they are getting one thing (due to campus advertising) and are really getting another. It is not fine when business leaders are talked into giving money to support programs with leaders who hate the free market system that made the money. (Want an example? Calvin College has a scholar’s program run by a person who has written about his antipathy to capitalism. Check out the speaker’s list and see if you think it reflects the mainstream of evangelical opinion as manifested in the last election or whether it seems more concerned about the good opinion of academic friends at the University of Michigan.

How many Reformed business leaders know that there money ends up supporting such folk? Everyone has a right to any scholarly opinion they want to hold in our culture, but we don’t have to pay for it. We also don’t have to pay extra to have our sons and daughters get told roughly what they would be told at a secular school.

Shop carefully for a college and at least know what you are getting. Good shopping is nobody’s foe.

Phillip Johnson is the most important Christian thinker in the United States. He is brilliant, but also humble. He frames a question better than anyone I know. My analytic friends will prefer a “careful” thinker like Al Plantinga. I see the value in that kind of work, but my heart admires a profound revolutionary.

Phil Johnson is the Gandalf of the West.

Here is the Post story.

Doubting Rationalist

By Michael Powell

BERKELEY, Calif. “The Washington Post is not one of my biggest fans, you know that.”

Hello?

The Washington Post reporter has just walked out of a spray of Pacific-borne rain into the living room of a modest bungalow west of downtown. There’s a shag rug, an inspirational painting or two and Phillip Johnson, dressed in tan slacks and a sweater and sitting on a couch. He pulls a dog-eared copy of a Post editorial out of his shirt pocket and reads aloud:

“With their slick Web sites, pseudo-academic conferences and savvy public relations, the proponents of ‘intelligent design’ — a ‘theory’ that challenges the validity of Darwinian evolution — are far more sophisticated than the creationists of yore. . . . They succeed by casting doubt on evolution.”

The 65-year-old Johnson swivels his formidable and balding head — with that even more formidable brain inside — and gazes over his reading glasses at the reporter (who doesn’t labor for the people who write the editorials).

“I suppose you think creation is all about unguided material processes, don’t you? Well, I don’t have the slightest trouble accepting microevolution as the cause behind the adaptation of the peppered moth and the growth of finches’ beaks. But I don’t see that evolutionists have any cause for jubilation there.

“It doesn’t tell you how the moths and birds and trees got there in the first place. The human body is packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and evolutionary gradualism can’t account for that.”

He’s not big on small talk, this professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley’s law school.

For centuries, scriptural literalists have insisted that God created Heaven and Earth in seven days, that the world is about 6,000 years old and fossils are figments of the paleontological imagination. Their grasp on popular opinion was strong, but they have suffered a half-century’s worth of defeats in the courts and lampooning by the intelligentsia.

Now comes Johnson, a devout Presbyterian and accomplished legal theorist, and he doesn’t dance on the head of biblical pins. He agrees the world is billions of years old and that dinosaurs walked the earth. Evolution is the bridge he won’t cross. This man, whose life has touched every station of the rationalist cross from Harvard to the University of Chicago to clerk at the Supreme Court, is the founding father of the “intelligent design” movement.

Intelligent design holds that the machinery of life is so complex as to require the hand — perhaps subtle, perhaps not — of an intelligent creator.

“Evolution is the most plausible explanation for life if you’re using naturalistic terms, I’ll agree with that.” Johnson folds his hands over his belly, a professorial Buddha, as his words fly rat-a-tat-tat.

“That’s only,” he continues, “because science puts forward evolution and says any other logical explanation is outside of reality.”

Johnson and his followers, microbiologists and geologists and philosophers, debate in the language of science rather than Scripture. They point to the complexity of the human cell, with its natural motors and miles of coding. They document the scant physical evidence for the large-scale mutations needed to make the long journey from primitive prokaryote to modern man.

They’ve inspired a political movement — at least 19 states are considering challenges to the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

None of which amuses evolutionary biologists, for whom intelligent-design theory inhabits the remotest exurb of polite scientific discourse. Darwin’s theory is a durable handiwork. It explains the proliferation of species and the interaction of DNA and RNA, not to mention the evolution of humankind.

The evidence, they insist, is all around:

Fruit flies branch into new species; bacteria mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics; studies of the mouse genome reveal that 99 percent of its 30,000 genes have counterparts in humans. There are fossilized remains of a dinosaur “bird,” and DNA tests suggest that whales descended from ancient hippos and antelopes.

Does it make any more sense to challenge Darwin than to contest Newton’s theory of gravity? You haven’t seen Phillip Johnson floating into the stratosphere recently, have you?

William Provine, a prominent evolutionary biology professor at Cornell University, enjoys the law professor’s company and has invited Johnson to his classroom. The men love the rhetorical thrust and parry and often share beers afterward. Provine, an atheist, also dismisses his friend as a Christian creationist and intelligent design as discredited science.

As for the aspects of evolution that baffle scientists?

“Phillip is absolutely right that the evidence for the big transformations in evolution are not there in the fossil record — it’s always good to point this out,” Provine says. “It’s difficult to explore a billion-year-old fossil record. Be patient!”

Provine’s faith, if one may call it that, rests on Darwinism, which he describes as the greatest engine of atheism devised by man. The English scientist’s insights registered as a powerful blow — perhaps the decisive one — in the long run of battles, from Copernicus to Descartes, that removed God from the center of the Western world.

At which point a cautionary flag should be waved.

Scientists tend to be a secular lot. But science and religion are not invariable antagonists. More than a few theoretical physicists and astronomers note that their research into the cosmos deposits them at God’s doorstep. And evolution’s path remains littered with mysteries.

Is it irrational to inquire if intelligent life is seeded with inevitabilities?

“Give Johnson and the intelligent-design movement their due — they are asking terribly important questions,” says Stuart A. Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity at the University of Calgary. “To question whether patterns and complexity, at the level of the cell or the universe, bespeak intelligent design is not stupid in the least.

“I simply believe they’ve come up with the wrong answers.”

Johnson’s early life was, by his own accounting, a rationalist lad’s progress. He grew up in Aurora, Ill., a cocky kid so razor sharp that after his junior year in high school he packed off to Harvard. “I attended church in high school, but it was just part of the culture, like the Boy Scouts,” he says. “We’d drop my father off at the golf course on the way to church.”

He finished Harvard and then law school at the University of Chicago, where he graduated first in his class. He dabbled in Christian philosophy, read some C.S. Lewis. “I found it mind-stretching but I remember thinking: It’s a real shame it’s not true.” Johnson became a clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren at the Supreme Court. In 1967, with a wife and two young children, he went west to Berkeley, where he would gain international renown as a teacher of criminal law and legal theory.

His life was marching to an up-tempo beat.

“I wasn’t working very hard intellectually. My motives were shallow,” Johnson says. “I was a typical half-educated careerist intellectual with conventional liberal politics.”

Johnson possesses a tenured professor’s inability to hold his tongue, whether assaying a reporter’s dumb question or his own life’s arc. In the 1970s, Berkeley was roiling. Johnson opposed the Vietnam War but grew disillusioned and turned right. His wife, an artist, found feminism and wandered another way. Their marriage swept away like flotsam.

“I had been very happy for a long time,” he says. “I was shaken to my core.”

Johnson’s daughter, Emily, remains close with each parent. She recalls a time of upendings. “Men of my father’s generation really expected that if they did their job, and provided, how could their marriage fall apart?” she says. “They didn’t know what to make of the new questions and new demands.”

The night his wife decided to leave in 1977, Johnson attended a church supper with Emily, who was 11. The pastor spoke passionately of Christ and the Gospels. The professor doesn’t remember a Lord-sundered-the-heavens moment; he wasn’t rending his tweed jacket.

He just heard the words, perhaps for the first time in his life. “I wasn’t convinced,” Johnson says, “but I said to myself: ‘The minister’s presenting me with a real option.’ “

Johnson drove home that night and pulled out his books of law and philosophy. If this was to be his epiphany, he would experience it with his rationalist lights on.

“I was concerned that I could be just throwing my brain away,” he says. “I needed to know if I was adopting a myth to satisfy my personal hunger.”

He was nudged along by his interest in “critical legal studies,” a left-wing movement that holds that the law is prejudice masquerading as objective truth. Asked to contribute a conservative critique for the Stanford Law Review, Johnson embraced the movement — sort of.

“I disliked intensely their infantile politics,” he says. “But their critique of liberal rationalism and the sham neutrality of rationalism helped me become a Christian. I became the entire right wing of critical legal studies.”

In time, he converted and married his present wife, Kathie — who also was an adult convert. They met at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, which was, like most everything in that town, a very liberal institution. “We have never felt,” Johnson says, “a need to be around only people who agree with us.”

All of which laid the groundwork for Johnson’s sabbatical in 1987. He traveled to London nagged by the sense that his intellectual gifts had been put to mediocre ends. One day while browsing in a bookstore, Johnson picked up a copy of “The Blind Watchmaker” by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins argued that life was governed by blind physics, that free will was illusion, that religion was a virus.

Johnson devoured dozens more evolutionary texts. He found extraordinary minds and polemics, but the evidence didn’t much impress him.

“I was struck by the breadth of Darwin’s claims as opposed to how scanty were the observable changes.” He peers at you with that unwavering gaze. “I said to my wife that I shouldn’t take this up. I will be ridiculed and it will consume my life.

“Of course, it was irresistible.”

This was more than a middle-age exercise in mental gymnastics. Johnson discerned in Darwinism a profound challenge to the faith he had embraced so passionately.

“I realized,” he says, “that if the pure Darwinist account was accurate and life is all about an undirected material process, then Christian metaphysics and religious belief are fantasy. Here was a chance to make a great contribution.”

The image remains a tad incongruous, this tweedy law professor from Berkeley with the hair combed carefully to the side of his pink forehead, making the rounds of London’s scientific conferences, ambling up to prominent biologists and paleontologists and peppering them with questions. He was not impolite, just persistent. “Sometimes they pinned my ears back,” Johnson recalls. “Sometimes I made friends.”

Stephen C. Meyer, then a young graduate student studying the philosophy of science at Cambridge, got word of this “law professor who was getting some odd ideas about evolution.” Meyer, who harbored his own doubts, walked to a tavern with Johnson and they talked for hours.

“Phillip understood that the language of science cut off choices: Evolution had to be an undirected process or it wasn’t science,” says Meyer, who today directs an intelligent-design think tank affiliated with the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. “He knew the rhetorical tricks.

“By the end of that day I knew we could challenge Darwin.”

So what does that mean, “to challenge Charles Darwin”?

Darwin wrote “The Origin of Species” in 1859. In the broadest terms, Darwin had three insights: Evolution is responsible for the vast profusion of life, as all living organisms descend from common ancestors. Species are not immutable — new species appear gradually through micro-mutations known as speciation. Natural selection guides all of this, acting as nature’s drill sergeant, culling the flawed genes.

It sounds so tidy. But evolutionary theory — like most scientific theories — trails behind it no small number of unanswered questions, lacunae and mysteries.

Darwin, for instance, noted that different species tend to have similar body features, and attributed this “convergence” to a common ancestor. But that often isn’t the case. The complex eye of a squid and a human are nearly identical yet lack a common genetic inheritance. The renowned biologist Simon Conway Morris has found many such examples in nature and proposed that it’s “near inevitable” that species converge toward an intelligent “solution” to life.

Morris’s theory treads a touch too close to Heaven for many biologists.

Then there’s the inconvenient fact that most species evolve little during the span of their existence, which leaves the mystery of how to account for evolutionary leaps. The late biologist Stephen Jay Gould speculated that species become isolated and mutate in revolutionary transitions of a few thousand years. That remains a controversial explanation.

“Some biologists still argue that you can get to high evolutionary forms purely through natural selection,” says Theodore Roszak, a noted historian of science. “That involves more faith in chance than religious people have in the Bible.”

Darwinian theory also presupposes an “inconceivably great” number of links between living and extinct species. But paleontologists have discovered only a relative handful of such fossils. And scientists still puzzle at the great explosion of life known as the “Cambrian explosion,” when thousands of multicellular animals appeared over 10 or 20 million years (a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms).

Johnson composed a sort of prosecutor’s brief. Natural selection? It strengthens existing species, but there’s “no persuasive reason for believing that natural selection can produce new species and organs.” Mutations as a driver of new species? Much too slow to account for grand changes.

By the end of his 1991 book, “Darwin on Trial,” Johnson was convinced that he had peppered Darwinian theory with intellectual buckshot. So he posed the question: Why won’t science consider that an intelligent hand operates alongside chance and physical law?

Let it be said that Johnson’s book did not change the world. The scientific reviews weren’t so hot and a few law school colleagues looked at him as if he had lost half a brain lobe. But Meyer, director of the Center for Science & Culture, remembers reading it and feeling a sense of relief.

“A lot of creationists are unctuous and earnest and begging for a place at the scientific table,” says Meyer. “Not Phil. He was a star academic, he conceded nothing, and he’s got rhino hide for skin.”

The building blocks of the intelligent-design movement slowly took form. A few like-minded souls in academia e-mailed Johnson. He called back, connected one with the other, and often traveled to meet them.

“I found a lot of people ready to challenge the culturally dominant orthodoxy, but they didn’t know how,” Johnson recalls. “They thought if they just dutifully presented evidence, the Darwinists might listen. I said we have to think more strategically.

“I evolved — if I may use that word — as a leader of that group.”

After all those years in Berkeley lecture halls, he had a thespian’s feel for a crowd. Once he debated the famed biologist Gould. Gould was learned and merciless, but most critics say Johnson held his own. “It was like playing Jack Nicklaus and losing in a playoff,” Johnson says.

As Johnson explained to Touchstone magazine, a Christian journal: “I do not want my audience to go away thinking: ‘That’s one clever lawyer who can make you look like a fool. . . . I want them to go home saying . . . ‘There’s more to intelligent design than I thought.’ “

You want to talk Cambrian explosion? Fine. But how about a little perspective?

“We have to acknowledge the reality that it took place more than 500 million years ago,” says Kenneth Miller, a Brown University microbiologist and author of “Finding Darwin’s God,” arguing that theism is not at odds with evolutionary theory. “It’s not as if there was some sort of instantaneous injection of complexity into an ordered world.”

Miller pauses a moment.

“Look, I can admit that fossils might be the result of a super-intelligent or supernatural form — I’m a Red Sox fan. But it’s surely not very likely.”

Johnson finds precious few fans in the scientific establishment, particularly among biologists. They see conservative money spent on academic conferences and publicity and public debates. Johnson thrives, they say, by the law professor’s tactic of attacking soft targets and then raising his hands in victory.

The best scientific theories, scientists say, offer overarching explanations for natural phenomena even while acknowledging that many details remain to be worked out. If Einstein supplants Newton, that’s the joy of science.

“Anytime the intelligent-designers find a mystery that scientists can’t yet explain, they shout: ‘See!? See!?’ ” says Provine, the Cornell biologist. “I like having Phil come to Cornell to debate. He turns a lot of my students into evolutionists.”

Maybe mysteries aren’t so mysterious. Intelligent life, Provine says, is understandable as adaptations accrued over hundreds of millions of years. And the cell falls short of miraculous.

“A lot of the DNA in there is not needed — it’s junk,” says Phillip Kitcher, the Columbia University philosopher of science. “If it’s intelligently designed, then God needs to go back to school.”

Harvard professor Owen Gingerich has studied the cosmos as senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and is a devout Christian. He enjoys talking to Johnson and doesn’t care for the insistent secularism of many Darwinists. But he doesn’t buy intelligent design’s utility as a scientific theory, not least because he sees no way to test its ideas.

“Johnson tends to avoid questions he doesn’t want to answer — such as what accounts for mankind if not evolution?” Gingerich says. “If he says that the first man literally came out of the mud like Minerva from the brow of Zeus, he knows he would be ridiculed.

“Looking for God’s direct hand is a very fuzzy business.”

So what of God?

Isn’t there, Johnson is asked, a risk inherent in trying to toss out Darwin and discern God’s footprints? Why would He use his hand to create the tyrannosaurus and the Cro-Magnon only to discard them in great extinctions? What of gamma blasts and dead stars, and the cold maw of the universe?

If science proves that the wonders of the cell and the machinery of the eye are the result of a material process, what becomes of faith?

Johnson listens and folds his hands in his lap and remains silent. He’s had two strokes, the latter a few months back. His mind remains a fine instrument, the levers and wheels spinning sure as ever. But putting thoughts into words can be laborious. He shakes his head and dislodges a stream.

“One answer is that it’s hard to evaluate unless you know what the Designer was trying to create,” he says. “I suppose the Creator could have made it so that we would live forever and be bulletproof. Flawless design may not be his point.”

Many in the intelligent-design movement shy from overt talk of religion, wary of handing a rhetorical gun to their critics. God, Gaea or super-intelligent alien: They do not presume to pierce the veil of the Designer.

Johnson pays no heed to these worries. Darwinists and Christians alike, he says, “start from faith, just as every house has a foundation.” His friend Provine, Johnson says, has found faith in materialistic atheism. Johnson has found Christ.

Johnson, who is already back on the lecture trail, is not content with a Creator so deferential to natural processes as to fade into the cosmic woodwork. Johnson is convinced, intellectually and emotionally, that His hands have shaped human life — and the evidence likely is there if only science will look for it.

Johnson works his way to his feet and walks slowly to his living room window. The lemon trees are in bloom. Mist rises off the sidewalk. “I think it’s very possible that God left some fingerprints on the evidence,” Johnson says, his words rattling out now. “Once you open science to that possibility, we’re poised for a metaphysical reversal.”

He smiles and catches himself. “I’m content just to open science up to an intellectual world that’s been closed to it for two centuries.”

The Mystery of the Insurgency: “But insurgents in Iraq appear to be fighting for varying causes: Baath Party members are fighting for some sort of restoration of the old regime; Sunni Muslims are presumably fighting to prevent domination by the Shiite majority; nationalists are fighting to drive out the Americans; and foreign fighters want to turn Iraq into a battlefield of a global religious struggle. Some men are said to fight for money; organized crime may play a role.”

By 1919 it was easy to see that a horrible regime had taken control of Russia. It was breaking Russian tradition and intent on destroying the character of the nation. Strongly religious Russians could never make their peace with this regime. Nationalist Russians felt (because it had come with German support) that it was a foreign ideology imposed on them by a friendly occupying army. The Communists lost the only free election held at the time badly. They broke the government elected and took control by force.

As a result, civil war broke out in Russian. How could the tiny Communist party win? How could a madman like Lenin be allowed to destroy an entire nation and way of life?

Smart money bet on the opposition.

However, the Whites (as opposed to the Communist Reds) were never really a single movement. They were composed of tsarist factions, thugs, socialists, democrats, simple farmers who hated talk of collective farms, and ethnic groups that desired autonomy from the central state. Almost the only thing that unified them was hatred of the Communists. Any time they made progress winning the hearts and minds of the peoples of the old Russian Empire the anti-Semites and the thugs would set things back. There was no real White Russian government or political program. With the Communists, you knew what you were getting and perhaps it would better. Who knew for sure in 1919?

The Communists also had a unified command structure, better generals, and a consistent (albeit evil) ideology to offer. As a result, despite all their disadvantages (and they were huge), the Communists prevailed. They even did so fairly easily. The bad guys won because they had the four keys to success in winning a national struggle: a coherent ideology, the best army (with foreign aid), control of the cities and elites, and an opposition that they kept divided and on the run for most of the struggle. The Whites got some foreign help, but it was half-hearted and ineffective. In some ways it was counter-productive because it allowed the Communists to ignore their own foreign aid (German) and accuse the Whites of aiding “invaders.”

The result of the Civil War was hardly ever in doubt.

The good news from Iraq is that the bad guys are in a worse position than the Whites in 1919.

The terrorists have no unifying ideology. They are always on the run and every “victory” is followed by a crushing defeat. The “insurgents” do not have any figures that are as charismatic as Kolchak, Wrangel, or Deniken (White leaders) were in the Russian Civil War and that is damning the insurgent leaders indeed. The insurgents unlike the Whites have no armies at all. Unlike the Whites there is no single region of the nation where they are safe (as the Whites were in the Cossack region the Russian Empire).

The democrats in Iraq and their American allies have a coherent democratic ideology. They have far and away the best army and the only real generals. They control the cities, media, and elite opinion. They are keeping the opposition on the run. The American presence in Iraq is benign and almost utopian when compared to the German occupation of the most productive third of Russia and the actions of the Communist butchers in Moscow. Americans are just much harder to hate than Lenin and company and are providing much less pretext to keep the opposition going.

I cannot think of a single asset that the bad guys in Iraq have.

In short, there is no chance that the bad guys can win in Iraq if we stay. Their external help is limited to under the table aid from nations like Syria and Iran . . . much less than what the Whites received from Britain, Japan, and the United States. Potential allies such as Syria and Iran are rightly afraid to help them openly knowing we will crush them if they do. In short, this is nothing like Vietnam. . . it is more like Russia in 1922 and this time the good guys have learned history’s lessons and will win. -

What is love? What is true education? One of the great masters of both, Socrates, gave us a lesson in the dialogue Symposium that is powerful.

Socrates ends his discussion of Love on a high note. He says of Diotima’s speech, “This . . . was what Diotima told me. I was persuaded. And once persuaded, I try to persuade other too that human nature can find no better workmate for acquiring this than Love. That’s why I say that every man must honor Love, why I honor the rites of Love myself and practice them with special diligence, and why I commend them to others.” (212b)

For only the second time in the Symposium, people applaud. This is a bad sign. Socrates has made a speech. Instead of being in dialogue with them, they clap for the good show. Forgetting the men and returning to the place where men dwell has caused this problem. It trivializes his own speech. The men cannot hope to live in the place he has described. Instead of giving them a vision and bringing them “back down to earth,” Socrates has made a fine speech. All is not lost at first. Aristophanes starts to question Socrates. Aristophanes wants to defend his own speech. Suddenly there is a loud, even frightening noise. Conversation becomes impossible. Alcibiades bursts into the room “very drunk and very loud.” (212d)

In the Meno, Plato demonstrates that a good philosophy would produce good men. The entrance of Alcibiades into the Symposium is the toughest challenge to that view. Alcibiades was a student of Socrates. He was handsome and brilliant. He was also the worst Athenian of his day. He had the greatest gifts of any of Socrates’ students. Yet he betrayed the city to her enemies.

Amongst his other crimes, he defiled the gods of the city. Alcibiades dishonored the herms. The herms were statues of Hermes placed at street corners. They were all over Athens. They frequently had large erections and were symbols of fertility. Alcibiades was infamous for mutilating these statues around the time of this dialogue.

Alcibiades drunken entrance would have reminded any Athenian of his nighttime orgies and blasphemies. Alcibiades will betray Athens again and again. However, he is so verbally skilled and so handsome that he is forgiven repeatedly. He is the slick and skillful manipulator of public opinion. Nothing sticks. This student of Socrates was a very bad man.

Alcibiades was raised by the great Athenian statesman Pericles. In the Meno, Socrates pointed that these great men were unable to raise their sons well. They could not teach them virtue. (Meno 94) Somehow the statesmen escape the blame for the corruption of their sons. Socrates will be killed for it. It is safer for the city to blame philosophers. Statesmen rule the city. To acknowledge their failure would be to admit difficulties at the very center of politics. Philosophers by their very nature are usually found at the margin of positions of power. Their impact on the city is not as easy to tame.

Alcibiades gives the last speech of the dialogue. It is a necessary corrective to Socrates, but in a negative sense. Alcibiades gives a bad speech that has a good effect. Sometimes in discussion in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, we will get deeply involved in the text. God will begin to reveal some deep truths of His Word to us. A kind of holy hush will fill the room. Suddenly, through the open windows, we will hear a group of student speaking loudly and perhaps crudely. The mood is broken. In one way, the students have behaved badly. In the Providence of God, they have also reminded us of the purpose of the gifts of God. They are for the people of God in a broken world. Just as Diotima’s speech taught, but was dangerous in its beauty, so the moment of stillness in class was both good and dangerous. It was good to sense God in a real way. It equips for ministry in a draining world. There is the real danger that we might wish to stay there after God has finished with the moment. Plenty of students and professors become drunk on philosophy and never leave school.

Alcibiades will remind Socrates of his job. It is no accident that when he leaves the party, he immediately returns to the marketplace of Athens and attempts to find good students to become his dialogue partners. He has gained important insight in his mental dialogue with Diotima. His fearful confrontation with Alcibiades has reminded him of the urgency of his work in the city.

Agathon is very drunk, but in this drunkenness he speaks the truth about himself. His spiritual blindness is symbolized by his pushing his hair ribbons over his eyes. He sits between Agathon, who admires him, and Socrates. This talented and wicked man has come between the good of the city and Socrates. This is what his behavior will do in actuality. The real value of Socrates to the city of Athens will be forgotten compared to the degenerate behavior of this young man.

When Alcibiades discovers he is near Socrates, he becomes enraged. This rage may have been meant to be amusing, but in his drunkenness it is actually frightening. Socrates seeks protection from Agathon. Alcibiades crowns both Agathon and Socrates. He also takes over leadership of the group and orders everyone to drink. The old community, formed by Phaedrus at the start of the dialogue, is destroyed.

Socrates says that he is in love with Alcibiades. Alcibiades accepts this praise as his due. He accuses Socrates of being a jealous lover. Of course, he confuses Socrates’ love for his soul with erotic love of the body. Erixymachus proposes a new round of speeches. Alcibiades agrees, but revelry will prevent any speech but his own. The dialogue threatens to begin again. This actually happens in Republic II after a fruitless discussion. Great things come of this restart. Nothing comes of this new city.

Why not? Alcibiades has come as a tyrant and believes he is a god. He insists of “naming” anyone who speaks, describing their character. He hands out the crowns of victory like the god Dionysus in Frogs. He demands wine. Alcibiades bullies Socrates. He ends the old discussion and begins a new one with not consultation of others. What is to be done with Alcibiades?

The tyrant will be followed by no other speeches. There can be no other speeches after Alcibiades. He has castrated the city. There can be no fruitfulness after Alcibiades. Socrates begs him to “speak the truth,” but Alcibiades can only see himself. His physical eroticism overwhelms everyone at the party and attracts even more drunk revelers.

Alcibiades speaks in praise of Socrates. He begins by describing him as a satyr. A satyr was a goat-man with a great sexual appetite. They were frequently portrayed with erections. Plato is reminding the reader of the mutilation of the Hermes. Socrates would have gotten the message. Alcibiades is going to try to castrate Socrates in speech. The tyrant is now at war with the old philosopher. One of them will be silenced at the end of the dialogue.

He claims that there is a magical erotic power in the words of Socrates. They disturb the young man for they, “upset me so deeply that my very own soul started protesting that my life- my life! - was no better than the most miserable slaves.” He continues, “Socrates is the only man in the world who has made me feel shame.” (216) In this, of course, he speaks truth. Philosophy and the truth have moved Alcibiades and briefly turned him from his narcissism. He even catches a glimpse of the Forms. (217)

Alcibiades does not want to pursue wisdom or the Good. Alcibiades thinks that if he can possess Socrates, that he will possess the Forms. The educational system of the city has trained him to look for the erotic from his teachers. He does as he has been trained to do. Socrates will not cooperate. Alcibiades complains that once when he tried to get Socrates to bed him, Socrates refused again and again.

Despite this, Alcibiades cannot leave Socrates alone. Socrates has all the virtues most Athenians lack. Alcibiades sees that Socrates is brave in battle. Socrates even saves his life. Still, what Alcibiades wants is sex. Alcibiades could have Socrates pure love, but not his body. Alcibiades says he has bitten by philosophy like a snake, but he cannot love ideas. He only knows how to love bodies. (218b)

Like every tyrant, Alcibiades attributes his own motives to every man. He believes Socrates is trying to control him or make fun of him. The best of potential students has been destroyed by the Athenian educational system. Alcibiades has condemned himself and the culture of the city that raised him with his own words.

Alcibiades came to the party loudly but disappears from the dialogue with no mention of the fact. He is just gone. He has been neutralized by Socrates. Agathon, the good of the city, chooses to be with Socrates on the basis of Alcibiades speech. Without knowing it, Alcibiades has shown Agathon and the company a better path of love. When Agathon moves next to Socrates, Alcibiades is allowed one complaint and then he is gone. Alcibiades vanishes, but Socrates’ work goes forward.

Sometimes I fear that our American educational system has not learned this lesson. Just as in Athens most of the young are educated by our poets. Our poets perform on television, radio, and in the music. They worship Eros as a great god. My students come to college full of passion. Dimly, they perceive that they need something. Often, they want to attend to the texts. They simply cannot.

These students are unable to follow an argument. Amusement has made difficult study almost impossible for them. It is hard for them to imagine questions to which there are not immediate answers. After all, can’t we just google it? We have amused them to death and they come to college drunk on years of television, degenerate music, and worthless movies.

It is easy to show them that following the logos is a better way, but many are unable to follow. They have been conditioned to worry first about themselves. The have been saturated with sexual images of love. Few have deep and meaningful relationships that are not also sexual. The number one question of college students at Biola University is, “Am I liked?” What is to be done with Alcibiades?

Socrates leaves the party alone. This postlude matches the prologue. Socrates begins the dialogue alone. He slowly becomes part of the newly forming community at the symposium. In the end, he slowly withdraws from the dying group. A large group of drunken revelers appear and destroy any chance for further conversation. (223b) Erixymachus and Phaedrus leave. Pausanius disappears from view. Only the last three speakers before Alcibiades remain to carry on the dialogue. These were the men strong enough to drink at the start of the dialogue. They begin to do so now. Despite all the distractions, they try to continue to talk. Socrates attempts to unify Agathon, the tragedian, and Aristophanes, the comic. However, both of the men eventually fall asleep. The room becomes as still as a tomb. The text says, “But after getting them off to sleep, Socrates got up and left and Aristodemus followed him, as always. He said that Socrates went directly to the Lyceum, washed up, spent the rest of the day just as he always did, and only then, as evening was falling, went home to rest.”

Socrates has put the speakers to sleep or driven them away. Why? Socrates has given up on the men at the symposium. They are not merely clueless. These speakers are dangerous. The best thing he can do for the city is to allow them to fritter away their time in parties or put them to sleep. It is bad for the city when its intellectual leaders are in this condition, At the harm of these bad men is minimized. When the rulers are bad, the best the common man can hope is that they destroy themselves and leave the rest alone. Of course, this destructive behavior cannot be contained for long. For example, the poets should be using their power to transform the Athenian imagination. Instead, they are either posture for the status quo or make unreal utopian proclamations. By their very failure to lead Athens in the right direction, the city is beginning a slow decline.

In part, this is Plato’s justification of his master’s teaching. These bad men, especially the brilliant Alcibiades, are not truly the students of Socrates. They may hang around him as an interesting figure, but do not follow his life style. Socrates is a celebrity to them, like the winner of a drama prize. He makes beautiful speeches and so attracts men like Phaedrus. When he tries to pull them from their base and immoral behavior, they pull back from following him. In Symposium, only Aristodemus follows him from the beginning to end. However, it is not sure that even Aristodemus is attracted to wisdom. He may simply be looking for a guru. He loves Socrates, but is incapable of understanding his teaching.

Plato has described the death of an academic culture. Each school, each little academic community, begins with promise. The tools of the dialectic are freely available. The great books are cheap and freely available. However, the great books are hard. It is easier to follow a guru than look for the Good. The guru gives quick answers, the dialectic is hard. Books like the Bible are not written with lists of answers to all the questions we think it should answer. Instead, to get value from it, we must learn to ask what it is saying. Then we must question those sayings to see if they are true. This task is long and hard.

As a result education is often replaced by speech making. Students are often delighted to participate. They opine freely on their own. But in the end, such an institution, Plato warns, will be invaded by the stronger erotic souls. They will reduce college to a four year party before being forced to get jobs. Worst still, school will be reduced to a place where bad men learn the techniques that will help them manipulate the many.

If such a place will not follow the logos, then the best that can be done is to lull it into inactivity and leave. I am not without hope, however. Anyone can read a great book. All over America home schooled students are gathering in discussions with their mothers. These women do not think they know the answers. I have met hundreds of them. In their humility they approach the text and let it teach them. Each is a kitchen table Diotima.

There are high schools and colleges that are also taking this approach. They are often not very large, but they are hopeful signs. It does not take many. There are seldom many who follow the logos with love wherever he leads. I have seen students so intent on following the argument, that they forget I am there as teacher. Then I can sit back and know that even Alcibiades can be saved, if he will, by the power of the Word.

What is the religious right?

I suggested that people should stop using the phrase if they cannot define it.

One of my students challenged me to give it a try. I have done a parody definition, but here is a serious attempt.

A person is a member of the “religious right” in the United States if and only if, he:

a. believes basic human rights are given by the Creator God. These rights include:

1. life (hence strong support for the “culture of life” from conception to natural death)
2. liberty
3. ownership of private property.

b. believes that liberty is found in an absolute freedom to do what is right and not in the freedom to do what is wrong. There is no fundamental right to do harm or evil.

c. believes that “right and wrong” can be broadly known by reason and by divine revelation. Divine revelation is knowledge and can be used in the secular realm. However:

1. the “secular” realm (as opposed to the Church) should allow religious pluralism as much as possible since God allows for freedom of conscience.
2. limitations to religious liberty are so serious that a Christian legislator should pass as few laws as possible (in order to protect life, liberty, and private property) so as to avoid offending the conscience of the minority.
3. limitations on human knowledge, even with divine revelation, are so severe in our fallen state that no human institution should be “sure” of itself. Therefore, such institutions should always remain modest in size and err on the side of letting the guilty go free in order to avoid the false persecution of the innocent.

d. believes that given human nature and a pluralistic society that a small central government is the best means to obtain a good society.

e. believes that the Kingdom of God will not come in this life. There will be no utopia. Humans are so fallible that no one institution can be trusted with too much power. Church and state must always check each other in influence.

f. believes that of late the “secular” sphere has been hi-jacked by “secularists,” those who think religion does not provide useful knowledge, and who would exclude religious knowledge from public debates.

Politics: Edwards Looks Back—And Ahead to 2008 - Newsweek Politics - MSNBC.com: “Joking or not, Edwards has reason to break from the 2004 team as he considers his own future.”

In a story only the blogosphere would dare to cover, your hard working philosopher has discovered that John Edwards is thinking of himself. Yes. He is considering his own future.

At last. At last. If only this selfless man had thought of himself in 2004, John Kerry would be in the White House. Jon Edwards’ selfless campaign for the unworthy Kerry where Edwards allowed his hair to be mussed and his pillows unfluffed turned off the American people. Frequently, we would see a snap shot of Edwards getting ready for bed the feet on his jammies worn through by his endless pacing as he attempted to bring the two America’s together.

This was a man so selfless, a lawyer so unlawyerly, that he made us uncomfortable. We may admire Mother Theresa, but we would not make her President. The selfless way John Edwards campaigned to be made Kerry’s Vice-President was a lesson in our own selfishness. We saw his sacrifice as a one term senator dared to stoop to seeing himself as the leader of the free world. We could not imagine the Boy Orator from Carolina’s pain as he stooped to number two.

Thank the good Lord. Jon Edwards is following his heart and being true to himself. Many of us had feared that he would take the easy road and give of his great foresight be appearing on Crossing Over. But not for Edwards the path of easy money. No, the man who sued his way to wealth, wants the hard work of always running for office.

I can only hope someone keeps Saint Edwards, a saint in the hands of his self-made god, always centered on himself. We love lawyers and politicians and men who think of themselves.

Gwynne Dyer: Bush picked a poor moment to display his ignorance: “That deserves respect, as does the fact that the Red Army actually did liberate Eastern Europe from something far worse than Communism. “

The Nazis were evil, very evil.

The Communists were evil, very evil.

The Nazis killed millions. The Communists killed millions. In fact, the Communists killed more people than the Nazis though they had more time to do it.

So why does the left keep apologizing for Communism?

Any agreement that allowed the Communists control over millions of people was a bad one. We never recognized Soviet control over the Baltics.

We had the bomb. The Soviets did not. By Yalta Roosevelt should have known the promise of such a weapon. If he did not, then at the very least less of a “pragmatic” sell out would have allowed him to take a hard line with a fearful Soviet Union after the power of the bomb was demonstrated.

The Soviets had been bled white by the War. Without Allied help it is difficult to see them sustaining a war machine. What could they have done if we had told them to leave? Does anyone believe the Soviets could have defeated a determined Allied liberation of Eastern Europe?

In any case how would the monster Stalin have reacted to a threat, even if a bluff?

For sadly it must be admitted that the political will did not exist to take this action in the West. It did not exist because the Left, and even Hollywood, never allied for the demonization (appropriate) of Uncle Joe and his minions. Our intellectual leaders, with certain notable exceptions (MGM!), were always softer on the Reds than the Blacks. Reds were misguided nice guys who somehow killed millions of Slavs.

We should have refused to recognize enslaved Poland the same way we refused to recognized enslaved Estonia.

We did the right thing in the Baltics. Did it help? Perhaps. It is certainly the case that it kept an emigre group alive that could form the basis for civil government. The Baltics have done better, on the whole, than the rest of Eastern Europe.

Yalta betrayed our best ideals. Yalta featured a Soviet spy, Hiss, at the right hand of a dying President. It was a bad deal and a blot on our conduct of the World War. God bless the President for saying so.

The Corner on National Review Online: “Mark Noll’s book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was a smart appraisal of evangelical weaknesses from the inside. My impression is that its thesis, arguments, and implications have been vigorously debated among evangelicals, at evangelical colleges, among other places. That the debate is occurring is evidence both that there are problems here, and that Hart’s picture of an evangelical world that is all about emotion and not at all about intellect is a caricature.”

This is very true.

It is also true that the Noll book received a great deal of criticism and debate in Evangelical schools. I thought it a self serving bit of tripe that found anti-intellectualism mostly where Noll did not like the perspective about which he was writing. However, it inspired a good deal of better writing and many thoughtful papers at Biola.

Basically, Derb’s comments on evangelicals are dated, ill informed, and offensive. That is the great thing about the NOR site. There is nothing better than such Victorian secularism to get one ready for a good day of philosophy!

The New York Times > Movies > Hollywood Worries as Decline Continues: “In the case of ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ Fox labored to make a film about religious war that would offend neither Christians nor Muslims and trimmed some of Mr. Scott’s more violent scenes, said a person who worked on the film and spoke on condition of anonymity to protect relations at the studio. But because the subject matter was religious war and not, as with ‘The Passion,’ resurrection, the studio could not count on a big Christian turnout, the person said. A spokesman for Fox said the film was actively marketed to Christians.”

I saw ads for this film in my favorite news magazine, World. I am just amazed at how clueless this means Hollywood must be.

You cannot make a film about Christianity where “religion” is presented as the greatest danger to peace and anticipate an enthusiastic religious response.

The new hope seems to be that Star Wars will save the movies. However, my college students seem turned off by the previous two dreadful films. Lucas also seems to be turning to preaching and leftist religion and politics. That will not help the box office.

Memo to Hollywood: try making a film that offends you, but makes the red states happy. Believe it or not many if not most blue staters will like a well made film of that sort as well. (Minority groups, the core of the Democrat Party, are also socially conservative and patriotic.)

A gay Alexander is no more exciting to Hispanic and black film goers than to White Southern men. A King Arthur who mocks the traditional church and is a heretic is not going to turn out the Southern Baptists or Hispanic Roman Catholics. Bluntly the only epic to really make it was a Catholic one (Lord of the Rings) that appeals to evangelicals.

John Derbyshire on Conservatism on National Review Online: “Evangelicalism is, in fact, too intellectually flimsy to sustain any coherent political position outside a narrow subset of ’social issues.’”

I often agree with John Derbyshire, but every once in a while he is given to the sort of instinctive wheeze about religion that is a hold over from the nineteenth century. Tradition is a fine thing, but this is one traditional American opinion that needs to go. It gets in the way of good thought. Evangelicals have a rich intellectual heritage. R.A. Torrey, to cite but one example, had a good education, valued the life of the mind, and carried out a sustained public and private ministry over the course of decades that was sophisticated and thoughtful.

Evangelicals are a big group. They touch all classes of people and all intellectual abilities. As such they often mirror the strengths and weaknesses of America. America is not a very “intellectual” country. We should all be thankful for this since I do not think the angst ridden cafe driven conversations of Paris have done much for Western civilization. However, sometimes a proper reaction to snobbery, laziness, and impotence (which disguises itself as thoughtfulness) can lead to anti-intellectualism and that too is a bad thing.

Evangelicals have been betrayed by the intellectuals often. First, the schools they built turned on them. The loss of Princeton in particular hurt. Then they carefully nurtured the second tier schools, think Baylor, only to see those betray their values. Finally, they went to the third level of schools, often only slightly better than high schools, and built those institutions up. Schools like Wheaton College fit this category. However, the siren song of “intellectualism” and the pressure to conform to the professorial union has too often moved those schools away from core evangelical values. This frequent betrayal has led a few evangelicals to give up on thoughtful approaches to faith. Like the victim of a crime, they shun the site of their victimization. Evangelicals can, at times, confuse thoughtful, Socratic living with the treasonous “intellectuals” who let them down.

However, there exists a sustainable and exciting rational core to evangelicalism. It does not give up. Evangelicals are readers. Any movement centered on the Bible has a rich and sustained intellectual tradition. Evangelicals have been attending to the Fathers and to their Reformation roots in the last fifty years. Movements like Dispensationalism have produced scholars like Biola’s own Robert Saucy and others to develop theological rich takes on core ideas. The Biola attack on “replacement theology” where Jewish persons are not allowed their Biblical role now looks charitable, profoundly correct, and theologically sophisticated.

In short, Derbyshire needs to read a good systematic theology. He might start with Wayne Grudem. He could think pick up some John Piper. Following this he could sit with some of my students at Torrey Honors and discuss the Bible, culture, and America’s founding documents. He would find a confident group that is committed to Socratic exchange, passionate about ideas, and brave enough to defend our country.

Derbyshire may not agree with our conclusions, but he has given no evidence that evangelicalism is intellectually flimsy. In fact, it is easy to point to contrary examples. Without government money it supports a K-University educational system. One can earn an accredited Ph.D. in psychology for example having never left an evangelical educational institution. It supports numerous presses (IVP, Baker, Word). Many of these have serious academic lines which frequently sell respectable numbers to pew sitters. The movement is deeply self-critical, a sign of intellectual life, and very engaged in the culture.

In terms of a broadly coherent worldview, evangelicals have undergone a philosophic Renaissance. Derbyshire should sit with a copy of Philosophia Christi, the philosophy of religion journal. As part of the traditional Christian mainstream, evangelicals have all the worldview strengths of Christianity. However, that may be Derbyshire’s complaints. He moves from evangelicals to attack Roman Catholics with the same nineteenth century fervor.

Christians have been around a long time. In the process of thinking through the abolition of slavery, the creation of the modern University, the development of science, and democratic forms of government we made many mistakes. Derbyshire remembers all of them. However, the secularism that Derbyshire seems to favor has in its modern Western incarnation done almost nothing of value (lacking any popular support in most of the West) and has done a great deal of harm in some places.

In short, if my choice is between the worldview and sophistication of Al Mohler and the whacky ramblings coming out of the libertarian camp then count me with the Southern Baptists.

Remember when people told you to forget that Kerry was:
a. Liberal
b. from New England
c. a Senator.

He was a Vietnam Vet! He was really a moderate! He was a great speaker! He could “light up a room.” Besides conservative pundit X (one you had not heard from since Ford) says that he could see Kerry winning!

I told you to forget it. He could not carry a Southern State or one in the Appalachian region. This “West Virginia” test is key. If you cannot carry West Virginia, you cannot be President as a Democrat. Really.

Now we are hearing that the new Hillary Clinton may win! She is moderate! She is improving!

Here are the simple facts:

a. She is from New York. This is the only state liked less than Massachusetts in the South. New York just means New York City to most of the region. New York means: crime, hatred of traditional values, and big city morals. That is not fair, but a wide spread perception.

She will not carry a single Southern state. Her husband was from Arkansas. Hillary (!) is not and never was.

b. She is a sitting senator. 1960. That is before I was born and that is the last time a sitting senator became President. Since then we have had such great candidates as Dole and Kerry run for the White House. Lately we have heard how many of the senators respect Hillary (!). That is a sign she is doomed. The skill set needed to make Lincoln Chafee like you is the same that will make Ohio hate you.

The former First Lady is a terrible platform and television speaker. She makes Kerry look glib. Her voice is grating and nasal. She drones. She is not always terrible and this gets her gushing press, but she is always the sort of speaker that will drive Red-Staters mad. And she must capture some Red States.

Clinton has a tin-ear for the Red States. One example?

She uses her maiden name as a middle name. . .even on her web site. That will play well in West Virginia! There such a move is often seen a signal to other liberals that you are part of the progressive future that dislikes traditional marriage. Fair or not, that is the way it is.

I would suggest that her foe run commerical after commerical calling her: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

All those votes in the Senate? Rich fodder for commercials.

c. Everyone knows she is a liberal. Kerry could sound patriotic, because the base knew he hated the military in his heart from his Vietnam protestor days. Clinton can sound moderate, because the Dem base knows she is a radical just like they are. The trouble is that everyone else knows she is a liberal. Clinton will never convince anyone pulling an actual voting lever she is a moderate. Smart people will keep confessing surprise at how moderate Hillary (!) actually is. Regular Red-staters will keep sighing at how easily duped talking heads are. We all know she is running for President and that she is voting with that in mind.

Meanwhile as a woman she will frequently “over poll.” Many people will feel as if they should be willing to vote for Clinton who cannot stand her. Why? Opposing Clinton will “feel” like opposing a qualified female for President. You can anticipate many a story on whether America “is ready” for a woman president. This will imply to many that being against Clinton (!) is somehow wrong.

But they will not vote for her, because Clinton is not likeable. She will never be President for the same reason that Newt Gingrich will never be president. When my wife sees both, the Fairest Flower says, “Turn the channel.”

Finally, there is Bill. Anyone believe he is being good? His habits will become front page news again the minute She Who Must Be obeyed announces.

When Kerry won the nomination, Republicans were forced to act scared. Of course they would have preferred Dean who could not carry much of New England if nominated, but Kerry was good in a pinch. Clinton is the same. Republicans know she cannot get the electoral votes to win.

Watch for some of them to “act scared” in order to double-dog-dare the Dems to nominate a sure loser.

Don’t believe me? Ask a friend, “Quick! A liberal senator from the North East will carry how many states Kerry lost?”

See what he or she says.

Take it to the bank: Clinton cannot win which is a fact that Dems will only admit when she loses.

‘Kingdom of Heaven’ tops weekend box office - MORE MOVIE NEWS AND FEATURES - MSNBC.com: “Hollywood’s box office slump continued with revenues down for the 11th straight weekend compared to the same weekend last year, said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.”

When I was a kid, we dreamed of a day when Hollywood would make cool Christian movies.

Films aimed for our demographic were often juvenile and seldom exciting. Then Hollywood quit making any kind of film for us at all.

We imagined that Hollywood did not make Christian movies, because they did not think it good box office.

We imagined it was because our movies (the ones associated with “Christians”) were bad films.

Last year Christians (mostly) made a film that was R-rated, foreign language, and very violent a huge cash cow for Mel Gibson. “We shall see,” I thought to myself. Critics of the Christian sub-culture had long argued that our marginalization was mostly due to us. We were not smart enough to go to good films. We went to this art film. We not only went. We went in droves and made Mel Gibson rich.

Now we know that Hollywood does not like Christians and would rather lose money than make a film they like.

Where are the imitations of the Passion of the Christ?

Instead, Hollywood makes films that should be pitched to us and ruins them. The best example is the religiously and politically incoherent “Kingdom of Heaven.”

It started with a top box office draw from a film series (”Lord of the Rings”) that evangelicals loved. It had the right plot: a battle against radical Islam in defense of a Christian state under attack. The home audience, the fifty-one percent of folk who voted for Bush, was ready for Legolas to fight for the Holy Cross. We were bound to be disappointed. Such a film would have received sneers from the people film makers party with and who stoke the egos of most film makers.

Instead of playing to the home audience and rooting for the Christians (eighty percent of the audience) with some subtle nods to the glories of mainstream Islam (just to be fair!), it went in the opposite direction.

Is there really a big American market for angst ridden, religion hating, confused epics? One goes to an epic like this to see the battle scenes, but leaves this picture ashamed at having gone to see the battle scenes.

We are at War with Terror. This War is against radical Islam. In World War II Hollywood decided to sign up for the duration and so marginalized fascism that they killed it. Nazi and fascist just means evil to almost everyone. That is a good thing.

Why can’t they do the same thing to radical Islam? If history is to be rewritten (as it was for this film) why couldn’t the West be made to look good?

Imagine this film as pro-Christian and pro-West. The talking heads would have screamed, but Iowa and West Virginia would have bought tickets.

Too many folk in Hollywood would rather lose money than make a film that the red states like.

I am on the Frank Pastore show as co-host (useful prop!) from 4-7 today, KKLA 99.5 FM.

Frank is smart. Frank is interesting. . .

and contrary to certain Major Cultural Forces Frank is at or near his playing weight.

Really.

OpinionJournal - Extra: “Why I’m Rooting Against the Religious Right
Save the Republic from shallow, demagogic sectarians.

I like Christopher Hitchens as a writer. I also like the fact he is unpredictable. He supports what he wants to support and though it is hard to discern a coherent worldview in his positions at least he is not bought and paid for by some faction.

Christians and other people of faith need to start taking seriously the notion that there has existed a soft bigotry against religion in our nation (and certainly in Britain) for some time. Because it has mostly been hidden in smirks at University wine and cheese gatherings and in liberal foundation gatherings most Americans have never noticed it. It does exist and Hitchens is giving voice to it.

The sad news for Hitchens is that this secularism has never been tried out on the market of American culture. It has always kept hidden. Now that it is out most Americans find it insulting and bluntly silly.

This republic has always been dominated by religious images and themes. Think of Teddy Roosevelt marching his political forces into battle with “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Try removing all the Biblical images from Lincoln’s speeches. Count the number of out of the closet atheists who have been President.

Secularists are and should be free to be wrong. They have been pretty bad at sustaining free societies. The only states to be officially atheistic (one thinks of Albania) have not been very pleasant places to live. Of course secularism need not be atheism. How has it done when non-atheistic?

If Western Europe, still partly running on the borrowed culture of its Christian heritage, is the future Mr. Hitchens prefers then most Americans are likely to say “no thank you.” France has been pretty secular (in Hitchen’s sense) for over one hundred years in government and a close examination of its history and the trajectory of its culture leads me to say, “No thank you.” In is not clear that secular France can reproduce itself let alone defend itself. What model of secularism does Hitchens have in mind?

Still secularists, who have a great many borrowed Christian and Jewish ideas they cannot really defend, are often decent folk and good citizens. It is a free country and though I doubt Mr. Hitchen’s view of thinks is anything short of a disaster for any party that adopts it both parties are free to try.

My comments in italics below.

BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Thursday, May 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

I hope and believe that, by identifying itself with ‘faith’ in general and the Ten Commandments in particular, a runaway element in the Republican leadership has made a career-ending mistake.

Mr. Hitchens could easily find equally hopeful predictions during the Reagan administration from secularists when the death of the Republican party for going “too far” with the “dying religious right” was often predicted. Because he does not define his target (what is the religious right?) and does not understand the sub-culture his analysis ends up being simplistic to the point of parody.

In support of this, let me quote two authorities:

* The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100%. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. . . . Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some god-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’

* ‘Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother.’ And he said, ‘All these have I kept from my youth up.’ Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, ‘Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.’

The first citation is from Barry Goldwater, moral founder of the Reagan revolution, who, when I interviewed him on his retirement from the Senate, vowed to ‘kick Jerry Falwell in the ass.’

Barry Goldwater changed over his time in Washington. He became. . . how shall we put it. . . eccentric? In any case, I think Reagan the more likely moral founder of the Reagan Revolution and he loved the religious right. He worked with them and wrote a pro-life book while in office. By the way, Reagan actually won his elections. Hitchens must prefer Republicans who kick their own base and who are losers in general elections. (Like the British Tory Party?)

The second citation is from Luke 18:20-22.

We can now predict that Hitchens is going to misuse Scripture. Let’s do a quick context and remind ourselves that Jesus Christ is attacking the love of money. To such greedy and short-sighted men money had become all consuming. These rich would be better off without money. Just as radical surgery is not for everyone, but may save the life of someone eaten up by cancer, so the words of Jesus remind us that the lust for money may require a radical cure in some. It also reminds his full-time servants, the clergy, that theirs is to be a purely altruistic calling. They are to live for others. Of course, such a calling, that of a Mother Theresa, makes no sense to men like Hitchens.

I am neither a Republican nor a Christian, and I don’t propose that there is any congruence between Sen. Goldwater’s annoyance and the alleged words (which occur in similar form in all four gospels) of the possibly mythical Nazarene.

Did he say, “Possibly mythical?” We now know Hitchens has been communing on the kool-aide served at the very fringes of the secularist community. There are a few marginal “scholars” who argue that Jesus may not have existed. Since he appears in at least one non-Christian historical source (Josephus) and since there exist documents (Pauline epistles) referring to his life that even the most liberal scholars date from the first decades after Christ’s death almost no serious scholar doubts Jesus existed. Hitchens has lost all claim to be taken seriously by this one comment, but perhaps that was not his point.

I suspect instead that he has thrown in this adjective to get the “fundies” mad and to get the kind of reaction from our fringe that will justify his hopes. Sadly for Hitchens most evangelicals, and even sensible secularists, will just roll their eyes and move on to something interesting. Such claims about Jesus not existing are like the cocky seventh grader who thinks he can dismiss Biblical authority because it requires believing Jesus Christ was made of wood when He said He was the Door or who believe he has invented the problem of evil when setting out to stump their AWANA leader. That is funny in a kid, but it is just sad when one finds a college educated person still thinking the same things and still expecting them to be “crushing” to the religious.

Yet two things are obvious. The first is that many conservatives appreciate the value of a secular republic, and do not make the idiotic confusion between “secular” and “atheist” that is so common nowadays.

Of course secular does not mean atheism, though all atheists are secularists not all secularists are atheists. However, the notion that there can exist a water tight compartment between religious ideas and the state is pretty silly and has never been true in the United States. Just a quick reading of public documents shows this to be the case. Sometimes religion has had a good impact (abolitionists and slavery) on our politics and sometimes a bad one (McKinley prayed his way into the Spanish American War), but it has been there. Bluntly, the American Republic has done pretty well with our permeable wall between religious ideas, religious people, and the state.

Hitchens may be misunderstand the historical American Christian (even Calvinist) distinction between the “secular” and the “church” sphere so common in the language of the Reformers with more modern ideas of “secularism.” Of course, they did not intend by this any 1950’s notion of keeping religion totally out of things. These early thinkers, including almost all the Founders, simply wanted the Church authorities to recognize the limits of their sphere. No Anglican bishop should confuse governing his Church with governing the state. This did not mean that the Anglican governor was supposed to keep his Christian ethics at home. In fact, it would have been hard to get elected to the presidency without talking about Christian (or later Judeo-Christian) ideas in Christian ways.

In one sense, I am a secularist if by that one means that there exists a sphere of human life not directly governed by Church authority. However, no Christian is a secularist if Hitchens means that we should leave our worldview at the office or government door.

Though it may not be easy to flow chart this American relationship it works. Secular is a good old English word which does not simply mean “religion free zone.” In the past it has had religious uses (see “secular clergy”) and has a special use historically in the American context.

My own bishop recently commented that the clergy should stay out of politics. By this he meant that clergy should stay out of direct influence in political matters. He is not going to attempt to govern the state from the bishop’s throne! On the other hand, he has taken strong pro-life positions and I assume would expect any of his members to live out their faith in government or in any other job in the broader culture. We want our bishops to work in the ecclesiastical sphere while Christian carry their faith into the market place and compete in that open area for attention. That does not mean the Christians have become “secular.”

The second is that no “Moral Majority” type has yet proposed that the most important commandment, the one underlined by Jesus himself, be displayed in courtrooms or schoolrooms. It turns out that the Eleventh Commandment is not “Thou shalt speak no ill of fellow Republicans,” but is, rather, a demand for the most extreme kind of leveling and redistribution.

This is Hitchens taking Our Lord out of context. Jesus Christ did not want anyone to love money, but he was followed by many wealthy people and so far as we can tell did not command all of them to “give away everything.” Judas was the only disciple to suggest everything should be sold and given to the poor. . . and his track record of getting Jesus right was not good.

The early Church did not, or at least the vast majority of it, did not so understand Him. I will take Paul and the apostles as better sources of what Jesus meant than Hitchens. Paul worked to avoid being a burden on his followers (II Thes. 3:8) and I Timothy 5:8:

8But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Protestant forms of Christianity have long been associated with free market economics, but perhaps Hitchens understands the Bible and Jesus better than they?

I have never understood why conservative entrepreneurs are so all-fired pious and Bible-thumping, let alone why so many of them claim Jesus as their best friend and personal savior. The Old Testament is bad enough: The commandments forbid us even to envy or covet our neighbor’s goods, and thus condemn the very spirit of emulation and ambition that makes enterprise possible.

Hitchens now lets the lid off with a good old fashioned nineteenth century village skeptic rant. This sort of things is so dated that is fun. It is like finding an actual tent revival only on the other side! In the next article, we can anticipate Hitchens finding some crushing rejoinders in Ingersoll or some other nineteenth century professional Bible-basher.

Hitchens should get out a good commentary before doing Biblical exegesis.

What is it to covet? Hitchens should look here for one example of what one billion people take it to mean.

Put simply wanting a car like my neighbor’s is not coveting. Being consumed with such a desire or wanting my neighbor to lose his car so I can have it (or stealing it) is forbidden. In short, the Commandment confirms the right to private property as a human right, though not an absolute one. It also tells people not to view economics as a “zero sum game.” Your car is your car and I should not be consumed by desire (leading to economic doom in the long run ) for your possessions. It functionally bans socialism.

But the New Testament is worse: It tells us to forget thrift and saving, to take no thought for the morrow, and to throw away our hard-earned wealth on the shiftless and the losers.

This is mostly a lie. Hitchens is reading words more out of their literary context than any freshman student I have ever had. However, Hitchens is right about one thing. Christians are called to have hope for people he calls “shiftless” and “losers.” Secularists (of the Hitchens sort) have a hard time doing that. People who think Christians heartless should remember that we started almost every charitable program in the West and remember these words from Hitchens.

At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the Republican Party really prepared to disown such modern intellectuals as it can claim, in favor of a shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity?

Rand is an important thinker, but I think her wrong about religion. So? I am a Platonist, but I don’t agree with everything Plato said. I can use ideas from a person without kow-towing to everything they said.

As for Strauss, I value Strauss greatly and have started an entire academic program chock full of his methods. I received professionally training and am close friends with one of his students. I admire him highly and wish people actually read him more, but even here I do not have to agree with all his conclusions. I think Strauss’ particular reading of Plato wrong, but appreciate his focus on the text as an end. I am a Straussian and a member of the religious right. What does Hitchens have to say about that?

What is the religious right Mr. Hitchens? Who is in it? What must we believe? What is our creed?

Perhaps one could phrase the same question in two further ways. At the last election, the GOP succeeded in increasing its vote among American Jews by an estimated five percentage points. Does it propose to welcome these new adherents or sympathizers by yelling in the tones of that great Democrat bigmouth William Jennings Bryan?

I doubt anyone is suggesting a revival of nineteenth century rhetorical styles in either party. It might be that persons of non-Christian faith find an open and honest expression of religious belief, much of it compatible with their own, less threatening than a ban on all expressions of faith in the public square.

By insisting that evolution is “only a theory”?

Is Hitchens suggesting that belief in an active Creator God is limited to Christians? Is Genesis a Christian book?

By demanding biblical literalism and by proclaiming that the Messiah has already shown himself?

The only wooden literalism I have seen of late is Hitchens misusing Christ’s words in this article in an overly literalistic (not literary!) way that would do a movie fundamenatlist proud.

My religious Jewish friends and I disagree, but we have more in common than we have with a secularist like Hitchens. We believe in God given rights and in a Creator. I am not likely to say the Hebrew Bible “is bad enough” like Hitchens did. They might appreciate that and, who knows, resent Hitchens’ slurs.

Christians in the religious right also understand that “making disciples” is a Church job and is not part of their job when governing. Jesus is Lord of my life wherever I am. However, I see no need to push this into the face of my friends who disagree at the drop of a hat. We agree to disagree and work together in civil discourse. Hitchens wants to split us by using our real, and serious, differences to divide us which is the only way his tiny minority in the US can have power. We will not let him.

If so, it will deserve the punishment for hubris that is already coming its way. (The punishment, in other words, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson believed had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. How can it be that such grotesque characters, calling down divine revenge on the workers in the World Trade Center, are allowed a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, among patriotic Republicans?)

Quote mining is a bad habit for all writers. If Falwell and Robertson said 9/11 was “God’s judgment” then they were wrong. Being wrong has been known to happen to other than religious leaders.

Both should re-read “City of God.” Augustine points out in that great book, which forms the deep thinking of the American right in many ways, that God’s providence is not always manifest in any single action. Why did Rome fall? Was God punishing us? Was it for other reasons? At any given moment this is hard to say and human hubris to be sure of any divine connection at the moment. God’s plan in history can only be seen over time. His ways are subtle and not apt for blogging!

Then again, hundreds of thousands of young Americans are now patrolling and guarding hazardous frontiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is there a single thinking person who does not hope that secular forces arise in both countries, and who does not realize that the success of our cause depends on a wall of separation, in Islamic society, between church and state?

Lots of people who are religious know that just because some religious ideas are true that not all religious ideas are true. Hitchens seems to think that the problem in Iraq and Afghanistan is that they were “too religious.” I think it more likely that given how religious men are by nature that the problem is that they were fed bad religious ideas. Here is hoping for an Islamic society (majority opinion) in both places that allows Christians and others (a large minority in Iraq) freedom of association and ideas. Here is hoping we don’t get a France, a Hitchens secular solution,. . . which cannot last, is failing in France, and which is contrary to the dreams and wishes of the majority.

In fact, the best solution is the American solution! Let’s have a permeable wall between mosque and state. Let the Islamic religious leader govern his mosque and let his faithful followers live out their moral ideals in business and in government. Christianity invented this “low wall” between Church (but not Churchmen!) and state. . . can Islam adapt to it? Why not? If not, then Islam is guilty of a bad religious ideal and will fail. My Islamic friends think they can do it and I hope they do so.

How can we maintain this cause abroad and subvert it at home?

This is insane. Religious conservatives want to defend the way things have always been at home (traditional marriage, sanctity of life) and Hitchens thinks we are undermining America?

Is defending the way things have been changing them?

It’s hardly too much to say that the servicemen and -women, of all faiths and of none, who fight so bravely against jihad, are being stabbed in the back by the sunshine soldiers of the “crusading” right. What is one to feel but rage and contempt when one reads of Arabic-language translators, and even Purple Heart-winning frontline fighters, being dismissed from the service because their homosexuality is accounted a sin?

Hitchens should look at the states and areas where troops come from. He should note that the armed forces are and historically have been some of the most traditionally religious places in American society. Chaplains were not invented yesterday.

We are not fighting for Hitchen’s style secularism. If we were, Hitchens would have to find new volunteers for his army. He might start with Harvard Yard or the latte drinkers in Oregon. Good luck.

We are fighting because radical Islam wants to destroy our way of life. They hit us and the state is allowed to defend itself. We are mostly Christians and all Americans and think that our nation is best able to protect our faith and freedom. We don’t mind Hitchens hating us and his mostly leftist secularist friends living off our sacrifice. That is what freedom is all about, but is a bit hard to get mocked for bearing the lion’s share of the burden.

If left to Hitchens and the fighting secularists, the War on Terror would be lost.

I will bet Hitchens his favorite adult beverage that the Republicans go right on getting a large majority of Armed Services votes. The fighting men and women don’t feel that defending American morals is a jihad. They have seen a real jihad and know the difference. American troops have decided that homosexual behavior has no place in a modern army. Confusing that with a Taliban-culture that has no place for homosexuals to live is lazy thinking.

Hitchens also conflates our destruction of an evil religious government, the Taliban, with an evil, secular Iraqi government. Repeat to yourself Mr. Hitchens: Sadaam was a bad non-religious leader who led a secular Iraqui party.

Thus far, the clericalist bigots have been probing and finding only mush. A large tranche of the once-secular liberal left has disqualified itself by making excuses for jihad and treating Osama bin Laden as if he were advocating liberation theology. The need of the hour is for some senior members of the party of Lincoln to disown and condemn the creeping and creepy movement to impose orthodoxy on a free and pluralist and secular Republic.

It is more likely that the party of Lincoln will emulate Lincoln and become more religious as the War continues. This religion will become more sophisticated in its use of religion and not less so. It will be led by a man who can speak like Lincoln and not like Hitchens. Only then can real liberty based on the rights given by a Creator God bless our one nation under God. We will not allow Hitchens and his aging, childless, secular minority to change our Republic because we have Lincoln’s words engraved not just in stone but in our hearts:

Fellow-countrymen: At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued seemed very fitting and proper. Now, at the (1) expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and (2) phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and (3) engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. . . .

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an (4) impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avoid it. . . . Both parties (5) deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came. One-eighth of the whole population were slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, (6) perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would (7) rend the Union by war, while government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the (8) territorial enlargement of it.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. . . . Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each (9) invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in (10) wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayer of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. . . . If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the (11) providence of God, must needs come, but which having continued through His (12) appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we (13) discern there any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always (14) ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, (15) fervently do we pray, that this mighty (16) scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continues. . . until every drop of blood drawn with the (17) lash shall be paid another drawn with the sword . . . so still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

With (18) malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.