I am curious what my blogging pals here at Middlebrow think about immigration. As a traditional Christian, I feel compelled to help the stranger in my midst. On the other hand, nothing in the Bible says that I have to allow law breakers to over run my community. Tough call.

In the end, I am not for open borders with Mexico, but for a much easier means for folk to get here legally. People are the source of power for a country. Mexico’s population loss seems to me to be our gain. . . who would not want the benefit from all those images of God coming to America?

So call me, like the President, a fan of making it easier for folk to come here legally to work, with some pathway to full citizenship for those who play by the rules, while trying to weed out the no goods and criminals. All the plans I have seen for securing the borders seem worse than the present situation. (How in the world would we deport eleven million souls humanely. . . What would we call the holding areas? Wouldn’t they look a great deal like the Superdome during Katrina pretty quickly?. . . even assuming that the act of deporting so many people would not in itself deprive us of the human potential such folk represent?)

Faithful Christians all over the world face the appearance of a new movie, “The Da Vinci Code” that will slander the faith once delivered to the apostles and lie to millions about the nature and actions of the Son of God. Of course it is just a work of fiction, badly written, but it also claims to relate religious truth and I have personally talked to many people confused by it. While we all applaud the right of Americans to make any film they wish, I also applaud the right of Americans to say that a particularly noxious film is bad.

I was pleased to see that the Greek Archdiocese has opened a web site for the faithful dealing with this film. My own school, Biola University and the Torrey Honors Institute, has tried to be at the forefront of also providing resources to turn slander into Socratic discussion in good Greek tradition! However, in the last few days Tom Hanks, a person who has claimed to be part of the Orthodox Church, has attacked anyone opposed to the film.

Should the Orthodox be involved in making such films? Of course, they have the right, but should they use their freedom in this way? Would the Church advise members to make such entertainment?

All of us understand that no priest should reveal the private spiritual journey of a member. I thank God for that, but this person has both claimed to be Orthodox, made this film, and then attacked those, like Greek Archdiocese, who have complained about aspects of the film.

I know that the judgments of God and His church are the same for the rich and powerful as for the humble. Mr. Hanks just made a film that at the very least makes into entertainment ancient lies about our Lord. He now defends that choice in the public square and has, by implication, attacked your own choice to set up a web site condemning the film. Was he right? Has he acted as you would advise your spiritual children to act?

If you missed it, Andrew Sullivan newly famous for being conservative, sort of, and gay, really, has decided all that stands between Evangelicals and becoming just like the Taliban is our secular Constitution which we wish to destroy. Andrew Sullivan says he is a Christian, but with a new definition of what it means to be Chrisian. The sad case of Andrew Sullivan, once a conservative, once a Catholic, is a perfect image of the wages of sin. Sullivan used to be interesting, writing about many things with many points of view, some quirky, some fun, some insightful. But Sullivan decided that his urge to a particular sin was more powerful than his Christian commitment and now everything he writes can be understood through the single reductive desire to justify that sin. When Saint Paul said the wages of sin is death, he was of course right, but I have never understood before the pitiable fact that the mental atrophy comes long before the physical death.

Tonight Antony Flew received the Phillip E. Johnson Award at Biola University.

The award is dedicated to those who will pursue truth where it leads. Flew received the award and confirmed his intellectual journey had moved him from atheism to deism. He quoted the Socratic dictum that one should follow the argument where ever it leads. . .

We were frequently reminded in the ceremony that Flew had attended the Socratic Club first organized by C.S. Lewis at Oxford. Though still unpersuaded by Lewis’ Christian theism, Flew has had the courage to change a long held position in the face of evidence.

To me this is a good reminder that philosophy is not endless logic chopping, post-modern nonsense not with standing. Philosophers do change their minds and arguments do evolve (even if life does not) under the pressure of discussion. It is a hard road. People who will not follow the path of reason are missing out on the joy of that journey.

Sadder still are Christians too silly to see that the Divine Word, the Reason behind the Universe, under girds any quest for truth that will follow the Ideas in His Divine Mind. Both narrow minded “fundamentalists” and post-modern academics have given up on the path of Socrates and reason. It is their loss.

Perhaps the only thing sillier are those people who will pant that Flew is no Christian yet, but only a deist. . . and of course this is true. But if Aquinas had decided to become an agnostic at the end of his career, atheists would have been right to see progress, even if it was not “all the way.”

Occasionally, very occasionally, I meet Christians who wish the United States would revive public laws against blasphemy. They dislike the coarse culture that does not allow them to move in the public square without having their most cherished values assailed in the most casual manner.

The difficulty is that laws are not an effective way to end crude talk and their social cost is greater than their benefit. Such laws are hardly ever enforced since enforcing them would give the state great power over individuals. Does anyone wish to give the state the power to enforce such speech codes? Christian experience has said, “No.” We have a clear, hard won, historic distinction between the role of the state, in Dante’s language the “imperium” and the Church. Blasphemy laws seem to muddle roles.

Western Christians, especially in the Anglo-sphere (English speaking world) have learned the hard way that such laws tend to make religion look ridiculous. Enforcement attracts the sort of tight lipped kill joy that is the bane of any religion. Reacting to such laws is the only thing that can make a Mark Twain out of the local childish village atheist.

This is not to say that such language is not serious. I love my wife and would rebuke any person who slandered her in my hearing. Such man could not be my friend. How much more likely is this to be true of my Savior!

Social pressure is adequate to stop most crude talk. We rightly shun those who use the “n-word” to refer to African-Americans. I would be loath to do business with any person who used such filthy talk. In the same manner, I am much less likely to do business with anyone who uses my Lord’s Holy Name as a curse or a by word. That is my right in a free nation as it is his right to repulse me with his blasphemy.

Christians nations have long recognized. . . recognized generations before “secular pressure” could have forced them to do so. . . that they are the most healthy when they allow members to leave if they feel they must. Even nations with national churches have long agreed that persons can full citizens (even atheists) while disagreeing with the core, recognized values of the state church. In fact, properly understood these national churches were a way of allowing for diversity of thought while maintaining a means for the majority to achieve recognition of its central values without coercion. England was a Christian nation by history, culture, and population. The state could recognize and even promote Christian activities, but it would not punish minority opinion. In fact, by the Victorian age religious minorities were allowed full citizenship rights in a nation that was overwhelmingly traditionally Christian. When Christians had the power to choke off Darwin or Marx in England, they did not. They allowed both men to scribble away and attempted to battle their ideas.

The American solution to this problem provides for even more liberty. It is perhaps no accident that as a result the American church is even more robust. The majority Christian population elects Christian (in a cultural sense) representatives to our government. Not surprisingly such representatives have reflected their world view in their politics. . . both right and left have been inspired by the Christian vision in the US. William Jennings Bryan could urge more government to help the poor based on the Gospel while Ronald Reagan could argue that the best way to help the poor, a Biblical mandate, was to increase economic liberty. Both were reflecting their Christian convictions and trying to work them out. Fundamentally their areas of agreement (the poor should be helped) were more important than their areas of disagreement. We have not historically believed that the ideas of religion must be kept out of politics, for then most American individuals would not be able to serve in politics!

We have believed that state and Church have different roles. The state may encourage public morality, but it cannot coerce belief. Christians can work for the state and in it, but they Church does not run it. We are citizens and Churchmen. We synthesize the roles, but we do not confuse them.

The result is predictable. Western Christianity not only survives, but it thrives. Since it is true, Christianity has nothing to fear from freedom. It can welcome constitutional forms of government, because it has internal confidence. It knows secularism, its greatest foe for the last 200 years, is dying unable to sustain a culture of life. We have taken the best shots of Darwin, Freud, Marx, and company and prospered. In fact, the most powerful Western state (the US) is the most religious. Because we chose to not live in a hot house, but fight bad ideas with better ones, our faith is strong and robust.

Islam has never been so wise. It has chosen to hide from secularism or competition. As a result, men like Bin Laden must live in fear. They do not think they can defeat materialism or Western ideas so they turn to the power of the state.

Of course, this brings us to the case of Abdul Rahman. He is a man who, from an Islamic point of view, has committed the ultimate blasphemy by rejecting Islam and embracing another faith.

To my Islamic friends, I would say this: if Islam is true, then I wish to believe it. I want to hear your ideas. I want truth more than I wish to be right about my particular thoughts. However, if you are confident in your beliefs, then you have nothing to fear from the free market place of ideas. I am quite content to allow a majority Islamic population to encourage general Islamic culture in the state. In this sense, I part company with my more strongly libertarian friends. However, encouragement ends with the use of force. If you wish to fund schools which begin the day with Islamic prayers, I would not be offended. . . if you do not make me pray them. Allow me full freedom to vote against your ideas, to argue, to set up an alternative culture to that of the majority and I will rest content. You may use your majority status (says Western tradition) to argue for your point of view, but it is wicked, and almost as bad self-defeating, to use force to make me conform outwardly.

Many faithful Christians have lived for centuries in peace in Islamic lands, yet you have not been willing to give them full liberty. Your evangelism in the West for centuries has fallen on deaf ears. Why? You have not done battle with our best and our worst. As a result your apologetics is often childish and dated. I am forced to wrestle with the ideas of friends who have every possible idea. I have seen beloved students reject my views and follow ideas I think destructive and which have proven destructive in their lives. And yet I would not force them to an external faith if I could for, as you too believe, such a faith would be a mockery of the true love of God.

God placed a tree in a Garden and told men not to eat of it. He allowed men to break His single, loving law. If God will allow a Fall, at great pain to Himself, then we should not force men to love Him. If He who had a right to demand love did not do so, then who are we to demand it?

As hard as it will be to stand, and I know the pain, you must allow men to turn their backs on what you think is the Truth. It is the only way to confirm your faith that it is the Truth for only the Truth is never insecure and endures. If you wish us to be attracted to your Faith, or even for your faith to survive, it needs the flexibility and vigor gained by recognizing the different roles for church and state in our fallen world.

You must set Addul Rahman free and let him live in peace as a minority in your culture. Or are you less sure Islam is true, then I am that Christianity is true?

Dear Mr. President,

If you read what I write, you will know I have supported you and the War on Terror.

Some of my best students have been in harm’s way, even sustaining injury, to heroically serve our nation in this War. They did not fight so that their faith, a faith you share, would lead to death in the nations they liberated.

This is a non-negotiable for many of us. I am encouraged that you agree that Addul Rahman must be freed. I know we agree, but we need strong action. I know we may not see the necessary behind the scenes steps you take, but Rahman must be freed and Christians must be able to live in peace in the Middle East.

Results in this area matter to many of your most loyal supporters.

I once thought George Allen could be the man. . . and I still might be convinced of this. However, of late I have worried that he is not, well, quick on his intellectual feet.

I am open to Sam Brownback or Mike Huckabee, though the first has a name like a gay cowboy film and the second like a bad comedy (I heart the Huckabee!). It is hard to think of any of them overcoming the “He does not sound like a President” test. But perhaps, I underestimate the American voter.

Against my inclinations, I am growing ever fonder of Mitt Romney. He has great experience, good geography and lately has been making strong stands in the culture war. He is no secularist which is key in our three way civil war for the hearts and minds of the globe (dying European secularism vs Islam vs Christianity). He is very, very smart. . . which will be important for the next Republican nominee.

I think the question of whether mainstream Americans will vote for a Mormon is an odd one. The President is not our pastor or our chief theologian. I do not have to moderate my theological differences with Mormonism one iota to vote for Romney. These differences are great and are not getting smaller. At the same time, I have shared common cultural cause in intellectual arenas with Mormons. . . for example at a conference at Cornell University. . . and did not feel my religious commitments shrinking as a result. Part of growing up mentally is learning to agree where you can and disagree where you really do.

So I am becoming intrigued by Romney and wondering about Allen.

One test for me is how well any candidate actually understands Red State voters and the next generation (home schooled/Christian schooled/Bible Club public school) of conservative, Evangelical voters.

Will they keep talking to yesterday’s leaders or will they look for thriving centers of traditional Christian thought and see how their message plays? Will any of the contenders of either party be savvy enough to contact a program like Torrey Honors at Biola and try to come to one of the intellectual centers of the Red State voters?

Clinton could test her outreach program and see how it does. If she cannot open the minds of these Socratically trained students, she can forget the border states. Allen could come and demonstrate with an open microphone that he can take the tough question. Believe me no debate question will be tougher than those devised by THI students! Brownback and Huckabee could show they can escape the “he cannot win” test by wowing the toughest audience on earth: post-ipod college students jaded with edutainment and looking for the Right Stuff.

For Romney such an experience could be critical as he would face a huge pool of culturally savvy Pacific rim honor students who are fiercely Evangelical and at the forefront of the Mormon-Evangelical dialogue. (Torrey recently ran an entire class around such dialogue that involved listening as well as sharing their own points of view to Mormon leaders. . . reading primary Mormon texts.) Could he sell such a crowd? If so, then this might be his Kennedy in West Virginia moment. I wonder if he will have the sense to come.

Will Mitt Romney know to give Torrey a call?

Sometimes it is hard not to see pacifism as a view that is at best pleasantly parasitic on culture and at worst suicidal to society, like advocating universal celibacy. Shakers may be pleasant people, but if they don’t recruit your kids, then they die out, because there will be no children of their own. In the same way pacifists seem to depend on non-pacifists for their very existence.

Now my friends who are pacifists will point to the witness of martyrdom as being a way that those who will not resist evil with force can triumph. The blood of the martyrs, they point out, is often the seed of the Church and this is true. But it seems to me that it is true only in those situations where the people doing the killing are not very good at it or do it sporadically (like Rome). Early Japan and parts of Arabia have been very good at sowing the religious ground with salt so that whatever seed the martyrs sowed died. It is easy to mock Constantine or to sit back and be too pure live in the world as it is, but there is a reason Christianity still exists in Europe and does not exist in Arabia and the Far East in its ancient forms.

Of course thoughtful pacifists have suggested answers to these worries, but that does not stop most of us from having the intuition that pacifists are trying to live in the world to come and not in the world as it is. When God has a heavenly host led by Michael the Archangel, it seems hard to see how Christians can be sure, totally sure, that fighting is never the answer. Aren’t we glad God is going to bring Evil to an end using force at the end of all things? Or do we wish he would send France and the UN to deal with the Diabolical Realm? (”There, there Satan. We can see your point of view, but can’t you see ours?”)

Whatever the merits of historical Christian pacifism, and it is a minority notion in church history, modern pacifism has one trait that is utterly annoying. They adopt a tone of moral superiority to every other Christian unjustified by their actual arguments. They have failed to persuade most of us, but now they just sneer at us.

This is particularly odious in the case of the war protesters just freed by our brave troops in Iraq. Say what you will about the war, the smarmy morally bankrupt inability to see a difference between our troops in Iraq and the terrorists is inexcusable intellectually. Even if war is an evil that should always be opposed, one can see a moral difference between the Marines and the terrorists. The terrorists fight with no restraint, the Marines try to follow the rule of law, however, imperfectly. George W. Bush may have slain his hundreds (taking their point of view), but the radical Islamic thugs in the region have killed their millions. Anyone who makes the two morally equivalent cannot be trusted to make any moral distinction.

Here is the delightful press release put out by the pacifists who were freed by the US and British army.

My comments are in italics as usual.

CPT Statement: CPTers Freed

Note the passive language of the pacifists. Our brave troops rescued these ingrates. They were not freed by the terrorists or by an act of nature. In fact, the CPTers did nothing, yet in their own narcissistic minds they are the story. But for most of us, they are not the story. We are happy they are free, but the real story, the real action, came from the armed forces of the Coalition who defeated evil men to liberate ungrateful ones.

23 March 2006

Our hearts are filled with joy today as we heard that Harmeet Singh Sooden, Jim Loney and Norman Kember have been freed safely in Baghdad. Christian Peacemaker Teams rejoices with their families and friends at the expectation of their return to their loved ones and community. Together we have endured uncertainty, hope, fear, grief and now joy during the four months since they were abducted in Baghdad.

Who abducted them? It could be space aliens for all we know. Was it bad that these unnamed folk did this thing? We know what the pacifists endured, but not who caused them to do the enduring. Note again the utter self-centered nature of the pacifists. One cannot even kidnap them, they can only endure suffering.

We rejoice in the return of Harmeet Sooden. He has been willing to put his life on the line to promote justice in Iraq and Palestine as a young man newly committed to active peacemaking.

Active peacemaking seems to consist, in their weird world, of going to a place where one is not wanted, doing nothing constructive except getting in the way of real progress, and putting oneself in harms way so that people bringing peace to a nation (the Coalition) will have to risk their lives to save the peacemakers.

We rejoice in the return of Jim Loney. He has cared for the marginalized and oppressed since childhood, and his gentle, passionate spirit has been an inspiration to people near and far.

Note that these ingrates do not rejoice in the heroes who actually acted (active life saving) to rescue these men. Instead the men who did nothing but get saved are described in glowing detail. It is as if a hospital decided to celebrate the patient instead of the doctor who saves the patients life. These are the sort of folk who resent the police who arrest the criminals that terrorize their own neighborhoods.

We rejoice in the return of Norman Kember. He is a faithful man, an elder and mentor to many in his 50 years of peacemaking, a man prepared to pay the cost.

He went where he was doing no good, where nobody much wanted him, and put himself at risk. He then forced others to save him at great risk to self. People who commit suicide are prepared to “pay the cost” but we do not celebrate their lives.

We remember with tears Tom Fox, whose body was found in Baghdad on March 9, 2006, after three months of captivity with his fellow peacemakers. We had longed for the day when all four men would be released together. Our gladness today is made bittersweet by the fact that Tom is not alive to join in the celebration. However, we are confident that his spirit is very much present in each reunion.

Nobody was released. The ones blessed enough to be saved by the Armed Forces of the Coalition were freed by the Coalition. The terrorists would have killed them all.

Harmeet, Jim and Norman and Tom were in Iraq to learn of the struggles facing the people in that country.

They learned that nobody wanted them there. The terrorists wanted to kill them, the average Iraq citizen lives by a moral code that despises such weak thinking folk, except for the large number of pacifist Moslems in Iraq, and the Coalition troops had to save them.

They went, motivated by a passion for justice and peace to live out a nonviolent alternative in a nation wracked by armed conflict.

While they might have attempted to be non-violent, their foolish behavior gave the terrorists a chance to be terrorists. That does not justify their behavior, but it does make them full of pride or folly. Their plan to live non-violently did not go well, since their being there triggers predictable violence.

They knew that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers.

This also did not go well.

We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq. The occupation must end.

You must read this again and again. The troops that kept the pacifists heads on their bodies are to blame for terrorism. Apparently before we invaded Iraq it was a haven of joy and love. This despite the fact that if we had not invaded Iraq, this same group would be blaming us for the deaths caused by sanctions on the Hussein regime. They also seem not to care that more people in Iraq would have been murdered by the regime than have died in the War and its aftermath.

It appears that unless the US is involved deaths in Iraq do not count.

Today, in the face of this joyful news, our faith compels us to love our enemies even when they have committed acts which caused great hardship to our friends and sorrow to their families.

What kind of acts? They could manage to call the occupation of Iraq by the Coalition “illegal,” but could muster no adjective (not even “naughty”) to describe the brutal murder of one of their own. (By the way: under what legal system was our invasion “illegal?”)

In the spirit of the prophetic nonviolence that motivated Jim, Norman, Harmeet and Tom to go to Iraq, we refuse to yield to a spirit of vengeance.

It appears that they will also not yield to common sense or gratitude either.

We give thanks for the compassionate God who granted our friends courage and who sustained their spirits over the past months. We pray for strength and courage for ourselves so that, together, we can continue the nonviolent struggle for justice and peace.

No thanks for the men who save them. Will they ask our government to let them die when they are captured? Or are they going to go on putting themselves in harms way so that our sons and daughters will have to go save them so that they can go on prophesying the message of their god? This is, of course, not the God of the Bible who calls Himself a God of War. It appears to be the God of folk who would rather prance about drawing attention to self, putting soldiers at risk, and then doing something.

I have great respect for pacifists who join the medical corps of our Armed Force or groups like the Red Cross. Those brave folk act. These pacifists with press agents are only worth our attention at this moment because of their callow ingratitude for the men and women who liberated them.

Throughout these difficult months, we have been heartened by messages of concern for our four colleagues from all over the world. We have been especially moved by the gracious outpouring of support from Muslim brothers and sisters in the Middle East, Europe, and North America.

Sadly, such concern did not motivate the Muslims who killed your friend. There is no hard “prophetic” word for the killers or their enablers in the Islamic clergy . . . only kind words for the minority that did nothing to actually liberate their friends (who in fact have never liberated anybody in Iraq) and hard words or no kind words for their liberators.

That support continues to come to us day after day. We pray that Christians throughout the world will, in the same spirit, call for justice and for respect for the human rights of the thousands of Iraqis who are being detained illegally by the U.S. and British forces occupying Iraq.

Detained illegally? Under whose legal system?

The moral equivalence presented between the terrorists and the Coalition is sickening.

Ask yourself, “Would you rather be held by the Americans and British or by the terrorists?”

The worst Americans will humiliate you, go to jail for it, but let you live. Most Americans will act according to the rule of international law and respect your right to life and basic dignity. You will get food, medical care, and shelter. You will even get a Koran. The terrorists wanted to cut off heads and put the results on television.

During these past months, we have tasted of the pain that has been the daily bread of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Why have our loved ones been taken? Where are they being held? Under what conditions? How are they? Will they be released? When?

Once again the arrest of Sadaam thugs and others is compared to the actions of the terrorists.

With Tom’s death, we felt the grief of losing a beloved friend. Today, we rejoice that our friends Harmeet, Jim and Norman have been freed safely. We continue to pray for a swift and joyful homecoming for the many Iraqis and internationals who long to be reunited with their families. We renew our commitment to work for an end to the war and the occupation of Iraq as a way to continue the witness of Tom Fox. We trust in God’s compassionate love to show us the way.

What would be better: our going home now, allowing Iraq to plunge into violent chaos or winning a war we are winning and leaving a strong Iraq state with a chance at peace and prosperity? We know the pacifists wanted to live Sadaam in power (killing thousands) and now want us to cut and run killing more thousands. Again it appears that unless the Coalition is fighting, death does not bother these folk. Were they going to Sadaam’s Iraq (or present Sudan or North Korea) to protest the actions of the tyrants then? Or do these moral cowards only attack Bush, who will order troops to protect them, and not attack tyrants who would quickly give them the “prophetic” martyrdom they claim to crave?

Living through the many emotions of this day, we remain committed to the words of Jim Loney, who wrote:

“With God’s abiding kindness, we will love even our enemies.
With the love of Christ, we will resist all evil.
With God’s unending faithfulness, we will work to build the beloved community.”

As for the rest of us, to paraphrase a far better poet, we shall not cease from mental fight, nor shall the sword rest in our hands, until we have built in Iraq a green and pleasant land.”

LATER:

It must have dawned on a few of the folk who wrote the first press release that they looked. . . well. . . bad for not thanking the troops who saved them. Of course, what really made them look bad was comparing those same troops morally to the terrorists who tried to kill them, but that is for another day.

These folk, who should be good for days o’ laughs, released the following:

Addenda
23 March 2006, 9 p.m. ET
We have been so overwhelmed and overjoyed to have Jim, Harmeet and Norman freed, that we have not adequately thanked the people involved with freeing them, nor remembered those still in captivity. So we offer these paragraphs as the first of several addenda:

Here is a thought. If you were just saved by a police officer, what would you say first? If this “addenda” is to be believed, they composed a very long press release and just forgot to thank anyone. Note that they did NOT “adequately thank” which seems to be aggressive pacifist speak for NOT THANKING THE TROOPS AT ALL and comparing them to terrorists.

We can be glad to know that this is the first of many addenda. . . these group will be the gift that keeps on giving to President Bush.

We are grateful to the soldiers who risked their lives to free Jim, Norman and Harmeet. As peacemakers who hold firm to our commitment to nonviolence, we are also deeply grateful that they fired no shots to free our colleagues.

Why? What would they have done if shots had been fired? Condemned the rescue? Vote for the anti-war Democrats folks and you will get folk who take this twaddle seriously! We are still waiting for the apology for calling the Armed Forces of the US the cause of the terrorism in Iraq.

We are thankful to all the people who gave of themselves sacrificially to free Jim, Norman, Harmeet and Tom over the last four months, and those supporters who prayed and wept for our brothers in captivity, for their loved ones and for us, their co-workers.

One line for the troops and a second line about pacifism and then it is on to thanking their friends and the members of the Academy. . . and all the little people. . . soon they will be thanking us for loving them, really, really loving them.

We will continue to lift Jill Carroll up in our prayers for her safe return. In addition, we will continue to advocate for the human rights of Iraqi detainees and assert their right to due process in a just legal system.

We do hope Jill Carroll is freed. I bet if she is, it will be with American guns pointing the way. Note that once again. . . there is no word that terrorists should STOP killing people and kidnapping them only another complaint about US troops and our legal system. I assume this is to purify their post from the one sentence added to thank US troops.

Sometimes it is hard not to see pacifism as a view that is at best pleasantly parasitic on culture and at worst suicidal to society, like advocating universal celibacy. Shakers may be pleasant people, but if they don’t recruit your kids, then they die out, because there will be no children of their own. In the same way pacifists seem to depend on non-pacifists for their very existence.

Now my friends who are pacifists will point to the witness of martyrdom as being a way that those who will not resist evil with force can triumph. The blood of the martyrs, they point out, is often the seed of the Church and this is true. But it seems to me that it is true only in those situations where they people doing the killing are not very good at it or do it sporadically (like Rome). Early Japan and parts of Arabia have been very good at sowing the religious ground with salt so that whatever seed the martyrs sowed died. It is easy to mock Constantine or to sit back and be to pure live in the world as it is, but there is a reason Christianity still exists in Europe and does not exist in Arabia and the Far East in its ancient forms.

Of course thoughtful pacifists have suggested answers to these worries, but that does not stop most of us from having the intuition that pacifists are trying to live in the world to come and not in the world as it is. When God has a heavenly host led by Michael the Archangel, it seems hard to see how Christians can be sure, totally sure, that fighting is never the answer. Aren’t we glad God is going to bring Evil to an end using force at the end of all things? Or do we wish he would send France and the UN to deal with the Diabolical Realm? (”There, there Satan. We can see your point of view, but can’t you see ours?”)

Whatever the merits of historical Christian pacifism, and it is a minority notion in church history, modern pacifism has one trait that is utterly annoying. They adopt a tone of moral superiority to every other Christian unjustified by their actual arguments. They have failed to persuade most of us, but now they just sneer at us.

This is particularly odious in the case of the war protesters just freed by our brave troops in Iraq. Say what you will about the war, the smarmy morally bankrupt inability to see a difference between our troops in Iraq and the terrorists is inexcusable intellectually. Even if war is an evil that should always be opposed, one can see a moral difference between the Marines and the terrorists. The terrorists fight with no restraint, the Marines try to follow the rule of law, however, imperfectly. George W. Bush may have slain his hundreds (taking their point of view), but the radical Islamic thugs in the region have killed their millions. Anyone who makes the two morally equivalent cannot be trusted to make any moral distinction.

Here is the delightful press release put out by the pacifists who were freed by the US and British army.

My comments are in italics as usual.

CPT Statement: CPTers Freed

Note the passive language of the pacifists. Our brave troops rescued these ingrates. They were not freed by the terrorists or by an act of nature. In fact, the CPTers did nothing, yet in their own narcissistic minds they are the story. But for most of us, they are not the story. We are happy they are free, but the real story, the real action, came from the armed forces of the Coalition who defeated evil men to liberate ungrateful ones.

23 March 2006

Our hearts are filled with joy today as we heard that Harmeet Singh Sooden, Jim Loney and Norman Kember have been freed safely in Baghdad. Christian Peacemaker Teams rejoices with their families and friends at the expectation of their return to their loved ones and community. Together we have endured uncertainty, hope, fear, grief and now joy during the four months since they were abducted in Baghdad.

Who abducted them? It could be space aliens for all we know. Was it bad that these unnamed folk did this thing? We know what the pacifists endured, but not who caused them to do the enduring. Note again the utter self-centered nature of the pacifists. One cannot even kidnap them, they can only endure suffering.

We rejoice in the return of Harmeet Sooden. He has been willing to put his life on the line to promote justice in Iraq and Palestine as a young man newly committed to active peacemaking.

Active peacemaking seems to consist, in their weird world, of going to a place where one is not wanted, doing nothing constructive except getting in the way of real progress, and putting oneself in harms way so that people bringing peace to a nation (the Coalition) will have to risk their lives to save the peacemakers.

We rejoice in the return of Jim Loney. He has cared for the marginalized and oppressed since childhood, and his gentle, passionate spirit has been an inspiration to people near and far.

Note that these ingrates do not rejoice in the heroes who actually acted (active life saving) to rescue these men. Instead the men who did nothing but get saved are described in glowing detail. It is as if a hospital decided to celebrate the patient instead of the doctor who saves the patients life. These are the sort of folk who resent the police who arrest the criminals that terrorize their own neighborhoods.

We rejoice in the return of Norman Kember. He is a faithful man, an elder and mentor to many in his 50 years of peacemaking, a man prepared to pay the cost.

He went where he was doing no good, where nobody much wanted him, and put himself at risk. He then forced others to save him at great risk to self. People who commit suicide are prepared to “pay the cost” but we do not celebrate their lives.

We remember with tears Tom Fox, whose body was found in Baghdad on March 9, 2006, after three months of captivity with his fellow peacemakers. We had longed for the day when all four men would be released together. Our gladness today is made bittersweet by the fact that Tom is not alive to join in the celebration. However, we are confident that his spirit is very much present in each reunion.

Nobody was released. The ones blessed enough to be saved by the Armed Forces of the Coalition were freed by the Coalition. The terrorists would have killed them all.

Harmeet, Jim and Norman and Tom were in Iraq to learn of the struggles facing the people in that country.

They learned that nobody wanted them there. The terrorists wanted to kill them, the average Iraq citizen lives by a moral code that despises such weak thinking folk, except for the large number of pacifist Moslems in Iraq, and the Coalition troops had to save them.

They went, motivated by a passion for justice and peace to live out a nonviolent alternative in a nation wracked by armed conflict.

While they might have attempted to be non-violent, their foolish behavior gave the terrorists a chance to be terrorists. That does not justify their behavior, but it does make them full of pride or folly. Their plan to live non-violently did not go well, since their being there triggers predictable violence.

They knew that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers.

This also did not go well.

We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq. The occupation must end.

You must read this again and again. The troops that kept the pacifists heads on their bodies are to blame for terrorism. Apparently before we invaded Iraq it was a haven of joy and love. This despite the fact that if we had not invaded Iraq, this same group would be blaming us for the deaths caused by sanctions on the Hussein regime. They also seem not to care that more people in Iraq would have been murdered by the regime than have died in the War and its aftermath.

It appears that unless the US is involved deaths in Iraq do not count.

Today, in the face of this joyful news, our faith compels us to love our enemies even when they have committed acts which caused great hardship to our friends and sorrow to their families.

What kind of acts? They could manage to call the occupation of Iraq by the Coalition “illegal,” but could muster no adjective (not even “naughty”) to describe the brutal murder of one of their own. (By the way: under what legal system was our invasion “illegal?”)

In the spirit of the prophetic nonviolence that motivated Jim, Norman, Harmeet and Tom to go to Iraq, we refuse to yield to a spirit of vengeance.

It appears that they will also not yield to common sense or gratitude either.

We give thanks for the compassionate God who granted our friends courage and who sustained their spirits over the past months. We pray for strength and courage for ourselves so that, together, we can continue the nonviolent struggle for justice and peace.

No thanks for the men who save them. Will they ask our government to let them die when they are captured? Or are they going to go on putting themselves in harms way so that our sons and daughters will have to go save them so that they can go on prophesying the message of their god? This is, of course, not the God of the Bible who calls Himself a God of War. It appears to be the God of folk who would rather prance about drawing attention to self, putting soldiers at risk, and then doing something.

I have great respect for pacifists who join the medical corps of our Armed Force or groups like the Red Cross. Those brave folk act. These pacifists with press agents are only worth our attention at this moment because of their callow ingratitude for the men and women who liberated them.

Throughout these difficult months, we have been heartened by messages of concern for our four colleagues from all over the world. We have been especially moved by the gracious outpouring of support from Muslim brothers and sisters in the Middle East, Europe, and North America.

Sadly, such concern did not motivate the Moslems who killed your friend. There is no hard “prophetic” word for the killers or their enablers in the Islamic clergy . . . only kind words for the minority that did nothing to actually liberate their friends (who in fact have never liberated anybody in Iraq) and hard words or no kind words for their liberators.

That support continues to come to us day after day. We pray that Christians throughout the world will, in the same spirit, call for justice and for respect for the human rights of the thousands of Iraqis who are being detained illegally by the U.S. and British forces occupying Iraq.

Detained illegally? Under whose legal system?

The moral equivalence presented between the terrorists and the Coalition is sickening.

Ask yourself, “Would you rather be held by the Americans and British or by the terrorists?”

The worst Americans will humiliate you, go to jail for it, but let you live. Most Americans will act according to the rule of international law and respect your right to life and basic dignity. You will get food, medical care, and shelter. You will even get a Koran. The terrorists wanted to cut off heads and put the results on television.

During these past months, we have tasted of the pain that has been the daily bread of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Why have our loved ones been taken? Where are they being held? Under what conditions? How are they? Will they be released? When?

Once again the arrest of Sadaam thugs and others is compared to the actions of the terrorists.

With Tom’s death, we felt the grief of losing a beloved friend. Today, we rejoice that our friends Harmeet, Jim and Norman have been freed safely. We continue to pray for a swift and joyful homecoming for the many Iraqis and internationals who long to be reunited with their families. We renew our commitment to work for an end to the war and the occupation of Iraq as a way to continue the witness of Tom Fox. We trust in God’s compassionate love to show us the way.

What would be better: our going home now, allowing Iraq to plunge into violent chaos or winning a war we are winning and leaving a strong Iraq state with a chance at peace and prosperity? We know the pacifists wanted to live Sadaam in power (killing thousands) and now want us to cut and run killing more thousands. Again it appears that unless the Coalition is fighting, death does not bother these folk. Were they going to Sadaam’s Iraq (or present Sudan or North Korea) to protest the actions of the tyrants then? Or do these moral cowards only attack Bush, who will order troops to protect them, and not attack tyrants who would quickly give them the “prophetic” martyrdom they claim to crave?

Living through the many emotions of this day, we remain committed to the words of Jim Loney, who wrote:

“With God’s abiding kindness, we will love even our enemies.
With the love of Christ, we will resist all evil.
With God’s unending faithfulness, we will work to build the beloved community.”

As for the rest of us, to paraphrase a far better poet, we shall not cease from mental fight, nor shall the sword rest in our hands, until we have built in Iraq a green and pleasant land.”

LATER:

It must have dawned on a few of the folk who wrote the first press release that they looked. . . well. . . bad for not thanking the troops who save them. Of course, what really made them look bad was comparing those same troops morally to the terrorists who tried to kill them, but that is for another day.

These folk, who should be good for days o’ laughs, released the following:

Addenda
23 March 2006, 9 p.m. ET
We have been so overwhelmed and overjoyed to have Jim, Harmeet and Norman freed, that we have not adequately thanked the people involved with freeing them, nor remembered those still in captivity. So we offer these paragraphs as the first of several addenda:

Here is a thought. If you were just saved by a police officer, what would you say first? If this “addenda” is to be believed, they composed a very long press release and just forgot to thank anyone. Note that they did NOT “adequately thank” which seems to be aggressive pacifist speak for NOT THANKING THE TROOPS AT ALL and comparing them to terrorists.

We can be glad to know that this is the first of many addenda. . . these group will be the gift that keeps on giving to President Bush.

We are grateful to the soldiers who risked their lives to free Jim, Norman and Harmeet. As peacemakers who hold firm to our commitment to nonviolence, we are also deeply grateful that they fired no shots to free our colleagues.

Why? What would they have done if shots had been fired? Condemned the rescue? Vote for the anti-war Democrats folks and you will get folk who take this twaddle seriously! We are still waiting for the apology for calling the Armed Forces of the US the cause of the terrorism in Iraq.

We are thankful to all the people who gave of themselves sacrificially to free Jim, Norman, Harmeet and Tom over the last four months, and those supporters who prayed and wept for our brothers in captivity, for their loved ones and for us, their co-workers.

One line for the troops and a second line about pacifism and then it is on to thanking their friends and the members of the Academy. . . and all the little people. . . soon they will be thanking us for loving them, really, really loving them.

We will continue to lift Jill Carroll up in our prayers for her safe return. In addition, we will continue to advocate for the human rights of Iraqi detainees and assert their right to due process in a just legal system.

We do hope Jill Carroll is freed. I bet if she is, it will be with American guns pointing the way. Note that once again. . . there is no word that terrorists should STOP killing people and kidnapping them only another complaint about US troops and our legal system. I assume this is to purify their post from the one sentence added to thank US troops.

Imagine that someone told you that Hugh Hewitt was a secret agent for Howard Dean. With breathless assurance, he tells you that Hugh has been given instructions to act as an advocate of Republican or conservative values as part of an elaborate plan. What is the plot? Dean is betting Bush will implode during his second term. This implosion, better than a narrow Kerry win in 2004, will set up the White House for a true progressive in 2008. Hewitt was recruited by Dean from PBS in order to advance this deep plot to deny the Republicans the White House long term and to revive the far left. Hewitt attacks Democrats in order to help them.

Now this is an amazing revelation, contrary to all information one can gather about Hewitt from public records. The Hewitt dissident is going to need some pretty potent evidence to convince Hewitt fans, especially his closest friends, that Hugh secretly pined his entire life to write for the Daily Kos. Now suppose your source is breaking this odd story decades after the fact and his only evidence is an alleged written record of a conversation Hewitt had with one of his friends which was heard by nobody else. Conveniently this evidence also fits an eccentric view of Republican politics in the early twenty-first century, which otherwise would be impossible.

When folks want you to believe something Big . . . they need Big Evidence. Sadly, secret conversations that fly in the face of common sense and the public record need more verification than one person’s word . . . especially if the person reporting the conversation was not there . . . and the report conveniently fits odd views the person holds.

And yet to believe the mainstream media, and folks I am talking to in the airport, Christians should be deeply disturbed by even less evidence advanced in the so-called “Gospel of Judas.” Some media sources act as if the entire Christian faith might be in trouble because of this “explosive document.”

What does this have to do with the Gospel of Judas? Just like the Hugh as Democrat thesis, this ancient manuscript asks us to believe the unlikely based on the improbable.

First, the good news: anyone who loves old books (hurrah!) has to be happy to find any manuscript from the third or fourth century. Any new text will expand scholarship. It is far better to learn something directly than indirectly and an early manuscript that cuts out some of the middle men of textual transmission is helpful.

The bad news, from a scholarly point of view, is that there is not much new here or much that is exciting in terms of explosive new ideas. Ancient Christian apologists wrote about the gospel of Judas summarizing its main points. Irenaeus, perhaps relying on earlier apologetic works, is the first example now extant. Now, if this new text is a real one, we know Irenaeus got it right. We have long known such a Gospel existed by about 150 A.D. This new manuscript does not contradict this date and in fact suggests it.

What does this mean? If the Gospel of Judas undermined the faith, then every reading Christian would have left the faith by now as we have know of its claims for centuries! It is nifty to have the actual text, but that adds nothing to the argument. There is nothing in this text (so far as I can tell from news accounts) we did not already know.

The Gospel of Judas claims that Jesus told Judas to betray him. It claims that Judas is the best disciple (convenient!). It was written decades after Judas was dead . . . and so it could not be falsified even if true. There is just no reason to believe it.

We have long known that there was an early sub-Christian group that decided Judas was a good guy. Why? First, some Christians wanted to make Christianity less Jewish. They wanted to squash Greek ideas into Christianity and the standard story told in the canonical Gospels got in the way. The traditional Gospels don’t leave an “exciting Jesus” from the point of view of those who want religion weird, esoteric, or Greek. Jesus in the oldest Gospels (which are plausibly written by eye witnesses) is just too first century and very Jewish. How can he fit into the world of mystery religions and Greek philosophy?

Now I am a big fan of thinking about this sort of question, but one must resist the temptation to change the text and give oneself a Jesus that makes the job easier. Sadly, this early Christian sect, the Gnostics, took the easy way out and began to write their own texts.

The second reason these sub-Christians groups wanted a new Gospel was a desire to know stuff no one else knew. This is one reason we have so few copies of their books (in fact Christians preserved their memory in many cases!). Copies of Gnostic texts were few and far between (unlike the Gospels) because these groups did not want “public readings” (as happened with the Gospels), but only readings for the insiders.

The Gnostics had a problem. Public Christianity was, well, public and allowed the common folk to examine their arguments and sacred texts. The same kind of person who wants to become a Free Mason today and learn secret words and “deep insights” unavailable to the “outsider” also existed in the ancient world. Some folks just don’t like worshipping with just anybody. They want a small group of the “brightest and the best.”

Think of these Gnostic gospels as the club handbooks for the secret societies of the ancient world. We don’t get the funny hats of groups like the Shriners when we look at the ancient secrets societies, but we do get the funny ideas. The Gnostic texts contain teachings that do not fit early Christian documents from the first century (like the letters of Paul). They contain bizarre (really!) stories about Jesus childhood and often show strong reliance of the canonical Gospels/or standard accounts.

Gnostic ideas lost in the market place of ideas. They lost because their ideas were derivative, elitist, and misogynistic.

The Gnostics did not lose because they were persecuted. They were losing or had lost long before Christians had the power to do much overt persecuting, unless one counts having better arguments as persecution! Gnostics simply lost the argument. Go read a Gnostic gospel and compare it to the Jesus of the canonical gospels. The Gnostic gospels do not reflect a Jewish Jesus (which is suspicious since Jesus was Jewish) or the worldview of the converted Jews of the first century. They do not jibe well with the letters of Paul, which even the most liberal scholars agree come within living memory of the events portrayed. At least Mark (on even the most liberal reading) is based on manuscripts from the period of the eye witnesses to the events and is plausibly written within the lifetime of those eye witnesses.

The canonical gospels argue that Judas betrayed his Lord because he was a bad man. Ask yourself what you know of betrayers. Is it more likely Judas was motivated by money (in your experience of bad men) or secret plans to exalt Jesus? Surely Judas as bad guy is the simplest and most plausible interpretation of the betrayal of our Lord! The burden of proof is and was on the Gnostics to provide contrary evidence. This was a burden they could not meet in the second century and there is no reason to think they could do so now.

Bluntly, orthodox Christianity had no profound reason to lie about Judas. Nothing so great would have been gained or lost theologically if Judas had been written out of the story altogether. He is put in because he was there . . . and those who knew him well assigned motives to him. On the other hand, the Gnostic group’s very existence depended on having mysterious and counter-intuitive secret knowledge. They needed to be weird . . . and the Gospel of Judas was written to fill that need.

Why is this so attractive to modern people? If there is nothing new here, then why do we get so excited? Our interest often gets mixed up with bizarre anti-Catholic conspiracies that have been popular since the founding of the nation. Otherwise responsible people will speculate about all sorts of documents hidden for centuries in the Vatican. Of course to believe this one will have to ignore that the Pope has been forced out of the Vatican several times in history, be utterly cynical about every Pope (surely one of them was not a fraud?), and believe something based on no positive evidence, but their hatred of the Bishop of Rome.

Waggish liberal scholars will coyly suggest that the gospels might hint at Judas and Jesus having such a relationship. They point to Jesus telling Judas to do what he must do quickly, but then overlook the guilt assigned by the same gospels to Judas. Of course they never actually argue this openly, because they know how weak of an argument this is.

Why? It proves too much. These ideas assume the Biblical writers were too stupid to get rid of a pro-Judas statement, but clever enough to invent his guilt. Why invent reasons for his guilt but leave in mitigating passages? The more sensible view is that the Gospels (which were written very early in time) were written before the Gnostic gospel of Judas. They don’t reflect any theological worry that anyone (and who would?) would suspect that Judas was on the Jesus team. As a result, they report the whole story without fear, including parts that their later foes would use against them. (“Aha, but did not Jesus tell Judas to act?” “Well, yes, but He was very unhappy with Judas’ choice. Evil must come but woe be to he by whom it comes.”) If the “Judas story” found in the Gospel of Judas had really been around at the time of the writing of the canonical Gospels, and the Gospel writers were so all fired intent on changing history to grind a theological axe then they would have left out any expression that helped “the other side.”

But just as conventional historians have always thought . . . the Gnostics and their books were the product of the second wave of Christianity that was struggling with its Jewish roots and wondering what to do. The Gnostics offered the Church an anti-woman, anti-Jesus, elitist, Greek path. The Church found the only safe road was to embrace her actual roots and stick to history. That is why the older Gospels survived.

What is the mainstream media doing? Religion sells. Over written stories confirming religion sell papers. . . but so do stories that attack religion. The temptation is strong for reporters, who in my experience have staggering ignorance about religion, to hype a story. They don’t much care for traditional religion, are not well read, and hype sells. So it is easy for them to decided to challenge Christianity right before Easter (what odd timing!). . . sell a television special and then move on. The good news is that the new media including blogs can quickly give another point of view.

Finally, we should all beware. Ancient texts or artifacts sometimes get announced, even “confirmed” only to turn out to be fakes. Anybody remember the “bone box” of James, Jesus brother? It may be real, but is probably a fake. It was announced with the same explosive media hoopla. . . The document in question has a very odd history to say the least . . . and we shall see what happens when the entire world of scholarship gets a crack at it.

Just as you would require major evidence to believe Hugh was a secret Democrat, so you should need huge amounts of evidence to believe that Judas was a secret Jesus agent. You are not tempted to worry about Hugh . . . you should not worry about Jesus!

The sad thing is that ill informed people might believe the hype and worry.

More blogging later, but I am in the Pittsburg airport following a great time at the wonderful Franciscan University of Steubenville, as a guest of a student club. It seems to me that this University would be a great choice for Roman parents looking for a first class education integrating spiritual and academic values. I was very impressed with the students I met.

Lincoln was in despair before his second election to the presidency. Most people felt the mood in the North had turned against the war. The Democrats, many of whom opposed the liberation of the oppressed in the South, had finally gotten sober and were running a general, supposedly more popular with the troops than Lincoln, for president. The Republican party? It had no choice but to support Lincoln, but not everyone liked it. One wing of the party found him too moderate and others too little concerned about meeting their private political objectives.

He was a President that the big city papers, especially the New York Times, often viewed as an inadequate leader with out a well thought out policy. His speeches were often considered embarrassing failures, lacking the stem winding and literary elegance the times demanded.

Then Lincoln won the war and suddenly everyone knew that he was great.

Once again, the nation has a war time President facing discontent. Howard Fineman recently pined for Clinton noting that Clinton knows how to explain french fry production. One could almost feel his sigh as he longed for a man who could engage us for hours in the trivial or in his own personal life. Clinton could explain the world to us and Fineman is right about Clinton’s power in the world of words.

Clinton was simply impotent in that world.

Bush has set a course for victory that will transform the world for a generation and he is well on his way to success. Iraq is not bursting into Civil War. The religious leaders know they need to unite. Our armed forces are not falling apart. . . enlistment remains high. While Clinton looks into the rear view mirror, checking on himself and Europe, Bush is making new allies with rising nations such as India. Bush is looking ahead to the future on the Pacific rim. This cowboy Bush is a Western man and he understands the future is in the Pacific. He will secure us friends in that region from Mongolia to South Korea to New Delhi that will give us powerful allies for decades to come.

Most important, he will have built a model republic in Iraq that will transform the Middle East because it is there. What will make it fail? Civil War? Who will lead it? Terrorists? Terrorists alone cannot overthrow a government and they will eventually unite the common folk in horror against their “cause.” Iran? The young people of that nation will soon long to emulate a prosperous neighbor. Twenty-first century Iraq will have more appeal to the young of Iran than the sixteenth century vision of their own tyrants.

When the dominos of democracy begin to fall across the Middle East it will be George Bush’s victory, because he stayed the course. When Israel is safe with secure borders, it will be because Bush had a plan and despite the imperfect implementation that will always plague any great vision he saw it to the end.

The mistake his opponents make is that the President will be in office for more than two more years whatever they do. In wartime, Bush will be able to act on the chief issue of our time to the very end of his term. His long struggle with Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and his goal of transforming them from an Axis of Evil to allies does not require popularity. There is little political likely hood that even his foes are so reckless to cut off the money the troops need and so Bush will be able to pursue his course to the end.

Our media culture never liked Bush and now, as they grow with all second acts, they are tired of him. The public also grows weary and wishes the sacrifice, the pain of losing our best, would end. We are irritated by the petty mistakes that by a second term add up. Bush has called us to greatness and we are tired of the trumpets. We wish we could rest, even though we know we cannot. It costs us nothing to blame the one who keeps calling us to battle to a pollster. It is easy to gripe and moan, but the vast majority of Americans will not turn back. Just as in the Civil War, only the Republican Party offers victory and Americans will not accept less.

In the end, it will not be Bush that the Democrats face in 2008. Make no mistake some other Republican, equally committed to seeing Bush’s world come to pass, will get the nomination, but he or she will be a fresh face. This candidate will have made no gaffes and will have new energy, but Bush will have locked him into a course that he will not even try to escape. He will adjust the rudder, but the direction is set. Against such a person, the Democrats will fracture between the insanity of those who wish our defeat and the responsible wing of the party which also will do as Bush is doing but with greater modifications. Bush has committed this nation to a long task that no responsible figure, not Hilary Clinton and not Joe Lieberman, could escape. Nobody more radical can win.

The next President will simply continue the Bush agenda: republics in the Middle East, destruction of terrorist cells globally, and friendship with India and Asia.

And at some point the nation will remember that for six years and counting there has not been a major terrorist attack on the nation since 9/11. Bush kept us safe, far safer than any predicted. Committees can go on writing reports of this failure of this or that department, but they cannot hide the fact that Bush and his government has been competent enough to keep us safe.

Bin Laden has failed, utterly failed, to hit the United States again since 9/11. Even if he lands a blow soon, six years of impotence cannot be an accident. George W. Bush cannot please Howard Fineman with long discussions on the economics of the french fry, but he has kept us safe from terror.

The chief difference between Bush and Lincoln when examining their time of troubles before their final victory is that Bush has already won his second term. He need only stay the course and get Iraq to stability to become a Rushmore president. They say that less than forty percent still support the President. I can understand that. We are all tired. But polls don’t show the Democrats winning in 2008 against the two leading Republicans. Why? We are tired, but we are not stupid. We will gripe at our leaders, like all good Americans, but we are not willing to fail. The next President, like the next Congress, will continue the fight that Bush has begun so well and, just as in all our great wars, the United States will win.

One day, when central Iraq looks like the Northern third does now (and do not think the Iranian Kurds do not know what Bush has done for their Iraqi brethren), then a very hard truth will occur to world.

George Bush will have led his armed forces to victory. He will have not blinked or talked himself into a new policy every poll. He will have won.

After Appomatox, everyone remembered that they had always supported Lincoln, just as (I am told) every Steelers fan now recalls prophesying the triumph of their team in the middle of the season when the playoffs looked hopeless. Such fans, such supporters, are welcome to the party. It is human nature to lose hope in tough times and then to forget that loss when those times change. Nobody would judge such folk harshly, but better still to have been more a simple human, to have been a civilized man. It is the nature of a civilized man to remain undeterred by obstacles in pursuit of his great goals.

There are forty percent, we are told, of such men and women in this war. Aren’t you glad that we can always tell our children that we were in that forty percent and know it is the truth? When we look up at Rushmore and see George W. Bush there, wouldn’t you be glad that before victory was obvious to even a Democrat you saw it coming? These are good days to support the President!

Recent news that a fairly insane rant by a geography teacher about politics was caught on tape by one of his students supports my contention that parents and local schools can be trusted to deal with this sort of thing. The school is dealing with the issue carefully and one cannot doubt that the end result will be less ranting and more geography in the class. On the other hand, though I find the teacher’s views amusingly insane, I cannot take the comfort some conservatives do if he is not allowed to express them as part of his teaching.

Strong parent control may restrict the content of his speech, and I would willing to live with that, but then conservatives (and the religious) will have to live with restrictions on their speech when they express minority views. This runs the risk of making education boring and inoffensive.

I do not think most parents or school administrators want such boring education. They must be trusted with the education of children, because (after all) these are their children! The situation with insane teachers like this geography teacher is that the system has been messed up by union protections and Big Government censorship of some ideas (such as intelligent design).

What is the danger of too heavy a hand on teachers? This leftist teacher was in a geography class and geography will have political overtones. As any social studies teacher knows, a good way to motivate discussion is to stake out a position and let students react to it. This Socratic style of education is good for students and good education as it forces the student to think outside the box.

Now of course if the teacher spends the bulk of every class advancing his or her agenda in an area that touches on, but does not consist of the core curriculum, has created a problem. Who should make the call to prevent boring education on the one hand and ideological rant fests on the other? Teachers, parents, and administrators can (in general) be trusted to make that call if left alone by courts and the state. This is not a perfect solution (is there one?), but it is better than Big Government imposing oat meal flavor education on everyone. . . the intellectual equivalent of Oliver Twist’s gruel.

The strength of the reaction to this teacher is partly a result of a feeling of impotence on the part of parents and taxpayers. They don’t feel that they have a say in creating or choosing the education they are forced to support. In a freer system if parents did not want someone in the classroom with the ideology of that ranting leftist teacher (and I am sure I would not want him for my own children!), they would be free to work through the school board and find someone else. . . but at the moment they are prevented from doing so by teacher’s unions and Big Government. Both groups tell them what can and cannot be said in the classroom and traditional conservatives know that this has not been done evenly.

The fundamental problem is a lack of educational choice combined with this government control. I have chosen private education to avoid exactly this sort of leftist agit-prop and to expose my students to ideas now banned in the classroom. All parent’s should more easily have this option as well by being able to take their own money (now taken from them by taxes) as credits to the school of their choice. Until then, as long as we must have government schools, we should allow teachers and local schools as much latitude as possible in picking their faculty. After all, the liberal is more likely to be protected in his opinions in today’s government schools than the maverick conservative.

Fundamentally, parents should be the ones to decide the nature of the education their children should receive.

An outstanding Torrey chum asks if the mullahs and other religious leaders are not sufficient to count as leaders in a civil war. I think not, because they lack a political platform, an alternative government, or any ideas of how things “could be better.” Hatred of one’s neighbor can raise hell on earth, but is not likely to sustain anything more than unrest. A civil war, the worst of all situations, needs more than hate. It needs an alternative vision. Now those religious leaders in Iraq, the Shiite, who might have such a vision (gained from Iran) are the most likely to support the new constitution since they mostly gain from it. The Sunni who are trying to get the Shiite to abandon support of the constitution are, therefore, trying to get the Shiite clergy and people to act against their own immediate interests. The Sunni people, on the other hand, who have the most short-term gain in the failure of the new constitution seemingly have no alternative plan but chaos. Many Sunni, even if they hate the new constitution, will reject chaos.

So for now I remain that rare Iraq optimist.

Fred has posted a great argument, which he is not yet willing to embrace, about the Trinity and answers to prayer. Now I am a Trinitarian (said as I piously cross myself) and I greatly admire Andrew Murray, but I think the argument against radical monotheism (such as Islam) might fail on the following grounds:

Suppose God is outside of time (experiencing everything in human time as a “now”) and has foreknowledge. Such a God could be said to “answer in prayer” in the single creative act that produced the world. Knowing what He knew about the future as He created the world He also met those needs in it that fulfilled His divine desires. If God could create as a radically monotheistic entity, then He certainly could make that single creative act answer all His desires (which would include making those states of affairs exist that He willed to exist.) Such a God heard the prayers we will make from the foundation of the world and so does not change His mind (which seems to be Murray’s fear), but made up His mind from the start. From that perspective God does not answer our prayers, He has already answered our prayers. The relationship with us formed in the act of creating us seems sufficient to me to spur the Divine will in this timeless creation. This also seems to mean prayer matters, our freely praying (assuming free will is compatible with foreknowledge) is built into the entire plan for the cosmos.

The Trinity, it seems, adds a poetic beauty to answered prayer as it has God responding to us the way He responds within Himself, but I don’t think it improves on radical monotheism in the way Murray hopes.

But perhaps I am missing something in Murray’s argument. . .

Long time readers of my blog Eidos, hello Mom, know my fears regarding the death of Russia. She embraced secularism first of all the nations of Europe as an official dogma and her freedom from Communism led only to adding Western libertine behavior to her woes. Now others are writing about it. Look here.