Tasteless Atheists

There have been a lot of books written by atheists about the folly of religion recently, and they tend to take a rather high line with believers. 

Apart from the usual bromides about religion causing wars, and religious people hopelessly missing the point about evolution, they proudly parade their "rational ethics" as a substitute for belief.

As Sam Schulman writes:

They write as if great minds had never before wrestled with the big questions of creation, moral law and the contending versions of revealed truth. They argue as if these questions are easily answered by their own blunt materialism. Most of all, they assume that no intelligent, reflective person could ever defend religion rather than dismiss it.

Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion complains about people accusing him of being very "nineteenth century."

Actually, it is probably more accurate to call him "eighteenth century."  He seems to think that we are still arguing about the proofs of God's existence.  But I thought that Kant had put that one away two hundred years ago and more when he showed that you couldn't prove or disprove God's existence.

But Kant did something more.  He claimed that we couldn't know reality, things-in-themselves, but only appearances.  He must have been onto something because a century later a young German kid completely upset the assumptions about space and time by saying that space and time were relative, not absolute as Newton had assumed.

Atheists like Dawkins and Sam Harris of The End of Faith don't engage with Kant, and that's a shame.  They delight their followers by beating up on the small fry like fundamentalists and the religious right instead of dealing with the big beast.  

Kant is generally thought to be the most important philosopher since Aristotle, so what he wrote about God would have to be important, you would think.

By the way, Sam Harris writes a lot about in The End of Faith about "rational ethics," but when it comes to the point he just presents his idea of the end of ethics as increasing happiness and decreasing suffering as given.  How rational is that?

The Cars at the Detroit Auto Show

Which is more important?  The news, according to Popular Mechanics, that Dodge has put an 

8.4-liter aluminum V10 engine in the latest version of its super coupe/convertible to deliver 90 more horsepower and 0-60 mph acceleration time of under four seconds — not to mention a horsepower rating of 600[?]

Or the news that Chevrolet has thrown in the towel and produced a new 2008 Malibu "offering more expressive styling on completely new sheet metal" and a "refined 2.4-liter" engine and available 6-speed automatic transmission?

Never mind.  The important thing is cars.  Cars are important, and always have been.  Here at Road to the Middle Class we believe in personal transportation.  We follow the instinct of the Mesopotamian king who liked to drive his chariot on the king's road in and out of town.  And woe betide the subject who tried to use the king's own personal highway reserved for his own personal transportation.

But it is interesting that finally GM and Ford are competing directly in the Honda Accord Toyota Camry market segment.  The specs for the new Ford Fusion are exactly the same as the Accord and Camry, in weight and engine and power.  Only the price is different: $1,000 less. Presumably the new Chevrolet Malibu will follow suit.

Imagine having to give away $1,000 per unit in order to compete head-to-head with market-leading Honda and Toyota.

Speaker Pelosi pledges partnership

Today the Democrats formally took control of Congress as Nancy Pelosi was sworn in as Speaker of the House of Representatives.  As Andrew Taylor reported for the AP, she told the House: 

"I accept this gavel in the spirit of partnership, not partisanship, and look forward to working with you on behalf of the American people," Mrs. Pelosi said in remarks prepared for her colleagues. "In this House, we may belong to different parties, but we serve one country."

That is right and proper.  And indeed it is a healthy thing for the Democrats to be handed power.  They have got into power on the strength of a withering partisanship that began in the aftermath of the razor-thin election of 2000, and now they need to put up or shut up.

The truth is that President Bush and the Republicans dodged a pretty nasty bullet in the early 2000s, turning a deflationary spiral into healthy economic growth.  As is right and proper, they have gotten no credit at all for this achievement.  The voters ask: "What have you done for me lately?" And they are right.

Now it is time to "do something" about the nation's festering problems that had to take second place while the political leadership properly concentrated on fixing the dot-com crash and the 9/11 rendez-vous with terror.

Social Security, education, Medicare: all these programs are the legacy of a century of the welfare state.  But they are bloated monstrosities, unaccountable and unreformed.

Just what do the Democrats propose--other than throwing money at them, of course.

A Lesson in Race Relations

We've all heard the one about Jesse Jackson admitting that, when he's being followed down the street on a dark night, it's nice to know that the chap behind him is white.

Even though it doesn't fit the MSM template, the fact is that young African Americans do have a deserved reputation for deliberate intimidation.  Like this story reported by Larry Elder.  The car in front of him at a traffic light failed to move when the light turned green.  So, after a suitable pause, he gently tooted his horn.

The three passengers immediately flipped me the bird, with the two in the backseat glowering at me as we moved forward.

The driver and passengers, of course, were black.

Was he a victim, a black man victimized by a car full of African American teenagers, he asked his brother in a bookstore parking lot, flipping the bird for emphasis.

Unfortunately, he was standing in a vacant parking stall and a white thirtysomething driver thought that he was the target of the hand gesture.  Larry Elder decided he ought to apologize.

You can imagine how eager the white guy was to be accosted by two black guys. It was only after Larry and his brother had followed him into the store that communication became possible.

Then the white "guy slowed down, and turned and smiled."

That's what it will take to heal race relations in the USA.  People like Larry Elder.

Come Back to Class, Says Duke Administration

Oh good. Now that newly elected Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong has withdrawn charges of rape against the Duke Three the administration of Duke University has invited the two accused students still at the university to return to classes, according to the report of Fox News.

"As circumstances have evolved in this extraordinary case, we have attempted to balance recognition of the gravity of legal charges with the presumption of your innocence," Larry Moneta, Duke's vice president for student affairs said in a letter to Seligmann dated Tuesday.

So that’s all right then. Duke President Richard Brodhead agrees.

"We have decided that the right and fair thing to do is to welcome back Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty to resume their studies at Duke for the spring semester."

But we who are not liberal and not members of the Duke community and not card-carrying members of the Democratic Party understand exactly what has been going on in the Duke Rape Case.

It is rank, raw, liberal injustice. It is rank, raw, liberal race-baiting. It is rank, raw, liberal mob hysteria. It is the injustice that often festers and bursts open when a self-righteous political community is so powerful that it lacks any sense of accountability to the nation as a whole. It is the injustice that swirls around the whole liberal project as the social idealism of 1900 has slowly encrusted into the powerful incumbency of 2006.

We have seen what went down at Duke, and what went down in the prosecutor’s office. We saw the reaction of the liberal Duke faculty.

And we know that we are looking at a political culture that is rotten to the core. Or, if you like, a political culture that, in its self-congratulatory fight against racism, sexism, classism, and homophobic has become racist, sexist, classist, and heterophobic to the core.

And it is wrong.

File This Under "Climaco Case"

OK, I admit it. When the New York Times gets in trouble, I enjoy it. The Germans, in their thoroughness, have a word for it: Schadenfreude. Or as some wag wrote: It isn’t enough for me to be happy. The rest of the world must be miserable.

I’m talking about the Climaco case, of course. Carmen Climaco makes her appearance in the coda of a long article in the Times Magazine about the criminalizing of abortion in El Salvador, “Pro-Life Nation” by Jack Hitt.

It’s a story that is bound to appeal to the upscale women readers of the New York Times Magazine. You see, if you get an abortion in El Salvador you could go to jail.

It’s all done in the best narrative style of the new journalism. We follow the story of “D.C.,” a “a tall and strikingly beautiful woman” after she had a botched abortion. There’s the examination in the clinic, the investigation, and finally, the court date.

[T]he judge began the proceeding, and he said I would go free, that what they were going to do was look for the person who had done this to me and that I had no reason to go to jail. I was so happy, so very happy.

What? No jail? That would never do. The NYT subscribers expect value for money.

So, in the sweep of a pen, we get the case of a real woman who went to jail for getting an abortion. It’s the story

of a 20-year-old mother named Carmen Climaco, whose abortion of a fetus estimated at 18 weeks had been recast by the prosecutor as aggravated homicide.

Now she’s in jail for 30 years.

Perfect! Outrage! And Bush is to blame!

Not so fast. As the Times Public Editor, Byron Calame, put it:

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the “recently born.”

You see, the autopsy determined that the baby’s “lungs floated when submerged in water,” a test done, presumably, to determine if the lungs had been inflated.

No doubt you’d have to look long and hard for an 18-week-old fetus that could sport that kind of lung.

The story shows why media bias is such a problem. It’s not just the bias. It’s the professionalism, the credibility, that gets lost in the haste to advance a political or cultural agenda.

If Jack Hitt had been an unbiased reporter he could have checked up on the Climaco story with one of his pro-life sources. “What’s this deal about this kid sent up for 30 years for a botched abortion,” he could have said.

You can imagine how quickly any pro-life activist would have tried to disprove that one.

But Hitt didn’t do that. And the multiple layers of editing at the New York Times didn’t either.

Now it turns up that the Times may be axing the Public Editor position.

What a surprise!

The Economist Discovers Pentecostalism

At the Road to the Middle Class we believe that a critical component of the great transition from country life to city life is enthusiastic religion, and most useful of all, enthusiastic Christianity.

Wherever you find people trying to make it in the city you will find a spontaneous upwelling of enthusiastic Christianity.

The reason is simple. Enthusiastic Christianity gives ordinary people the tools they need to succeed in the city. It worked in Britain in the Industrial Revolution. It worked in the United States, and now it is working its magic in Latin America and Africa.

Now, finally, the secular western elite is starting to wake up and figure out what is going on: e.g. The Economist (sub). It has suddenly discovered that there are 500 million Pentecostals out there, out of a total of 2 billion Christians worldwide.

Pentecostalism began with William J. Seymour’s mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, about the time that the secular elites were writing religion out of the future in favor of their own secular religions.

The great secular ideologies of the 19th and early 20th centuries&mdashfrom Marxism to Freudianism&mdashhave faded while Seymour's spirit-filled version of Christianity has flourished. Pentecostal denominations have prospered, and Pentecostalism has infused traditional denominations through the wildly popular charismatic movement.

...
Pentecostalism offers a “third way” between scientific rationalism and traditional religion. For many people rationalism is thin gruel. But they are reluctant to return to traditional churches. Pentecostalism offers something different&mdasha religion that is about excitement and emotion, not hierarchy and dogma.

...
Pentecostal churches offer a ready-made community and a source of discipline in an urban society rife with temptations. The churches are full of put-upon women who have dragged their men along, hoping to wean them off drink, gambling and other women.

This is an important point. Secular modernists have made a great point about the helplessness of women down the ages. But Pentecostalism is mainly driven by the needs of women—for safety, for community, for discipline, and for ecstasy.

Who cares if its God and its theology is cross-ways with science and evolution? It is getting the job done for hundreds of millions of people who desperately need to learn how to live in the city.