The Reformation at First Things

Apparently, self-described anti-Catholic internet blogger Frank Turk has been given guest status at First Things "Evangel" blog, so naturally he uses it to indulge in a pharisaic concern over whether he becomes "unclean" by posting on a site that has banner ads for a book by Pope Benedict XVI.

Before you read this, I know: I’m a guest here, and that as a guest it’s best for me to honor my hosts’ platform and objectives. And in that, I don’t mean to be an ingrate or to offend advertisers who make this blog possible.


BUT…

Is anyone else bothered by the banner ad at the top of the page for that movie about the visions at Fatima and books by the current Pope?

If not, fellow contributors, are there any ads (apart from pr0n) which would cause you to wonder whether or not it’s right to partner here?

I’m curious …

The comments then descend into various uses of the term "Roman" to describe Catholics, e.g., "The Romans may do as they wish" and "It seems to me that (doctrinally) those who are most faithful to the teachings of Rome are those whom we should be concerned about within the Roman Catholic church."

Nice display of Christian charity in all that.

What major institution deserves the title for most evil? Well, I'm pretty sure the Washington Post wouldn't have printed the answer if it was "Islam" or "the Jews."

The Washington Post gives Richard Dawkins space to vent about the Catholic Church's rapproachment with Anglicans who voluntarily choose to enter the Catholic Church as corporate bodies. Apparently, this private decision about voluntary choices by some Christians is an occasion for the uber-atheist to vent on about bigotry.  Dawkins writes:

What major institution most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world? In a field of stiff competition, the Roman Catholic Church is surely up there among the leaders. The Anglican church has at least a few shreds of decency, traces of kindness and humanity with which Jesus himself might have connected, however tenuously: a generosity of spirit, of respect for women, and of Christ-like compassion for the less fortunate. The Anglican church does not cleave to the dotty idea that a priest, by blessing bread and wine, can transform it literally into a cannibal feast; nor to the nastier idea that possession of testicles is an essential qualification to perform the rite.

And:

For some, the motive will be homophobic bigotry, and a consequent dislike of the efforts of decent church leaders such as the Archbishop of Canterbury to accept those whose sexual orientation happens to deviate from majority taste. Never mind that they will be joining an institution where buggering altar boys pervades the culture.

Such a strange, demented rhetoric, opposing alleged bigotry with actual bigotry. 

Dawkins' descent into patent bigotry has been identified before.  Writing in First Things, Anthony Flew has described Dawkins as "something he (Dawkins) probable thought impossible: a secularist bigot."  According to Flew:

What is important about this passage is not what Dawkins is saying about Flew but what he is showing here about Dawkins. For if he had had any interest in the truth of the matter of which he was making so much he would surely have brought himself to write me a letter of enquiry. (When I received a torrent of enquiries after an account of my conversion to Deism had been published in the quarterly of the Royal Institute of Philosophy I managed – I believe – eventually to reply to every letter.)


This whole business makes all too clear that Dawkins is not interested in the truth as such but is primarily concerned to discredit an ideological opponent by any available means. That would itself constitute sufficient reason for suspecting that the whole enterprise of The God Delusion was not, as it at least pretended to be, an attempt to discover and spread knowledge of the existence or non-existence of God but rather an attempt – an extremely successful one – to spread the author’s own convictions in this area.

That seems like as quick a disembowlment of Dawkins' pretensions as has ever been written.


In regard to Dawkins' bigotted rant, Damien Thompson at the Telegraph asks a pertinent question:

The peg for this piece? The Pope’s offer to make special arrangements for Anglicans converting to Rome, a matter I would have thought was none of Prof Dawkins’s business. But I’m not going to bother to argue with any of his points, because these are the ravings of a man who appears to have lost all sense of proportion. Seriously: is there something wrong with him?

The answer is clearly yes.

Polytheism, Pluralism and Tolerance

Wintery Knight has a very interesting excerpt of a dialogue between a Hindu and a Christian.  The Hindu's argument seems to be that the Christians should be prevented from proselytizing, or even speaking about their faith in public, because Christianity makes a claim to exclusivity, whereas Hinduism can permit a diversity of religious views...except for one that says other views are false.

Hindu_Jagdish:


- Hindus believe that there are many ways to achieve union with God

- they are all equal, you can follow the path you like to be united with God

- we Hindus are very very inclusive, every other path is a right path to God

Hindu_Anil:

- the right to freedom of religion does not allow you to say that Christianity is correct

- Jesus did not say that you go and condemn people of other religions

Christian_Sunil:

- but I convert people by my love and self-sacrifice, not through coercion

Hindu_Anil:

- it’s ok to be a Christian if you keep it to yourself and don’t tell anyone else that their religion is wrong

According to Professor Philip Carey, Christianity is unique in the religious-sphere because of its obsession with the person of Jesus.  Because Christianity is about a person, it is essential to know who that person is, which therefore puts a heavy emphasis on doctrine, specifically correct doctrine, about the person of Jesus.  Christianity is thus a faith rather than simply a practice and faith - being intellectual adherence to ideas - are by definition exclusive.  One can, for example, be faithful to many things, until there is a conflict among those things, and then the true faith has to be determined. This is the reason for the Christian obsession with orthodoxy, i.e., "correct belief," rather than some Christian proclivity for hair-splitting.

In contrast, other religions tend to emphasize "orthopraxy," i.e., "correct action."  Undoubtedly all religions have a mix of orthodoxy and orthopraxy.  In the Catholic and Orthodox churches, orthopraxy can be found in the requirement of correct liturgical and sacramental actions, but even there orthopraxy follows from,  or is intended to safeguard, orthodox belief.  For example, the hedges around the sanctity of the Eucharist simultaneously flow from and emphasize the realization that the Eucharist is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ.

Religions without the commitment to "faith" or "doctrine" may be able to find unity in an orthopraxy divorced from the personal belief of the practitioners of that religion.  Hence, it is said that the pagan Roman religions were frankly indifferent to the personal beliefs of their adherents as long as those adherents went through the proper motions.  I'm skeptical of such sweeping generalizations because I suspect that the desire for meaning is wired into the human psyche and, so, we care what other people believe.  Also, I note that the Athenians seemed to care very much about what Socrates believed, albeit they might have cared less if he hadn't also been the teacher of various politically disreputable students. 

The exclusive claims of Christianity may represent something unique even compared to the exclusive claims of Judaism.  Certainly, Jews could not worship other deities, but apparently gentiles could participate in Jewish communal worship while maintaining a "faith" in other deities.  According to Paula Fredriksen:

DH Ancient Judaism is a way of life, a way of looking at everything. So what would have changed for a God-fearer when he or she became convinced by Paul’s message?


PF I imagine Paul going into a Diaspora synagogue as part of the gathering that would happen on the Sabbath, and among his audience are gentiles who are interested enough in Judaism to also be there. What they hear is an extreme form of Judaism—that the Messiah has come, and that the end of the age is at hand. They’re able to understand what Paul is talking about, because they’ve heard the Bible read to them in the synagogue.

Behaviorally, what changes for them? The difference is that Paul said they must not worship their own gods anymore; that they couldn’t eat the meat that was sacrificed to their native gods anymore; that they could only worship the God of Israel through baptism into His Son, Jesus Christ. Paul (and others like him who were giving this message to these “churched” pagans—pagans who were already in the synagogue) is giving them the message that in this regard they have to act as if they’re Jews. These gentiles are being told by Paul that, as a matter of principle, they have to violate their ancestral custom and not worship their ancestral gods. They’re going to be included, as gentiles, in the final redemption.

Now in one sense, so far, that’s normal Judaism. Paul is standing on top of a centuries-long tradition that anticipates gentiles being part of the kingdom of God. Israel will be redeemed from exile, and gentiles will be redeemed from idol worship. Paul, in this odd wrinkle in time between the resurrection and the second coming, is asking these gentiles to stop worshiping idols before the kingdom is publicly established. He’s making a much more rigorous Jewish demand on his gentiles-in-Christ than the normal synagogue would make on their pagan gentile sympathizers, because he’s saying, “You must not worship your own gods any longer.” Normal synagogues never did that. It would be much more difficult, and socially destabilizing, to be a gentile-in-Christ within Paul’s movement than to be a gentile God-fearer in a mainstream synagogue community.

Now, that is something I'd never heard before.  I had assumed that the God-fearers had given up their worship of other Gods - their idolatry - as part of their participation in the Jewish synagogue.  Apparently that assumption was wrong, in which case Paul's message of avoiding idolatry does take on a different, more urgent, context.  It would seem to have been, as Fredriksen argues, potentially destablizing to established pagan culture.

Goofing Off

A recurring theme during the Bush presidency was the complaint that he was "goofing off" when the nation needed his attention.  Needless to say, that theme won't make an appearance during this presidency, particularly by a media that looks on "date night" as the occasion to wax sentimental.  But it does seem that Obama may get tagged as a "goof off."

James Taranto observes:

Who says President Obama hasn't accomplished anything since taking office? To his Nobel Peace Prize and two Grammys, we can add a sports record, Politico reports:

Obama has only been in office for just over nine months, but he's already hit the links as much as President Bush did in over two years.

CBS' Mark Knoller--an unofficial documentarian and statistician of all things White House-related--wrote on his Twitter feed [Saturday] that, "Today - Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24. Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months."

 Yes, we can!

And:

Hang on a second. It has now been 51 weeks since Obama was elected president, and more than nine months since he took office, and he's just now getting around to asking the "questions . . . that have never been asked"?


But that's not really fair to Obama. After all, he has a busy schedule, what with golf games and pitching the International Olympic Committee and date nights and Democratic fund-raisers and health care and the U.N. Security Council and Sunday morning talk shows and saving the planet from global warming and celebrating the dog's birthday and defending himself against Fox News and all.

We should have no problem with a President taking time-off from a difficult job, but the double standard is worth noting.

Cogito ergo Twitter Sum


The 60 Second Philosopher offers a summary of the great thoughts of the great philosophers via the medium of Twitter:

Socrates: Drinking hemlock; toes tingling; legs getting numb. Maybe unexamined life worth living? Guard!


Plato: Symposium 2nite 7pm, @ The Cave. Open mike, open bar. Under 21 admitted free.

Hume: No sense can b made of anything, nothing can b known, crud just happens. I'll b @ the pub.


Kant: The thing as it appears is white, creamy, and delicious; we cannot know whether it is, in itself, just mayonnaise.

Schopenhauer: All is empty, pointless. Deep, dark despair. Could use snack.

Marx: Hegel wrong. It's not spirit that moves bodies. It's coffee.

I also like his 60-second take on Aquinas, which concludes:

Aquinas wrote prolifically, culminating in his great masterpiece Summa Theologica, a massive work summarizing all of Christian doctrine -- at least as understood by Aquinas. He did not, however, complete this great work. On December 6, 1273, during Mass, he underwent some mystical experience, upon which he suddenly ceased to write -- explaining that all that he’d written now seemed to him “like straw.” He died just months later, at 49.


A short time after his death, Aquinas was canonized by the Church, to become Saint Thomas. His works went on to become the main text to which all the rest of Christian philosophy amounts to just footnotes.

Some straw!

As someone who has spent over 7 years tackling St. Thomas one question at a time twice a month and is only 20 percent of the way through the Summa, I couldn't agree more.

Thoughts on Reformation Day

I've often been puzzled by the odd coincidence of Reformation Day - which commemorates the anniversary of Luther's nailing of the "95 Theses" to the Wittenburg church door - falling on Halloween. Odd timing,  I would normally think.

Then, this year it dawned on me: "95 theses"...protest against indulgences...indulgences for those in purgatory....prayers for the dead...Feast of All Souls....Halloween.

D'oh!

Sometimes it takes a while.

Called to Communion has Stanley Hauerwas' essay on Reformation Day up.  Hauerwas makes a number of points that seem to connect with a book I've recently read by Pamela Eisenbaum entitled "Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle."  Eisenbaum is a Jewish professor of Bible Studies at a Christian seminary.  Her thesis is that Luther severely distorted Paul into an anti-semitic, Torah-hater by ignoring the pro-law statements in Paul's letters and by being ignorant of the world view that Paul was writing from.  Our view of the stark dichotomy of Law v. Grace comes from Luther, not Paul, who would have seen grace in the law, which incidentally St. Thomas Aquinas taught in his Commentary on Romans:

For even in the Old Law faith was necessary, just as it is in the New: “You who fear the Lord believe him” (Sir 2:8); “I believed; therefore I have spoken” (Ps l16:l0). And indeed, works are required in the New Law, namely, the works of certain sacraments, as commanded in Luke 22(:19), “Do this in memory of me” and of moral observances: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only” (Jas 1:22).

According to Hauerwas, Luther's polemical approach had a rhetorical objective of making a caricature of Jews in order to have Catholics take the place of Jews in Luther's reading of the New Testament:

For example, note what the Reformation has done for our reading texts like that which we hear from Luke this morning. We Protestants automatically assume that the Pharisees are the Catholics. They are the self-righteous people who have made Christianity a form of legalistic religion, thereby destroying the free grace of the Gospel. We Protestants are the tax collectors, knowing that we are sinners and that our lives depend upon God’s free grace. And therefore we are better than the Catholics because we know they are sinners. What an odd irony that the Reformation made such readings possible. As Protestants we now take pride in the acknowledgment of our sinfulness in order to distinguish ourselves from Catholics who allegedly believe in works-righteousness.

Later, Hauerwas explains what this has done to Christian-Jewish relations:

You can tell the destructive character of that narrative by what it has done to the Jews. The way we Protestants read history, and in particular our Bible, has been nothing but disastrous for the Jews. For we turned the Jews into Catholics by suggesting that the Jews had sunk into legalistic and sacramental religion after the prophets and had therefore become moribund and dead. In order to make Jesus explicable (in order to make Jesus look like Luther — at least the Luther of our democratic projections), we had to make Judaism look like our characterization of Catholicism. Yet Jesus did not free us from Israel; rather, he engrafted us into the promise of Israel so that we might be a people called to the same holiness of the law.

Hauerwas' observation is that Luther turned Jews into Catholics, but the buried lede is that Luther turned Catholics into Jews by the same caricaturization.  This caricature lives on: within the last several weeks, at a Protestant theology discussion group, I heard one Protestant member casually describe Catholicism in terms no different than those which St. Paul is supposed to have used for the "Jews": legalistic, ritualistic, without grace, etc.

Of course, this rhetorical approach by which one Christian group plays the "they are more Jewish than we are game" has a long provenance.  Another Jewish professor (of history), Paula Fredriksen in her very excellent "Augustine and the Jews" points out that it was a common trope of internecine Jewish "slanging" for one Jewish group to accuse another of being "legalistic", "carnal" and "sinful", which the Christians were more than happy to pick up on in their dispute with the Jews.  On the other hand, when Christian heretical groups used those tropes to undermine the Old Testament in order to argue that the God of Christ was not the God of Moses, then the stakes involved in bad-mouthing the Jews reached a new high because the game was no longer a "zero sum" game of Christian v. Jew, but was one were everyone could lose when it was Christian and Jew v. Manichee. Thus, according to Fredriksen, Augustine had to re-order the game by defusing as best he could the casual anti-semitism that had - and, unfortunately, continued to - plague Christian apologetics.

It is interesting how a Jewish re-assessment of Reformation approaches to Paul and Augustine may further intra-Christian dialogue.

Right here in Fresno

There's usually a prayer vigil outside the Planned Parenthood clinic on Van Ness Avenue.  When I've driven by the people are usually doing nothing more than standing there with signs, essentially exercising their First Amendment rights.

Of course, we've had decades of the media demonizing people who oppose abortion as oppressive haters who are basically outside of civil discourse.  So, it's not surprising that some on the pro-abortion side feel privileged to engage in conduct that amounts to a criminal assault and battery.



This video is provided by the Catholic Caveman.  I certainly did not hear about this from any conventional media source.

Creepy or Hoax or Both?

Does "this man" play a role in your dreams?

Here's the alleged story:

HISTORY

In January 2006 in New York, the patient of a well-known psychiatrist draws the face of a man that has been repeatedly appearing in her dreams. In more than one occasion that man has given her advice on her private life. The woman swears she has never met the man in her life.

That portrait lies forgotten on the psychiatrist's desk for a few days until one day another patient recognizes that face and says that the man has often visited him in his dreams. He also claims he has never seen that man in his waking life.

The psychiatrist decides to send the portrait to some of his colleagues that have patients with recurrent dreams. Within a few months, four patients recognize the man as a frequent presence in their own dreams. All the patients refer to him as THIS MAN.

From January 2006 until today, at least 2000 people have claimed they have seen this man in their dreams, in many cities all over the world: Los Angeles, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Tehran, Beijing, Rome, Barcelona, Stockholm, Paris, New Dehli, Moskow etc.

It's probably a total hoax according to IO-9:

This website is actually the creation of a sociologist and marketer named Andrea Natella. He runs a company called Guerriglia Marketing which stages "subversive hoaxes" and creates weird art projects that are mostly about pornography, politics, and advertising.


I think ThisMan.org has to be Natella's greatest masterwork. It doesn't smack of artsy pseudo-intellectual "politics" like a lot of his other art does. It's just cheesy and a little bit scary. There really is something uncanny about the pictures of the man and the fake stories from people who claim to have met him. Sweet dreams!

Happy Halloween.

Victicrat

If only teachers in Utah could marry

The number 1 reason for the revocation of teaching licenses in Utah is inappropriate sexual activities with students:

There are nearly 20,000 licensed educators in Utah, most of them hard-working professionals. But since 1992, the State Board of Education has suspended or revoked 313 teacher licenses, 208 of them (66 percent) for sexual misconduct. That doesn't include 10 cases under consideration before the Utah Professional Practices Advisory Commission.

But sexual misconduct by teachers -- from inappropriate touching and downloading pornography on a school computer to full-blown molestation -- is a persistent and pervasive problem. It is the No. 1 reason Utah educators are forced to surrender their licenses. And the tools for preventing it haven't evolved much over the years.


"I talk about it every chance I get, at trainings, lectures and an education law class I teach," said Carol Lear, the state's top education lawyer. "The whole cell phone thing, texting and social networking. The landscape has just become increasingly complicated and sophisticated."

In 2005, Utah ranked 16th in the nation for teacher sex offenses, according to an Associated Press survey of disciplinary records from 2001 to 2005 in 50 states and the District of Columbia. At that time, 52.7 percent of Utah teachers who lost their licenses surrendered them for sexual misconduct -- twice the national rate, the AP found.


Education and law enforcement officials can't say what accounts for Utah's disproportionate rank. Lear speculates it's because the state disciplines wrongdoers more rigorously than other states.

In Utah, all teachers undergo national FBI background checks upon hire and relicensure every five years. They must report suspected child abuse. "Inappropriate" communication with students is forbidden. Forfeiting a license for merely downloading pornography is common. And there's zero tolerance for sex offenses, including those plea bargained to lesser charges or subject to a diversion agreement.

It could also be because more victims come forward.

Deputy Salt Lake County District Attorney Alicia Cook believes victims are more willing to report abuse because of greater public awareness through news coverage and efforts to demystify the court process.

"I don't think this is coming out of the blue," Cook said. "This activity has been with us a really long time. We just haven't heard about it."

And a recent chronology of teachers in trouble:

Here is the status of some recent cases of teachers charged with sexual improprieties.

Oct. 15 » Kenneth William Taylor, 45, a wood shop teacher at Roy Junior High School, is charged with developing a relationship with a 14- or 15-year-old student, which turned sexual when she was 16.

Oct. 13 » John Robert Cody, 39, a social studies teacher at Pineview High School in St. George, is alleged to have fondled two girls and a woman at his apartment complex pool in 2008.

Sept. 29 » Keith Gillins, 61, a long-time teacher, boys basketball coach, former Fillmore mayor and an LDS bishop, is sentenced to up to life in prison for the alleged sexual abuse of a 16-year-old student in the back of his classroom.

Sept. 8 » Douglas Bullock, 42, a teacher at Bloomington Hills Elementary in St. George, is charged with 12 counts of third-degree felony unlawful sex with a minor for an alleged relationship with a 17-year-old boy.

Sept. 7 » Matthew Scott Adams, 31, a shop teacher at Cedar Middle School in Cedar City, is sentenced to one year in the Iron County Jail for allegedly videotaping young women through their windows. Some of the victims were students where he taught.

Aug. 25 » Churchill Junior High substitute teacher Christopher Benjamin Page, 20, of Salt Lake City, pleads guilty to one count of forcible sexual abuse after Sandy police find him and a 13-year-old female student both shirtless in a parked car.

Aug. 17 » Melissa Ann Andreini, 28, a former special education teacher at Helper Junior High School, is charged with unlawful sexual conduct with a minor stemming from an alleged relationship with a 15-year-old student. She allegedly paid the victim between $1,400 and $1,500 after the encounters.

The 208 out of 20,000 teachers looks to approximate the 1% that Phillip Jenkins estimates for Catholic priests.
 

Those Whacky Protestants

The Amazing Grace Baptist Church will be hosting a book burning for Halloween:

A North Carolina pastor plans to host a Halloween event at his church to burn heretical books. At the top of the list — the Bible.


Pastor Marc Grizzard claims the King James version of the Bible is the only true word of God, and that all other versions are "satanic" and "perversions" of God's word.

On Halloween night, Grizzard and the 14 members of the Amazing Grace Baptist Church will set fire to other versions of the scripture, as well as music and books by Christian authors.

“We are burning books that we believe to be Satanic,” Pastor Grizzard said.

“I believe the King James version is God’s preserved, inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God… for English-speaking people."

All other religious or Christian texts are sacreligious, the pastor insists. The list of books being burned will include works written by "a lot of different authors who we consider heretics, such as Billy Graham, Rick Warren… the list goes on and on,” Pastor Grizzard said.

Also on the pastor's list of heretical authors — Mother Teresa, according to a full list that was previously available at the Amazing Grace Baptist Church's Web site. The Church's Web site — which is no longer available — calls the event 'Burning Perversions of God's Word,' and urges parishioners to "come celebrate Halloween by burning Satan's bibles." Calls to the Amazing Grace Church were not returned Thursday.

"Come celebrate Halloween by burning Satan's bibles."  That's catchy.   Unfortunately, I suspect that there will be a number of kids who will be disappointed at getting ashes instead of candy.

It looks like Amazing Grace Church is fairly ecumenical in burning Billy Graham's books.

I think it's important to be ecumenical.  Since the Sunday after Halloween is Reformation Day, I will be commemorating the day by burning the effigy of a heretic.

This year it will be Melancthon.

New Book!

Taylor Marshall - a former Anglican priest turned Catholic convert - has a new book out called "The Crucified Rabbi: Judaism and the Origins of Catholic Christianity.  The Crucified Rabbi is available on Kindle, as well as old-fashioned pulped tree format. Marshall blogs at Canterbury Tales.

After reading Pamela Eisenbaum's "Paul was not a Christian," and having gone through a recent internet dialogue on the Catholic practice of praying for the dead, and finding that this practice was normative in First Century Judaism, I'm convinced that understanding the Jewish context of the early Christian movement is essential for understanding Christianity.  Marshall's book seems to be one of the rare texts addressing that particular issue. 

It should be a good read.

Worldviews

Charles Colson at Christianity Today, in an essay on doubting atheists, observes:

More recently, A. N. Wilson, once thought to be the next C. S. Lewis who then renounced his faith and spent years mocking Christianity, returned to faith. The reason, he said in an interview with New Statesman, was that atheists "are missing out on some very basic experiences of life." Listening to Bach and reading the works of religious authors, he realized that their worldview or "perception of life was deeper, wiser, and more rounded than my own."


He noticed that the people who insist we are "simply anthropoid apes" cannot account for things as basic as language, love, and music. That, along with the "even stronger argument" of how the "Christian faith transforms individual lives," convinced Wilson that "the religion of the incarnation … is simply true."

Chesterton observed that the insane man has not lost his reason, rather the insane man has lost everything but reason.  People who think that reason can explain everything do seem to lack some basic human traits, such as the imaginative ability to see the world from another person's perspective without necessarily adopting that perspective.

Update:

This is an essay by Wilson on his re-conversion.  This is the passage referred to by Colson:

But religion, once the glow of conversion had worn off, was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person. Therefore I was drawn, over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers. Reading Louis Fischer's Life of Mahatma Gandhi, and following it up with Gandhi's own autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth, I found it impossible not to realise that all life, all being, derives from God, as Gandhi gave his life to demonstrate. Of course, there are arguments that might make you doubt the love of God. But a life like Gandhi's, which was focused on God so deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense. Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary Samuel Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting?

This is interesting:

A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: "It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish between one another by giving names."


This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing in the historicity of Noah's Ark. More so, really.

Do materialists really think that language just "evolved", like finches' beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where's the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena - of which love and music are the two strongest - which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

And some good advice:

I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief "don't matter", that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.

Finally:

When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion - prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.

If only teachers could marry... The Argument from Publicity

This is an update on the 41 year old teacher in Santa Clara who was arrested for having a sexual relationship with a 17 year old female student.  According to the student, "My senior year was miserable," said the woman, who is now 20 years old and attends a Bay Area college."  The parents warned the school district about the teacher, but the district ignored the complaint.

Here's why I do this "feature":  Op-eds like this one in the (Newfoundland) Telegram by Peter Jackson (no relation) makes the claim:

One of the most important questions to come out of the sex abuse scandal is whether the church should continue to demand that its priests remain celibate. It is a question the Vatican is unlikely to even consider anytime soon, but it has been raised nonetheless with increasing frequency.


But even without entertaining an end to celibate priesthood, it is long past time that the Vatican should examine the culture of priesthood and determine what measure must be taken to counter this epidemic of abuse.

Great theory, except for all of the teachers who have been involved in pedophilia.  But don't let that stand in the way of a great theory.

The columnist really plumbs the depth of bias with this:

[Gary Wills] talks about the position of power that a priest is given, not just as an authority figure in general, but as a purveyor of God's magic. His fingers magically transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. A priest holds a special power over any boy in his charge (and the vast majority of abuse victims are boys). The priest alone is the holder of Christian truth and morality, and he alone knows what is right and wrong. So complete is this delusion that a handful of pedophile priests have felt perfectly consistent in providing counselling to the very boys they abuse.

Gary Wills might have talked about "God's magic," but I don't think so.

So, couple the generalized demonization of Catholic practices with ignorant statements about priests practicing "magic" plus no awareness that other professions have a similar problem and what you might conclude is that the constant beating of the Catholic scandal drum is part of an argumentum ad publicity - the problem in the Catholic Church is worse than anything else because that's the only scandal people hear about.

Empty Suit with a Bad Attitude.

This is really bad.  The Obama Administration has attempted to ban Foxnews from being included in the pool interviewing the White House "Pay Czar."  In other words, it has attempted to ban the only media outlet that will take a critical position to its position. 

What is great is that the other members of the pool - i.e., Obama's poodles - refused to do the interview unless Foxnews was included.



We await the outrage from the ACLU and the Free Speech Left.

*Crickets Chirping*

Jennifer Rubin at Commentary observes:

In its mindless war against Fox, the White House tried to ban Fox News from the White House press pool that was to interview the “pay czar,” Kenneth Feinberg. (Yes, it was a nice touch of imperial irony that the effort to cut off access to a particular news outlet came in the context of an interview of an administrative official who is not subject to congressional confirmation or oversight and whose job it is to dictate compensation rules to private firms that were bullied into taking government bailouts.) The mainstream media’s collective spine stiffened, and the administration was forced to back down

And:

It’s a cringe-inducing moment, both for those who oppose the White House on policy grounds and those who cheer its every move. As surely as Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton allowed their personal flaws to erode the office of the presidency, Obama seems bent on allowing his own flaws (thin-skinnedness, hubris) to do potentially grave damage to the office as well. And over what? Not some grand policy matter or some key personnel matter, but over the desire to exclude a news network that has criticized him. For those who suggested that Obama’s main selling point was his “superior temperament,” we anxiously await an admission of grave error. It seems they were terribly mistaken.

I've spent my entire life hearing about how scary it was for Nixon to have an "enemies list."  At least, Nixon had the decency to be a hypocrite about it.  Now, we have an administration that thinks it is entitled to act like it was running a Banana Republic rather than the greatest democracy in world history.

Richard Dawkins Cross-Examined by Hugh Hewitt

Here's the transcript.

Here is an example of the great man's view on the use of reason and evidence:

HH: All right. At the outset of your book, early in your new book, The Greatest Show On Earth, you write about science teachers, “when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with the loss of their jobs.” How often has that occurred?


RD: It’s never occurred to me, I am very happy to say, and I would give short shrift to anybody who threatened me. However, I have heard over and over again from American school teachers, especially at school rather than at university, over and over again, I’ve heard from them, more or less heart cries, that they are not able to teach their subject properly, because they are indeed hassled and harried, and all those other words that I used.

HH: You see, I’m flabbergasted by that. That would be big news. I’m in the journalism business, and if that had happened even once, especially the idea of someone being fired for teaching evolution, it would have been an international cause celeb, and I’m…

RD: Oh, well, that’s very interesting then. I mean, I’m interested to hear you say that, because that makes, that suggests to me that what I should do is collect together some of the letters that I received. I thought that was undisputed. I thought it was well known.

HH: Oh, it’s absolutely disputed. I think actually, you’ve been bamboozled by people claiming your sympathy, when they in fact have never been fired. I don’t know of anyone who’s been fired from the public school system for teaching evolution in the thirty years I’ve been doing this.

RD: All right. Well, if you’ll send my publisher your address, I will, the next time I get letters along those lines.

HH: But letters wouldn’t be dispositive, would they? I mean, you get letters from Creationists as well, and you toss them aside as piffle.

RD: All right. I mean, I can’t actually produce chapter and verse over the telephone like this, but I, I’m, I think I’m a fairly good critical observer, and these sounded pretty convincing to me.

 In other words, in Dawkins' view, if the claim confirms the prejudice, then it constitutes "evidence."

And then there is Dawkins' the class act:

RD: Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine?


HH: Yes.

RD: You seriously do?

HH: Yes.

RD: You actually think that Jesus got water, and made all those molecules turn into wine?

HH: Yes.

RD: My God.

HH: Yes. My God, actually, not yours. But let me…

RD: I’ve realized the kind of person I’m dealing with now.

HH: But what would that person be? The Stephen J. Gould student that you’re dealing with now?

RD: Okay. You think that…

HH: Wait, we’ve got to go to a break, Professor.

RD: …something, because you’ve read in the Gospel, you think that Jesus turned water into wine?

HH: I know you’re dismissive of me, but we’ve got to take a break. I’ll come back, I’ll give you a chance.

What  a small, confined worldview Dawkins lives in.

And there is this:

HH: Did you ever believe in God, Richard Dawkins?


RD: Of course, I was a child.

HH: And when did you put off your foolish belief in God?

RD: When did I put away childish things?

HH: Yes.

RD: At the age of about fifteen.

HH: And under who’s influence was it?

RD: I suppose it was the influence, not of Darwin directly, but of the education in evolution that I was receiving.

HH: And did you just up and one day declare that’s it, no God?

RD: No, it was a more gradual process than that, as it was with Darwin himself. I mean, he gradually lost his faith.

 So, at the age of 15, with no experience of the world, under the influence of Darwin, who provided no answers to the fundamental questions of why the universe exists at all, Dawkins constructed his fundamental view of the world, from which he now decides what claims constitute evidence, and it seems that he's never questioned that childish decision.

Rome Rebuilt

Without a time machine, this is the best we are going to do right now with respect to actually visiting the ancient world.

That Crafty Benedict

Father Longenecker - a former Anglican priest - offers his take on how the "Anglican Rite" deal was accomplished.  He offers this thought:

Pope Benedict has been working with these people for decades. He knew they would only stall, ask for 'further clarification', dig in their heels and throw up endless obstacles. The Pope understands that there has been enough talk, enough diplomacy, enough listening and dialogue, and sometimes you have to act.


Benedict will be seen as a kind of Ronald Reagan of the Vatican. When Reagan got to the White House he discovered that the established way of dealing with the Soviets was detente, talk, talk, talk and more talk. He decided that victory was in his grasp and proposed a firm confrontation. "Mr Brezhnev, pull down that wall!" His professional statesmen and diplomats were shocked at his 'foolishness.' But it worked. Communism was already fragile all it needed was a puff of air to knock it down completely.

Pope Benedict's move this week will have similar impact in the world of Christian dialogue. With Personal Ordinariates not only have the professional ecumenists been shown the way forward, but the duplicitous liberal Catholic bishops who would have stalled, moved it into 'discussion groups' and presented 'further obstacles' have also been very effectively gone around. No longer will a gifted, willing and able convert priest have to wait years to be ordained and in the meantime be pushed from pillar to post by Catholic bishops who are driven by a liberal agenda that is actually illiberal.

Finally, the English and Americans should stop being so parochial and offended. Pope Benedict did not make this move to offend the Church of England or to poach people from the Episcopal Church. He was responding to pleas from people who have already left or are planning to leave the Anglican Church. Furthermore, he is aware of the tremendous growth of both the Catholic and Anglican Churches in the developing world. I believe he has his eye on the faithful Catholics and Anglicans in Africa and Asia, and that he hopes this move will enable them to join together in a young, new and energetic alliance for the twenty first century.

 Sometimes taking an end-around the professionals is the game-breaker.

A person can be arrogant or a person can be stupid, but a person should never be both at the same time.

A Stanford study on personality offers insight to the phenomenon of "internet trolls."

In the study students were asked to offer their opinion on drinking.  The study observed that people with extreme pro-drinking positions were quickest and loudest in offering their opinion, until they were shown that they were in the minority.  The author observed:

It is only when they have this sense that they are in the majority that extremely pro-alcohol students are more willing to express their views on the issue.

And:

You have a cycle that feeds on itself: the more you hear these extremists expressing their opinions, the more you are going to believe that those extreme beliefs are normal for your community.

Which certainly explains the phenomenon of the obnoxious internet atheist/Calvinist/etc.

If only married female teachers with two children could marry

This time it's a 28 year old married female teacher with two kids and a 14 year old boy.

That Crafty Benedict

Apparently, the Pope took the matter of ecumenical relations out of the hands of the professional ecumenists:

This from a good source in Rome: apparently both Lambeth Palace and elements in the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity were “implacably opposed” to Pope Benedict XVI’s dramatic new arrangements for Anglicans. The source also reports speculation that Archbishop Rowan Williams put pressure on Vatican ecumenists to stop the Apostolic Constitution being issued. For all I know, he did persuade Cardinal Kasper, head of the Pontifical Council, that it wasn’t a good idea. But this particular portfolio was taken out of Kasper’s hands a long time ago; indeed, it looks as if the cardinal was simply “informed” what was happening by the CDF.


The professional ecumenists on both sides had decades to get this right. They screwed it up. So now Pope Benedict has opened up another route to unity: a high-speed bypass.

It's nice to know that the guy in charge knows that the purpose of ecumenicism isn't all about the process of ecumenicism.

Shut up, they explained

A liberal climate professor gets borked by dissenting from the offiicial party line on Global Warming.

Dark Thoughts in the Morning

Shannon Love reflects on the reasons why the Left bought so easily into the fake Limbaugh quotes:

Watching so many serious journalists and leftist political figures fall for the fake Rush Limbaugh quotes tells us something very frightening about what leftists believe true about non-leftist America. I say, “frightening,” because we evaluate the level of threat that others pose based on our understanding of the amorality of their beliefs. Then we rationalize the harshness of the methods we are willing to employ against them based on our threat assessment. We are much more willing to use draconian methods against people we view as extremely evil than we are against people we judge less evil. As a nation, we were willing to employ much more draconian methods to defeat fascism than we employed to fight anyone else. The same basic principle applies to our internal conflicts as well. The more extreme and dangerous we view our political and social opponents as being, the more tolerant we become of extreme measures to oppose them.

Given this, what does it portend for American non-leftists that a wide and powerful swath of the American left apparently believes it quite credible that a major media figure with an audience in the tens of millions looks back fondly on slavery and approves of political assassination? What draconian methods could those leftists rationalize using if they really believe they are fighting people with such values?

As I have written before, immersion in fantasy is a defining aspect of leftism. As they move progressively towards the left pole of the political spectrum, the realities become more and more immersive while becoming more and more detached from reality. At the far end of the spectrum, the leftists become delusional to the point they believe they are trapped in a gotterdammerung struggle of good versus evil that justifies any action they might take in fighting that struggle. When dangerous fantasies, once the providence of the 5% most radical left, become accepted as true in the 40% just to the left of center, the rest of us are in great danger.

 Two quick points:

First, when you look at the brutal history of the French Revolution, you will see that even before the Terror, French radicals were engaging in acts of open brutality - such as massacring Catholic priests and political prisoners - out of the simple fear that if they lost, those people would be massacring them.  The logic of the brutality was to "do unto them before they got a chance to do unto us."  If the Left believes that the Right is capable of brutality, then we move one step closer to a self-fulfilling cycle of preemptive retaliation.

Second, one of my favorite aphorisms from the practice of law is that if the other side is accusing you of doing things that it has never occurred to youd to do, then you can bet the other side is doing it.  When the Left fantasizes about political assassinations and repressions on the part of the non-Left, it's fair to wonder what's going on with the Left, particularly given the historic far Left fascination with violence, terror and repression.

Quagmire

Britt Hume points out that the Obama Administration's war on Foxnews has drawn them into a quagmire.



I love Hume's closing observation.

The Return of the Witch.

This story reports on the beating and abuse in India of five Muslim widwos for allegedly being witches:

"On Sunday morning the victims were taken to a playground where hundreds had assembled to watch the ghastly incident," deputy inspector general of police Murari Lal Meena told the BBC.


"No one in the mob came forward to rescue the victims as they were being stripped and beaten up," he said.

The victims are now under police protection.

Police say that people in Pattharghatia believe that certain women in their village are possessed by a "holy spirit" that can identify those who practise witchcraft.

"These women recently identified five women from the same village as being witches who practised witchcraft and brought miseries to the area," a police official said.

Soon, an unruly mob broke into their huts, dragged them out and started beating them up.

***********

Hundreds of people, mostly women, have been killed in India because their neighbours thought they were witches.

Experts say superstitious beliefs are behind some of these attacks, but there are occasions when people - especially widows - are targeted for their land and property.

An interesting feature of the video is that the beating and stripping being shown in the video - which must have been but a small part of the women's ordeal - is being done by a woman.  That would suggest that narratives about the concept of witchcraft being used as an excuse to engage in the systemmatic suppression of women or woman spirituality are probably nonsense; the better explanation remains human nature, such as greed, jealousy or good old fashioned malice.

Arrived in the Mail 

God's Philosophers: How the medieval world laid the foundations of modern science by James Hannam.

I am looking forward to this. A quick glance of the book discloses a timeline, an index of characters and chapter titles like "Heresy and Reason" and "How Pagan Science was Christianized" and three chapters on Galileo, and a map of Europe to follow the action.

James Hannam - blogging as "Bede" - is the internet "go-to" guy for debunking "urban stories" about how Christianity repressed science. I read a preview of his chapter on Gerbert of Aurillac aka Pope Sylvester II, one of the most scientifically learned men of his day. Based on that chapter, I'm sure that the book will introduce the reader to a fascinating world that is unfortunately much beclouded by modern superstitions about that era.

Update:

Science Fiction author Mike Flynn does Yeoman work in debunking the fundamentalist/atheist lies about Christianity and science.

Flynn offers this precis on the Galileo affair:

Once again, the one and only scientists ever hassled over a point of natural philosophy is trotted out to do his star turn. Mr. Walker evidently has no idea of the issues of the trial, the particulars of the charges, and all those things that Galileo himself said in a letter to Pieresc hid behind the "mask of religion." There was the flame war with Grassi, for example, in which Grassi's meticulous observation of the Comets of 1618 were pooh-poohed by Galileo, who had not observed them at all. (He was ill.) Grassi said their orbits put them on a hyperbolic trajecotry from the outer reaches of the solar system; Galileo said the comets were emanations of the earth's atmosphere. Guess who was right.


Galileo was not convicted of heresy, nor was heliocentrism declared heretical. (The terms "vehement suspicion of heresy" and "formally heretical" were terms of art. It meant that the one motion wasn't heretical "but we think it might be because we don't like you" and the other was heretical in its form, i.e., the way it was phrased.) And the Pope never signed off on it, anyway. The two propositions had been studied by the scientists of the day and found to be false. In particular, if the earth revolved around the sun, there should have been parallax among the fixed stars. None could be detected. That was why Aristotle, Archimedes, and everyone else rejected the notion. (The reason turned out to be that the stars were much farther away than the Greeks, Arabs, and Latins had estimated from their apparent size and brightness, and so the predicted parallax was much smaller. But you cannot save one unproven hypothesis with a second unproven hypothesis.) If the earth rotated, then objects dropped from a tower should fall to the east of the drop point. Galileo himself suggested the experiment, but never carried it out. (Or else he did, and it showed no deflection, and so he kept mum.)

Bellarmine told him that since the science seemed settled his denialist stance was at odds with the consensus. Okay, they didn't talk that way back then. But he wrote that there was no problem in teaching Copernicanism as a mathematical model. After all, the Ptolemaic model did not claim to be an actual representation of physical reality, why should this model? (Astronomy was then a branch of mathematics, not of physics. Moving astronomy under physics was the real revolution.) And, Bellarmine added, there would be no problem teaching it as fact provided empirical proof could be found. The Church was accustomed to regarding Biblical passages as poetical or allegorical. The Protestant revolution had made them gun-shy so they didn't want to do that without solid evidence.

And Galileo never found the solid evidence. When he published the Dialogues, his Big Fat Proof of the earth's rotation was the ocean tides. They were caused by sloshing from the earth's spinning. This answer was not only incoherent -- it contradicted an earlier argument in the book against the objection of the wind (why don't we feel a constand east wind?) but it was pretty well known that the tides had something to do with the Moon.

The Anglican-Rite

Creative Minority Report links to this news from the Vatican:

“In this Apostolic Constitution the Holy Father has introduced a canonical structure that provides for such corporate reunion by establishing Personal Ordinariates which will allow former Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony.”

The L.A. Times reports

The Vatican announced surprise plans Tuesday to make it easier for Anglicans to convert, reaching out to those who are disaffected by the election of female and gay bishops to join the Catholic Church's conservative ranks.

Pope Benedict XVI approved a new church provision that will allow Anglicans to join the Catholic Church while maintaining many of their distinctive spiritual and liturgical traditions, including married priests, Cardinal William Levada, the Vatican's chief doctrinal official, told a news conference.

That crafty Benedict.

Faith and Works

Ken Pulliam, Ph.d. - a "deconverted" Evangelical - writes:

Another reason for my de-conversion from evangelical Christianity was my realization that the Bible is a very ambiguous book, i.e., subject to many different interpretations.

Kevin Bauder, the President of Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, would certainly disagree with me. He has written an article on the Perspicuity of Scripture available online. Perspicuity, which means “clearness or lucidity, as of a statement” was a major tenant of the Reformation. The Reformers argued that one could read and understand the major teachings of the Bible without any help from the Roman Church. The RCC, on the other hand, maintained, that they, and only they, could properly interpret the Scriptures.

So which is it? Is the Bible unambiguous or is it open to a variety of opposing interpretations?

Parenthetically, it is interesting how often it is over-emphasizing a particular issue that pushes people into crises of faith. I know a former Seventh Day Adventist for whom it was the incoherent dating of the years from something like the fall of Jerusalem to the birth of Christ that caused him to leave the SDA. For others, it is the clearly insupportable claim that the Bible is not ambiguous.

Obviously, it is ambiguous. Why shouldn't it be? It was written over hundreds of years by a plethora of authors who wrote from the background assumptions of cultures long vanished. Again, why shouldn't it be ambiguous? Heck, Shakespeare is ambiguous.

Pulliam also notes this bit of dissent on the issue of the role of faith in salvation:

1. What exactly is faith?

a. Is it merely intellectual assent? Members of the Grace Evangelical Society answer in the affirmative. On their website, one reads:

Faith is the conviction that something is true. To believe in Jesus (“he who believes in Me has everlasting life”) is to be convinced that He guarantees everlasting life to all who simply believe in Him for it (John 4:14; 5:24; 6:47; 11:26; 1 Tim 1:16).

No act of obedience, preceding or following faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, such as commitment to obey, sorrow for sin, turning from one’s sin, baptism or submission to the Lordship of Christ, may be added to, or considered part of, faith as a condition for receiving everlasting life (Rom 4:5; Gal 2:16; Titus 3:5). This saving transaction between God and the sinner is simply the giving and receiving of a free gift (Eph 2:8-9; John 4:10 ; Rev 22:17 ).

b. Is it intellectual assent plus submission to the Lordship of Christ? John MaCarthur and many strict Calvinists would say, Yes.

MacArthur writes that faith ‘encompasses obedience,’ and that obedience is ‘an integral part of saving faith.’ Indeed, obedience is bound up in the very 'definition of faith,’ being a constitutive element in what it means to believe.’ Thus any ‘concept of faith that excludes obedience’ must be rejected because obedience is ‘indivisibly wrapped up in the idea of believing.’ In fact, ‘the character of true faith’ is nothing less than the ‘higher righteousness’ of the Beatitudes of Matthew 5:3-11.8. MacArthur even suggests that obedience is ‘synonymous with’ faith. (See The Gospel According to Jesus: What Is Authentic Faith?, pp. 173-176)

McArthur's definition of faith is a most Catholic understanding. Faith means a "living faith" means "faithfulness." Father William Most makes this point in a number of writings, including this one on Paul:

Paragraph in Context:

[P.15] Further, we must understand faith as Paul means it. It is not, as Luther thought, just confidence that the merits of Christ apply to me, or taking Christ as your personal Savior, so that after that one can sin freely and it will not hurt him. If we read all places where Paul speaks of faith, keep notes, add them up, the result is this: 1)If God speaks a truth, in faith we believe it in our minds; 2)If God makes a promise, in faith we are certain He will keep it; 3)If God tells us to do something, we do it, we obey. Paul thus speaks (Rom 1:5) of the "obedience of faith", the obedience that faith is; 4)all is to be done in love. (A standard Protestant reference work, Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, Supplement,p.333, gives the same picture of faith as we have just done). This is vastly different from Luther's mistake. He thought after getting faith, one can sin freely. He told his lieutenant Melanchthon (Epistle 501): "Even if you sin greatly, believe still more greatly." No, faith includes obedience. So it does not exempt from obedience. In Gal 5:19-21 (cf. 1 Cor 6:9-10; Eph 5:5) Paul gives a list of the most important great sins, and adds that those who do these will not inherit the kingdom of God. When we inherit from parents, we have not earned it, but we could have earned to lose it, to be disinherited.

Again, I'm surprised to see MacArthur's take line up with Father Most's. Given the venting on by some in the Reformed camp about "works righteousness," you'd think there would be more distance.

The Self-Correcting Nature of Science....but not if the scientists had their way.

Despite the paen of atheists to the marvels of science - its single-minded pursuit of the truth, the fact that it is based on facts, its ability to self-correct - it seems that scientists deliberately used bad data to develope the infamous "hockey stick" or "we are all going to die" model of climate warming and would have gotten away with it if it was not for a persistent blogger who called bullshit on the whole thing.

The scandal has serious implications for public trust in science. The IPCC's mission is to reflect the science, not create it.

As the panel states, its duty is "assessing the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data." But as lead author, Briffa was a key contributor in shaping (no pun intended) the assessment. A small group was able to rewrite history.

When the IPCC was alerted to peer-reviewed research that refuted the idea, it declined to include it. This leads to the more general, and more serious issue: what happens when peer-review fails - as it did here?

The scandal has only come to light because of the dogged persistence of a Canadian mathematician who attempted to reproduce the results. Steve McIntyre has written dozens of letters requesting the data and methodology, and over 7,000 blog posts. Yet Yamal has remained elusive for almost a decade.

The IPCC is the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has announced Global Warming as a fact.

The backstory is this:

Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is problematic, and a dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In dendro jargon, this disparity is called "divergence". The process of creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples - a choice open to a scientist's biases.

Yet none of this has stopped paleoclimataologists from making bold claims using tree ring data.

In particular, since 2000, a large number of peer-reviewed climate papers have incorporated data from trees at the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. This dataset gained favour, curiously superseding a newer and larger data set from nearby. The older Yamal trees indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures.

How could this be? Scientists have ensured much of the measurement data used in the reconstructions remains a secret - failing to fulfill procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious peer reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to demand the data from contributors. Until now, that is.

At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions B the data has leaked into the open - and Yamal's mystery is no more.

From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.

In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which ten were alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the mid-19th century. The implication is clear: the dozen were cherry-picked.

Controversy has been raging since 1995, when an explosive paper by Keith Briffa at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia asserted that that the medieval warm period was actually really cold, and recent warming is unusually warm. Both archaeology and the historical accounts, Briffa was declaring, were bunk. Briffa relied on just three cores from Siberia to demonstrate this.

Excuse me, what??? Three cores? Twelve cores??? Twelve cherry-picked cores???

From Siberia???? Only freaking Siberia??? I thought the answer to the Medieval Warm Period - when Vikings settled in Greenland - was that that was a localized phenomenon.

We're basing global economic decisions on three or twelve trees???

Hokey hockey sticks

Mann too used dendrochronology to chill temperatures, and rebuffed attempts to publish his measurement data. Initially he said he had forgotten where he put it, then declined to disclosed it. (Some of Mann's data was eventually discovered, by accident, on his ftp server in a directory entitled 'BACKTO_1400-CENSORED'.)

Tree data was secondary in importance to Mann's statistical technique, which would produce a dramatic modern upturn in temperatures - which became nicknamed the "Hockey Stick" - even using red noise.

Similarly, all the papers that used the Yamal data have the same point to make. All suggest recent dramatic warming. Having scored a global hit with a combination of flawed statistics and dubious dendroclimatology, the acts repeated the formula.

Unfortunately:

All the papers come from a small but closely knit of scientists who mutually support each other's work. All use Yamal data. And without the Yamal data, the temperature record shows a very different shape.

No Yamal trees, no Hockey Stick.

Amazing. I guess we are all supposed to forget how conclusive the "Hockey Stick" was supposed to be.

I like (a) how the GW scientist "lost" his data and (b)how the "right" data was cherry-picked and (c) all those really smart scientists never asked to check the data. As a non-scientist bystander, I have to wonder what motivates this level of "cheating."

Ideology much? The quest to do the "right science" and get the "right answers" to win the big prizes?

Someone ought to look into that issue.

The Register article links to this more extensive description of the scandal [at BishopHill.

The Texas Scribbler offers this speculation about the motivation of the researcher who cooked the books:

MORE from McIntyre's co-researcher Ross McKitrick: "Whatever is going on here, it is not science." I wonder if it all began as Briffa's attempt to save his job for some reason. You know, make a big discovery, prove his worth? And then Al Gore and his cronies took over. Pols are always looking for a big controversy to justify their existence. Stir in the Dictators Club's IPCC, and the earth is doomed.

Twelve measly trees indeed.

On the number of trees, I'm reminded of one the most devastating cross-examinations I've ever seen, which, unfortunately, was on my expert witness on agricultural economics. I'd put the expert on in order to show the lost production of a particular kind of fruit tree. The expert was extremely well-regarded in the industry and had degrees, experience and qualifications.

During the cross-examination, the other attorney zeroed in on the comparative study that the expert had used to show productivity, which consisted of one row of trees - maybe 15 or 20 trees - in an area that the expert could not say was comparable to where my client's trees were located and were subject to localized micro-influences that might or might not have been similar to what my client's trees were subjected to.

The jury picked up on the small sample size and the speculative connection between the study and my client's orchard and did not award my client future lost profits.

The Fresno jury was apparently more intelligent than the IPCC and the scientific community.

The most influential tree in the world update:

It turns out that the hockey stick study was skewed by a single tree. Of the ten trees cherry picked from the larger sample, one was off the mean by six standard deviations, and, thus, produced the hockey stick, which made for global policy, cap and trade nonsense and the rest.

What should not be overlooked is the stone-walling done by the researcher Keith Briffa over the underlying data. Although most journals require the release of information, none enforced their rules, until the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Nonetheless, it took substantial time afterwards for Keith Briffa to put it up on his website, prompting this criticism:

3. Why the hell did you wait 10 years to release the data? You did yourself no favors by deferring reasonable requests to archive data to enable replication. It was only when you became backed into a corner by The Royal Society that you made the data available. Your delays and roadblocks (such as providing an antique data format of the punched card era), plus refusing to provide metadata says more about your integrity than the data itself. Your actions make it appear that you did not want to release the data at all. Your actions are not consistent with the actions of the vast majority of scientists worldwide when asked for data for replication purposes. Making data available on paper publication for replication is the basis of proper science, which is why The Royal Society called you to task.

Aquinas on the Apocrypha

On the Commendation and Division of the Sacred Scriptures:

Jerome mentions a fourth kind of book, namely, the apocryphal, so called from apo, that is, ‘especially’, and cryphon, that is, ‘obscure’, because there is doubt about their contents and authors. The Catholic Church includes among the books of Sacred Scripture some whose teachings are not doubted, but whose authors are. Not that the authors are unknown, but because these men were not of known authority. Hence they do not have force from the authority of the authors but rather from their reception by the Church. Because there is the same manner of speaking in them and in the hagiographical works, they are for now counted among them.

If only teachers could marry.

Nashville teachers arrested on child pornography charges four years after his school district was notified that the teacher had committed child abuse as a substitute teacher.

DCS said, "We have to determine whether a specific child is at risk. Without specific allegations of abuse and identified possible victims, we don't have any authority to investigate."

Levine was arrested in April on charges of producing child pornography with an extensive hidden camera system in his home.

The indictment alleges Levine lured children to his home to do drugs and have sex, but he is also accused of having unlawful sexual contact with a 16-year-old boy.

A grand jury indicted Levine on 18 counts, including five counts for soliciting the sexual exploitation of five boys ranging in age between 15 and 18 at the time.

And a Texas lady teacher arrested for improper relations with, and sexual assault on, a student.

And in Sacramento, it's a music teacher.

Hot Babe and Etymology.

This could be the end of any productive work for the rest of the day.

This link comes from this article on "12 Hottest Geek Girls."

What did happen to Global Warming???

According to the BBC Climate Correspondent - who may be out of a job if he can't drum up some pro-GW news - it ain't happening:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Could it be the Sun???? Well, maybe....

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Or maybe it's that Pacific Decadal Oscillation - which I was told a few years ago was as mythical as the Easter Bunny:

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."

So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.

They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature.

Sounds natural.

And then there is this:

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Of course, the pro-GW scientists predict a continuing warming trend after 2025, a prediction that we should take to the bank inasmuch as they completely missed this cooling trend.

It would be far more impressive if the pro-GW scientists were able to make a prediction that actually happened. As the author of the BBC article notes:

2) Did the models predict that temperatures would level off?

None of the climate models suggested that global temperatures would not rise any further for at least another 10 years, which is what we have observed. The Hadley Centre model does incorporate ocean cycles. But that doesn't alter the fact that the models did not predict this. So the question must be, will it/has it captured the negative PDO that some scientists say will last for the next 20 odd years - and if it hasn't, why hasn't it? I also know that the Met Office are currently conducting research into why temperatures have levelled off/fallen from their peak.

I'm sure that the models have been revised so that they now "predict" the cooling period we've actually experienced.

That Puzzling Erasmus.

Erasmus is invariably cited as someone with the opinion that the "deuterocanonical books" - i.e., the books that were contained in the Greek Septuagint, but not contained in the Hebrew canon formulated after the destruction of Jerusalem, such as Maccabees, Wisdom, Judith, Tobit, etc - were or should not be part of the Christian canon.

That statement has puzzled me ever since I read Erasmus' Diatribe on Free Will which was written to rebut Luther's doctrine of predestination. In the Diatribe, Erasmus offers as a "proof text" a quotation from Ecclesiasticus - one of the books subseqently removed from the canon by Luther. Erasmus has a throw-away line about how he assumes that Luther will accept Ecclesiasticus as authoritative because it has been recognized by the Church for so long. Luther, of course, does no such thing in his "On the Bondage of the Will, and his kerfuffle with Erasmus might be the point where his attitude to defining his own canon begins to really take shape. (OK, I'm really speculating about that idea.)

Erasmus wrote a rebuttal to "On the Bondage of the Will" called the Hyperaspistes. Although "On the Bondage of the Will" is considered to be one of Luther's three most important books, the Hyperaspistes gets very little notice. For example, it cannot be found on-line.

So, I ordered it.

On page 344 is this passage:

But when Luther says that he has a right to take exception to the authority of htis book, which goes under the title of Ecclesiasticus, because in the past it was not in the canon of the Jews, either he is inconsistent or he gives little credit to the authority of the Catholic church. For previously he had said that the book of Esther, which is in the canon of the Jews, is especially worthy of being removed from the canon; and here he attributes such great authority to their canon that he proclaims he is free to reject a book that the Catholic church accepts as a holy source of its public liturgy, often beginning mass with a text from this book instead of a psalm or taking something from it to be read as an Epistle. Even St. Augustine himself borrows weapons from this book to transfix heretics, and when they in turn aimed at him arguments from it, he does not have recourse to rejecting it but rather to interpreting it soundly.

It seems that Erasmus should not be cited as a reason for believing that the Old Testament canon was uncertain prior to Luther.

Culture of Death

Hmmm....not only will the young have to contribute to health care by buying insurance they don't need, but maybe they will have to contribute in other ways too.

Because nobody is going to want old folks' broken down, used up body parts.

Obama's Regulatory Czar is advocating that the State remove the organs of those who are dead or near death whether or not the consent.

Because "the state owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone's permission."

You are owned by the State.

Or at least your body parts are.

Here is the full squib:

TEL AVIV – President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar defended the possibility of removing organs from terminally ill patients without their permission.

Cass Sunstein also has strongly pushed for the removal of organs from deceased individuals who did not explicitly consent to becoming organ donors.

In his 2008 book, "Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness," Sunstein and co-author Richard Thaler discussed multiple legal scenarios regarding organ donation. One possibility presented in the book, termed by Sunstein as "routine removal," posits that "the state owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone's permission."

It appears that Sunstein is suggesting that consent for such removal be "presumed" in the absence of a statement revoking such presumed consent.

[Via Catholic Caveman.]

Archduke Ferdinand found alive; WWI fought by mistake.

Jews and Christians have been mistranslating the Bible for thousands of years. Genesis does not say that God "created" the world.

Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb "bara", which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate".

The first sentence should now read "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth"

According to Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the Earth out of nothing.

Tradition, smadition...we're talking science here.

Furthermore:

A spokesman for the Radboud University said: "The new interpretation is a complete shake up of the story of the Creation as we know it."

Prof Van Wolde added: "The traditional view of God the Creator is untenable now."

I'll just bet all the rabbis, pastors and bishops are feeling pretty darn foolish right now.