Second Update - The light slowly dawns:

Updating this post, please note that Instapundit observes that Eric Alterman is worried that allowing Stalinist groups to sponsor the anti-war Pro-Dictatorship movement Idiots. may strengthen popular support for military action against Sadam.

Despite my self-promoted reputation for nuanced attention to detail, all I can come up with is "well, duh" and "jeez, after fifty years of sucking up to the Stalinists, now you finally realize that letting the psycopathic Marxists set your agenda may offend normal society?"

Then, as if he was decoding the Dead Sea scrolls, Alterman observes:

It is a little-known fact — I discovered it while researching my senior honors thesis in 1981-82 — that the anti-Vietnam demonstrations may have actually increased support for the war. Nobody was more unpopular with the country than the demonstrators. Even people who opposed the war, according to Gallup data, disapproved of the demonstrators by vast proportions. (The alternate argument — equally unprovable — is that the movement helped end the war because it scared the Nixon administration into suing for peace for reasons of domestic tranquility. But this is belied by the collapse of the movement following the end of the draft.)

"A little known fact?" To whom? The people living within littering distance of Central Park or Telegraph Hill? I think the rest of us knew that the anti-draft protests - which featured equal parts of cliched America and sophomore-level intellectual posing by the "best and brightest" - fostered a strong reaction in the rest of society. When he gets around to it, Alterman needs to think about why it was that the males belonging to his cohort of the Baby Boom generation - those who graduated High School after 1975 - gave overwhelming support to Reagan in the 1980 election. Could it have been that we got tired of listening to our older brothers and sisters tell us that we were living in the most corrupt nation the world has ever known?

Update #3 - The Permanent Revolution and the continuing Relevance of Agitprop

This David Horowitz post makes the point that Charles Rangel - who has been positioning himself as a patriot who wants a return of the draft in order to spread the burden of military service - spoke at Saturday's anti-war Pro-Dictatorship movement Idiots. rally. Horowitz also points out that Saturday's rally, as insignificant as they were, still attracted far more participants than attended the first anti-Vietnam rally's which occurred (a) at a time when there was a draft and (b) people actually were being killed in Vietnam.

What does this mean? Initially, it appears that there is an larger and institutionalized element of American society that operates on the assumption that American interests are presumptively corrupt than there was in the 1960's. I mean, what else it could it mean? The protests weren't about military conscription or the futility of an Iraqui war since those things haven't happened.

Second, does Rangel want a draft so that he can kickstart even larger protests? People who would be drafted were in the crowds listening to him. Why weren't they protesting him? Like Ted Kennedy's continuing relationship with Mary Joe Kopechne, does agitprop requires certain sacrifices? [By the way, check out this Instapundit post rebutting the buried assumption that front line soldiers will be disporportionately minorities.]

More on changes in religious demographics

ibidem - please note that he has moved to blogmosis - offers a post on the long term consistency in American religious values. Ibidem's sources generally support the idea that even during the purportedly satisfied and conventional period of the 1940's and 1950's, a large proportion of college students were skeptical about traditional religion and their particular religious heritage. These proportions apparently track back into the 1920's and "probably has been so for the last hundred years, perhaps longer."

I don't think, though, that these studies answer questions about the existence or cause of the decline of mainline Protestantism. I don't doubt the studies that Mr. Gill cites, but they do concentrate on college students, who until the 1960's were hardly representative of broader society. Further, there is a typical movement in and out of religious commitment during an individual's life. A person's college years probably represent the most secular phase of a person's life, which may be a modern phenomena insofar as we define St. Augustine as a modern. [OK, I'm being somewhat facetious, but, in truth, I have always felt that the St. Augustine's experiences are not dissimilar to those experienced by people who lived during the 1960's.]

The question is whether they will eventually return to their childhood church or go somewhere else. [Again, reflect on St. Augustine's travels through Manichianism, Gnosticism and Neo-platonism before his return to Orthodoxy.] Marginal shifts in the rate of return, or in an individual's election to join a different church, can lead to dramatic changes in demographics over time. Again, I believe the evidence shows that the the mainline UPC and UMC have been losing membership over the last thirty years. They have probably been losing members to both secularization and to those denominations that have been increasing membership. I don't think the explanation is that they have inadequately stressed "social activities" and intensified "good works" because that is the precisely the course that those churches - at least, the UMC - has charted for itself. Simply put, if the problem was collegiate religious skepticism, the UMC would have the answer.

My simple goal is to build bridges of friendship and goodwill every day of my life.

Mr. Sulik and Mr. Dodd may I introduce you to Molly, who is an opinionated conservative Chica from San Diego. Miss Molly may I introduce you to Mr. Dodd and Mr. Sulik. They are both lawyers, incidentally, and I am unclear what their connection to the Bay Area is, but you should have quite a bit to discuss.

Man, that felt great.

On my reading list

I was seduced into purchasing this book - "The Matrix and Philosophy" by William Irwin, ed.

Verus Ratio posts on the anniversary of the Battle of Cowpens, which certainly ranks with Saratoga as one of the most important battles of the American Revolution.

This may be an interesting site - Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It bills itself as focusing on the mutual threat perceptions and resulting military plans of the two Cold War alliances. Well, we are waiting for the Thucydides of the Cold War.

Troop Movements presage Invasion

USS Clueless analyzes troop deployments and concludes that invasion is imminent. Molly's Musings was at the deployment, seeing off her father and cousin. It's not academic. It's real, and very necessary to prevent loathsome sociopaths from getting their hands on nukes which they can use against New York or, more likely, Tel Aviv. Then, to connect these dots, go back to USS Clueless and look at the ship he has a photo of - the Bonhomme Richard. My old man served on the predecessor to this "Bonny Dick." I also remember his deployment back during the '60s to Viet Nam when I was in second grade. Let's remember to pray for those who carry on America's military traditions and for those who remain behind.

Affirmative Action Returns

Bakke was decided a few years before I entered college. For those who don't remember, Bakke held that the use of race to determine college admissions was unconstitutional. A plurality did hold that race background could be used as one factor among many in college admissions. [Incidentally, Bakke was decided by a 5-4 plurality - closer actually than the decision in Bush v. Gore, and we know how the left feels about such pluralities.] What informed all parties in the Bakke decision was a recognition that the use of race required "strict scrutiny" because the use of race for the allocation of social benefits raised concerns that were distinctly and historically different than other criteria.

I say all that because it appears that the Left has completely forgotten that race is different than other criteria. For example, notwithstanding Bakke, universities began to use race as the single most important factor in determining admission and as the substitute token of diversity. Then read this excerpt from Lean Left (which sounds exactly like an argument Alan Colmes recites nightly on Hannity & Colmes):

So, according to Bush, giving extra points to athletes is not a quota system, giving extra points to legacy students is not a quota, but giving extra points to minorities is a quota. Why? Seriously, why? Someone on the right needs to explain this a clear manner, because it makes no sense. Athletes are given extra points because they bring skills and talents to the University that other students lack. Minorities are given extra points because they bring experiences and perspectives different that other students do not have (life in America as a Latino is different than as a Black than as a White than as a recent immigrant than as an Asian). Legacy students are given extra points because, well, because their parents generally bring money and connections that the parents of other students don't have. What, exactly, is the difference here?

Well, the simple answer is "Race." Right or wrong - and we all agree it's right - constitutional jurisprudence has selected certain criteria as requiring "strict scrutiny" as the standard of review of decisions using "suspect" classification. Strict scrutiny is a substantially higher standard than the alternative standards of review, such as "intermediate scrutiny" and "rational basis." In actual practice, strict scrutiny means that the program will never pass constitutional muster, while rational basis means it will never fail. So, while athletic preferences might be noxious - and they are - there is a completely different level of review between the practices because using race as a selection factor is intended to involve race and athletics isn't. Likewise, while legacy may be an unfair admission criteria - and as a UC graduate, I have no personal stake in defending such a policy - it is not a "suspect classification." [Although, if the effect of legacy admissions is to disadvantage racial minorities, then a challenge could be made on that basis.]

Would Lean Left's arguments for affirmative action pass a strict scrutiny review? I doubt it. First, why can't the same arguments be used to give points to Irish-Catholics? Don't they have a point of view that is "diverse" and "under-represented in academia?" Speaking from my experience at UCLA Law, I assure you that those are true statements. And yet, UC Berkeley wait-listed me three times before giving my place to someone with a lower gpa and LSAT score because apparently my minority viewpoint wasn't sufficiently diverse enough. [This despite the fact that you could bet that my political and cultural background as a military brat/small business owner would have been virtually unique. And let's not get started on whether the fundamentalist viewpoint is adequately represented at the elite professional schools.] My point is not merely personal; it establishes that the "diversity" argument is a pretext for race discimination pure and simple.Under Bakke, race discrimination qua race discrimination has always been illegal.

The second reason that Lean Left's arguments won't pass muster is that this isn't 1978. We are literally one generation beyond Bakke. Social and racial demographics have changed. Affirmative action has either accomplished its goal, or it never will. On either basis, affirmative action appears as nothing more than racism designed to promote racial groups with the proper political attitudes. Check out this Angry Clam post on the large swing that affirmative action gives to "special admittees:"

Let me put that into perspective for you: if every single member of your family since the founding of Michigan went there, AND you were the leader in everything in high school, AND you wrote a personal statement up for the Nobel Prize in literature, you'd get twelve points, eight behind what you'd get just for being black.

This is not what Bakke intended. The argument for affirmative action that has traditionally been framed by its proponents is that under affirmative action, that as between two equally qualified candidate, the nod would go to the minority on the basis of the diversity factor. The fact that Michigan is giving twenty unanswered points on the basis of an individual belonging to the right underrepresented group is a far different than how affirmative action was presented to the Supreme Court and the nation a quarter century ago.

Elsewhere, Lean Left made the argument that opponents of affirmative action are hypocrites because "all of a sudden" after five hundred years of benefitting from racism, whites get religion about a color-blind society. [Certainly, my ancestors, who were digging potatos for "the Man" back in Ireland, enjoyed full participation in the preferential treatment accorded "whites," except, of course, for the whole Cromwellian extermination program, the laws against Catholic literacy and the various legal restrictions predating Catholic Emancipation in the 1830s. But, frankly, most "whites" outside of America were serfs and their positions in society were not something to be envied by modern standards.] Sorry, but that argument is a Constitutional non-starter. Here's an excerpt from the majority decision in Bakke:

Petitioner urges us to adopt for the first time a more restrictive view of the Equal Protection Clause and hold that discrimination against members of the white "majority" cannot be suspect if its purpose can be characterized as "benign." 34 [438 U.S. 265, 295] The clock of our liberties, however, cannot be turned back to 1868. Brown v. Board of Education, supra, at 492; accord, Loving v. Virginia, supra, at 9. It is far too late to argue that the guarantee of equal protection to all persons permits the recognition of special wards entitled to a degree of protection greater than that accorded others

Finally, noting that affirmative action declares war on 17 year old asian women, The Volokh Conspiracy has this observation:

NAACP national chairman Julian Bond, and so he has said on several occasions in the past (I found three stories on LEXIS quoting him on this, each mentioning a different speech): "Affirmative action is the just spoils of a righteous war."

So here's what I want to know: War of whom against whom? Pro-civil-rights forces against anti-civil-rights forces? If so, then why is it that Asian and white 17-year-olds (among others) -- who were never in the war, and whose parents may well have been on the right side -- have to yield up the spoils?

A legal system founded on neutral principles promote civil peace. Martin Luther King, Jr. appealed to neutral principles - to the promissory note of American justice - in order to promote racial justice. We treat race as different from other classifications for historically good and sufficient reasons. We are not going to lessen the standard by which we scrutinize racial classifications, notwithstanding the Left's arguments that we should.

Update: Discriminations has a post on "the invidious ubiquitous non sequitur of regarding racial discrimination as no better or no worse than discrimination over athletic or musical ability or where your parents went to college. " Discriminations quotes the ever-quotable James Q. Wilson that:

In taking this approach, the Court has given practical effect to what somebody said on another occasion: we did not fight the Civil War to make sure the University of Mississippi would admit good quarterbacks, we fought it to make certain it would admit blacks. To say that racial and athletic classifications are similar or that one can reason from the latter to the former is foolish. No court has ever held, or is likely to hold, that being able to throw a football 60 yards (or to have a father who gave the school a million dollars) places you in a class whose rights are protected by the barrier of strict scrutiny. Of course, one could argue for making both race and athleticism the same, by getting the Court to say that race is no longer a suspect classification. But that would mean reversing 40 years of desegregation.

Good quick theme - We didn't fight the Civil War to make sure that the University of Missippi would treat athletes equally, we fought it to make sure that it would treat races equally. Which is why race is a "suspect classification" and your parents' donation status is not.

I ask again, doesn't the Left bother with historical or constitutional scholarship anymore?

Ace Reporter cracks case

Anna risked life and her sense of the surreal and returned with photos from the Pro-Sadam demonstrations mounted this weekend. Go check them out and then tell me if you think that they keep this protest paraphenalia in mothballs in Berkeley or somewhere and have been rolling out the same stuff since the 60's. I mean for heaven's sake, poor Anna would never have found the protest if it wasn't for the red flags. Red flags? Who has red flags anymore? I thought those things were all burned in 1989. Must have been a boxful of them left in that Marin County warehouse.

And that dude on stilts - "...and stilt walkers. You can't convey a carefully thought-out anti-war message unless someone is willing to climb the poles" - is that right out of the game plan for a 60's anti-draft protest or what?

The doubty Anna reports that the "Dictatorship Preservation Society" amused themselves with clever slogans like:

Who do we love?
Saddam!
Who do we love even more?
Osama!

and she was there and its in print, so it must be true.

Check out the last two photos in order to regain your sense of proportions.

Update:

My offhand snide observation about the fossification of the anti-war Pro-Dictatorship movement Idiots appears to be dead on. The OmbudsGod has several posts showing the contribution of the Workers World Party to Saturday's shindig. The WWP is a bizaare Stalinist coelacanth that no one could possibly take serious, except for the anti-war Pro-Dictatorship movement Idiots. Kind of like pro-confederate romanticism, except the Left is given a free pass on its romance with the mass killers who worked their perverse politics within living memory.

This is Sexist and I rebuke anyone who sees any humour in this photograph.

The Cracker Barrel Philosopher links to The Angry Cyclist's photo of Sheryl Crow's new "theme" t-shirt. Again, I want it to be clear that I don't approve of this kind of objectification of the female body. But it is part of public discussion.

Remember, it's political speech and that this blog is devoted to the highest principles of public discourse and would never link to cheesecake photos for cheap titillation - er, drat - cheap thrills.

I hope that's clear.

Did you know that j-files works as a clerk to the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia/Office of the Prosecutor? OK, that sounds like a pretty cool job. Better, perhaps, than debating the CEQA requirements for the treatment of human waste I'm thinking.

Lord of the Rings - A Critical Reassessment

Toren Smith at The Safety Valve vents about the Two Towers. He feels the movie had its good points but he's not happy with certain aspects of the movie:

Other nits are "reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" sequence with Aragorn, the inexplicably cringing women of Rohan--especially Eowyn--during the battle of Helm's Deep, the failure to establish the tension between the orcs of Mordor and the Uruk-Hai, and a few others. Most of these could have been resolved with a minute or two of screen time, and there was plenty of that wasted elsewhere.

The movie failed to establish the tension between the orcs of Mordor and the Uruk-Hai???? The Uruk Hai and the orcs weren't the same thing?? I thought that the Uruk-Hai was something like super-Orcs, like the difference between the regular Army and the Rangers. I think just explaining that would have stopped the movie in its tracks as Gandalf and Saruman spent five minutes in expositional dialogue:

Gandalf: "You know, Saruman, I couldn't help but notice- after you opened a big can of whup-ass on me with that sticky thing of yours - that your troops seem dispirited and listless. They don't seem to have the same interest in devouring living Hobbit captives that they're known for."

Saruman: "Oy. You have no ideas what difficulties there are in leading a hell-spawned slave army. The logistical problems are near insurmountable. Mostly, resulting from the fact that, as near as I can tell, there is no Orcish agricultural sector, and in a neat reversal of the usual strategems of war, I have burned and despoiled my own lands. It's also a wonder that my massed legions haven't succumbed to disease given the fact that they have personal hygiene habits that make the French look fastidious."

Gandalf: "From where I was trapped at the top of the 300 foot tall tower exposed to rain and wind, I could certainly smell your problem. It's what I imagine Paris would smell like if the perfume-cartel raised prices."

Saruman: "And don't get me started on the morale problems. My Orc infantry is in a positive snit about the Uruk-Hai?"

Gandalf: "Who?"

Saruman: "The Uruk-Hai. The snarling, filthy warriors with fangs."

Gandalf: "The Orcs?"

Saruman: "No. The more snarling, filthy warriors with fangs."

Gandalf: "Oh."

Saruman: "By the way, how did you survive that fall into the burning pits of the earth and defeat the Balrog?"

Gandalf: "Oh, that. Simple. Once I had extricated myself from the burning pits of the earth and defeated the Balrog...."

You can see how this would have interrupted the flow of the movie.

Eric Burns at FOXNews is turning into someone to watch. He is not afraid to point out the failings of both the left and the right in terms of news coverage. This column, for example, takes Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's award of a "P.U. -litzer" to a CNN anchor for saying that public interest in a story determined coverage. Burns writes that the anchor (Cafferty) said :

This [CNN] is a commercial enterprise. This is not PBS. We’re not here as a public service. We’re here to make money. We sell advertising, and we do it on the premise that people are going to watch. If you don’t cover the miners because you want to do a story about a debt crisis in Brazil at the time everybody else is covering the miners, then Citibank calls up and says, ‘You know what? We’re not renewing the commercial contract.’ I mean, it’s a business."

Which elicited this response from FAIR:

According to Solomon, Cafferty’s statement "mixed candor with exemplary media arrogance."

Burns chides FAIR for both its elitism and distance from reality in assuming that the media should dictate public news interest. Burns writes:

By criticizing Jack Cafferty as he did, Norman Solomon implies that CNN should not care about profits, that its coverage decisions should be totally independent of financial considerations, which is another way of saying that CNN should cover the kinds of stories that Solomon thinks it should cover even if it loses money in the process, and is thereby forced to lay off employees and remove money from the investment portfolios of its stockholders.

Sounds to me like the kind of thinking that is worthy of an award for arrogance.

There is nothing new in what Burns writes. It's just nice to hear it from somone in the media.

Important legal developments

I picked this one up from an internet case alert service. I was kind of suprised to find out that we had a published environmental law decision. That would explain what Doyle is doing in his office all day. Looks like a fascinating case. California Environmental Quality Act application to the application of human waste to agricultural land. [ee-yuck.] Welcome to the Valley and one of its growth industries.

Ah, who cares?

OpinionJournal - Taste has a column noting that Ramsey Clark's "Jesus was a terrorist" slur was met with silence. [Why, in truth, does anyone even listen to Ramsey Clark. All I know about him is that his old man quit the Supreme Court so that Ramsey could be Johnson's Attorney General. The last time I saw him on TV, he had this deer-caught-in-the-headlight stare that made me wonder when his keepers would wheel him off the stage and back to the care facility.]

More Demographics

Best of the Web has an interesting spin on the political/cultural demographics resulting from abortion. The observation is embedded in a critique of an argument predicting eventual Democrat political dominance resulting from the liberalizing attitude of Americans toward sex. The idea is that Republicans will lose support because of their traditional positions on moral issues. BOTW writes:

The second problem is Edsall's failure to acknowledge that changes in attitudes and laws concerning sex have a long-term effect on the electorate. If a pregnant woman chooses tomorrow to have an abortion, the result in 2021 will be one fewer eligible voter--and that's a statement of fact, not a moral judgment. If tens of millions of women have abortions over decades, as they have, it will eventually have a significant effect on the voting-age population.

Not all women, after all, are equally likely to have abortions. It's almost a truism that women who have abortions are more pro-choice than those who carry their pregnancies to term, and it stands to reason that they generally have more-liberal attitudes about sex and religion. It also seems reasonable to assume that parents have some influence on their children, so that if liberal women are having abortions, the next generation will be more conservative than it otherwise would be.

Now, I am generally skeptical of this argument, and I sure wouldn't hold my breath as a Republican for this demographic phenomena to play itself out. There are a lot of social influences that determine a lot of social attitudes. Media depictions of sexual attitudes, for example, would seem to be controlling in both the short and the long run.

But still, social attitudes are passed along in the family. For example, whether you are a Republican or Democrat has more to do with what your parents were than anything else. Likewise, the student radical leaders of the 60's were more often than not the red-diaper babies of the Communists of the 30's. One would suspect that attitudes toward abortion and sexuality would be communicated throught that mysterious process by which attitudes are formed within the family.

Likewise, part of Stark's argument [see below] for the sociological success of Christianity was simply that Christians outbred the competition. Christians didn't expose or abort their children like the Pagans did. Likewise, Christian morality tended to keep Christians alive longer and able to reproduce more children than the Pagans. These kinds of trends, as small as they are at any given time, can make huge differences over a long enough time.

Anna is deciding on her prom outfit - basic black and nukes.

Actually, Anna's suggestion kind of sounds like fun.

The Blog from the Core links to new Vatican rules on political participation. So does The Angry Clam, who offers some concrete suggestions about who should be the first to the auto-da-fe. Likewise, The Mighty Barrister adds his contribution. [Which is getting fairly close to an RC/lawyer trifecta.]

First Amendment Watch

The California Daily Journal (no link available, which there should be because "print is dead") reports that the United States Supreme Court has agreed to accept the appeal in Nike v. Krasky. In case, you have forgotten, Nike is the case where the California Supreme Court held that activists could sue Nike under California's unfair competition statute - Business and Professions Code section 17200, if you care - for false statements concerning labor and social policy. The Cal Supremes held that Nike's speech was "commercial speech" which was not entitled to protection because of Nike's profit motive, which they felt would insulate Nike from self censorship. Here's my post from June 2002 if you want more detail. My magic 8-ball says that the Cal Supremes get reversed.

Communio Topic

To those in my Fresno Communio Group, let's talk about this post on Free Will from He Lives.

Will Spin for Food

Rich Galen is looking for work.

As a parent with proto-teenagers, I have to remember to save Pdawwg's post on teenagers and their discontents for the next decade.

The OmbudsGod has two posts on amazing news coverage. One article from the Boston Globe speculates on the debt that Mary Jo Kopechne would owe to Edward Kennedy if she had lived to to be 62 years old this year. The other deals with NPR's cognitive dissonance in its reporting on Israel.

If this goes on?

Here's a disturbing piece of science fiction recommended by Mark Shea. "Cut" by Magen Lindholm

The Living Constitution

NINOMANIA - who else do you think would have it - has a link to "The Man's Fredericksburg Speech on Religion Clause Jurisprudence." And go to the comments to this post - Joshua Claybourn's Domain: The Allegiance Returns - for a nice debate kicked off by Scalia's comments.

Argh, the Enemy

laborblog - a blawg devoted to the management side of employment law.

Church Membership Data

Relative to the post several entries below analyzing the existence of "anti-fundamentalist" animus, Bruce Rheinstein directed me to this Economist article and to this site. I have heard anecdotal statements over the years that while the mainline Protestant denominations are hemorrhaging membership and support, Catholics and evangelicals have been increasing membership through conversion and recruitment. Personally, I have been involved in cases locally involving mainline churches - Methodist and Presbyterian - where local congregations have split off because of social and theological differences with the denomination. The local churches are of the view that although they haven't moved, the denomination has, and on significant and uncompromisable theological issues. The Economist article and the RCMS data supports these anecdotal observations.

The Economist begins with an observation about the differences between Europe and America:

DO YOU believe in God? If you are European, you probably shuffle your feet, look mildly embarrassed, and mutter, “Well, it depends on what you mean by God.” Or something of the sort. In Western Europe, a mere 20% of people go regularly to a service; in Eastern Europe, only 14%. But if you are American, the answer is almost certainly an unabashed “Yes”. Only about 2% of Americans are atheists, and a startling 47% tell pollsters that they go to a religious service at least once a week. Even if that is an over-statement, the broad difference between continents is clear.

The explanation of this difference "lies in the unique history of religious experience in the United States, in the adaptive genius of Pentecostalism, and in the power of the fundamentalist Christian message in an era of rapid social change. " The Economist article places the continued vitality of Christianity in America on the style of worship:

But not all denominations have done well. A survey by the Glenmary Research Centre of Cincinnati, Ohio, found impressive increases in the past decade in the number of Mormons, Catholics and non-traditional Protestant churches such as the Pentecostalists and the Southern Baptists. The losers were traditional churches such as the Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians. Catholics apart, Americans are fleeing in droves from the churches with set liturgies, organ music and ministers in robes, and towards those that offer fiery preaching, noisy music and telegenic men in suits.

Further in the article, the Economist offers - not surprisingly - an economic explanation for the decline of mainline Protestantism:

The authors argue that the most successful churches have always been those that preach traditional doctrines and make tough demands on their members. The Methodists, for example, flourished in the 19th century, when they were seen as an extremist sect. With subsequent respectability, however, has come decline. The same holds for other churches that have modernised and compromised.

The reason, the authors argue, is that “religious organisations are stronger to the degree that they impose significant costs in terms of sacrifice and even stigma upon their members.” Religion, they explain, is a collectively produced good, partly because people are more willing to accept the risks involved in pursuing benefits that arise only in the hereafter if others around them have accepted the same deal.

But the problem with any collectively produced good is the free rider—in the case of (especially European) religion, the church members who turn up only at Christmas and Easter, leaving the pews discouragingly empty in between. The answer lies in demanding a sufficient level of sacrifice to chase away free riders and to motivate the faithful to pitch everything into their church life. If they cannot drink alcohol, play cards or take drugs, they may find the social life at church more appealing. And a congregation of whole-hearted devotees gives everyone greater spiritual rewards than a half-empty churchful of sceptics.

This argument, incidentally, was used by Stark in his sociological explanation for the success of Christianity prior to Constantine.

The RCMS U.S. Report provides the raw data on this phenomena. According to the site, Presbyterians (PCUSA) membership declined 11.6%, or 411, 000 members, during the 1990's. The United Methodist Church membership declined 6.7%, or 740,000 members, during the same decade. The Episcopalians were down 5.3%, or 130,000 members, in the 1990s. As for the Lutherans, the ELCA declined 2.2%, or 113, 000 members and the Missouri Synod lost 3.2% or 82,000 members. [Bad news for Penner, the Mennonites lost 19.9% or 38,000 members, not counting my partner.]

Incidentally, these numbers may not reflect the real magnitude of the membership losses experienced by these churches. I have seen samizdat Methodist data that indicate that Methodists haven't been anywhere near 10 million members for decades, and that the actual number is closer to 8 million. In which case, they would have a loss of near 20 to 30% over the last several decades.

On the other hand, the Evangelicals saw growth. The EV Frees were up 57.2% (104,000 members), the Southern Baptist Conference increased 5%, or nearly a million members. The LDS increased 19% or 683,000 members. The Assembly of God was up 18.5% or 400,000 members.

As the Economist noted the real surprise is Catholicism. During the 1990s, Catholic membership shot up 16.2%. This large percentage increase is more amazing since it is based on a titanic population base. The Catholic population increased from 53 million to 62 million over the 90s. Catholicism, in other words, added almost as large a population group as the LDS had at the start of the 90s.

The Stark thesis may have some traction here. Despite its attempt to position itself as the hyper-politically correct denomination, the UMC - Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors - has lost huge numbers of membership. The policy of inclusiveness and mealy-mouth theology simply hasn't attracted membership. My personal experience with the Methodists is that the hiearchy's refusal to vouch that core issues, such as the Resurrection, are not optional parts of Methodist theology is what has driven devout Methodists away from their denomination. This is somewhat important inasmuch as such departures are typically depicted as a dispute over social issues, such as homosexual marriages. Let's face it, a willingness to subscribe to a belief system, or creed, is a fairly minimal investment relative to the free rider problem.

The Catholic situation is instructive as well. Although a substantial portion of the increase must have come from immigration, there must be a large influx from conversion. According to this site, which is run by "Negative Population Growth" and therefore presumably does not have an incentive to under-report immigration, immigration adds one million people a year to the population. Since the Catholic increase was about that number, and not all immigrants are Catholic, Catholic growth must have another source. Further, since natural population increase hasn't sustained the mainline churches membership, the logical conclusion is that Catholicism has grown by conversion.

Now for the ironic ending.

I have the seen the argument made repeatedly that Catholicism must modernize in order to maintain its relevance to its membership. The argument has been asserted that because of its allegedly archaic rules on contraception, abortion, divorce, ordination, etc., the Catholic church risks alienating the moderns and cutting its own throat, demographically speaking. There is obviously no demographic support for this argument, and if the Stark thesis and the example of the UMC, have any relevance, adopting such policies would result in a decline in membership, irrespective of the merits - theological or philosophical - of the given policy.

Update/Feedback

First, thanks for the feedback. I find this subject interesting because it reveals a cognitive dissonance in our culture. On the one hand, the dominant theme of American culture since at least the 1970's - prior to which the collective memory recedes into the foggy mists of pre-history - has been the drive for "inclusiveness." Examples of this are cliches which extol tolerance and condemn statements of preference for one social option over another. Think of the Murphy Brown crusade on behalf of the idea that no particular form of a family was objectively preferable to any other form, or the universality of no-fault divorce, or the seeming inevitability of some form of homosexual marriage, or simply the cliche statement that one should be able to do one's own thing so long as it does not harm anyone else and who is to judge. Under this social view, denominations that internalize this non-judgmental attitude should be able to reap membership benefits by appealing to both a larger population base and to people of modern sensibilities who don't want to be subject to someone else's rules of conduct. I think this calculation has motivated in some part things like the UPC's current position on subscription to doctrine or the UMC's "open hearts, mind, doors" slogan.

The cognitivie dissonance stems from the fact the policy of embracing the inclusive zeitgeist is simply - and patently - not working. The explanation for this phenomena are worth exploring.

Jay Manifold from A Voyage to Arcturus in the comments notes the attraction of the community aspects of evangelical churches. Certainly, this is a factor in their success. The interesting thing, though, is that based on the "free rider" problem, people are more willing to invest in their communities when every other member is also contributing. [This notion comes right out of Stark, incidentally.] Rotary is the leading community service organization, and it also has fairly rigorous attendance rules, which tends to weed out the half-hearted. By having a smaller, more committed membership, Rotary membership gives greater value to those who stay in the organization because virtually everyone is a contributor.
So, the attractiveness of the benefits offered by evangelical membership may flow from the investment required by the church.

Mark Byron notes that without some religious investment there is no difference between a sermon and an Oprah show. I think this makes some sense. People who might be put off by the idea of the Resurrection, are not going to invest in Methodism simply because of its social agenda. They are going to invest in Greenpeace or the Sierra Club.

Jesus Gil in a comment at Mark Byron's site questions the significance of the data and notes that similar trends have existed at other times in history. I would be interested in seeing this point developed. There is, of course, always the problem of falling into the "exceptionalism" fallacy. Things are never so bad or so unique as right now. I don't think that mainline Protestantism disappears in the short term, but in the long run, according to Stark, a 10% growth rate resulted in the conversion of half the Roman Empire to Christianity in 300 years. Also, consider the cultural and political influence of Methodism. The last two Presidents have either been Methodists or influenced by the Methodist tradition. Something like 25% of Congress are Methodists. Certainly, there should be some diminution of the influence of Methodists over the next twenty years and an increase in Evangelical political influence. I leave it to the experts to suggest what effect that would have on society.

Joshua Claybourn also has a post and mentions the post on "anti-fundamentalist" animus. I guess I missed previous discussions on this subject, but I would frankly be interested in hearing whether, and how, this animus plays itself in the real world.

I also find the Catholic input interesting because I share the same sentiments. I can almost say that I am a devout Catholic despite the best efforts of the organized church. Until quite recently, I had no - zero, none - involvement in anything that looked like a Catholic community. The support that I see among members of the evangelical churches has no reference in my experience. When I shared this observation with a Church of Christ friend who is now teaching in the UAE, he was awed by the fact that I could be a committed Catholic and have no community involvement.

Last, but not least, check out Mark Cameron for the further application of the Stark thesis to modern sociological phenomena.

Local News

One Pilgrim's Walk reports that he attended the ordination of the first class of deacons in the Diocese of Fresno. I was happy to see that former member of North Fresno Rotary, John "Supi" Supino was on the list. I remember him telling me about his diaconate training when we shared the front table at a NFR meeting around three or four years ago. Also, I was sort of surprised to see local attorney Edward C. Valdez's name. I had no idea that he was heading in this direction when I consulted with him in April on an employment issue. I know he has an active practice. Does this mean that he will be giving that up? It certainly is good to see that the Church provide a vehicle for these men - succesful in their chosen professions and nearing retirement - to serve.

Celebrity Indulgence Watch

joyfulchristian has a good post on Sheryl Crow's T-shirt's message that "war is not the answer." As he points out, it depends on the question. Such as "how does one stop a mad man from developing nukes?" Also, his contribution to HTML code is cute.

New Internet Sport

the dark goddess of replevin speaks and says that she likes reading the deposition transcripts of RC Cardinals which, according to the DG, is like watching a slow motion train wreck. She notes:

Daily is more likeable but also has what I have taken to calling Law's Disease, a seemingly congenital inability to allow the interrogator to finish his questioning before jumping in with an answer.

In any case, these men seem not to have reviewed the documents produced before their depositions. It did not serve them well.

She asks, who prepped these guys?

Interesting. Here's my post from May of last year:

Third, I repeat, it didn't seem that the Cardinal was woodshedded very effectively. Let's face it, all depositions involve polishing up the witness so that he is comfortable with the themes of the case and knows the basic facts of the litigation. Witnesses are always taken to the woodshed where after you get their attention, you can address their attitude. However, woodshedding can run into the sow's ear problem; you can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. Witnesses are who they are, and 10 to 20 hours of deposition preparation won't change a lifetime of habits. This is particularly true when you have a succesful person who is used to being treated deferentially.

Well, clearly, the Cardinals still have "CEO Disease." When you're used to being surrounded by minions who will wait for you to finish every silly utterance you start, you tend to forget that not everyone thinks everything you say is brilliant. Particularly when you're not.

My current attempt at a new Axiom of Litigation is Garrulity corrupts, obsequiousness corrupts absolutely. [This should go after Axiom Number 5 - "Always take the money."] Of course, if someone has a different - and catchier - formulation for this existential truth, I will give due credit.

Here's a possibly impertinent question.

Rand Simberg has a post on the proposition that Einstein was right in his prediction that the "speed" of gravity and the speed of light are the same. Or, at least, according to a recent study, they are within 20 % of each other.

My question is, why?

Why is light the absolute speed limit of the universe?

I get the feeling that the answer to this one is that I am going to be told this is somehow a meaningless question, like what existed before the Big Bang. Or what exists outside the expanding wave front of the universe.

My next question is, how did Einstein pick photons as the objects that travelled the fastest of all objects in the universe? Was this a lucky guess on his part?

Based on my college experience of hanging out with political science majors, I get the feeling that the answers are not going to come from the conservative, Catholic or lawyer lobes of this site. Hopefully, some physicist will stumble onto this site in search of porn.

Update While I'm waiting for that physicist (as if they can't get enough action simply by flashing their degrees at the local bar), I have gotten some great answers to my questions.

As set forth in the comments, according to Mr. Muncey, Einstein perceived that light and photons were moving at some kind of absolute speed because there was no observable difference in their speed if one moved toward them or away from them. That does spark some long term physics memory. Of coure, there is a doppler shift phenomena with respect to frequency, which is one of the empirical supports for the Big Bang. David provided some links to sites which said (a) don't ask stupid questions about why natural phenomena are the way they are and (b) photons can move at the speed of light because they are massless (or really, really light) and so don't suck all the energy out of the universe when they go really, really fast. (Because mass increases asymptopically at light speed.) So, I guess, photons travel at light speed because they can. My next question is do photons go that fast because of something internal to themselves or do they get accelerated that fast by an outside source.

So, I'm still waiting for that physicist in search of lava hot rabbit love involving naughty college coeds. [There, that should bait the trap.]

Did you ever think you would see an article in National Review opposing the death penalty? See Rod Dreher on Death Penalty & George Ryan on National Review Online

Who is ChessLaw? And what does blawging have to do with chess?

Xrlq notes in regard to Pete Townsend that:

if he turns out to be guilty, it's going to be pretty tough enjoying all those Who tunes. Some of his stuff, Tommy for example, may become become unlistenable.

Now that Xrlq mentions it, I don't think I can ever listen to a song about that "deaf, dumb and blind kid" without thinking about calling CPS. Drat, another naive memory of my youth soiled by the grubby realities of time. First, it's pine cones and now it's this.

Fox News is carrying Joe Lieberman's announcement of his candidacy for President. Listening to his strong statements in support of religious belief, it looks like he has absorbed the information which is the basis for the following post, and is looking to establish a base of support in southern fundamentalists.

There is a Culture War, after all

Ben Domenech furnishes this link to this Daily Standard article - The Party of Unbelievers, which in turn leads to this The Public Interest article on Our secularist Democratic party You can read the Daily Standard article for a synopsis of the Public Interest piece, which is the present "cultural war" occurred because of the 1972 capture of the Democratic Party by a secularly oriented voting block. The Public Interest article looks at various surveys, including one that measures affinity or antagonism by way of a questionaire that generates a feeling thermometer. The Standard article explains this point:

Another striking finding is the intensity of many secularists' dislike of conservative Christians--vastly greater than any dislike of Jews of Catholics discernible in the survey data from the University of Michigan that the authors analyze. "One has to reach back to pre-New Deal America," they write, "when political divisions between Catholics and Protestants encapsulated local ethno-cultural cleavages over prohibition, immigration, public education, and blue laws, to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group."

Even though I am anything but a fundamentalist, my gut feeling is that this is an accurate statement. Popular depictions of fundamentalists in the media and statements that one hears on the street would immediately be recognized as bigoted if directed against any other group. Again, to be candid, there are popular stereotypes of the "low church Protestants" concerning their education, intelligence, emotional stability, mental flexibility. [Look, don't blame me for listing these stereotypes. Everyone knows this. Think about the Captain Frank Burns character in MASH who was characterized as a "sky pilot" and then unmercifully persecuted by his zany roommates. Or choose any of a number of other depictions of a "bible thumper" character. Oddly, one of the most favorable depictions of fundamentalists was in an X-File episode where the fundies turned out be right and the moderate-liberal pastor was Satan.] But, of course, since "christians" are viewed as the majority, and not a minority group, complaints that such depictions are pandering to bigotry are quickly dismissed. Frankly, there will have to be a dramatic reorientation of the social weltenschauung before the idea that such depictions constitute a form of pernicious group libel could be sold.

Other interesting details from the Public Interest article:

The average rating white Christian fundamentalists gave to Jews was a warm 66 degrees, a finding consistent with ANES surveys reaching back over a decade. It was no different from the mean ratings that Catholics and mainline Protestants gave to Jews. Among respondents who could correctly identify both Lieberman's and Gore's religious affiliation, Christian fundamentalists felt significantly warmer toward Lieberman (56 degrees) than toward Gore, a Southern Baptist (42 degrees). Disapproval of Lieberman came not from Christian fundamentalists but from secularists, who complained that his public professions of faith and piety blurred the line between religion and politics, and from cultural conservatives who suspected that Lieberman's post-convention stances on issues like partial-birth abortion and school vouchers were more in tune with the secularist tilt of the Democratic party than with his pre-convention positions, thought to be anchored in his religious orthodoxy.

Amazing. Supposedly narrow minded fundamentalists supported Lieberman over Gore. That doesn't fit the popular stereotype, now does it?

Appropos of proving anti-christian bias, check out quote in the next paragraph below. [I am having a problem with using the term Christian here. What I am describing really is distinct from traditional anti-Catholicism. Christian in this context really refers to "low church protestant," and if someone has a better term, let me know. Side note: the low church protestant tradition is really the radical christian tradition, which is contrasted with the magisterial protestant tradition of the likes of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. Hence, in the future, I will refer to the "radical christian" tradition in lieu of "christian" or "low church protestant." Second side note: If these findings are correct anti-Catholicism will not be a product of the "usual suspects" - the radical christian element. Rather it will come out of the secular oriented sector of society - the non-religious.]

Anyhow, here's the quote:

In terms of their size and party loyalty, secularists today are as important to the Democratic party as another key Democratic constituency, organized labor. In the 2000 election, for example, both secularists and union members comprised about 16 percent of the white electorate, and both backed Gore with two-thirds of their votes. The religious gap among white voters in the 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential elections was more important than other demographic and social cleavages in the electorate; it was much larger than the gender gap and more significant than any combination of differences in education, income, occupation, age, marital status, and regional groupings. The importance of evangelicals to the ascendancy of the Republican party since the 1980s has been pointed out ad nauseam by media elites. But if the GOP can be labeled the party of religious conservatives, the Democrats, with equal validity, can be called the secularist party.

The increased religious polarization of the electorate has given rise to a new type of voter: the anti-fundamentalist. We discovered this when we examined one group of ANES respondents: those who rated Christian fundamentalists 35 degrees or below on ANES's scale. We wanted to find out whether elite hostility to Christian fundamentalists, clearly apparent in the convention delegate surveys, had filtered into broader segments of the public. In ANES's 2000 survey, about a quarter of white respondents met the anti-fundamentalist criterion, rating fundamentalists 35 degrees or below. For comparison purposes, only 1 percent felt this antagonistic toward Jews and about 2.5 percent expressed this degree of hostility toward blacks and Catholics. ANES results indicate that anti-fundamentalism appears disproportionately among secularists, the highly educated, particularly those living in big cities, and persons who strongly favor legalized abortion and gay rights, oppose prayer in schools, and who, ironically, "strongly agree" that one should be tolerant of persons whose moral standards are different from one's own.

The results indicate that over the past decade persons who intensely dislike fundamentalist Christians have found a partisan home in the Democratic party. Clinton captured 80 percent of these voters in his victories over President Bush in 1992 and over Senator Robert Dole four years later; Gore picked up 70 percent of the anti-fundamentalist vote in the 2000 election. One has to reach back to pre-New Deal America, when political divisions between Catholics and Protestants encapsulated local ethno-cultural cleavages over prohibition, immigration, public education, and blue laws, to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group.

In short, a major political party is dominated by a group of voters who, incidentally, are viscerally biased against fundamentalists. Is it unfair to assert that these attitudes make their way into policy decisions? For example, how much of the current opposition to the Boy Scouts arises from that organization's pro-religious orientation? Perhaps even more importantly, how much of the FBI's policies on Waco and Ruby Ridge were informed by latent attitudes concerning the fundamentalists involved in those situations? What about the fever pitch of legal interest over the relatively trivial policy issue of creches in civic Christmas displays? Or the fairly recent legal intuition that phrases like "In God We Trust" or "ONe Nation under God" violate the First Amendment?

Should there be a policy concern about discrimination against fundamentalists, as there is, for example, is with respect to Hispanic-Americans? I don't think such concerns are taken seriously and based on my own experience, I suspect that a complaint with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing alleging anti-fundamentalist discrimination would languish in obscurity before being round-filed.

To be clear, we are not talking about Nuremburg laws being passed against the fundamentalists. But anybody reading this information ought to recognize the need for more sensitive toward this minority group. In fact, perhaps there should even be sensitivity training classes concerning fundamentalism and they shoud be given extra points in the interest of diversity. [Of course, I'm being facetious, but isn't it hypocritical of the proponents of such measures to pick and choose among the groups they feel are entitled to such treatment? Just asking.]

Update: I knew this would happen. My low church Protestant partner Penner told me this morning that he was tired of being referred to as a "low church" Protestant. As far as I know, the term "low church" wasn't intended to denigrate the tenets of its adherents. Rather, the term is to contrast the "high church" Protestants that maintain more ritual and liturgical elements, which in turn may have its cognate roots in "High Mass." On the other hand, the term "low church" does have connotations of the social status of the originally adherents of the radical Protestant tradition, which back in the Sixteenth Century was in the "lower orders" of society as compared to the adherents of the magisterial Protestant traditions, like the Lutherans, which included nobility, and the Calvinists, which had succesful towns people, respectively, as their backbones.

Good News

There are still some on the left who remain convince the George W. Bush is "stoopid" and they can't wait for the next election to prove it. I can't wait for Michael Moore to recycle his "payback Tuesday" essay.

Ecumenical Alert

A post in the Corner provides a reminder that the haggis eaters will be celebrating the "eternal memory" of Robert "don't call him Robbie" Burns on January 25. Incomprehensible poetry, but I have gone to about five of those Burns Dinners that the Scotts like to throw and they provide a wicked good time. And haggis is not bad when you drown it in wiskey, either.

[My home DSL seems to be working for the moment. Must be pixies at work or something.]

In case you needed another one.

Ignore the entry immediately below. Appropros of Penner's favorite subject, Molly has "yet another reason to hate France."

OK, I'm out of here. It's Saturday at 3pm. I just finished preparing a client for a deposition on Monday. My home DSL line is still on the fritz. [And, I may need to see about some kind of a 12 step program. I am having some real "issues" when I find that I can not go online and find out all the movies that Peter Weller starred in during the 1980's or when the Austro-Prussian War started. I may just need to get a life.]

Talk to you all on Monday.

The OmbudsGod has a multiple choice test on the number of MDSOs who are unaccounted for in California. The test is worth taking. [MDSO="mentally deranged sex offender." One of my time-killing projects is to run the name of my partner Penner within five words (/5) of mdso to see what comes up. Harmless, actually.]

Anyhow, my value added is this Megan's map site for Fresno. This link should take you to the map for my kid's school. Note that there is a single blue dot. The area is in the wealthy northern end of Fresno in new developments occupied by the usual professional class. And this should be the link for Lowell Elementary, which is where my Rotary club puts a good deal of its community service emphasis toward. Lowell is over 100 years old as a school - a rarity in California and check out this site for a the history of the neighborhood- in what is now a poor neighborhood housing a largely migrant population. The map looks like it has the measles.

I'm not sure what this means. Do professionals cover up abuse better? Probably. Are mandated reporters more likely to blow the whistle on the poor than on the wealthy? Maybe. Do poor migrants lack the language skills and legal connections to cop to a lower plea? Perhaps. Is there more abuse occuring in poorer neighborhoods just as there is more crime generally. Again, perhaps. I do remember, though, from my
time as Community Service Director for North Fresno Rotary that there was an incident where there was an attack in the Lowell neighborhood. The attacker fled to the school, where he was captured by five or six men from the neighborhood, who turned him over to the police. So, it may not be the best neighborhood to on Megan's list in. And the neighborhood is also the host to a phenomena where professionals have moved back into the neighborhood as a part of their religious calling, like Randy White:

In 1993 the White’s intentionally moved into the Lowell Neighborhood, Fresno’s highest poverty, highest crime community, where they have lived with college students and sponsor tutoring programs, kid’s clubs, and Christian Community Development activities on an ongoing basis.

So, I don't have anything profound here. I have no conclusions or theories. I just have some quanititative data that is interesting, and some counterpoint examples to that data, which would otherwise be used to show society's lack of concern for the poor.

There are no coincidences because everything is controlled by a very small group of people sitting in a room somewhere.

This is an interesting "coincidence." Earlier this week I made a passing reference to the service that I felt that William F. Buckley, Jr. performed for the conservative movement in ruling certain peoples and groups out of order. (See this post. ) David helpfully furnished this link to Buckley's book on the Sobran and Buchanan controversy. If that wasn't enough, as if arranged by a select group in the highest reaches of the media/military/government hiearchy, Book TV ran John McManus talk on his book "William F. Buckley, Jr.: Pied Piper for the Establishment."

Now, I am happy to report that I am young enough not to remember anything about the John Birch Society. But I had a dim recollection that Buckley sent the Birchers into the outer darkness back in pre-history. Well, it appears that the Birchers are still around and are looking for payback. According to this Book TV post, McManus is president of the John Birch Society. I caught part of the Q and A following his talk, which Book TV described as:

Mr. McManus addresses what he views as Buckley’s promotion of liberal causes, including abortion, drugs, and pornography, his connections to the CIA and Yale's Skull & Bones Society; and his criticism of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch.

The part I caught had McManus criticizing Buckley for (a) denying that there was a conspiracy (according to McManus, Moscow was a branch office of the conspiracy and (b) castigating Buckley for acting as the arbiter of conservativism and (c) implicating William Kristol, William Bennett and other neocons as enabling the liberal agenda.

There was enough wackiness to go around for everyone. [And who knew that the Birchers were still around and able to get broadcast time.]

And, by the way, in the tradition of Irving Kristol, who was a neo-con tending to the flickering flame of capitalism when everyone else was hopping on the socialist express, two cheers for Buckley.

Not for Sheep... is a blog by a "process philosopher." I guess that would make her blog a "philosophy blog," aka a "phlog," and the proprietor a "phlogger." [Give me a break here, I'm working.]

This is a really funny site.

Also from Mark Shea, check out this site which conclusively proves that Catholicism is paganism. Here's one link in the chain of the searing indictment of a Two thousand year old fraud:

Let us now examine the various Pagan groups that have utilized the Pine Cone in their ceremonies, their rituals, and their art. Once you study this list, you will be in for a great surprise in that the Roman Catholic Church utilizes the Pine Cone, just as any good Pagan religion would do! This fact is further firm evidence that Roman Catholicism is Pagan, not Christian. In fact, we would say that Roman Catholicism is counterfeit Christianity, with Paganism as its beating heart.

Amazing, I went to my local church - St. Anthony of Padua's - and for the first time I saw the Pine Cone motifs everywhere. St. Anthony holding a Pine Cone, the Pine Cone monstrance, the satanic images of Chip and Dale depicted as the Archangels Gabriel and Michael, respectively, elevating the false Pine Cone of Salvation. It was all there. How could I have missed it these last forty years.

The site contains other and equally conclusive evidence that Catholicism is a "counterfeit Christianity with paganism as its beating heart."

Enjoy.

A Modest Question

Mark Shea links to this article in the Standard.

Before you go there, though, are you eating anything? Ok, finish it up. I'll wait.

Done? OK, here's an excerpt from the article:

A few years ago, the London Daily Telegraph reported that "doctors at the state-run Shenzhen Health Centre for Women and Children hand out bottles of thumb-sized aborted babies to be made into meat cakes or soup with pork and ginger. Zou Qin, a doctor at the Luo Hu Clinic in Shenzhen, said the fetuses were 'nutritious' and that she had eaten one hundred herself in the last six months. 'We don't carry out abortions just to eat fetuses,' said Qin. '[But they would be] wasted if not eaten.'" And what--apart from vomiting--is the answer?

Here's my question. Apart from revealed or traditional morality, why would this be wrong? [I know it's wong within my moral tradition which recognizes dignity of human beings and the sanctity of the body, but why would an atheist find this practice to be wrong or immoral? Thanks, just wondering.]

Mark Shea to an article about a proposal in the Kentucky legislature about voiding the priest-penitent privilege in abuse cases.

Communio

After a two month hiatus, I went back to the Communio discussion group at the Holy Child bookstore. I've been busy, but if you find yourself divorced with children you had better make an effort to socialize or you can fall into non-social habits. The Communio group tackles obscure topics suggested by the Communio magazine. The articles are always dense and convoluted. Witness an article in the recent volume - The Concept of God after Theodicy.

The topic that we discussed tonight was mysticism in the Catholic understanding. Catholicism readily acknowledges mysteries. The Rosary calls Catholics to contemplate mysteries, such as the Incarnation, which are beyond human understanding. The Eucharist is both tangible and transcendent - bread and the Body of Christ. The mysteries involve events where the transcendent God becomes instantiated in his creation. Consider the Luminous mystery of the Baptism in the Jordan. Why did God need to be baptized? Don't answer. Stop there for a second. It doesn't need an answer. The answer will never be sufficient. Appreciate for a moment that God was baptized. What does that mean to us? Does it need to mean anything to us? Catholics are therefore called to be - in some sense - mystics. But what is mysticism?

The group's consensus was that mysticism is an attitude to God. Through a mystical approach to religion one attempts to "be" with God, to be with God and have some unity with God. A person contemplating a theological mystery can't unravel the mystery. God's becoming one of his creations cannot be parsed through logic, but it can be appreciated, accepted and contemplated.

How does the mystical experience differ from the Pentecostal experience? Both involve some kind of union with God. In the Pentecostal case, the union is with the Holy Spirit. But is there a difference? The mystical experience seems to involve the believer fitting himself to God. The mystic attempts through contemplation to seek God's presence. The Pentecostal experience seems to seek to have God fit the believer to Himself, to grab the believer into whatever that experience is. I am sure that that is a shallow formulation, but the interesting thing is the way that the difference highlights the different views that the two traditions have about the efficacy of human action. In general, for the Protestant tradition, humans have very little - or virtually no - capability to find God through their own effort. Catholicism, on the other hand, expects humans to use the powers that God has given man to seek and find God, of course, with God's assistance, sustenance and grace at all times. Consequently, because Pentecostalism emphasizes the Holy Spirit’s influence over believers may be very congenial to Protestants, whereas Catholicism may tend to mysticism inasmuch as that route nuances the believer’s pursuit of spiritual experience.

This is all speculation, of course. I don’t profess to be knowledgeable about either Pentecostalism or mysticism. Augustinian rationalism is more my forte. If you have a view, educate me.

Update Katherine at Not for Sheep... has her "rversion" story about her recent move from Budhism to Catholicism. I post this here because part of our Communio discussion was whether there was a difference between Budhist and Catholic mysticism. Naturally, thre are profound similirities in the attempt to find union with God, there are also differences. As a grounded rationalist, I submitted that one difference might be the divergent orientation of the two traditions to the physical world. Orthodox Christianity [i.e., non-gnostic] generally accepts that the real world is good since it was created by God. My understanding of Budhism is that it views the physical world as an illusion and seeks to get past the illusions of this world in a search for a loss of identity in Nirvana. Certainly, the Christian mystic is also trying to get past this world to the Real and the True in an attempt to find union with God, but I don't think it involves the same annihilation of personality as occurs in the Budhist tradition.

Katherine at Not for Sheep sketches the view that the real difference is love.

Well, she would know better than me.

The Raven fisks a watch.

This could start a whole new trend of fisking inanimate non-sentient objects, i.e., couches, automobiles, Alec Baldwin....

Moore-Watch

Verus Ratio links to this article concerning how Michael Moore is alienating yet another English-speaking country:

"Moore went into a rant about how the passengers were scaredy-cats because they were mostly white," Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote in the Jan. 6 Independent. "If the passengers had included black men, he claimed, those killers, with their puny bodies and unimpressive small knives, would have been crushed by the dudes."

Of course, if this had been said by a Republican, there would have been calls for resignations and reparations. And I thought that the thesis of Moore's Bowling for Columbine was that America was an overly violent culture prone to high number of gun deaths. Well, whatever. In any event, chalk this up as another example of Moore's-patent-lack-of-sensitivity-to-other-people's-tragedies.

In case you missed this.

I just received this in an e-mail, so I'm sure it's making the rounds.

Little Melissa comes home from first grade and tells her father that they learned about the history of Valentine's Day. "Since Valentine's Day is for a Christian saint and we're Jewish," she asks, "will God get mad at me for giving someone a valentine?"

Melissa's father thinks a bit, then says "No, I don't think God would get mad. Who do you want to give a valentine to?"

"Osama Bin Laden," she says.

"Why Osama Bin Laden," her father asks in shock.

"Well," she says, "I thought that if a little American Jewish girl could have enough love to give Osama a valentine, he might start to think that maybe we're not all bad, and maybe start loving people a little bit. And other kids saw what I did and sent valentines to Osama, he'd love everyone a lot. And then he'd start going all over the place to tell everyone how much he loved them and how he didn't hate anyone anymore."

Her father's heart swells and he looks at his daughter with newfound pride. "Melissa, that's the most wonderful thing I've ever heard."

"I know," Melissa says, "and once that gets him out in the open, the Marines could blow the shit out of him."

Man, I love this stufff

I grew up reading Analog. One of the favorite games of Analog readers was to write letters to the editor - originally, John W. Campbell, Jr., but in my day, Ben Bova - correcting errors in stories. The letters were usually chock-a-block full of math equations and other things I couldn't understand. [And still can't, which is why I went into law by way of a history major.] I couldn't understand the math but, of course, I envied the whole
existential coolness of the geek mystique.

Anyhow, Jay Manifold over at A Voyage to Arcturus is playing this game with his earlier post on the effects of a "burrowing nuclear bomb." Jay had originally posted that a shaped nuclear charge would have minimal effects on the surrounding environment. However, based on an abstract entitled "Low-Yield Earth-Penetrating Nuclear Weapons, " he's been forced to go back to the sliderule. It seems he hadn't considered seismic effects of a "shaped nuclear weapon:"

... expect complete destruction of buildings due to seismic waves at distances R [is greater or equal to ] 0.5 kT0.35 km, and considerable damage out to a distance R [is greater or equal to ] 2 kT0.35 km.

Now, I'm not sure what that means, but I get the sense it can't be good.

This seems like a good idea. Tech Law Advisor links to articles arguing for a statutory immunity for hyperlinks.

The Raven has an eclectic post on "cops." For example, there's the New York group that pays $200 to drug users to undergo sterilization procedures. [My Catholic instincts think that there is something quite wrong about this; my conservative instincts instilled by my conservative father think I should write a donation check. Particularly, after I read news reports like this one.

The Blog from the Core is pulling the Mullings-watch this week and points ot that Rich Galen makes some interesting observations about "Good news is no news." And, honestly, I hadn't heard how incoming Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist acted as a Good Samaritan on New Years Day or that the Florida State Democratic Party chairman was decrying the condition of his party, despite the desire for a payback of Mooreian (sp?) [Mooreovian, Moorish, whatever] proportions. Perhaps The OmbudsGod could shed some light on the "Dark Energy" that seems to dominate the Journosphere.

More Right-wing Historical Revisionism

Relative to yesterday's post on Bill Back, the California's Republican Party's Vice Chairman who circulated an article by William Lind which projects a rosy view of a world where the South won the Civil War, David provides this link to a Joe Conason article at Salon. Conason, who will never miss an opportunity to tar conservatives with vile innuendo, writes:

Is slavery compatible with compassionate conservatism? Can a patriotic Republican wish that the Confederates had won the Civil War? I ask because a White House spokesman has "declined to comment" on the revelation that Bill Back, a candidate for the chairmanship of the California Republican Party, distributed an article promoting those neo-Confederate views

Playing the guilt by association card, Conason follows up with:

It's likely that Rove and Bush don't want to annoy William Lind's patron, the powerful far-right figure Paul Weyrich, who often made life miserable for the White House during the first Bush regime. Lind operates the Center for Cultural Conservatism, a subsidiary of Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, where he fantasizes about burning feminists at the stake and concocts theories about the Marxist Jews who have infected American culture.

In case, anyone misses none too subtle smear, Conason points out:

Lind is the latest example of the moral sickness that pervades the far right of the Republican Party, where "morality" is sufficiently elastic to permit bigotry and thuggery, and "conservative" is defined to include the CCC and other openly racist organizations. Last summer, Lind appeared at a Washington conference of Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, where he delivered a speech explaining how the "Frankfurt School" refugee academics who fled from Hitler's Germany to New York were the villainous creators of political correctness and much else that later went wrong in their adopted homeland. "These guys were all Jewish," he reportedly said, no doubt to considerable applause from the audience of anti-Semites.

Now, a few points are in order. First, Back's e-mail was circulated in 1999, so it appears that someone is doing a bit of historical hit-and-run smearing. Second, Back did publicly repudiate the Lind article when it resurfaced. Third, it appears - I hope - that Back has not circulated any e-mails speculating on a rosy what-if AH where Hitler won World War II.

On the other hand, this is all poison. As Jeff Jacoby points out Republicans are regularly slandered as "Nazis" and "Fascists." Those terms have more semantic weight than charges of being a "communist" or "red." [Which is a tribute to the fact that the Communists had a better public relations department since (a) communism was equally vicious and murderous and (b) remained a threat for most of the Twentieth Century, long after Fascism had been retired to a ridiculous project of knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing cretins.] A good example of this is Conason's ability to play a Connections-like game of linking Republicans to pro-confederate sympathy to an anti-semite to Nazi Germany. This kind of thing is particularly pernicious when you think about the honorable example of William F. Buckley, Jr., who has repeatedly disassociated conservativism from those elements - the John Birch Society, Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran - who would compromise conservatism's authenticate belief in individual moral equality.

Alternate History is interesting. It can illuminate the significant turning points of history by showing that history is not predetermined and that decisions have consequences. Holocaust revisionism and lamenting the Lost Cause, however, are not really inspired by an interest in AH. If one wanted to play the AH game of how to improve the Twentieth Century, there are more promising departure points than the Civil War. For example, what if the German Empire had won World War I. Fritz Lieber uses that assumption as the take-off point for his Hugo Award winning "Catch that Zeppelin." [It's probably more fantasy than Science Fiction, and here is the Fritz Leiber Homepage as value added.] Niall Fergusson's The Pity of War makes an extended argument that British intervention in the second Franco-Prussian war was a mistake. [And that book has just this minute gone on my 2003 reading list.] The fact that there is no equal fascination with this point of departure chillingly suggests that there is not a sufficiently large audience of irredentist Hohenzollern partisans to make it worth the while of the politician. And that alone is a reason not to tolerate pro-confederate or pro-fascist historical speculation.

cyberpunk author, William Gibson, has a blog. [Via Instapundit.]

My favorite Bored of the Rings Lines

Inspired by an offhand post on the Corner. Here goes:

"Look, the Winged Victory of Samothrace."
"The Boggy legends spoke of a time when a shadow fell upon the land and the potatoes would grow no longer."
"The wind blew the shrapnel in the other direction."
"Stomper the Ranger."
"Gandalf appeared wearing a tee-shirt bearing the magically glowing inscription "Will thee kiss me in the dark, baby."
"The Sword that was broken and has since been hastily scotch taped together."

That's the best I can do without the source and based upon twenty year old recall.

Joshua Claybourn is pondering the eternal question of free will versus predestination, or God's Love versus free will, which may be the same thing. This reminds me of what may be an apocryphal story about a medieval Pope. It seems this Pope was constantly being bothered by one religious order that fervently believed in predestination and by a competing order that believed equally as strongly in free will. The Pope solved the problem by declaring the whole thing a mystery, and forbidding the subject from being presented to him again.

If there's a historical basis for this story, let me know.

Update and Lightning Turn-Around Time

David provides this citation to authority - CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Congregatio de Auxiliis. The entry states:

Congregatio de Auxiliis
A commission established by Pope Clement VIII to settle the theological controversy regarding grace which arose between the Dominicans and the Jesuits towards the close of the sixteenth century. Vast as was the subject of that controversy, its principle question, and the one that gave its name to the whole dispute, concerned the help (auxilia) afforded by grace; while the crucial point was the reconciliation of the efficacy of grace with human freedom. We know on the one hand that the efficacious grace given for the performance of an action obtains, infallibly, man's consent and that action takes place. On the other hand it is certain that in so acting, man is free. Hence the question: How can these two things--the infallible result and liberty--be harmonized? The Dominicans solved the difficulty by their theory of physical premotion and predetermination; grace is efficacious when, in addition to the assistance necessary for an action, it gives a physical impulsion by means of which God determines and applies our faculties to the action. The Jesuits found the explanation in that mediate knowledge (scientia media) whereby God knows, in the objective reality of things what a man, in any circumstances in which he might be placed, would do. Foreseeing, for instance, that a man would correspond freely with grace A, and that he, freely, would not correspond with grace B, God, desirous of man's conversion, gives him grace A. This is efficacious grace. The Dominicans declared that the Jesuits conceded too much to free will, and so tended toward Pelagianism. In turn, the Jesuits complained that the Dominicans did not sufficiently safeguard human liberty, and seemed in consequence to lean towards Calvinism.

The controversy was resolved as follows:

Clement VIII died 5 March, 1605, and after the brief reign of Leo IX, Paul V ascended the papal throne. In his presence seventeen debates took place. The Dominicans were represented by Diego Alvarez and Tomçs de Lemos; the Jesuits by Gregoria de Valencia, Pedro de Arrubal, Fernando de Bastida and Juan de Salas. Finally, after twenty years of discussion public and private, and eighty-five conferences in the presence of the popes, the question was not solved but an end was put to the disputes. The pope's decree communicated (5 September, 1607) to both Dominicans and Jesuits, allowed each party to defend its own doctrine, enjoined each from censoring or condemning the opposite opinion, and commanded them to await, as loyal sons of the Church, the final decision of the Apostolic See. That decision, however, has not been reached, and both orders, consequently, maintain their respective theories, just as any other theological opinion is held. The long controversy has aroused considerable feeling, and the pope, aiming at the restoration of peace and charity between the religious orders, forbade by a decree of the Inquisition (1 December, 1611) the publication of any book concerning efficacious grace until further action by the Holy See. The prohibition remained in force during the greater part of the seventeenth century. (See also Augustine of Hippo; Baius; Baûez; Grace, Controversies on; Molina; Thomism.)

Quite diplomatic, don't you think, but hardly an answer to Mr. Claybourne. [Incidentally, I incline to the free will side of the question for reasons I hope to adumbrate later.]

Regions of Mind reports on a California nut-case Republican who pines for an alternate history where the South won the Civil War. Geez, Louise, what is wrong with these people? Let's go over it again. The Southern economy was largely a slave economy. The ascendancy of the South were slave-owners. The South seceded because it feared that Lincoln who had been elected by a free soil party might interfere with their "peculiar" institution ["Peculiar," not in the sense of being unusual, but rather significant.] Lincoln fought to preserve the Union, but he wouldn't have had to fight if the South hadn't seceded to protect slavery. Slavery is a bad thing. The Confederacy was a bad thing. Lincoln and the Republicans and the North freed the slave. That was a good thing.

I like the blithe assertion that slavery would have naturally withered away. Really? Slavery in Brazil made it well into the 1880's. Harry Turtledove's alternate history where the South won with the assistance of the French and British phases slavery out around the same time. But the condition of the former slaves didn't really change much as they became more serfs than chattel.

These pro-southern apologies by Republicans are just gobsmacking nuts.

Verus Ratio pens a retrospective on Eric Hobsbawm. Read Hobsbawm's "apologia" on Communist atrocities. Of course, being a "socialist in a hurry," Hobsbawm gets book deals and faculty positions.

Happy Birthday, J.R.R. Tolkien

Verus Ratio provides a reminder that today is Tolkiens 111 birthday. Join me and C. Muncey in raising a toast this evening to the immortal memory.

Finally, an explanation for the popularity of rap music and Bill Clinton

ScienceDaily News Release: "Dark Energy" Dominates The Universe

Actually, it's another article on the evidence that vacuum contains "non-zero energy." Which proves - once again - that reality is weirder than fiction because fiction has to be plausible.

By the way, yesterday I was on hold - forever - on AOL's help line trying to get my DSL modem replaced and AOL was playing rap music. Most excruciating 40 minutes I've spent and a pretty good idea for the CIA interrogators in Gitmo. I think the most hardened jihadista would crack after one session like that.

Trivial historical trivia

Statutory Construction Zone ran a trivia question about the location of the common law court of Westminster Hall. Here's the answer:

Westminster Hall was located in the County of Middlesex. It is currently located in greater London, which was previously London County. The importance of Middlesex comes from the so called "Bill of Middlesex" by which the Kings Bench claimed general jurisdiction through the fictious allegation of a trespass against the king in Middlesex county. Since Kings Bench in theory only had jurisdiction in suits between king and subject, it expanded its jurisdiction by allowing suits to proceed that alleged a fictious trespass against the king.

Aren't legal fictions cool?