timeimmortal

Sounds like an interesting guy.

Members of Japan’s ruling party have selected a bluff conservative, Taro Aso, as their new leader, meaning he is almost certain to become the next PM.

Mr Aso advocates greater public spending to promote the economy, and an assertive foreign policy.

He overwhelmed his four Liberal Democratic Party rivals for the party leadership in a crowded race.

He apparently is also a huge fan of comic books.

I wasn’t aware that the Japanese had a law requiring a child’s parents to be married in order for said child to obtain citizenship in Japan. And now it appears that said law is being struck down — evidently, it’s unfair to deny citizenship to children born out of wedlock.

And in what could possibly be considered “true to form” for the Japanese, the proposed solution: “Japanese fathers’ acknowledgement of paternity will be the sole requirement for children to obtain Japanese citizenship, removing the requirement for parents’ marital status from the provision.”

I don’t know about you, good Reader, but I get the strange sense that this change won’t really solve much of anything. If nothing else, it presents men with an interesting way to “get back” at a “baby mama” with whom they have had a falling out: her child could be permanently denied citizenship in Japan.

But then, perhaps I’m being too cynical — could it be that Japanese men have a more responsible attitude toward children they father out of wedlock than do North American men?

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

…but creating one in real life, especially a half-human, half-animal hybrid, is not morally sound, nor does it seem all that defensible on scientific grounds. Yes, I will grant that it is possible that some great new advance in medicine might come about because of experimentation on hybrid embryos, but so what? Imperial Japan made some great leaps in the field of medical research back in the 1940s, but their methods included grotesque experimentation on Chinese prisoners. The desired ends do not justify the means by which they are achieved.

David Warren, in fine form as always, puts the proper perspective on the issue:

The current British prime minister, Gordon Brown — the one who did not win the last election, and with any luck, will not win the next one — is naturally among the advocates of the legislation his government tabled. In campaigning for it, he has made shameless emotional use of his own small child, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. He would not himself recognize it as shameless, of course, for he is wallowing in confusion over ends and means. But using his own son, Fraser, as his exhibit, he has very emotionally declared that the creation of hybrid animal/human embryos for research purposes is “an inherently moral endeavour, that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time, millions.”

…Gordon Brown was uttering an untruth. As even the leading “expert” advocate of the government’s measures — Lord Robert Winston, the English fertility specialist, politician, and television personality — has admitted, there is no pressing need for animal/human hybrid embryos. He had already said that the loss of the hybrid clause “won’t fundamentally alter the science of stem cell biology.” The research could perfectly well go on with adult stem cells, to the use of which there is no moral objection. Even the Catholic Church has contributed directly and materially to that research.

An emotional argument has thus been made, and accepted as perfectly legitimate, where “the end justifies the means.” But where an opponent of the evil means speaks “emotively” in defence of a moral absolute, he is dismissed as lowering the tone of the debate.

We are most certainly dealing with a moral absolute in this case. Our entire civilization (including e.g. all legal codes throughout the Western world) depends upon the sharp and unambiguous distinction between what is human, and what is not. We do not abandon this “front line” without inevitably lapsing into the kind of barbarism of which fascist-era Germany and Japan served as terrible warnings.

Alas, we already crossed this line, in 1967 in Britain, in 1969 in Canada, when abortion was legalized. The definition of what is human, that is extremely sharp in nature, was made legally vague. The sharp line in nature can only correspond to human conception. From that moment of conception, a woman is carrying a baby, not some inhuman “thing” that becomes “relatively more human” with the progression of time. Ignore that sharp line, and no other line can be drawn and held. By comparison, childbirth itself provides no precision whatever, for a child may be born many weeks prematurely, and still survive and flourish.

Evil ultimately only begets evil; that is why the Church constantly cautions against using evil means that good ends may come from it. Though the campaigners for abortion “rights” were doubtless driven by what was, in at least some of their minds, a desire to do “good” — in providing something that was, in their view, of benefit to women, and a tool of emancipation moreover — the ends they have achieved have far surpassed any gains that might have emerged.

Equality and suffrage for women good ends that have emerged from feminism, but these ends could have been achieved without abortion, and might even have been sweeter victories had history played out in that way. As it is, though, what gains feminism has made in terms of expanding the rights and role of women in society have been more or less counteracted — if not erased entirely — by the fact that our society, more than any other, objectifies women in ways that would have been unimaginable to our “patriarchal” forebears. It’s a common charge that the women of old were valued only for their ability to make babies. Even assuming that’s an accurate statement, it seems that in the modern day women are valued for even less than that — indeed, the ability of women to become pregnant is seen by many as something which needs to be corrected for. Our modern society regards women, essentially, as a means of consequence-free gratification.

And it should come as no surprise, then, that our modern, enlightened, post-Christian society thus regards human life in general as something expendable, and as something which can be tampered with willy-nilly at its earliest stages in pursuit of murky, uncertain, and rather unlikely scientific ends. Experimenting on embryos is, to be sure, different than experimenting on Chinese prisoners, but only in the sense that the embryos are at an earlier stage of development. The same disregard for certain categories of human life is still present. And creating human-animal hybrids does not remove that particular moral dilemma; it adds to it.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

The list of only those scientists whose (last) names begin with ‘K’ has 1,495 entries. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that is a bit more than half the number of scientists who produced the latest IPCC report, no? And there are twenty-five more letters in the alphabet.

Related: It’s U.S. data, but April 2008 was fully one degree (F) colder than average in America, which makes it the coldest April on record in the last 11 years.

For those who labour under the delusion that science and religion are in some way opposed and/or irreconcilable, it might do well to take a look at history:

History shows that the natural sciences grew out of Christian culture. As the sociologist Rodney Stark has so convincingly shown (See especially For the Glory of God: How monotheism Led to Reformations, science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery), science was “still-born” in the great civilizations of the ancient world, except in Christian civilization.

Why is it that empirical science and the scientific method did not develop in China (with its sophisticated society), in India (with its philosophical schools), in Arabia (with its advanced mathematics), in Japan (with its dedicated craftsmen and technologies), or even in ancient Greece or Rome?

The answer is fairly straightforward. Science flourished in societies where a Christian mindset understood nature to be ordered, the work of an intelligent Creator. Science grew where people assumed that the natural world is intelligible and bears the handwriting of its author.

Far from being an obstacle to science, Christian soil was the necessary humus where science took root.

Christianity’s unapologetic support of science is borne out by the immense direct contribution of the Church to science itself. To take but one area — that of astronomy — J. L. Heilbron of the University of California-Berkeley has written:

“The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions.”

…

Just as the Christian church patronized the arts, so it vigorously supported scientific research. The caricature of an obscurantist, ignorance-promoting church simply doesn’t correspond to historical truth.

Some of history’s greatest scientists — Newton, Pasteur, Galilei, Lavoisier, Kepler, Copernicus, Faraday, Maxwell, Bernard and Heisenberg — were all Christians, and the list doesn’t stop there. Some important scientists, such as astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, were actually Catholic priests!

Christianity is not against science, but against an absolutist reading of science. The empirical sciences cannot do everything, and hold no monopoly on knowledge and truth. Many important questions — the most important, really — fall outside the purview of science.

What is the meaning of life? How should people treat one another? What happens to us when we die?

No matter how long a white-coated scientist toils and sweats in his laboratory, his instruments will never reveal the answers to these questions. Science is the wrong tool for the job.

The saddest part, I think, is that this sort of thing was, at one time, obvious.

I seem to be entering another “atheist” phase on the blog here; the poor dears seem to come in waves.

Case in point: Samuel Skinner writes in to complain about something I said in this article.

I keep on seeing this “Christianity provide moral capital” argument. I don’t know where Christians get this idea from. We have had things like democracy, free speech and atheism invented by the Greeks (yeah, they were very busy).

Saying “moral capital” and referancing Christianity seems to be a covert way of implying that atheists are immoral and that only theists can have morality. It also implies that atheists are only moral when they borrow from Christianity. This happens to be false.

I can go into greater detail or you can use google and hit daylight atheism- or any other atheist blog. It turns out almost all of them have a critique of that idea.

Other Google searches will reveal critiques of almost any idea, including evolution. I trust that the Reader can agree with the Author that the mere fact that rebuttals to an idea exist somewhere on the internet does not mean that the idea being rebutted is actually false?

While I appreciate the mild ad hominem attempt to paint me as a historical ignoramus (I’m well aware of all the various things which the Greeks gifted to us in terms of philosophy and political methodology, O Reader), I can’t help but get the sense that Sam is grasping at straws. He feels that I am being unfair in arguing about the existence of Christian moral capital in society, and yet he has no idea what the term even means (as is evidenced by his straw-man argument in the second paragraph).

As it happens, I am implying nothing about how moral/immoral atheists and theists are relative to each other; everyone is a sinner, whether one believes in God or not. I’m fully aware that atheists can be every bit as moral as theists can, which is as it should be since the call to morality is written first and foremost on the human heart; if a person doesn’t heed the call to live morally that is inherent in his or her being, no amount of words in a book will do anything to change that.

Not that saying that discounts, in any way, the value of the Word.

When I speak of moral capital, and in particular Christian moral capital, I am in a way acknowledging the contributions of the Greek philosophers, among many others, and I am further acknowledging a rather large portion of history that happened in the interim between the heyday of the Ancient Greeks and the modern era — that is, I am being mindful of the moral and philosophical developments of early Christendom, which Sam seems to be discounting wholesale. The fact is, our social reasoning did not jump directly out of Greek philosophical tradition; it emerged out of that philosophical tradition by way of the Church and the unique shaping that nearly two thousand years of Christianity, and in particular Catholicism has applied to it.

It is this willful ignorance of Christian philosophical history that blinds Sam, I think, to the fact that Thomas Aquinas more or less addressed this specific objection several hundred years ago. Fundamentally, the argument can be distilled to something I myself observed above: what could be termed “natural law” should be innate and known by each and every person. To the atheist, this would seem to be the basis to argue that God had anything to do with natural law, or that Religion and faith have anything substantial to do with being moral.

And following his suggestion to Google around for additional commentary on this issue will enable one to discover evidence of that phenomenon in action.

That’s all very well and good, but ultimately incorrect. For the role that religion plays is not to introduce us to morality itself, but that by way of natural law we are called to be moral. Yes, everyone has (or should have) a sense of right and wrong, and yes, there are definite rights and definite wrongs. We should understand that wholly apart from any religious faith (or lack thereof) that we hold. The purpose of religion is not to teach us to be moral, but to teach us whence comes morality, which is the more important question.

Why is understanding the purpose important? Well, we can look around and note that despite the fact that morality is written in to the being of every single person, many people do not act in a particularly moral fashion. Simply knowing, then, that morality exists and that men and women should be moral is insufficient.

By way of example, I observe that Mark Shea notes “that Jesus’s Golden Rule was, in fact, often *not* understood in even the most rudimentary of societies long before it was enunciated by Jesus. That’s because the Golden Rule requires grace in order to be understood, much less lived. Judaism articulated the basic norm that all pagan societies, at their best, could attain: love your neighbor, hate your enemy. It’s the norm we still basically live by today. Jesus’ Golden rule implied love for enemies because it included enemies in the term “neighbor”. It remains, apart from grace, an impossible and (for the worldly) ridiculous standard. The notion that anybody — especially an atheist — would aspire to it is a classic example of the way in which atheists live off Christian capital.”

When I speak of moral capital, then, I am merely echoing Chesterton: “The fact is this: that the modern world, with its modern movements, is living on its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom; including, of course, many truths known to pagan antiquity but crystallized in Christendom. But it is NOT really starting new enthusiasms of its own. The novelty is a matter of names and labels, like modern advertisement; in almost every other way the novelty is merely negative. It is not starting fresh things that it can really carry on far into the future. On the contrary, it is picking up old things that it cannot carry on at all. For these are the two marks of modern moral ideals. First, that they were borrowed or snatched out of ancient or mediaeval hands. Second, that they wither very quickly in modern hands.”

Essentially, I am observing that Western notions about law, freedom, rights, and human dignity each draw heavily, in their own way, not only upon the pagan philosophy of the Greeks, but on the Christian philosophy that expanded upon in in later centuries, re-shaping and transforming it by grace into the very same principles which we draw upon today. I’m making no pronouncements as to who — theists or atheists — is the more moral, but instead am simply observing that all of us live today, in the West, in societies formed and shaped largely by Christian principles, or principles “once removed” from Christian philosophy.

And whenever anyone upholds values such as the equality of men and women, or the right to freedom of expression, or the notion of free will, one is unconciously (or perhaps conciously) drawing upon teleology in order to state one’s case; in a wholly secular framework, there is no basis on which to found the argument that men and women, or white men and black men, or Asian men and white men, are equal, because by all empirical measures they are not. In forming the concept of equality of persons, and equal dignity of persons, we are appealing to higher concepts above and beyond what mere senses can reveal — we are invoking telos, in essence.

And more to the point, we are invoking a very Christian notion of telos, whether we realize it or not. Yes, many of the concepts had their origin in Greek philosophy, but they ultimately arrived at the point they are at today through their sanctification in the philosophy of the Church (that is: through the fusion, essentially, of Christian concepts and ancient truths known to the great pagan religions of old). I do believe St. Paul addresses this in one of the books of the New Testament. Romans, I think.

That is Christian moral capital. One observes that in nations where Christianity was not a prominent feature of the nations’ formation, things tend not to be so pretty. Oh, a few exceptions exist, and that is to be expected — as has been observed, all people are called to be moral regardless of what faith they do or do not adhere to, and we ought not be surprised that others throughout history have “got it right.” But we do observe that they are in the minority. Japan might be one example…though not a very good one.

As to where we get the idea of societies banking on Christian moral capital from, I can’t say. History, perhaps? Reason and rational analysis of the facts? I suspect we think that because that’s just what happens.