timeimmortal

Vox Day points out a trend I admit I never noticed before. But his analysis makes sense.

Isn’t it interesting how the secularists always seem to do whatever they claim to be afraid of conservatives and Christians doing? It looks as if secular Europeans are far more puritanical than the American religious right would ever dream of being. Some time ago I wrote that women’s rights were a disease… it’s clear that cancer would have been the most apt comparison. Perhaps by the time men are banned from smoking, drinking, having sex, playing video games, watching football, or leaving the house without express written consent from a woman, people will begin to realize that my warning was dead-on.

This is in response to news that the EU is considering implementing new guidelines to eliminate sexist content, including portrayals of “gender roles,” from television advertising. Which means: no more Eva Herzigova lingeré commercials, and no more bare-chested male construction workers selling soda pop.

Not that we need such things in advertising, I’ll grant. It’s still a good point: I thought it was supposed to be us uptight, Christian folk that were the prudes and puritans in the world? And yet, more often than not, it seems to be the case that it is secular politicians who are the ones calling for restrictions on television content and the consumption of “vice” products like alcohol and tobacco.

Okay, we can grant the exception of those Christian fringe groups in America that lobby against Grand Theft Auto. They lobby for policy change…but one can’t help but notice that they never really get anywhere. This situation is different.

After reading the text of Palin’s speech, I think it’s pretty clear that this could prove to be an interesting election after all…and something of a first. Well, obviously it’s a first, given that Palin stands a good chance of being the first woman to hold such a high office in America.

She’s Margaret Thatcher with five kids and a Klondike drawl.

But more than that, there’s something interesting emerging here, a trend of sorts. At least based on what we’ve seen so far, this could well be the first election in which a presidential candidate, in essence, ends up running against his opponent’s vice-presidential pick. The face-off that seems to be shaping up is not between John McCain and Barrack Hussein Obama, but between Sarah Palin and Obama.

Which is damned odd, to be sure. But also damned interesting.

Anyhow, the Anchoress has a roundup of reactions to Palin’s speech, which seems to have liberal-minded folks all in a panic…as well it should, given how sharp some of its observations were:

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown.

And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves.

I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” [a position Obama held in Chicago, and which constitutes a large portion of his resumé — Ken] except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.

We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.

Also, I suddenly find that I like Dr. Phil McGraw a bit more, after his excellent smackdown of David Letterman’s poo-pooing of Bristol Palin.

Guest “Dr. Phil” on Wednesday night chastised David Letterman’s misunderstanding of teenage sexual behavior and parental influence after Letterman sarcastically complained that if a President McCain “drops dead…don’t you want your President to have had the presence of mind to have chatted to her teenaged kids for five minutes about birth control?” (Letterman delivered the same belittling joke the night before too.)

Referring to Letterman’s almost five-year-old son, daytime TV host Phil McGraw, aka “Dr. Phil,” informed Letterman:

Let me tell you something, new dad. If you are under the misapprehension that when Harry is 17 that you are going to have even a remote influence on what he decides in the back seat of a Chevy on a Saturday night — I don’t think old Dave’s going to be popping in his mind at that point. It’s not a 15-minute conversation. It’s a dialogue that you need to have starting when he’s about eight or nine.

Undeterred from his contempt for Sarah Palin, Letterman asked: “Then why didn’t they have the dialogue?” McGraw suggested: “Maybe they did. But when children get that age, at 17 — see, here’s the thing. The body’s grown but the brain is not.” Letterman soon sneered: “They don’t sell Trojans in Alaska? Come on,” prompting McGraw to point out: “Wasn’t Barack’s mother like 18 when he was born?” Indeed she was.

And over at his blog, Vox Day observes that the (liberal) media has no clue how the heck they should respond to Palin:

First, they were all taken completely by surprise when McCain made the most obvious and effective choice for vice-president. Second, they actually thought conservatives and the religious right would somehow be turned off by a pregnant girl marrying the father of her child and having the baby! Here’s a little secret for the irreligious Left: religious people not only believe that sin exists, they believe that everyone engages in it. True, it’s best to avoid sin, but the far more important thing is how you attempt to amend for your errant actions when you, like everyone else, fall short of perfection.

Now they’re all surprised that a woman whose nickname is “Barracuda”, who compares her kind of woman to a pitbull, who took on and beat the corrupt old boys of Republican politics in Alaska, should turn out to be an effective attack dog. Whoever could have imagined it?

This is why I don’t read much political commentary except as a guide to what the clueless parrots will be repeating. With a few exceptions, it’s almost completely useless.

This was shaping up to be a boring election, an unstimulating contest between Tweedledum and Tweedlenotsodum. Indeed, I’d barely been paying attention to it. Now, though, it’s a whole new ballgame.

And I am loving — loving — watching the supposed champions of women’s rights and tolerance (a.k.a. “the Left”) soil their trousers and abandon all pretense in response to McCain’s running mate. I mean, when people openly admit their intent to lie their asses off in order to take Palin down by any means necessary, and when people openly opine about how tearing a family apart is a small price to pay to avert “a disaster” (e.g. a Republican victory in the coming election), you know they are scared.

As in: pants thrice-soaked, fight-or-run-for-your-damned-life-flight scared. The Left has come unhinged over this. Un. HINGED.

I don’t often disagree with the Shaidle, but I think I have to in this case. But first, let me say this much: I wasn’t thrilled to hear that Bristol Palin, the 17-year old daughter of John McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin, was pregnant. I agree with Kathy on (some of) these points:

Sex is where babies come from. It doesn’t matter that you “didn’t mean to get pregnant” and only wanted the fun parts. An extreme skateboarder doesn’t “mean” to break a leg in eight places, but guess what?

I’m glad she’s not getting an abortion. I’m less thrilled that she’s getting married, but she probably isn’t thrilled either. If it works out, great. It’s been known to happen. But she should have planned her life better. It really isn’t that hard to do. Call it “delayed gratification.” Just control your damn self.

But I don’t agree as much with this:

This makes the Palins look really really tacky and low class.

We should want people better than “tacky and low class” in the White House. I left Hamilton to get away from tacky, low class people and their pregnant teenagers. Now they’re all over my damn television.

We criticized Bill Clinton for helping kids think “oral sex wasn’t real sex.” But we’re all cool with this? Kids will say, “So? Whatsername’s pregnant.”

When it’s “one of us” we’re all suddenly “compassionate” and “forgiving” and “oh but that’s different”?

I think the main point that Kathy misses here is that we criticized Bill Clinton, because of the (admittedly poor!) decisions he made with Monica Lewinski and others. We can criticize Bristol Palin for the same reasons, because she has made some poor choices indeed…but I’m not sure we can really fault her parents for it to any real extent. Obviously, teen pregnancy is an ongoing social problem, and there is certainly real potential that impressionable teenage girls will take this revelation as a sort of tacit “hey, it’s cool” message where getting pregnant themselves is concerned.

But at the end of the day: a teenager made the choice to sleep with her boyfriend, and she got pregnant because of it. This is her mother’s fault…how? Yes, her mother is ardently pro-life, to the point of putting her money where her mouth is and choosing to carry a child with Down’s to term. Yes, her mother is pro-abstinence, and supports teaching abstinence as a part of sex-ed in schools. And yes, legally speaking, Bristol Palin is still the responsibility of her parents, and will be for another year.

She’s still her own person, and she made a bad choice. I don’t see how her bad choices reflect poorly on her mother. Some have speculated that Sarah and Todd Palin have been lax in their duties as parents to impart good sex-ed to their children. Maybe they have been lax — we cannot and do not know — but even if they were, their daughter still had a choice to make between right and wrong, and chose “wrong.”

In my own life, I’ve known parents who have imparted very good lessons about sexuality and Christian sexual morality to their children. Sometimes those lessons have taken, but sometimes they haven’t. Some people listen to good teaching, and some people don’t; Jay Currie speaks truthfully when he notes that “telling young ladies to ‘keep their legs closed’ tends to be less effective than the Pill, condoms or, Hell, even the rhythm method.”

Actually, my thoughts mirror Jay’s on one other point as well:

Does this make Mrs. Palin unfit to be Vice President. Hell no. It makes her far better able to understand the realities which are faced by families all over the world. It makes her capable of at least having the chance to rethink a rule against sex education in school because, let’s face it, she did not get the job done at home.

The fact that the Palin’s have a daughter who is now pregnant at 17 does not make them “look really really tacky and low class.” What could have made them look that way was their response to the issue, but their response was very tactful and honest:

Mrs Palin and her husband Todd said in a statement: “Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realise very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family.”

There is a world of difference between the man and woman making the above statement and the Hamilton baby mamas that Kathy decries in her blog post, not the least of which is the understanding that the first act of the family — their duty in Christ — must be love and compassion. And it’s clear that Bristol Palin will have that from her family.

At the same time, a second Christian mandate is also discernable in what has been said: the Palin’s know that Bristol is in the wrong here, and I would bet that that they have told her as much. They’re exactly correct: the road ahead for Bristol and her now-fiancé, Levi Johnston will be difficult, but it’s a road they will have to walk down. Unfortunately, he sounds like a bit of a piece of work, but then, he could have just skipped town. That he didn’t says something, perhaps. That, or he didn’t want to mess with governor Palin who, let’s face it, is probably pretty intimidating: she’s a passionate NRA member and hunts moose. That’s not some mother you want to cross.

Predictably, the media and the Left (but I repeat myself) are having a field day with the whole affair*, and in particular seem to be interested in attempting to nail Sarah Palin to the wall over her support for abstinence-based sex education using Bristol as their example. The Anchoress enumerates many of the hypocrisies that are inherent in such a move (with additional commentary here):

The party that has claimed that pre-marital sex is groovy and doesn’t matter, and — quite rightly — that one’s worth should not be judged by one’s sex life, is apparently all-of-a-doo-dah because of some scintillating rumors, good for whispering behind the hands, like a bunch of puritanical washerwomen. Puritans indeed. When they finished fainting, they apparently decided to start sewing the scarlet A, for Mrs. Palin. A-for-ADULTERER (cackle, cackle!)

No one should ever be judged, except Christians. If they have sex and don’t abort, they’re fair for ridicule, smears and sport. And a woman’s choice should always be respected; unless she’s the wrong sort of woman, the kind with an R after her name.

Apparently, since the left can’t really go after Palin on her experience (Obama has equal or less, and he’s running for the TOP job, not the bottom) or her record, which seems very appealing to a reform-minded electorate, the left has settled on the uterine comings-and-goings of not just Sarah Palin but of one of her “witchy-named” daughters, too.

Some of the more detestable commentators on the Left are even suggesting that Trig Palin, the Down’s baby that Palin carried to term, is actually Bristol’s first child. The lowest scumbags have even suggested that Todd Palin is, incestuously, the father of Trig, by Bristol. Vox Day takes both theories to the woodshed:

It’s hard to decide which is the more ridiculous idea: (a) That the governor of Alaska successfully faked a pregnancy and is passing off her grandson as her son, or (b) that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy somehow demonstrates the inefficacy of abstinence-based education.

Both notions require brain damage, an IQ at least 35 points below the norm, or willful ideological blinders for anyone who spends more than five seconds thinking about the matter to adhere to them. Palin’s pregnancy has been sufficiently attested to that it needs no further explication here. As for the abstinence argument, consider the following facts:

1. In 2001, the federal and state governments together spent $4,403,000 in Alaska on contraceptive services and supplies for 141,000 women of childbearing age.
2. Almost all U.S. schoolchildren receive sex education by eighth grade, most begin receiving sex education in fifth grade. This sex education may include abstinence programs, but it is almost never limited to them.
3. Bristol Palin was not homeschooled for most of her education and her fiance is a hockey player at a public school.

Therefore, Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is much more reasonably viewed as a failure of comprehensive sex education because that is the form of sex education she and her fiance almost certainly received, rather than a failure of the abstinence-only program that her mother favors and which she did not receive. One would have to be extraordinarily logically handicapped to indict a program that cannot be held responsible for a situation while trying to claim that the program that actually was involved in the situation would have prevented it.

Furthermore, abstinence programs are superior to other forms of sex education, at least when measured in terms of reduced STD contraction. This is what I noted in analyzing Sam Harris’s statistically tortured attempt to attack abstinence programs: “What he neglected to mention was that while the study showed that 4.6 percent of the abstinence-pledged teens contracted an STD, this was 35 percent less than the 7 percent of non-pledged teens who also acquired one.” - TIA p. 127

But let’s come back to where we started, for just a moment. Jay Currie notes one other important distinction between how Sarah Palin has handled the actual news of her daughter being pregnant versus how Obama responded to a hypothetical question about teen pregnancy, using one of his daughters as an example:

Obama stated - and I can’t be arsed to get the link - that if one of his daughters was knocked up he would not “want her punished with a baby”. Mrs. Palin has said:

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support,” the Palins said. ann althouse

Kathy is exactly right that we should want “people better than ‘tacky and low class’ in the White House.” But really, given the example above, who is the one who is really tacky and low class? Sarah and Todd Palin, with their messages of accepting responsibility, reminders of just how difficult the road ahead will be for their daughter, and emphasis on the importance of the love and support of family in such times? Or Obama’s “screw now, abort later” attitude?

Who really has the Hamilton ghetto attitude?

Kathy notes that she is happy that Bristol has chosen not to seek an abortion, less happy that she has chosen to wed. I don’t share this view: I think both are positive steps, and I think she will grow up quite a lot thanks to both of them. Bristol Palin will indeed have a tough road ahead. But she will have the loving support of her family, she will have a child to nurture and love, and she will have a husband who may just turn out to be a decent sort who will love and care for her “till death do they part.” Stranger things have happened, and as fates go that one is not so terrible at all. Bristol is unlikely to become another welfare baby mama.

Update: Peter Sean Bradley nails one out of the park:

If only John Edwards was the father…

…the media would have buried the Bristol Palin pregancy story.

Oh, and where were the thoughtful discussion on the need for sex education when Rielle Hunter got knocked up?

Hypocrites.

* The hypocrisy of the Left on this issue is actually quite staggering, as has been pointed out, both at SDA and at Protein Wisdom “for your delectation“.

was noted for having published a number of papers, starting (if memory serves) in about the 1950s, advancing an atheistic philosophy based on his studies in biology. Then, in the early years of this century, he changed his mind, and ‘converted’ to deism. In November of 2007, he released a book entitled There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, detailing the process of his conversion and the reasoning behind it.

And now, Professor Flew has taken Richard Dawkins to task with a scathing review of The God Delusion.

The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’).

The fault of Dawkins as an academic (which he still was during the period in which he composed this book although he has since announced his intention to retire) was his scandalous and apparently deliberate refusal to present the doctrine which he appears to think he has refuted in its strongest form.

…an academic attacking some ideological position which s/he believes to be mistaken must of course attack that position in its strongest form. This Dawkins does not do in the case of Einstein and his failure is the crucial index of his insincerity of academic purpose and therefore warrants me in charging him with having become, what he has probably believed to be an impossibility, a secularist bigot.

…

On page 82 of The God Delusion is a remarkable note. It reads ‘We might be seeing something similar today in the over-publicised tergiversation of the philosopher Antony Flew, who announced in his old age that he had been converted to belief in some sort of deity (triggering a frenzy of eager repetition all around the internet).’

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

This whole business makes all too clear that Dawkins is not interested in the truth as such but is primarily concerned to discredit an ideological opponent by any available means.

Not that it should come as any surprise that someone like Dawkins would end up being little more than a dyed-in-the-wool bigot; after a man goes his disciples, of course, and the average Dawkins disciple is not what one might term a paragon of compassion and understanding.

And Flew has it exactly right. Vox Day, in his book The Irrational Atheist, noted as much, pointing out that much of Dawkins’ bestseller is devoted to denigrating opponents more than to actually presenting a coherent philosophy supported by evidence (indeed, Day noted that the evidence itself was rather sorely lacking, in addition to the incoherency of the philosophy being presented). The God Delusion is not a work of science (or philosophy, for that matter) as much as it is a series of one-sided (and two-sided) vendettas finding their expression in print.

So Vox Day posted a link to an online autism test and challenged his readers to take it, reporting their results in the comments of the post and specifying their religious stange in the vaguest categories possible: theist, atheist, or agnostic. Fully aware that web-based surveys are essentially meaningless, Vox nevertheless had some fun with the idea, and offered it as a way to test his theory that atheism is closely associated with what he has likened to a kind of “social autism” — this based on the fact that many adamant atheists seem to display the same lack of social graces that people with syndrome and/or autism often display.

The results that came back were a mixed bag, with both atheists and theists scoring in the lows and highs. But whereas the majority of theists seem to have had no problem following the directions (report your score, report your religious stance, and then shut up), many of the atheist respondents gave their scores and followed them up with long-winded explanations questioning the validity of the study, the effectiveness of Vox’s methods, his honesty, and so on and so forth.

Which, I think, may just have inadvertently proved Vox’s point.

Way to go, O champions of reason!

Evidently, Christopher Hitchens posed a question to Dinesh D’Souza, who came back with a rather surprising answer that very handily turned Hitchens’ supposed point back around to incriminate atheism just a little bit.

This seems to be a popular tactic (Vox Day uses it as well), and one which can be applied fairly consistently. But what I was struck by was not the reversal itself, but rather the numbers involved.

Here is the thrust of Hitchens’ point: God seems to have been napping for 98 percent of human history, finally getting his act together only for the most recent 2 percent? What kind of a bizarre God acts like this?

I’m going to answer this argument in two ways. First, I’m going to show that Hitchens has his math precisely inverted. Second, I’ll reveal how Hitchens’ argument backfires completely on atheism. For my first argument I’m indebted to Erik Kreps of the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.

An adept numbers guy, Kreps notes that it is not the number of years but the levels of human population that are the issue here. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born before Christ came to earth.

“So in a sense,” Kreps notes, “God’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. If He’d come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world’s population, so even though 98 percent of humanity’s timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption.”

I suppose some will be tempted to attempt to argue against this by complaining that God’s timing is still suspect — why not incorporate the other 2%? D’Souza doesn’t quite deal witht this objection, but he does note that for most of humanity’s approximately 100,000-year run thus far, we haven’t had a lot to show for ourselves. Major social and technical advancements began five or six thousand years ago; for over 90,000 years before that, humanity (as far as we can tell from what historical evidence can be found) lived primitively.

In light of that, God’s timing of His revelation, and especially of His gift of redemption, not only encompasses the vast majority of people who have ever existed, but also more or less coincides with a leap forward in human knowledge, a sort of awakening — as though man’s eyes were suddenly opened.

Or as though, as D’Souza notes, a soul was suddenly breathed in, because at last mankind was ready to know and become more.

Vox Day responds to an atheist critic of his book, The Irrational Atheist, with his usual barbed wit.

…the reason no one looks askance at Christian accoutrements is that the Christian who makes a public statement is making statement about himself and his own beliefs. Atheists, on the other hand, are making a statement about everyone else and everyone else’s beliefs. Unsurprisingly, everyone else tends to look on this askance.

Let me see if I can explain this in sufficiently simple terms. If I wear a shirt that says “I like chocolate”, this does not offend anyone who prefers strawberry or vanilla. It is merely providing you with information about me. If, on the other hand, I wear a shirt that says “Vanilla is evil and everyone who likes it is stupid and bad”, then I should not be surprised when those who happen to like vanilla are not favorably disposed towards me. It is not only providing you with information about me, it is providing you with information about my negative attitude towards you. And to those atheists who are so narcissistic as to believe that another individual’s Religion is a statement that somehow concerns them, I merely say: Get over yourself! Life, the universe and everything are not about you!

There are those who wear their atheism in approximately the same way that Christians and other religious people wear their beliefs — matter-of-factly, presented simply as an aspect of character that intends to say nothing about what other people might think or to impose an opinion thereupon. On the internet, at least, such level-headed sorts are a bit more of a rarity, though not impossible to find.

But on the Internet, as in real life, there are also those who are very “out there” in their atheism, to the point that Vox Day describes above. And whereas all but the most hardcore Christian evangelists (and Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses) tend to present their case in the form of a dialogue, it has been this blogger’s experience that evangelistic atheists tend to present themselves as “the learned” dictating “the truth” to “the deluded” proles into the midst of which they have dared to wander.

This is equally true of atheist “accoutrements” that one typically sees out and about. The “Jesus Fish” is relatively innocuous, whereas the “Darwin Fish” is not so innocuous; the “Jesus fish” tells us only about the beliefs of the driver of the car it adorns, while the “Darwin fish” seems to be intended as a “teaching moment” that the atheist in the adorned car would like to offer to all the other drivers around him (the gender pronoun here is significant; it is usually a man in a car thusly adorned).

(The critic to whom Vox is responding is one notable exception, then.)

At any rate, here’s a couple of other good barbs from Vox:

Ethical belief systems are far less similar than atheists would usually have one think, of course, an atheist attempting to compare ethical systems is rather like a deaf man attempting to distinguish between Mozart and Vivaldi.

This is something to keep in mind, I think, the next time I’m having to deal with the old moral relativism canard.

The relevant point isn’t that religious people don’t ever kill - all are fallen - but that religious people are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less likely than atheists to kill when they are in positions that enable them to do so. I suppose it should be expected that Kelly would find this statistical reality to be an incredible coincidence, though, since her entire worldview is founded on a series of incredible improbabilities occurring for no reason at all. Life must be interesting for the atheist, coming as it does as a series of totally unexpected, completely unconnected surprises.

I don’t know about you, good Reader, but if all I had to believe about life was that it was an improbable result of unpredictable reactions that occurred for no particular reason, I’d probably be an alcoholic….like Christopher Hitchens.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

As much as I realize that Vox Day is being facetious, I feel that I should point out that it’s highly unlikely that Richard Dawkins would ever be hauled before a human rights commission in Canada. Not because he is a foreign national — I’ve no doubt that the commission wouldn’t hesitate to prosecute a case against someone simply because they aren’t a Canadian citizen (I’m half-tempted to file a complaint against Dick Cheney to test this theory) if in fact it fit their agenda — but because, well, it wouldn’t fit their agenda to go after a noted scholar of atheism, especially on behalf of disaffected Christians.

I wonder how long it will be before someone in Canuckistan reports Richard Dawkins to one of these human rights commissions; he has almost surely made far more disparaging remarks about Jews, Christians, and Muslims than Stephen Boissoin ever made about homosexuals or Mark Steyn ever made about Muslims. The whole thing is appalling to anyone who supports human freedom, of course, but it would be extremely ironic to see Dawkins forced to publicly apologize “for his views on Judaism” and refrain from disparaging the religious faithful by a godless secular organization. Perhaps then he might see that connection between atheism and totalitarianism that he just hasn’t been able to locate yet.

The Jewish angle seems more workable, but I still doubt the prospects of succcess; I honestly can’t see such a radical, left-wing organ of the Canadian state as the CHRC (or any provincial HRC, come to think of it) going after a modern champion of secular thought.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Vox Day brings to light a statistic of which I was not aware:

The ratio of girls per 1,000 boys in these areas hovers around the 700s and 800s, with as few as 300 girls per 1,000 boys in some high-caste urban areas of Punjab. As investigative journalist Gita Aravamudan argues in her 2007 book, “Disappearing Daughters: The Tragedy of Female Feticide,” “Female infanticide is akin to serial killing. But female feticide is more like a holocaust. A whole gender is getting exterminated.” The problem extends beyond India….

A new study suggests that female feticide may be disturbingly common in some American communities. In an analysis of 2000 Census data published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Columbia University economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund examined the sex ratio of births among U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean and Asian-Indian parents. They found “evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage.”

Abortion was supposedly the ultimate guarantor of women’s rights in this, the age of enlightened post-Christianity. Equally, it’s supposed to be the ultimate expression of a woman’s right to “control her own body” (whatever that actually means).

And abortion seems, now, to be shaping up as the tool or mechanism by which women will all but disappear from many regions of the world.

Vox Day links to an article from the New York Times that discusses new policies being put in place by Italy’s recently-elected government.

Underscoring the new Italian government’s determination to crack down on illegal Immigration and what the government contends is associated crime, Italy’s police arrested hundreds of people this week in a sweep of migrant shantytowns in major urban areas across the country, the police announced Thursday.

Nearly 400 people were arrested, including more than 100 who were immediately expelled. The police said more than 100 of those arrested were suspected of violating immigration laws, 180 of theft or prostitution, and 92 of drug dealing. Those arrested included 50 Moroccans and 32 Romanians.

The widely publicized raids were a strong signal from Italy’s new right-wing government, which is led by Silvio Berlusconi and includes the anti-immigrant Northern League Party, that it will keep its promises to pursue tougher policies toward immigrants.

“The anti-immigrant sweep was a positive thing because that’s what people want,” said Umberto Bossi, the minister of institutional reforms and federalism. “People ask us for safety, and we must give it to them.”

Vox is predicting that Italy will, within a decade or so, withdraw from the EU (given that the Italians seem to dislike most of the rest of Europe, this is probably a good possibility). Whether or not that comes to pass, however, this crackdown is ultimately a bit of a sign of hope for the Italian nation.

Especially in Europe, but over here as well, multiculturalism has become something vastly different than what it began as. The “mosaic/patchwork quilt” I was told about in school was all well and good when it simply meant that people wore different (and often more colourful) styles of clothing on the streets and opened up all manner of tasty restaurants and novelty shops. Now that it means that all manner of frankly ugly ideologies — things like Sharia law — are making inroads into Western democracies, multiculturalism is revealed to be something much less beneficial to those nations which espouse it.

I seem to recall that it was Lenin who remarked that the capitalist West would sell Communism the rope from which the West itself would hang. Lenin, ultimately, turned out to be wrong, but I can’t help but wonder if the sentiment itself had a ring of truth to it. More and more, it seems like multiculturalism is the rope from which the West — or, at least, some Western nations — may end up being hung. And there’s really only one plausible response to that danger: jettison multiculturalism.

Vox has a rather moving reflection up at his site regarding motherhood:

Motherhood is a sacrifice. It may mean putting off a college education and a career, or even giving them up entirely. It may mean sacrificing a flawless figure. It may mean sacrificing dreams. It definitely means putting two, three, four or more lives ahead of your own. But motherhood is also an expression of hope. Motherhood is a vote of confidence in the future of mankind. Motherhood is the brave voice of a woman saying, “I will not live life for today. I will create life for many tomorrows.”

Would that our society placed the same value it once did on the idea of self-sacrifice for the benefit of another. Would that our society placed the same value it once did on the idea that one could find boundless meaning and fulfillment in self-denial, especially if one did so for the benefit of another.

And to all those women who still understand the value and meaning in such things, and who can see the necessity in such things, let me say a belated “thank you” that should, more properly, have been uttered yesterday.

Vox Day links to an article by Rachel Lucas concerning some…investigation she’s been doing recently into this strange little religion called Christianity. Lucas is herself an atheist, but unlike many others who occupy that particular belief system, she’s at least willing to be open to inquiry.

It’s difficult to articulate on a blog why I’m even bothering trying to learn about Christianity now because as I’ve mentioned before, I hate being misunderstood. The truth is that I am not exactly seeking salvation or God or anything like that, and frankly if I were, I would not talk about it with virtual strangers at this stage of the game. At this moment, my biggest aim is simply trying to relieve myself of the terrifying feeling I’ve had for years that I live in a society full of and run by people who believe a Theology I don’t believe in, and that therefore I am surrounded by crazy people. It’s a bit of cognitive dissonance that I simply couldn’t take anymore.

Is my dad a crazy person? Are 90% of the people who read my blog crazy people? Are most of my friends crazy people? If I think Christianity is crazy, then the only answer to those questions is YES. But it just never added up. I had to know how they could believe something that I do not think is real and somehow not be crazy. That’s why I started asking about it here and why I started reading books like the Lewis one. And I have to tell you that the mission has been accomplished. It’s not even remotely “crazy” to believe in Christianity, and Christians have perfectly sound reasons to believe what they do, even if I disagree with some of their conclusions.

Vox adds his own thoughts to this:

This is an interesting post, because it is an honest admission of what far too many atheists obviously find themselves doing, whether they realize it or not. Most atheists haven’t actually reasoned anything through for themselves and because they’re operating on intellectual autopilot, they assume that everyone else must be too.

…Reliant upon superficial and inaccurate sound bites, the average atheist reliably reveals near-total ignorance of not only theology, but also history, philosophy, logic and even the dictionary. There are few things I find more amusing than hearing an atheist get started on the “evidence” line; I have yet to run into a single atheist who is not stopped dead in his tracks and forced to backpedal by the simple observation that scientific evidence is but a subset of the various forms of evidence known to Man…

I don’t think it’s crazy to be an atheist and I completely understand the appeal of atheism, especially for the young. What’s not to like about a behavioral carte blanche limited only by one’s desires, societal mores and the policeman around the corner? There is much that is compelling about the concept of Enlightenment 2.0 and the shiny secular science fiction society it promises the true believers. Unfortunately, I happen to find that progressive vision far less rationally credible than I do an ancient tribal anthology telling the story of a fallen creature who is congenitally incapable of lifting himself out of his own evil.

I always find posts like that which Rachel Lucas has written as being heartening, the same way I find it heartening when other Internet atheists sometimes write posts that communicate even a small understanding of a truth that is deeper than they could hope to comprehend from within their limited metaphysical framework, but which they nevertheless know must be true. There’s a certain proto-Muggeridgean element to such outpourings.

At some point, we all have to grow up and test or challenge the basic assumptions of what we believe against what we observe to be true in the world around us. That’s as true for believers as for non-believers; at some point, all of us have to take the beliefs we grew up with and stress-test them against the world around us. We have to develop questions and seek answers…and whether one is a believer or not, that means that one has to take one’s manner of thinking beyond the level of “childish.”

Is Christianity rational? In a nutshell, yes, yes it is…or, rather, it can be. So can atheism. But rationality is not a direct result of what one believes, necessarily; one can hold any number of beliefs and still be rational, or still be irrational. Atheism tells, and is predicated on, many, many lies, but certainly one of the more egregious of these is the assumption that one is necessarily rational if one refuses to believe in God, or that one who believes in God cannot, by definition, be rational.

Experience should tell us that this way of thinking is bollocks, and countless authors (of which C. S. Lewis is but one example, though a good example) and orators throughout history should be sufficient evidence of this. That this is not the case is, I think, a rather lamentable testimony to the intellectual integrity of our society (or, rather, the overall lack thereof).

Which brings us back to Lucas’ post, and why it is so heartening. It’s an example of someone taking that step away from thinking about something in a childish sort of way. It’s an example of someone taking their first steps “into a larger world” (pace Obi-Wan Kenobi). And it’s an example of someone being genuinely rational, and in so doing realizing that other people can be, and are, every bit as rational in what they believe. It’s a way of thinking that sets adults like Rachel Lucas apart from pseudo-children like Joel (whom some readers may remember from a while ago).

And in a certain sense, it’s also the first in what may be a series of baby steps toward faith. Time will tell, but certainly there is a hopefulness there.

…Vox Day provides a handy refresher by way of example, quoting a little tidbit from the Rational Responders

“Rational” Responders, rather.

What’s truly hilarious is that so many of an atheistic bent seem to have marked Christianity as their sole (or, at least, primary) enemy, and strive mightily to equate it with the barbarisms of Islam. That the comparison fails under even the slightest scrutiny would certainly seem to undermine any claims of being the more rational or more grounded in reason made by said same atheists. And all the while, what is missed in their considerations is that it is only because Christianity flourished that the intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment — which paved the way for the modern philosophies of atheism to emerge — likewise flourished.

I’ve never really felt all that threatened by the Euthyphro “dilemma,” despite the fact that some atheists I have debated seem to cling to it as either a comfort blanket or supposed “clincher” argument. The “dilemma” is an interesting thought experiment, I suppose, but being that it was initially asked from within a polytheistic framework — and in large measure depends on certain internal contradictions in the Greek Pantheon in order to actually set up the aspect of it which presents a “dilemma” to believers — it is far less applicable to the Christian situation than adherents of atheism might hope for.

As is roughly the same case with the “problem” of suffering/evil (theodicy), I basically regard Euthyphro as a non-issue, and tend to view dimly anyone who injects it into an argument.

And I see that Vox Day has also had a (much more comprehensive) go at deconstructing the (non-)dilemma, in two parts (one and two). What’s really amusing is that, in similar fashion to how he dismantles the reasoning of the likes of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, Vox dismantles the “dilemma” not only from without (by pointing out its inherent non-applicability to Christianity), but from within. It is a most amusing thing to see Socrates skewered on his own logic.

It arrived in the mail while I was away.

I’m looking forward to reading this, let me tell you! There’s nothing quite so enjoyable as engaging atheists on their own ground, and it looks like Vox Day has done exactly that.

Interested readers can buy the book here.