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Corn and Hitchens argue over Niger

homoeconomicusnet — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:45:00 +0000

In the run up to war, much was made over Iraq's attempt to get yellow cake uranium from Niger. David Corn writes about it being a hoax, and that Christopher Hitchens was wrong. Hitchens responds to that here. The photo of him in the shower I could not resist - which comes from Vanity Fair with Hitchens doing a story on being at a California Spa which separated him from booze and cigarettes.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="263" caption="Hitchens, a man who knows where his towel is ..."][/caption]

There's only one reason to go to Niger.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2006, at 5:20 PM ET

Click here to read David Corn's critique.

Wissam al-Zahawie did indeed have "a simple explanation" for his 1999 trip: low-level sanctions-busting. He had another equally simple (and laughable) disclaimer: He did not even know that Niger produced uranium. But I repeat the question that Corn declines to ask himself: What is an ambassador to the Vatican, with a background in nuclear diplomacy, doing on such an out-of-the-way mission in the first place? It's hardly my fault if the Senate intelligence committee and the ISG don't ask themselves this: Ambassador Rolf Ekeus (who does ask it) outranks them in the sort of expertise that Corn selectively affects to value. Of course, one may always prefer to rely on the "excerpts of Zahawie's travel report," and the IAEA's discovery that Saddam's envoy—a former friend and colleague of theirs—did not choose to claim that he talked about uranium. This might be described as the Joseph Wilson standard of forensic investigation.

The related question—was Niger open for business?—is partly answered by the presence of A.Q. Khan on its territory in 1999 and again in 2000. Corn ignores this completely while making feeble jokes about an Austin Powers alliance between rogue states. Has he cared to look at the list of countries visited and armed by A.Q. Khan, from North Korea to Libya? Has he ever asked himself how our "intelligence" community missed all that, too? The supposed "box" that contained Saddam Hussein contained A.Q. Khan and the nuclear black market as well, not that the CIA had the vaguest idea of that fact or any other.

From the simple-minded presumption of Iraqi innocence to the conspiratorial assumption of American guilt: Corn's original charge was that the administration broke the law in an attempt to expose Wilson's wife. Now that we know that this is false he falls back on the discovery that there were people in the administration who didn't like Wilson and wanted to explode his claims. Well, fine. But how does that become the business of a prosecutor who sends one of our fellow journalists to jail? Meanwhile, for Corn to say that Richard Armitage was "most likely not part of a White House campaign" is to invite and deserve utter ridicule.

This leaves us only with two remaining questions: the forgery, and the rationality of Saddam Hussein as an actor. On the first point, Corn presumably knows that a forgery is not a hoax but an attempted copy of a true bill. The people who attempted to pass off a fake version of Zahawie's visit may have been interested only in money, or they may have been attempting disinformation. Or both. I have canvassed all three propositions, and am relatively neutral as among them. However, any reader of Slate can look up the two independent British commissions of inquiry, both conducted at a time of hysterical accusations against Prime Minister Blair, both of which found that the original intelligence on Niger was well-founded, and that it predated any funny business with the Zahawie seal, or stamp.

It's wearisome at this late date to read again the bland assertion that Saddam Hussein did not do things because it would have been unwise or irrational for him to do so. On that very basis, our intelligence establishment concluded that he would not invade Kuwait, would not set fire to the oil fields, and would not perform any number of other insane actions. His megalomania and volatility were consistently underestimated, with real consequences in the real world. No policy based on the assumption of his rational conduct ever worked. Now, the passage of time has allowed some glib people to represent him as the victim of a frame-up. What an offense to the historical record that is.

I have other reasons, which have been well-enough exposed in Slate and elsewhere, to think that Saddam Hussein's name may indeed be uttered in the same breath as the ambition to recover WMD. Corn seems to believe that the dictator who not only acquired and concealed them, but who actually used them, must be granted the benefit of the doubt. I differ, and yes I do think that post-invasion Iraq was unusually "clean." Even Hans Blix and Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröeder thought that some weaponry would be found, and the list of stocks that Iraq last handed to the United Nations has never been accounted for. Other evidence—such as the centrifuge buried by Saddam Hussein's chief scientist and the Baathist negotiations to buy missiles off the shelf from North Korea—was uncovered only by the invasion itself. So, this is not an induction from no evidence to evidence, but the result of a long experience with a regime highly skilled in concealment and deception. Were it not for his defeat in 1991, and the resulting UNSCOM discoveries, we would not have known the extent of Saddam Hussein's previous nuclear capacities, either. So, even if it is true that he had been wholly or partially disarmed before 2003, that outcome was only the result of sternly refusing to take his word for it, and of the application of a policy of sanctions-plus-force that was opposed by David Corn's magazine at every single step.

This difference among others led me to separate myself from The Nation, where neither my prose nor my socializing were as stellar as Corn recalls. Incidentally, I begin to tire of this sickly idea that I used to be a great guy until I became fed up with excuses for dictators and psychopathic murderers (let alone for mediocre CIA fantasists). Alexander Cockburn is surely nearer the mark when he says that I was a complete shit and traitor all along.

Click here to read David Corn's critique.

Hitchens review of Dylan book

johnfitzj — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:44:05 +0000

America's Poet?

From the July 5 / July 12, 2004 issue: Bob Dylan's achievement.

by Christopher Hitchens

07/05/2004, Volume 009, Issue 41

Dylan's Visions of Sin

by Christopher Ricks

Ecco, 528 pp., $26.95

"Not all great poets--like Wallace Stevens --are great singers," Bob Dylan once suggested. "But a great singer--like Billie Holiday--is always a great poet."

It would be an enterprise in itself to disentangle the many ways in which this brief statement is dead wrong. The antithesis, if it is meant as an antithesis, between poet and singer, is false to begin with. The "not all" is based on a nonexpectation: How many poets have been singers at all? Certainly not Dylan Thomas, the Welsh boozer and bawler from whom Bob Dylan--a Jewish loner from Hibbing, Minnesota, who was born as Robert Zimmerman--annexed his nom de chanteur.

Other cryptic or pretentious observations, made by Bob Dylan down the years, have licensed the suspicion that he's been putting people on and starting wild-goose chases for arcane or esoteric readings that aren't there. There are also those who maintain that Dylan can't really sing. (This latter group has recently been reluctantly increasing.) Of his ability as a poet, however, there can be no reasonable doubt. I used to play two subliterary games with Salman Rushdie. The first, not that you asked, was to re-title Shakespeare plays as if they had been written by Robert Ludlum. (Rushdie, who invented the game, came up with The Elsinore Vacillation, The Dunsinane Reforestation, The Kerchief Implication, and The Rialto Sanction.) The second was to recite Bob Dylan songs in a deadpan voice as though they were blank verse. In addition to

the risk of the ridiculous, it can become quite hypnotic. Try it yourself with "Mr. Tambourine Man": It works so well, you hardly care that a tambourine man can't really be playing a song. "Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts," "Chimes of Freedom," and "Desolation Row" all have the same feeling.

But as a guide to Dylan's poetic moments, do we really need help from Christopher Ricks, author of Keats and Embarrassment, editor of T.S. Eliot's juvenilia, instructor on the funny side of Tristram Shandy, and all-around literary mandarin? Need him or not, we now have Ricks--who, in Dylan's Visions of Sin, performs over five-hundred pages of literary criticism on the lyrics. Reading Dylan as the bard of guilt and redemption, Ricks takes his stand on the recurrence in the songs of the seven deadly sins, only just balanced as they are by the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues (or heavenly graces: faith, hope, and charity).

It's Ricks's own potentially deadly virtues that bother me. What temptation should one avoid above all, if one is a former professor of English at Cambridge? The temptation to be matey, or hip, or cool--especially if one is essaying the medium of popular music. But Ricks begins his book like this: "All I really want to do is--what, exactly? Be friends with you? Assuredly I don't want to do you in, or select you or dissect you or inspect you or reject you."

The toe-curling embarrassment of this is intensified when one appreciates that Ricks is addressing his subject, not his reader. Why did he leave out other verbs Dylan had in that song: simplify you, classify you, deny, defy, or crucify you? And surely, he's already at least "selected" him?

Then, accused by one of his usually admiring rivals in Dylanology, Alex Ross of the New Yorker, of "fetishizing the details of a recording," the prof resorts to unbearable archness. ("What me? All the world knows that it is women's shoes that I am into.") Some of Ricks's jokey attempts at making puns work ("cut to the chaste"), but "interluckitor" is a representative failure. This last is coined to deal with a claim by Dylan, made in 1965, that every song of his "tails off with--'Good Luck--I hope you make it.'" Such a claim, if taken seriously, would in any case vitiate most of Dylan's claims to profundity.

Having said that distinguished academics ought not to try and be ingratiating with the young, I pull myself up a bit and realize that true Dylan fans are probably well into their fifties by now. It must have been in 1965 that I first heard what Philip Larkin called, in a quasi-respectful review of Highway 61 Revisited, his "cawing, derisive voice." And it will be with me until my last hour. Some of this is context. The "sixties" didn't really begin until after the Kennedy assassination (or "Nineteen Sixty-Three," as Larkin had it in another reference), and Bob Dylan was as good a handbook for what was supposedly happening as Joseph Heller. Much of it of course also had to do with the sappiness, in both "sap" senses, of adolescence. Yet even at the time, I was somehow aware that Dylan wasn't all that young,

and didn't take "youth" at its face value. A good number of his best songs were actually urging you to grow up, or at any rate to get real. Dylan respected his elders, most notably Woody Guthrie. And he was braced for disillusionment. How does it feel? Don't think twice, it's all right. It's all over now, baby blue. I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.Ricks essentially wants to argue that Dylan has always been swayed by the elders and that his verses consistently defer to the authorities. How else to explain, for example, the many latent affinities between "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and the Book of Ezekiel? The kings of Tyre, the dying music, the futility of earthly possessions. . . . That's Covetousness taken care of, with Pride (or at any rate hubris) given a passing whack into the bargain. Six sins to go.

Ricks has no success with Greed (as he admits) and not much with Sloth, either. There is a good deal of anomie and fatalism in Dylan; a fair amount of shrugging and dismissal and an abiding sense of waste and, equally often, of loss. It's pervasive but nonspecific in "Time Passes Slowly," which Ricks interrogates without any great profit. So I pushed on to "Lust," and was taken aback.

"Lay, Lady, Lay" is one of the great sexual entreaties, and it has in common with "I Want You" and "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" a highly ethical reliance on the force of gentle persuasion. There is no blackmail, moral or otherwise, and no hint of a threat or even a scene in the event of nonconsummation. But nor is there any doubt of what the minstrel wants: His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean. / And you're the best thing that he's ever seen. Of this false modesty and abject flattery, Ricks astonishingly says that "his hands are clean because he is innocent, free of sin: no lust, for all the honest desire, and no guile." Had Dylan written "his clothes are dirty but his mind is clean," this might have been believable. And is there no guile in the succeeding stanza?

Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile

Why wait any longer for the world to begin?

You can have your cake and eat it too.

Why wait any longer for the one you love

When he's standing in front of you?

Ricks then moves to a laborious comparison with Donne's "On His Mistress Going To Bed," at which point I thought, well, as soon as I turn the page he'll stop clearing his throat and make the obvious metaphysical connection to Andrew Marvell and "To His Coy Mistress." But no. And here's the clue to Ricks's method. The words "bed," "show," "see," "man," "hands," "world" he says all appear in both Donne and Dylan, while the words "unclothed" and "lighteth" appear in Donne, balanced by "clothes" and "light" in Dylan.

Shall we agree that all the words just specified are in somewhat common use today, and were in equally ordinary employment in the seventeenth century? Whereas, if you care to glance again at the Dylan lines I just cited, not only do you think at once of Marvell's Had we but world enough and time / This coyness, Lady, were no crime (which gets "lady" in there, right enough, and in delicious apposition to "world" at that), but you also find yourself grappling with Marvell's gentle but urgent sense of delay and frustration. Dylan further beseeches the lady to stay while the night is still ahead and to have [her] cake and eat it too: Metaphysically speaking this is not so remote from Marvell's reminder that the darkness of death will last an awfully long time, while in the grave the worms may dine long and well. This is something different from Donne's poem, which swiftly becomes a near-raunchy celebration of achieved carnal knowledge of someone familiar to him. Finally, Marvell speaks beautifully and seductively about keeping the sun in motion since there's no chance of making it stand still, and Dylan longs to see his beloved "in the morning light," having banished the night in the only way that lies open to him. I hope I don't boast about my own poor exegesis, but Ricks's procedure is more like that of the people who pore over Bible codes or kabbalistic crossword puzzles.

DYLAN'S VERSION OF ANGER is sardonic and bitter: an exemplary match for the "cawing, derisive" tones noted by Larkin. In "Masters of War," "Only a Pawn In Their Game," and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," he said to the military-industrial complex and the racists, in effect, "You win. For now. But for now you also have to live with your shame. And judgment will follow, and is coming." (I have always hoped, for this reason, that Joan Baez was wrong in claiming that Dylan wrote "When The Ship Comes In"--his most Jeremiad and vengeful poem--in response to bad service at some hotel.)

"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" was based on a real event in 1963: the lethal beating of Hattie Carroll by William Zanzinger in a Baltimore hotel. Zanzinger's lenient treatment by the courts fired Dylan into a hot rage, yet producing his most glacial and most measured poem of outrage and contempt. He simply relates the story, with deadly counterpoint as between the rich and careless white man and the dispensable black servitor. The song never uses the words "black" or "white," as Ricks points out, but just: He owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres, while she emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level. Thus is the plantation relationship re-cast and, as Ricks rightly says, "it's a terrible thing that you know this [their respective colors] from the story." But then again, as Ricks also emphasizes, Dylan's affecting line And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger is a sort of clue. I have always thought that this was Dylan ventriloquizing, without condescension, the "Black English" demotic comment on the affair. Ricks improves on my intuition by giving the example of James Baldwin in The Amen Corner: "He hadn't never done nothing to nobody."

Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle

, in Dylan's haunting phrase, Zanzinger slew Hattie Carroll with a cane that he twirled around his diamond-ring finger, and who would pass up the chance to recall the first murderer, Cain, in this context? Not Ricks, who also calls attention to the words lay slain by a cane and to the triple repetition of the word "table," which closes three consecutive lines. "Does this -able" he inquires, "prepare for the word that soon follows, 'cane'? Cain and Abel, masculine and feminine endings?" Well, no, I shouldn't think so. Whatever the song is about, it most decidedly isn't about fratricide. And Cain and Abel--scarcely unique metaphors where murder is concerned--appear in other Dylan songs under their own names. Ricksian hermeneutics has its limits.I could, nonetheless, have used some more counsel from Ricks about the title. In what way was Hattie Carroll's death "lonesome"? There is an unmistakable sentimentality in this word; a tear-jerking note that is wondrously absent from the song itself. Insufficient guidance is forthcoming: Ricks proposes without much brio that Dylan "perhaps" wanted the word to evoke a contrast between Hattie's death and the crowded hotel. But with or without that "perhaps," ultimately, everybody dies alone.

Ricks's closing thought is superior. He argues that T.S. Eliot understood the difference between writing religious poetry and writing poetry religiously, and that Dylan with "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" has written politically rather than merely writing a political song. That seems to be a distinction well worth observing, most especially at a time like the present with its ephemeral garbage of pseudo-protest. ("We've suffered for our music--now it's your turn.") The finest fury is the most controlled. One still feels a generous anger when listening to the song--incidentally, William Zanzinger turned up again a few years ago in the Baltimore courts, for leasing black people squalid, waterless cabins that he didn't even own--and the pairing of generosity with anger (annexed from Orwell out of Dickens) might license some interpenetration of sin and virtue, or even sin with grace.

It's back to hermeneutics in Ricks's study of "Love Minus Zero / No Limit," which occurs in the chapter on "Temperance." As you will recall, the song begins My love she speaks like silence / Without ideals or violence, while in a succeeding verse:

In the dime stores and bus stations

People talk of situations

Read books, repeat quotations

Draw conclusions on the wall.

For Ricks, this is Belshazzar's feast in the fifth chapter of Daniel: "In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace. And this is the writing that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it."Building upon this, Ricks insists that the biblical "candlestick" furnishes Dylan not only with his song's reference to candles and matchsticks, but the biblical word "numbered" may have a relation to the "Minus Zero" in Dylan's title. This same chapter of Daniel has the words "people," "tremble," "wise men," and "gifts"--and also "spake," "said," and "that night." What more could one want as proof of the direct influence of the prophet Daniel upon the song?

Something more, as it happens. The words of the prophets are written on the subway wall, as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were to say in "The Sounds of Silence," and it was as obvious to me the first time I heard "Love Minus Zero / No Limit" as it is today that Dylan was alluding to graffiti: a special emphasis in that time and place. If you really want to connect Babylon to Dylan, you might have better luck with "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts": The cabaret was silent--except for the drilling in the wall.

AT THE SAME TIME I was digesting all this in Dylan's Visions of Sin, I noticed that Ricks deals with an obvious contradiction in his account (the king being "reduced" to the pawn) in the following evasive manner: "'Even the pawn must hold a grudge.' Even the king? Even Dylan, whom I ungrudgingly admire?" This is ingratiation raised to the level of unction. I remember the first time that I ever felt a qualm about Dylan's claims. It was early on as well: He said that he had written "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" at the time of the Cuban missile crisis--and he had been in such an apocalyptic hurry that every line could be the first line of another song. Even in my early teens, I knew that that was bravado.

Oddly, perhaps, Ricks spends almost no time on the influences that Dylan actually does affirm or the influences that we know about. "Blowin' In the Wind" borrows from an old slave spiritual called "No More Auction Block," with its haunting words about "many thousands gone." Dylan was actually sued by Dominic Behan, brother of Brendan, for plagiarizing not only the tune but the concept of "The Patriot Game" for his "With God on Our Side." More recently, his song about a Japanese yakuza was tracked down to an obscure but identifiable source, while the deft Daniel Radosh has blogged a near-perfect match between Dylan's "Cross the Green Mountain" (written for Ron Maxwell's movie Gods and Generals) and Walt Whitman's "Come up from the Fields, Father." If I had to surmise another influence, it would be William Blake, not just for the speculative reasons given by Ricks but because, as Blake phrased it: "A Last Judgment is Necessary because Fools flourish."

Even secularists often find themselves thinking things like that, and there is a store of words in the Bible that springs ready-made, as it were. Thus, Ricks could well be correct in thinking that Dylan's "how many times" is an echo both of "How long, oh Lord, how long?" and of Christ's injunction in Matthew on the number of times that it might be needful to turn the other cheek. (He may also be right, though coming down-market more than he likes, in discerning a vague sacred/profane overlap between "I Believe in You" and "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.")

But Christianity as a religion of peace and tolerance and forgiveness is not, superficially at least, compatible with ringing phrases about judgment and the sword: In order to believe in the apparently kindly and reassuring verses about taking no thought for the morrow, one had better have a lively sense of the second coming. This was the line that Dylan actually did take in his born-again period, where he spoke of "spiritual warfare" as well as his "precious angel," and warned that there would be no hiding place on the day. But this, which produced some of his most beautiful writing (and singing) would appear to have been as lightly affected as the gritty dustbowl socialism which the Old Left was already denouncing him for abandoning as far back as 1964. Dylan dropped it and kept moving on.

Indeed, I am sure I remember Ricks welcoming him "back," as it were, when he came up with "Most of the Time" about fifteen years ago. But here, and in his discussion of this superbly apt and lovely and troubling song, I began to write heavy notes in the book's margin: "Most of the time," Ricks writes, "'Most of the Time' consists of repeating the words, 'most of the time.'" [Marginal note: Oh no it doesn't.] Unbelievably, Ricks manages to go on for a half-dozen pages about this song, without ever achieving the realization that it is one of the most vertiginous, knife-edge accounts of a post-love trauma ever penned. You should only listen to the song if you are not currently trying to persuade yourself that "it" is all over and that you are all over "it."

Ricks wraps up blandly: "It is only most of the time that the man in this long black song succeeds in being not disturbed. But he is halfways there. On the other hand, 'She's that far behind.' One too many mornings and a thousand miles behind, to be exact." [In the margin: To be inexact, you mean, you fool. She's right behind him and in front of him and all around him, all of the time. His attempted banishment of her is a hopeless failure! What have you got in your veins--tapwater?]

There follows a lengthy Ricksian contrast between the words of Dylan's song "Not Dark Yet" and Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." Not, you understand, that our author wants to be taken too seriously. "I don't believe that Keats's poem is alluded to in Dylan's song. That is, called into play, so that you'd be failing to respond to something crucial to the song unless you were familiar with, and could call up, Keats's poem." [In the margin: Oh no, of course, not that.] After all, the deep connection between Keats's My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains and Dylan's Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain is transparent neither in sense nor rhythm.

It is true that the words "dark," "shadow," and "day"--together with "sleep" and "time," or their cognates--are to be found in both sets of verses. I am quite ready to believe that Dylan had a subliminal memory of being taught the poem in school. But Renata Adler did much better than this, during the 1968 Republican convention that nominated Nixon in Miami. Surveying the sea of placards with their jaunty slogan "Now More Than Ever," she suddenly recognized that it came from verse six of the "Nightingale" ode: Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain.I think that might have afforded Dylan a smile, and possibly Ricks too. But only one of them has an attitude to sin that is in any sense original.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. He is writing a study of Thomas Jefferson in the Eminent Lives series.

HYPERLINK "http://www.weeklystandard.com/banman/banman.asp?Task=Click&ZoneID=25&CampaignID=267&AdvertiserID=75&BannerID=373&SiteID=0&RandomNumber=4941

Free Speech

mantecanaut — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:20:47 +0000

Christopher Hitchens' masterful speech on freedom of expression.

A Penance

blendedworship — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:14:17 +0000

I am bummed.

I had one great last post all ready to urge people to reject the teachings of Frank Viola and George Barna. I had commentary on their use of proof-texting to defend their entire book. I even had given them a clever "celebrity couple" name. And I was chomping at the bit to finish, polish and send it.

Then God the Holy Spirit convicted me. That post will never be sent.

In the face of the onslaught of what I am calling the "New Stalinism": attacks from the ridiculously far left (Bill Maher, Hitchens, Pullman, Dawkins and the like), I had to take a good, long look at my way of dealing with extremism within the Body of Christ. Is it right for me to respond to divisive comments with (possibly more divisive) counter-attacks?

I had to conclude: nope.

The radical atheist movement, which would like to see the Body of Christ disappear from the face of the earth, are too unified in their one, simple piece of religious dogma - "God is not" - for us to afford to be divided. And, when my efforts to counter division in the Church become ugly attacks on the very sources of division, the New Stalinists become even more powerful.

Fact is, Christ has one Bride, the Church. She is a conflicted gal, to be sure. She is simultaneously convinced of the efficacy and sufficiency of the Cross and the need for meritorious works; the surety of God's sovereign choice and the freedom of the individual; the priesthood of all believers and the importance of the clergy; embracing at times Rome and at times the Reformation; holding icons in one hand and casting them away with the other...

Some of us speak of salvation as "when you die and go to heaven" while others think of the "living in the hope of the resurrection" - two very different aspects of the same hope. We wrestle with incompatible thoughts, such as definitions of the Church and views of the "end times". The Bride is one, yet she often doesn't know it.

What good is it, then, for me to respond to division with more contentious argument? That doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss, or even argue. But I feel that one must watch the tone of such interactions.

I am at fault. When Frank and George argued there was no place in the Church for pastors, choirs, orderly worship and the like, I responded with the attitude that there was no room in the Church for such opinions. Of course there is! I may think they are wrong, but their thoughts are welcome.

Radical Atheist (a)theology is so simple that even the most diametrically opposed atheists are unified in their basic belief that God and religion taint everything and have no value. We can't be the blazing light that will burn up such ignorant darkness if we are distracted by infighting.

So, as a penance, I am willing not to be contentious any longer. When I disagree, I will - with God's help - disagree in the most, well... agreeable of ways, welcoming my brothers and sisters into dialogue with, as one of the Epistles says, "gentleness and respect".

These words from Battlestar Galactica, are quite fitting:

So say we all.

Quotes of the Day: Morality vs. Authority

Ubiquitous Che — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:46:43 +0000

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

– Socrates (Euthyphro, by Plato)

If you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that He made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being but that they are in the essence logically anterior to God.

– Bertrand Russell

If it is the case that a code of ethics is only moral because it is recommended by God, then why should I take it seriously? This is the case where morality ceases to have any meaning - God becomes little more than a petty and petulant tyrant, and all the richness and nobility of our struggle for the moral life gets reduced down to the merest, most mindless response to the basic impulses of greed (for heaven) and fear (of hell). It would be Hitchen’s celestial North Korea, revealed in truth for the tyranny that it is, all of its rottenness and depravity on full display.

– Ubiquitous Che

And a quick question: Given that my quote is in context, is it egotistical at all to quote myself? It doesn't bother me if the answer is yes - I bloody know that I'm plenty egotistical, so no problems there. I'm just curious if this counts.

Building a Wall

gideonsthreehundred — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:47:02 +0000

Nehemiah opens: "Now it happened in the month of Chislev, in the twentieth year, as I was in Susa the capital, that Hanani, one of my brothers, came with certain men from Judah. And I asked them concerning the Jews who escaped, who had survived the exile, and concerning Jerusalem. And they said to me, 'The remnant there in the province who had survived the exile is in great trouble and shame. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire.'

"As soon as I heard these words I sat down and wept and mourned for days, and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven. And I said, 'O Lord God of Heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open, to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel your servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Even I and my father's house have sinned. We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, and the rules that you commanded your servant Moses."

The first chapter of Nehemiah contains the words and the spirit by which we in America need to cry out to God, for Jerusalem's walls could be a metaphor for the ruin of this country. Nehemiah's response should be our response: weeping, fasting, and prayer. Is there anyone who cannnot say "Even I and my father's house have sinned"?

We are a nation lost. Our descent over the past two centuries has been incremental, but we can point to occasions that have accelerated our decline, such as the 1962 Supreme Court decision (Engel v. Vitale) which, redefining one word, removed prayer from schools. The First Ammendment states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." From 1791, when the First Ammendment was adopted, until 1962, when this decision was handed down, the word "establishment" meant the creation of a national denomination, as they had in Great Britain. The 1962 decision reinterpreted the word to mean any religious activity in public. This was a landmark decision, allowing for the subsequent removal of the Bible, the Ten Commandments, and religious symbols from the public arena---essentially clearing the way for the challenge of anything religious in public. This sweeping clean of our civic landscape---even history class---of any reference to a religious heritage, continues. The climate we observe today is one in which criticism of the church is not even in the realm of argument or debate. Rather, it is generally condescending, dismissive mockery and ridicule.

I used to run down a country road, along which lived two dogs. Day after day, I noticed that the little dog was harmless unless he was in the company of his friend, the big dog about four times his size. With the big dog providing courage, the little dog not only barked, but bit too. Critics of the church are similarly more aggressive and hostile in this current climate, in which religion has been officially removed from the public arena. Denunciations of Christianity have the sanction of the big dogs---government and media---and so the attacks of little dogs like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Bill Maher, and countless others, are more and more hostile. I wouldn't call them courageous. They are what we would expect, given that the cultural pendulum, aided by our courts, has swung away from Christianity, toward secularism and new age paganism.

For most of our country's history, government and Christianity were linked together, sharing sway in our culture. Murals on state buildings, biographies and writings of founding fathers, and state and federal laws attest to the fact that ours was a Christian nation. While that was the case, implied was that we were blessed---because we were Americans. We must now concede that if we are blessed, it is in spite of it.

Which brings us back to Nehemiah. Nehemiah returned to Jerusalem to organize the rebuilding of the city wall in a hostile climate. While some worked on construction, others carried weapons. Each worker kept a weapon at his right hand. If we are to seriously undertake a rebuilding campaign in this country, we will find that our decline has created an internal opposition more hostile than anything external, and it is upon the internal opposition that we must train our weapons. We are a population that derives morality from feelings, does not believe in objective truth, and rejects notions of right and wrong. Almost no difference in behavior (divorce, premarital sex, abortion) exists between evangelicals and the rest of the population. The wall we must first construct, therefore, is one around the church, purging it and protecting it from attitudes and biases of a culture that mocks God.

In Chapters 8 and 9, Nehemiah gives us a picture of a people worshiping God, giving thanks, and confessing sins. This is the image we as a church need to model. The wall we must build around the Church, keeping the culture out, must coincide with putting the picture presented by Nehemiah---of a people worshiping God, revering His word, giving thanks, and confessing sin---in.

not very useful analogies, really

drinkme — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:04:51 +0000

Hitchens accuses Obama of being another Dukakis... The comparison I always thought of was that Hillary/Obama were like Ted Kennedy / Carter in 1980, where Carter went on to be a somewhat weak though well-intentioned leader, and Kennedy went on to serve as a powerful senator who in retrospect many people wonder if he could have had a greater impact on history... but the ties to family and the implications of corruption were things democrats were eager to get away from. I just hope we don't end up with another Reagan if Obama isn't able to deliver on the "hope" he's been selling.

Carter wrote a lot of books and had that religious connection, too, but it turned out he wasn't really able to get the country behind him, even if in many ways he was a great man. He was just better at running a non-profit, in the end. Seems like so much of being president really does have to do with how the country feels about you, and though a lot of college students love Obama, what will matter is how the corn farmers and walmart workers and accountants and gas station attendants and electricians and retiring pharmacists think of him...

Bob Dylan - reviewed by Hitch

bantamlyons — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:47:11 +0000

America's Poet?

From the July 5 / July 12, 2004 issue: Bob Dylan's achievement.

by Christopher Hitchens

07/05/2004, Volume 009, Issue 41

Dylan's Visions of Sin

by Christopher Ricks

Ecco, 528 pp., $26.95

"Not all great poets--like Wallace Stevens --are great singers," Bob Dylan once suggested. "But a great singer--like Billie Holiday--is always a great poet."

It would be an enterprise in itself to disentangle the many ways in which this brief statement is dead wrong. The antithesis, if it is meant as an antithesis, between poet and singer, is false to begin with. The "not all" is based on a nonexpectation: How many poets have been singers at all? Certainly not Dylan Thomas, the Welsh boozer and bawler from whom Bob Dylan--a Jewish loner from Hibbing, Minnesota, who was born as Robert Zimmerman--annexed his nom de chanteur.

Other cryptic or pretentious observations, made by Bob Dylan down the years, have licensed the suspicion that he's been putting people on and starting wild-goose chases for arcane or esoteric readings that aren't there. There are also those who maintain that Dylan can't really sing. (This latter group has recently been reluctantly increasing.) Of his ability as a poet, however, there can be no reasonable doubt. I used to play two subliterary games with Salman Rushdie. The first, not that you asked, was to re-title Shakespeare plays as if they had been written by Robert Ludlum. (Rushdie, who invented the game, came up with The Elsinore Vacillation, The Dunsinane Reforestation, The Kerchief Implication, and The Rialto Sanction.) The second was to recite Bob Dylan songs in a deadpan voice as though they were blank verse. In addition to

the risk of the ridiculous, it can become quite hypnotic. Try it yourself with "Mr. Tambourine Man": It works so well, you hardly care that a tambourine man can't really be playing a song. "Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts," "Chimes of Freedom," and "Desolation Row" all have the same feeling.

But as a guide to Dylan's poetic moments, do we really need help from Christopher Ricks, author of Keats and Embarrassment, editor of T.S. Eliot's juvenilia, instructor on the funny side of Tristram Shandy, and all-around literary mandarin? Need him or not, we now have Ricks--who, in Dylan's Visions of Sin, performs over five-hundred pages of literary criticism on the lyrics. Reading Dylan as the bard of guilt and redemption, Ricks takes his stand on the recurrence in the songs of the seven deadly sins, only just balanced as they are by the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues (or heavenly graces: faith, hope, and charity).

It's Ricks's own potentially deadly virtues that bother me. What temptation should one avoid above all, if one is a former professor of English at Cambridge? The temptation to be matey, or hip, or cool--especially if one is essaying the medium of popular music. But Ricks begins his book like this: "All I really want to do is--what, exactly? Be friends with you? Assuredly I don't want to do you in, or select you or dissect you or inspect you or reject you."

The toe-curling embarrassment of this is intensified when one appreciates that Ricks is addressing his subject, not his reader. Why did he leave out other verbs Dylan had in that song: simplify you, classify you, deny, defy, or crucify you? And surely, he's already at least "selected" him?

Then, accused by one of his usually admiring rivals in Dylanology, Alex Ross of the New Yorker, of "fetishizing the details of a recording," the prof resorts to unbearable archness. ("What me? All the world knows that it is women's shoes that I am into.") Some of Ricks's jokey attempts at making puns work ("cut to the chaste"), but "interluckitor" is a representative failure. This last is coined to deal with a claim by Dylan, made in 1965, that every song of his "tails off with--'Good Luck--I hope you make it.'" Such a claim, if taken seriously, would in any case vitiate most of Dylan's claims to profundity.

Having said that distinguished academics ought not to try and be ingratiating with the young, I pull myself up a bit and realize that true Dylan fans are probably well into their fifties by now. It must have been in 1965 that I first heard what Philip Larkin called, in a quasi-respectful review of Highway 61 Revisited, his "cawing, derisive voice." And it will be with me until my last hour. Some of this is context. The "sixties" didn't really begin until after the Kennedy assassination (or "Nineteen Sixty-Three," as Larkin had it in another reference), and Bob Dylan was as good a handbook for what was supposedly happening as Joseph Heller. Much of it of course also had to do with the sappiness, in both "sap" senses, of adolescence. Yet even at the time, I was somehow aware that Dylan wasn't all that young,

and didn't take "youth" at its face value. A good number of his best songs were actually urging you to grow up, or at any rate to get real. Dylan respected his elders, most notably Woody Guthrie. And he was braced for disillusionment. How does it feel? Don't think twice, it's all right. It's all over now, baby blue. I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.Ricks essentially wants to argue that Dylan has always been swayed by the elders and that his verses consistently defer to the authorities. How else to explain, for example, the many latent affinities between "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and the Book of Ezekiel? The kings of Tyre, the dying music, the futility of earthly possessions. . . . That's Covetousness taken care of, with Pride (or at any rate hubris) given a passing whack into the bargain. Six sins to go.

Ricks has no success with Greed (as he admits) and not much with Sloth, either. There is a good deal of anomie and fatalism in Dylan; a fair amount of shrugging and dismissal and an abiding sense of waste and, equally often, of loss. It's pervasive but nonspecific in "Time Passes Slowly," which Ricks interrogates without any great profit. So I pushed on to "Lust," and was taken aback.

"Lay, Lady, Lay" is one of the great sexual entreaties, and it has in common with "I Want You" and "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" a highly ethical reliance on the force of gentle persuasion. There is no blackmail, moral or otherwise, and no hint of a threat or even a scene in the event of nonconsummation. But nor is there any doubt of what the minstrel wants: His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean. / And you're the best thing that he's ever seen. Of this false modesty and abject flattery, Ricks astonishingly says that "his hands are clean because he is innocent, free of sin: no lust, for all the honest desire, and no guile." Had Dylan written "his clothes are dirty but his mind is clean," this might have been believable. And is there no guile in the succeeding stanza?

Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile

Why wait any longer for the world to begin?

You can have your cake and eat it too.

Why wait any longer for the one you love

When he's standing in front of you?

Ricks then moves to a laborious comparison with Donne's "On His Mistress Going To Bed," at which point I thought, well, as soon as I turn the page he'll stop clearing his throat and make the obvious metaphysical connection to Andrew Marvell and "To His Coy Mistress." But no. And here's the clue to Ricks's method. The words "bed," "show," "see," "man," "hands," "world" he says all appear in both Donne and Dylan, while the words "unclothed" and "lighteth" appear in Donne, balanced by "clothes" and "light" in Dylan.

Shall we agree that all the words just specified are in somewhat common use today, and were in equally ordinary employment in the seventeenth century? Whereas, if you care to glance again at the Dylan lines I just cited, not only do you think at once of Marvell's Had we but world enough and time / This coyness, Lady, were no crime (which gets "lady" in there, right enough, and in delicious apposition to "world" at that), but you also find yourself grappling with Marvell's gentle but urgent sense of delay and frustration. Dylan further beseeches the lady to stay while the night is still ahead and to have [her] cake and eat it too: Metaphysically speaking this is not so remote from Marvell's reminder that the darkness of death will last an awfully long time, while in the grave the worms may dine long and well. This is something different from Donne's poem, which swiftly becomes a near-raunchy celebration of achieved carnal knowledge of someone familiar to him. Finally, Marvell speaks beautifully and seductively about keeping the sun in motion since there's no chance of making it stand still, and Dylan longs to see his beloved "in the morning light," having banished the night in the only way that lies open to him. I hope I don't boast about my own poor exegesis, but Ricks's procedure is more like that of the people who pore over Bible codes or kabbalistic crossword puzzles.

DYLAN'S VERSION OF ANGER is sardonic and bitter: an exemplary match for the "cawing, derisive" tones noted by Larkin. In "Masters of War," "Only a Pawn In Their Game," and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," he said to the military-industrial complex and the racists, in effect, "You win. For now. But for now you also have to live with your shame. And judgment will follow, and is coming." (I have always hoped, for this reason, that Joan Baez was wrong in claiming that Dylan wrote "When The Ship Comes In"--his most Jeremiad and vengeful poem--in response to bad service at some hotel.)

"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" was based on a real event in 1963: the lethal beating of Hattie Carroll by William Zanzinger in a Baltimore hotel. Zanzinger's lenient treatment by the courts fired Dylan into a hot rage, yet producing his most glacial and most measured poem of outrage and contempt. He simply relates the story, with deadly counterpoint as between the rich and careless white man and the dispensable black servitor. The song never uses the words "black" or "white," as Ricks points out, but just: He owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres, while she emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level. Thus is the plantation relationship re-cast and, as Ricks rightly says, "it's a terrible thing that you know this [their respective colors] from the story." But then again, as Ricks also emphasizes, Dylan's affecting line And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger is a sort of clue. I have always thought that this was Dylan ventriloquizing, without condescension, the "Black English" demotic comment on the affair. Ricks improves on my intuition by giving the example of James Baldwin in The Amen Corner: "He hadn't never done nothing to nobody."

Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle

, in Dylan's haunting phrase, Zanzinger slew Hattie Carroll with a cane that he twirled around his diamond-ring finger, and who would pass up the chance to recall the first murderer, Cain, in this context? Not Ricks, who also calls attention to the words lay slain by a cane and to the triple repetition of the word "table," which closes three consecutive lines. "Does this -able" he inquires, "prepare for the word that soon follows, 'cane'? Cain and Abel, masculine and feminine endings?" Well, no, I shouldn't think so. Whatever the song is about, it most decidedly isn't about fratricide. And Cain and Abel--scarcely unique metaphors where murder is concerned--appear in other Dylan songs under their own names. Ricksian hermeneutics has its limits.I could, nonetheless, have used some more counsel from Ricks about the title. In what way was Hattie Carroll's death "lonesome"? There is an unmistakable sentimentality in this word; a tear-jerking note that is wondrously absent from the song itself. Insufficient guidance is forthcoming: Ricks proposes without much brio that Dylan "perhaps" wanted the word to evoke a contrast between Hattie's death and the crowded hotel. But with or without that "perhaps," ultimately, everybody dies alone.

Ricks's closing thought is superior. He argues that T.S. Eliot understood the difference between writing religious poetry and writing poetry religiously, and that Dylan with "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" has written politically rather than merely writing a political song. That seems to be a distinction well worth observing, most especially at a time like the present with its ephemeral garbage of pseudo-protest. ("We've suffered for our music--now it's your turn.") The finest fury is the most controlled. One still feels a generous anger when listening to the song--incidentally, William Zanzinger turned up again a few years ago in the Baltimore courts, for leasing black people squalid, waterless cabins that he didn't even own--and the pairing of generosity with anger (annexed from Orwell out of Dickens) might license some interpenetration of sin and virtue, or even sin with grace.

It's back to hermeneutics in Ricks's study of "Love Minus Zero / No Limit," which occurs in the chapter on "Temperance." As you will recall, the song begins My love she speaks like silence / Without ideals or violence, while in a succeeding verse:

In the dime stores and bus stations

People talk of situations

Read books, repeat quotations

Draw conclusions on the wall.

For Ricks, this is Belshazzar's feast in the fifth chapter of Daniel: "In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace. And this is the writing that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it."

Building upon this, Ricks insists that the biblical "candlestick" furnishes Dylan not only with his song's reference to candles and matchsticks, but the biblical word "numbered" may have a relation to the "Minus Zero" in Dylan's title. This same chapter of Daniel has the words "people," "tremble," "wise men," and "gifts"--and also "spake," "said," and "that night." What more could one want as proof of the direct influence of the prophet Daniel upon the song?

Something more, as it happens. The words of the prophets are written on the subway wall, as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were to say in "The Sounds of Silence," and it was as obvious to me the first time I heard "Love Minus Zero / No Limit" as it is today that Dylan was alluding to graffiti: a special emphasis in that time and place. If you really want to connect Babylon to Dylan, you might have better luck with "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts": The cabaret was silent--except for the drilling in the wall.

AT THE SAME TIME I was digesting all this in Dylan's Visions of Sin, I noticed that Ricks deals with an obvious contradiction in his account (the king being "reduced" to the pawn) in the following evasive manner: "'Even the pawn must hold a grudge.' Even the king? Even Dylan, whom I ungrudgingly admire?" This is ingratiation raised to the level of unction. I remember the first time that I ever felt a qualm about Dylan's claims. It was early on as well: He said that he had written "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" at the time of the Cuban missile crisis--and he had been in such an apocalyptic hurry that every line could be the first line of another song. Even in my early teens, I knew that that was bravado.

Oddly, perhaps, Ricks spends almost no time on the influences that Dylan actually does affirm or the influences that we know about. "Blowin' In the Wind" borrows from an old slave spiritual called "No More Auction Block," with its haunting words about "many thousands gone." Dylan was actually sued by Dominic Behan, brother of Brendan, for plagiarizing not only the tune but the concept of "The Patriot Game" for his "With God on Our Side." More recently, his song about a Japanese yakuza was tracked down to an obscure but identifiable source, while the deft Daniel Radosh has blogged a near-perfect match between Dylan's "Cross the Green Mountain" (written for Ron Maxwell's movie Gods and Generals) and Walt Whitman's "Come up from the Fields, Father." If I had to surmise another influence, it would be William Blake, not just for the speculative reasons given by Ricks but because, as Blake phrased it: "A Last Judgment is Necessary because Fools flourish."

Even secularists often find themselves thinking things like that, and there is a store of words in the Bible that springs ready-made, as it were. Thus, Ricks could well be correct in thinking that Dylan's "how many times" is an echo both of "How long, oh Lord, how long?" and of Christ's injunction in Matthew on the number of times that it might be needful to turn the other cheek. (He may also be right, though coming down-market more than he likes, in discerning a vague sacred/profane overlap between "I Believe in You" and "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.")

But Christianity as a religion of peace and tolerance and forgiveness is not, superficially at least, compatible with ringing phrases about judgment and the sword: In order to believe in the apparently kindly and reassuring verses about taking no thought for the morrow, one had better have a lively sense of the second coming. This was the line that Dylan actually did take in his born-again period, where he spoke of "spiritual warfare" as well as his "precious angel," and warned that there would be no hiding place on the day. But this, which produced some of his most beautiful writing (and singing) would appear to have been as lightly affected as the gritty dustbowl socialism which the Old Left was already denouncing him for abandoning as far back as 1964. Dylan dropped it and kept moving on.

Indeed, I am sure I remember Ricks welcoming him "back," as it were, when he came up with "Most of the Time" about fifteen years ago. But here, and in his discussion of this superbly apt and lovely and troubling song, I began to write heavy notes in the book's margin: "Most of the time," Ricks writes, "'Most of the Time' consists of repeating the words, 'most of the time.'" [Marginal note: Oh no it doesn't.] Unbelievably, Ricks manages to go on for a half-dozen pages about this song, without ever achieving the realization that it is one of the most vertiginous, knife-edge accounts of a post-love trauma ever penned. You should only listen to the song if you are not currently trying to persuade yourself that "it" is all over and that you are all over "it."

Ricks wraps up blandly: "It is only most of the time that the man in this long black song succeeds in being not disturbed. But he is halfways there. On the other hand, 'She's that far behind.' One too many mornings and a thousand miles behind, to be exact." [In the margin: To be inexact, you mean, you fool. She's right behind him and in front of him and all around him, all of the time. His attempted banishment of her is a hopeless failure! What have you got in your veins--tapwater?]

There follows a lengthy Ricksian contrast between the words of Dylan's song "Not Dark Yet" and Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." Not, you understand, that our author wants to be taken too seriously. "I don't believe that Keats's poem is alluded to in Dylan's song. That is, called into play, so that you'd be failing to respond to something crucial to the song unless you were familiar with, and could call up, Keats's poem." [In the margin: Oh no, of course, not that.] After all, the deep connection between Keats's My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains and Dylan's Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain is transparent neither in sense nor rhythm.

It is true that the words "dark," "shadow," and "day"--together with "sleep" and "time," or their cognates--are to be found in both sets of verses. I am quite ready to believe that Dylan had a subliminal memory of being taught the poem in school. But Renata Adler did much better than this, during the 1968 Republican convention that nominated Nixon in Miami. Surveying the sea of placards with their jaunty slogan "Now More Than Ever," she suddenly recognized that it came from verse six of the "Nightingale" ode: Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain.I think that might have afforded Dylan a smile, and possibly Ricks too. But only one of them has an attitude to sin that is in any sense original.

Another book for the wish list...and perhaps some forthcoming challenges

Ron — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:50:18 +0000

Blog and Mablog, Doug Wilson's blog, I go there about once a week or so. Thoughtful content from a Reformed perspective. Through Justin Nale's blog, Thoughts of a North Carolina Baptist, another good read of the Reformed Baptist persuasion, I find a brief review of "Is Christianity Good for the World". From what I gather, the book transcribes the debate between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson, a dialog in the context of the respective value and truthfulness of Christianity verses atheism. I will add this to my list of books that I would like to read as time allows.

This book is relevant to my interests because a couple of weeks ago or so, out of the blue, a close relative, well-read and an atheist, asks me if I would like to engage in a co-authored blog with him, a point/counter-point thing. Now, I have had discussions with non-theists before about things of faith, both face to face and on-line, debating issues of morality, of evolution, etc. I used to read 'entry level' apologetics quite a bit and have had great interest in the subject of origins for quite a while. My focus has, however, recently moved to other dimensions of the faith.

That all being said, and should the co-blog thing come to fruition, my overarching goal is to be Christ-centric and Christ exalting and to affirm the inspired, infallible, and authoritative nature of Scripture. It will be, I hope, a civil discourse and there will be no rhetorical beat-downs. If it does come to pass, I will try to keep things as condensed and as simple as possible, primarily because I am a working man with a family, and I am absolutely not a scholar; I have no huge surplus of 'spare time'.....and my Redeemer is sovereign over all this.....

A Secular Postamble

hippoglyph — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:07:59 +0000

Dear America,

You might not know it, but today, September 17th, is a holiday. On this very day, two-hundred and twenty one years ago, a document was signed that would change the world. Our constitution was to frame the future of a nation and a people no longer subject not only to the weak and divisive Articles of Confederation, but in a more distal sense to monarchies of their past, which institutionalized their religious belief and was free to legislate without consent, and to tax without representation.

The sad thing is that I think we've forgotten about our constitution. We forgot that our forefathers were the intellectual elite of their day; it was Bostonians, New Yorkers, and Virginians, educated and blasphemous, that so eloquently constructed the foundation of our democratic republic.

Yes, on the face of it they were religious, but their more private dealings and confessions reveal the great lot of them to be at least deists. Some, like Jefferson, were most probably non-believers. They needed no supernatural vindication for their belief that all people deserved government representation, and in fact made it concrete that government officials needn't pass any religious test to acqure their standing.

Americans didnt find their way when they exchanged secular politics and intellectualism for frontier justice and bible-thumping, they lost it. And so it makes me sick when the senators exclaim "We are a CHRISTIAN NATION, and will ALWAYS be a CHRISTIAN NATION"at religious congretations. It makes me sick when the vice-presidential candidate of the republican party "hopes our troops are on a mission from god". It saddened me when Mike Huckabee hoped to make the constituion more in-line with the bible, and when public schools (read: Children) were attacked by the wedge of creationism.

It's the elephant in the room folks - a great, sagging, intolerant blimp of tusks and blubber that seeks to subvert the very democratic ideals championed by our forefathers. Where is my voice on this issue? Reframed, the real question is why are liberals and moderate republicans such pussies?

A quick example should help shine light on the pussification of the secular: In 1994, an orthodox Rabbi gave genital herpes to several children in New York City. The mohel who performed the genital mutilation (a practice so euphemized as "circumcision") did so in the traditional way. After cutting around the prepuce, he sucked the lopped-off foreskin into his mouth, and then spit the saliva and blood-drenched flap out. What did the mayor do? Instead of condemning this deadly, revolting and rediculous practice, Bloombergs immediate response was to tell his beuracrats to delay the verdict on the mohel. The key, he said, was to make sure that the free practice of religion was not being impinged upon (see: Christopher Hitchens' book "God is Not Great" for various other nightmares perpetrated by the "holy").

I'm glad I have no idea how many more people in this country can recite the ten commandments than the Bill of Rights, but I'm sure the disparity is astronomical. And so, today, on this Constitution Day, I would like to invite everyone here to stand up for secular politics, and to not vote for those who wish to make laws of ancient desert superstitions. And feel free, if you do believe in this type of nonsense, to come to your senses. There never was an Ark, so stop looking (ahem, discovery channel). There never was a Jonah, and he never lived in a whale's belly. No one ever lived to be 900 years old. The earth is quite a bit older than 6000 years. Evolution is a fact - there is no real or substantive controversy. And finally, whether or not there is a god, he doesn't give a fuck about you. Just like he didn't care about the dinosaurs, or the cambrian verterbrates, or the 99% of life on earth that has gone extinct. Get over your egocentrism, because you sound silly.

WIth love,

Dan Hipp

Problema recensământului

fishingwithdarwin — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:26:59 +0000

Una din cele mai la modă critici ale Noului Testament este problema recensământului. Spun „mai la modă” pentru faptul că am citit-o în două din cele mai bine vândute cărţi de profil: „The God Delusion” a lui Richard Dawkins şi „God is not great: religion poisons everything” a lui Christopher Hitchens.

Ideea e următoarea: Biblia relatează întoarcerea în Betleem a lui Iosif cu familia (Maria şi Isus) cu ocazia unui recensământ făcut pe vremea lui Quirinus şi a lui Irod cel Mare. Există două mari probleme (zic băieţii menţionaţi mai sus): Quirinus a domnit în Siria din anul 6 al erei noastre, deci cu câţiva ani după ce se menţionează evenimentul, iar Irod a domnit până în 4 î.e.n. şi, în plus, e absurdă chemarea tuturor locuitorilor la casele lor, oriunde s-ar afla aceştia.

Ar putea părea ciudată această metodă, mai ales pentru omul modern, însă este atestată istoric. Gaius Vibius Maximus, prefect al Egiptului spune: „Văzând că a venit vremea pentru recensământul din casă în casă, este necesar să-i obligăm pe toţi cei ce din diferite motive locuiesc în afara provinciei lor să se întoarcă la propriile lor case, pentru a îndeplini procedura obişnuită de recensământ, dar şi pentru a-şi cultiva cu hărnicie pământurile”. Notaţi expresia „procedură obişnuită” ce atestă că, deşi pare greu de crezut, această practică era una destul de frecventă în lumea antică.

Mai rămâne de rezolvat problema discrepanţei de 10 ani între domniile lui Quirinus şi ale lui Irod. Datele guvernărilor celor doi nu sunt contestate de către niciun istoric. Deci există doar un singur mod de a rezolva dilema, lucru ce de fapt s-a şi întâmplat: este vorba despre doi Quirinuşi. Arheologul Jerry Vardaman a găsit o monedă pe care se află numele Quirinus, şi care îl plasează pe acesta proconsul al Siriei şi Ciliciei din anul 11 î.e.n. până după moartea lui Irod. La aproape aceeaşi concluzie a ajuns şi Sir William Ramsay, arheolog şi profesor la Oxford şi Cambridge doar că acesta, pe baza diferitelor inscripţii, a concluzionat că a existat un singur Quirinus, dar că a domnit în Siria de două ori: prima dată, până după moartea lui Irod şi a doua oară din anul 6 al erei noastre.

Oricăţi Quirinuşi or fi fost, important e că cel puţin unul a domnit în vremea când s-a făcut recensământul şi asta nu mai reprezintă vreo problemă pentru relatarea biblică. Q.E.D.

Essay: Godless

disaphorism — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:08:47 +0000

Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, writes a long essay in the New York Review of Books including a history of religious and scientific debate, criticisms of religion, and how life is without belief in God.

The first source of tension arises from the fact that religion originally gained much of its strength from the observation of mysterious phenomena—thunder, earthquakes, disease—that seemed to require the intervention of some divine being. There was a nymph in every brook, and a dryad in every tree. But as time passed more and more of these mysteries have been explained in purely natural ways. Explaining this or that about the natural world does not of course rule out religious belief. But if people believe in God because no other explanation seems possible for a whole host of mysteries, and then over the years these mysteries were one by one resolved naturalistically, then a certain weakening of belief can be expected. It is no accident that the advent of widespread atheism and agnosticism among the educated in the eighteenth century followed hard upon the birth of modern science in the previous century.

...

Of course, not everything has been explained, nor will it ever be. The important thing is that we have not observed anything that seems to require supernatural intervention for its explanation. There are some today who cling to the remaining gaps in our understanding (such as our ignorance about the origin of life) as evidence for God. But as time passes and more and more of these gaps are filled in, their position gives an impression of people desperately holding on to outmoded opinions.

...

Note that I refer here to behavior, not consciousness. Something purely subjective, like how we feel when we see the color red or discover a physical theory, seems so different from the objective world described by science that it is difficult to see how they can ever come together.

...

There is a fourth source of tension between science and religion that may be the most important of all. Traditional religions generally rely on authority, whether the authority is an infallible leader, such as a prophet or a pope or an imam, or a body of sacred writings, a Bible or a Koran.

...

The various uses of religion may keep it going for a few centuries even after the disappearance of belief in anything supernatural, but I wonder how long religion can last without a core of belief in the supernatural, when it isn't about anything external to human beings. To compare great things with small, people may go to college football games mostly because they enjoy the cheerleading and marching bands, but I doubt if they would keep going to the stadium on Saturday afternoons if the only things happening there were cheerleading and marching bands, without any actual football, so that the cheerleading and the band music were no longer about anything.

...

Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

A Response By One of Us:

I don't believe I am as adversarial towards religion as Weinberg is, though he merely states his allegiance with Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al., instead of bringing down the God-smiter. I think, and perhaps I could convince Weinberg of this were I to possess the social capital to talk frankly with him, that religion for most people is an apt surrogate for what he calls living on the knife-edge. To live on the knife-edge sort of assumes that your rational faculties are developed enough that you can deftly navigate difficult information. Most people are given to extreme thinking, what I call "race to the status quo", and the poor application of logic, and I think you might have a whole lot of civil unrest and outright chaos if say, the state abolished religion and mandated the pure application of reason.

That sounds condescending. Let me amend that by saying that intelligent people, in full strength of their logical capacities, can find benefit in religion as well. I think that humans are inclined towards spirituality and there is benefit to be gained from such indulgence (Roman Catholic pun intended). I don't think spirituality is good or bad in and of itself, but rather that it is simply another experience to have that people tend to enjoy. When I go into a church, I feel spiritual, in the Freudian oceanic sense and also buying into the solemnity of the structure, the ceremonial quality of the pretty gold fixtures, marble columns and statutes.

I have thought quite a bit apart from Weinberg on his right consideration that "we are going to lose something with the decline of religious belief. Much great art has arisen in the past from religious inspiration." It is my belief that one of the benefits of irrational, creative output is that it has great capacity to inspire. Tupac Shakur's quote has been cited by this website before, but it is worth repeating: "I'm not saying I'm gonna change the world, but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will change the world." See Wikiquote, Attributed, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur. I also think that logic has a significant shortcoming in that, while deadly in an oversight role, is often a blunt tool applied to the formation of new ideas because new ideas by their nature lie outside of contemplated data points. As James Wood surgically put it to Keith Gessen, "The Editors had unwittingly proved the gravamen of their own critique: that it is easier to criticize than to propose." Wood, James (2005). "A Reply to the Editors". 'n+1' 1 (3): 129. (As you may note, Wood's criticism can just as easily be applied to the methods of analysis on this website.)

I think religious belief can be cast as a manifestation of human creativity--a novel way of making sense of the world's physical movements, of lending a teleology to human affairs. I also think that Weinberg could have extended this to all kinds of creativity, whether it be art, literature, music, whatever. Because at the end of the path of discovery, as Weinberg himself notes, we may not find any reason for existence at all, and the danger there is to slide into nihilism. All the logic in the world does not appear to answer the basic question of human existence. We may become harder, better, faster, stronger, but to what end?

The answer when there is no answer, it appears to me, that the arbitrary things we create, the practices we have, the friendships and romances and bonds with create with other humans, all in order to have fun and enjoyment out of life is what makes this whole human experiment worthwhile. So, perhaps paradoxically, in the end the arts and humanities do matter, they perhaps are more important than all of this empirical stuff. Because the empirical stuff seems to strongly led to a deeply discomforting answer: that there's no reason behind it all. So why not try to have as many good experiences as possible, what Weinberg calls "the pleasures of the flesh"?

IS BARACK OBAMA CORRECT REGARDING THE WAR ON TERROR???

T. Haines — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:57:14 +0000

Christopher Hitchens has written an excellent piece in SLATE regarding the U.S. Presidential candidates and their perceptions/opinions on where the real battles must take place in the war on terror and what, precisely, needs to be done in order to successfully battle the terrorists and their intentions.

In this particular writing, Hitchens singles out Barack Obama as being the only candidate who recognizes the role that Pakistan is actually playing in the fight against the Taliban and other elements of terror.

I can't say that I entirely agree with Mr. Hitchens on his foreign policy positions, but I do, however, thoroughly enjoy reading his opinions and analysis regarding politics, current events and well, just about anything.

Christopher Hitchens is a very bright man and the current administration, as well as the contenders for President of the United States of America, would do well to at least read and try to understand his logic and points of thought.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH A VIDEO OF HITCHENS TALKING ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES HILLARY CLINTON AND BARACK OBAMA DURING THEIR SPRING PRIMARIES, AS WELL AS THE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE JOHN MCCAIN...

Reading in retirement

Ken — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:00:51 +0000

Scientific research is a very creative and personally satisfying process. However, researchers often find that the inevitable specialisation and concentration on limited aspects of reality can lead to a lack of understanding and appreciation of discoveries in other fields.

Since retirement I've appreciated the opportunity to read more widely. I find myself returning to subjects I haven't considered for decades, or have neglected. I'm learning about the amazing discoveries humanity has made (behind my back) in the meantime.

I was encouraged to check out, and summarise, what I have been reading by the reading lists blogged by Damian and others. The number of books I have got through (in four years) shocked me - perhaps I'm a bit obsessive, or maybe its just the freedom retirement has given me.

I can recommend most books on the list - but definitely not every one (guess which).

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Infidel
Peter Atkins: Galileo's Finger
Michael J. Behe: Darwin's Black Box
Sharon Begley: Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain
Sandra Blakeslee, Matthew Blakeslee: The Body Has a Mind of Its Own
Pascal Boyer: Religion Explained
John Brockman (Ed): What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
Christopher Brookmyre: Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks
Hamish Campbell, Gerald Hutching: In Search of Ancient New Zealand
Sean B. Carroll: Endless Forms Most Beautiful
Austin Dacey: The Secular Conscience
Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species
Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man
Paul Davies: The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World
Richard Dawkins: A Devil's Chaplain
Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow
Richard Dawkins: The Ancestor's Tale
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition
Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion
Daniel C. Dennett: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Daniel C. Dennett: Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond: Collapse
Norman Doidge: The Brain That Changes Itself
Helen Ellerbe: The Dark Side of Christian History
Barbara Forrest, Paul R. Gross: Creationism's Trojan Horse
Steve Fuller: Kuhn Vs.Popper
Daniel Goleman: Destructive Emotions
Ursula Goodenough: The Sacred Depths of Nature
Malcolm Gladwell: Blink
Stephen Jay Gould: Rocks of Ages
Alan Grafen, Mark Ridley: Richard Dawkins
Brian Greene: The Fabric of the Cosmos
Nancy Thorndike Greenspan: The End of the Certain World
John Gribbin: The Fellowship
Nicky Hager: The Hollow Men
Sam Harris: Letter to a Christian Nation
Sam Harris: The End of Faith
Christopher Hitchens: God Is Not Great
Edward Humes: Monkey Girl
Max Jammer: Einstein and Religion
Eric R. Kandel: In Search of Memory
David J. Linden: The Accidental Mind
Irshad Manji: The Trouble with Islam Today
Ernst Mayr: What Evolution Is
Kenneth R. Miller: Only a Theory
Andrew Newberg, Mark Robert Waldman: Born to Believe
Christop Norris: Quantum Theory and the Flight From Realism
Michel Onfray: Atheist Manifesto
Andrew J. Petto, Laurie R. Godfrey: Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism
Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Sheldon Rampton, John Stauber: Weapons of Mass Deception
Martin Rees: Before The Beginning
Matt Ridley: Nature Via Nurture
Matt Ridley: Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code
Matt Ridley: Genome
Oliver Sacks: Uncle Tungsten
Carl Sagan: The Varieties of Scientific Experience
Sahotra Sarkar: Doubting Darwin
Michael Shermer: The Science of Good and Evil
Michael Shermer: How We Believe
Michael Shermer: Why People Believe Weird Things
Lee Smolin: The Trouble With Physics
Dava Sobel: Longitude
Victor J. Stenger: God: The Failed Hypothesis
Kim Sterelny: Dawkins vs Gould: Survival of the Fittest
Ian Tattersall: The Fossil Trail
Chris Turney: Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution
Max Wallace:The Purple Economy
Peter Ward, Donald Brownlee: The Life and Death of Planet Earth
Peter Ward: Life as We Do Not Know It
James D. Watson: DNA: The Secret of Life
Spencer Wells: Deep Ancestry: Inside The Genographic Project
David Sloan Wilson: Darwin's Cathedral
Edward O. Wilson: The Creation
Edward O. Wilson: Consilience
Peter Woit: Not Even Wrong
Lewis Wolpert: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Phillip Zimbardo: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
Carl Zimmer: At the Water's Edge
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Christopher Hitchens on Palin

homoeconomicusnet — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:54:20 +0000

Reposted from Slate:

The Best Woman?Don't patronize Sarah Palin.

By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Monday, Sept. 8, 2008, at 12:11 PM ET

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="288" caption="From this blogger's view, she helps McCain"][/caption]

In The Best Man, the only useful or amusing film—or play—ever to have been set at an American political convention, Gore Vidal presents us with Joe and Mabel Cantwell (Cliff Robertson and Edie Adams in the 1964 movie version), who are a right-wing "family values" couple with a large and grisly brood. The two have the appalling habit of referring to each other as "Papa Bear" and "Mama Bear," and when it seems that Cantwell has the goods on his rival, William Russell, and is sure of the nomination, Mabel exclaims horridly that this means that "Papa Bear and Mama Bear and all of the baby bears are on their way to the White House." Can American cinema boast of a creepier moment? So tense was the casting of the movie that Ronald Reagan was apparently passed over for the role of President Art Hockstader—eventually played by Lee Tracy—on the grounds that he was insufficiently "presidential." In the event, Cantwell's crude attempt to paint his rival as mentally unstable is checked by the counterallegation that during the war he had indulged in gay sex on a military base—in Alaska, as it happens.

Vidal's Cantwell family was a nightmarish cross between the Nixon and McCarthy strains. I partly sympathize with all those who have been trying for a week to paint the former Miss Wasilla as a candidate from (fairly nearby, in Anchorage terms) Manchuria. However, as often as I have forwarded some alarming e-mail about her from a beavering comrade, I have afterward found myself having the sensation of putting my foot where the last stair ought to have been and wasn't. Was she in the Alaska Independence Party? Not really. Did she campaign for Pat Buchanan in 2000? The AP report from 1999 appears to be contradicted by her endorsement of Steve Forbes. (Not great, I agree, but not Buchanan, either.) The most appalling thing I have unearthed so far is the answer that she gave to a questionnaire when she ran for governor in 2006. All candidates were asked "Are you offended by the phrase 'Under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?" Her response was:

Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers [it's] good enough for me, and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.

The very slight problem with this—because it would truly be awful if Gov. Palin didn't know that the pledge itself dates from only the late 19^th century and that the unwonted insertion of the words "under God" was made in the mid-1950s—is that it is somehow funny. And it's also the sort of mistake that many people can imagine themselves making and thus forgive someone else for making.

I could well be wrong, but I think something similar is involved in the attempt to paint the Palin family as if it were Arkansas on ice or Tobacco Road with igloos and Inuit. Very well, she possibly has had her Troopergate and even trailer-park moments. But whom exactly did the Democrats drown in moist applause, for two nights running, in Denver? The most dysfunctional family ever to occupy not the vice-presidential mansion but the executive one. It's hard to imagine that there will be any more unwanted pregnancies or shotgun weddings when or if the Palins move to the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue, whereas with the Clintons, the very thing that made all Bill's friends turn white and pee green was that they made him the president, and he still wouldn't stop. For me, it is astonishing that the Democrats have been babbling all week as if this point isn't just waiting—indeed begging—to be made in riposte to their "opposition research."

Walter Dean Burnham, one of the country's pre-eminent Marxists, used to attract ridicule back in the 1960s and '70s by saying that Ronald Reagan would one day be president. He based this on various calculations, one of which was what I'll call the attraction-repulsion factor. Previous candidates of the right, from McCarthy to Nixon, indeed, had expressed powerful dislike and resentment of their foes. That can work, up to a point, but the problem is that if you radiate hostility, you also tend to attract it. Reagan didn't radiate it and also didn't attract it. He went on, in a genial enough way, to destroy the Democratic "New Deal" coalition. I don't think Gov. Palin has quite that sort of folksy charisma, but I am still not sure it's entirely wise to patronize her.

Interviewed by Rick Warren at the grotesque Saddleback megachurch a short while ago, Sen. Barack Obama announced that Jesus had died on the cross to redeem him personally. How he knew this he did not say. But it will make it exceedingly difficult for him, or his outriders and apologists, to ridicule Palin for her own ludicrous biblical literalist beliefs. She has inarticulately said that her gubernatorial work would be hampered "if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with god." Her local shout-and-holler tabernacle apparently believes that Jews can be converted to Jesus and homosexuals can be "cured." I cannot wait to see Obama and Biden explain how this isn't the case or how it's much worse than, and quite different from, Obama's own raving and ranting pastor in Chicago or Biden's lifelong allegiance to the most anti-"choice" church on the planet. The difference, if there is one, is that Palin is probably sincere whereas the Democratic team is almost certainly hypocritical. The same is true of the boring contest over who can be the most populist, and of the positively sinister race to see who can be the most demagogically anti-Washington. With this kind of immaturity right across both tickets, it's insulting to be asked to decide on the basis of experience, let alone "readiness."

OTHER BLOGS:

Sam Harris on Palin

Sarah Palin and the Witchdoctor

A letter from Wasilla about Sarah Palin

5,000 Visitors and Counting...

Look2theWest — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 11:15:23 +0000

Recently my main blog, Look2theWest, the Audacity of Reason, passed 5,000 visitors.

Not much compared to Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter or Christopher Hitchens but I'm grateful so many have visited my site and read my writing.

I'm an IT project manager who helps lead software development teams. I had to take some time off from work recently and took up the habit of putting my thoughts down in writing and sharing them over the Web.

I would be honored to serve my country someday in the public policy area - writing, legislating or campaigning. I'm too old (44) to join the U.S. Marines, like my Uncle who fought in Korea, so I will fight the War of Ideas in a suit instead of fatigues.

I chose the name Look2theWest because:

"There's a feeling I get
When I look to the west
and my spirit is crying for leaving"

It's a lyric from Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven that captures the way the west has inspired millions to migrate here and billions to demand freedom and justice in their own lands.

The Audacity of Reason is a nod to the excellent philosophy of Ayn Rand and an easy counter to Obama's purposely ambiguous euphemism the "Audacity of Hope".

Many say the country's on the wrong track but I find that many things about modern America are truly remarkable.

One of them is the dramatic rise in home-grown blogging. Could our fathers and mothers, let alone our forefathers and mothers, have predicted that someday the average person can sit down at their desk, write down their thoughts and then share them with thousands of others in an instant?

I've never had to convince some liberal publisher that my conservative viewpoint would be popular. I just put my writing out there and people decided for themselves if it was good or not.

You did not have to rely on some elitist screener to determine - for you- what's worth reading or not.

Likewise, I can go online, read what other Americans are thinking and even give them feedback. Sometimes the feedback sparks a discussion between two strangers about important issues. That's remarkable to me, and fun.

Thanks again for your interest in Look2theWest, the Audacity of Reason.