Cross and Culture

One Christian’s perspective on the day’s news and commentary:

1.  Last night I interviewed Jeremy Lin, a basketball phenom at Harvard (yes, that’s right) who is a legitimate contender to be first-round draft pick for the NBA.  He’s also a devout believer.  I’ll post the interview next week.  For now, here’s the best article written on Jeremy (so far).

Also, in the meantime, check out my interview of Amanda Borden, captain of the “Magnificent 7″ team that won the gold in Atlanta 1996.

2.  The Huffington Post has decided to tackle religion with a new section.  Here is the editor of the new feature, in his introductory piece.  Frankly, I’m not inspired.  It’s the usual railing against “the religious right” as having coopted religious discourse in America (if the religious left was not speaking up, whose fault is that? and the religious right is not nearly the monolith it used to be, if it ever was).  And it’s the usual “religion is important” and a politically correct refusal to be critical of anyone except conservative Christians.

I looked over a few of Raushenbush’s past articles, like “Go to Hell, Pat Robertson.”  While I’m hardly inclined to defend Pat Robertson, passages like this are neither fair nor inspiring:

“Go to Hell, Pat Robertson — and the sooner the better. Your ‘theological’ nonsense is revolting. Don’t speak for Haiti, and don’t speak for God. Haiti is suffering a catastrophe and you offer silliness at best, and racism at the worst. Haiti was the first island in the Western hemisphere to overthrow slavery and white oppression — this is what you call a pact with the Devil?”

For a more informed take, see this article from The Immanent Frame.

Also amusing is Raushenbush’s take on Obama’s recent struggles.  Why has Obama been struggling?  Because he’s been too nice.  It’s time to “take the gloves off.”  If the sheer adulation in the article were not embarrassing enough, there is the absurd notion that getting tougher with his political opponents is really going to help.  Getting tougher with the enemies of America, on the other hand, might actually be helpful.

3.  Sad to say, but I think Frank Shaeffer has really lost it.

4.  Thank goodness.

5.  An electric night of figure skating.  Epic.  Beautiful.  It’s just too bad there were no Americans in the top 3, but it was a pleasure to see all of the top skaters skate to their potential.

6.  Americans want to know that their government is open for them to watch — but they don’t actually want to watch.  And it’s no wonder.  Yesterday’s political theater, an alleged attempt to forge a more bipartisan path on health care reform, was entertaining only for the most extreme of political junkies.  Obama presided over the meeting with his usual combination of intelligence, thoughtfulness, and condescension, and with his usual blindness to the ways in which he is guilty precisely of what he condemns his opponents.  He condemned Eric Cantor for the “political stunt” of bringing the entire 2000-page plus health care bill to the table; he condemned John McCain for still campaigning, when McCain spoke to his failure to deliver on campaign promises against secrecy and backroom dealing; and he scolded Republicans generally for failing to compromise, when he never moved an inch from his own starting line.

I think the President and his camp should be pleased that so few people watched.  He came across fairly well in his meeting with Congressional Republicans two weeks ago, but less well here.

7.  This touches on the topic of different constituencies and their different impressions of a politician and how well he or she has performed.  I’ve been meaning to say something about this.  Picture candidate C, who belonged to party X and is speaking to politicians from party Y.  Other people who belong to part X have been longing for candidate C to make their best arguments over against the politicians from party Y.  If he does so, they are pleased — and they think that he has been devastatingly effective, and anyone who watches will be persuaded.  This happened with Obama spoke to Congressional Republicans.  Liberal blogs were ablaze with reports on how well he did, how convincing he was, how foolish the Republicans looked.  Yet when conservatives watched the video, they did not think Obama was all that persuasive, because they are conscious of all the problems with what Obama was saying.  And, to be clear, the situation would have been exactly reversed if the parties were reversed.

Liberals were convinced by Obama’s arguments because they belonged to party X because they find those arguments persuasive. Many, also, because they do not read the commentary from Party Y, are not aware that Party Y has perfectly fine responses to or criticisms of those arguments.  Thus, people who belong to Party Y, when they watch the proceedings, do not find candidate C nearly so persuasive.  They are not yet convinced by those sorts of arguments (if they were, they would belong to the other party) and they are aware of all the ripostes, all the criticisms, all the exceptions that candidate C is not mentioning.

I remember observing this during the 2008 campaign.  Liberals came away believing their candidate had marshaled the better arguments, and conservatives came away believing their candidate had.  Liberals would greet Obama’s comments with “that’s right” and McCain’s comments with “but here’s the problem.”  Conservatives would greet McCain’s comments with “that’s right” (at least, when McCain made a conservative point) and Obama’s comments with “but here’s the problem.”  Each side is armed with the arguments and counter-arguments for one side of the debate.  Since they are not familiar with all the shortcomings of their own arguments, or all the counter-arguments the other side might make, they believing their candidate has made a compelling case.

8.  Obama’s approval rating is down to 44%.  I have a question for my liberal friends: do you think that his support has slid so far just because of a hyper-critical, misleading media machine?  If so, do you accept that Bush’s support may also have been driven down by a hyper-critical, misleading media machine?

And I have a question for my conservative friends.  Do you still think that the mainstream media bends over backwards to help Obama?  If so, it apparently hasn’t been of much help lately.

9.  An interesting ranking of the most liberal, most conservative, and most centrist Senators and Republicans.  It’s a little tough to judge the center, since, if you simply take the numerical center (as the ranking does), well, the house is not evenly divided between Democrats and Conservatives.  I would be more interested to see who were ranked the most conservative Democrats and the most liberal Republicans.

10.  Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief right now, as Governor David Paterson pulls the plug in his reelection bid.  Paterson’s career was already tottering, and the recent New York Times article may have cleared the way for a far more effective candidate, the candidate all the Democrats really want — Andrew Cuomo — to run instead.  This is a boon for the Democratic party.

11.  On another comic note, the headline says it all, “Boozy Ape Heads to Rehab.”  And the picture says it even better:

12.  Today’s Two Sides.  Two views on education.  Arne Duncan, the education secretary (and, for my money, a reasonably good one).  And John Stossel of Fox Business, talking about the problem of impossible-to-fire teachers.

Here is an interesting story of a woman on her way to have an abortion, who encountered a pro-life protester.  She put a knife to the protester’s throat, and was arrested and confessed to second-degree assault.  What makes the story interesting, though, is that the woman never got the abortion, and now thanks the pro-life protester for her intervention.

Worth reading.

I apologize for missing the Morning Report last Friday.  I was called, unexpectedly, to a conference down in NYC.  Without further ado, then, one Christian’s perspective on the day’s news and commentary:

1.  TIGER GAUTAMA WOODS.  Last Friday, Tiger Woods offered a public apology for the behavior that took his family to the brink of ruin, that drove away hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising money, and that earned opprobrium from around the world.  None of this is surprising.  What was surprising, at least slightly: Tiger spent a lot of time talking about his upbringing in Buddhism, his straying from it in recent years, and his intention to return to it now for moral guidance.

Tiger has never been particularly open about himself in general, and certainly never about his faith.  I must admit that he is my dream interview when it comes to our series on faith and sports.  I realize I have virtually no shot at it, even though he knows me and we lived across the hall from one another our freshman year at Stanford.  But who knows?  I would love to talk with him about the effect of his faith on his life and his pursuits in sports, about how he believes Buddhism will help him return to the straight and narrow, and what he thought of Brit Hume’s admonition (if he heard it) that Tiger should turn to a faith that is (and Brit was correct about this, as impolitic as it is to say) more about forgiveness and redemption than Buddhism is.

So Tiger, if you’re listening, give me a call.

2.  GEORGE AND THE JEWS.  Today is the anniversary of George Washington’s birthday, and it’s well to remember the remarkable exchange between Washington and a Jewish congregation, an exchange that points to the quality of the man and to the great good of religious toleration.

3.  CHRISTIANITY AND SCIENCE.  I love this article we posted on the longstanding “conflict” thesis between Christianity and Science.  The notion that Christianity and Science are locked in essential conflict is an enduring one, but it is based on bad history and biased historians.  James Hannam does an excellent job of puncturing some of the myths.

4.  OBAMACARE FINALLY REAL.  Today the Obama White House put forward its own health care proposal.  Obama has long been criticized for leaving the sausage-making up to the Congress, which seems to take the messiness of sausage making to entirely new levels.  If you believe John Boehner, however, the plan is even more extreme than the Congressional plans.

Obama’s new plan eliminates the “Cornhusker Kickback” but retains the “Louisiana Purchase.”  No word yet on the fate of the Rhode Island Revenue Stream or the California Cash Register.

Congressional Democrats threaten to use the reconciliation process if Republicans don’t get on board.  All of this should be understood as the assumption of battle positions.  The Democrats are adopting the position from which they want to begin their negotiations, and they’re starting as far away from the Republicans as possible.  What concerns me is not adopting a bargaining position.  What concerns me is how far back they’ve put themselves.  It raises questions of whether they really intend for their to be any bipartisanship, and whether instead they are merely making a show of the whole thing, providing some sort of narratival justification for their abandonment of bipartisanship and ramming the legislation through by any means necessary.

Time will tell.

5.  BENNETT V. BECK, READY TO RUMBLE.  Bill Bennett and Glenn Beck have a kerfuffle over whether the Republican party is as rudderless and idea-less as Beck claims it is.  I think Bennett makes a good case that Beck is just perpetuating a media misperception here.  Many in the Republican party have foresworn the big-government ways of the Bush administration and called for the restoration of fiscal sanity.  Point goes to Bennett.  Which is not surprising in the slightest.

6.  GUESS THE ADMINISTRATION.  Here are some comments about a Justice Department; you tell me which Justice Department, that if George Bush or that of Barack Obama: this Justice Department “is illustrative of the White House in other ways: the hyper-partisanship, the disregard for facts and careful analysis, the tendency to ignore critics and blindly follow a predetermined course of action, and the need to make an embarrassing about-face when it all comes crumbling down.”

The quotation, in fact, is from Jennifer Rubin at Contentions, and it refers to the Obama/Holder Justice Department.  As I was reading it, however, I couldn’t help but note that this is precisely what liberals said of the Bush Justice Department.  This is not to say that one side cannot be more justified than the other in making these claims.  But it does point to the extraordinary polarization of our political environment.  Each side believes the other ignores “the facts” because they cannot even agree on what “the facts” are, and each side finds the other hyper-partisan because they have skewed measurements of where “the center” is found.  Each side finds the other arrogant, because they believe it arrogant when the other side “ignores” (though they actually disagree with) their own ideas.

I get a similar impression when I read the Obami and their fans complaining that the press has focused unduly on the negatives, and not spent enough time talking about the achievements of the administration.  Do they think that the press was any more fair to the other side?  Do they not think it true that the press magnified the negatives and overlooked the positives of the Bush administration?  If they cannot recognize this, they are not dealing with reality.

7.  OBAMA PRESS-SHY?  The Washington Times laments that Obama has gone 215 days without a true press conference, going beyond the record of President Bush, who once went 214 days between pressers.  Is this a legitimate concern?  Yes and no.  To complain about formal press conference strikes me as somewhat artificial, since Obama has been anything but out of the limelight.  In fact, in my view and the view of many, he has been dramatically over-exposed.  The question is rather of the means through which Obama chooses to communicate to the American people — and the relative advantages of the different media available to him.  As one reporter says in the article, it’s about control.  The formal press conference is an uncontrolled setting, and it was in the last press conference that Obama made the comment that the Cambridge police department had acted “stupidly” in taking Henry Louis Gates into custody.  (The Times calls this a “disastrous” mistake, and I would have to agree.  It undermined what had been the American public’s confidence that Obama would not take knee-jerk positions in racial politics.  It began a fall from public favor that has continued to this day.)

8.  HALL OF JUSTICE.  The Department of Justice, after a lot of bluster and noise, found no misconduct by Bybee and Yoo, the authors of the famed “torture memos,” or the legal memos in which they explored (as they were asked to do) how far interrogators could go without crossing the legal line of torture.  I think this is correct.  The lawyers, over a course of a few days, in a pressure-packed post-9/11 environment, were asked to establish the boundary line between interrogation and torture when it comes to illegal combatants who were not signatories to the Geneva Convention.  If they gave leeway, whenever possible, to interrogators, it’s because they were asked, essentially, “How much is permissible?”

The most extreme method, waterboarding, was employed on only 3 of the worst terrorists, and its use was discontinued by the Bush administration shortly thereafter.  While I cannot condone torture, as a Christian, there is no bright line between torture and aggressive interrogation, and aggressive interrogation may well be needed in some circumstances.  That intelligent and well-meaning people find the line at different places is to be expected, not criminalized.

Some, however, will not be deterred.  The Judiciary committee chairman, Democratic Senator Pat Leahy, says that he plans to hold a hearing on the issue because he was “deeply offended” by the legal memos.  Although Bybee and Yoo escape the worst censure, they are still censured for faulty and incomplete analysis.  Michael Mukasey co-authored a defense of Bybee and Yoo on this score, and the defense is pretty persuasive.

9.  GREEN MOVEMENT: IN MEMORIUM.  Finally, is the Green movement dead?  So some say, at least in reference to the Green movement’s current iteration.  The movement as we have known it is dead, and sooner or later a new movement will rise from the ashes, but it must confront some terrible realities first:

“The climate change movement now needs to regroup, and at some point it will have to confront a central, unpalatable fact: the wounds from which it is bleeding so profusely are mostly its own fault.  This phase of the climate change movement was immature, unrealistic and naive.  It was poorly organized and foolishly led.  It adopted an unrealistic and unreachable political goal, and sought to stampede world opinion through misleading and exaggerated statements.”

Was it always unrealistic to suppose that all the major nations in the world, given their competing political and economic interests, could come to some sort of grand bargain to limit the use of the world’s most important fuel?  Was the Bush approach of more targeted bilateral and regional treaties actually more realistic and more productive?  Perish the thought.

Walter Russell Mead calls for a house-cleaning:

“The service the movement now needs (but likely won’t get) from its close friends in the mainstream media is a harsh and unsparing review of exactly who screwed up and why.  What dodo-brained foundation executives streamed money to groups committed to a suicidally unrealistic political strategy?  Have they been fired yet?  Why not?  Who were the ignorant, self-righteous ‘leaders’ who shouted down anybody with doubts about this disastrous course?  Why haven’t they resigned yet?  When will they?  Whose brainchild was the brilliant idea that the IPCC didn’t need a full time chair?  What hare-brained funders failed to provide Phil Jones and the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia with enough clerical help to comply with the freedom of information act?  And why was there no one available to counsel Jones when, apparently, he realized that some of the requests couldn’t be satisfied because key data was lost?  How did the climate of carelessness at the IPCC develop — and why were warning voices from inside the movement ignored in the rush to get all the alarming but unverified predictions into print?”

Why is it so important to hold the leaders accountable for the failure of the movement?  Because “Failure to deal sternly and coldly with those who made these errors will leave the same incompetents in charge for the next stage of the movement.”  And whom does Mr Mead himself blame?

“Frankly, I blame Al Gore. I think Al Gore failed the climate change movement and that his negligence and blindness has done it irreparable harm.  If the skeptics are right and the world isn’t warming — or if natural causes are responsible for climate change –  it doesn’t matter much.  But if Al Gore and the climate change people are even half right about what is happening to our world, the cost of Mr. Gore’s failures are incalculably great. He was the one world leader who had the standing inside the climate change movement to lead it onto a more sustainable path and, as far as we can tell from the facts now before us, he didn’t really try.”

And if you think Mead is alone in turning his anger against Al Gore, take a look at the comments.

10.  TODAY’S TWO-SIDES.  Is the Tea Party movement a fraud?  Glen Greenwald argues in the affirmative.  Bill Frezza says the real frauds are those who make Tea Partiers into the bogeyman.

11.  COLUMN OF THE DAY.  Robert Samuelson on the economic turmoil in Greece and what it means for the future of western welfare states.

1.  IN THE TRENCHES IN HAITI.  Conducted an interview today with Kent Annan of Haiti Partners, a great ministry that is well worth your support.  Look for that interview to go live tomorrow.

2.  THE AMAZING VANISHING CHURCH.  Al Mohler offers a lesson in “Vanishing Christianity.”

3.  CELEBRITIES ON FAITH.  What happens when celebrities theologize.  From Rev Dr. Anne Hathway.

4.  YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK.  A sobering, sobering look at the waste, inefficiency and sluggishness of federal bureaucracy.  And another example.  It’s hard to have much comfort in the notion of the government taking over anything right now.

5.  AN EXERCISE IN INTERPRETATION.  This graph is making the round, showing the rate of job losses more or less reaching it peak around the time Obama was elected and came to power, and going down afterward.  How to interpret the graph is a matter of some contention.  As I said a long time ago, three things were inevitable, or nearly so: (1) sooner or later, the economy would begin to recover; whenever it recovered, whether or not they helped or hindered, (2) the Obama camp would take credit for it; and (3) Republicans would claim that the Obama policies really did not help the recovery, but may in fact have slowed it and put us in bad shape for the long run.  Not that it took much insight to foresee these things, but they’re all coming true.

As I recall it, we were no longer staring into the abyss by the time that Obama came to power.  We were still hemorrhaging jobs, but no one expected that to last for long, at least not at that rate.  The financial system was no longer at risk of utter collapse.  The TARP money here, and similar efforts oversees, had stopped the most precipitous drops and volatility in the world market.  And the rate of job losses began to decline around January and February, but that is far before any of Obama’s policies were actually implemented.  They had more to do with businesses seeing that the economy was not going to fall completely over the cliff, so they stopped shedding jobs at the same rate.  If Obama deserves credit for that — and to some extent I think he does — then it’s merely for carrying on the TARP policies that Bush had begun.  Both parties actually did a decent job, in the midst of the worst of the crisis, putting money at the center of the financial system and stopping the downward spiral.

So the question is: given that the economy will probably recover sooner or later — even if there is a bit of a double dip — to what extent have the policies actually implemented by the Obama administration helped or hindered that recovery?  Could the recovery have happened quicker with other policies?  Or cheaper?  Even if it is true that throwing mountains of money out as stimulus (now estimated around $860B, not the $787B originally forecast) has helped, was it a terrifically inefficient way of helping?  Or was it our only choice?  What do you think?

6.  ALARMING NUMBERS.   Jobless claims, inflation jump, while the country faces an “alarming” rate of homelessness.  Not a coincidence: 52% of respondents to a recent CNN poll said that Obama should not receive a second term, and Republicans now have a 9% lead in the Generic Congressional Ballot, whereas Democrats had a 7% lead before the 2008 election.  Quite a shift.

7.  MEDIA ON FAITH.  What happens when reporters try to talk about religion.

8.  TEA PARTY EFFUSIONS.  Some information here on the demographics of the Tea Party movement.  If you want to indulge in an exercise in shoddy demography and statistics, you can spin this, as the article does, to say that Tea Partiers (to avoid the gross epithet that one finds so often in skeptical circles) are “overwhelmingly” white, male and conservative.  The “overwhelming” percentage who are male turns out to be only 60%, however, which is not that different for the number of conservatives in general.  Also, although the percentage is 80% white, that’s only 9% higher than the general population of respondents.  The difference comes almost entirely from African-Americans, since the percentage of Hispanic Tea Partiers was statistically the same as the percentage of Hispanics in general.  In any case, this is only relevant if you assume that a movement that is 80% white is racist by definition or implication.

Some will point to the higher average incomes among Tea Parties, but the number is about right given that we’re mostly talking about conservative whites, who tend to have a higher income.

The only number I find surprising is that only 44% of Tea Partiers identify as Republicans.  Over 50% identify as Independents.

9.  PEACOCKS ON ICE.  Been watching the figure skating at the Olympics?  Me too.  Cringing at some of the outfits?  Me too.  Until I saw this humorous take on the fabulously ugly outfits so many in the figure skating (and ballroom dancing) world seem to wear.

10.  TODAY’S TWO SIDES.  Matt Miller from the Washington Post explains why our current debt level is manageable.  Jeffrey Anderson from Investor’s Business Daily explains why it’s not.

11.  COLUMN OF THE DAY.  Robert Samuelson on our fundamental failure to understand China and its aims on the international scene.  Spot on.

One Christian’s perspective on the day’s news and commentary:

1.  A Newsweek piece by Lisa Miller (long in the works, and for which a friend of mine was consulted) takes Harvard to task for its failure of nerve when it comes to education on religion.  Al Mohler has an interesting commentary on the article here.

2.  Was the great Christian musician Haydn gay?  Does it matter?  The answers are: it is quite possible, and it depends on what you mean by ‘matter’.

3.  An interesting discussion here on Avatar, Christ, and culture (h/t Justin Taylor)

4.  Are we reaching “The End of Secularism“?  S. T. Karnick’s review of the book of this name is well worth reading.  A selection:

“What the current spate of anti-Christian screeds really reflects, it now seems clear, is bitter disappointment at Americans’ continuing refusal to come to their senses and stop believing in God. The intensified attack comes primarily from people who characterize themselves as forces for rationality, tolerance, and fairness. Faced with mounting evidence of religion’s widespread appeal, such fine people could well be expected to question whether there might be something wrong with secularism itself. Yet they haven’t.”

“Enter Hunter Baker. In The End of Secularism, Baker addresses the notion that a secular outlook results in “rational thinking processes, empirical verification, and social harmony” whereas religious belief is “tied to mysticism, violence, ignorance, and coercion.” As Baker observes, this set of definitions is absurdly skewed in the secularists’ favor. In reality, secularism is on the very same logical footing as religious thinking. Secularism, Baker writes, “cannot claim scientific authority for its proposals …. [T]here is the knowledge that we can gain via scientific experimentation and verification and then there is everything else. The ‘everything else’ happens to be where secularism and religion do their work along with a host of other attempts to make sense of the parts of life we really care about and that happen not to yield scientific answers.”"

5.  On to politics.  Evan Bayh is retiring.  Anyone else beginning to see a trend?

6.  Marc Thiessen’s appearance last Friday on Morning Joe was pretty intense.  Now former CIA director Michael Hayden tells us that Thiessen is essentially right.  And that his book is “must read” material.  The handling of Abdulmuttalab is proving quite damaging — partly because of people like Dick Cheney, who will not let Obama off the hook on this subject.

7.  A. O. Scott, the great movie reviewer for the New York Times, notices the trend of movies celebrating humans or Americans or whites who begin as perpetrators or schemers of violence against some (usually harmonious) native population, but end up fighting with those natives over against the imperialistic humans/Americans/whites.

8.  Some women — at an even higher percentage than men — believe that women who are raped share some measure of responsibility for their rape if they had drinks with the rapist, brought him home, and got in bed with him.  One needs to make a sharp distinction, it seems to me, between a woman who foolishly (and in some cases sinfully) put herself in a vulnerable situation with a man who could not be trusted / and a woman who is partly responsible for her rape.  The woman is responsible for doing something unwise and wrong.  Yet she is not responsible for the rape.  Men might claim that they are put in situations where their animal instincts overcome them.  One hears this sometimes, alas, in Muslim nations; a woman who bares her arms arouses passions in men that subtract the man’s agency, leading him to do things for which he cannot be held responsible.

But does anyone doubt that if a gun were put to the head of the rapist in the moment before he committed the act, that he could stop?  The man has agency.  The woman may sometimes be partly responsible for entering into a bad situation.  The man is nonetheless fully responsible for the rape.

9.  A good question is asked here.  Apparently US and international counterrorism authorities have launched a worldwide manhunt for some of the men they are now learning about from Abdulmutallab.  The question is inexorable: what if we had learned about these folks 5 weeks ago?  Would we have been more likely to catch them?  To thwart their plans?  The questions answer themselves.

I really do try, I bend over backward, to give the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt.  But they should have kept this guy in forceful interrogation until they were absolutely certain they knew everything he knew.  Obviously he had more to say than he said in the mere 50 minutes he spoke with interrogators before he was given Miranda rights and a lawyer.  Yet old intelligence is far less useful than the up-to-the-day intelligence he could have provided on Christmas.

10.  Two interesting pieces on climate change here and here.  If you have been willing, at least, to look at both sides of the argument, then you will already know of the concerns raised in the first article: that the placement and sometimes movement of weather stations has created a strong bias in favor of warming.  Stations designed to measure the temperature, if they were once in a rural area and came later to be surrounded by buildings and asphalt, will show higher temperatures as a result of the absorption of heat.  The effect will be even stronger if, as in some of the most famous cases, the stations end up near heat-generating machinery such as air conditioning or incineration units.

The second article concerns Phil Jones, the scientist at the center of the leaked emails fiasco.  Jones acknowledges (what you would know already, again, if you follow both sides of the argument) that the world has not warmed to any statistically significant measure since 1995, and that the Medieval Warm Period might have seen higher global temperatures than we have seen recently.  Neither of these is dispositive against anthropogenic global warming, but the damage to the climate change case is proving to be very deep indeed.  Not because such revelations are “seized upon”–as the second article puts it–but because they show the sloppy science that has lain beneath the IPCC reports.

I will comment further on this later.  But why was the science so sloppy?

Everyone who follows the debate (even if you follow only one side) knows of the famous “hockey stick” graph showing virtually no climate change for many years and then a sharp upward bend.  The graph has been shown fallacious on several occasions.  Now, when Phil Jones is pressed for the data on which the hockey stick graph was based, he says that he can no longer find the data.  Jones claims that the reason he did not share information when it was requested of him, through freedom of information requests, is because it is hard for him to find his records.  He is not being deliberately deceptive or obfuscatory.  Oh no.  He just doesn’t keep a tidy desk.

I do not have a strong position for or against anthropogenic global climate change.  But I do know BS when I see it.  I know an irrational intellectual fad when I see it–and it has been clear for years that, whatever the merits of the argument might be, many academics were attaching themselves to the cause because it was the fashion, and the latest way to distinguish themselves from the unenlightened masses.  I *also* know an industry when I see it.  The best business in the world for academics, right now, is in global climate change.  If you want your dissertation approved, if you want tenure, if you want an endowed chair, if you want mountains of research money and armies of research assistants, take up the cause of global climate change.  For all its celebration of free inquiry and diversity of opinion, elite academia may be the most conformist sector in American society today.  You make your career by taking on the causes of your mentors, by making sensationalist claims (but always sensationalist in the approved direction), and captaining the ships the admirals of academia have christened.  And if you have a modernist view of how academic science works, you’d best leave it behind.  Scientists chase after their own fads, bow to the high priests in their realms, and will maneuver and maneuver in order to put down their opponents and conceal their mistakes.

If you are a firm believer in anthropogenic climate change, and you have come to that conclusion in the right way, more power to you.  But do so with eyes wide open, knowing that there is money to be made on both sides, that there are ulterior motives on both sides, and that the science and the politics and the industry have become so entangled that it’s virtually impossible anymore to separate them.

11.  Some are predicting a long period of joblessness.  Lovely.

12.  TODAY’S TWO-SIDES.  Fred Barnes from the Weekly Standard analyzes “Obama’s Fall.”  Michael Barone says that the problem is that Obama has returned to “crony capitalism.”  Yet E. J. Dionne thinks that all Obama really needs is a little dose of the Clinton magic.

One Christian’s perspective on the day’s news and commentary:

1.  AMERICAN GNOSTICISM.  Scot McKnight has been reading through Tom Long’s new book, Preaching from Memory to Hope.  Long is regarded as one of the finest preachers in the world today, and he has some great points.  As McKnight writes, beginning with a quotation from Long:

“… today this nasty suspicion that Christian leaders are like stockbrokers peddling junk bonds has made its way from the academy into church pews and is finding vigorous expression in congregations …” (55). What’s this nasty suspicion? That religion refers to nothing real; church language is smoke and mirrors. It’s nothing but empty lingo pointing to nothing…

Read the rest of the entry at the Jesus Creed.

2.  MOVEMENTS WITH ROOTS.  Yesterday I listened for a little while to a streaming video from the Radicalis conference at Saddleback Church in California.  Some really good stuff.  I’m encouraged by movements such as this.

3.  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!  If you’re looking for a daily walk-through-the-Bible guide, you could do much worse than For the Love of God online.

4.  THE BRIDGES OF MARIN COUNTY.  The Evangelical Portal at Patheos will soon host a conversation on reimagining the relationship between evangelicals and the gay community.  In research for it, I was pointed (h/t Adrianna Wright at InterVarsity Press) toward the Marin Foundation.  Worth taking a look.  Anyone have any thoughts?

5.  HUMAN RIGHTS DEATH PANEL.  It appears likely that Iran will win a position on the Human Rights Council.  Yes, seriously.  Gotta love the UN.  Another illustration of why it was a good idea from John McCain to form a league of democratic nations and de-emphasize the UN.

6.  TEA PARTY RACISM?  The Tea Party movement has inspired an equal measure of derision and misunderstanding.  The author’s of this piece in the Washington Post begin with a nice nutshell summary: “The 600 delegates at the National Tea Party Convention feel taxed to death, ignored by their elected representatives and the media, and appalled at the federal government’s spending.”

However, many treatments of the Tea Party movement in popular media have the tone of pseudo-scientists observing hamsters in a maze, wondering what makes them tick, never quite taking their own rationality and their own self-explanations seriously.  It is common, more or less subtly, to identify the true motivation of tea partiers as racism.  The WashPo article does this subtly, by means of misdirection.  And it’s one of the oldest tricks in the race-baiting game: if a group is mostly white, it must be racist:

“Jeff Link, a luxury jewelry maker from New York, says that President George W. Bush started the fiscal policies that ruined the economy and that President Obama is making them worse, a belief shared by many here. But, he says, looking at the crowd, which is overwhelmingly white and middle-aged, “it saddens me not to see this gathering more diverse.”"

7.  ON THE OTHER HAND.  I find nothing racist in the central values and goals of the Tea Party movement.  Still, the recent speech by Tom Tancredo at the Tea Party Convention was awful.  Kudos to Peter Wehner at Contentions for calling him out.  One theme of commentary has been that Tancredo’s appeal for a civics test to qualify citizens to vote is racist because it harkens back to attempts to exclude blacks from voting; I don’t find this a convincing line of argument.  Even if a civics test was used to exclude blacks in the past, it would not have to be done in such a way today.  What I find most reprehensible is Tancredo’s implicit characterization of Mexican immigrants and illegal immigrants.  I find the suggestion of a civics test not so much reprehensible as foolish and impractical.  Who wouldn’t want a more informed electorate?  Many societies have required people to earn the privilege of voting; but it runs against the grain of our nation and its history (or at least the more laudable parts of its history!).

Furthermore, the continuing references to Barack “Hussein” Obama do boil down, in the end, to nativist fearmongering.  Commenting on this and on the characterization of Obama voters as unable “to spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English,” Wehner writes: “This is ugly (to say nothing of stupid and ignorant) stuff. It is the manifestation of a person filled with rage and obsessions, bitter and brittle, eager to play to people’s worst instincts.”

8.  STAR WARS REDUX.  The United States military successfully shot down a ballistic missile with an airborne laser.  Yeah, not too shabby.  Strengthening our anti-ballistic missile shield has to be one of our highest national security priorities, not because of the likelihood of an attack but because of the unthinkable amount of damage such an attack would do, not only to the United States but to the global order.  If you hear anyone tell you that we should not develop a missile shield because it would upset the (outdated) doctrine of mutually assured destruction, tell himm — kindly, Christianly — that he is a complete moron.

Also coming soon: Submarines with light saber Yoda slices.

9.  NEVADA TWO-STEP.  Not sure quite yet what to make of this case of Senate politicking.  Democrats and centrist Republicans had worked for weeks to assemble a “jobs bill” they could pass together.  The bill was announced with great fanfare, and with immediate approval from the White House.  With Obama’s endorsement still ringing in the air, however, Reid reneged and withdrew the legislation, putting forward instead a leaner version.  I can understand the frustration of Republicans, who felt that they had negotiated in good faith.  In all probability, Reid sees this as an opportunity to hang the Republicans with their own promises.  Once the election season heats up, he can point to how it was actually Republicans who had favored a larger bill with more spending and more pork, but Democrats had pulled back and gone for a more lean and sensible alternative.  H

It’s a smart maneuver, though clearly unethical.  Some conservative commentators are saying that advancing the bill, then withdrawing it hours later, makes the Democrats look like a mess.  But no one will remember the two-step a few months from now.  Democrats will remind them, however, that it was the Republicans who favored the more bloated, lobbyist-driven version of the bill (if that characterization is true).

On the other hand, the second version of the bill might actually be a better piece of legislation, from a fiscal conservative point of view.  Which is well and good.  But haven’t the Democrats been arguing that we need more spending, not less?

Like I said, I’m not sure yet what I think of this one.  I trust more information will spill out over the weekend.

10.  EVIDENCE OF THE FALL, ITEM 432,478,654,293.  I’m not an Alex Baldwin fan, but it’s hard to blame celebrities for getting frustrated with tabloid reporters.  Can one blame him for “attacking” a reporter?  Yes, of course, except grabbing a person by the collar does not an “attack” make.  Moreover, Baldwin and his unnamed friend make a credible case that Kim Basinger, whose divorce from Baldwin has been a never-ending horror show, orchestrated the whole event.  This is essentially a story of a family torn asunder, and former spouses pitted against one another over the fealty of their daughter.  Apparently Baldwin had an argument with his daughter and went to take an Ambien and go to bed.  Whether or not she honestly misinterpreted her father’s words, his daughter called Basinger and was encouraged to call 911.  Police arrived and carted Baldwin off to a hospital.  He was swiftly released, but when he returned to his Central Park West apartment at 2am, he found reporters waiting outside his door.

Divorced parents will sometimes go to awful lengths to win the hearts–and custody rights–of their children.

11.  SO LONG, CORZINE.  Looks like someone is finally standing up and being the adult in the room, freezing and cutting state expenditures.  There will be all the standard cries of heartlessness, but what would be truly heartless would be to allow our financial system to collapse and bankrupt our government.  Who will pay for the social services then?

12.  THIS IS WHAT PHILOSOPHERS CALL PERFORMATIVE SELF-CONTRADICTION.  Bob Shrum condemns Sarah Palin for her “blend of slurs steeped in personal animus” by writing an article with blend of slurs steeped in personal animus.  It is possible to think Palin is unqualified for the Presidency without belittling and demonizing her.

13.  A follow-up to our earlier commentary on Paul Ryan and his budget proposals.  From Robert Samuelson: “Paul Ryan, a six-term Republican congressman from Wisconsin who is the ranking minority member of the House Budget Committee, has yanked himself from obscurity by doing something no one else in Congress or apparently the White House has done: design a specific plan to control long-term government spending and budget deficits. That he stands virtually alone is a damning commentary on our politics.”

14.  Further links on Abdulmutallab and Miranda rights.  (Bear in mind that the question of who should be the detaining force, who should be permitted to interrogate and under what circumstances, and whether the suspected terrorist should then be handed over to civilian prosecution are three different questions.)  Stuart Taylor Jr is critical.  Ali Soufan speaks up for the defense.  And former U. S. Attorney General, Michael Mukasey makes some helpful historical points.

15.  COLUMN OF THE DAY, Pt 1.  Peggy Noonan.

16.  COLUMN OF THE DAY, Pt 2.  Hard to disagree with Charles Krauthammer on this one.  Yes, financial times are tough, and cutting manned space exploration is an easy bit of public relations.  But the program cost $3B per year, which is a vanishingly small amount when compared to the endless supertankers of money that we have thrown into silly stimulus programs.  Why not stimulate and support the manned space flight program at the same time?  Obama pretended to turn the job over to the private sector, but this is one job the private sector is not yet prepared to do, and shows no inclination to do anytime soon.  This, I think, is a shortsighted decision.

One Christian’s perspective on the day’s news and commentary:

1.  Christianity Today has a nice list of the “The 1o Most Redeeming Films of 2009.”  I like the comment on The Road: “Despite the bleak and sometimes terrifying post-apocalyptic milieu, this film—based on the book by Cormac McCarthy—stands out from other recent end-times flicks in its tenacious, audacious insistence on hope in the midst of darkness. Plus it’s one of the most loving father-son relationships ever depicted on the big screen.”

2.  The title: “How Christians Have Succumbed to the Sports Culture–and What Might be Done About it.”  Hmm.  What do you think?  Is sports culture as nefarious as this?

3.  We sometimes bring material from Jonathan Dodson over to the Evangelical Portal.  His series on “How Not to be a Missional Church” is well worth your time, especially if you are a pastor or a lay leader at church.

4.  PALIN FEVER.  The Dean of beltway columnists, David Broder, wakes up to the fact that Sarah Palin is not the moron the left would paint her as.  She is, rather, a populist.  Even if she is not presently qualified for the Presidency (which she is not), she is building her repertoire as she receives daily briefings from Washington wise men about foreign and domestic issues.  Just as importantly, she is developing a rock-solid bond with the grass roots Tea Party movement.  As Broder says, “Those who want to stop her will need more ammunition than deriding her habit of writing on her hand. The lady is good.”  It does seem ironic to mock Palin for writing a few notes on her hand, and yet venerate Obama for delivering speeches by teleprompter.  Just saying.

Also, here is another excellent demonstration of Palin hysteria.  Palin is condemned for the brazen act of wearing a black bracelet with the name of her son Track, who served in Iraq; black bracelets such as these, we are told, are only to memorialize the dead.  It is as though Palin is trying to take credit for the death of a son, when no son has died.  Sure enough, anti-Palin writers and bloggers gleefully condemn Palin–and make fools out of themselves.  First, black “deployment bracelets” are also common, as ways of remembering those who are deployed.  Second, it turns out the bracelet isn’t black at all, but bronze.  The same organization that gave Palin one gave one to Joe Biden.  Unbelievable.

How many times do you have to leap into attack mode, only to be shown a fool, before one realizes that one is all too eager to attack?

5.  SLAYING SINATRA.  Frank Sinatra was long said to have connections with crime families.  Turns out he’s a real killer.

6.  Is the US guilty of torturing Binyam Mohammed?  Take a look behind the sensationalized news stories, and it turns out that Americans only shackled him and deprived him of sleep with loud music.  He was constantly monitored medically.  The torture took place when he was in Pakistani and Morrocan custody.  What bothers me is the rendition of prisoners to nations where torture takes place.  Perhaps I am heartless, but I’m not particularly bothered by exposing those involved with terrorist organizations to sleep deprivation.

7.  EVIDENCE OF THE FALL, ITEM #213,492,394,583: A British woman known as the “baby factory” has given birth to her 14th child, which, like all her previous children, was swiftly taken into state custody.  Despite having four of her children diagnosed with disabilities, the woman continued to smoke throughout this pregnancy.  The woman lives with another go-getter in Luton, Bedfordshire, where they collect over 1000 pounds a month.  The woman, unfortunately, reflects the welfare state of mind, as she describes her response when her latest child was taken into custody: “‘I was angry, I was annoyed and I was crying. Nobody helps us….‘They’re saying we’ve got these problems and we need help but social services should pay for our counselling.’”  I am not unsympathetic to the woman’s feelings.  But the fact that it has just now occurred to her to get her life in order, in order to win back one or more of her children, rather than continuing to have more children in the hope the state will let her keep one, reflects all too clearly the modern mindset and its abandonment of the sense of personal responsibility.

8.  Iran celebrated the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution that replaced the Shah with the current theocracy.  Pro-government celebrants were bused in, while anti-regime demonstrators were forcibly dispersed.  Ahmadinejad boasted that they were now a “nuclear state” capable of developing weapons-grade uranium.  And the countdown clock to a nuclear-armed Iran keeps ticking…Bush and Obama both have dithered; their attempts at engagement have, as yet, produced no discernible fruit.  The development of a nuclear bomb in Iran would be profoundly destabilizing, would immediately put Tel-Aviv at risk of destruction, and you place the world’s most powerful weapon in the hands of one of the world’s most maniacal dictators.  A subject for prayer.

9.  I take no issue with the New York Times article which blames record snowfalls on global warming.  What bothers me is all the bad pseudo-science one hears on both sides of the debate.  Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) skeptics point to increased snowfall as evidence against global warming only because we have been told for years that decreased snowfall was evidence for it.  Neither case is true.  The skeptics will happily point to articles such as that of RJK, Jr., who claimed that global warming was reflected in how they once had sledded at the Kennedy home near D. C. but now such sledding was nowhere to be found.  And yet those who believe in AGH will make arguments that higher temperatures allow for more moisture in the air, and thus for more “extreme weather events.”

The problems are these.  (1) No particular set of high or low temperatures can make a good argument for or against global warming.  We need a complete set of temperatures stretching over the course of decades.  However, global warming activists have too often pointed to the record high in, say, Dallas, as though this vindicated their argument.  That was illegitimate, just as it is illegitimate now to point to record lows now as evidence against.  The important point is the averages over the course of time–and when it comes to those averages, we simply don’t have enough evidence right now to draw solid conclusions.  We know the world warmed during the 90s, but it has largely stayed the same since, or even decreased.  (2) Also, none of this has anything to do with the question of whether global warming is human-caused, or whether it is simply a cycle of 30 years or so.  We have seen several cycles of warming and cooling throughout the 20th century, and of course we can see such cycles stretching back for hundreds and thousands of years.  (3) Most importantly, global warming theory has become literally unrefutable.  That may sound like a good thing for the global warming theorists, but it’s not.  When a theory becomes such that it cannot be disproven, it has ceased to be a testable scientific theory.  Unfortunately, the way global warming science is propounded right now on the popular level, an increase in temperature and a drought is taken as evidence for global warming, but a decrease in temperature and heavy snows are also takes as evidence for global warming (or global “climate change”).  (4) Finally, it is difficult to measure whether “severe weather events” have become more common, or whether our worldwide reporting system is just so much improved, and whether global warming discussions have made us so much more attentive, that we hear and think more about them.  In the past few years, high predictions for hurricane activity have completely failed.  Unfortunately, our sense of extreme weather events is mostly driven by anecdotes instead of solid evidence, partly because there is no definite record of extreme weather events to which we can compare our present circumstances.

So how ought Christian to approach the global warming discussion?  With clear eyes, a strong commitment to truth and honesty, and a determination not to be led astray by misleading rhetoric on either side.  Moreover, we should take seriously how climate change, even if it is merely local climate change, affects of the lives of the poor.  See organizations like Floresta, which do great work helping indigent farmers adjust to changing weather circumstances.  Finally, we should be good stewards of the creation God has given us.  That means making use of the earth for the establishment of healthy societies, but it also means using its resources wisely and doing what we can to minimize our negative impact on the environment.  None of this requires us to believe that global warming is largely driven by human activity; all of these things would apply even if the world were not warming, or even if human activity were not accelerating that warming.

10.  Keith Hennessey has a pretty devastating response to those who blame the previous administration for our current financial mess.  While neither party has managed the budget well in the past ten years, Hennessey gives solid numbers to show the dishonesty of the rhetoric right now.  Meanwhile, the jobs outlook remains dismal.

11.  TODAY’S TWO-SIDES.  It’s a tale of dueling editorials.  The Washington Post voices its hope for dramatic climate change legislation.  The Denver Post is more interested in getting the research right first.

12.  COLUMN OF THE DAY.  With entries such as this on the budget deficit and where the blame for it lies, Megan McArdle is establishing herself as the queen of the sensible middle in the political commentariat.  Observe the following snippets:

“The proponents of blaming every single bad thing that happens on one George W. Bush offer the wan defense that, after all, it would be hard to not extend the tax cuts.  But that argument applies equally well to Bush; it would have been hard not to enact the tax cuts in the first place, and politically disastrous not to do a Medicare prescription drug benefit, and idea that was essentially forced on him by Democrats eager to curry favor with seniors.

“But the fact remains that George Bush enacted a bunch of tax cuts, and did nothing to implement the spending control those tax cuts demanded.  He shouldn’t have done that, even if voters would have been, like, rilly rilly mad if he didn’t give them free drugs.

“So, too, at some point, Obama has to take responsibility.  Listening to his defenders reminds me of those people who sit around whining about how their Dad was really distant and critical . . . I mean, fine, you apparently had a rotten childhood, but Dad can’t get come and get you off the couch and find you a girlfriend and a better job.  Girls and employers get really creeped out if they try.

Whatever George W. Bush did or did not do, he’s no longer in office, and doesn’t have the power to do a damn thing about the budget.  Obama is the one who is president with the really humongous deficits.  Deficits of the size Bush ran are basically sustainable indefinitely; deficits of the size that Obama is apparently planning to run, aren’t.  If he doesn’t change those plans, he will be the one who led the government into fiscal crisis, even if changing them would be [sob!] politically difficult.”

She ends with these questions: “Can we pick a date for when bad things that happen on Obama’s are actually in some measure the responsibility of one Barack Obama, rather than his long gone predecessor?  And then stick with that date?  Conversely, can we agree that as long as the bad things that happen are really George Bush’s fault, any good things that happen should probably be chalked up to his administration as well?”

Still waiting for some adults to step forward and do what needs to be done to return the federal budget to a sustainable trajectory.

One Christian’s perspective on the day’s headlines:

1.  I’m a fan of the blog Parchment and Pen.  Actually, I have been doing a series of guest posts there.  The chief blogger and proprietor of Parchment and Pen is C. Michael Patton, and we often feature his material at the Evangelical Portal at Patheos.  He has a nice post on the question of progressive revelation and whether even New Testament authors developed in their doctrine in between their earlier and their later writings.  Check it out.  He also has a related discussion of the seven fallacies of biblical interpretation.

2.  Somehow I missed this a few weeks back.  Spanking scores an A+ on a recent report card.  From an article in the Wall Street Journal:

“Antispanking advocates say that physical discipline isn’t just immoral but also detrimental to a child’s long-term adjustment.

Yet a new study by Calvin College’s Marjorie Gunnoe found no evidence to support the claim. In fact, it found that those adolescents who were spanked as young children actually ended up having a sunnier outlook and were better students than those who were never spanked.

Compared with those who had never experienced physical discipline, those who endured parental swats between the ages of 2 and 6 were much more likely to report positive academic records and optimism about their future. Even those who received their last spanking between the ages of 7 and 11 reported that they volunteered more, compared with those who had never been spanked. In fact, the never-spanked group never scored the best on any of the 11 behavioral variables analyzed. According to Prof. Gunnoe, her research, which was based on surveys of 183 adolescent children, doesn’t provide answers to parents as to how they should discipline so much as undermine the rationale for banning spanking.”

3.  Churches in eastern Texas are being set ablaze at an alarming rate.

4.  There’s a good chance I will be interviewing Jeremy Lin soon for the Evangelical Portal, or for our series on faith and sports.  Haven’t heard of Jeremy Lin?  This is a good place to start.  Jeremy is one of the best point guards in the nation, and a leader of his Christian fellowship at Harvard.  To see how far his fame is spreading, check out this article from the China Post.

5.  A new opinion poll of the Muslim world was released by the Pew Research Center.  The worst number: 51% of Palestinians support Osama bin Laden.  For a study of a different kind, see this material on pedophilic homosexuality and misogyny amongst Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan/Pakistan.  It’s so shocking that I really do not know what to think about it.

6.  I remember well, when the Democrats controlled Congress in the final two years of the Bush White House, how it was the Republicans accusing the Democrats of being “the party of no.”  The debate was similar in many respects.  “The other side is all about obstructionism; they’re not serious about governing; surely the electorate would not reward the party of no!”  “We would be happy with the other side if they made serious instead of extremist proposals.”  Ad nauseum.  Even when the minority party protests that they are offering alternatives, the majority party counters that they aren’t serious alternatives, aren’t detailed, and so forth.  Ad infinitum.  It seems almost inevitable that the minority party gains traction as the majority party’s ideas receive greater scrutiny.

A part of the problem is that the ruling party sucks up all the oxygen in the media.  I don’t think I’m being biased when I say, however, that the mainstream media, which remains by and large liberal, has even less interest in highlighting conservative alternatives than the other way around.  If you’re interested in looking at one conservative approach to budgets and deficits, you might enjoy Michael Gerson on Paul Ryan’s proposals, and then you might research those proposals themselves — and the CBO analysis.  The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein is reasonably fair in his assessment, even if he gets a few things wrong.  Detractors focus on the way in which insurance vouchers grow at a slower rate than projected health-care costs.  But this would radically change the way in which health-care costs would have to be projected.  A part of the problem right now is that we have eliminated free market principles from the pricing of health care.  Tell me: do you know exactly how much your last hospital stay cost?  Almost certainly not, if you did not have to pay for it.  Would you have been a smarter consumer, finding the best value available, if you had been footing the bill?  And would hospitals charge those exorbitant amounts if they knew that patients were value shopping?

In any case, the Ryan proposal balances the budget; the question is whether we are willing to pay the costs.  Ryan’s plan continues to help the poor (despite alarmist rhetoric to the contrary), but it expects privatization of medical and social security benefits for the middle class to bring greater benefits than whatever is lost along the way.

Or you might enjoy reading about the so-called “2007 Solution” put forward by Florida Senator George LeMieux.

Relatedly, Michael Scherer looks at the history of calls for bipartisanship.

7.  Marco Rubio is quite the rising star in the Republican vault.  Not unlike Obama was not long ago.  And given that he’s from Florida, the 2012 Presidential candidate would be a fool not to give him serious VP consideration, assuming he wins the Senate seat he’s up for in 2010.  Meanwhile, Palin hysteria continues, especially at MSNBC.

8.  A sharp article in the WSJ maintains that it was the culture of secrecy that led to Toyota’s downfall.

9.  TODAY’S TWO-SIDES.  Is John Brennan an effective messenger on behalf of the Obama foreign policy team?  Steve Benen says yes at Political Animal; Rory Cooper at the National Review has a different opinion.

Bonus: coming after Brennan’s claim that those who criticize the Obama policy are helping the terrorists, you’d think an editorial called “The Politics of Fear” would be condemning that sort of talk.  But you’d be wrong.  The editorial comes, after all, from the New York Times.  And it is condemning Republican criticisms of the Obama team.  Figures.  It’s been a while since I’ve read a NYT editorial, but I don’t remember one so extremely misguided and tone deaf.  (For instance: yes, the Bush team took Richard Reid into FBI custody, but the military tribunal system was not in place then, there was no high-value interrogation team, and we had not had the benefit of the past 8 years of reflecting on the issue and learning from past mistakes; the “over 300″ charged on terrorist-related issues includes those that have absolutely nothing to do with al-Qaeda attacks against the United States; and some of those they mention were handed over for trial after they had been interrogated by the military.  That the NYT editorial team does not want to bother with these sorts of nuances suggests they are either disingenuous or uninformed.)

I enjoyed this post at the Jesus Creed blog regarding the use and dominance of methodological naturalism at secular (and many Christian) universities.  The post quotes a letter from an academic: “If one accepts methodological naturalism consistently as the basis for academic inquiry and rational thought,  it follows that Christianity and religious belief have no place in the university, or in rational discussions, except to do autopsy on them.”

In response, I wrote:

The subject of methodological naturalism and its effects throughout the academy is important and deserving of much more discussion than it typically receives. While *methodological* naturalism does not necessarily presuppose naturalism per se (it may be adopted, as some claim, simply for methodological reasons), it invariably collapses into naturalism tout court. If one is determined to privilege naturalistic explanations of phenomena, then inevitably one develops a naturalistic view of natural and historical occurrences. Non-naturalistic explanations, no matter how reasonable, are rejected in favor of naturalistic explanations, no matter how improbable.

These concepts have histories. We need to understand how it came to be the case that so many Christian scientists, who were not themselves naturalists (methodologically or otherwise), contributed to the creation of a naturalistic view of science and the world it reveals. One book I suggest is Michael Buckley’s “At the Origins of Modern Atheism.” An extraordinary book that was a real game-changer for me.

There were several philosophical and theological moves made at the dawn of the modern age (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) that really set us on a trajectory that has proven, to my mind, disastrous for Christian belief. Among them was the development of an incredibly narrow (and unrealistic) ideal of scientific inquiry and scientific rationality. Eventually, as rationality came to be defined exclusively as *scientific* rationality, and scientific rationality was understood in an extremely narrow sense, then anything that did not meet the criteria of this mythical scientific rationality did not warrant the title of ‘rational.’ Since Christianity, it was thought, could not demonstrate its essential claims according to the standards of a rigorous scientific method, it was rejected as irrational. But (1) something is not irrational merely because it cannot be demonstrated according to the canon of scientific rationality, and (2) scientific method was mis-defined, such that nothing of any import–not even the essential claims of what many today consider the ’scientific’ worldview–could be demonstrated according to those false standards.

There is much more, much to be said here.  Ironically, it was not the scientists themselves who abandoned traditional sources of Christian conviction.  It was theologians, and some Christian philosophers as well, who adopted the standards of the “skeptics” in order to show the skeptics that they could beat them at their own game.  (As though they were saying: Even if I adopt your standards of evidence and argumentation — and even if I doubt everything that can possibly be doubted — I can still construct an unassailable case for all fundamental Christian claims).  I will have to do a series on this sometime.

It raises the question: What if the history of western thought itself took a wrong turn?  What if it believed that it had to accept Proposition P, and the acceptance of Proposition P has proven enormously damaging for Christian faith…yet it never had to accept Proposition P in the first place–and, in fact, we can now see with confidence that it was wrong to accept Proposition P? One cannot go back in time and undo this maneuver, and so much of modern thought is premised upon it and its consequences.

I will explain more of what I mean in a series of articles later.  We will have a discussion of faith and science soon at the Evangelical Portal, and I will make sure that the place of methodological naturalism is one of the primary topics of conversation.

I am resuming my regular “Morning Update” posts.  I will try to keep them shorter.  They will continue to be a mish-mash of religion, politics and social commentary, but I will try to prevent the politics element from dominating.

0.  A powerful account on the battle against child sex slavery.  1/3 of sex workers in Cambodia are children.

Relatedly, here is an article from Jedd Medefind, whom I interviewed some months ago for his work with the Christian Alliance for Orphans, with his fair and intelligent take on the Christian missionaries arrested in Haiti for trying to extract children without the imprimatur of the government.

1.  There is a movement afoot amongst many evangelicals to “lengthen our memory” or recover insights and traditions of worth from the Early Church Fathers.  This is an excellent thing.  In some of the churches in which I was raised, it seemed as though “church history” began with Billy Graham, or, at best, with the first Great Awakening.  InterVarsity Press has been at the forefront of the movement, with an excellent series from Christopher Hall on Learning Theology…, Worshiping…, and Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers.  My favorite, however, is their series on Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture.  When the series is complete, you will be able to look up any passage in the scripture and see how numerous of the early church fathers interpreted that passage.  It’s an extraordinary resource not only for scholars, but for pastors and anyone who wants to inform his/her spiritual life with the riches of many generations of Christian reflection.  (Also available on CD-ROM).

2.  Lauren Winner, always a provocative writer, offers “three fresh perspectives on religion in the American south” via Christianity Today.

Another provocative writer today is Justin Taylor, whose “Between Two Worlds” is one of the best Christian blogs out there.  He uncovers some great recordings of R. C. Sproul on the holiness of God.

3.  Israel has a vibrant entrepreneurial community, and this is a fresh and exciting ‘new’ approach to education.  Here is a little information:

The basic thesis Time To Know is operating under is that today’s current classroom is following a teaching paradigm designed in the industrial age, i.e., a teacher standing in front of a class, a blackboard on the wall and students at their desks. Think of it this way… Imagine time warping a teacher from the 1800’s and implanting her in a classroom in 2010. She could basically hit the ground running with little to no adjustment in teaching style. Quite scary when you think about it.

4.  Shame cultures have their uses.  Here’s hoping that the CEO of Toyota does not commit suicide, but as I watched his apology and his numerous bows I found myself wishing that Madoff and his ilk had shown a little more capacity for shame.

5.  Obama’s address at the recent National Prayer Breakfast brought on this response from Jim Wallis, who applauds Obama’s call for civility.  Peter Wehner at Contentions pointed to this 2007 piece from Wallis and wondered whether it was the kind of civility Wallis wanted.  Fair enough.

6.  A remarkable story on how–and how quickly–fabulously wealthy professional athletes lose their money.  Just consider these two facts:

• By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.

• Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.

7.  A glance at the vast quantities of money pouring into campaign funds for Democrats and Republicans alike.  I don’t oppose corporate donations any more than I oppose union donations.  Many stipulations of the McCain-Feingold act did seem unconstitutional to me.  The better solution is to eliminate the earmarking process.  Yes, earmarks only account for 1-2% of the federal budget.  But their consequences are far, far more dramatic than that.  First off, they establish a culture of corruption, bribery and cattle-trading.  They degrade our representatives morally.  And representatives are far more likely to vote for exorbitant spending bills if they include their own earmarks.

John McCain was sometimes criticized for making such a big deal out of earmarks when they are not a large part of the budget.  But he was right on this.  Would that the American people would make a principled commitment to vote only for those representatives who take a no-earmark pledge, and a commitment to vote out any incumbent who breaks that pledge.  At the same time, those who stand against earmarks need to do a better job of developing and rallying support around legislative solutions.

The President says that he would rather be an excellent one-term President than a mediocre two-term one.  Even if it costs him the favor of Pelosi, Reid, et al, Obama should take up this fight.  The American people would love him for it.

8.  A new set of pictures of the Twin Towers on that awful morning on 9/11.

9.  Can we all agree to dispense with the disgusting “teabagger” epithet?  Whatever you think of the Tea Party movement, I can think of no other political constituency that is defined in such a vile and degrading manner.  Or, no matter what you think of them, it should be beneath your dignity.

This occurred to me when I was reading this response to the “Green Police” Superbowl ad.  Seems the ad is creating a bit of a stir.  Other than the ridiculous claim that the Tim Tebow advert promoted violence against women (yes, I’m serious), this has got to be the most entertaining response to a Super Bowl commercial this year.  So was the ad mocking environmentalists, or was it premised on the notion that we should all do our part?  It depends on whom you ask.

10.  An interesting behind-the-curtain account of the decision to pursue sweeping health care reform when political expediency would have suggested a focus on pro-employment measures.  It sounds as though the President himself was the one who pushed for health care reform now.  Was it courageous or arrogant?  The act of an ideologue or of a principled man?  It’s hard to say where to draw the lines these days.

11.  The Toyota story is not going to go away for a long time.  There will continue to be leaks and whistleblowers for weeks and months, talking about efforts to cover up the defects or at least not notify drivers until a low-cost solution had been found (potentially keeping drivers at risk).  You can be sure there will also be federal investigations and hearings.  This will put government-owned car companies in an interesting position.  The U. S. government has always fought on behalf of American car companies, but will they go even further now into a strong conflict of interest?  Is that a bad thing?  Is it fair?

12.  TODAY’S TWO-SIDES.  John Brennan defends the administration’s anti-terror policies (his contention that critics are helping al Qaeda is raising some hackles).  A Wall Street Journal editorial claims that the Obami are vindicating everything that Dick Cheney has said.  You be the judge.

13.  And finally, further evidence of how unhinged our political conversation becomes when it concerns Sarah Palin.