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A local furor erupted a couple days ago over a Wellesley Middle School class’ visit to an area mosque, a story which has subsequently gone national. This whole story is just so wrong, on so many levels, that it approaches (?) the absurd. It is a microcosm of everything wrong with the deracinated public life that has banished religious faith to the margins, and adopted a functional atheism as public policy (despite the lingering religiosity of much of the unwashed masses).

The 6th grade class found itself at the mosque as part of a social studies unit called “Enduring Beliefs and the World Today.” It’s hard to pass over the name chosen for the program without snickering at the irony of it, for unfolding events would make it clear enough that “enduring” pretty well describes the approach these public sector “leaders” take toward beliefs – at least of a religious nature.

Along with visiting the mosque, the learning unit called for visiting a synagogue, and meeting with “Hindu religious representatives” – whatever that means. Oh, there was also apparently a section on Christianity, which I guess also continues to be a belief endured in the modern world. So what did the “Christian” field trip entail? Attending a “gospel music performance!”

OK, so you might be thinking that perhaps it’s hard to find an actual house of Christian worship in Wellesley – hence the detour to hear Al Green covers, or whatever they ended up listening to. Alas, though, this school is barely more than a stone’s throw from Saint Paul Catholic Church, with its associated elementary and middle school (where my youngest daughter is enrolled). If the teachers were afraid of catching dogma cooties from entering a real church (where Mass, incidentally, is offered daily at 9:00 AM – perfect timing for a walking-distance morning field trip from the public middle school), they could have taken a trip to at least view the parochial school kids, with their frumpy uniforms, old-fashioned manners, and serious classroom demeanor.

But whatever possessed them to so trivialize the “Christian” component of their program, that’s just so much snarky background for what would transpire with the trip to the mosque. A mother accompanying the class took a cell phone video showing several of the school boys motioning along with the men they were standing near during midday prayer. Well, between the knee-jerk anti-Islamic sentiment and the knee-jerkier sentiment that the children had been exposed to “prayer” without donning proper repellent gear, this has turned into an absolute circus.

First came the accusation from a group apparently aggressively intolerant of Islam, named Americans for Peace and Tolerance (founded by Jewish Advocate columnist Robert Jacobs), who claimed in a YouTube video based on the cell phone capture that the boys had been “asked to participate” in the prayer service – a provocative overstatement – and then they go on to ask: “How did Wellesley public school teachers allow this to happen?”

Now, I’m at a loss to understand how any sane person would think that those teachers should have forbade the youngsters to pray – never mind the likelihood that the boys probably engaged the rite on about the same level they’d engage a Cotton Eye Joe dance at a school social, but the superintendent of schools issued an apology for the “error” that “any students were allowed to [participate],” and assured the parents that “it was not the intent for students to be able to participate in any of the religious practices” [emphases added].

Somehow, we’ve gone from Thomas Jefferson’s conviction that the state should not decide which religious beliefs and practices should be suppressed, to an air-headed bureaucratic conviction that government at any level is in “error” if it permits any kind of religious practices among those unfortunate young charges left in its incompetent care. God forbid [can I say that?] we permit any kid to participate in a “religious practice” on the watch of the overbearing nanny-state! Although I do have to wonder: do you think the kids were permitted to sing along at the gospel concert? Did they have to self-censor certain words? What if all they did was dance, or bounce to the beat? Looks pretty similar to Muslim “prayer acts” if you ask me…

However, not to be out-done by the educators in either inanity or self-importance, the director of the group stirring up this trouble, Dennis Hale, has instead likened the “prayer acts” movements to the hypothetical scenario of the children having been taken to a Catholic church, and given Communion! A journalist friend of the group has called for the firing or suspension of the superintendent and/or the teachers involved! And now another Jewish advocacy group – the American Jewish Committee – is calling for the creation of state guidelines for school visits to religious institutions! Oy vey!

I can tolerate a little Jewish over-reaction to Muslim hostility, real or imagined – the Jews don’t have the luxury to consider appeasement – but leave the public schools out of it; those kids are already getting the shaft.

Every now and again, I find myself disputing with advocates of human cremation over the propriety of the process. Cremation has very rapidly become the preferred option, in certain sectors of society, for dealing with the corpses of the deceased. Whereas at one time its appeal may have been pretty much strictly economic to those not strongly influenced by oriental, non-Christian culture (or anti-Christian sentiment), it is these days often pitched as a moral recourse to a looming Malthusian crisis of usable land – the argument being that burial unnecessarily consumes land that could be put to more utilitarian use; the accompanying hysterical assertion being that we are running out of land upon which to live because of all the land that is left for the dead.

On the rare occasion I find myself discussing this, I try to make the case that the cremation process – which is by no means a simple incineration, but also involves a subsequent pulverizing of the skeletal remains, as if the bones of the deceased are fed into a human garbage disposal – is a disrespectful way to treat the body of a deceased loved one. To make the point that it should matter to us how the dead are treated, I’ve asked people if they would consider having their wife/husband/parent etc. disposed of corporeally by being dropped into a vat of acid that would eliminate all traces of the deceased, and then could be simply drained away. I’ve intended it as an over-the-top, reductio ad absurdum argument that might give people pause to stop and think about the importance of respect for the corpse. How naive of me…

David Mills published a post at the First Thoughts blog last Friday entitled Rest in Solution, which linked to a Daily Mail article about Belgium’s plan to wash its dead down the drain, a plan which entails using a potassium hydroxide solution to eliminate the fleshly material of the corpse – leaving, as does burning, the bone matter to be crushed. The big selling point? It’s more eco-friendly than cremation, which emits large amounts of carbon dioxide! Gotta watch that carbon footprint! Given the anti-burial movement’s long history of symbolic and actual rejection of Christian resurrection doctrine, I’m not quite sure what to make of the claim in the Daily Mail that the process, called resomation, comes from a Greek word for the rebirth of the human body (soma meaning body in Greek).

The body reduced to near nothingness seems to be of a piece with modernity’s contempt for the body. Moderns seem largely divided into two silently collaborating camps: those who hold a reductionist, positivistic view of human life comprising only bodily life, unsanctified by the spiritual soul – with all that implies for the dignity of the place of man in the cosmos; and, on the other hand, those who, reviving the ancient errors of Gnosticism, see the body as a kind of unfortunate storage place for a soul. But the body is an integral aspect of the human being: neither the totality of the person, nor an inessential “thing” that exists apart from the self – except in that dreadful state of personal violation we call death.

As a counterweight to the depressing, techno-sterile misanthropy of resomation, Mills provides a second link in his article, this one to a Weekly Standard article from last March by Matt Labash called: Love Among the Ruins. It tells the story of “Father Rick” Frechette’s tireless work to minister to the castaway dead in Haiti – among his other acts of mercy to the people of that broken land. I’ve taken the title of this post from the response he gives in the article to a question about why he expends so much time and energy to minister to those who are already dead, and won’t know the difference:

Frechette thinks about it a long while, then says, “If the dead are garbage, then the living are walking garbage.”

In another place, he speaks about why he carries on, offering his gifts of mercy in what seems to be such a losing battle:

“Sometimes with horrible things, you really feel there is nothing you can do. Nothing. You’re just useless. But over time, you start seeing that to do the right thing no matter what has tremendous power.”

Reading this article feels like taking a warm bath after reading that Daily Mail piece. Strange, considering what a tale of desolation and horror it is. God bless you, Father Rick. I think it’s time for a re-reading of the Book of Tobit.

I picked up a link from Hot Air a few days ago to a disturbing but fascinating (English-language) article in Der Spiegel Online, The Sexual Revolution and Children: How the Left Took Things Too Far. The article explores the history of post-1968 views on human sexuality, specifically its role in the “liberation” politics of the left wing in the non-communist world, and how that was translated into pedagogy at the Kinderladen (nursery school) level in the more left-leaning communities in Germany. The results, it should come as no surprise, are chilling:

Does what happened in a number of the Kinderladen qualify as abuse? According to the criteria to which Catholic priests have been subjected, it clearly does, says Alexander Schuller, the sociologist. "Objectively speaking, it was abuse, but subjectively it wasn’t," says author Dannenberg. As outlandish as it seems in retrospect, the parents apparently had the welfare of the children in mind, not their own. For the adherents to the new movement, the child did not serve as a sex object to provide the adults with a means of satisfying their sexual urges. This differentiates politically motivated abuse from pedophilia.

As shocking as the idea of politically motivated child abuse might seem, I have to confess to being rather unsurprised to come across its revelation. In no small part, that is because of a short article by Mary Eberstadt I was immediately reminded of having read in the December 2009 issue of First Things, How Pedophilia Lost Its Cool (the FT archives are paid content, but are well worth the price, even if you purchase just a single-day’s pass to them – lots of gold there to mine). In it, she identifies a significant change in a trend which she had traced over the preceding several decades, and on which she had published in The Weekly Standard on a couple of different occasions: with Pedophilia Chic, Part One and Part Two in June of 1996, and again in January 2001 with ‘Pedophilia Chic’ Reconsidered, Part One and Part Two.

In essence, the Weekly Standard articles were exposes of the way in which American cultural elites, especially in literary circles and the social sciences, had been floating the cultural normalization of pederasty, that is, of sexual liaisons between adult men and teenage boys. The change she noted in the 2009 First Things article was that in the face of the Catholic clergy sexual abuse crisis that had rocked American culture over the previous decade, American liberal elites had lost their taste for tolerating the particular pleasures of pederasty. If one was going to stake a high ground upon which to berate the Church for its pederastic sins, after all, this newfound moralism was a necessary regression in the otherwise progressive liberalization of sexual mores and moral standards, and nothing motivates liberal elites quite like excoriating the Catholic Church for some wrong.

To this end, one of the more interesting thoughts Eberstadt drew from all this was the ironic idea that the sexual abuse of boys and young men by Catholic clergy, for all its evil, might ultimately prove the be the decisive event in turning back a social movement toward the widespread acceptance of that self-same pederasty. Perhaps she could be accused of trying to paint a happy face on a dreadful situation, but its awfully hard to argue with the evidence (which she produces) of leading liberal media voices changing their views on the permissibility of pederasty after “the long Lent” of 2001. It also makes a lot of sense on an intuitive level, because the greatest threat (I say ultimately the only threat) to radicalism’s project of overturning the moral order is the Catholic Church, and pretty much everybody knows it. Whatever it costs, the Church must be defeated, or radicalism will fail. Only the naive (most of whom belong to the Church) don’t understand that.

So, as I was reading the Der Spiegel article, and thinking about Eberstadt’s, I couldn’t help being impressed by the timing of it. Why did Der Spiegel, hardly a voice of social conservatism over the sixty or so years of its publication, choose this time, after all these years, to address the issues of pedophilia in the history of Germany’s political left? Why come clean about it now, and try to bury it in the past as an historical anachronism? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the German Catholic clergy’s involvement in the pederasty of the day has finally come to light – in full fury – within the past few months? Maybe Eberstadt is on to something.

After having spent several hours over the past few days reading, re-reading, and thinking about the questions that are raised here, there is much more I would like to say, especially about the relation between pederasty and the larger homosex movement, which Eberstadt treats somewhat in the later Weekly Standard article. There are some common assumptions about that relationship which Eberstadt seems to share, and which I find increasingly troublesome. I hope to find the time in the near future to follow up on this at some length.

Related to the juxtaposed references to articles on civic and religious engagement in Monday’s post, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput delivered an address at Houston Baptist University on Monday entitled The Vocation of Christians in American Public Life, which is particularly interesting for the way he takes John F. Kennedy to task for his famous speech in Houston 50 years ago, in which Kennedy tried to reassure his audience of Protestant ministers that his Catholicism would not play a meaningful role in his public performance of duty, should he be elected President of the United States. Archbishop Chaput lays at Kennedy’s feet much of the facile double-mindedness that has since become so culpably endemic in the lives of too many Catholic public figures. Furthermore, he ties it to a general disintegration of of intellectual, moral, and spiritual vitality within the Catholic Church in America:

Too many Catholics confuse their personal opinions with a real Christian conscience. Too many live their faith as if it were a private idiosyncrasy – the kind that they’ll never allow to become a public nuisance. And too many just don’t really believe.

It’s a pretty sober reflection.

Contributing to my continually growing suspicion that I am an alien who ended up on this planet by mistake, I observed the world observing Earth Day yesterday. This seems like a harmless enough celebration, and at one time I probably thought it sounded like a good way to recognize the importance of acknowledging humanity’s responsibility as steward of creation, but somewhere along the line (and quite possibly right from the start), the notion of earth-stewardship was co-opted by hucksters of an astounding variety of stripes.

Everywhere I turned yesterday, there were people trying to sell me “green,” be it in the form of cynically marketed products, paternalistically proffered political ideology, or simply as a fashionable assertion of social conformity – lest I come to the abominable conclusion that some party wasn’t sufficiently “green.” But the pitch that takes the cake came in an email at work, from a newsletter aimed at selling professional services to project managers. Why this one? Because it simply cuts through the bull, and gets to the point:

The term "eco-friendly" shouldn’t make people roll their eyes anymore.they should see dollar signs.

I took the title of this post from the heading on the article blurb that began with the above sentence (punctuation irregularities in original). Really, I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. In the end, this “movement” is nothing but another scam; another opportunity for the clever to despoil the gullible. But marketing scams are a dime a dozen, and I fear this one traverses some dreadful terrain before it cashes in.

My deeper problem with the “green” movement is in the way it is passed off by the cultural illuminati as a form of morality. It serves as a substitute for a serious moral vision, placing no demands upon individuals except to practice acts of cheesy piety, such as recycling or buying green-blessed goods, yet offering the illusion of having satisfied some grave public – and perhaps even cosmic – need. This would be comical if there weren’t so many people jumping on the bandwagon, because the illusion of goodness, being the essence of idolatry, is a much more formidable enemy to the genuine good than bald evil is. “Green” certainly has become nothing if not a weapon against sound reason.

I sat in a traffic light in Wellesley tonight on my way home from work, behind a station wagon bearing a bumper sticker that said: “Be responsible: shut your car off while waiting.” Also emblazoned on the car were various peace stickers, and an Obama campaign sticker. And then there was the pro-choice slogan. If this kind of “morality” is not the height of whitewashed bourgeois acceptability and self-satisfaction on the face of an inferno of injustice and inhumanity, then I don’t know what is.

Yet this inhumanity seems to be a part of the very paradigm of the green movement. Whether it be Malthusian hysterics, anti-technological eco-puritanism, or the wildly popular “global warming” apocalyptic, humanity always seem to get painted as the problem that must be overcome in order to “save the Earth.” About a year ago, I read a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe from a leading local executive of either the United Church of Christ or the Unitarian Universalist Association, making the astonishing claim that global warming is the most important moral issue of our time. Never mind the dubiousness of the “crisis” in and of itself, can any sane person really imagine that man-made climate change is the most serious moral issue in a world still staggering from the bloodiest century in its history, still armed to the teeth with weapons of unfathomable terror, slaughtering its own children in a frenzy of sexual idiocy, and recklessly embracing immoral political ideas that attack the very foundations of human community?

But this is not the isolated view of a single left-wing whack job. The Worldwatch Institute held an interfaith symposium on global warming back in September 2006, during which Episcopalian priestess Sally Bingham expressed the emerging view: “Global warming,” says Reverend Bingham, “is one of the greatest moral issues of our time, if not the greatest.” And these supposed thought leaders are only following Prophet of Environmentalism Al Gore, who had earlier claimed that global warming was a moral issue, not a political issue.

Well, as recent history has proven yet again, hang on for dear life any time a politician starts claiming that a pet issue is not a “political” issue. But the most sublime symmetry is provided to this claim – that global warming is a moral, and not a political, issue – by a web petition sponsored by the National Council of Churches Eco-Justice Program, which sought to generate political support for the belief that global warming is a moral issue. Ah, serendipity. Alas, though, they fell short of their goal of 10,000 signatures. That only would have taken one signature from every ten congregations from among their member communions, according to the parent organization’s web site. Perhaps their membership was overly confused as to what it means to vote on whether or not something is a moral issue? I think the notion would have perplexed me.

A couple weeks ago, I came across an article on Boston.com that really struck me as being foreign to the world I live in. "Patients with strong faith more likely to get aggressive end-of-life care" looked at a Journal of the American Medical Association article that explored the influence of religious faith on end-of-life medical decisions by terminal patients.

What startles me in the writing is the apparent assumption that religiosity among these men and women was not something constitutive of them as persons, but a selected process of "coping." The clinicians quoted in the story seem fascinated by what they call "religious coping," expecting that some kind of objective analysis of the phenomenon will yield a "better understanding" of how it factors into decision making. These patients, essentially, were viewed not as persons of particular personal character, but as a sample of concept-consuming human laboratory rats who "used religion to some extent to cope with their illness."

Aside from the sadly comical image of clueless empiricists standing around a scene of deep human meaning with clipboards, kind of like they’re trying to measure changes in friction, for example, to explain human sexuality, I’m left with the disturbing realization that these people see "coping" as the fundamental human act. Everything is a tactic to be utilized in a complex story of universal manipulation. Even the human being as a subject is nothing more than the object of external phenomena that must be "coped with," for there is, in this barren and shallow worldview, no truly interior life.

Of course, the belief that reality can be manipulated is the very heart of superstition…

Even the chaplain gets into the act, finding “diverse choices” associated with “high levels of religious coping.” This makes her almost a dissenter to these “findings.”

I’m sorry, but I just can’t imagine entrusting someone I love to these imbeciles during his or her final days. I just don’t know how I’d cope.

“O Radiant Dawn, splendor of eternal light, sun of justice: come, shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.” _{(O Antiphon for Dec 21st)}

Natick, Massachusetts has been buried under a stubborn snowstorm over the past 48 hours or so, and it seems to have been a while since the light of dawn has made its presence felt. The feeling intensifies when I open my window to the world, and peer out at what is happening in my society today.

Christ, as the Sun of Justice, not only judges in righteousness, but also illuminates. For the second day in a row, the antiphon references the plight of those “who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Lk 1:79). This seems strangely appropriate as I look on the spectacle unfolding around Barack Obama’s invitation to Rick Warren to pray the invocation at Obama’s inauguration ceremony in January.

When I first saw the swirling blurbs of a scandal brewing, I immediately assumed that conservative Evangelicals (often wary of Rick Warren anyway) were inveighing against Warren for accepting the invitation, and therein supplying Obama’s image machine with a pretense of mainstream Evangelicalism’s accommodation of Obama’s notoriously radical and unholy social agenda. I will confess to having had some initial pangs of sympathy with that perspective (no doubt partly fueled by my own ambivalence toward Warren, whom I rightly or wrongly see as more of a best-selling promoter of self-help religion than a prophetic Christian witness), but I soon concluded that such reactionaryism was unwarranted – recognizing that the requirement to pray for and honor public leaders is not conditioned upon their policy aims – nor even their character.

How profoundly shocked I was, once I bit on some of the story teases, to learn that the outrage was coming from the left! Warren’s rejection of the “gay marriage” ploy is apparently enough to constitute him as a “bigot” unfit to give such a solemn invocation. But I have to ask, what does that make every other minister who has ever given the invocation for the Presidential office? For that matter, what does it make virtually every single human being who has ever populated this sorry planet?

Shine upon those in darkness and the shadow of death, indeed, O Light of Dawn.

[Update: Sure enough, the original post has been closed to comments, and the existing comments have, ummm, disappeared - but not before I received at least one reply worthy of an eight year-old schoolyard bully, replete with personal insults, and taunts that sounded eerily like "I'm rubber and you're glue." JWG]

[Update2, Dec. 20, 2008: My understanding is that the comments on the other site reappeared (resurrected?) after things died down. Regardless, since I got a decent amount of traffic on this post, and since I can have a do-over whenever I want on my own website, I've edited my counterpoints below to clarify both what some of the issues were, as well as some of my responses. JWG]

Since this post is supposedly directed at Christians for their instruction, and since I am a Christian forever in need of instruction, I read it. In doing so,I uncovered more than a few questionable assumptions being made. This, in turn, prompted me to put together what I here offer as a well-intentioned, point-by-point rejoinder, which I suppose I should title:

Things an Atheist Should Know Before He Tells Christians Things They Should Know Before Talking to an Atheist

1.) I’m not sure why your very first assertion is that Hitler was not an atheist. I suppose it must be because you sometimes hear people associating him with your cause, but I think most thinking Christians couldn’t care less whether Hitler was an atheist, a refashioned pagan warlord demigod, or a New Age guru selling a vision of utopia built upon a bloody battlefield. He was an idolater in any case.

However, this raises another point that bears mention: atheists often play flip-flop in their apologetics, arguing one minute against theism, and the next minute against Christianity proper – conflating the two tendentiously. It might, therefore, seem to some Christian apologists to be a case of “turnabout is fair play” to lump Hitler in with the major atheistic mass murderers of the 20th century (Stalin and Mao), since the three of them form a kind of perfect demonic troika of testimony to refute the tired atheistic canard that Christianity’s “wars of religion” in Europe and/or Crusading in Asia are “proof” that religion is the seedbed of humanity’s warring violence.

So, before you protest your disassociation from Hitler so loudly as to call attention to it, you’d do well to carefully examine the actual philosophical similarities and differences – apart from playing “label” games, and name-calling – because he was nothing if not committed to abolishing the Christian religious virtues in Europe, which is precisely the aim of militant atheism. Contemporary atheism may have a much narrower agenda than German National Socialism did, but it can hardly be disputed that they both drink from the same well of modern, anti-Christian thought, such as that of Nietzsche.

2.) Morality is not a “state of conscience” at all, whatever that means. Rather, it is the consideration and accomplishment, in particular circumstances, of the good and/or evil inherent in an act or idea, and a measure of the moralness of an act or idea in terms of its conformance to the good. If you are attempting to claim that morality is not the exclusive domain of Christianity, and that atheism can also produce morality, you are half right, but you have a problem.

The problem is that since morality measures the moralness (or goodness) of an act by its conformance to the good, the good must really exist in order for morality to be rational. Atheism, however, cannot coherently accept the actual existence of either good or evil as real things, as opposed to concepts that are products of either individual people’s preferences, or of collective opinions. Because if there is such an independent reality “out there” as the good, against which the opinions of individuals or groups or even all of humanity can be measured, then “the good” is God (in the most basic, theistic sense).

And if there is not such a reality as the good “out there” to produce the judgment of morality, then there can be no such thing as actual morality, only opinion – meaning that social “morality” would be nothing but the prevailing opinion of the most powerful interest group (=might makes right). This kind of irrational tyranny is not what Christians (or other theists, for that matter) are referring to when they speak of morality.

So, no, atheism cannot produce morality – and atheists cannot even intelligibly engage in discussions evaluating morality. Atheism can produce value systems based on opinions of greater or lessor worth, but in order for such a value system to be judged moral or immoral, there must be some pre-existing standard of the good to be measured against (i.e. the moral order, or the truth) – the very existence of which would prove the inanity of atheism.

3.) Kindly do not tell Christians who or what they can or cannot pray for. Christians are free human beings who do not tolerate such attempts at thought control, especially coming from someone who holds them in such obvious contempt. As for the millions of “ill and starving,” God is not “testing” them; it looks to me like God is waiting for you to go tend to them. Yes, God is testing you. Please be sure to leave us all a note telling us when you’ve decided to put your money where your mouth is. If you’re, you know, too busy, I’m sure God can find someone else.

4.) The “leprechauns” bit really makes atheists look like clowns. It takes a number of forms, but they all basically come down to the accusation that believing in God is no different than believing in (fill in the blank: leprechauns, fairies, Santa Claus, etc.). The problem, of course, is that these are not the same at all. To an atheist, perhaps the existence of a leprechaun might seem as likely as the existence of God, but that does not make God a leprechaun, nor does it follow that belief in one is the same kind of belief as belief in the other. Any time an atheist accuses me of believing in a “sky pixie” or something of the sort, I know he has run out of intelligent things to say – he is ridiculing me on the obviously false premise that I believe in what I do not in fact believe in, all for the sake of asserting that he is justified in his unbelief of that which I really do believe in. That’s pathetic.

An illustration: To a theist, it seems equally likely that there is no such reality as air, as that there is no such reality as God. Now, if theistic apologists started mocking atheists’ unbelief in “invisible things” by claiming that atheists must believe there is no such thing as air, atheists would probably be beside themselves. They would complain: “This is an outrageous accusation. Just because we don’t believe in God doesn’t mean we don’t believe in air. Even though neither God nor air is visible, there are other rational means we have for believing that air is real, which are not applicable to the problem of the existence of God.” This complaint would be 100% valid, of course.

But if the theists nonetheless continued to mock atheists by claiming that their atheism was, at least by extension if not explicitly, a denial of the reality of air, the atheists would have no other option but to eventually come to the conclusion that the theistic apologists were intellectually dishonest. They would be right. Theistic apologists, after all, have an intellectual responsibility to grapple with the best arguments atheism has. To instead sidestep the real arguments, and construct an absurd strawman argument that bears none but the most blatantly superficial resemblance to the view held by the opposition, is really an admission that you don’t have the gonads to tackle the real arguments.

Ridiculing people with lies when you don’t have an intelligent argument to offer against them might make you feel less impotent, but it only makes you look like a clown. You might want to rethink the “leprechaun” shtick.

5.) If you tell a Christian that you think Jesus is an imaginary person, you’re likely to get a bemused look – if not a pat on the head. The historicalness of Jesus of Nazareth is beyond honest dispute. Now, whether he really is God Incarnate might be an open question, but his disciples were not willing to be tortured and killed for the sake of an imaginary person they conspired to pretend existed. Jesus was a real man whom they really loved.

6.) Atheists may think they know the Bible better than most Christians (and some Christians hardly know the Bible at all, so that’s not saying much), but actually atheists generally know very little about the Bible. If they know anything, they know a handful of carefully selected “gotcha” passages, yet even those they don’t know well enough to understand properly. Most Christians would be well aware of that fact, if and when confronted with demands to answer some “gotcha” question or other. In Biblical language, knowledge implies intimacy, which is the one thing that atheists, by definition, can never achieve with the Bible and still remain atheistic. For to become intimately knowledgeable with (or even about) a book means to come to know, in some manner, its author.

7.) While certain Protestants have, admittedly, muddied the water with their self-contradictory Sola Scriptura doctrine, most Christians would look at you with a bit of incomprehension if you tried to claim that the Bible does not “prove” God. The Bible is a collection of stories that reveal God, not argue for His existence. The Bible, being understood as inspired by God, presupposes both the existence of God, and the existence of the knowledge of God. Christianity has produced some philosophical proofs for God (such as those of Anselm and Aquinas), but these have no real bearing on the life of faith – and certainly have nothing to do with the Bible.

The great theological virtues are faith, hope, and love – the implication being that faith and hope are stepping stones to love. But “proof” (or perfect knowledge), when it comes, will obsolete both faith and hope. This is obvious in the very meanings of faith and hope. That is why the Christian seeks “proof” (of what is yet still hidden) within faith and within hope – and not in the Bible as some kind of cosmic trump card or master answer sheet. You’re barking up the wrong tree.

8.) The founders of the USA did not flee Europe, as you assert; they were mostly born here. I live in a state (Massachusetts) that produced some of the finest of them. On the other hand, those folks who did flee Europe to come here did not flee Christianity, they mostly (especially early on) fled to practice Christianity – albeit in the manner they saw fit, which the states they fled were hostile to. When their descendants later founded the USA, they founded it on ideals of political and religious liberty, avoiding the anti-religious zealotry that would, just a few years later, turn the French Revolution into the abomination of The Terror.

The genius of the refusal to establish a national church, protecting the rights of all to practice their religions freely, needs to be extended in our own day to combat the new, modern threat to religious liberty, which is the militant atheistic tendency to attempt to suppress public religious expression through the use of the power of the state to enforce a practical atheism on public life. This is precisely the kind of state interference in the free exercise of religion that the First Amendment to the Constitution intended to protect against.

9.) I agree that evolution is not just for atheists. But evolutionism, as a post-modern intellectual movement, is simply not content with evolution. Instead, it extends incessantly into philosophical (or metaphysical) naturalism, which is indeed, by definition, for atheists only. This all gets very confusing to discuss, since no less than three completely different ideas end up going by the name of evolution. These three can be more precisely called: micro evolution; macro evolution; and philosophical naturalism. It is my contention that this linguistic confusion is intentional on the part of philosophical naturalists, who benefit from the public conflation of their absurd ideas with the simple and provable (micro)evolution observed in particular species by biologists.

10.) Attendance at “God’s judgment day” will not be voluntary. As for you not needing to be “saved,” what Christianity offers is salvation from death, and if you think you are going to somehow slide by that obstacle without Christ, well, good luck to you, but the Christians you announce this to will not be impressed.

11.) If you believe that someone, before Jesus, was born of a virgin, and resurrected from death, I’d be interested in hearing how it is that you believe it. I suspect this is a pointless point, boldface and all…

12.) Regarding proofs and elves, please see earlier comments on proofs and leprechauns.

13.) Love and faith are not, in fact, emotions; they are acts of the will. While there are feelings associated with these, they are at root rational, outward-focused expressions of human freedom, not feelings.

As to the anatomy matter, you are not likely to impress anyone with pedantic biology lessons. We know what a heart is.

14.) I agree that quoting Bible verses to an atheist is a waste of time, but not because the Biblical writers were ostensibly insane. Rather, it is a waste of time because atheists do not accept the authority of the Bible, and have no interest in what it says – with the exception of those things that can be misconstrued for dubious ends. The Bible itself actually boasts wisdom to this effect.

15.) Regarding your claim that not all atheists are intellectuals: I couldn’t agree more. Heck, I was an atheist myself once, as a teenager. But I ended up discovering that my adolescent atheism – as convenient as it was at the time – was even more childish than the childish “faith” of my youth, and I had to give it up.

I’m afraid many of the Christian apologists you will meet will have had a similar experience to mine, and I don’t think it will be a revelation to them that disbelief is running rampant through all the several strata of our society, and not just in the ivory towers of academia. I must admit surprise, though, that you find it worthwhile to distance yourself from the intellectuals of your movement. Perhaps you think that buys you authenticity. Whatever.

You may or may not have some decent arguments to make, but I think you gain little in distancing yourself from the Dawkins and Hutchins of the world unless you have something more civil and substantial than they do to offer in terms of disagreement. I don’t see any evidence of it here.

The “holiday” feeding frenzy is off to an inauspicious start today. The day began, in Nassau County, New York, with a 34 year-old WalMart employee being trampled to death by a mob of early-morning deal seekers who broke down the doors of the building in an earnest attempt to score the very first discounted gizmos.

Not to be outdone by the east coasters, a pair of men in a California Toys “R” Us store gunned each other down after their female companions entered into fisticuffs (in front of their children). The corporate offices of Toys “R” Us, however, issued a statement saying that “it would be inaccurate to associate the events of today with Black Friday.”

Black Friday? I know I’m a bit out of the loop when it comes to these things, but exactly how and when did this day come to be called Black Friday? It’s bad enough that it’s been known as the beginning of “Christmas Season,” even though Advent Season doesn’t even start for another few days – let alone the real Christmas Season, which starts late in December. Of course, nowadays, nobody with any manners would refer to “Christmas Season” for fear of being labeled a religious intolerant. That’s just as well, because “Black Friday” and the rest of the associated seasonal lunacy (murders aside) has absolutely nothing to do with the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus Christ, which is, ostensibly, where this whole disgrace began.

No doubt, we will soon enough be assaulted by the annual appeals to “keep Christ in Christmas.” I’m not sure that’s exactly the right solution, though. At this point, that sounds to me too much like syncretism. I think the Church needs to find a way to disassociate itself from the annual orgy of materialism, allow the hostile secularists to extirpate all references to Christ from the public occasion, and offer, instead, a very different vision of the season – one rooted in the reflective and preparatory spirituality of Advent.

Few things make me feel like I was born on the wrong planet as much as the blatant denial of the meaning and authority of reality – that is to say, the reality of objective truth. This is truly a malady of modern human reason, and it seems to be rampant – maybe even epidemic. There are days I’m sure I’ve seen everything, then there are days, and I think this is one of those days, when I’m almost afraid to look out the window at the world for fear of the lunacy I might encounter.

I came across a startling statement in a Boston Globe article a couple months ago or so, which I decided at the time to let slide without comment, but the story reappeared last week, and fits too well into a pattern with some other recent stories, suggesting that we have inadequate cultural resources at our disposal, on account of our social penchant for subjectivism, with which to deal seriously with personal fraud.

The statement came from a 71 year-old Massachusetts woman named Misha Defonseca, in an article discussing her ongoing troubles with an American publisher named Jane Daniel, in which Defonseca offered what she must have thought was a serious explanation for fabricating the story behind a book she wrote at Daniel’s urging. Defonseca claimed to have been a young Jewish girl who escaped the Nazis and was raised by wolves in the Ukraine, among other adventures. The book was huge commercially in Europe, and was even made into a film in France, but the story was a complete fabrication. Defonseca isn’t even Jewish, never mind the bit about the wolves.

Defonseca’s troubles with Daniel don’t really interest me – it is a tawdry story without any redeeming characters – but her explanation for the fraud she perpetrated floored me when I read it in the Globe:

“This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” Defonseca said in a statement released by her lawyers.

What on earth is that supposed to mean? Not only did a 71 year-old woman think this statement up, but her lawyers apparently thought it could somehow garner sympathy! What if they’re right?

It’s important to understand that she did not make the story up to publish in a book for profit; she had been telling the story for years to anyone that would listen. She has spent half a lifetime feeding off the attention her “fantasy” has attracted her (not to mention the large sums of money earned over the past decade or so), and yet now that her hoax is revealed, she shamelessly tries to cling to her story by subjectivizing the grounds for judging her actions. As long as she wants the story to be true, she figures she can continue to perpetuate it at some level, denying any culpability, with no concern for the many people she deceived, no sense of genuine repentance, and no apparent understanding that the truth matters. By her own words, her life has become so intertwined in this lie that she cannot extricate herself.

In a world in which the public order has repressed religious authority as being unreasonable and oppressive of individual freedom, we see in this embarrassing episode the worst elements of religious self deception and irrational, delusional pretense coming to expression in the hope-forsaken framework of the psychologized modern mind, with its pathetic appetite for self-esteem and “affirmation,” trapped in a prison of relativistic subjectivity that is incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. Reality (that is, the truth) plays such an inconsequential part in her chosen shade of existence that she will likely go to the grave without ever comprehending the evil she has contributed to the world through her shameless dishonesty. But perhaps even sadder is that she has completely lost her own self in the process.

This is, after all, not her story at all, even as she so desperately wants to believe it is. It is the story of someone who never existed, the story of no one at all. It’s the story of nothing – it’s not even a story; it’s a fraud – it’s not real. Her story, indeed, can never be known, because her existence has been emptied out meaninglessly, replaced by a fraud that has no reality, no existence. No one will ever know her, because her story can never be told; eternally lost in the fog of deceit and moral corruption, she doesn’t even know herself.

Truly, the saddest thing about the indulgent “identity” culture of modernity’s narcissistic bent is that identity can never be found in the mirage of self-seeking, only lost:

Thus says the LORD:
What fault did your fathers find in me that they withdrew from me,
Went after empty idols, and became empty themselves?
Jeremiah 2:5 (NAB)

Somewhere, there are those who, as young Jewish girls, did go through the horrors of Nazism, who must feel nothing but shame for this woman, who cannot manage to be ashamed of herself.