Commentor KW on China's one-child policy

Commentor KW takes issue with my post condemning China's one-child policy:

KW:

I certainly object to forced abortion. It's outrageous,

There are different degrees of force. I presume you don't support government officials strapping women to tables to abort their children (a common practice in China). But any government population policy is force. The force may take less obvious form-- the family may be punished financially or professionally. It's still force. And you have no problem with it, it seems.

but only slightly more outrageous than forcing women to give birth.

Giving birth is natural, not forced. It's how we all got here, KW. If you mean that restricting abortion is force, I point out that killing innocents has generally been prohibited by law. Insisting that a child's life be protected and respected is not 'only slightly less outrageous' than forced abortions. It's not outrageous at all.

Perhaps big tax breaks for couples that have only one child would be better approach for the Chinese government.

Taxing the hell out of families with more than one child is such an enlightened policy. It will be of particular benefit to sustenance farmers trying to feed more than one child. That'll teach 'em to procreate when you ordered 'em not to.

The practice of selective abortions of girls is stupid because it will harm Chinese society.

It's not "stupid". It's an atrocity. And killing girls doesn't just harm Chinese society. It harms the girls who are killed. You seem to keep forgetting about them.

I hope the sake of Chinese morality isn't fixed by some transcendent opinion, and that the Chinese can learn to love their child no matter their sex. 

'Love and cherish the little darlings, but if you have more than one, we'll rip out your ovaries'. A prescription for love.

China is trying to save China,

Totalitarians are doing what totalitarians always do. It has nothing to do with "saving China". It has to do with the assertion of power over the most intimate aspects of family life. Large families and the intimate loyalty within the family have always been an impediment to totalitarians. Families distract people from doing what the totalitarians want them to do, which is obey totalitarians. Strapping a woman to a table and ripping out her kid that she conceived despite your order is a very effective way to teach obedience. It makes people listen more attentively in the future. In the society you envision, there can be no foci of influence (family or church) that distracts people from submission to your authority. Totalitarianism 101.

and in so doing the help to make the earth more sustainable for the rest of us.

I feel so much more sustained after of tens of millions of murders and forced abortions and sterilizations. Don't you?

I know that many, if not most, of American religious conservatives simply don't believe that we can ruin the earth because we are not in control.

Christians support conservation. It's batsh*t fact-free totalitarianism that gives us pause.

Others believe and want their best friend in the sky to save their righteous asses as it all goes to hell. Unfortunately the rest of us, living in the real world, have to suffer the consequences of your faith based politics.

And tens of millions of children murdered and men and women involuntarily sterilized for your totalitarian ideology suffered the consequences of your faith based politics.

The world is indeed going to hell in a hand-basket,

Can you name one prediction you totalitarian overpopulation nuts have made since Malthus that has come true?

and it's religious conservatives the world over that are fighting the hardest to make sure we do nothing about it.

Damn right. We think that the only overpopulation we have is that there is too much totalitarianism. We're trying to reduce the rate at which it reproduces.

If every person really understood what was happening to our planet, and wanted a future with a minimum of human suffering, they would use that knowledge and their intellect to suppress the genetically driven, religiously mandated, drive to reproduce like lemmings.

Tens of millions of dead Chinese children is quite a start on your crusade to save the world from... from... people. And why isn't the unchecked spread of totalitarianism a problem for our planet? Why isn't the violent intrusion of jackbooted government "population" officials into the most intimate aspect of family life a problem for our planet? Scares me a whole heck of a lot more than a few more people.

Why don't we just restrict the increase in population of totalitarians? (We could make condoms with little pictures of Pol Pot so totalitarians would want to use them). Unlike Chinese farmers, totalitarians have a proven record of killing lots of people.

Education and the shedding of illogical religious dogma is the key to a prosperous, just, and happy future.

Just what China has done. Hundreds of millions of dead children. Tens of million missing girls. Millions of women forced to undergo involuntary abortions. Millions of involuntarily sterilized men and women. Families shredded. An aging population without enough young people to sustain growth or even to support the aged.

But they do obey, which is what totalitarianism population control is all about.

Atheist censors try to stop street naming for 9-11 heroes

From Hot Air:

Street name “Seven in Heaven Way” upsets American Atheists

POSTED AT 7:12 PM ON JULY 12, 2011 BY TINA KORBE 

This summer, the city of Brooklyn renamed a neighborhood street “Seven in Heaven Way” to honor seven local firefighters who gave their lives on Sept. 11, 2001. A nice thought, right? Simple, symbolic, sincere. But sadly, the commemorative gesture has since generated controversy.

The New Jersey-based American Atheists, the same group that brought the country “God Less America” Fourth of July aerial banners, promptly objected to the street name.

“It’s improper for the city to endorse the view that heaven exists,” American Atheists president David Silverman said. “It links Christianity and heroism.”

Atheist bigots have no shame. The naming of the street reflects the views of the vast majority of Americans who want to honor these brave men-- who are in heaven.

Additional objections: Sept. 11 was an attack on “all of America,” so no memorial of it should “break” the Constitution — and, also, the street sign presumes to know what the seven firefighters themselves believed.

But, as The Heritage Foundation’s Jennifer Marshall points out, the group’s objections reveal a misunderstanding of freedom of religion.

"Godless secularism – or a “naked public square” denuded of all religious references and symbols, as the late Richard John Neuhaus put it – never was intended to be the character of our American republic. Religious freedom, the cornerstone of all freedom, is freedom for religion, not hostility toward it.

Yes, the Founders wisely separated political from religious authority in our federal government, but they didn’t intend to divorce religion from public life or politics. They based the American model of religious liberty on a favorable view of religious practice.

Far from privatizing or marginalizing religion, the Founders assumed religious believers and institutions would take active roles in society, engaging in the political process and helping to shape consensus on morally fraught questions. …

Most nations are dominated, demographically anyway, by adherents of particular faiths. But every denomination – and the atheist camp as well – is a small minority somewhere on the planet. This reality underscores why religious liberty, not the radical secularist or theocratic systems at either end of the spectrum, should be precious to everyone."

But on a more practical level, the objections reveal an acute sensitivity that seems unwarranted in this situation. A street name with the word “heaven” doesn’t automatically imply an endorsement of Christianity — many other religions include a paradisal idea of the afterlife, too. Nor does it even necessarily imply an endorsement of the belief that heaven is real. Are no streets named for mythical places or fictional characters?

Do we have to change all names of public places-- Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis -- that some moonbat atheist might find objectionable?

We need to understand that the humorous caricature of the atheist--  the faculty lounge denizen with the pony tail and the Che t-shirt-- under-represents the simple hate that these people have for Christianity. They are the perpetually offended, inveterate totalitarians, who use every means at their disposal to inflict their idiot ideology on the American public.

The proper response to these thugs is derision and defiance.

David Berlinski on Uncommon Knowledge

The brilliant David Berlinski is a guest on Peter Robinson's Uncommon Knowledge.

I had the pleasure of having dinner with Berlinski a few years ago. Berlinski is a genuine skeptic, unlike the atheist frauds who today lay claim to the moniker. He asks deep questions about all claims to knowledge, including his own. He is a gifted writer and thinker. His books-- including the Devil's Delusion and his most recent One, Two, Three; absolutely elementary mathematics, are must-reads for those interested in scientism, philosophy of science, and mathematics.

He is a gentleman as well as a scholar, and I highly recommend his work. He is a public intellectual in the finest sense, unlike the poseurs so prominent in the public square today.

Jerry Coyne stands up for abortion and infanticide. Not so much for democracy.

Jerry Coyne on abortion and infanticide:

Coyne quotes CNN news:

From CNN News comes this bizarre event: Mississippi will hold a referendum to determine whether voters think that “personhood” begins with conception.

Mississippians vote on whether a zygote is a person

Voters in Mississippi will be given a chance to decide whether life begins at conception, a controversial abortion-related ballot initiative that the state’s highest court has refused to block.

The Mississippi Supreme Court late Thursday allowed Measure 26, also known as the Personhood Amendment, to appear on the state ballot November 8. The decision was a rejection of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and abortion-rights groups.

The 7-2 ruling said those groups had not met the legal burden required to restrict the right of citizens to amend the state constitution. . .

. . . Anti-abortion forces hope the amendment, if passed, would ultimately be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, providing another opportunity for the justices to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. 

Coyne:

...I recognize that for many abortion is not a clear-cut issue, and there is controversy about the stage at which aborting a fetus should be considered illegal or immoral. Some, like Peter Singer, even think that some euthanasia of severely afflicted or doomed newborns might be permitted, and I can see the validity of that view as well.

Medical killing of handicapped children has quite a history in the 20th century. In Groningen Holland neonatologists have been killing handicapped newborns for a decade. They even published a paper describing their technique (legal technique, not just the medial technique) in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In Germany in the 1930's, the T4 program euthanized killed a quarter of a million handicapped people, many of whom were children. After the war, the doctors responsible for it got to explain themselves in court. Their explanations were similar to explanations used by defenders of euthanasia of handicapped children today. The court carefully considered their explanations. The doctors were hanged.

Hint to Coyne: your opinion is on thin ethical ice if it was used by defense counsel at Nuremberg.

At any rate, according to a 2006 survey by the Guttmacher Institute, only 1.5% of abortions in America involve fetuses older than 21 weeks, the age at which the fetus is usually considered viable,...

There were over a million abortions in the U.S. last year. So 15,000 "viable" babies were aborted last year. Actually, most of the million kids were viable, if they hadn't been killed and had been allowed to continue to grow in their mother's womb.

There are 3700 undergraduates at the University of Chicago, which is the institution at which Coyne teaches. The fact that the number of viable babies (babies who could live outside of the womb at the time they were aborted) killed by abortionists each year is four times the number of  undergraduates at Coyne's university seems not to bother him. His term for that number of viable aborted babies is "only..."

 I know that women don’t take the procedure lightly, and hardly regard it (as many religious people seem to do) as a form of birth control.

Abortion is the most common surgical procedure performed on women in the U.S.-- about 1.2 million per year. That's more than all breast augmentations (296,203), nose reshapings (188,676), liposuctions (179,207), eyelid surgeries (177,288), and tummy tucks (111, 642) combined.

Women don't take abortions lightly.

Clearly, an 100-cell blastocyst does not have any feelings or thoughts...

Coyne uses his scientific training here.

(much less a soul),

The soul the form of a living thing. A human being has a soul from conception to natural death.

Coyne has a soul too. He had one when he was a 100 cell blastocyst, and he'll have one when he's very elderly. All human beings have souls.

and to deem that ball of cells equivalent to an adult human being elides some very serious differences involving sentience.

To deem a human being at the blastocyst stage the intellectual equivalent of an human being at the adult stage would be mistaken. To deem a very young human being devoid of the right to life is another matter entirely.

Coyne's implicit assertion is that intelligence or sentience is the criterion on which to base human rights. This is an assertion that most people would challenge, which is why it is usually stated vaguely.

Do notice that pro-abortion pro-infanticide folks always assert that their own qualities (adulthood, intelligence,...) are the criteria that confer human rights. Coyne does not assert, for instance, that non-interference with the rights of defenseless humans should be a criterion for conferral of human rights.

Coyne's criteria for human rights seems to boil down, in the important respects, to being like Coyne. Hmmm...

A blastocyst is no more what we think of as a “person” than an acorn is the same thing as an oak tree.

A member of a species remains a member of that species throughout its life. An acorn is a very young oak tree. A blastocyst is a very young human being. Species and individuation remain the same throughout life. Accidents (size, leafiness, sentience) change.

Does Coyne, a professor of biology, believe that the unborn child changes species during development? If it does not, then the child is as much a homo sapiens (human being) at conception as he is when he gets tenure at the University of Chicago. People look different, and have different capabilities, at different ages. They're still human beings, from conception to natural death. Basic biology, Jerry. Do you actually teach your students that human beings change species in the womb?

And this doesn’t even take into consideration the widespread view that abortion is a private matter involving the wishes of the parents, the fact that women will seek out abortions whether or not they’re illegal (thousands of Irish women, for example, fly to England every year for abortions), and the possibility that the production of unwanted children may be bad for both those children and society.

Uwanted children are not "produced". They're born. They need to loved, nourished, and cherished.  Ever heard of adoption, Jerry?

Further, if a fetus at any state is deemed a “person,” then abortion becomes equivalent to murder.

Abortion is homicide, as a matter of definition. Murder is the just most serious form of homicide.  Pro-abortion activists try to scare the public into assuming that legal restriction on abortion would involve charging the mother with murder. That is not part of the pro-life view. Abortionists-- the people who profit from killing babies-- should and would be the target of legal sanction.

Now there are nonreligious objections to abortion, but clearly much of this “personhood” kerfuffle derives from religion and its attendant concept of a soul...

The "concept" is respect for human life.  Christians (which is what Coyne means by "religion") believe that all human beings have the right to life at all ages. The most fundamental right of personhood is the right to life. It is the right on which all other rights depend.

It seems to me that although America is a democracy, it’s dicey to leave the definition of “personhood” up to the voters rather than the judiciary (but please, not this Supreme Court!).

Jerry Coyne finds this "We the People..." stuff so... so... frustrating. Why should the people of Mississippi get to write the laws for the people of Mississippi? Shouldn't the (unelected and unaccountable) judiciary get to make the laws? And shouldn't Jerry Coyne get to pick which courts get to make the law? They're elites like Coyne, and they know best.

The sheer depravity of Coyne's worldview in on display here. Support for abortion, including the annual killing of 15,000 babies capable of living outside of the womb, killing of handicapped children, idiotic assertions about the biology of human development to justify killing the young, and startlingly casual dismissal of democracy are part and parcel of atheist/materialist ethics.

This is why we fight.

Joe Carter on the myth of Galileo

Joe Carter at First Things has a superb post on the truth about the Galileo affair:

The Myth of Galileo: A Story With a (Mostly) Valuable Lesson for Today

Thursday, September 8, 2011, 12:36 PM

Joe Carter

In the Republican presidential debate last night, Rick Perry responded to John Huntsman’s appeal to science on climate change by saying:

The science is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet to me is just nonsense . . . Just because you have a group of scientists who stood up and said here is the fact. Galileo got outvoted for a spell.

This has lead to numerous pundits to scoff at Perry’s analogy. Political scientist Steven Taylor provides a typical example:

. . . Perry presented this analogy as if Galileo was caught up in a scientific battle with other scientists when, in fact, he was the scientist battling non-scientists. As such, governor, that analogy does not mean what you think it means (or, to. paraphrase a debate line from many years ago: you, governor, are no Galileo).

Steven Taylor is a very smart guy. But he is (mostly) wrong about Galileo.

Here is the real story about Galileo Galilei. It’s not the story about an enlightened scientist being persecuted by a narrow-minded Catholic Church because that story is (mostly) a myth. It’s not a story about a great scientific genius either, though he was that (mainly). It’s also not a story about someone being reincarnated with the soul of the old astronomer like the song by the Indigo Girls that, for a few weeks in ’92, I thought was (almost) profound. (And I should point out that it not an original story but one that cribbed together from other sources.)

But like all good stories this one provides a (mostly) valuable lesson.

In Galileo’s day, the predominant view in astronomy was a model first espoused by Aristotle and developed by Claudius Ptolemy in which the sun and planets revolved around the earth. The Ptolemic system had been the reigning paradigm for over 1400 years when a Polish Canon named Nicholas Copernicus published his seminal work, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs.

Now Copernicus’ heliocentric theory wasn’t exactly new nor was it based on purely empirical observation. While it had a huge impact on the history of science, his theory was more of a revival of Pythagorean mysticism than of a new paradigm. Like many great discoveries, he merely took an old idea and gave it a new spin.

Although Copernicus’ fellow churchmen encouraged him to publish his work, he delayed the publication of On the Revolution for several years for fear of being mocked by the scientific community. At the time, the academy belonged to Aristotelians who weren’t about to let such nonsense slip through the “peer review” process.

Then came Galileo, the prototypical Renaissance man a brilliant scientist, mathematician, and musician. But while he as intelligent, charming, and witty, the Italian was also argumentative, mocking, and vain. He was, as we would say, complex. When his fellow astronomer Johann Kepler wrote to tell him that he had converted to Copernicus’ theory, Galileo shot back that he had too — and had been so for years (though all evidence shows that it wasn’t true). His ego wouldn’t allow him to be upstaged by men who weren’t as smart as he was. And for Galileo, that included just about everybody.

In 1610, Galileo used his telescope to make some surprising discoveries that disputed Aristotelian cosmology. Though his findings didn’t exactly overthrow the reigning view of the day, they were warmly received by the Vatican and by Pope Paul V. Rather than continuing his scientific studies and building on his theories, though, Galileo began a campaign to discredit the Aristotelian view of astronomy. (His efforts would be akin to a modern biologist trying to dethrone Darwin.) Galileo knew he was right and wanted to ensure that everyone else knew that the Aristotelians were wrong.

In his efforts to cram Copernicanism down the throats of his fellow scientists, Galileo managed only to squander the goodwill he had established within the Church. He was attempting to force them to accept a theory that, at the time, was still unproven. The Church graciously offered to consider Copernicanism a reasonable hypothesis, albeit a superior one to the Ptolemaic system, until further proof could be gathered. Galileo, however, never came up with more evidence to support the theory. Instead, he continued to pick fights with his fellow scientists even though many of his conclusions were being proven wrong (i.e., that the planets orbit the sun in perfect circles).

Galileo’s primary mistake was to move the fight out of the realm of science and into the field of biblical interpretation. In a fit of hubris, he wrote the Letter to Castelli in order to explain how his theory was not incompatible with proper biblical exegesis. With the Protestant Reformation still fresh on their minds, the Church authorities were in no mood to put up with another troublemaker trying to interpret Scripture on his own.

But, to their credit, they didn’t overreact. The Letter to Castelli was twice presented to the Inquisition as an example of the astronomer’s heresy and twice the charges were dismissed. Galileo, however, wasn’t satisfied and continued his efforts to force the Church to concede that the Copernican system was an issue of irrefutable truth.

In 1615, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine politely presented Galileo with an option: Put up or Shut up. Since there was no proof that the earth revolved around the sun, there was no reason for Galileo to go around trying to change the accepted reading of Holy Scripture. But if he had proof, the Church was willing to reconsider their position. Galileo’s response was to produce his theory that the ocean tides were caused by the earth’s rotation. The idea was not only scientifically inaccurate but so silly it was even rejected by his supporters.

Fed up with being dismissed, Galileo returned to Rome to bring his case before the Pope. The Pontiff, however, merely passed it along to the Holy Office who issued the opinion that the Copernican doctrine is “foolish and absurd, philosophically and formally heretical inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the doctrine of Holy Scripture in many passages…” The verdict was quickly overruled by other Cardinals in the Church.

Galileo wasn’t about to let up, though, and to everyone’s exasperation, pressed the issue yet again. The Holy Office politely but firmly told him to shut up about the whole Copernican thing and forbid him from espousing the unproven theory. This, of course, was more than he was willing to do.

When his friend took over the Papal throne, Galileo thought he would finally find a sympathetic ear. He discussed the issue with Pope Urban VIII, a man knowledgeable in matters of math and science, and tried to use his theory of the tides to convince him of the validity of his theory. Pope Urban was unconvinced and even gave an answer (though not a sound one) that refuted the notion.

Galileo then wrote A Dialogue About the Two Chief World Systems in which he would present the views of both Copernicus and Ptolemy. Three characters would be involved: Salviati, the Copernican; Sagredo, the undecided; and Simplicio, the Ptolemian (the name Simplicio implying “simple-minded”). And here is where we find our hero making his biggest blunder: he took the words that Pope Urban had used to refute his theory of the tides and put them in the mouths of Simplicio.

The Pope was not amused.

Galileo, who was now old and sickly, was once again called before the Inquisition. Unlike most suspected heretics, though, he was treated surprisingly well. While waiting for his trial, Galileo was housed in a luxurious apartment overlooking the Vatican gardens and provided with a personal valet.

In his defense, Galileo tried a peculiar tactic. He attempted to convince the judges that he had never maintained nor defended the opinion that the earth moves and that the sun is stationary and that he had, in fact, demonstrated the opposite by showing how the Copernican hypothesis was in error. The Holy Office, who knew they were being played for fools, condemned him as being “vehemently suspected of heresy”, a patently unjust ruling considering that Copernicanism had never been declared heretical.

Galileo’s sentence was to renounce his theory and to live out the rest of his days in a pleasant country house near Florence. Obviously the exile did him good because it was there, under the care of his daughter, that he continued his experiments and published his best scientific work, Discourses on Two New Sciences. He died quietly in 1642 at the ripe old age of 77.

As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “In a generation which saw the Thirty Years’ War and remembered Alva in the Netherlands, the worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”

As Paul Harvey would say, now we know the rest of the story. So what can we learn from this tale? I think it provides different lessons for different groups of people.

For scientists it shows that if you are in agreement with most of your colleagues, you will most likely be forgotten while history remembers some crank. For advocates of non-consensus positions (e.g., AGW skeptics, Intelligent Design theorists) it teaches that claiming your theory is correct is no substitute for backing it up with experiments and data (even if you are right). For aggressively self-confident people the lesson is that sometimes being persistent and believing in yourself will just get you into trouble. For Catholics it provides an example of why you shouldn’t insult the Pope (at least when there is an Inquisition going on).

I suspect that there are many more lessons that can be gleaned from this story. But I find that the real moral is not so much in the story itself but in the fact that the story even needs to be told in the first place. While I first heard the story of Galileo in elementary school, it wasn’t until long, long after I had graduated from college that I finally learned the truth. No doubt some people are just now hearing about it for the first time. How is that possible?

I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that for centuries people like Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Carl Sagan, Bertolt Brecht, and the Indigo Girls have been passing on the myth. I don’t think any of them were intentionally lying. In fact, I doubt any of them ever bothered to examine the facts themselves. They didn’t need to. The story fit what they already believed—that science and religion were natural enemies—and that was all they needed to know.

It would be easy to mock such gullibility and intellectual laziness. But the truth is that I’m probably guilty of doing the same thing quite often. Perhaps it’s because I am a journalist (sort of) and am more apt to believe whatever version of a story I find more interesting. As a newspaper editor I often favored David over Goliath, even when the powerful Philistine was more credible than the person slinging the stones. “Boy Shepherd Slays Powerful Giant” always makes for a better headline.

As a Christian, though, I don’t have the option of favoring the position that will sell more newspapers. Instead, my duty is to side with the truth. When I hear a story that fits my agenda I should examine all the relevant facts before accepting it as Gospel. I may not always be absolutely certain which side of the line the truth lays. But I do know on thing for sure. That is the side that God will be on.

As one might expect, the Galileo affair is a much more complex matter than is presented in caricatures today. Galileo was right about some things, and wrong about others. Just like the Church.

On reflection, I think that the Church, contrary to the fables in currency today, was the more judicious of the interlocutors. Much of the debate was less about religion than it was about prudence and respect for evidence. Galileo was arrogant and wrong on important aspects of the science, and the Church appropriately challenged him on his claims. His support of the Copernican view was mostly right, but he misrepresented the state of the evidence.

Galileo was a great scientist, and like most great scientists, he had an enormous ego and made many mistakes. His unique contributions were largely eclipsed by his successors.

But he has lived on as metaphor, in the pantheon of those who hate the Church.

No room for firemen at World Trade Center 10 years later...

Mark Steyn on Mayor Bloomberg's exclusion of firemen (and clergy) from the ceremonies at Ground Zero:

What’s missing from these commemorations?

Firemen?

Oh, please... As Mayor Bloomberg’s office has patiently explained, there’s “not enough room” at the official Ground Zero commemoration to accommodate any firemen...

On a day when all the fancypants money-no-object federal acronyms comprehensively failed — CIA, FBI, FAA, INS — the only bit of government that worked was the low-level unglamorous municipal government represented by the Fire Department of New York. When they arrived at the World Trade Center the air was thick with falling bodies — ordinary men and women trapped on high floors above where the planes had hit, who chose to spend their last seconds in one last gulp of open air rather than die in an inferno of jet fuel...

The podium accommodates plenty of New York pols, no doubt. Dignitaries by the busload. But they can't fit in a few firemen, police officers, EMS folks. No room for the first responders.

“Which is kind of weird,” wrote the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, “since 343 of them managed to fit into the exact same space ten years ago.”

Vox Day on "The Problem of Evil".

Internet Superintelligence Vox Day had a superb post from last Easter on evil. It is an appropriate reflection for today, the anniversary of 9-11, a day when evil slipped off its veil.

Vox Day:

The problem with evil

Posted: April 25, 2011
1:00 am Eastern

© 2011

The fact of the existence of evil troubles many individuals, religious and irreligious alike. Numerous strategies have evolved for dealing with it, from denying it like the Buddhists, enduring it like the Stoics, combating it like the Christians or redefining it like the Marxists. But regardless of the method one chooses, there is observably something to which all of these people from the panoply of religious and philosophical creeds are responding.

For centuries, philosophers have wrestled with the so-called problem of evil. They have attempted to define the nature and the character of evil and to provide explanations for the persistence of its existence. Many of them have been Christians and, indeed, the problem of evil is a major stumbling block to belief in the existence of God for many individuals. It is not uncommon for those struck by tragedy to question their faith, or even to lose it, since they are unable to balance the notion of personal suffering with the existence of a God who claims to love them.

The problem with this reasoning is that it is fundamentally at odds with the very heart of Christianity. Christianity does not postulate that the world is a good place. Jesus repeatedly declared that the world hated him and it would hate those who loved him. Christianity does not claim that God is presently in control of events; when Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, Jesus rejected the offer but did not claim that it was spurious. And, indeed, Jesus twice spoke of "the prince of this world" as a being who was coming to kill him but would ultimately be driven out by Jesus' death.

Christianity does not have a problem of evil because it requires evil for the great historical event celebrated yesterday to have any meaning at all. Just as I wrote last week that the Crucifixion and Resurrection make no sense if man is not at risk of hell, they make no sense in a world that is not given over to evil. But if Christianity has no problem of evil, Christians most certainly have a problem with evil. 

One hears much these days of the need for religious tolerance. But this is a false doctrine. Christians are not called to tolerate evil or to love wickedness. We are instead commanded to fight it, to wage tireless and unceasing war against it in all of its myriad forms. We are called to resist it in our own lives, to mitigate it in others and to destroy it wherever possible.

Jesus spoke truly. The world still hates him, and it hates those who worship him. As has been the case for the last 2,000 years, Christians are being actively persecuted around the world. Christian converts are being murdered in Somalia even as Christian churches unwisely welcome Somali immigrants to America. New Christians have been murdered in Iraq and imprisoned in Afghanistan. Life-long Christians in Britain have been threatened with losing their jobs if they don't hide signs of their religion, even though Sikhs are permitted to wear turbans, Jews are permitted to wear yarmulkes, and Muslims are permitted to wear headscarves. America's time may not be soon, but it will eventually come, too.

The West is belatedly discovering the truth about the love of money being the root of all evil. The arrogant nations of the post-Christian West put their faith in their wealth, only to learn that Mammon is a false and treacherous god. The great irony is that despite the world's rejection of God and its foolish embrace of evil, those who find themselves suffering the promised consequences of their actions will end up blaming God for them. Such are the perils of free will.

But there is no cause for Christians to be discouraged despite observing that the prince of this world still rules over his kingdoms and once-great Christendom is in decline. On that first Resurrection Day, not even the 11 remaining disciples believed, only those few grief-stricken women who had entered the tomb and were astonished to find it empty. From that meager seed, a mighty church of more than 1 billion believers has grown. And yet, it hardly matters if there is but a single man or woman remaining who is willing to stand up in the face of the world's hatred and give voice to the Good News, for even if we remain silent, we are told that the rocks themselves will thunder.

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.

The Christian understanding is that the world is occupied territory. It is occupied by evil itself, in spiritual and personal form. We are passing through it, but we are not meant for it. We are in the world, but not of it.

Islamic terrorism is not an exception to the world. It is a manifestation-- one of many manifestations-- of the world, of a fallen world. God is soverign, but He permits freedom, even horrendous freedom. If we, who are created in His image, are to strive for good, we must be free to strive for evil. It's not a paradox. It's a necessary truth. That necessary truth showed itself with frightening clarity a decade ago.

Christ's call for us is to join Him, which means to join the fight. We must understand that we are on a battlefield, not our home.  The battle shifts. At times it is physical-- rushing up a staircase in a burning skyscraper to help innocents trapped. At times it is political-- standing up publicly for freedom and for the sanctity of human life. At times it is moral-- doing the right thing when every instinct we have is to do the wrong thing.

But we are not home yet. Our home has many rooms, and we will rest there, when we have finished the chores assigned to us in our time.

Let's remember all of the innocents who perished on that awful day, and remember with special gratitude those first responders who so courageously did His work, and finished the chores assigned to them in their time.