We Should Live - Ben Bateman

The Democrats have rammed through the Congress a bill to demand that we surrender in Iraq within a year. Sen. Lieberman delivered an eloquent statement in opposition.

These defeat-obsessed Democrats baffle me. I want to dismiss them as insane, but that would be laziness. The liberals who want to surrender aren’t stupid, and they aren’t particularly uninformed. They just have fundamentally different beliefs about morality and the nature of reality. They have a different religion.
I need to give this modern religion a name, but it has been a struggle finding the right word. Here’s how I arrived at it:

• We are God’s chosen people—Judaism.
• We are children of God—Christianity.
• We are slaves of God—Islam.
• We are God—Humanism.

A little Googling show me that the word ‘humanism’ has been used in all sorts of ways, so let’s just skip the objection that someone once used it in a way that’s inconsistent with how I want to use it.

Let’s just clarify that use: Strong humanism is a belief that people are gods, or that some human institution such as a government or nation is God. The individual version leads to radical libertarianism and ultimately anarchy, while the group version leads to communism, fascism, and other forms of totalitarianism.

Again, this is the strong version of the religion. It’s the version that the foundational beliefs ultimately push you towards if you think about them hard enough, but most of the believers haven’t thought about it that hard. Most believers in nearly all religions are that way: They declare a belief in the tenets, but in their daily lives they take the parts that they like, they avoid the parts that they don’t like, and they don’t worry too much about the contradictions involved. There’s nothing shocking there; that’s just the normal imperfection of humanity. But the strong version is still important because that’s the point towards which the believers will drift when they have occasion to ponder their own beliefs. (more…)

USA Today reports that Al Gore is training 1,000 volunteers to deliver a global-warming slideshow based on Gore’s eco-propaganda movie An Inconvenient Truth.

The stocky man with the soft Southern accent rivets the hotel ballroom crowd with his plea: “We are in a time of peril, so please allow me to explain a topic that has overwhelming importance in my life.”

Meet, no, not Al Gore, but Gary Dunham, 71, a grandfather from Texas who was the first of 1,000 Americans Gore trained to deliver his Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth slide show to schools, Rotary clubs and nursing homes around the nation.

Two weeks ago, the last 150 of this hand-picked crew arrived here — paying their own way for everything but food — to go through a two-day seminar starring Gore but effectively led by Dunham and a few other graduates of the former vice president’s global-warming boot camp.

To date, The Climate Project has drawn everyone from Wal-Mart workers to Cameron Diaz. And though the 1,000 mark has been reached, “we keep hearing whispers that (Gore) might do more,” project director Jenny Clad says. “I wouldn’t call this final.”

Even the USA Today reporter can’t write about this without using religious analogies.

Dunham is from Houston, where he worked in advertising and raised three children. He’s a proud American, a red-state guy who “voted for George W. twice,” he says. “I didn’t realize how much his connection to the oil industry would wind up mattering to me.”

The epiphany occurred July 3. Dunham was accompanying his wife, Jan, to Washington, D.C., where she was scheduled to give a talk to the Daughters of the American Revolution.

He stayed back at the hotel and flipped on the TV. Staring back were Oprah Winfrey and Leonardo DiCaprio. “I’m not fans of either,” but talk turned to Gore’s new movie. Not only did Dunham not change the channel, he hunted down a local theater and watched An Inconvenient Truth. The movie’s “scary stuff got me,” as well as the urgency of the problems, he says, from dying polar bears to melting ice caps. “When the movie ended, I was drained.”

And inspired. Dunham took his wife to the movie, an easy sell for the Democrat in the family. Then he went out and bought a laptop and the Inconvenient Truth book. Over the next few weeks, Dunham created his own slide show using photographed pages of Gore’s book and helped his wife present them at her DAR speaking engagements. (more…)

Michelle Malkin points to a story about liberal intolerance on college campuses. It’s a sadly typical story, but bears telling:

At the University of Rhode Island they have a chapter of the College Republicans, as do most college campuses. These Republicans oppose racial discrimination by government, especially of the sort that passes under the name “affirmative action”. To tweak the opposition on the nose, this chapter decided to offer its own discriminatory scholarship, which would be available only to white heterosexual American males. Read the scholarship application here. The value of the scholarship was a nominal $100, and many of the applications were satirical in keeping with the project’s overall purpose. I can only imagine the fun that the college students would have had with the essay question:

In 100 words or less, what does being a White Heterosexual American Male mean to you? As a White Heterosexual American Male, what adversities have you had to deal with and overcome?

The university’s student senate didn’t appreciate the humor, and prevented the College Republicans from disbursing the funds. And the College Republicans were fine with that. They had made their point. But the student senate wasn’t satisfied. A senate committee also demanded that the College Republicans publish an apology in the campus newspaper.

Enter the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a group devoted to protecting the rights of individuals on college campuses. FIRE wrote to the senate president and pointed out that the proposed punishment would be unconstitutional. Freedom of speech includes freedom not to speak, that is, freedom from coerced statements.

The student senate ignored FIRE’s letter and upheld its committee’s decision, and in this memo reiterated the demand for a public apology. Not just any public apology, mind you, but a specific apology to be submitted to a student senate representative and subject to the senate committee’s editorial control.

Having tried to be polite, FIRE next went to the university president with this letter, which points out that the student senate receives a large portion of a student activity fee that every University of Rhode Island student must pay as part of tuition. The university president is no dummy. He figured out that FIRE was right, and he pointedly instructed the student senate: “you may not impose any sanctions on the College Republicans, or any other student group, that requires them to make public statements which are not their own.”

So rather than demand a public apology, the senate committee has decided to de-recognize the College Republicans. The full senate will consider the matter next Tuesday.

Here maybe we can see a generation gap within the left. The baby boomer liberals were mostly true believers. They really wanted to buy the world a Coke and usher in the Age of Aquarius. If only you could increase your awareness and raise your consciousness, then you, too, could come to understand the profound truths of hippie philosophy. They were fools, but I would like to believe that most of them were at least honest fools, that most of them really believed the nonsense they were spouting.
It’s harder to believe that with the modern young leftists. If they really believed that their mishmash of trendy liberal beliefs carried any transcendental truth or power, then they would expect their beliefs to prevail on their own, absent compulsion. Coerced confessions of heresy and statements of loyalty toward the state religion may stroke the egos of the high priests, but they also amount to an admission by the high priests that their religion lacks appeal and can only be spread at the point of a sword. And in the long run, such a religion is unlikely to survive.

UPDATE: Anchor Rising provides some historical perspective, and links to this page on the URI web site, which lists various private scholarships available to URI students, including many that directly state a race or sex preference. My favorite is the Artacky and Elese Berberian Scholarship, which states a preference for Armenians. Given that Armenia is located squarely in the actual Caucasus, which makes them about as caucasian as you can get, maybe the student senate should next take aim at this scholarship.

Michael Williams points to this discussion of women in combat, with the issue being raised by the Iranian seizure of British sailors, including one woman. The post itself isn’t much, but the comments are unusually articulate for blog discussion. It’s an interesting potpourri of different perspectives, nearly all of them reasonable.

It fascinates me how these conversations dance around an open and glaring contradiction within liberalism, and even within mainstream American thought:

1. Evolution is absolutely true, and if you doubt it for a moment then you’re a Bible-thumping, knuckle-dragging lunatic who wants to impose theocracy.

2. Women are exactly like men in every way, and the truth of that statement is so glaring that you aren’t even allowed to think about it. The only exception is areas in which women are better than men. You can think about those areas, but not too hard.

Everyone is required to believe in evolution, but nobody seems to think about what it means. Evolution draws many followers because it puts humans on the same plane with animals. It denies that there’s anything special about our species. And for a certain segment of the population, that’s an enormously gratifying conclusion at which to arrive, to be trumpeted as loudly as possible. (more…)

Michelle Malkin reports on a terrorism drill that took place last month in New Jersey’s Burlington Township High School. The drill was designed to test the disaster response of students, faculty, and local emergency personnel. This source says that “the mock gunmen pretended to gun down several students in the hallways before taking 10 students hostage in the school’s media center.”

And that’s all fine. There’s nothing wrong with holding disaster drills at a high school, though I doubt that it’s a particularly efficient use of resources. What made this drill newsworthy was the backstory that the local police department invented for the terorrists, which described them as: “members of a right-wing fundamentalist group called the “New Crusaders’ who do not believe in separation of church and state. They also have a strong commitment in their right to bear arms.” The story went on that the terrorists went to the school who went to the school to seek justice because one of the terrorists’ daughters had been expelled from school for praying before class.

You’ll find this story all over the conservative blogosphere, on Fox News, and nearly nowhere else. Most of the stories don’t mention one detail that I found very interesting: The Buck County Courier Times reports that the official in charge of the exercise published the scenario beforehand, and a local congregation objected. It seems that their complaints were ignored. So this was no accident or oversight. The scenario was written with some care, and was meant to read exactly as it did.

The Burlington Township’s web site has issued a terse non-apology:

The scenario chosen was intended to be generic in nature and never to offend any group, affiliation or religious belief. The term “Christian” was not included in the scenario. It was believed that all groups pray and prayer in school is a universal issue. Similarly it is further believed that all groups experience right-wing fundamentalists in their organizations. The bottom line was the protection of human life should a significant event unfold. That goal was met.

The Township regrets any insensitivities that might have been inferred by this action. (more…)

People who don’t really understand history nearly always assume in some form that people in the past weren’t as smart as we are today. It’s tempting to imagine, for example, that if you or I could go back in time to some crucial moment in history, then we could explain to all those ignoramuses what they were doing wrong, and the pure light of our modern knowledge would awe them.

Trial by ordeal is an excellent example of the sort of historical practice that tempts us to think that our ancestors were not too bright. In medieval Europe (and many other places), criminal accusations were sometimes resolved by subjecting the accused (and sometimes the accuser, too) to various types of injury or hardship, with the assumption that the innocent would emerge unharmed. The accused might be required to walk over hot irons, carry a hot iron, dip his hand into boiling water, survive being dunked into cold water, or ingest toxic substances. My favorite is the ordeal of the cross, briefly prescribed by Charlemagne, in which the accused and accuser were both required to stand with arms outstretched as if crucified, and the first to drop his arms lost. (More background on ordeals here.)

It’s fun to giggle at what seem such silly practices, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail does a fine job parodying them. But the lesson I’ve drawn from studying history is that humanity changes very little, if at all, and we are much more similar than we realize to the ancestors that we mock.

Consider this story: Two Orlando middle-school girls get into a fight during class, and a third student records video of a few seconds of the fight with a cell phone. Now one of the girls’ parents demands to know why the substitute teacher didn’t break up the fight. Though the story doesn’t a lawsuit or similar shakedown by the parent, that’s the rather obvious subtext. (more…)