If not, it sounds like we’re at least to the tipping point in Iraq; the headline in The Times of London reads, “Iraqis lead final purge of Al-Qaeda,” and the article quotes the major general commanding the American forces in northern Iraq as saying, “I think we’re at the irreversible point.” Even Barack Obama is starting to admit he may not be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Personally, I’d call that progress.Also, those interested in the ongoing efforts to clean up Iraq after Saddam’s rule might appreciate this story: we just finished moving the last 550 metric tonnes of yellowcake uranium from the Tuwaitha nuclear complex in Iraq (about 12 miles south of Baghdad) to Canada, where it will be used to generate electricity. Apparently, there was a great sigh of relief once the stuff was finally out of the region. Now, the goal is the decontamination of Tuwaitha. The article dryly notes that “U.S. and Iraqi forces have guarded the 23,000-acre site—surrounded by huge sand berms—following a wave of looting after Saddam’s fall that included villagers toting away yellowcake storage barrels for use as drinking water cisterns,” which just makes me shudder; the sooner that place is safe, the better.HT: Bill
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
The atheism of presumption and the case for God
The “New Atheists” have sold a lot of books and spun up a lot of media coverage; what they haven’t done, particularly, is make a very good case for atheism. Mostly, they preach to the converted and mock those who disagree with them; along the same lines as C. S. Lewis’ observation (in The Screwtape Letters) that not everyone can make a joke but anyone can talk about something as if it’s funny (which is how he defines flippancy), they’ve demonstrated that it’s easier to act as if something’s already been proven than it is to go out and prove it. Remove their assumption that atheism is the only intellectually respectable position, and there’s not a whole lot left.
Now, this wouldn’t matter if their assumption were correct; but it isn’t. In truth, as William Lane Craig notes in a recent article in Christianity Today, that point of view is behind the times. The relative weakness of the intellectual case for atheism was underscored when the world’s most important atheist philosopher, the man who first argued for “the presumption of atheism,” Dr. Antony Flew, abandoned atheism (a change of mind he discussed in interviews with Dr. Gary Habermas and Dr. Benjamin Wiker). Perhaps in part consequence, more and more of the younger generation of Christians have become interested in apologetics (the study of the defense of Christianity on rational grounds); as I’ve posted before, I wouldn’t be surprised if the primary long-term effect of the “New Atheists” and their work is not the growth of atheism but the growth of the church.
Democrats for faith-based initiatives?
I’ve said before that one of the things I appreciate about Barack Obama is his commitment, as a liberal Democrat and a Christian, to making the case to his fellow Democrats for allowing and heeding religious voices and arguments in the public square; it was thus no surprise, but nevertheless a good moment, to see him make the case for continuing and expanding the current administration’s support for religious social-service organizations. What I didn’t expect was to see the Rev. Wes Granberg-Michaelson, the General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America (my home denomination), weigh in with the comment that in doing so, Sen. Obama is only rebalancing the issue and reclaiming a prior Democratic position:
In September 2000 I was at a breakfast for religious leaders at the White House when President Clinton said that regardless of who was elected that fall (Bush vs. Gore), faith-based initiatives would be one of the new challenges to be worked on by any president. And the best speech on the subject was given by Al Gore during that campaign. So this never was seen as a “Republican” idea until Bush was elected, and then many more Democrats began to distance themselves from the initiative. . . .The pundits have it wrong. This isn’t a right-wing or a left-wing idea; it isn’t a Republican or a Democratic idea. It’s simply a good idea.
I have a great deal of respect for Wes, and I certainly agree that this shouldn’t be “a right-wing or a left-wing idea”; equally, I hope his optimism that this can be an issue on which the parties can make common cause proves out. However, I think he’s forgetting something: there are a lot of Democrats who don’t agree with him, who think this is a “right-wing idea,” want no part of it, and want no part of Sen. Obama speaking out for it. I agree that the marginalization of the Christian Left, to the point where folks like Jim Wallis are basically rubber stamps for the secular Left, is a bad thing; I’m not, however, optimistic that it can be reversed as easily as all that. I applaud Sen. Obama’s commitment to continuing and expanding the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives—but if he’s elected, I’ll be very much surprised if that’s a commitment on which his party permits him to follow through.HT: Presbyweb
Maybe they should lay off the Guinness, eh?
If you’ve ever flown Aer Lingus, the national airline of Ireland, you might want to take a moment and say a prayer of gratitude that you made it home. As Lindsay Watt noted recently on her blog Random Dispatches, for an airline, they seem to have a small problem with geography. Apparently upstate New York has moved to Québec without telling us, taking Maine with it:
You may also notice, down in the corner, that they’ve relocated New Orleans. Nice of them to do that, but maybe a little late. Pittsburgh, meanwhile, appears to be somewhere in Ohio. For the whole map from Aer Lingus’ inflight magazine, check out the original post.HT: Strange Maps
When the bank is your sweetheart
Apparently, when Sen. Barack and Michelle Obama bought their Hyde Park mansion, they got “an unusually low discount interest rate” on their $1.3 million home loan from Illinois’ Northern Trust Bank, well below what others could have expected to get. As political news, this isn’t in the same category as Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-CT, and Sen. Kent Conrad, D-ND, getting sweetheart deals from Countrywide Financial Corp.—unlike Countrywide, Northern Trust isn’t in the middle of a financial scandal—or even the news that Sen. John and Cindy McCain were four years behind on the taxes on their California beachfront condo (they had nearly caught up on their back taxes when the story broke); but it does highlight the fact that when you’re a rising star, when you have influence and your influence is increasing, everybody wants a piece of you, and everybody wants to get on your good side. It also highlights the fact that the appearance of impropriety, or of partiality, can be as damaging as the real thing. (Just ask Sen. McCain, who’s been criticized in some quarters for having lobbyists on his staff even though he’s never yet changed positions at a lobbyist’s behest.) This is yet one more thing at which Sen. Obama doesn’t have much experience; I hope for his sake (and for all of ours) that he’s guarding his heart, and his integrity, carefully.“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men.”—Lord Acton
A bipartisan prescription for health care
This is an Atlantic article from nearly eight years ago in which columnist Matthew Miller got Rep. Jim McDermott, long the Democratic standard-bearer for socialized medicine, and Rep. Jim McCrery, one of his conservative Republican counterparts on the House Ways and Means Committee, together to talk about how to fix the health care system; much to everyone’s surprise, they ended by thrashing out a rough approach to doing exactly that. Unfortunately, while there was real hope in the room that conditions were right to address this problem, circumstances (chiefly, I expect, the disputed end to the 2000 election, followed by 9/11) intervened to scuttle that hope. Still, it’s an excellent discussion, and I think points the way forward out of our current, increasingly unworkable situation.
Happy Canada Day!
Having lived five mostly good years in Canada, I couldn’t very well put up a post critical of one aspect of the country on the eve of Canada Day and then ignore the holiday; like any place, it isn’t perfect, but Canada’s a great country, and I loved my time there. (The fact that it included our first four years of marriage probably didn’t hurt. 🙂 ) So, to all my friends under the Maple Leaf: happy Canada Day!
Trust me, you don’t want Canadian health care
In the US, more and more people, upset by the rising cost of health care, want to turn the whole shooting match over to the government. “We want to be like Canada,” they say.I have to tell you, I lived in Canada for five years; I had surgery in Canada; I saw lots of specialists and the inside of five or six hospitals in Canada; my oldest daughter was born in Canada. America, you don’t want to be like Canada.That is not, incidentally, a slam on the people who make the Canadian health-care system go. For one thing, we were net beneficiaries, as a poor American student family living in Canada; we got a lot for not much, and I appreciated our host’s generosity. For another, we had some truly brilliant doctors, and some wonderful nurses, and the staff at BC Children’s Hospital were beyond superb; they cared deeply about their tiny patients and were past masters at making bricks without straw. The thing is, they had to be.The equipment was junk—they finally gave up on the blood-oxygen monitor on my little baby and took it off when it reported a heart rate of 24 and a blood-oxygen level of 0 (or the other way around—it’s been a few years now); while we were there, the provincial government tried to donate some of its used medical equipment, and no one would take it. The Sun quoted one veterinarian as saying the ultrasound they wanted to give him wasn’t good enough to use on his horses. Meanwhile, the doctors kept taking “reduced activity days,” or RADs (which is to say, they took scheduled one-day strikes without calling them strikes), to protest their contract. I was actually up at St. Paul’s in Vancouver for a scan one of those days; the techs were there, obviously, but no doctors. A hospital with no doctors is a very strange place.I could also tell you about the time we took our daughter to the ER (different hospital) at midnight; there were only a few patients there at the time, but it still took them three hours just to get us into a room, and another hour to see us. It was 5am before we walked out the front door. At that, we were the lucky ones—there were a couple folks still waiting to be seen who’d been waiting when we got there. Or I could tell you about friends who had other friends, or family members, die while on waiting lists for vital surgeries. Or I could tell you about doctors and nurses who got tired of it all and left for better jobs in the US. The list goes on.In case you think I only think this way because I’m an American, I’ll certainly grant you that many Canadians still loyally defend their health-care system; as I say, they have some wonderful people to defend. The fact of the matter is, though, there are many Canadians who don’t, anymore—including, among others, the (liberal) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverly McLachlin. The normal routine in Canada is, if you need a major procedure done, you get put on a waiting list. If you can afford to go south of the border and get it done in the US—or if you can get the government to pay for you to do so—you do that. If you can’t, you wait. When this system was challenged in court—a resident of Québec teamed up with his doctor to sue the province over its law forbidding private medical insurance—the Canadian Supremes threw out the law, and came very close to declaring the entire national system unconstitutional. They didn’t quite agree to do that, but they did indict the system in scathing terms; as the Wall Street Journal summed up the matter, their opinion essentially said that “Canada’s vaunted public health-care system produces intolerable inequality.”Which it did. And does, as do similar government-run systems in Britain and elsewhere. In one Ontario town, for instance, people buy lottery tickets to win appointments with the local doctor. The system doesn’t work. That’s why more Canadians are opting to sue; it’s why in Britain, seriously ill patients end up waiting in ambulances, not even admitted to the emergency room; and it’s why “the father of Quebec medicare,” Claude Castonguay, the man who started the ball rolling that produced Canada’s government-run system, now says it’s time to break it down and let the private sector take some of the load.And why not? After all, that approach is working in Sweden.
Another false messiah
I don’t usually link to the same blog back-to-back, but there’s another post of Doug Hagler’s I want to point you to, one he titled “Idolatry American style: Barak Obama”; obviously we have very different views of the Republican Party (though even most Republican voters aren’t very happy with the Republican Party at the moment), but as I’ve written before, I think the idolatrous tendencies in American politics are a real problem, and I agree with Doug (and others) that they’re particularly pronounced around Sen. Obama. (I don’t think they’re the senator’s fault—rest assured, I’m not accusing him of having any sort of delusions in that regard—but I do think he’s yielded to the temptation to take advantage of them, and I really wish he hadn’t.)
Somehow or other, we need a countercampaign to bring the people of this country around to a critically important truth: Politics will not save us. We keep getting sucked in to the idea that if we can just win this vote or elect this candidate, that will take care of our problems, and it just isn’t going to happen; Doug’s dead on when he writes, “Nothing messianic is coming from either party any time soon.” Nor any time later, either. Politics will not save us, government will not save us, no institution is going to save us; only God can save us, and he builds his people from the bottom up, one life at a time. If we want to work to address our problems in a way that will actually make a difference, it certainly helps to have a government (and other institutions likewise) that facilitates our efforts rather than making matters worse, but in the end, all we can do is follow God’s example. One life at a time, one family at a time, one small group of people at a time. From the bottom up. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Calling all feminists for Zimbabwe
Doug Hagler has an important post up on the group Women of Zimbabwe Arise! (WOZA); like most Zimbabwean groups that care about anything other than keeping Robert Mugabe in power, they’ve been taking a pounding from the government and its affiliated thugs. In a pattern drearily familiar from corrupt and brutal tyrannies throughout history, the abuse of women to keep the opposition down is a real problem under Mugabe’s misrule, which makes it particularly important, I think, to support WOZA’s peaceful witness.