From "Standard Operating Procedures", Gourevitch/Morris

How do you deal with an atrocity?

They keep happening in this golden era of ours, as we slip the chains of our superstitious religious beliefs that we might be held to account one day for our actions - ethnic cleansing, mass murder, systematic brutality. How should we react to them?

It is wrong to demonise the protagonists - to behave as though they were somehow much worse than any of us. Nobody ever gets up in the morning and says, "You know what? I feel like violating the human rights of large numbers of other people today." And it's also wrong to rationalise the actions in some way - to behave as though there could be some justification for the systematic extermination of a race, or the torture of prisoners. There isn't - and any human being reflecting with any sort of detachment on such events for more than a few minutes has to come to that conclusion.

The approach taken in this book is helpful. It is a calm, dispassionate analysis of what happened in the prison at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqi prisoners were abused by US military personnel, based on accounts from eyewitnesses - the people involved in the actions. It ties in with the award-winning film of the same name. The book does respond "editorially" to the events, but the response is disconnected from the reporting, and the authors work hard to establish what went on not for the sake of startling headlines, but from the perspective of the people involved - to understand how these events could have happened; what could have led these people to behave in this way.

One of the conclusions that can be drawn on the basis of the book is that given the situation that prevailed at Abu Ghraib, the events that so sensationally appeared in newspapers were perhaps not as awful as they appeared. Please note that this is not a justification - but as a matter of record, some of the pictures don't tell the whole story of what was happening. Further, the people involved - often reservists, undertrained, under pressure, uninformed, in a foul living environment themselves - could almost be considered victims themselves. The real problems lie further back - with the decision made at the highest level in the US government that the Geneva Convention could be set aside in some circumstances; with the use of different government agencies, diluting avenues of accountability and responsibility ; and frankly, with the naive way in which the US embarked upon this war in Iraq.

Here is an extract:

... the designation security detainee, or security internee (the terms were used interchangeably), is nowhere explicitly defined in law. And yet, it was from the Geneva Conventions that the occupation authorities in Iraq derived the justification for holding prisoners in this category. The fourth convention, which extends Geneva's regime of rights and protections to civilians n wartime, includes a few lines in Article Five that create an exception for anyone "detailed as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power." Such captives are still to be treated with humanity, and they are covered by nearly all of Geneva's usual provisions. But, the convention says, in the name of "absolute military security" or "imperative military necessity," they may be held incommunicado and indefinitely, so long as their cases are reviewed by the occupier from time to time - "if possible every six months."

That is all the fourth convention has to say about the matter. It is as general and open to interpretation as the third convention's rules on POWs are particular and rigorously prescriptive. The International Committee of the Red Cross, in its longstanding commentary on Geneva, describes the critical loophole created by Article Five of the fourth convention as uncharacteristically "involved," "open to question," and "regrettable." "What is most to be feared," the ICRC says, "is that widespread application of the Article may eventually lead to the existence of a category of civilian internees who do not receive the normal treatment laid down by the Convention but are detained under conditions which are almost impossible to check. It must be emphasized most strongly, therefore, that Article Five can only be applied in individual cases of an exceptional nature, when the existence of specific charges makes it almost certain that penal proceedings will follow. This Article should never be applied as a result of mere suspicion." (Standard Operating Procedures, p.33)

This is not a pleasant read, but it is a book that ought to be read - it ought to be mandatory reading for people at high levels in government and the military, to help them to understand the way in which policy decisions they make have a direct and perhaps unexpected impact on actions that are taken at ground level. The people at those high levels can't absolve themselves of responsibility for Abu Ghraib simply because they weren't carrying out the actions. And it ought to be read by citizens, to help them to understand why the protections of things like the Geneva Convention were put in place, and what it would mean to them if they weren't there.

What is a church minister like?

The person boring Mr Bean? (See 1.32 onwards)

Or this guy? Mark Driscoll talking about why he hates religion. "The religious people are the ones who murder Jesus!"

"The Night Following", by Morag Joss

This book can be found on Amazon, and the proper context for this review is there. To anybody who has come here from facebook (or similar) and wants to know more about the book (i.e. the characters, plot outline and so on), that site will probably fill you in.

Although I haven't read other of Joss's books, she is established as an author, and on the basis of this book, it is evident that she is very much in command of her craft.

The book is written in an assured manner, with excellent control over voice, tone, character and plot. It is not the sort of book I would have expected to appeal to me, and yet I found it compelling and read it within a couple of days.

The plot is outlined on the Amazon website. Other people have commented on the redemptive nature of the narrative. There is certainly a theme of redemption there, as the doctor's wife seeks to restore to Arthur some of what she has taken from him. But redemption doesn't normally look much like this - it generally comes with a bit more hope. Both the two main characters are in very dark places - literally, being unable to face daylight. Arthur is disintegrating for the loss of his wife Ruth, the doctor's wife (unnamed) losing her identity effectively due to a lack of love or even interest in her. And there is another big theme - the systematic and undeserved betrayal and incomprehension of women by men. The women are largely committed and engaged (if naive about the men): the men are uncomprehending, abusive, misguided and largely incompetent. Even within the relationship between Arthur and Ruth, his late wife, which is portrayed more positively than any other in the book, it is shown that Ruth is the one with emotional intelligence and depth, whilst Arthur is devoted to her but largely uncomprehending of the depths of her life, being more captivated as so many men are by such things as constellations and bird-watching.

This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of men, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead.

An interesting article I read recently reflected on the fact that most literature takes place "under the sun", as Ecclesiastes would put it - as though there is nothing more than purely material causes and effects - there is nothing higher - no God; increasingly no fate; no real significance. Stuff just happens. That's a reflection of where we are generally as a culture. This book shows where that perspective takes us. Random events happen - the woman discovers her husband's affair; Ruth is killed in a road accident - with no real significance - it's just how life is. It is a very bitter perspective, and few people are prepared to accept this - even whilst denying the possibility of a higher power, many people would rather close their minds to the full implications of this, or embrace a vague and un-thought-out pantheism, believing vaguely in some sort of faint guidance of fate, and some perception of their own significance. Joss's book is more honest in that regard - there is only me, nobody else, and I have to make my own sense of my life, give myself some significance.

And yet, for all that the wife of the doctor pursues a redemptive aim, she is still lost at the end. The characters who seem best able to cope with this random life under the sun are those who seem to have least comprehension - the doctor, the blind grandmother. Those who face the world as it is seem to consistently end up wrecked. Only Ruth, perhaps, carves out for herself a purposeful, meaningful place - and then she is killed by an arrow of outrageous fortune.

This is a very good book - it is definitely literature, not simply a story. I would recommend it for reading groups, and anybody keen to read and reflect on what they read.

"The Hero with a Thousand Faces"

It's the title of a seminal book by Joseph Campbell, which I'm hoping to read shortly. I mentioned it previously, having heard of the book in the context of some reading about Harry Potter.

As I said in that post, Campbell apparently suggests that the reason for the universality of this archetype is that "every one of us shares the same ordeal." Note that this isn't based on my reading of his book - I hope to say more of substance at some stage. However, my thesis, which I am certainly not in a position to defend at the moment, would be the opposite of that - none of us actually shares an ordeal like this in any sort of significant respect. And yet, we all recognise these heroic narratives. Why is that? Why do they have a universal cultural significance?

According to the reviews on Amazon,

one unique aspect of it at the time it was published was its approach to Christianity. For Campbell, Christ's life had to be seen as a myth. Before him, most Western scholars wouldn't have dare to say such a thing. Others had written on that, but in a skeptical manner. Campbell's view is that the Virgin Birth, miracles, Resurrection, etc have meaning only because they ARE myths.

This represents a particular historic/philosophical approach to Christianity, which I believe has largely been considered unsuccessful. You simply can't reduce the historical figure of Jesus, and the events surrounding his life, to the level of myth. The canonic gospel-writers evidently took some trouble to establish the events they record as real events that happened at a particular time and place, with real people. As far as I know, no attempt to show the gospels, or for that matter the rest of the historical accounts in the Bible, are unsound has proved successful.

The Jesus narrative, I would argue, makes clear that Jesus is a universal hero, according to the archetype Campbell establishes. And yet where all the other heroes that he considers are myths or stories, Jesus is grounded in history. This makes him a unique figure in literary terms, as well as historical terms. The reason we are responsive to other heroes - in all different cultures - is to prepare us for this one specific, trans-cultural figure who is the hero that all humans should be looking for. The significance of a hero isn't that they have experiences that are representative of ours, but is that they have experiences that are in place of ours - instead of us.

Six Impossible Things

Sorry.

I keep reading remarkable and relevant essays at the bethinking website, and wanting to pass them on. Here is a lengthy analysis of Lewis Wolpert's atheism, as expressed in books and interviews. Note that the article doesn't say that atheism is wrong, or that theism is right, or unrefutable - just that his argumentation is seriously unsound - and that (for example) William Lane Craig's defence of theism is much more substantive.

From the conclusion:

Atheists, agnostics and theists alike should avoid Lewis Wolpert's narrow-minded approach to the question of God's existence, an approach that amounts to saying, 'My mind is made up, don't confuse me with the evidence.' We all have our own personal default position on the subject of God's existence, but we owe it to each other and to ourselves (and perhaps we even owe it to God) to take the alternatives seriously enough to decry blind faith.

Christian worldview and the English novel

I recently wrote a long post on sex - which see below, if you are interested. This was an attempt to apply a Christian worldview to an area where it tends not to give its deliberate, reflective scrutiny.

On the bethinking website, "Chronicles of Heaven Unshackled", the lightly edited version of a doctoral thesis is being posted. Only the introduction is available so far; more is to be posted, though. In many novels, authors confine themselves to purely materialistic cause and effect - with any "divine" input being at a pretty deistic level. This is not inherent in the nature of the novel - it is quite possible to write a novel using a different set of assumptions about the nature of reality. Of course, there is no guarantee that a story written with a Christian worldview would be of good quality, any more than there would be that one written with a materialistic worldview would be. But C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien, in choosing to write from a perspective that is theologically more complex than the average novel, provide us with particularly satisfying stories, that break out of the narrative "flatlands" into a more solid world. This thesis explores some of the implications of the theological worldview of Tolkien and Lewis in their work.

This is an interesting area for consideration. What, for example, is the theological framework of (say) an epic poem like Beowulf? Are there other examples of writers whose novels reflect a worldview in which the supernatural is active? Are some particular genres more amenable to such approach than others?

I would argue that the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, by Philip Pullman, is another example of a non-flatland novel - which is one of the reasons that the stories are so powerful. Pullman has stated that his books are about "killing God" - and yet, in order for him to be able to do away with the Judeo-Christian God, he needs to provide a transcendental being to take its place. Pullman's dust has many of the properties that Christians would associate with their God - transcendence, a preference for moral virtues, an idea of destiny, an ability (albeit limited) to communicate with conscious beings, and being essential to the sustaining of life. The only way in which Pullman can use his novels to write about getting rid of God is by providing an alternative.

Flew comments on "The God Delusion"

... and incidentally, refutes the suggestion that he was used by others in the production of "There is a God", on the Bethinking website.

In case you didn't know, Antony Flew is

a renowned philosopher who was arguably the best-known atheist in the English-speaking world until his announcement in 2004 that he now accepts the existence of God. The son of a Methodist minister, Flew often attended the weekly meetings of C. S. Lewis's Socratic Club as an undergraduate at Oxford, but was not convinced by Lewis's argument from morality that a God exists. In 1950, Flew set the agenda for modern atheism with his renowned essay "Theology and Falsification," which became the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last half century.

Schaeffer

Today we have a weakness in our educational process in failing to understand the natural associations between the disciplines. We tend to study all our disciplines in unrelated parallel lines. This tends to be true in both Christian and secular education. This is one of the reasons why evangelical Christians have been taken by surprise at the tremendous shift that has come in our generation. We have studied our exegesis as exegesis ....; we study something about art as art; we study music as music, without understanding that these are things of man, and the things of man are never unrelated parallel lines. "Escape from Reason" ch 1.

From "The God Who Is There"

This is what Francis Schaeffer says you should believe when you become a Christian ...

1. Do you believe that God exists and that he is a personal God, and that Jesus Christ is God - remembering that we are not talking of the word or idea god, but of the infinite-personal God who is there?

2. Do you acknowledge that you are guilty in the presence of this God - remembering that we are not talking about guilt-feelings, but true moral guilt?

3. Do you believe that Jesus Christ died in space and time, in history, on the cross, and that when he died his substitutional work of bearing God's punishment against sin was fully accomplished and complete?

4. On the basis of God's promises in his written communication to us, the Bible, do you (or have you) cast yourself on this Christ as your personal Savioud - not trusting in anything you yourself have ever done or ever will do?

This is what believing on the Lord Jesus means. If a man has believed in this way, he has God's promise that he is a Christian.

Interesting interview with Dawkins

Melanie Phillips is a thoughtful analyst, who features regularly on Radio 4 and many other places, and wrote one of the most damning indictments I've seen of British education, "All Must Have Prizes". She writes for the Daily Mail as well, and I wish she'd stop as I have so many other issues with the content of that august publication.

She reports in The Spectator on the latest debate between John Lennox and Richard Dawkins.

In the first debate ... Dawkins was badly caught off-balance by Lennox’s argument precisely because, possibly for the first time, he was being challenged on his own chosen scientific ground.

This week’s debate, however, was different because from the off Dawkins moved it onto safer territory– and at the very beginning made a most startling admission. He said:

A serious case could be made for a deistic God.

This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force.

H/T Miss Mellifluous

School photos

What IS it about school photos? Since the advent of digital photography, the quality of school photos has plummeted! It used to be the case that in a few seconds, the photographer would arrange you, and produce a decent pose. Now, you are plonked in front of the camera; no notice is taken of whether you have sorted out your hair, or if your clothes are straight; and as like as not the photo will be taken before you have had time to sort out your smile.

Outcome? Generally, school photos are more and more rubbish, and we are increasingly reluctant to shell out the pounds to buy even one copy, let alone copies for the sundry relatives who we might previously have bought them for.

Actually, I think I know what the issue is. The people taking the photos today are fundamentally technicians, rather than photographers. They have no interest in their subject. And they know how much parents want the formal photos, so they think they can get away with anything.

The silly thing is that with the abundance of cheap and effective camera equipment, it is incredibly easy to get hold of photos of people - a hundred million people probably have an average of a hundred photos each of them on Facebook! What is really needed to set school photos apart from this glut of imagery is somebody who actually does have an eye for a person, who can capture a character in a few seconds. It's easier now to look at the image and decide if it's any good straight away, and throw away a poor shot. SO WHY DON'T THEY??

Christians and sex

A couple of quick warnings. Firstly, please note that this post is about sexual matters. I hope that the content proves useful, particularly to Christian parents who need to talk clearly with their children about sex, but I would encourage mature Christians to read and think about this, and make sure that they understand it themselves, prior to simply pointing anybody else to it.

Also, this is a long article (over 2000 words). I suggest you print it out to read rather than trying to wade through it on screen. If it is of any use to you, I can send it to you as a PDF file - add a comment, and I can pick up your email address from there.

Christians are reluctant to talk about sex. I can suggest various possible reasons for this. One is embarrassment - there are too many "naughty words" that we feel should be omitted from polite discourse. One is a dualistic hangover that many of us still feel, namely that the physical is dirty and bad, and it's only the spiritual that can be good. One is the fact that it stirs up strong feelings and we are perhaps a little worried about them.

The effect of this is that Christians often offer nothing of substance to discussion about sex. This isn't a good thing. We are generally bad enough at understanding the impact of worldviews in any case, even when we are able to make the case for the Christian worldview. But when it comes to sex, the worldview of the surrounding culture is left to dominate, with Christians rarely seeming to say anything more constructive than "Do not taste, do not touch" - as though sex is simply a matter of rules that we have to adhere to. So this post is an attempt to redress this balance somewhat.

What happens when we start from a basically materialistic, darwinian worldview - the one that dominates intellectual discourse today? We deduce that we are fundamentally biological (and thus chemical, and thus physical) entities, and everything we see is of necessity derived from this. In this context, reproduction is - well, not the highest good, because "good" implies a value system which is ultimately absent when physics is all there is - but certainly the fundamental necessity in biological terms.

This would explain why our sex drive is so powerful. However, at this point, the explanatory power of materialism ceases to be helpful. As in so many other areas, materialism and darwinism aren't so much scientific theories as means of accounting for any observation - a worldview which is used to interpret phenomena.

At one end of the spectrum, if physics is all that there is, ultimately, then it really isn't possible to say much more in consideration of sex than "this is what happens". Objects with mass attract one another. Space is curved. De Sade felt that it was legitimate for the stronger person to dominate the weaker. Certain people abuse children and have a desire to rape. If physics is ultimately all that there is, then all of these are ultimately just observations about the universe, and disapproving of sexual "deviancy" is a bit like disapproving of gravity. Even when such people harm others, do we have any real basis for saying that this shouldn't happen?

Few people accept this, of course, although it is hard to see how to find fault with it intellectually. From a materialistic point of view, morality is usually defined in terms of sociological acceptability, with sociology being some kind of emergent property at the level of the species. Note that individual morality can't really provide much guidance - because if somebody else has a different morality, then how do we choose between mine and theirs? But sociologically, perhaps, "morality is a herd instinct". If this is the case, then sanctions can be applied by the "herd" to constrain the behaviour of individuals within appropriate boundaries. And this is pretty much where we are at. Although society generally accepts and enforces certain limits, it means that there are no absolute standards of morality, in sexual terms. A hundred years ago, it was considered morally correct that sex ought to be confined to heterosexual marriage (however widespread deviation from this actually was). Now things are different. It is assumed that people in the west will be sexually active before forming a permanent or semi-permanent relationship; that it is better for people to live together before they marry; that sexual fidelity is no more than an arbitrary choice. The change in the sociological landscape itself justifies the changes in behaviour.

Bear in mind that the dominance of the materialistic worldview is a relatively recent (last 30 years or so) phenomenon. During this time, the fact that we have a biologically strong sex drive has led to the general acceptance that fulfilment of that drive is pretty much a biological necessity. So over the course of that time, we have seen (for example) increasing acceptance of pornography and prostitution, and the increasing acceptance of homosexuality within mainstream culture.

But even accepting the consensus of the materialistic culture up to this point, it now breaks down. The analysis that a male within the culture might make (if - and it is often a big if! - he were able to string together the ideas sufficiently coherently to express them!) would be to say that the biological sex drive finds its release in the orgasm. This justifies the acceptance of pornography and prostitution, and sex before and outside marriage in general. These things don't hurt anybody, it is argued, therefore there is no reason for them to be considered immoral.

However, many women would increasingly reject this analysis. Female dissatisfaction with the limitations of sex - even within the boundaries of a materialistic worldview - can be found throughout the culture - in popular shows like Sex and the City, in the feminist rejection of patriarchal models of sexuality, and on an everyday level with the fact that following the liberation(!) of the sexual revolution, men walk away from sexual relationships far more easily than they used to, with far less guilt, leaving women to deal with the consequences - emotional, psychological and physical. Perhaps the biological foundation for this is that women are designed to nurture children, and seek a stable relationship with a male who can provide for them whilst they are caring for the child. But the point is that the materialistic metanarrative has not managed to establish a coherent justification for a new pattern of sexual behaviour, and over the last 15 years it has arguably ended up looking less likely to do so. Whereas the consensus about "right" and "wrong" prior to the sexual revolution provided a framework for a society which had largely functioned in a stable manner for thousands of years, I would suggest that the widespread acceptance of a materialistic and sociological consensus about sexual relationships has largely led to the breakdown of social structures, and has also had a negative impact on individuals' sense of identity.

Another challenge to the materialistic approach to sex comes from the fact that such a large proportion of sexual activity (using the term in its widest sense) is not and has never been related to procreation. And given that the explosion in all sorts of sexual activity following the rise of materialism and the sexual revolution has not led to a population explosion, it can't be seriously suggested that sex, and the sociologically permitted changes in sex that we have seen, are fundamentally about strengthening the relationship between partners for the purpose of rearing children. Therefore, it seems reasonable to cast doubt on the original premise - namely, that sex is about the biological drive to reproduce.

So although people accept the materialistic idea that sex is the biological imperative, we find that we have moved away from any shared concept of how this ought to be expressed, and the phenomena we observe doesn't really seem to be consistent with the idea anyway. So the evidence suggests that the worldview may not be correct.

What is the Christian alternative? Firstly, sex has to be moved away from being the central item in the discussion. Christianity argues that although humans are animals (and therefore have a biological nature), there is more to them than this - there is a fundamental difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, which Christianity talks about as being the image of God. Whereas sex might be considered the biological driving force throughout the natural world, it isn't for humans.

Even this assertion starts to show Christianity as being different from some highly pervasive materialistic ideas. It allows the possibility, for example, that aesthetic sense isn't solely on some level about sexual arousal. It suggests that creativity isn't fundamentally about attracting a mate. It permits the possibility of a desire for knowledge which isn't just about passing genes onto the next generation. These are helpful steps forward, as explanations of these phenomena which reduce them to outworkings of our sex drive were never really convincing.

I would suggest that relationships are a fundamental part of our identity as humans, and this is different from animals - it is part of the image of God. Incidentally, this assertion also means that the worldview which I am talking about is distinctively Christian (in which relationships exist within the divine nature, as a consequence of the Trinity) rather than any other monotheistic worldview. Inherent in the idea of relationships is the idea of love. There are different Bible words which are translated as love, but the focus should be on what they have in common, rather than their differences. Love, in Christian terms, is about giving myself for the other person. This is most completely expressed in the love that Christ had for his people, which resulted in him laying down his life for them ("Greater love has no man than this ..."). But we can see that this is the key component of love in all sorts of relationships - a parent's sacrifice of their own time and money for the sake of their children; a child's love for its parents expressed in the acceptance of the parents' authority over their life; the love for a friend which sacrifices time and care for them. Of course, the nature of love is that sacrifices don't feel like anything of the sort - but from the perspective of the observer, it can be seen that a person is giving up something of their own for the sake of another.

The example of Christ and the church is an important one, as the Bible talks about this being the prototypical marriage relationship. Christ gave up heaven, privilege and ultimately his very life for the sake of his people. Within the institution of marriage is the idea that husbands should give themselves up for the sake of their wives ("Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church..."), and that wives should be as devoted to the husbands who give themselves up for them as the church should be to its Head. Whereas love can be expressed in many ways to many different people, there can only really be one person to whom you give yourself up in this complete way - only one person to whom you can really say, "All I am and all I have is yours." Having done that for one person, you are no longer yours to give away.

Sex is the physical expression of this complete abandoning of yourself to another person. "All I am and all I have is yours ... and that includes my body, which is yours for your delight." The husband and wife give themselves to one another in a physical way, and again, this complete giving of themselves is something that is only really meaningful in the context of a relationship with one person. It follows as a physical act from a commitment that has already been made.

Of course, this is thoroughly consistent with the content of the wedding service with which we are still so culturally familiar. But it is a major departure from the ideas of sex which we get from the culture around us. The ideas which have become common currency in the last 30 years and which simply didn't exist before - like sexual compatibility and trial marriages - simply have no place in the Christian worldview. It's not a question of a reactionary attempt to turn the clock back. It's the fact that the Christian worldview is so fundamentally different from the materialistic one that hardly any of what has been derived from materialism can be meaningfully accommodated if you start from the Christian worldview.

Christians don't talk about this too much, and in many cases they haven't thought out what their worldview says about it. There are many sections of Christianity which simply work out some way of accommodating the materialistic approach - after all, this is usually easier than being "in the world but not of the world". Sections of the church work out how to accommodate homosexuality at all levels, nobody asks questions about people's lifestyles, Bible teachers avoid speaking about, or relativise, the sections of the Bible that address matters of sexual morality. Perhaps most disturbingly, Christian parents lack confidence in offering guidance to their children. The consequence of this is that even people who consider themselves Christians rarely demonstrate anything distinctive in terms of their sexual morality.

As Christians, we need to have a clear idea of the impact that the Christian worldview has, in this area as much as all others. We also need to understand the change in worldview which has been expressed in cultural changes, and be prepared to point out to the people around us the consequences of their worldview. If Christianity is true (which we believe it is), it should be true no matter how deeply you scratch it. If the alternative worldviews are false (which we believe they are), then at some level there must be a contradiction between expected and observed phenomena. This can be seen in the breakdown of society which has taken place following the adoption of the materialistic worldview, and the fact that materialism simply fails to give a good account for so many of the things that we see.

I hope that this article helps Christians to be more confident in giving a reason for the hope that is in them ....

Berlusconi killed Alitalia

... by making a promise that he couldn't keep, to keep the airline going, apparently unconditionally.

So the "intransigent" unions basically sat there thinking to themselves, "We can hold out as long as we like, because Berlusconi won't let it fail."

They were wrong. Berlusconi has no choice. Had he acknowledged that in his election campaign, the unions might have been more realistic about what of Alitalia could survive, and accepted a workable deal.

Ben Folds- Still Fighting It

Yep.

Thanks, Jane.

I said ...

... that this was the book I would most like my friends to read.

And this is why. It's nothing to do with "I told you so". It's everything to do with - "Can you see this?"

Incidentally, still no substantive response to "A Meaningful World" from an anti-teleological perspective.

G.K.Chesterton

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

Peppered moth evolution

It just occurred to me ....

Probably a stupid question, but I'm sure somebody will set me straight if necessary. Did anybody ever establish whether there was in fact a genetic basis for industrial melanism in peppered moths?

Could it be possible, for example, that the expression of melanism was due to the presence of higher levels of carbon and pollutants in the diet of the moths? This might be earlier in the lifecycle of the moths, or even possibly in the lifecycle of ancestor moths.

One of the implications of this is that it would undermine the case made for natural selection. Rather than a random distribution of light and dark moths, with differential predation at work subsequently changing the distribution and leading to a shift in the population (the natural selection paradigm), such developmental changes would result in a non-random distribution of light and dark moths in different environments, regardless of predation.

Was this possibility excluded at the time? Has it been since?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

Already part of a line which includes Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky - acute observers of the human condition.

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

I failed ...

... to get round to writing anything of substance on the "Atheists for Jesus" article by Richard Dawkins. However, here's a link to someone who has written something.

The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything