As the high-water mark for Barack Obama recedes, his campaign must now confront several dangerous stumps that were once hidden below the surface. The problems began with Obama's long attachment to Rev. Wright, Trinity United Church, and Black Liberation Theology, but they won't end there.
So, what issues are now lurking for Obama? Read More.
A self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam, whom Pope Benedict XVI baptized during the Easter Vigil at St Peter's. Allam's renunciation of Islam as a religion of violence and his embrace of Christianity denotes the point at which the so-called global "war on terror" becomes a divergence of two irreconcilable modes of life: the Western way of faith supported by reason, against the Muslim world of fatalism and submission. Read More.
Why conservatives are happier than liberals. Read the rest.
How many Iraqis have died because of the American invasion? It would be nice to know the local price of Saddam Hussein’s ouster, five years on. Many researchers have produced estimates. Unfortunately, these range from 81,020 to 1 million. The wide variance, of course, speaks to considerable uncertainty, although the individual figures are often absurdly precise.
The figure most often quoted, and until recently regarded by many as the most scientific, comes from a study published in TheLancet, a prominent British medical journal, just before the 2006 election. That study, which made headlines worldwide and was cited by war opponents from Ted Kennedy to Al-Jazeera, found that a shocking 601,027 Iraqis had died violent deaths since the U.S. invasion. But the timing of the study’s publication and the size of its estimate have attracted a great deal of criticism; its authors, mostly researchers at Johns Hopkins University, have been accused of everything from bias to outright fraud. Read more.
BY THE standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at Geneva. The first task of CERN's new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson—an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The €2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general. Read More.
The Democratic National Committee proposes to spend unlimited amounts of money to "tell the real story" about John McCain before Republicans can "start smearing" the eventual Democratic nominee. But the line of attack the Democrats outline to their potential donors in an e-mail contains some claims that are false or misleading.
If recent history is any guide, the preemptive attack that the DNC outlines in this message will be followed by similar attacks by Republicans. Past elections have included spiraling rounds of attacks by both parties, in which each side claims to be responding in kind to the other. Read the rest.
- The DNC paints McCain as favoring "endless war" in Iraq. What McCain actually said is that he wouldn't mind a hundred-year troop presence "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."
- It says McCain "looked the other way" rather than investigate Jack Abramoff and a Republican "Culture of Corruption." In fact, McCain's investigation led to a prison term for Abramoff and the downfall of several powerful Republicans. His investigators didn't probe members of Congress directly, but that wasn't the job of his Indian Affairs Committee. And in any case, federal prosecutors opposed a competing congressional investigation which might have interfered with their own efforts.
- The DNC message makes criticisms of McCain that could be directed at its own leading candidates as well. It notes that he lacks training in economics, which is equally true of Clinton and Obama. And it accuses him of "staggering" reliance on lobbyists for campaign help, when Clinton also has substantial aid from lobbyists and Obama has some from former lobbyists.
The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman. Read More.
CATASTROPHIC predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.
"Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)" Read More.
Stephanie Gill, a bartender in a white working-class neighborhood, noticed the shift immediately.
A week ago, her customers at Rauchut’s Tavern in Tacony didn’t have much to say about Barack Obama. But when she returned to work Wednesday, a day after the Illinois senator attempted to quell the furor over his pastor’s racially incendiary remarks, the reaction inside the corner bar was raw and unapologetic. Read More.
Revenge is sweet — and thanks to tattoo ink, sometimes permanent — for a growing legion of "scambaiters" who have taken it upon themselves to punish the thieves behind those Nigerian e-mail scams. Read More.
Dinesh D'Souza is skeptical of skepticism and enthusiastic about the faith. by Tony Snow » There are two types of Christian apologetics. One makes the positive case for faith; the other responds to critics. Dinesh D'Souza's delightful book, What's So Great About Christianity, falls into the second category. It sets out to rebut recent exuberant atheist tracts, such as Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. Read the rest.
In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama's longtime minister, friend and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president. Read More.
“YOU hardly ever hear the phone ring any more,” the publicity director at my publishing company said last summer. “I walk down the hall now, and it’s just so quiet.” Read More.
Future historians of the phenomenon known as "multiculturalism" that the West bone-headedly adopted towards the end of the second millennium will note the precise time when it was dealt a mortal wound.
It was at 8:46 on Tuesday morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the first of the four commercial airliners hijacked by Islamist terrorists -- all of Arab origin -- struck the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. Read More.
Many of us familiar with Chicago politics have been wondering for months at the apparent disconnect of the media regarding Obama’s relationship to the Chicago political machine. Where did they think this guy came from?
The lack of curiosity by the press about Obama’s connections to one of the most corrupt city governments in the United States should be one of the big media stories of this campaign. While it is true that Obama’s connections to the Machine are not as extensive as many other politicians, I’ve got news for you Obama apologists; try running for any office in Chicago – local, state, or federal – and see how far you get without support from the regular Democrats. Read More.
I read these notes from John MacArthur's opening address to this year's Shepherd's Conference and I simply don't understand how he can say the following:
Whether the gospel was preached to Jews or to Gentiles, the message did not change. And all those whom God had chosen, responded to that message in faith.
The apostles went out for absolute disdain for contextualization. The modern drive for cultural contextualization is a curse, because people are wasting their time trying to figure out clever ways to draw in the elect. Contextualization is “zip-code ministry.” The message of Jesus Christ, on the other hand, is transcendent. It goes beyond its immediate culture or sub-culture. It crosses the world, and ignores the nuances of culture. It never descends to clothing or musical style, as if that had anything to do with the message of the Gospel.
Does your message ignore the trends and superficial icons of culture, and bring heaven down in its transcendent reality? Can you take your sermons and preach them anywhere?
I have some questions: Read More.
"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."
So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family. Read More.
The television evangelist Benny Hinn has an audience of millions - and makes millions. David Millikan joined the throng on stage intent on asking the American preacher a tough question. Read More.
The origin of sin in a universe created by an omnipotent, omniscient, and all loving God is a perplexing theological challenge. Traditionally, the disobedience of Adam and Eve is seen as the event that inaugurated the Fall. The rest of humanity is thought to have inherited Original Sin either biologically (if the couple is seen as the ancestor to all of humanity) or through some mysterious process of representation (the federal view). However, this story of sin’s origin is becoming increasingly difficult to defend. Genetic evidence indicates that humanity cannot trace its ancestry to a single pair of recent humans, so our shared biological parentage to a couple of Neolithic farmers is impossible to reconcile with the scientific record. On the other hand, the federal view runs into difficult theological issues (eg. were humans that pre-existed or coexisted with Adam and Eve only sinful after the curious incident with the forbidden fruit?) Read More.
