A new study from Britain affirms …
By Bob Felton | May 9, 2008
… what everybody knows, that Christianity continues to decline there.
Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation, research published today suggests.
The fall - from the four million people who attend church at least once a month today - means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable.
Albert Mohler sees dark days ahead but … ho-hum. Thousands upon thousands of religions have arisen, flourished — and died. New knowledge displaces and makes embarrassing the storyline, the Eternal Truth begins to look gaudy and ridiculous, ethical teachings based upon the failed storyline seem degrading. Zoroastrians survive yet, and so too will colonies of each of the old religions, but their numbers will continue declining because educated men and women know their storylines aren’t true and will not submit to their demands.
And whatever comes next will itself someday fail.
The only really interesting questions are, What will the next generation of Eternal Truths look like?, and, What explanation will be given to justify them?
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Bad to worse in Burma
By Bob Felton | May 9, 2008
Cyclone Nargis may have killed as many as 100,000-people outright, and the estimates of those who will die of secondary typhoid, diphtheria, and starvation, now range up to as many as 1-million. The U.N. weather agency predicts additional rain in the next few days, the military junta that runs the place will not permit foreign aid into the country, and when the U.N. tried to send relief the food was confiscated for the use of the junta. The U.N. has recalled its relief workers.
They’re going to die, and there is nothing to be done about it. And … that’s that.
Well, no — it’s not. John Hagee, Holy Man, reaffirmed just yesterday his settled belief that the Big Guy arranged the death by drowning of 3000 poor, mostly black people in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in order to get even with gays scheduled to hold a parade there the following week, and Holy Men worldwide characterized the Christmas Tsunami of 2004, which killed 500,000-people, as a warning against abortion. In view of the dramatically greater numbers from Burma, and His proved custom of drowning poor people when other people do, or contemplate doing, something which peeves Him, I think we can take solace in the assurance that somebody, somewhere, was planning to do something really awful, and all those dying Asian proxies are getting just exactly what somebody, somewhere, deserves.
Unless, I mean, the Holy Men are a smug, ignorant, self-satisfied pestilence unfit for the company of decent people.
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Delta Dawn redux
By Bob Felton | May 8, 2008
Hillary has been reduced to reminding voters that Barack Obama is, you know … black.
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.
Yes, there is: Hillary has nutcased into a desperate and embarrassing caricature of Delta Dawn. She’s living in a fantasyland, and needs to be taken home and put to bed.
[HT: Quote, Andrew Sullivan]
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The Evangelical Manifesto
By Bob Felton | May 8, 2008
An evangelical group that seems as if they might be folk I wouldn’t mind knowing.
Second, we repudiate the two extremes that define the present culture wars in the United States. On one side, we repudiate the partisans of a sacred public square, those who would continue to give one religion a preferred place in public life.
[ ... ]
On the other side, we repudiate the partisans of a naked public square, those who would make all religious expression inviolably private and keep the public square inviolably secular.
[ ... ]
We are committed to a civil public square – a vision of public life in which citizens of all faiths are free to enter and engage the public square on the basis of their faith, but within a framework of what is agreed to be just and free for other faiths as well. Every right we assert for ourselves as Christians is a right we defend for all others.
Y’all better download your copy now, because I am sure that the signatories will all have been burned at the stake for heresy by this time tomorrow.
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Ken Miller on Expelled
By Bob Felton | May 8, 2008
AMERICAN science is in trouble, and if you wonder why, just go to the movies. Popular culture is gradually turning against science, and Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled, is helping to push it along.
[ ... ]
Expelled is a shoddy piece of propaganda that props up the failures of Intelligent Design by playing the victim card. It deceives its audiences, slanders the scientific community, and contributes mightily to a climate of hostility to science itself. Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science. If we actually come to believe that science leads to murder, then we deserve to lose world leadership in science.
What’s to say? The anti-mind really is the anti-life, and the anti-intellectualism of religious fundamentalism really is no more than a crude death wish, a desire to blank-out and escape the hard choices of adulthood till the ‘real’ life begins at the grave. And predictably enough, that impulse is strengthening throughout the culture as life grows more complicated.
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I’ve been telling y’all for the longest time now …
By Bob Felton | May 8, 2008
… that elimination of birth control is destined to become an important cause to the evangelical right, and here’s the latest:
June 7 marks the 43rd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut. This was the first of many decisions that led to the culture of death we live in today.
On that day in 1965, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Griswold v. Connecticut case, it set a legal precedent for claiming that the Constitution grants women the right to privacy in matters of sexual practice. This meant that Connecticut and the rest of the United States could not stop a married woman from obtaining birth control pills.
Meantime, Albert Mohler aids and abets with some hyperventilating about Japan’s declining birthrate, here.
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Ouch!
By Bob Felton | May 8, 2008
Nobody, nowhere, has George Will’s knack for gutting an enemy with just a few words.
If even, say, Texas, California and Ohio were permitted to have winner-take-all primaries (as 48 states have winner-take-all allocation of their electoral votes), Clinton would have been more than 400 delegates ahead of Obama before Tuesday and today would be at her ancestral home in New York planning to return some of its furniture to the White House next January.
He then adds a deserved swipe at Obama, and a cogent warning to McCain.
McCain’s problem might turn out to be the fact that Obama is the Democrats’ Reagan. Obama’s rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan’s ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness — the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.
Obama’s ‘rhetorical cotton candy’ is starting to bug Aaron Brown, too.
Obama, while certainly charismatic, talks a lot about change and says relatively little when he does.
Vapidness never hurt a politician; if it did, the theology scam would have died centuries ago, of neglect. Mencken’s rule remains vital: Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
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Mixed Blessings
By Bob Felton | May 7, 2008
Between Barack Obama’s shellacking of Hillary Clinton in North Carolina, and her razor-thin margin in Indiana, there is now all but universal agreement with the prediction I made months ago: Barack Obama will be the Democrats’ nominee. We don’t know when or how evil-tempered will be Hillary’s withdrawal, but there can no longer be any serious-minded doubt that she is finished.
That’s the good news — but it’s not an unmixed blessing.
The pathologically nasty politics perfected by James Carville and exemplified by the Clintons’ has been rejected, and rejected decisively. Good. Our public life has been fouled for too long by their cynical, Goebbels-like, shout-loudest dishonesties.
Invariably, however, propagandists come to believe their own lies — and that is, just as invariably, the thing which undoes them. They fail to recognize that propaganda does not persuade anybody, that what it does is serve as a lens that focuses already-latent discontents. The malcontents exploited by the Clintons, and their doppelgangers on the right, will remain discontented and susceptible — but the meaning of Hillary’s defeat is that the discontents of the majority are now focused on the propagandists and noisemakers themselves.
Obama was first to recognize that, and has exploited it with extraordinary skill, with the result that the efforts to slime him according to the now-standard Carville play book have done him no injury while furthering irritation at the Clintons et. al.
The noisemakers understand clearly that there is something afoot in the public mood, and they understand clearly that the locus of the threat to their cynical manipulations is Barack Obama, and that is why the noisemakers of the left and the noisemakers of the right have so easily joined hands to trash him. Their business — Sharpton, Jackson, Limbaugh, Hannity, on and on — is keeping simpletons unbalanced with rage, and Obama threatens the good times.
So they will ramp-up their already-cynical, noisy, and dishonest attacks on Obama and, probably … elect him, because they just can’t ‘get,’ or accept, that disgust with them is Obama’s secret, right-out-in-plain-sight weapon.
That’s the downside of Hillary’s defeat: Obama will be the nominee, and likely victor in November. He is the most gifted politician in living memory, and he will almost certainly defeat John McCain.
And then his stupendous, outsized gifts will be turned toward the sale, adoption, and implementation of policies that will, as the Boomers buy lime-colored pants and move to Florida, hasten the nation’s decline under the already crippling weight of collectivism.
Collectivism always fails, causing cataracts of human misery on the way down. There has never been an exception to that rule, nor will there ever be an exception, for a simple reason: all species of collectivism rest upon naive assumptions about human nature. The genius of capitalism is that it harnesses individual energy and smarts to individual well-being; the defect of collectivism is that it harnesses individual energy and smarts to your neighbor’s well-being. A collectivist outlook works all right in families, usually, where there are bonds of love and loyalty; it cannot work on a larger scale, though, because the bonds that justify the corresponding self-sacrifice are absent.
It will never work. Case closed — forever.
The line that Obama and company will peddle is “Waaal … those other folk just didn’t do it right, you know, but we will.” No, they won’t, because their isn’t any right way to connect workers’ rewards to the ‘needs’ of the not-very-energetic slug next door. The only way to enforce a system like that is at gunpoint, and that is why collectivist states invariably become tyrannies.
Like I said … Hillary’s defeat is a mixed blessing. You can almost see from here the end of the nasty politics she so shamelessly and amorally exemplifies, but the nearly inevitable Obama victory in November poses real dangers, too.
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Heavy turnout in Garner
By Bob Felton | May 6, 2008
I’ve got an e-mail that says turnout in Garner, North Carolina is heavy.
The election workers were commenting on the HIGH turnout for our area…but don’t know if that is the case state-wide….
And here is what the Census Bureau says about Garner:
Hispanic/Latino: 4.4%
White: 69.8%
Black: 23.5%
Native American: 0%
Asian: 0.8%
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0%
Other: 0.2%
Multiracial: 1%
Durham:
Hispanic/Latino: 3.9%
White: 72.2%
Black: 9.9%
Native American: 0%
Asian: 10%
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0%
Other: 1.2%
Multiracial: 2.5%
Youngsville:
Hispanic/Latino: 4.1%
White: 82%
Black: 12.1%
Native American: 0%
Asian: 0.5%
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0.1%
Other: 0.1%
Multiracial: 0.8%
Wake Forest:
Hispanic/Latino: 2.6%
White: 83.2%
Black: 11.9%
Native American: 0%
Asian: 1.1%
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0%
Other: 0.1%
Multiracial: 0.9%
We’ll know more when the votes have been counted and the statisticians have a crack at the data, but first, anecdotal impressions appear to sustain what common sense suggests: Obama’s candidacy has energized minority participation in the electoral rituals.
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High turnout in Durham
By Bob Felton | May 6, 2008
From Confederate Yankee:
I just got off the phone with Mike Ash, Director of the Durham County Board of Elections in Durham, NC. He doesn’t have any numbers as far as percentages of eligible voters making it to the polls at this point, but said several polling locations have already hit record numbers. That is as of 11:30 AM.
So: high black turnout in Durham but, in my neighborhood, disinterested white turnout? Sounds about right.
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