BUREAUCRACY IN ACTION!

BUREAUCRACY IN ACTION

BUREAUCRACY IN ACTION!

1. Start with a cage containing five apes. In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb toward the Banana.

2. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the apes with cold water. After a while, another ape makes an attempt with the same result–all the apes are sprayed with cold water.

3. Turn off the cold water. If later another ape tries to climb the stairs, the other apes will try to prevent it even though no water sprays them.

4. Now, remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all of the other apes attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

5. Next, remove another of the original five apes and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.

6. Again, replace a third original ape with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four apes that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest ape.

7. After replacing the fourth and fifth original apes, all the apes which have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced.

Nevertheless, no ape ever again approaches the stairs.

Why not?

“BECAUSE that’s the way it’s always been done around here.”

Why some LAUSD teachers are balking at a new approach to discipline problems

Why some LAUSD teachers are balking at a new approach to discipline problems

Or what happened to the family?

Los Angeles School police Officer Henry Anderson on his beat at Robert E. Peary Middle School in Gardena.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Teresa Watanabe and Howard BlumeContact Reporters

In a South Los Angeles classroom, a boy hassles a girl. The teacher moves him to the back of the room, where he scowls, makes a paper airplane and repeatedly throws it against the wall. Two other boys wander around the class and then nearly come to blows.

“Don’t you talk about my sister,” one says to the other. The teacher steps between them.

When she tries to regain order, another boy tells her: “Screw you.”

It’s another day of disruption on this campus in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has been nationally hailed by the White House and others for its leadership in promoting more progressive school-discipline policies. The nation’s second-largest school system was the first in California to ban suspensions for defiance and announced plans to roll out an alternative known as restorative justice, which seeks to resolve conflicts through talking circles and other methods to build trust.

The shift has brought dramatic changes: Suspensions districtwide plummeted to 0.55% last school year compared with 8% in 2007-08, and days lost to suspension also plunged, to 5,024 from 75,000 during that same period, according to the most recent data.

The district moved to ban suspensions amid national concern that they imperil academic achievement and disproportionately affect minorities, particularly African Americans.

But many teachers say their classrooms are reeling from unruly students who are escaping consequences for their actions.

They blame the district for failing to provide the staff and training needed to effectively shift to the new approach — and their complaints are backed up by L.A. schools Supt.Ramon Cortines. He said the new discipline policies, which were pushed through by the Board of Education and former Supt. John Deasy and which he supports, were poorly executed. He compared the implementation to the flawed effort to equip students and teachers with Apple tablets.

“I will compare it to the iPad,” Cortines said. “You cannot piecemeal this kind of thing and think it is going to have the impact that it should have. Don’t make a political statement and then don’t have the wherewithal to back it up.”

It’s called the devil in the details. Sometimes it means stopping what you’re doing and then do it right in a few places, and then do it right everywhere.- Richard Vladovic

Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said the union backs the new approach and that teachers with sufficient support have used it effectively at such high schools as Augustus Hawkins in South L.A. and Roosevelt in Boyle Heights. But widespread complaints from teachers without such support have prompted union plans to start its own training.

“We’re now carrying the consequences of … not enough staffing to make it work and a lot of frustration,” Caputo-Pearl said.

The most assertive supporters of restorative justice on the school board are Steve Zimmer and Monica Garcia. Both said the effort is essential to improving academic achievement, as important as instructional practices and financial management.

“This literally changes kids’ lives and their experience in school,” said Zimmer, the board president. “We have to get this right.”

Zimmer questioned reports of deteriorating discipline, saying such problems existed before the policy was enacted two years ago and resulted from numerous factors at a school.

But board member Richard Vladovic said a hasty rollout had the potential to make things worse.

Teachers with a high number of students with discipline issues are walking a fine line between extreme stress and a emotional meltdown.

“We have not provided all the training we should, but that’s been historic in education,” he said. “It’s called the devil in the details. Sometimes it means stopping what you’re doing and then do it right in a few places, and then do it right everywhere.”

Only 307 of the district’s 900 campuses have so far received training under the district’s five-year restorative justice plan, according to Earl Perkins, assistant superintendent of school operations. Last year, the district only budgeted funds for five restorative justice counselors until community pressure pushed officials to increase that to 25. This year, 20 more counselors were added for a total $7.2 million in spending.

But that covers less than a third of the district’s 181 secondary schools, where discipline problems are the most acute.

Community groups that monitor the issue say it is unclear how schools are coping with unruly students under the suspension restrictions — in part because the district has not released data on how many, for instance, are referred to the administrative office and what happens to them afterward. At Manchester Elementary and Markham Middle School in South L.A., principals reportedly sent disruptive students home without recording them as suspensions, but Perkins said no such reports have surfaced this year.

Sylvester Wiley, an L.A. Unified police officer for 32 years, said schools are increasingly calling police to handle disruptive students. “Now that they can’t suspend, schools want to have officers handle things, but we constantly tell them we can’t do this,” he said. “Willful defiance is not a crime.”

At Los Angeles Academy Middle School in South L.A., teachers have asked for an after-school detention program, but one has not yet been established. They say they are overwhelmed by what they consider ineffective responses to students who push, threaten and curse them. The stress over discipline prompted two teachers to take leaves of absence in the last two months.

“My teachers are at their breaking point,” Art Lopez, the school’s union representative, wrote to union official Colleen Schwab in a letter obtained by The Times. “Everyone working here is highly aware of how the lack of consequences has affected the site. Teachers with a high number of students with discipline issues are walking a fine line between extreme stress and a emotional meltdown.”

Lopez wrote that many teachers felt that administrators were pushing the burden of discipline onto instructors because they can no longer suspend unruly students and lack the staff to handle them outside the classroom. Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, which represents principals and others, declined to comment.

Michael Lam, an eighth-grade math teacher, said he has seen an increase in student belligerence under new discipline policies.

“Where is the justice for the students who want to learn?” he said, speaking at a recent forum held as part of the process to select the next superintendent of schools. “I’m afraid our standards are getting lower and lower.”

Cortines, 83, said he broke up a fight between students last year at Markham Middle School, which he said was “out of control” toward the end of the school year.

“There were just a lot of problems” and not only with restorative justice, he said. “I don’t think we provided the proper support for the administration. I don’t think we did proper monitoring.”

Cortines said the situation has improved at Markham. Principal Luis Montoya said change would take time, but that progress should pick up this year because the district has provided a full-time staff member for the restorative justice program and a teacher has been named to help lead the efforts.

But some teachers are dubious, in part because high staff turnover has stymied efforts. A highly regarded restorative justice counselor was let go in January because foundation funding ran out, and 10 of the 11 teachers on the school’s restorative justice task force last year have left the campus.

Schools with enough staff and training, however, report success. At Jordan High School in Watts, for instance, suspensions have dropped to just one as of October compared with 22 during the same period last year. The school has launched a well-staffed program led by a dean and two counselors, who meet with troubled students in a designated room featuring posters offering pointers about the practice, such as speaking and listening with respect.

At Gardena High School, Principal Rosie Martinez said the school began using restorative justice last year, with all teachers asked to hold discussion circles to build a sense of community and trust. When students misbehave, they are sent to resolve their conflicts with coordinator Deborah Moore.

“It’s a slow process getting everyone on board,” said Daron Andrade, dean of students. But she added that the new approach seems to have reduced arguments and fights.

Students who have experienced the restorative practices say they have helped.

Nataya Ross, 17, and Maya Smith, 16, were both referred to restorative justice circles after getting into campus fights. The students took turns sharing their feelings about the conflict and how to make things right.

“When I first heard of the circle, I thought it was useless,” Nataya said. “Now I think it is good. Me and my best friend were in the circle, and we got good in two minutes. We just had to get a lot of stuff off our chest.”

Maya also thought the circle was “dumb” at first. “But it actually helped,” she said. “It made me mature just a little. I think I’m way better than how I was last year.”

The students said some teachers believe the new approach has exacerbated discipline problems. But they also said restorative justice has the potential to help all students, if they are exposed to it.

Full funding to spread the practice to every campus is the district’s ultimate goal, Perkins said.

“We have to teach our students how to be good citizens … they don’t need to miss instructional time to make this happen,” he said.

 

Ligon

This is one of my favorite parts of the conference just to ask Ligon some questions there’ll be some theological personal some serious some enjoyable questions also so Ligon are you ready I hope so here’s the first question which I’ve been asked a number of time were you named after Ligon your ministries or is that your ministry I have more often been asked yet rather than bending former know I was not named after Ligon near ministries nor was leaving your ministries named after me leave your ministries is named after Fort Ligon here in Pennsylvania and if US RC Sproul is the question wisely in your ministries mainly in your ministries he says it’s named after the place explains why you speak French not English not French and that’s a long story starts sorry but my name Ligon came from there was a circuit riding Methodist minister in the Edgefield District of South Carolina who apparently had a great impact on my great-grandparents and they name their third sign Jennings Ligon after him and the name has been passed down you are the second I am the third and minor son is four and did you like being Jennings Ligon Duncan well I got cold little league because my father was a big way and because I was very proud of my father I liked being Little League are you still called Little League I’m not so much a I didn’t know there was a Methodist circuit rider is it true that you carried a briefcase to school it is true really and what sort of briefcase and at what age it was up my own leather briefcase with gold edges or brass you know did you these things in your pocket elementary school probably mashing my tie you know what you brought me know no shame if you anyone else your rings are brand. As I went what he was seated on a backpack you did it start out as authors of agreement Star Wars would’ve been like a Star Wars would’ve been you 1314 and who else among your friends would you say carried a briefcase. There may have been one or two of us that did that but not many marked ever perhaps Mario will have Al Mohler and a lot of them. Briefcase is going to make it up so you can be administered without the definitely more seriously to tell us a little bit about where you’re from your family of a very rich Christian heritage and tells you how he became a Christian I’m from Greenville South Carolina which is in the upcountry of South Carolina’s reports that the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains near the Blue Ridge so I could I could be in downtown Greenville and look at the Blue Ridge since it’s a lovely town and I went to school at Furman University which is just north of Greenville my mother was the choir director in our church growing up my father was an elder there were very godly they had a profound and know no two people have had a greater impact on me for the gospel of the Christian life and my mom and dad I have a grip and a great preaching might my two my boyhood pastor in the past when I was teenage teenager is tremendous faithful Bible preachers huge impact on me I made my profession of faith when I was 10 years old when I was nine I asked to go through the pastor’s communicant class to to prepare to become a church member and after going to that class I realize that my reason for wanting to join the church was insufficient I knew that my had my friends were joining the church knew that was not a good reason to join the church on me that I wanted to drink the grape juice on it that was not a good reason for join the church I need that I want to please my parents and I knew that was not a good reason join the church so I didn’t join with the pastors class didn’t join that following summer I went to Florida I would I would spend three or four weeks my grandparents every summer and they were members at the first Baptist Church of mems Florida I made a very faithful gospel preaching pastors actually difference with Adrian Rogers own brother Joe about right some of you may heard the name name brother Joe he faithfully preach the gospel Billy Graham was doing a Crusade in Orlando that summer I was in the Billy Graham five nights in Orlando preach the gospel that got me thinking again about what it meant to trust in Christ and so I went and talked with brother Joe in my way back, asked the pastor if I could go through the through the communicants class again and heat he’s to this day he says I’m the only got it plunked communicant class metadata you but I went through communicant class and at the at that time I felt like I understood what it meant to repent of your sins and have faith in Jesus Christ and so I joined the church and made a public profession of faith when I was 10 but I really struggle with assurance even though I was under good faithful reformed preaching where the doctrines of grace were explained I I had a release I didn’t understand the sovereignty of God in salvation and on I thought that my faith and repentance preceded regeneration and in some sense caused regeneration and it was at up at a youth conference when I was 14 years old that I heard a pastor preaching on Ephesians chapter 1 and it dawned on me that before I ever reached out in faith to God he had reached out and grace to me and that the only reason that I trusted in him was because he had reached out and graced me and when that clicked everything changed and that profoundly address some of my questions of assurance it really began my sense a call to ministry to grew up in Greenville was it was a racially segregated was it a racially tense United job you had to three of the whole Lobos of the South in the 60s was impacted by the independent course parts of the North as well Boston Chicago elsewhere were flashpoints Cleveland during the civil rights era but your Greenville South Carolina is where Jesse Jackson is from and so here’s experiences as a child very much have colored know his public political response and he had really bad experiences in Greenville John Piper grew up in Greenville and remembers a very very tense bad racial climate they are now in 1967 when I was starting first grade Greenville public schools were already integrated so I never ever went to a segregated public school and my best friends in in middle school were African-American but but there were did you know that the lingering legacy of Jim Crow segregation racism was definitely in the background I’ve only very frankly more recently become aware of how extensive that was you when you’re in the city you don’t you don’t realize it I’ve become more aware of it as a so you’re your call to ministry but when you called did you feel called to academic ministry before pastoral ministry because that’s I started out ion from from the time I began to perceive ministry I had an interest in teaching but my thought was this that I would perceive as much education as I could get as quickly as I could get it but that I would be serving in a local church and then maybe one day serve as a teacher or professor and somewhat but in in God’s ironic providence that’s just I went I went from college to seminary I did 2° in seminary while working in a local church I went immediately to do doctoral work in Scotland serve the local church while I was there and then was called back to that well I’ve never been to Mississippi in my life I was called to Mississippi to teach at RTS and one of things I said to the to the president of the seminary that times look up I’m never been a solo pastor of the senior pastor I’ve been in the system I’ve served in churches, feel like this is backwards and he said every talk about that with the board and your can be serving the local church while you teach here so I literally showed up on campus and the man who was my boyhood pastor was the head of the pastoral theology department and he walked up to me said boy you be my assistant you said yes and I said we every southern boy yes sir and so I ended up being his assistant and he was a great experience serving the local church and teach in some getting a root appear we don’t say yes or no no it’s just that just a Southern parallel to think what what it’s you sir what if you study for your your PhD with and borough who to study when I I studied with Amanda and David Wright wonderful evangelical and but he was a world-class scholar in early Christianity and also in Reformation so I got my the man who was my mentor and seminaries manning David Calhoun and David was a wonderful godly brilliant man and he had met David Wright and and David Calhoun said to me if you’re going to study early church I really recommend you go work with David Wright and so I literally collated right on the phone one day in talk to him from St. Louis to the Scotland and ended up going in studying with him at new collagen and to study patristic’s yes early Christianity II studied the era before the Council of Nicaea 325 so it’s cold pre-Nicene or ante-Nicene theology was it was a topic or was a person I studied unit the covenant idea so I got interested in covenant theology when I was in seminary and I got interested in the history of covenant theology and as I was studying that I wonder did the reformers quote any of the church fathers when they were talking about theology and all you have to do is look at the index to Calvin since you sent answer is yes and they quoted the father’s a lot and so I started wondering I wonder if there’s enough they here to study the covenant idea and when I was having a conversation with David he himself civil not sure there’s enough here for a PhD on that topic and is a well I’ve only found one article on it it’s by this guy that I’ve never heard of before and I’m Everett Ferguson minutes of the covenant idea in the second century and David said oh if Everett says it’s the evidence that any and every turned out to be one of the most important characteristic scholars here in America and so David immediately had confidence that if David that David Everett had written an article on it there must be enough to at least develop the idea and so that’s how it all started so did you have to become an expert in Greek and Latin well I had studied Latin in high school in college and in seminary I studied Greek in college and seminary so I had New Testament Greek the hard thing you have to do is you have to get a lot more vocabulary and you have to get great it’s a little bit different than the Greek of the New Testament so patristic Greek has a much more extensive vocabulary it has regional differences that you don’t have a New Testament Greek so I I continued to study Greek and Latin you don’t use as much Hebrew when you’re studying the church fathers because not many of the church fathers new Hebrew so Jerome new Hebrew there only a few of the fathers that that worked in Hebrew but then you have other languages that that are you serious tray and things like that so I I mostly worked in in modern languages in German French and English and then in Greek and Latin I highly recommend doing doctoral work with people who wrote in English, that’s a good idea is a good idea speaking of the church fathers is it true that you wrap it is true really what what can you tell us about your right I was a DJ and hot with with a brief case the recess in the briefcase land song and I ran the the our school had a low wattage radio station and so I ran it was the station manager for WG HS and on my sign on in the morning was the way I do it in your in your best sort of baritone radio voice right I was known as live league all right morning this is Livelink and would like to welcome you to WG HS station of the Starscream of the crop top of the Pops number one sound of the city and play various seeking and things and so when I was in high school the first rap song ever to be mainstreamed lines of the top 40 by the sugar will gain whole rappers delight really VH theological just that’s right very rich theological and I memorized the whole of rappers delight and that began my wrapping cursor I’m very I’m very old school rap not many of the new stuff is is beyond my talents so you are is a true there are videos online if you read it is sadly true there are videos you online I think is a one with your brother there is one big in and that is a flashback to because my brothers come over and visit me in Scotland in the summer as you can imagine they’re not that many Scottish rappers or at least one in those days and so the Italian students that would come to Milne’s court to study English as a second language in the summer times would all congregate in the windows around the Milne’s court courtyard and we would do wraps for them while cross-cultural ministry set so late and you are the was to tell your the Chancellor palpitating of theological so I said okay you want; and the young you know that goes bad so what does the Chancellor and CEO of RTS my my three main jobs is Chancellor are to make sure that we provide the support that is necessary to keep the institution going to pay the professor salaries to allow the students comes a bite I go and think very generous orders that support our institution and invest in the on because we don’t want to just to just benefit from their generosity we want to serve them and bless them secondly to provide leadership for the institution because we’re spread out all over the place we got 50 faculty members gobs of administrators eight campuses and a global program and it just there only three times a year when all of us are together so it takes some communication working leadership keeps all on the same page and move in the right direction and then finally to cultivate enrollment to to help folks learn about RTS and under the seminary I teach a full load but that’s really not part of my job description I do that for free so I tell people teaching is my golf so I get I get to do that as a reward for the other things that I did and wasn’t a hard decision I know that it was to to relieve pastoral ministry and what went into that decision and what do you miss about being a pastor I I miss everything about being a pastor is the most wonderful job in the world and I love the church I could’ve served my congregation until the day I died and never ever wanted to be anywhere else I’m not a grass is greener on the other side, guy I’m I’m happy content is never been an issue I love where I was and the only thing that he could’ve taken me from that position was the opportunity to pastor pastors and to prepare future pastors and so I tell people it was like dying a death to leave the church and very frankly again it was the Council of friends that impacted me Al Mohler when when this opportunity came on board I called Al up in a similar thought this through with you I’ve been offered the position of reformed theological seminary I’m wrestling through whether I should leave the church to do that before I could get another sentence out of my mouth Al said you must do this and and I started the duck you must do this is no of you must exist and so Al was very emphatic in in challenging me in that area Sinclair Ferguson another mutual friend of ours I’ve known sinker since I was 14 years old when he came to do a Bible conference our church he has been like a big brother to me my whole life I’ve looked up to him as a hero he has never given me advice about anything and he wrote me a letter and he said Ligon I hope that it is the Lord’s will for you to become the Chancellor reformed theological seminary if not who if not you who if not now when and I thought at sinker you’ve never told me anything in my life and in your writing me out of the blue telling me to do this I took that really seriously and so I got good counsel my I went to my elders and us and look you know you support reform seminary Summit seminary has gobs of professors teaching at your church I need I need you my elders to tell me whether I should do this or not and in my elders said we don’t want you to go but we think you should do this and so I had a lot of help in making that decision so I two years ago I took up the the work we are very glad I’m very glad that you know you left a wonderful congregation first Presbyterian there in Jackson so I am sure with hands how many of you are on a church staff or you do vocational ministry okay so a smattering of photos that most of us here and I’ll be a time there’s a leaders breakfast room or the price some folks have signed up for but it be helpful even for people who aren’t pastors on a church staff your pastor for longer did you ever faced discouragement in the ministry yes absolutely over what over what sorts of things will I know I tell people honestly I am my greatest this discouragement in a I think it’s often times that the sense of my failures in ministry mine not taking advantage of all the opportunities before me if you find you more if I pastored better do better job I I honestly had a very easy and wonderful congregation to deal with I have no complaints about the situation the context in which I ministered but ministry is just hard you you bury people that you love you see people who you really love and respect have marital problems and some of those marriages don’t make it you you you you bury children you see people fall away from the faith you you just see things that are really hard and if if you’re not if you’re not grounded in God’s word if you’re not depending on him it’s very easy to to get discouraged in that environment and so I think every minister of the gospel faces discouragement so for the the few pastors that are here that maybe there’s something they wish their congregation members who might also be here they wish they knew or some way that perhaps they could be an encouragement to their pastor what would you say to to people here who love their pastors want to know how how can I encourage this brother brother and what sorts of discouragements might he be facing that most people are unaware of and I think I think one giving meaningful words of sincere appreciation for the Ministry of your pastor is huge you have not just good sermon pastor but you know Kevin what you said last Sunday was an area that I’ve been struggling then or three years thank you for being faithful bring the words could you can write that down so you I I have and I know what when when a patent because you what you feel like you you feel like you have just opened up your chest and and shown your heart to the whole watching world when you preach a message and you just want to call in the hole and die when you’re done and you have the sneaking suspicion that you’ve had an impact on absolutely no one and when someone says that that message today was for me you put your finger right on that sin that I’ve been struggling with that issue that I’m doing with you help me thank you pastor meaningful or in a pastor I know you are incredibly busy the fact that you came to see me in the hospital I just can’t I can’t tell you how much that meant to me just just express meaningful sincere appreciation for four ministry is I think most ministers have days where he wonder am I making any difference in anybody’s life and imitate one reason why is in ministry you never ever get your final report card if if you’re a law your that best case may drag on for three years but there’s an end of the case and you know whether you either one it lost it or settled when your pastor you never ever know when the work is done because it actually never ever will be done until glory so you never get a final report card so you go to your entire life wondering cannot do without having any impact for the kingdom here and you ultimately don’t know so most pastors will will just wrestle with am I making any difference in my mind not doing any good to the people of God and meaningful encouragement means a lot were a gathering of lots of different kinds of people here we saw that the beginning some people even some rest we may have would criticize a gathering like this or say look that this could water down theological distinctives legal why do you think these are the meetings are important and why are you so nice to Baptists answer either question on this will preferably is really good I think especially in our culture today it is very important for people who believe in the absolute truth of God’s word and who believe in the gospel of grace to encourage one another and to know and love and pray for one another and support one another not to downplay the theological differences we may have but because we’re the last people on earth that believe in absolute truth so it’s actually I I love it when I’m with more in a bit people say only the love I love it when Mark never teases you about the sin of them for baptism essay minute and it is not teasing that’s right I there is no teasing as he was your life you ever been in a room with John Piper Mark Denver and Al Mohler for three hours while they go after you about baptism okay I have so that intricate remember that at 240 meetings a few years ago where the only two data Baptists and CJ gets you out in the hall to ask probably something about fantasy football who knows what he gets on the hall my only help so that all of the Baptist like wolves in the database in place it really is an image on paper leads across the table and you question everything you ever believe siphon way for you to get back in a room yes or not teasing but don’t you say is important unless I love the fact that they care about truth and and I I will I love the fact that they care about truth so much that not only does it not bother me that they care about that difference with me if it makes me thankful that they care about the difference with me and so I think is is Bible believing people we never need fear with about being with other Bible believing people even we have really important differences and I I want Baptists to know why there Baptists and I want Presbyterians know why their Presbyterian and I want congregation was no one there congregation and so on but it’s important for us I think as people on the book is people really believe the Bible really believe the gospel to fellowship with one another and encourage one another support one another just remember that the kingdom of God is a lot bigger than just our local church God is doing a lot of stuff out there in this big world and it it’s an encouragement is just an encouragement this is gonna be at work not out of time but this is the rat a rapidfire section here I just I’m just some categories I want you to just give if you can think of off the top your head one or two really good books put the pressure on yourself the best book ever written in this topic but if I were really smart we would have these books all out there would probably have some of them but other people can can write them down and always looking for for good books so quick prayer Matthew Henry’s method for prayer evangelism on evangelism and the sovereignty of God by JI Packer or Mark Denver’s book on personal evangelism styles bookmarks of them is great book good books on evangelism Rico Tice has a new book on Amanda he’s really yet just read that that was really good honest about the struggles of interest about the doctrines of grace sort reformed theology so to rheology the plan of salvation by BB Warfield or I’d redemption accomplished and applied by John Murray marriage go to books on marriage that you hand couples I hand Wayne Max book on marriage which is hold remember I’ve seen the other having the weight when mad I I use it lead me what I love about it is it’s a it’s a biblical study through important passages about marriage with rate questions that force you to really think through in a difference is what it means to love one another that the things that convey laws to men in the things that convey love the women may be different and ranked in different orders and he just asked you how do you show love to your wife how do you show love to your husband and then he asked the same question of the other partner and just to have that conversation is hugely important so maybe our member though the name of the book parenting bolster strengthening your marriage to Wayne Max strengthening your marriage parenting parenting to bring his child’s heart that was maybe that was a very popular and an fine book I I tend to like to read the Puritans on on those passages in the paradigm generally did have a lot of you what about ecclesiology how Jesus once the church by Guy Waters us was a Presbyterians marked ever on for Baptist Scripture others a book called taking God at his word by Kevin Young Julia heard that the other ones I love JI Packer’s book fundamentalism in the word of God if you want to understand the controversy about the inerrancy of Scripture that has gone on for the last 50 years that’s a really good book porn about it, just two or three books maybe in a everyone in their Christian life at certain points there was a book or there was an author and it really depends a lot on where we were when we first heard these trees what one or two or three of those books or authors that were just really set you on fire for God are such a theology in place in it for me I’ve I’ve Calvin and Piper was some of that Lloyd Jones was some of that for me what or who are those guys for you knowing God by J huge for me Christianity and liberalism by Jaeger estimation was huge for me and and I read it in the first semester of my doctoral work so it landed at the exact that Christianity liberal is my written seminary Ned Stonehouse’s biography of Jaeger estimation I read in my first semester of doctoral work both of those books really really important for me no place for truth by David well right really really important for me in understanding what we were facing in this situation and our culture in the evangelical churches the the the letters of Samuel Rutherford Sands of Time is that from which and cousins road sense of time are sinking on Immanuel’s land really almost who was the who is the theologian who said that he wasn’t sure whether there was any any words ever written by an uninspired man that were closer to the language in the theology of the New Testament than Samuel Rutherford’s letters of reference letters so this is an important question and you know maybe you can answer it honestly because it may be you have your friends and family back in Mississippi but is it true that you’re an Alabama fan actually I’m a Clemson fan okay where’s her I I’ve my why would a firm in and we’re FCS you know somewhere where the are the little guy SEC tend to schedule those off the out a schedule clothes for you makes our budget for the year and give some of the young 70 points a so I went to farm and ends in South Carolina you grow up either pulling for Clemson or the University of South Carolina and my father told me that only drunks and crooks went to the University of South Carolina and therefore for Clemson and Gardens O’Neill is in a so so we pull for Clemson and but didn’t you just watch a game and lie safely on ice in the US by the one of our RTS major Alabama supporter and my daughter is a freshman at the University of Alabama and so we were there for the LSU Alabama and sat in the skybox and had an amazing experience you have houndstooth on I didn’t I didn’t have my Alabama tie on and a coat and I’d address to try to dress nicely since it was the skybox and so so being from SEC country just one more question on it so did do they ever did Amherst feel like it’s sort of the revolving door of self-congratulation you know this seems really good because it beats the SEC in a really good is a B the SEC and guess who does anything that’s accurate to see a all right well which conference one the cost of a playoff left you finally they are not SEC team one I’m not sure you’re excited about that though speak to Michigan about the audio you changing your what you go to a lot of churches in probably if they’re inviting you pretty good churches but you been around a lot of places what you think are some of the the biggest challenges you see next 5 to 10 years in the broader culture but also in the the church that you want people here hate just just keep your eye out for this keep your doctrinal discernment years open for these sorts of issues one is Christians in our culture are very very discouraged by the way things are going in our country and in the culture and they are often fed in that discouragement by the histrionics that are played out in television news which is become more infotainment than than real news and it can lead to a sort of a bunker mentality where your cranky and mad and angry and you just want to get together with the purer the purer and have nothing to do with this horrible bad culture and so I think discouragement drives and isolationism in parts of evangelicalism while on the other hand there are some evangelicals that are so desirous of getting the year of the world and the approbation of the world that they’re actually compromising so I think keeping faithfulness and engaging with the culture together is maybe the most important thing we have to do in the next 20 years in the American church but it can’t be one or the other it’s got to be both at the faithfulness people who if we just we just apologize and are nice enough all the bad problems will go away they get the the bunker just sort of the cranky are the the post in person the more the happier times as must be him again in about 10 more minutes and it was some some holiness questions which is another to let people get to know who Ligon is so I’m I’m in a give you some categories and you tell me a favorite so give me a favorite non-Christian nonfiction book favorite non-Christian nonfiction so that’s it on to Calvin and Barbara Tuchman a distant mirror so that I the calamitous 14th-century we were organizing that Barbara Barbara Tuchman is an amazing and this is this book one a number of prizes TUC HMA in what was calamitous well that is the 14th-century is that your of the Black death it’s the era of the Babylonian captivity of the papacy it is that your of the hundred years war and what’s fascinating sheet she wrote it the reason she titled the book a distant mirror she wrote it at the end of the 20th century and she said I see the same kinds of things happening in the 20th century then I said that I saw happening in the 14th-century of course the 14th-century laid the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation we would not have had the Protestant Reformation in the way that it happened had the events of the 14th-century not happen that there is a clear line between so here’s the here’s a message for us today when you see lots of bad stuff happening out there God’s up some and it’s going to get him glory and it’s good to build his church and its illness or the praise of Jesus so that doesn’t mean that bad stuff and bad the Black death was bad the beer that the the Babylonian captivity the papacy that was bad the hundred years war was bad and got used all of them to bring about the Protestant Reformation a favorite fiction book not Tolkien or see a small I can’t use rings favorite fiction book on you if you want to understand the mindset of upcountry self Carolinians the the book and who among us doesn’t on this is good I’m writing this one down to the house with you another no no no no I like South Carolina in the family there I’ve been there had donuts and whatnot so you want to go on a different category is okay this is fiction you can’t be more okay will go back there with what the movie Star Wars yeah this good band musicians fire I got a look that one up to Earth wind and fire TV show anything that you’re watching now do you ever you never home probably just around what’s a movable mail my TV shows role from you that when you know your what does your wife watch HDTV my wife hardly watches still is godly so what what about back in the day back in the day get smart man from uncle yeah the rat patrol I’ve heard of these on Nick at night before further good that’s great okay you want to tell us about this fiction book on South Carolina will I may change that okay with fiction book fiction but not Christian can be pulled the south timing that they they write fiction books this is a of our fiction is just very old reality unit that went on I went to Mississippi I thought that William Faulkner had the most overactive imagination in the history of the world and then after being there for about 10 years I realized all he did is when the family reunions rather much elementary stories alter all all that stuff that you think there’s no way people are crazy enough to do that yet we do that all the so you will move on all right, more questions about and hear talk about holiness describe the person and in don’t get their name and preferably not a pastor or missionary you can think describe the person whose godliness you respect as were talk about holiness and artist asset question needed to paint a picture of in ordinary person that you respect you feel like the that’s what I’m talking about that’s what I’d like to be that’s what I’m praying for my people to be just describe what this man or woman does is sends attitude on thinking one of my elders right now and he’s a lawyer and he’s buried his firstborn son is buried his first wife on he’s buried his best friend he’s Barry’s best friends wife and that man is had his heart broken over and over again and he loves Jesus and he loves the church I had one of his junior colleagues came to me in and he did and I’m never told him this is junior colleague came to me and said you know on Saturday mornings almost none of the partners are in the firm it’s is just all us junior guys were the ones in working in the senior partners get the benefit of our hard work and Paul is the only senior partner the town on Saturday mornings and he thinks he’s alone he denoted the rest of us around and he walks around goonies work singing hymns at the top of his lungs he didn’t even know were there and this this guy would go in on Saturday mornings just to hear Paul sing hymns while at work so just of a faithful man who worked in integrity in his profession he loved the church Trusting when he really really dealt with serious heartbreak after serious heartbreak after serious heartbreak are remember when his wife Jennifer was diagnosed with cancer on and she died in six months are going to his house and we were talking and he described to me the first time he saw her from head to toe what she was wearing what she looked like and I thought my heavens this woman has gotten into this man said he loved that woman you cannot imagine and to lose her to Lucy’s son to believe every word of the Bible to to keep to keep serving the church just got out a one I want to see people built with that kind of resilience with that, character with that kind of trust a methadone is a good man he is Lake how have you grown in holiness in the last 10 years and what what have been some hindrances or helps along the way all I I think that I am more aware of my sin that I was 10 years ago and what I think that that does is having become more aware of my sin I am aware of what I have to fight and I’m aware of my sin in the way of where it comes from and I think if you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing your adult lost the fight against and really is that the unit that the the great steps forward in the Christian life that I’ve experienced have often been when God in painful ways has made me aware of something that I didn’t want to admit about myself so soon example on my in my sabbatical in 2009 I thought that my sabbatical was good to be about writing books and getting things done and I realized that what that sabbatical actually turned into was God dealing with my sin and I had had a particular sin that I had I I knew about and I hated and I am and I cried out to God in the night to help me and I couldn’t couldn’t beat it but I also at the same time Justifying myself and that’s it I had a reason why that sin was okay in my mind even though I hated it more do it I kept excusing myself and decided you’re not wondering out what what was he doing that the sin was a is a particular kind of unrighteous ungodly anger that if you had been a member at First Presbyterian Church he never was my wife’s and it was killing her and Don I couldn’t beat it and I think part of the reason Kevin was I kept excusing myself and during that sabbatical up on Thursday night 2 AM on July 30 of 2009 I was walking around the middle when I woke up the middle and I started walking on the beach started praying for print out loud was really glad there’s nobody else rounds of others a crazy man on the beach talking itself and God brought that sin to mind and I started thinking about it and praying about and the same thing happened over and over again it was it was as if God was to bring the sin in front of my eyes and say who send is that in my head I would answer mine in the same question would come again who says that mine that happen for 50 minutes and I am not telling you is an audible voice or anything this just the this it it’s a conversation it was so real going on my in my head it felt like I was having a conversation and and finally at the end of that 50 minutes I screamed out literally out loud my and it was almost in my head was almost like not in and now quick quick thing that’s never happened to me before or since but instantaneously my tendency in that area was changed and I think one thing that happened was in the course of that prayer God made me admit that I didn’t have an excuse for that I’ve been excusing myself I didn’t have an excuse for that and the other thing was I just I I can’t completely confess my utter inability to do anything about and God’s kindness just dealt with me there and he broke the Dominion there and Don that doesn’t mean that I’ve never struggle with that again when I went a long time without struggling with that at all you have to work it everything you getting bad habits it anytime but to me that became a picture of how it if you’re not aware of why you’re struggling with something you have a hard time fighting against it and if you’re not utterly dependent on the Lord especially for fighting against the setting since you got a chance the setting since are usually about a constitutional weakness in and that constitutional weakness is probably not going away and that means you have been really overly dependent on the Lord to help you fight in that particular area and so a minute that’s it that’s just one picture may be of any I think I wrote in an awareness of my sin and where the sins come from wind struggling with that and then with the knowledge that I can excuse myself and I’ve got it on the board if item is a great place to end and of me the perfect reminder that we were talking about for these two days is not abstract right but it’s very real for all of us and there’s not a person here who isn’t who doesn’t have many reasons to be disappointed in themselves and the person who doesn’t find any of those reasons is that we most endanger you for that but there’s not a person here who doesn’t have the same God that met you if you know Christ that same God by his spirit to meet you into want to change each of us and help us grow and help us thanks those things and conquer those trucks thank you for sharing that let me pray for us a gracious heavenly father we thank you for a brother for his time for his reparation for his candor for his humility it may very well be the case that that there are any number of people here who signed up for this conference to to hear some sermons or to meet some people just to have something to do for a couple of days it would be edifying and they didn’t know that the last seven or eight minutes would would happen I didn’t know the can asset question until earlier in the evening ligand and no I was can ask it and yet by your sovereign mercy and kindness you have work that you want to do in our hearts may be a the husband that need to get on the phone and call his wife for a couple that needs to just get some time away or someone who needs to be quiet with you in the Bible or take a walk in start speaking out loud or whatever it is would you be so gracious to to correct us and change us with your severe mercy that we would grow in Christ likeness we we so fiercely cling to these sins which beset us and we believe the lie that it’s a part of who we are and that there’s no help and there’s no forgiveness and we we want to change in our best moments we we want to change we want to be different we want to be more like Jesus so help us would you by your spirit that we might be transformed from 1° of glory to the next that we might not only reflect your glory but know that gladness to be like you renewed in your image the Lord give a safety as we travel from this place a good night sleep safety as we come back especially if there’s snow falling down and would you bring us back here that we may be ready and eager to worship to learn and to grow we pray in Jesus name Amen then

in will

U.S. students need more philosophy education By DANIELE STRUPPA / CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY CHANCELLOR

U.S. students need more philosophy education By DANIELE STRUPPA / CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY CHANCELLOR

 

Jan. 18, 2016

By DANIELE STRUPPA / CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY CHANCELLOR

 

Daniele Struppa, professor and chancellor at Chapman University in Orange.MARK RIGHTMIRE, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Just a few weeks ago, in a hidden camera sting that received much attention, we were treated to the rather depressing spectacle of Ivy League students signing a petition to abrogate the First Amendment. The actor presenting the petition found it very easy to obtain the required signatures, through simplistic arguments to the effect that we should not be offensive when we speak. Not surprisingly, plenty of journalists, professors and politicians have commented on this bizarre turn of events.

The comments that I have read tend to blame political correctness and the media, and characterize the students as immature. But I think that the real responsibility lies with the systemic failure of our K-12 educational system to train our youth to think and argue rigorously.

What is the root cause of this failure? Young Americans are as intelligent as any other youngsters, and our teachers are not, in any way, less prepared or less committed than teachers in other countries. So, where do we turn to understand the reason why so many of our most talented students (such as the kids at those Ivy League institutions) appear so unprepared for intellectual discourse?

My response is that to understand this failure, we must take a critical look at how and what students learn in their formative years. When we compare our schools with their European equivalents, we can identify a fundamental hole in the American curriculum: Looking at what happens in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the most striking difference is the lack of philosophy among the mandatory subjects to which we expose our students.

“Wait a moment,” you will say. “Philosophy is an abstract discipline, mostly written by a bunch of dead white males, and so terribly alien from the needs and impulses of the modern world. Why would we waste our kids’ limited time on something that irrelevant?”

But that’s where you would be mistaken. The entire point of philosophy is not so much to study what these philosophers said over the last 2,000 years, but rather to understand that the questions we ask today are not new, and that many answers have already been tried, discussed and dissected. Thus, any discussion on these issues should not take place in a vacuum, but should instead be guided by this conversation that spans many centuries and covers many continents.

When we speak of democracy and civil disobedience, we cannot ignore what Plato wrote in “Crito,” when Socrates’ friends were asking him to escape an unjust punishment. When we speak about the nature of knowledge, we cannot ignore what Kant wrote in the “Prolegomena”; when we discuss the notion of beauty in art, we must confront Hegel’s “Lectures on Fine Art”; and when we puzzle about faith and morals, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche offer us a foundation for the conversation.

Thus, the point of reading Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is to learn the modality of argumentation, the importance of the dialogue across time, the value of understanding different points of views – and finally to instill a sense of humility in a young mind and help that mind realize that his/her point of view must engage and challenge what others have written and said about the topic at hand.

And so, it is not difficult to imagine that our young students are willing to sign a petition against free speech because they never read John Stuart Mill or Voltaire, and are not familiar with the transformative power of the Enlightenment. Their political decision is taken in an intellectual vacuum.

If we really want educated citizens, we need to rethink fundamentally what our kids will study in middle and high school. We need to pay attention to the huge repository of knowledge, ideas and critical thinking that the study of philosophy offers to young, eager minds. Until that happens, the universities will be left with the hard task to remediate rather than to build.

 

ONE WAY by RC SPROUL

ONE WAY by RC SPROUL

 

Tonight I want to take your attention back to the prologue of the Gospel according to St John which is an extraordinary introduction to John’s Gospel and those few verses that comprise that prologue are the verses that kept the most brilliant minds of the early church busy in seeking to understand the depth of it in terms of their understanding of the person and work of Jesus is not just for the first 30 years after our Lord’s ascension into heaven but throughout the first three centuries and in to the fourth century up to the Council of Nicaea which formalized and codified much of that theological investigation that focused on this prologue and is familiar as it is to all of you I don’t think you’ll hurt you this Christmas time to hear it again and so as I read the prologue of the Gospel of John would ask that you would please stand to hear it. In the beginning was the word the word was with God and the Word was God he was in the beginning with God in all things were made through him and without him nothing was made that was made in him was life and the life was the light of men and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it. There is a man sent from God whose name was John this man came for a witness to bear witness of the light that all through him might believe. He was not that light but was sent to bear witness of the that was the true light which gives light to every man coming into the world. He was in the world and the world was made through him the world did not know him. He came to his own and his own did not receive an but as many as received him to them he gave the right to become children of God to those who believe in his name who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man but of God and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory the glory as of the only begotten of the father full of grace and truth. John bore witness of him and cried out saying this was he of whom I said you comes after me is preferred before me for he was a form and of his fullness we have all received and grace for grace the law was given through Moses but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten son who is in the bosom of the father he has declared him with any wonder that the church mused, contemplated these words for centuries trying to plumb the depths of what is contained in them there’s enough information just in that preamble that I read to you a moment ago to provide Christmas sermons for 100 years you’ve heard the word of God please receive it as such. Let us pray Oh Lord once again that this Adventist season as we hear these profound words a new as always we need your help and ask that you would send it to us in the person of the Holy Spirit who superintended and inspired this record originally. For we ask it in the name of Jesus as I set a moment to gather so much in this preamble so much information and insight about who Jesus is that it almost seems arbitrary to focus on any one portion of it at the expense of the other parts we could look at the opening words in the beginning was the word or the logos word was with God and the word was God in the first sentence a distinction is made between God and the logos or the word in the next breath and identity between the word and God himself but rather than focus on that which is profound enough as I say to our congregation at the Christmas season we don’t celebrate the birth of a baby so much as we celebrate the incarnation of God that’s what Christmas is about. That rather I would like to direct your attention to verse 14 and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us we beheld his glory certainly a reference to the experience that John and Peter James had on the Mount of Transfiguration we beheld his glory was the glory. What was that glory?  The glory of the only begotten of the father full of grace and truth. Then in verse 18 no one has seen God at any time the only begotten son who is in the bosom of the father he has declared him twice in this prologue to the Gospel of John Jesus is identified as the Monoganace. The only begotten of the father. It was about 35 years ago that my dear friend Archie Perry issue with that time was the executive director of evangelism explosion at the coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale contacted me because they had given their evangelistic presentation to end of thousands of people already and they kept a record of the objections that people raised to the Christian faith in the course of evangelistic discussions. They collated these things counted these questions in terms of their numerical frequency and Archie said RC we boiled it down to 10 questions that are the 10 most frequent questions or objections that we hear when we go into the community and talk to people about Jesus and he said would you be willing to write a book for us on how to answer these 10 objections so I wrote the book 35 years ago in the original title was “Objections answered” (they change that since they always do) In the top 10 questions very close to the top of the questions that they encountered objections that people raised to the truth claims of Christianity was that they couldn’t understand how anyone could believe that there’s only one way to God we live in a pluralistic culture and pluralism teaches that there is no such thing as a unified or unitary truth and certainly no one can claim any exclusive possession of truth. If there is anything that is politically incorrect in our culture it is the claim to have a defining truth that is universal in its application unless it is the claim that there’s only one way to God and that way is through Jesus Christ. Statements that affirm such uniqueness and exclusivity about Jesus can almost spark riots in our land. I have often told the story of an embarrassing experience I had when I was a college student a new Christian in an English class of all places. Not a class and religion or philosophy or humanities it was English composition and the professor for that class was a woman who would been a war correspondent during World War II and she was as hostile to Christianity as one could be and she made her hostility clearly known in the classroom. She knew that I was a Christian she wasn’t happy about that. In the middle of a class one afternoon she looked at me and she said Mr. Sproul suggest man she said do you believe that Jesus is the only way to God. This question came out of nowhere and there was this hush in the room of anticipation. The students were straining to see what I would say in response to this question. Is Jesus the only way to God and if I ever felt impaled on the horns of a dilemma it was on that occasion because I knew if I said yes I believe is the only way to God that I would certainly incur the unmitigated wrath of this tough ex-war correspondent teacher. I also knew that if I said no I don’t believe he’s the only way I would be guilty of public betrayal and so with the boldness of Martin Luther of old when she said you believe that Jesus is the only way I answered mumbling yes. What did you say?  I said yes. Is that I believe that and she went ballistic that the ceiling was giving him down she said that’s the most narrow minded bigoted the egotistical, arrogant idea I can ever imagine. And I just sat there turn red while I felt I could physically feel the palpable hostility of everybody in the class. So at the end of the hour the bell rang this teacher did have some element of mercy in her she knew that she had embarrassed me and humiliated me in front of the class and so it was about to leave the classroom door she stopped me and she said Mr. Sproul I’m sorry that I embarrassed you to the degree that I did the life of me I can understand how anybody could be so narrow-minded. And I said her well do you think it’s possible that a humble person intelligent person could be persuaded that Jesus is one way to God. I know you don’t believe that but do you think it’s possible somebody could be persuaded of that truth. She said yes I know lots of people who I think are humble and are intelligent to who believe that Jesus is one way to God that’s not my complaint with you Mr Sproul. It’s your saying that he’s the only way. Here’s my problem convinced that he’s one way and he (Jesus) says he’s the only way. He said I’m the way the truth and the life no one, no one comes to the father except through me. I am the door through which men must enter. We are told elsewhere in the New Testament there is no other name under heaven through which men can be saved and again there is only one mediator between God and man. Jesus Christ in here in the text that we’ve seen twice he’s called the only begotten of the father. I said no Miss so and so, if I came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ is the only way to God because he’s my way that would be bigoted narrow-minded arrogant conceited and all those other adjectives you use to describe me. But don’t you see if I believe he’s one way and he says he’s the only way if I don’t acquiesce to that, then I would be conceited and arrogant by presuming to teach him. And she said I’m glad you explained it like that you said because I can understand how somebody could then come to this conclusion that you have but I have another problem. Okay what’s that?  She said but how can you believe in a God who only gives one way for salvation. Why doesn’t God give everybody in the world an opportunity to be reconciled to him by providing a number of avatars a plurality of incarnations why can’t people come to him through Mohammed or Confucius or Buddha? What kind of God is that? I guess we have to say he’s a kind of a narrow-minded God because he started giving his law to his own people. In the first commandment of the 10 was the thou have no other God before me and that before me does not mean ranking ahead of me but before me means in my presence and how far does his presence extent,  infinitely. Then what God is saying is you can’t have any other God’s. Period! The New Testament tells us that the primordial sin of the human race of which every natural man is guilty as the suppression of the knowledge of God that he makes clear of himself to all people but all people universally in each and every case suppress that truth and exchanged the truth of God for a lie, a truth that they know and knowing God they refused to acknowledge him as God or to be grateful and instead exchange that truth for a lie and begin to serve the creature rather than the Creator that is as Calvin said they become idle factories and so what about Mohamand, but what about Buddha, they’re not the sons of because God only has one. Buddha, Confucius and get ready for this Mohammed belong to the generic category according to the New Testament the antichrist. We are accustomed to thinking that antichrist is one particular person who will appear sometime at the end of the age. New Testament tells us the spirit of the antichrist is already at work. New Testament tells us that there many antichrists and also we have the tendency to think of antichrist as somebody simply goes opposed to Christ that’s what anti-means in the English language but anti in Greek not only means opposed to or against but it means one who usurps or pretends to be the Christ in his place. The cultural tells you that all religions are equal under the law we have a principal in this country of equal toleration to all religions and it’s a very very short step from believing equal toleration of all religions to the step of thanking equal validity of all religions. They are not the same thing. The law gives you the right to be wrong in your religion. The law is blind to whether you’re a Christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim or whatever you all have equal rights under the law. But don’t mistake that for God. God doesn’t give equal toleration to all these different religions. He commands all men everywhere to repent because he’s appointed a day in which he will judge the world by that man that he has appointed and demonstrated to be his Monogance. Buddha is dead. Mohamad is dead. But the father raised the sun to demonstrate to the world what he had spoken from heaven this is my beloved son. This is my only son. Listen to him. It goes against the grain of everything our culture tries to teach us and back to my discussion with my English teacher she said what kind of God could be like that?  And I said well let me see if I can explain to you what kind of a God could be like that you may not believe in this God and may give him no credibility whatsoever… But let’s supposed for the sake of argument that there is just one God and that he’s eternal and that he is absolutely holy and let’s suppose this God by his omnipotent power created the whole universe and everything in it. And he made animals and vegetables and bugs. And then he scooped down out of the dust and formed a human being and breathed into it his own breath and man became a living soul and that of all the creatures in the universe this God, eternal holy God, and righteous God stamped his image on man. Not on turtles, not mosquitoes, but on human beings. And he sent this original image of himself in the most wonderful beautiful paradise imaginable and he gave to the first couple almost absolute freedom, provided all these wonderful gifts for them in a set of all of the things there in this garden I have prepared for you may freely eat. But I have one restriction you are not allowed to eat from the street here because if you do, you will die. And supposed five minutes after he said that and gave this wonderful gift to our original parents they grab and the touch the tree and joined forces with the serpent against God, sought to be God, And suppose God said right then, okay that’s it. I told you the day you eat of it you will die, so you’re gone I’ll take my image and I’m in a put it in the grasshopper instead of you. But suppose he didn’t suppose instead in his mercy saying his naked ashamed creatures cowering in the trees made clothes to cover their shame. And in the process of cursing the serpent gave the promise that at some point in the future the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent, while his own heel would be bruised. And God let the human race continue until such point is that every human being began to do what was right in his own eyes and God destroyed them save for one family who received grace from his hand. And suppose this God out of that family gave generations of the descendants keeping them alive making a promise in a covenantal relationship with them to preserve them to heel them to redeem them And then one day he sees a man who is bowing down and worshiping idols in a pagan culture in Mesopotamia. And suppose God said to that man come here. What is your name?  “Abraham” Abraham suppose you do what I tell you to do and I want you to get up out of the country your living in and what you leave your family I want you leave your drugstore. I want you to leave your doctors I want to leave your lawyer I when you leave your business I want to go to a land that I will show you. And I am going to bless you and make you the father of a great nation through you I’m going to bless every nation in the world. Suppose he decided to do that. And God kept his promise to this man and his descendants became as grains of sand on the seashore as the stars of the sky. And then sadly the descendants of this man were brought into captivity by the most powerful ruler in the world and reduced to slavery and they cried. And God heard their cry and he sent a man to the king of Egypt and he said to pharaoh “Let my people go” Suppose that happened. And suppose the greatest liberation movement in the history of the world took place out of Egypt and God took these slaves and he molded them into a nation and he said you will be my people and I will be your God and he called their leader up to a mountain and he spoke to them there and he gave them the law by which he turned this people into a nation Isreal. And suppose he promised that out of this nation again the whole world would be blessed. And these people began to worship idols that they made out of wood and stone they made them out of their own hands and then they would deal down and they would talk to him and pray to them and worship them instead of the God who redeemed them. And so God said I can’t put up with this and so he anointed special men called prophets to come to this people would become hardened in their hearts and stiffen her neck and who it violated all the terms of the agreement that God made with them to bless them. And they killed the prophets, they stoned them. So then God said ok that’s it. Now he sends his son his only son to redeem these very people and they murdered him. And God wouldn’t have it. He raised from the dead and he said if you repent and come to come to the feet of my son and put your faith in him I am going to account his perfect righteousness for you, I am going to forgive every sin that you’ve ever committed and I’m going to impute the perfection of my only son to you, so that when you stand before me on the judgment day that I will see him and not you. And I’m going to have you live forever.  There will be no more death no more tears no more pain no more humiliation no more shame no more darkness but joy unspeakable not for a two-week vacation for two years for 2000 years but for eternity. Just suppose. Just suppose that all that happens.

I said to my professor if that’s true and I know you don’t believe it’s true but if it is true would you say to God you haven’t done enough. I would hate to be in the shoes of anybody who would say to their creator who gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting life that the father has not done enough. He has only given us one Savior instead of 10 You know I do not have any problem with the uniqueness of Christ I think there any contenders I think it’s blasphemous to mention them in the same breath with Mohammed. The question that baffles me is not why aren’t there 10 ways to God. But why is there even one. If were not amazed by that and we should never sing amazing grace and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory the glory as the only begotten of the father full of grace and truth the only begotten son who is in the bosom of the father he has declared him. That is why we say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays and I pray that this year will be a blessed time for you as you celebrate the birth of the only begotten son. Let’s pray.  Father we thank you for the extremities to which you have gone to redeem a single one of us. It is a time to sing Joy to the world, the joy that is, as far as wide as the curses from. Thank you for Jesus. Amen

 

 

 

Peter van Inwagen – Quam Dilecta (how lovely)

Peter van Inwagen – Quam Dilecta  (how lovely)

[Note to students: The first portion of this essay is autobiographical, and we won’t be talking about it directly. The second part is an explanation of why he trusts the Church rather than the enlightenment. This is the part that is of interest to us. To skip the autobiography, scroll down until you see a ‘****‘]

Peter Van Inwagen.

Yea, the sparrow hath found her an house, and the swallow a nest, where she may lay her young; even thy altars, O Lord of Hosts, my King and my God.–Ps. 84: 3

Three of my grandparents were unchurched Protestants, and one (my father’s mother) a devout Roman Catholic. As a consequence, my mother was, and is, not much of a churchgoer, and my father was a lapsed Catholic with pretty strong feelings on the subject- -an enthusiastic reader of Paul Blanshard and similar authors. When I was seven, my parents briefly sent me to a Presbyterian Sunday school. Our lessons were from a little textbook with the excellent title The King Nobody Wanted, which I still occasionall y come across in second-hand bookshops. I recall learning that we Christians believed that Jesus was the Messiah and that the Jews did not. (I remember wishing that I could have a chance to tell the Jews about Jesus; I was sure that they would be reasonab le about his Messianic status if someone were to inform them of it.)

I must also have absorbed the idea that Jesus was the Son of God, for, after my family had joined a Unitarian congregation, my father sternly informed me (presumably in response to some casual theological remark of mine) that we Unitarians did not believ e that Jesus was the Son of God. Well, I was shocked. I had thought that everyone believed that (except, of course, the Jews, but it was pretty clear that Unitarians weren’t Jews). I have a memory of walking through a hallway at my school–I think we’ve g ot to about age thirteen–and saying defiantly to myself, “I can believe that Jesus is the Son of God if I want to.” I must have been wanting in what Roman Catholic theologians used to call heroic faith, however, for I was soon enough a good little Unitar ian boy. I learned in Sunday school that the feeding of the multitudes was really a miracle of sharing, and how much more miraculous that was than a magical multiplication of loaves and fishes would have been if it had occurred, which of course it hadn’t. (Twenty years later, in the early seventies, Peter Geach told me how shocked he had recently been to hear the same story from a Roman Catholic priest. I was able to tell him that the Unitarians were at least twenty years ahead of Rome.)

My attachment to Unitarianism (and its three pillars: the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Neighborhood of Boston) did not survive my going away to college. That sort of thing is, of course, a familiar story in every denomination, but i t’s an easier passage for Unitarians, since it does not involve giving up any beliefs. My wife, who is one of my most useful critics, tells me that this is an unkind remark and ought to be omitted. It seems to me to be an important thing to say, however. I did not experience the crisis of conscience so common among Evangelical or Roman Catholic university students who leave the Church. And the reason is that if Evangelicals or Roman Catholics stop going to church, it is hard for them to avoid the question how they can justify not going to church when they believe what they do–if, indeed, loss of belief was not their reason for leaving the Church. It is, however, simply a fact that a Unitarian can sever his connection with Unitarianism without changing an y of his beliefs.

If you had asked me about my religious beliefs when I was an undergraduate or a graduate student (a period that covered roughly the 1960s) I suppose I should have said I was an agnostic, although there was a brief period when I was in graduate school dur ing which–under the influence of some version or other of the Argument from Evil–I should probably have said I was an atheist. This was a position of the head, not the heart, however: it had no more connection with my emotional life than, say, my belief (also briefly held in graduate school) that Quine had shown that quantified modal logic was impossible. My emotional life in the late 1960s, insofar as I had one, had entirely to do with the concerns of everyday life–although, to be sure, everyday life for a graduate student in philosophy is a little different from the everyday life of most people. A very important feature of my life as a graduate student was a growing conviction that I was a better philosopher than any of my fellow graduate students an d most of my teachers. Vanity in this area–wounded vanity, because little attention was paid to me or to my work during the early years of my career–was a dominant feature of my inner life in the 1970s. (Professional vanity may well continue to dominate my inner life, but it would be harder for me to tell these days, since I now feel, rightly or wrongly, that my philosophical talents are adequately recognized by the profession. Wounded vanity is a rather more salient feature of one’s inner life than se lf-satisfied vanity.)

When I was a graduate student, I began to read the apologetic works of C. S. Lewis. There were (under God) two reasons for this. First, I had loved his “space trilogy,” and I was looking for “more Lewis.” Secondly, I recognized him as a master of exposit ory prose, and thought–rightly- that I could learn a great deal from him about the art of expressing a line of argument in English. Like many other people, I first discovered what Christianity was from reading Lewis. The discovery was purely external, a matter of being able to use the right words when talking about “Christianity,” but it was no small gain to have a correct external understanding of Christianity. I saw that the picture I had been given of Christianity by my Unitarian Sunday-school teacher s and various teachers of philosophy (no great difference there) was self-serving, frivolous, and wildly inaccurate. I saw that Christianity was a serious thing, and intellectually at a very high level. (I was thinking, of course, in terms of propositions and distinctions and arguments.) I lost at that time, and for good, any capacity for taking any liberalized or secularized version of Christianity seriously. I could read Lewis. I could try to read Harvey Cox or William Hamilton. I could see the differen ce. To this day, I cannot see why anyone disagrees with my judgment that academic theologians of their stripe have nothing of interest to say. I have to admit, however, that some very learned people do disagree with this judgment.

The only thing was, I didn’t believe it. I could see that there was an “it” to believe, and, if I did not really see how much there was to being a Christian beyond having certain beliefs, I did see that the beliefs must come first, and that a Christian l ife without those beliefs is an impossibility. One day in the late 1960s, I fell to my knees and prayed for faith, but faith did not come. I do not know what led me to make this gesture, but presumably there must have been some sort of felt pressure, and presumably this pressure did not long continue. I expect that I had been setting God some sort of test: If You don’t give me faith on the spot, I’ll conclude that You do not exist or are not interested in me, and that these pressures I’ve been feeling hav e some sort of purely natural explanation and can be ignored till they go away. We all know how well that sort of thing works.

I married, spent two years in the Army (at the height of the American military involvement in Viet Nam; but I was safe in Germany), became the father of a daughter, and began to teach philosophy. I was entirely immersed in the secular world: Sunday was m y day of rest, and my day of nothing else. Although I continued to be interested in Christianity in an intellectual sort of way, it would no more have occurred to me to take up churchgoing–even as an experiment–than to take up hang-gliding or bookbindin g. In 1973, I spent six delightful weeks on the campus of Calvin College at an NEH Summer Institute in the Philosophy of Religion, which was directed by Alvin Plantinga. As far as I am able to tell by introspection and memory, this had nothing to with my religious development, although it had a great deal to do with my philosophical development. (Plantinga’s lectures–roughly, The Nature of Necessity- became for me a model for doing philosophy.) Besides my family, my only interests were philosophy and my career in philosophy. Perhaps my former wife and my daughter would say that the qualification “besides my family” is unnecessary. I certainly was taken up both with my researches and my desire to be recognized and admired. My researches, I think, went ver y well indeed, but I haunted my departmental mail box mostly in vain, and was subject to frequent periods of depression and spasms of anger because of my lack of professional recognition. The anger was directed at certain of my former teachers (the more f amous ones), who, I believed, were in a position to advance my career and yet were doing nothing for me.

I believed that they just didn’t see how good I was, and wasted their influence in advancing the careers of people who were less good than I. (I was n ever jealous of these other people, only envious: I didn’t want them not to get what they got, but I wanted some too.) When Al Plantinga wrote to Hector Castañeda, suggesting that a paper of mine be published in Noûs, and when Tony Kenny wrot e to the Oxfo rd University Press, telling them that I had a manuscript that they ought to try to get hold of, this made me even angrier with my teachers: “There,” I said to myself, “That proves it. It can be done. Comparative strangers do it, but they don’t.” I someti mes wonder whether my teachers knew about this anger. My relations with them were entirely friendly whenever we met. This friendliness was not exactly hypocrisy on my part, since, as I say, the anger was not continuous but spasmodic, and I am not very goo d at being angry with people who are actually in the same room with me. (But I never once in a calmer moment repented these spasms of anger, which I always considered appropriate and fully justified.)

I can remember pretty well one feature of this period that is particularly relevant to my topic: what it was like not to have any religious beliefs. That is, I can remember pretty clearly certain episodes of thought that are possible only for the secular mind, but the memory is not “sympathetic”; it is a sort of looking at the past from the outside. Here is an analogy. Suppose that you now love someone you once hated. You might well be able to remember an episode during which your hatred manifested itsel f–say, in the writing of a letter in which you said terrible things to that person. You might remember very clearly, for example, hesitating between two turns of phrase, and deciding that one of them was the more likely to wound, and choosing it on that account. But since you now love that person, and (presumably) cannot feel the way you felt when you hated, there is a good sense in which you cannot “remember what it was like” to write the letter. You are looking at your past from outside.

I shall try to describe three of these “episodes of thought.” First, I can remember having a picture of the cosmos, the physical universe, as a self-subsistent thing, something that is just there and requires no explanation. When I say a “having a picture,” I am trying to describe a state of mind that could be call ed up whenever I desired, and which centered round a certain mental image. This mental image–it somehow represented the whole world–was associated with a felt conviction that what the image represented was self-subsistent. I can still call the image to mind (I think it’s the same image) and it still represents the whole world, but it is now associated with a felt conviction that what it represents is not self-subsistent, that it must depend on something else, something not represented by any feature of the image, and which must be, in some way that the experience leaves indeterminate, radically different in kind from what the image represents. Interestingly enough, there was a period of transition, a period during which I could move back and forth at w ill, in “duck-rabbit” fashion, between experiencing the image as representing the world as self subsistent and experiencing the image as representing the world as dependent. I am not sure what period in my life, as measured by the guideposts of external b iography, this transition period coincided with. I know that it is now impossible for me to represent the world to myself as anything but dependent.

The second memory has to do with the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead. I can remember this: trying to imagine myself as having undergone this resurrection, as having died and now being once more alive, as waking up after death. You might think it would be easy enough for the unbeliever to imagine this–no harder, say, than imagining the sun turning green or a tree talking. But–no doubt partly because the resurrection was something that was actually proposed for my belief, and no doubt partly bec ause I as an unbeliever belonged to death’s kingdom and had made a covenant with death–I encountered a kind of spiritual wall when I tried to imagine this. The whole weight of the material world, the world of the blind interaction of forces whose laws ha ve no exceptions and in which an access of disorder can never be undone, would thrust itself into my mind with terrible force, as something almost tangible, and the effort of imagination would fail. I can remember episodes of this kind from outside. I can no longer recapture their character. I have nothing positive to put in their place, nothing that corresponds to seeing the world as dependent. But I can imagine the resurrection without hinderance (although my imaginings are no doubt almost entirely wron g), and assent, in my intellect, to a reality that corresponds to what I imagine.

The two “episodes” I have described were recurrent. I shall now describe a particular experience that was not repeated and was not very similar to any other experience I have had. I had just read an account of the death of Handel, who, dying, had express ed an eagerness to die and to meet his dear Savior Jesus Christ face to face. My reaction to this was negative and extremely vehement, a little explosion of contempt, modified by pity. It might be put in these words: “You poor booby. You cheat.” Handel ha d been taken in, I thought, and yet at the same time he was getting away with something. Although his greatest hope was an illusion, nothing could rob him of the comfort of this hope, for after his death he would not exist and there would be no one there to see how wrong he had been. I don’t know whether I would have disillusioned him if I could have, but I certainly managed simultaneously to believe that he was “of all men the most miserable” and that he was getting a pretty good deal. Of course this rea ction was mixed with my knowledge that the kind of experience I tried to describe in the preceding example would make Handel’s anticipation of what was to happen after his death impossible for me. I suppose I regarded that experience as somehow veridical, and that I believed that Handel must have had such experiences, too, and must have been trained, or have trained himself, to ignore them.

In 1980 or thereabouts, I began to experience a sort of pressure to become a Christian: a vast discontent with not being a Christian, a pressure to do something. Presumably this pressure was of the same sort that had led me to pray for faith on that one occasion ten years earlier, but this was sustained. This went on and on. My mind at the time is not readily accessible to me in memory. I wish I had kept a journal. I know that sneers directed at God and the Church, which–I hope I am not giving away any secret here–are very common in the academy, were becoming intolerable to me. (What was especially intolerable was the implied invitation to join in, the absolutely unexamined assumption that, because I was a member of the academic community, I would, of course, regard sneering at God and the Church as meet, right, and even my bounden duty.) I perhaps did not have anything like a desire to turn to Christ as my Savior, or a desire to lead a godly, righteous, and sober life, but I did have a strong desire t o belong to a Christian community of discourse, a community in which it was open to people to talk to each other in words like the ones that Lewis addresses to his correspondent in Letters to an American Lady. I envied people who could talk to one another in those terms. I know that I was becoming more and more repelled by the “great secular consensus” that comprises the world-view of just about everyone connected with the universities, journalism, the literary and artistic intelligentsia, and the enterta inment industry. I knew that, confused as I might be about many things, I was quite clear about one thing: I could not bear the thought of being a part of that consensus. What made it so repulsive to me can be summed up in a schoolyard cri de coeur: “They think they’re so smart!” I was simply revolted by the malevolent, self-satisfied stupidity of the attacks on Christianity that proceeded from the consensus.

I remained in a state of uncertainty for some time. During this period, I described my state of mind by saying that I didn’t know whether I believed or not. Eventually I performed an act of will. I asked Bill Alston (to his considerable astonishment) to put me in touch with a priest. The priest I was put in touch with was–at that time and in relation to that particular need–of no help to me, but my interview with him took place in his study, which was in a church building. While I was talking with him, it became clear to me that a large part of my difficulty with the Church might be churches. It became clear to me that one fact about me that was of relevance to my condition was that I didn’t want to start going to church. Well, I thought, at least that ‘s a fact I can do something about. I decided to start going to church–simply to attend an early Eucharist every Sunday morning as a sort of observer, with no more commitment involved than five dollars for the collection plate. I began doing this. The fi rst effect was that it put my wife into a fury, despite the fact that I was always home from church before she was awake. But I soon found that I liked going to church, and that an unconscious fear of churchgoing was no longer a barrier between me and the Church. This would have been in September 1982, at just about the time of my fortieth birthday. The following May I was baptized. (I have just noted, while setting out the sequence of dates in my mind, that this took place nine years ago to the day.) Fol lowing my baptism, I received my first Communion. Since then, the Sacrament has been the center of Christian devotional life for me. It is no more possible for me willfully to forego Holy Communion on a Sunday than for me, say, to slander a colleague or t o refuse to pay a debt.

And since then I have been an Episcopalian. I regard myself as a Catholic, and the Anglican communion as a branch (separated from other branches by historical tragedy) of the Catholic Church that is mentioned as an article of belief in the Creeds. I cann ot easily see myself as a member of any other denomination, although I believe that the Episcopal Church is among the best possible illustrations of Robert Conquest’s Second Law: Every organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.

Eventually, I suppose, the high-minded progressives who control the denomination at the national level will do some truly appalling thing and I shall at last have to leave, but I hope I have a while left in the Episcopal Church, because I really do like t he place. (An Anglican joke: “Why is Rome called the Eternal City? Because there’s always Rome.”)

As a Christian, I of course believe that conversions are the work of God, and are thus largely invisible to the convert, save in their effects. Nevertheless, I believe, the convert must have turned to God and, in some fashion have asked for His help. I h ave no useful memory of what I did to ask God for his help, or of the form in which that help came. Naturally, I prayed–conditionally–but what it was about those prayers that was different from my prayer in the sixties, or what it was that I did besides prayer, is unknown to me.

I was allowed the usual honeymoon. The counterattack occurred in 1985. As might be expected with a person like me, it was an intellectual counterattack. At least, it was an intellectual counterattack in the sense that it had to do with propositions and e vidence and arguments, and not with personal tragedy or sexual temptation or distaste for liturgical innovation or disillusionment with the behavior of my fellow Christians. But it was not an intellectual counterattack in the sense that it had much respectable intellectual content. A great deal of its content, in fact, was simply ludicrous, and I was perfectly well aware of that at the time, but that did not make it any less effective. One part of the counterattack was a real intellectual difficulty: I wa s extremely worried by Jesus’ apparent prediction of the end of the present age within the lifetime of some of the witnesses to his earthly ministry. Nowadays I would say that I don’t expect that the New Testament always gives an exact account of Jesus’ w ords, and that the passages that worried me are probably a conflation of his prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem, and his description of the End Times; I would say that this conflation was natural enough, given the beliefs of the early Church. And I would add to this that I am not sure it is inconsistent with a robust and orthodox theology of the Incarnation to hold that Jesus himself believed in an imminent Parousia (although I am not entirely happy about that idea). And not only would I say these things nowadays, but I said them (to myself, just about daily) for several years in the middle eighties. The difference is that now I am perfectly comfortable with these arguments, and then they seemed like a wretched subterfuge to me. It’s not that I pe rceived some flaw in them that I was unable to deal with. I perceived no flaw in them. They simply seemed like a wretched subterfuge to me, and that is all that there was to say about the matter.

The other parts of the counterattack are so flimsy that I am ashamed to record them. One derived from a newspaper report that a certain biblical scholar (a man who I later learned had written a book the central thesis of which was that Jesus was a halluc inogenic mushroom) maintained that unpublished material from the Dead Sea Scrolls contained prototypes from which the Gospels were derived, prototypes that antedated the birth of Jesus. The other had its basis in the claims of some physicists and cosmolog ists to be able to show (or to be about to be able to show) that the cosmos was somehow a thing that had come into existence literally out of nothing–that is, without any causal antecedents whatever, either temporal or ontological. I knew what to say in response to these arguments, of course. Anyone who thought about it would. I knew that this scholar did not claim to have seen these Gospel prototypes; rather he inferred their existence from scraps of information about the unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls ma terial by an elaborate Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) chain of reasoning; I knew that he was demonstrably regarded by many scholars as a crank, and that his theory was endorsed by no one; I knew that he was fanatically hostile to Christianity. As to th e physicists and cosmologists, their claim was philosophical nonsense, tricked out to look like sense by games played with the word ‘nothing’. These things I knew then as well as I do now, but I could not make them real to myself. There was always a voice that whispered, “But this is not philosophy. You are not a biblical scholar or a physicist. You are out of your element here, and they are in theirs. Your criticisms are without value, you amateur.”

The net result of my state of mind was fear. I was unable to read the Bible, or to look at a newspaper article reporting the latest public pronouncement of some cosmologist about where the universe came from. And I was ashamed to seek help from my fellow Christians, since I knew that the things that were troubling me were nonsense, and I didn’t want to look a fool. (And, at the same time, there was this quite inconsistent fear: Suppose I did ask and was told, “You know, that’s always worried me, too. I d on’t know what to say about that. And those counter-arguments you keep rehearsing to yourself are worthless, and I’ll tell you why.”) Perhaps the best way to describe my state of mind would be by an analogy. You don’t believe in ghosts, right? Well, neith er do I. But how would you like to spend a night alone in a graveyard? I am subject to night fears, and I can tell you that I shouldn’t like it at all. And yet I am perfectly well aware that fear of ghosts is contrary to science, reason, and religion. If I were sentenced to spend a night alone in a graveyard, I should know beforehand that no piece of evidence was going to transpire during the night that would do anything to raise the infinitesimal prior probability of the hypothesis that there are ghosts. I should already know that twigs were going to snap and the wind moan and that there would be half-seen movements in the darkness. And I should know that the inevitable occurrences of these things would be of no evidential value whatever. And yet, after I had been frog-marched into the graveyard, I should feel a thrill of fear every time one of these things happened. I could reason with myself: “I believe that the dead are in Heaven or Hell, or else that they sleep until the General Resurrection. And if my religion is an illusion, then some form of materialism is the correct metaphysic, and materialism is incompatible with the existence of ghosts. And if the Church and the materialists are both wrong and there are ghosts, what could be the harm in a gho st? What could such a poor wispy thing do to one?” And what would the value of this very cogent piece of reasoning be? None at all, at least in respect of allaying my fear of ghosts.

Possibly, if one were subject to an irrational fear of ghosts, one would eventually lose it if one were forced to spend every night alone in a graveyard. Something like that seems to have happened to me as regards the irrational fears that underlay what I have called the counterattack. Eventually, they simply faded away. I am now unclear about what the time-frame of all this was. I know that the full force of it lasted for several years and that it was horrible. I am sure that I could say nothing that wo uld convey the horror of it to someone who had not had a similar experience, just as someone who was “afraid of ghosts” (without believing in their existence) could do nothing to convey to someone who was free from this fear what was so horrible about spe nding a night alone in a graveyard or an abandoned and isolated house. The fears, while they lasted, were tireless and persistent. (At one time I called them–to myself; I never spoke of these things, out of pride and shame–the barrage.) Reason is impote nt in such situations, since one is already intellectually convinced that there is nothing to fear. (Fear replies, Ah, but you have reasoned wrong. “How have I reasoned wrong?” I said, you have reasoned wrong.) And prayer, whatever its objective benefits, brings no immediate psychological comfort, as it can do in many kinds of affliction; on the psychological level, prayer merely aggravates the fear that there is No One There by making the question whether there is anyone there momentarily inescapable, an d letting the fears loose on it.

Somehow, with God’s help, I got through this period. (I often wonder whether it was some kindergarten version of “the Dark Night of the Soul,” but I have never really understood what that phrase means.) I hope it never returns. I hope that the part of me on which it operated is dead, swallowed up in that death into which we are baptized. But God has, as is His usual practice, given me no guarantees, and, for all I know, it could all start again tomorrow.
There is not much more to tell about my life that is relevant to my topic. In 1987, my first wife, for reasons that I do not understand, insisted on a divorce. (This is perhaps the only bad thing that has ever happened to me, at least as the world counts bad things. I do not think I should make much of a martyr; I have not had the training.) The divorce was granted the following year, and the year after that I married Elisabeth Bolduc. Several years earlier, her husband had moved out and left her with a three-week-old baby and two older children. We met and were married in the church in which I had been baptized and confirmed. Lisette, as my wife is usually called, is–besides being a deeply Christian woman–an extrovert with a very strong personality a nd a vigorous emotional life. She thinks I am too intellectual and introverted and is determined to draw me out of myself. She may be succeeding. And then again, I may be too old a dog to learn new tricks.

At present my religious life is in what is sometimes called a dry period. I have trouble praying, and in “finding time” to read the Bible. I have almost no sense of myself as a sinner who needs the saving power of Christ, although, of course, I fully acc ept the proposition that I am a sinner who needs Christ. I can see perfectly well my pride and anger and sloth and lust and self-centeredness and callousness. I can see perfectly well that pride and anger and sloth and lust and self-centeredness and callo usness are sins. What I cannot do is to make the obvious logical consequence of these two objects of intellectual awareness real to myself. All of the particular acts that fall under these general headings (pride, etc.) “feel” all right to me because they are done by me–that is, in these mitigating circumstances, which only I appreciate. (Of course it was excusable for me to answer him in those words, after he looked at me like that.) Nevertheless, whether I should be or not, I am not greatly troubled or uneasy about this. I am somehow confident that God, having brought my intellect (at least to some degree) under His control is patiently working inward and is beginning to achieve some sort of mastery over my passions and my appetites. I believe that par ts of me that were diseased but vigorous ten years ago have been killed and replaced with grafts of living, healthy tissue. But it is obvious from my behavior and the shameful inner thoughts that I reveal to no one but God (and I sometimes catch myself th inking in ways that seem to presuppose that I can hide these thoughts even from Him) that the process has a long way to go. I often feel as if God is saying to me (when I have formed, say, some shameful plan of revenge and humiliation), “You know, if it weren’t for Me, you would actually carry out that plan. Don’t suppose that you are really capable of resisting the temptation to do things like that. In letting you have these thoughts, I am showing you what you would do if I ever left you to yourself, even for a moment.”

“Yes, yes, autobiographical narrative is all very well, but we want to know how you can possibly believe all that stuff.” A couple of years ago, I wrote a paper about New Testament criticism, which contained the following passage:

I am a convert. For the first forty years of my life I was outside the Church. For much of my life, what I believed about the Church was a mixture of fact and hostile invention, some of it asinine and some of it quite clever. Eventually, I entered the Chu rch, an act that involved assenting to certain propositions. I believe that I had, and still have, good reasons for assenting to those propositions, although I am not sure what those reasons are. Does that sound odd? It should not. I mean this. I am incli ned to think that my reasons for assenting to those propositions could be written down in a few pages–that I could actually do this. But I know that if I did, there would be many non-Christians, people just as intelligent as I am, who would be willing to accept without reservation everything I had written down, and who would yet remain what they had been: untroubled agnostics, aggressive atheists, pious Muslims, or whatever. And there are many who would say that this shows that what I had written down co uld not really constitute good reasons for assenting to those propositions. If it did (so the objection would run), reading what I had written on those pages would convert intelligent agnostics, atheists, and Muslims to Christianity–or would at least for ce them into a state of doublethink or intellectual crisis or cognitive dissonance. Perhaps that’s right. If it is, then among my reasons there must be some that can’t be communicated–or I lack the skill to communicate them–, like my reasons for believi ng that Jane is angry: something about the corners of her mouth and the pitch of her voice, which I can’t put into words.

I read the paper that contained this passage at a conference on philosophy and New Testament criticism at Notre Dame University, and Bas van Fraassen, who was in the audience, told me afterwards that he did not think that I would find it as easy to write down “my reasons for assenting to these propositions” as I supposed. I had to admit that it was possible that he was right. To this day, I am not sure. But I am now going to put the matter to the test.
Let me begin with a fact about philosophy. Philosophers do not agree about anything to speak of. And why not? How can it be that equally intelligent and well-trained philosophers can disagree about the freedom of the will or nominalism or the covering-l aw model of scientific explanation when each is aware of all of the arguments and distinctions and other relevant considerations that the others are aware of? How can we philosophers possibly regard ourselves as justified in believing anything of philosop hical significance under these conditions? How can I believe (as I do) that free will is incompatible with determinism or that unrealized possibilities are not physical objects or that human beings are not four-dimensional things extended in time as well as in space, when David Lewis–a philosopher of truly formidable intelligence and insight and ability–rejects them and is aware of and understands perfectly every argument that I could bring against them?

Well, I do believe these things. And I believe that I am justified in believing them. And I am confident that I am right. But how can I take these positions? I don’t know. That is itself a philosophical question, and I have no firm opinion about its corr ect answer. I suppose my best guess is that I enjoy some sort of philosophical insight that, for all his other merits, is somehow denied to Lewis. And this would have to be an insight that is incommunicable–at least I don’t know how to communicate it–, for I have done all I can to communicate it to Lewis, and he has understood perfectly everything I have said, and he has not come to share my conclusions. But maybe my best guess is wrong. I’m confident about only one thing in this area: the question must have some good answer. For not only do my beliefs about these questions seem to me to be undeniably true, but (quite independently of any consideration of which theses it is that seem to me to be true), I don’t want to be forced into a position in which I accept no philosophical thesis of any consequence. Let us call this unattractive position “philosophical skepticism.” (Note that I am not using this phrase in its usual sense of “comprehensive and general skepticism based on philosophical argument.”) I think that any philosopher who does not wish to be a philosophical skeptic–I know of no philosopher who is a philosophical skeptic–must agree with me that this question has some good answer: whatever the reason, it must be possible for one to have good and sufficient reasons for accepting a philosophical thesis when there are philosophers who, by all objective and external criteria, are at least equally well qualified to pronounce on that thesis and who reject it.

Will someone say that philosophy is a special case? Perhaps because nothing really hangs on philosophical questions, and a false or unjustified philosophical opinion is therefore harmless? Or because philosophy is in some sense not about matters of empir ical fact? As to the first of these two suggestions, I think it is false that nothing hangs on philosophical questions. What people have believed about the philosophical theses advanced by–for example–Plato, Locke, and Marx has had profound effects on h istory. I don’t know what the world would be like if everyone who ever encountered philosophy immediately became, and thereafter remained, a philosophical skeptic, but I’m willing to bet it would be a vastly different world.
The second suggestion is trickier. Its premise is not that it doesn’t make any difference what people believe about philosophical questions; it’s rather that the world would look exactly the same whether any given philosophical thesis was true or false. I think that that’s a dubious assertion, but rather than address it, I will simply change the subject.

Let us consider politics. Almost everyone will admit that it makes a difference what people believe about politics, and it would be absurd to say that propositions like “Capital punishment is an ineffective deterrent” or “Nations that do not maintain a strong military capability actually increase the risk of war” are not about matters of empirical fact. And yet people disagree about these propositions (and scores of others of equal importance), and their disagreements about them bear a disquieting resemblance to the disagreements of philosophers about nominalism and free will and the covering-law model. That is, their disagreements are matters of interminable debate, and impressive authorities can be found on both sides of many of the interminable debates.

It is important to realize that this feature of philosophy and politics is not a universal feature of human discourse. It is clear, for example, that someone who believes in astrology believes in something that is simply indefensible. It would be hard to find a philosopher who believed that every philosopher who disagreed with his or her position on nominalism held a position that was indefensible in the same way that a belief in astrology was indefensible. It might be easier to find someone who held the corresponding position about disputed and important political questions. I suspect there really are people who think that those who disagree with them about the deterrent effect of capital punishment or the probable consequences of unilateral disarmament are not only mistaken but hold beliefs that are indefensible in the way that a belief in astrology is indefensible. I can only say that I regard this attitude as ludicrous. On each side of many interminably debated political questions–it is not necessar y to my argument to say all–one can find well-informed (indeed, immensely learned) and highly intelligent men and women who adhere to the very highest intellectual standards. And this is simply not the case with debates about astrology.

Everyone who is intellectually honest will admit this. And yet few will react to this state of affairs by becoming political skeptics, by declining to have any political beliefs that are undisputed by reputable authorities. But how can this rejection of political skepticism be defended? How can responsible political thinkers believe that the Syndicalist Party is the last, best hope for Ruritania when they know full well that there are well-informed (even immensely learned) and highly intelligent people w ho argue vehemently–all the while adhering to the highest intellectual standards–that a Syndicalist government would be the ruin of Ruritania? Do the friends of Syndicalism claim to see gaps in the arguments of their opponents, “facts” that they have ci ted that are not really facts, real facts that they have chosen not to mention, a hidden agenda behind their opposition to Syndicalism? No doubt they do. Nevertheless, if they are intelligent and intellectually honest, they will be aware that if these cla ims were made in public debate, the opponents of Syndicalism would probably be able to muster a very respectable rebuttal. The friends of Syndicalism will perhaps be confident that they could effectively meet the points raised in this rebuttal, but, if th ey are intelligent and intellectually honest, they will be aware . . . and so, for all practical purposes, ad infinitum.

I ask again: what could it be that justifies us in rejecting political skepticism? How can I believe that my political beliefs are justified when these beliefs are rejected by people whose qualifications for engaging in political discourse are as impress ive as David Lewis’s qualifications for engaging in philosophical discourse? These people are aware of (at least) all the evidence and all the arguments that I am aware of, and they are (at least) as good at evaluating evidence and arguments as I. How, th en, can I maintain that the evidence and arguments I can adduce in support of my beliefs actually justify these beliefs? If this evidence and these arguments are capable of that, then why aren’t they capable of convincing these other people that these bel iefs are correct? Well, as with philosophy, I am inclined to think that I must enjoy some sort of incommunicable insight that the others, for all their merits, lack. I am inclined to think that “the evidence and arguments I can adduce in support of my bel iefs” do not constitute the totality of my justification for these beliefs. But all that I am willing to say for sure is that something justifies me in rejecting political skepticism, or at least that it is possible that something does: that the conclusio n that one is not justified in holding any “controversial” political beliefs is not a necessary truth.

Now let us turn to questions of religion. Is religion different from philosophy and politics in the respects we have been discussing? It is an extremely popular position that religion is different. Or, at least, it must be that many anti-religious philos ophers and other writers hostile to religious belief hold this position, for it seems to be presupposed by almost every aspect of their approach to the subject of religious belief. And yet this position seems never to have been explicitly stated, much les s argued for. Let us call it the Difference Thesis. A good example of the Difference Thesis at work is provided by W. K. Clifford’s famous essay “The Ethics of Belief.” One of the most interesting facts about “The Ethics of Belief” is that nowhere in it i s religious belief mentioned. It would, however, be disingenuous in the extreme to say that this essay is simply about the ethics of belief in general and is no more directed at religious belief than at any other kind of belief. “Everyone knows,” as the p hrase goes, that Clifford’s target is religious belief. (Certainly the editors of anthologies know this. “The Ethics of Belief” appears in just about every anthology devoted to the philosophy of religion. It has never appeared in an anthology devoted to e pistemology.) The real thesis of Clifford’s essay is that religious beliefs–belief in God; belief in an afterlife; belief in the central historical claims of Judaism or Christianity or Islam–are always or almost always held in ways that violate his famo us ethico-epistemic principle: It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. If, moreover, he is of the opinion that beliefs in any other general category are always or almost always (or typically or rathe r often) held in ways that violate his principle, this is certainly not apparent.

Let us call this principle–“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone . . .”–Clifford’s Principle. It is interesting to note that Clifford’s Principle is almost never mentioned except in hostile examinations of religious belief, and that the anti- religious writers who mention it never apply it to anything but religious beliefs. (With the exception of illustrative examples–like Clifford’s example of the irresponsible ship-owner–that are introduced in the course of explaining its content.) It is t his that provides the primary evidence for my contention that many anti-religious philosophers and other writers against religion tacitly accept the Difference Thesis: the fact that they apply Clifford’s Principle only to religious beliefs is best explain ed by the assumption that they accept the Difference Thesis. The cases of Marxism and Freudianism are instructive examples of what I am talking about. It is easy to point to philosophers who believe that Marxism and Freudianism are nonsense: absurd parodi es of scientific theories that get the real world wildly wrong. Presumably these philosophers do not believe that Marxism and Freudianism were adequately supported by the evidence that was available to Marx and Freud–or that they are adequately support ed by the evidence that is available to any of the latter-day adherents of Marxism and Freudianism. But never once has any writer charged that Marx or Freud blotted his epistemic escutcheon by failing to apportion belief to evidence. I challenge anyone to find me a passage (other than an illustrative passage of the type I have mentioned) in which any devotee of Clifford’s Principle has applied it to anything but religious belief. And yet practically all philosophers–the literature will immediately demons trate this to the most casual inquirer–subscribe to theses an obvious logical consequence of which is that the world abounds in gross violations of Clifford’s Principle that have nothing to do with religion.

An explanation of the widespread tacit acceptance of the Difference Thesis is not far to seek. If Clifford’s Principle were generally applied in philosophy (or in politics or historiography or even in many parts of the natural sciences), it would have to be applied practically everywhere. If its use became general, we’d all be constantly shoving it in one another’s faces. And there would be no comfortable reply open to most of the recipients of a charge of violating Clifford’s Principle. If I am an archa eologist who believes that an artifact found in a Neolithic tomb was a religious object used in a fertility rite, and if my rival Professor Graves believes that it was used to wind flax, how can I suppose that my belief is supported by the evidence? If my evidence really supports my belief, why doesn’t it convert Professor Graves, who is as aware of it as I am, to my position? If we generally applied Clifford’s Principle, we’d all have to become agnostics as regards most philosophical and political questi ons–or we’d have to find some reasonable answer to the challenge, “In what sense can the evidence you have adduced support or justify your belief when there are many authorities as competent as you who regard it as unconvincing?” But no answer to this ch allenge is evident, and religion seems to be the only area of human life in which very many people are willing to be agnostics about the answers to very many questions.

It might, however, be objected that what I have been representing as obvious considerations are obvious only on a certain conception of the nature of evidence. Perhaps the Difference Thesis is defensible because the evidence that some people have for the ir philosophical and political (and archaeological and historiograhpical . . .) beliefs consists partly of the deliverances of that incommunicable “insight” that I speculated about earlier. This objection would seem to be consistent with everything said i n “The Ethics of Belief,” for Clifford nowhere tells his readers what evidence is. If “evidence” is evidence in the courtroom or laboratory sense (photographs, transcripts of sworn statements, the pronouncements of expert witnesses, tables of figures), th en “the evidence” pretty clearly does not support our philosophical and political beliefs. Let such evidence be eked out with logical inference and private sense experience and the memory of sense experience (my private experience and my memories, as oppo sed to my testimony about my experience and memories, cannot be entered as evidence in a court of law or published in Physical Review Letters, but they can be part of my evidence for my beliefs–or so the epistemologists tell us) and it still seems to be true that “the evidence” does not support our philosophical and political beliefs. It is not that such evidence is impotent: it can support–I hope–many life-and-death courtroom judgments and such scientific theses as that the continents are in motion. B ut it does not seem to be sufficient to justify most of our philosophical and political beliefs, or our philosophical and political beliefs, surely, would be far more uniform than they are. If “evidence” must be of the courtroom-and-laboratory sort, how c an the Difference Thesis be defended?

If, however, “evidence” can include “insight” or some other incommunicable element–my private experience and my memories are not necessarily incommunicable–, it may be that some of the philosophical and political beliefs of certain people are justified by the evidence available to them. But if evidence is understood in this way, how can anyone be confident that some of the religious beliefs of some people are not justified by the evidence available to them? If evidence can include incommunicable elemen ts, how can anyone be confident that all religious believers are in violation of Clifford’s Principle? If “evidence” can include the incommunicable, how can the Difference Thesis be defended?

All that I have said so far in this section amounts to a polemic against what I perceive as a widespread double standard in writings about the relation of religious belief to evidence and argument. This double standard consists in setting religious belie f a test it could not possibly pass, and in studiously ignoring the fact that almost none of our beliefs on any subject could possibly pass this test.

I ask the reader to abandon this double standard. I ask the reader not to demand that my arguments meet standards modeled on courtroom rules of evidence or the editorial requirements of the Journal of Molecular Biology.

****

In the sequel I will present some arguments for the Christian faith. To set out these arguments, in my judgment, is to present those who attend to them with good reasons for accepting that faith. The arguments will almost certainly not convince anyone, b ut then such arguments as I might give for the truth or falsity of nominalism or regarding the deterrent powers of capital punishment would almost certainly not convince anyone either. It is often said that you can’t argue people into faith. Well, I don’t want to dispute that statement, but I do want to deprecate the idea that it is something worth saying. What can you argue people into? Faith–Christian faith, that is–is believing what the Church says (and continuing to believe it even when it is under the sort of “night in the graveyard” attack that I tried to describe in the preceding section). Would anyone say that you can’t argue people into believing Plato’s account of the trial of Socrates or into believing what the Democratic Party says about the superiority of its platform to that of the Republicans? I suppose that there is an element of truth in these two statements–argument is rarely coercive; in most areas of life, the best argument does not guarantee converts, even among the ideally rationa l–, but argument is hardly irrelevant to the question whether one should believe the statements of Plato and the Democrats. In point of fact, no one ever does say things like this. The fact that people go about saying that you can’t argue people into fai th, and saying this as if it were an intelligent thing to say, is simply one more example of the double standard that I have been attacking. There are several things I am not going to discuss that I might be expected to discuss in connection with arguments for the Christian faith.

I am not going to discuss “arguments for the existence of God.” Although I think that some versions of two of these arguments–the Design Argument and the Cosmological Argument–are as good as any philosophical argument that has ever been presented for a ny conclusion, I don’t think that they have any more to do with my religious beliefs than, say, arguments for the existence of other minds have to do with my belief that my wife would never lie to me or my belief that democracy is a good thing. (I am goin g to touch on some matters related to the Design Argument, but I am in no sense going to defend that argument.)
I am not going to discuss “the problem of evil.” I have said what I have to say on this topic elsewhere. I have always regarded the problem of evil as simply one more philosophical problem: every important system of belief raises philosophical problems, and the problem of evil is one that is raised by all religions that are founded on belief in a loving and all-powerful God. I think, of course, that what I have said in response to this problem is right. But that’s a mere philosophical opinion. On a relig ious level, my belief is simply that there are good reasons for the evils we see in the world–and that this would be true even if everything I have said on the subject is worthless. If I may interject an autobiographical note at this point, I will menti on that I have never had the least tendency to react to the evils of the world by saying, “How could there be a loving God who allows these things?” My immediate emotional reaction has rather been: “There must be a God who will wipe away every tear; there must be a God who will repay.” (Or this has been my reaction as a believer. I don’t think that as an unbeliever I had any sort of emotional reaction to the evils of the world.)

I am not going to discuss Christian mysteries–the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, the Atonement. I have discussed two of these elsewhere, but, on the religious level, my belief is that these apparently impossible things are real and are therefo re possible. Christian mysteries are News, and the recipients of news are not always in a position to understand it perfectly. I believe that in relation to the Christian mysteries we Christians are like people who have never seen a mirror, or even a refl ection in a pond, trying to grasp the nature of a mirror from listening to one of their fellows who has been shown a looking-glass by a traveler. Perhaps the closest analogy the observer of the mirror can find is provided by pictures scratched in the sand : “A ‘mirror’ is a kind of flat plate that shows pictures like the ones we scratch in the sand, but they’re three-dimensional–looking at a mirror is almost like looking through a window, even though the mirror has hardly any thickness and you just see an ordinary surface if you turn it round and look at the back–and they’re in color, and they’re absolutely perfect pictures (except that they’re backwards), and they change and move just the way real things do, and the mirror always shows pictures of the t hings right in front of it.” One can easily imagine the conceptual havoc a skeptical philosopher among these people could wreak on this attempt at description. Nevertheless, considering the situation of the speaker and his audience, it’s a good, practical description of a mirror. (It would, for example, almost certainly enable someone who had never seen a mirror to recognize a mirror on his first encounter with one.) In my view, creedal descriptions of the Trinity and the Incarnation are good, practical d escriptions of real things, descriptions that will do till we no longer see through a glass darkly. I am confident that they are at least as good as descriptions of curved space or the wave-particle duality in works of popular science.

I do not propose to say anything about religions other than Christianity. I have discussed this topic elsewhere and I have nothing more to say about it.
I do not propose to discuss miracles and questions about the believability of reports of events that are contrary to the laws of nature. This is an important subject, and one that I certainly should say something about, given the nature of my topic, but I do not have the space. If I had had sufficient foresight, I should already have written an essay on miracles that I could refer you to. Sorry.

Now, finally . . . Each of us accepts certain authorities and certain traditions. You may think that you are an epistemic engine that takes sensory input (that “fancifully fanciless medium of unvarnished news”) and generates assignments of probabilities to propositions by means of a set of rules that yields the most useful (useful for dealing with the future stream of sensory input) probability-assignments in most possible worlds. In fact, however, you trust lots of people and groups of people and–within very broad limit s–believe what they tell you. And this is not because the epistemic engine that is yourself has processed a lot of sensory data and, in consequence, assigned high probabilities to propositions like “Dixie Lee Ray is a reliable source of information on ec ological matters” or “Most things that the Boston Globe says about the homeless are true.” You may have done some of that, but you haven’t had time to do very much of it.
As regards questions about the nature of the world as a whole and the place of humanity in the world, it is statistically very likely that you trust one or the other of two authorities: the Church or the Enlightenment. (But some readers of this essay wil l trust the Torah or the Koran or even–I suppose this is remotely possible–a person or book that claims access to some occult, esoteric wisdom.) What I propose to do in the sequel is to explain why I, who once trusted the Enlightenment, now trust the Church.

There is, I believe, an identifiable and cohesive historical phenomenon that named itself the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and which, although it long ago abandoned the name, still exists. Like the Church, it does not speak with one voice. Li ke the Church, it has no central government. Like the Church, it is made up of many groups some of which heartily detest many of the others–some of which, indeed, regard themselves as its sole true representatives and all others who claim to be its repre sentatives as wolves in sheep’s clothing. Like the Church, it has a creed, although, unlike the Church’s creeds, its creed has never received an official formulation. But that is a minor point. Its creed can be written down, and here it is:

There is no God. There is, in fact, nothing besides the physical cosmos that science investigates. Human beings, since they are a part of this cosmos, are physical things and therefore do not survive death. Human beings are, in fact, animals among other a nimals, and differ from other animals only in being more complex. Like other animals, they are a product of uncaring and unconscious physical processes that did not have them, or anything else, in mind. There is, therefore, nothing external to humanity th at is capable of conferring meaning or purpose on human existence. In the end, the only evil is pain and the only good is pleasure. The only purpose of morality and politics is the minimization of pain and the maximization of pleasure. Human beings, howev er, have an unfortunate tendency to wish to deny these facts and to believe comforting myths according to which they have an eternal purpose. This irrational component in the psyches of most human beings–it is the great good fortune of the species that t here are a few strong-minded progressives who can see through the comforting myths–encourages the confidence-game called religion. Religions invent complicated and arbitrary moral codes and fantastic future rewards and punishments in order to consolidate their own power. Fortunately, they are gradually but steadily being exposed as frauds by the progress of science (which was invented by strong-minded progressives), and they will gradually disappear through the agency of scientific education and enlightened journalism.

Various Enlightenment “denominations” such as Marxism or Positivism or Freudianism or Social Darwinism would insist that this statement of the Enlightenment creed omits certain extremely important propositions–even propositions that are absolutely crucia l to an understanding of the world and humanity’s place in the world. But I have tried simply to capture the Highest Common Factor of the various schools of thought that compose the Enlightenment–the Apostles’ Creed of the Enlightenment, as it were. The Enlightenment has had its chance with me and I have found it wanting. I was once one of its adherents, and now I am an apostate. On the level of intellectual argument and evidence, it leaves a lot to be desired. And its social consequences have been horrible.

I am going to compare the attractiveness of the Church and the Enlightenment. I will group my comparisons into three parts. First, it seems to me, the teachings of the Church are, as I shall say, “congruent” with the facts of science and history in a wa y that the “creed” of the Enlightenment is not, and I shall discuss this. Secondly, I shall compare the “fruits” of the Church with the fruits of the Enlightenment. Thirdly, I shall compare the effects of adherence to the Church and to the Enlightenment in the lives of individuals.

The first matter for discussion is congruency. The preferred universe of the Enlightenment was constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is infinite in space and time, and it consists entirely of matter in motion. This universe was incompatible with the content of nineteenth-century science, even at the beginning of the century, and science became less and less hospitable to it as the century progressed. Nevertheless, this universe–that is, this picture of the universe–persisted in the popular imagination (which is what it was desi gned for) throughout the century, and it can be found in some circles even today. Today this picture is simply impossible. Present-day science gives us a universe that began to exist a specific number of years ago and may well be spatially finite; it is m oreover governed by laws that contain a lot of apparently arbitrary numbers, and if these numbers were only a bit different, there would be no life: only a vanishingly small region in the space of all possible sets of physical laws is occupied by sets of laws that permit the existence of life, and the one universe there is is governed by a set of laws that falls within that minuscule region. It is of course possible to explain these things in terms other than those of theism. My point is that the Christia n is right at home in such a universe, whereas the adherent of the Enlightenment would much prefer the universe of nineteenth-century popular science. That, after all, is the universe that was constructed by the imagination of the Enlightenment when the f acts still allowed that imagination free play. But it is the universe that was constructed to fit the imaginations of Christians (unless its source was actually in divine revelation) that turned out to be consistent with what science has discovered. (Let’ s hear nothing about “fundamentalism.” Some Christians are fundamentalists, and are consequently unhappy with the universe of modern cosmology. But fundamentalism is one of the accidents of Christianity, not a part of its essence. If St Thomas Aquinas was a fundamentalist in the current sense of the word, St Augustine was not. And Aquinas, when he discusses Augustine’s thesis that the “six days” of Genesis are a figurative description of six aspects of the created world, simply says that Augustine was wro ng; he does not say that Augustine’s views were heretical. A fundamentalist-turned-logical-positivist once called me a wishy-washy theological liberal because I read the book of Genesis in a way that was compatible with modern cosmology. I asked him wheth er he thought that Augustine was a wishy-washy theological liberal. “Yes,” he said.)

Coming down to more modern times, cosmologically speaking, what the Enlightenment would really like is a universe bursting with life, and chock-full of rational species. But no one knows anything to speak of about the origin of life on the earth except t hat it is at present one of the great scientific mysteries. There is, therefore, no scientific reason to think that life is something that happens “automatically.” It is pretty certain that there is no life elsewhere in the solar system, and the gleanings of the “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence” have not been very encouraging to those who would like to think of the Orion Spur (our own little galactic neighborhood) as festooned with technological civilizations like ornaments on the Christmas tree it rather resembles. When these facts are combined with the fact that rationality has evolved only once on the Earth (as opposed to forty times for vision and four for flight; and each of these evolutionary inventions is spread over hundreds of thousands of species, while rationality’s meager score is one), and the fact that this event would not have happened if a comet or asteroid had not happened to cause the mass extinctions of sixty-five million years ago, it begins to seem unlikely that the Enlighte nment will get what it wants in this area. The Christian, on the other hand, is right at home in a universe in which humanity is the only rational species, or is one of a small handful of them.

The Enlightenment would like it if humanity were continuous with other terrestrial animals, or at least very much like some of them. The Enlightenment would like this so much that it has actually managed to convince itself that it is so. It has even mana ged to convince itself that modern science has proved this. I remember reading a very amusing response made by David Berlinski to Stephen Jay Gould’s statement that modern science was rapidly removing every excuse that anyone had ever had for thinking tha t we were much different from our closest primate relatives. Berlinski pointed out that you can always make two things sound similar (or “different only in degree”) if you describe them abstractly enough: “What Canada geese do when they migrate is much li ke what we do when we jump over a ditch: in each case, an organism’s feet leave the ground, it moves through the air, and it comes down some distance away. The difference between the two accomplishments is only a matter of degree.” I am also put in mind o f a cartoon Phillip Johnson once showed me: A hostess is introducing a human being and a chimp at a cocktail party. “You two will have a lot to talk about,” she says, “–you share 99 percent of your DNA.” I’m sorry if I seem to be making a joke of this, b ut . . . well, I am making of joke of this. I admit it. Why shouldn’t I? The idea that there isn’t a vast, radical difference, a chasm, between human beings and all other terrestrial species is simply a very funny idea. It’s like the idea that Americans h ave a fundamental constitutional right to own automatic assault weapons: its consequences apart, it’s simply a very funny idea, and there’s nothing much one can do about it except to make a joke of it. You certainly wouldn’t want to invest much time in an argument with someone who would believe it in the first place.

The Enlightenment has, historically speaking, felt a certain affection for European civilization. (Admittedly, this affection is not what it used to be.) After all, European civilization produced the Enlightenment so it can’t be all bad. Nevertheless, the single greatest factor in the development of European civilization was the Church, so it can hardly be all good either. Best, perhaps, to stress its similarities to other civilizations (no doubt we’d find native “Enlightenments” bravely struggling again st the local superstitions in those other civilizations if we looked closely enough) and to ascribe its bad aspects to the Church and its good elements to the Enlightenment or to such “Morning Stars of the Enlightenment” as Roger Bacon and Copernicus. The main problem confronting this Enlightenment strategy is science.

Modern science–the kind of science of which Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion is a paradigm–has arisen only once in history. Oh, there has been some observational astronomy here and some attempt at systematic medical knowledge th ere. The achievements of the Greeks in taking the first steps down the path of science were magnificent, particularly in descriptive astronomy and statics–that is, in scientific studies that were essentially applied geometry. But the Greeks took a few st eps down the road of science and faltered.

Here is the story the Enlightenment tells. There would have been a scientific revolution like that of sixteenth-century Europe in the classical world if the biblical literalism and other-worldliness of Christianity had not stifled ancient science and cre ated the Dark Ages. Over a millennium later, science and the scientific method were reborn in the mind of Galileo (or maybe Copernicus had something to do with it). The Church persecuted Galileo, but it failed to kill the infant he had fathered, and has b een steadily losing ground to science ever since. (If you would like to see this story set out in more detail, consult A. D. White’s History of the Warfare of Science and Theology.)

I don’t want to get into an historical argument. I will simply tell another story, a story that is in my view better supported by the evidence. (This view is of course the view of an amateur, but a have, I suppose, as much right to it as any follower of the Enlightenment who was not a trained historian of science has had to the story told in the preceding paragraph.)

Ancient science discovered very little after about the time of the birth of Christ–which amounts to pretty quick work if Christianity stifled ancient science. The modern growth of science did not begin suddenly in the sixteenth century, but was continuo us with the natural philosophy of the High Middle Ages. (This has been well documented by Pierre Duhem.) There has been little persecution of science by the Church. There is nothing in the history of the relations of science and Christianity that can be c ompared with the Lysenko era in Soviet biology or the condition of science in Germany under the Nazis. When one looks carefully at the persecution of Galileo, the debate between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, or the Scopes trial, one finds that most of wh at one thought one had known about them isn’t true, and that the real episodes do little to support the Enlightenment picture of a perpetual “warfare of science and theology.”

Just as rationality has “happened” only once in the history of terrestrial life (unlike vision or flight), so science has “happened” only once in the history of humanity (unlike writing or the calendar). And the unique occurrence of science–real science , which does not stop with precise and systematic descriptions of phenomena, but goes on to probe their underlying causes–happened in a civilization that was built upon the Church. The task of explaining why there was no science in India or China develop ed into something of an industry in the eighteenth century. To someone who shared the values of Voltaire, it was extremely puzzling that “rational” Confucian China, an ancient and settled civilization with a long history of scholarship and a demonstrated capacity for mechanical invention, should never have developed science. The failure of the much admired classical world to develop science in the modern sense could be blamed on Christianity, but what was it to be blamed on in the case of China? After all , science had flowered in monk-ridden Europe, and it could hardly, therefore, be a particularly frail blossom; why, then, not in China? The question was never satisfactorily answered. It has since been largely ignored. Two devices contribute to this. Firs t, there is a tendency to use the word ‘science’ so broadly that at least some “science” can be found practically anywhere. If this does not solve the problem, it helps to sweep it under the carpet. Secondly, there is a tendency to identify the history of the world with the history of Europe. While this tendency has lately been much deplored by some of the current representatives of the Enlightenment (and rightly so), it has been useful to the Enlightenment, for it enables one to think of the birth of sc ience as something that belongs to the history of “the world” rather than to the history of a particular civilization; since there is only one world, this makes the unique birth of science seem somehow less puzzling.

I would suggest that science is an outgrowth of western Latin Christianity, connected with it in much the same way as Gothic architecture. (That is, the connections are historical and causal, not logical, and the causation is not inevitable.) I would sug gest that the Christian world-view of the High Middle Ages produced a mental climate that made the birth of science possible. (The suggestion has sometimes been made by representatives of the Enlightenment that a belief in miracles is inimical to science. Well, those who actually were responsible for the birth of science–Galileo and Newton, for example–believed in all of the miracles of the New Testament. It really is very hard to see how those who believe that, in the normal course of events, nature works by mechanical causes are going to be less effective scientists if they believe that miracles occur at special junctures in what Christians call salvation history–or even that they happen frequently at Lourdes. The real conceptual enemies of science are astrology and magic. There was a very dangerous outbreak of serious interest in astrology and magic during the Renaissance, which the Church worked very hard to suppress.)

The fact that the single birth of science occurred in Christendom is, therefore, a fact that is not congruent with the creed of the Enlightenment and which must, therefore, either be ignored or explained away by the Enlightenment. Christians, however, wi ll be comfortable with the fact that the single most powerful instrument for understanding the world developed in a culture that had been shaped by (as they believe) a unique revelation of the mind and purposes of the Creator of that world.

I have left what I believe to be the single most important congruency for last. All human beings are deeply, radically evil. (Are there no exceptions to this generalization? If there are, they are so rare that it is extremely unlikely that you or I have ever met one.) This evil may be only potential, but it is real. (In some cases i t may be comparable to an as yet asymptomatic but deadly and inoperable cancerous tumor.) This fact can be hard for the citizens of a truly civilized society to realize, for it is the business of civilization to train people from birth not even to deliber ate about certain acts. (We do not want our fellows to regard murder as a matter for rational deliberation.) It is, moreover, the business of civilization to attempt so to arrange matters that, if any individual does regard rape or murder or fraud or false witness as..R[dbl dagger] at people who live in a civilized society have no right to expect that their great-grandchildren–or they themselves in their old age–will live in a civilized society.

The Christian doctrine of original sin comprises an etiology, a diagnosis, and a prognosis. I will mention only the diagnosis and one half of the prognosis: we are deeply, radically evil, and this condition is unalterable by any natural means. The Enligh tenment, of course, does not accept this thesis. The Enlightenment holds either that human beings are naturally good, or that they are neither good nor bad but simply infinitely malleable. In either case, the horrible way that human beings treat one anoth er is regarded as a social artifact, and as therefore eliminable, or at least reducible to tolerable proportions, by some form or other of social reorganization. This reorganization (whose nature representatives of the Enlightenment discover by thinking v ery hard about how society should be organized) will, as the case may be, allow the natural goodness of human beings to flourish or mold them into a form in which they will behave only in desirable ways. The reorganization is humanly possible and when it has been achieved it will be stable. Rousseau and B. F. Skinner represent this point of view in its purest, most innocent form (innocent, that is, of contact with reality). But there are much shrewder thinkers who hold it in some recognizable form. It is not clear to me how anyone could ever actually have held such a position, but that anyone could hold it in the late twentieth century is believable only because there it is, right before our eyes.

The Christian is able to have a realistic view of the human past and present. The representative of the Enlightenment cannot. (At any rate most of them don’t. I concede that a few of the people who have described themselves as “humanists” have had a real istic view of human nature. But they have never been listened to by the body of the Enlightenment.) It is extremely unfortunate that some Christians have abandoned the doctrine of original sin. As someone, Chesterton perhaps, remarked, they have abandoned the only Christian dogma that can actually be empirically proved. (True as regards the diagnosis and one half of the prognosis, at any rate.)

The Christian is also able to have a realistic view of himself or herself. As one Christian writer of the present century remarked, “We are none of us very nice.” When I look back on the days of my allegiance to the Enlightenment, I discover that this al legiance was primarily a device to assist me in admiring myself. I still admire myself, I’m afraid, but at least I have silenced the voice of one flatterer. (“How intelligent you are,” the Enlightenment would whisper in my ear, “how progressive, how, well , enlightened.”) It may well be that not every adherent of the Enlightenment has used it that way; I do not claim to be able to look into the souls of the living, much less the long dead. But to read such Enlightenment figures as Hume or Voltaire with Chr istian eyes is to see every possible opportunity for self-admiration taken; and Voltaire and Hume, like me in my own Enlightenment days, do not seem even to be able to get on with the business of self-admiration without perpetual sneers at “milkmaids” (Vo ltaire)–that is, at the great mass of people who keep the wheels turning while the Enlightenment sips its chocolate and peers at them through its quizzing-glass. (The eighteenth-century Enlightenment–the Enlightenment proper, so to call it–no doubt hat ed kings and priests just as it said it did, but its real driving negative emotion was contempt for subjects and churchgoers. This is still true of the current representatives of the Enlightenment, mutatis mutandis.) I must admit, however, that I am not i n a position to feel too terribly superior to Voltaire and Hume and my own past self. In theory, I accept the words of the hymn: “Foul I to thy fountain fly/Wash me Saviour, or I die.” In practice, of course, I mostly think I’m a pretty fine fellow. (I me an, I not only have all my native niceness, but I’m religious as well.) But I’m sorry. Or I’m sorry I’m not sorry. And this is simple realism, however disinclined my heart may be to follow my head in this realism. The Enlightenment seems to be incapable o f such realism.

I will now turn to my second kind of argument. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” said Jesus. He was, perhaps, referring only to preachers and the doctrines they preached, but the saying has usually been taken in a more general sense (possibly under t he influence of St Paul on the fruit of the Spirit), and that is the way I shall take it.

I have mentioned one of the “fruits” of the Church: modern science. (I remind the Christian reader that I am at this point discussing only things whose existence would be admitted by a non-Christian.) There are others. One might mention democracy (we mus t remember that no Greek polis if it existed today would be described as a democracy), the concept of universal human rights and its embodiment in working constitutions, and the rule of law (law as opposed both to the momentary will of the sovereign and u nalterable custom). Like science, these things are, according to the Enlightenment, inventions of the Enlightenment. But they arose in Christian nations and the individuals who contributed to their development were mostly Christians. I concede that the de bt owed by all who cherish these things to certain representatives of the Enlightenment is very great. Thomas Jefferson certainly comes to mind. (If anti-Christians can admire certain Christians–St Francis, for example–despite the fact that they were Ch ristians, I suppose it is allowable for me to admire certain representatives of the Enlightenment like Jefferson, despite their allegiance to the Enlightenment.) In fact, however, those Enlightenment figures who actually contributed to the development of those benign social institutions that are among Europe’s greatest inventions were very imperfectly and selectively de-Christianized. If you want to see the social fruits of the Enlightenment in their pure form, you must look at the contributions to histor y of those who had consciously and decisively separated themselves from the Christian tradition and who based their political activities solely on Enlightenment theories. There is no point in looking at people like Tom Paine and Karl Marx who never actual ly held the reins of political power, for there is no way of determining how they would have used the forces of coercion that power places at one’s disposal when they were faced with recalcitrant political reality. I would suggest Robespierre and Lenin as instructive examples.

The Enlightenment makes much of the suffering and death caused by the awful things Christians have done–the Crusades and the Inquisition seem to be the standard examples, although if I were to give the Enlightenment advice on how to conduct its case, I would suggest that it pay more attention to the Thirty Years’ War. But with whatever justification these things can be ascribed to the Christian religion, such episodes as the Terror of the 1790s, the Great Terror of the 1930s, and Pol Pot’s experiment in social engineering in the 1970s can with the same justification be ascribed to the Enlightenment. And these caused thousands of times as many deaths and incomparably greater suffering than all of the pogroms and religious wars in the history of Europe. T he Crusades et al. were quite ordinary episodes in the immemorial string of crimes that mainly compose what the world calls history and what St Paul called this present darkness. The French Revolution was, as Burke was the first to realize, something new, a new kind of horror. The new kind of horror did not, of course, really hit its stride till about seventy years ago. Let no one say that I have blamed the great post-Christian horrors of the last two centuries on the Enlightenment. My claim is this: lay out an argument for the conclusion that responsibility for the crimes of the Crusaders and the Inquisition is to be laid at the door of Christianity, and I will produce a parallel argument of about equal merit–not very great, in my opinion–for the conc lusion that responsibility for the crimes of the Committee of Public Safety, the Soviet Communist Party, and the Khmer Rouge is to be laid at the door of the Enlightenment.

Whether or not the Enlightenment is responsible for the French Revolution and Pol Pot, it has nothing positive to offer humanity. It cannot legitimately claim to be the author of science or democracy, and its creed leaves only an aching emptiness at the spiritual level. In matters of the spirit, it bakes no bread. In its attempts to undermine Christian belief, it has opened the door to all manner of substitutes that are, by its own standards–standards it has borrowed from the Church; it cannot create s tandards, but can only edit the standards that the Church has made common currency–even worse than Christianity. The cult of the nation-state, Naziism, Satanism, “the jargon of authenticity,” New Age fluff, and what is this year called “theory” in litera ture departments have rushed in to fill the vacuum in the human heart that the Enlightenment has created. As Chesterton remarked, when people stop believing in God they are not going to start believing in nothing; they are going to start believing in ever ything. In the end, the Enlightenment cannot survive; even if (by the standards of the world) it should destroy the Church, what replaces the Church at the social and cultural level will destroy the Enlightenment. Saturn’s children will devour him. Those who doubt this should reflect on the actual fate of liberal humanism under Hitler, or on the probable fate of liberal humanism under a politically established Age of Aquarius, or under a triumphalist reign of “theory” in the universities.

Finally, I wish to consider the effects of the Church on individual lives. Here I must be brief, for there is no way that I can convey the evidence I am in possession of to you. I am, therefore, not talking about things whose existence is uncontroversial , although it is also true that I shall not be asserting the existence of anything that is in principle incompatible with the Enlightenment world-view.

There are many atheists I know, old-fashioned atheists of the Enlightenment type, who are singularly impressive people, people whose lives and behavior are worthy of the highest admiration. (“How, then, can you, as a Christian believe that without conver sion and repentance these admirable people are lost?” That question is not to the present point, but I will make one brief remark. I would look at the issue raised by this question from the other end: in the fact that even these admirable people cannot ju stify themselves before God, we see why it is that conversion and repentance are all the more necessary for the rest of us.) But each of these people is impressive in his or her own way. There are Christians I know, however, who are very impressive people , and their impressiveness is of a distinctively Christian sort. A common thread runs through their very diverse lives, and it is a Christian thread. I have never been able to discern an “Enlightenment” thread that runs through the lives of the admirable atheists of my acquaintance. There are five or six Christians I know who, for all the rich individuality of their lives and personalities, are like lamps, each shining with the same, dearly familiar, uncreated light that shines in the pages of the New Testament. I can no more doubt this judgment than I can doubt many of my much more everyday sorts of judgment to the effect that this or that person is kind or generous or honest or loving. When one is in the presence of this light–when one so much as liste ns to one of these people speak–it is very difficult indeed to believe that one is not in the presence of a living reality that transcends their individual lives. But there is nothing more I can say about this (except perhaps to say that I am sure that t he reason I do not see more Christians as lamps is to be found in my own limitations; I have no tendency to believe that the people who look this way to me are closer to God than any other Christians are). I mention it only because not to mention it woul d misrepresent my claims about the reasons I have for being a Christian.

All of the things I have mentioned–congruency, the fruits of the Church, my perception of the lives of some of my Christian friends–are, in the meditation of my heart, woven together into a seamless garment. When I take all of these things into account , it seems to me that I must conclude that the Church speaks with authority. I do not see how anyone could regard the Enlightenment–or any individual Enlightenment “denomination”–as an authoritative voice. Its creed is not congruent..ith the world we li ve in, the social consequences of its influence have been disastrous, and it has nothing at all to offer “milkmaids” and nothing but opportunities for self-admiration to offer the intellectual and governing classes. If two voices tell radically different stories about the world and the place of humanity in the world, one speaking with authority and one with a meretricious pretense to authority, it does not follow that the former is right. Maybe no one is right. (The stories are logical contraries, not con tradictories.) It is even possible that the meretricious posturer is right. But there is no way to believe only the logical consequences of what is uncontroversial and to believe very much, and no one–unless it were the inhabitants of some asylum–believ es only the logical consequences of what is uncontroversial. It seems to me, however, that anyone who believes the Church in the world as it is is in a pretty good epistemic position. At any rate, a better epistemic position than anyone else who is actual ly capable of functioning in the world. Maybe the only people who occupy a defensible epistemic position are skeptics–political and philosophical skeptics as well as religious skeptics. There is no way to show that that thesis is false. If there were, th ere would be a philosophically adequate refutation of skepticism. I believe, however, that the epistemic position of the Christian is demonstrably superior to any non-skeptical position, and it is for this thesis that I have tried to argue.

I am fully aware that my arguments will convert no one who is a firm adherent of any system of belief incompatible with Christianity. (If anyone who reads this essay thereupon becomes a Christian, that person was already a Christian–as regards propositi onal belief–when he began to read it; he just wasn’t yet aware of the fact.) As I have pointed out, however, I could do no better with arguments for any controversial philosophical or political thesis–that is, for any philosophical or political thesis t hat is of any interest or importance.

I do not mean to suggest that my acceptance of the Church as an authority rests on my own unaided rational evaluation of the arguments I have given. No one who believes the Church could take that position, for the Church teaches that without the help of God, no one comes to Christian belief. But, for all that, the arguments I have given may provide sufficient rational support for (or good reasons for accepting) Christian belief. An argument may provide sufficient rational support for a belief and yet be impotent to produce that belief in some (or all) of those who hear and understand the argument. Almost everyone would admit this as a general truth, whatever disagreements there might be about particular cases. I expect that all readers of this essay wil l grant that there are arguments that provide sufficient rational support for the following propositions: ‘Jewish blood cannot be distinguished from Teutonic blood under a microscope’; ‘The earth is considerably more than six thousand years old’; ‘The pyr amids are not the work of extraterrestrial beings’. And yet there are those who have heard the arguments and deny the propositions. What I would say about the arguments that I have given is that, first, these arguments do lend rational support to Christia n belief (but this assertion is not a part of my Christian faith; it is merely one of my opinions) and that, secondly, I require God’s help to find them convincing–indeed, even to find them faintly plausible. Hume has said, “Mere reason is insufficient t o convince us of its [the Christian religion’s] veracity: and whoever is moved by faith to assent to it is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.” The Christian who ignores Hume’s ironic intent and examines this statement seriously will find that it is very near to the truth in one way and very far from it in another. God’s subversive miracle is indeed required for Christian belief, but what this miracle subverts is not the understanding but the flesh, the old Adam, our continued acquiescence in our inborn tendency to worship at an altar on which we have set ourselves. (For this is what Hume, althou gh he does not know it, really means by “custom and experience.”) And by this miracle the understanding is set free.
Notes

1. I had considerable difficulty with the notion of remarriage. But there is little doubt that both my wife’s first marriage and mine were invalid by the standards of Rome–hers in fact has been annulled, in a proceeding instituted by her former husband– , and I suppose that there is no point in being more Catholic than the Pope.

2. “Critical Studies of the New Testament and the User of the New Testament” in Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology, Eleonore Stump and Thomas Flint (eds.), (South Bend: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. The qu oted passage occurs on p .The paper will be reprinted in my God, Knowledge, and Mystery: Essays in Philosophical Theology, forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

3. In Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1879).

4. To be precise, there are a few glancing references to religion in the essay, but the fact that they are references to religion, while it doubtless has its polemical function, is never essential to the point that Clifford is making. Clifford’s shipowner , it will be remembered, comes to his dishonest belief partly because he puts his trust in Providence. Another of Clifford’s illustrative cases is built round an actual Victorian scandal (described in coyly abstract terms: “There was once a certain island in which . . .”) involving religious persecution. But in neither case is the proposition that is dishonestly accepted without sufficient evidence a religious or theological proposition.

5. See “The Magnitude, Duration, and Distribution of Evil: A Theodicy,” Philosophical Topics, XVI no. 2 (1988) pp. 161-187, and “The Problem of Evil, the Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence,” Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 5 (1991) pp. 135-165. T he latter will be reprinted, along with responses to some critics of the paper, in Daniel Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil, forthcoming from Indiana University Press. Both papers will be reprinted in God, Knowledge, and Mystery.

6. See “And Yet They Are Not Three Gods But One God,” in Thomas V. Morris (ed.) Philosophy and the Christian Faith (South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 1988), pp. 241-278, and “Not by Confusion of Substance But by Unity of Person,” in a Festschrift f or Richard Swinburne, edited by Alan Padgett, to be published by Oxford University Press. Both essays will be reprinted in God, Knowledge, and Mystery.

7. See “Non Est Hick,” in Thomas M. Senor (ed.), The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith. The essay will be reprinted in God, Knowledge, and Mystery.

8. See, however, the two “humanist manifestoes” issued by the American Humanist Association. They are printed together in Humanist Manifestoes I and II (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1973). They are pretty mealy-mouthed compared with the “creed” in the text, and they are written in the worst sort of academic prose (“. . .the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values . . .”), but they come to much the same thing.

9. For evidence that this is what the Enlightenment would really like, see Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), pp. 170-81.

10. I am sorry to say that I do not remember where I read this.

11. My amateurish views on the history of science have been deeply influenced by the work of Stanley L. Jaki. I refer the interested reader to his Gifford Lectures, published as The Road of Science and the Ways to God, (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1978)

12. But the story about this is somewhat confused. The Enlightenment believed that the young Church had stifled the vigorous adolescent science of antiquity, but that the powerful Church of the sixteenth century was unable to dispose of the infant science of its day.

13. I have said something about the way in which (in my view) the Christian world-view made the birth of science possible in a note (number 15) to “Non Est Hick.”

14. George Mavrodes has presented a very interesting “congruency” argument in his essay “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” in Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright, eds., Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philos ophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 213-226. Mavrodes’s thesis is that Christianity–or, more generally, a certain kind of theism–is congruent with a belief in the reality of moral obligation and that the creed of the Enlighten ment is not.

15. I have borrowed this marvelous sentence from a talk I once heard Eleonore Stump give.

 

The most depressing article you will ever share.

ORLANDO MASSACRE

Gutfeld: Orlando’s doom. The most depressing article you will ever share. Share it anyway

By Greg Gutfeld

 FoxNews.comThe immediate consequences from the Orlando terror attack are obvious: dozens dead and maimed – families changed forever.

The next layer of consequences, arriving soon, are not as obvious, but they are coming.  Here they are:

We are getting a divorce. First, a poll shows that Americans are pretty much divided on their opinions about the attack.  Most of the Democrats see it as a gun control issue. Most Republicans see it as a terror attack.  And there seems to be no sign of compromise (why can’t it be mostly “terror” and a little “guns?” asks the therapist, Dr. Gutfeld)

This poll hints at an ongoing, disturbing change in this country – one that brings forth a series of even more problems – those of which I see as almost unsolvable. We quarrel about the quarrel. We cannot agree on the fight. And therefore we cannot begin to fight. Instead, we are like that proverbial snake that devours its own tail. Except, we think it’s sushi. But it’s blowfish. You get the idea. We’re dead.

How can America defeat ISIS if we have vocal factions believing that we are worse? How can we fight the enemy if a large portion of our population thinks an inanimate object – a gun – caused Orlando?

We assume different identities lead to different values. Does a black person, or a gay person or a fat white male, see a terror attack differently? I wouldn’t think so, but activists, talking heads and assorted thought-processors disagree.  Now we no longer look at a tragedy as an American one, but through the divisive eyes of balkanized camps of competing identities.

An activist at the University of Missouri, during a vigil for the victims of Orlando, actually expressed disappointment that she had to speak in front of grievers, who happened by birth, to be white. My only relief comes from the fact that a few people heckled her (a brave gay couple). That relief left when others drowned them out.

The beat-down is dead.  We need to train our populace on the basics of group self-defense – meaning how to cooperate and risk their skins to take down the lone aggressor.

If ten people attack a man with a gun, one or two may die – but the alternative is worse. “Be Like 93” should be the motto – in honor of the heroic actions of the passengers of Flight 93, who saved uncountable lives on September 11, 2001 by attacking the hijackers and bringing the jet down in a Pennsylvania field.

But that’s not what I’m really talking about. I mean justifiable aggression: explicitly meting out justice to those who deserve it. How can we do that, when we cannot agree who deserves it?

The New York Times blamed Republicans for Orlando. The Huffington Post blamed Christians. Every liberal blames guns, as well as the complicit wife of the murderous, terrorist dirtbag. And the dirtbag’s dad blames social networks. He’s even suing them.

The more we spread the condemnations around, the less we have for the truly guilty party. Hence our incremental approach to ISIS.  President Obama treats the war on “terror” (a polite phrase for Islamism), like we’re playing Jenga.  Slowly, and on rainy days.

We lose respect for evidence. Our inability to call a spade a spade is the result of divorcing cause from effect. If we can’t call Islamism out for this horribleness, then what’s left? Blame Guns. Christians. White Zinfindal.  It’s as though you blame a massive wild fire not on dry tinder and a lit cigarette, but on poor self-esteem among carbon products.

Here’s science: Islamism preaches the murder of gays; then an Islamist murders a club full of gays.  Cause…effect.

Why does the left deny science?

The way the media and our White House deny the effects of Islamism seems eerily similar to a certain industry we grew to loathe over time. Remember how the tobacco companies denied the role of their product in lung cancer? To deny that link, now, would have you laughed off the planet.  My prediction: 20 years from now we will feel the same way about Islamism.

“Remember when we had a president who refused to admit the link between atrocity and Islamism” will be the same as “Remember when people used to say cigarettes didn’t cause cancer.”

Refusing to link Islamism to evil is denying the evidence before your objective eyes.

You don’t even need to bring up Orlando. Try honor killings. Read up on the Taliban and what they do to girls who want to go to school. Google “Taliban” and “acid.”

President Obama isn’t just on the wrong side of history, he’s on the wrong side of the future.  For a guy who claims to be all about science, he lives in a fairy tale.

We have murdered sympathy. A product of modern leftism’s regressive identity politics: we see victimhood as a zero-sum game. If you grieve for the victims of terror, is there any left for Black Lives Matter?  If you light a candle for Orlando, why not for Ferguson?

If you aren’t gay, how are you able to sympathize with gay victims of terror?

What if you’re against gay marriage? Are you as evil as terrorists? Perhaps, some might say (or have said).

One anchor at another network actually chided a sympathizing politician, in the state where the terror took place… because she did not support gay rights enough to his satisfaction.  I was bummed he’d play bouncer to the “Who gets to grieve” night club.  That’s beneath him. Obama was against gay marriage just a handful of years ago, my friend.

Now sympathy is saddled with considerations for approval of other groups and classes. Maybe just keep quiet instead of expressing sympathy, one might conclude.

We have killed debate. To better enhance well-being, one must be able to argue and even allow oneself to be proven wrong. Science is all about that: prove me wrong, please.  Now, no one wants to be wrong, even when it’s an abstract debate.

Look, I think the gun control debate is a deflection from the core concern, which is terror. But I’m willing to listen to some common sense, or at least informed opinions on how to prevent terrorists from getting guns. Sadly, the gun control argument is a misleading one: used not to ban guns (we know it ain’t happening), but to drive the debate away from the more volatile issue, which Islamism’s universal plans.

And! – wouldn’t it be nice to talk about gun control with people who actually knew something about guns? Or control? If Orlando had been done not by gun, but by bomb — where would the left’s argument be? Where it was, after Boston. Nowhere.

We have disabled our impulse control. My motto has always been: your first public thought is often your worst public thought.  Meaning: think before unloading.

We now know that this is an impossible wish in this current climate of Twitter, Facebook and Piers Morgan. What happened to reserve? Contemplation? Thoughtfulness? What about waiting a few days before you spout an opinion?

Now every celebrity and their less famous sibling is on Twitter lecturing us on “assault weapons” and “tolerance” as if the world right now really needs a hot take from a sitcom star on his third bout of chlamydia.

The strong and silent type has been replaced with the weak and loud. I’d include myself in this, except that I only speak when spoken to. Otherwise, I sit quietly in a corner and drink copious amounts of wine.

We no longer cooperate. This sad and sober consequence is the result of combining all the results mentioned above together. Without cooperation, society is doomed.  Cooperation contributes to better lives, over all. If what’s good for you, is good for them you help them get what you have.

That’s not the case in this era of moral relativism.

The problem is: we no longer believe that what we have is good. How can America defeat ISIS if we have vocal factions believing that we are worse? How can we fight the enemy if a large portion of our population thinks an inanimate object – a gun – caused Orlando? And not this pernicious ideology you can’t even call a death cult, because radical Islam is worse than that? It’s a death movement. A death phenomenon.  It’s a force that sees our conscious lives as inferior to what happens after you die. Which is why, for them, killing gays is an act of love. They’re doing those sinners a favor – in their twisted skulls, killing innocents in a night club just gave the murdered a Fast Pass to Nirvana.

Boy, this is a depressing article.  And I wrote it.

Read it and weep.

For the victims. For the country.  For your family. For you and me.

Greg Gutfeld currently serves as host of FOX News Channel’s (FNC) The Greg Gutfeld Show (Saturdays 10-11PM/ET) and co-host of The Five (weekdays 5-6PM/ET). He joined the network in 2007 as a contributor. Click here for more information on Greg Gutfeld

 

Islamic State group: The full story

Islamic State group: The full story

By Jim MuirBBC News

20 June 2016

From the sectionMiddle East

Related Topics

Syrian civil war

Top of Form

Abu Anis only realised something unusual was happening when he heard the sound of explosions coming from the old city on the western bank of the Tigris as it runs through Mosul.

“I phoned some friends over there, and they said armed groups had taken over, some of them foreign, some Iraqis,” the computer technician said. “The gunmen told them, ‘We’ve come to get rid of the Iraqi army, and to help you.'”

The following day, the attackers crossed the river and took the other half of the city. The Iraqi army and police, who vastly outnumbered their assailants, broke and fled, officers first, many of the soldiers stripping off their uniforms as they joined a flood of panicked civilians.

Media captionVideo footage from Mosul after its capture by Isis shows militants driving through the streets, June 2014

It was 10 June 2014, and Iraq’s second biggest city, with a population of around two million, had just fallen to the militants of the group then calling itself Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham/the Levant (Isis or Isil).

Four days earlier, black banners streaming, a few hundred of the Sunni militants had crossed the desert border in a cavalcade from their bases in eastern Syria and met little resistance as they moved towards their biggest prize.

Rich dividends were immediate. The Iraqi army, rebuilt, trained and equipped by the Americans since the US-led invasion of 2003, abandoned large quantities of armoured vehicles and advanced weaponry, eagerly seized by the militants. They also reportedly grabbed something like $500m from the Central Bank’s Mosul branch.

How rich is IS?

Despite territorial losses, IS survives, thanks in no small part to its status as “the best-funded terrorist organisation” in history. While most people decry the validity inferred from the name of IS as a “state”, the group’s financing is certainly more reminiscent of a state than that of organisations such as al-Qaeda that relied heavily on donations to fund their operations.

Islamic State: The struggle to stay rich

“At the beginning, they behaved well,” said Abu Anis. “They took down all the barricades the army had put up between quarters. People liked that. On their checkpoints they were friendly and helpful – ‘Anything you need, we’re here for you.'”

The Mosul honeymoon was to last a few weeks. But just down the road, terrible things were already happening.

As the Iraqi army collapsed throughout the north, the militants moved swiftly down the Tigris river valley. Towns and villages fell like skittles. Within a day they had captured the town of Baiji and its huge oil refinery, and moved on swiftly to seize Saddam Hussein’s old hometown, Tikrit, a Sunni hotbed.

Just outside Tikrit is a big military base, taken over by the Americans in 2003 and renamed Camp Speicher after the first US casualty in the 1991 “Desert Storm” Gulf war against Iraq, a pilot called Scott Speicher, shot down over al-Anbar province in the west.exhumed at Camp Speicher, 2015

Camp Speicher, by now full of Iraqi military recruits, was surrounded by the Isis militants and surrendered. The thousands of captives were sorted, the Shia were weeded out, bound, and trucked away to be systematically shot dead in prepared trenches. Around 1,700 are believed to have been massacred in cold blood. The mass graves are still being exhumed.

Far from trying to cover up the atrocity, Isis revelled in it, posting on the internet videos and pictures showing the Shia prisoners being taken away and shot by the black-clad militants.

In terms of exultant cruelty and brutality, worse was not long in coming.

After a pause of just two months, Isis – now rebranded as “Islamic State” (IS) – erupted again, taking over large areas of northern Iraq controlled by the Kurds.

That included the town of Sinjar, mainly populated by the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority regarded by IS as heretics.t IS attacks on their community in northern Iraq, 2014

Hundreds of Yazidi men who failed to escape were simply killed. Women and children were separated and taken away as war booty, to be sold and bartered as chattels, and used as sex slaves. Thousands are still missing, enduring that fate.

Deliberately shocking, bloodthirsty exhibitionism reached a climax towards the end of the same month, August 2014.

IS issued a video showing its notorious, London-accented and now late executioner Mohammed Emwazi (sardonically nicknamed “Jihadi John” by former captives) gruesomely beheading American journalist James Foley.

In the following weeks, more American and British journalists and aid workers – Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning, and Peter Kassig (who had converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdul Rahman) – appeared being slaughtered in similar, slickly produced videos, replete with propaganda statements and dire warnings.

In the space of a few months, IS had blasted its way from obscurity on to the centre of the world stage. Almost overnight, it became a household word.

Seven-and-a-half thousand miles (12,000km) away, then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott summed up the breathtaking novelty of the horror. It was, he said “medieval barbarism, perpetrated and spread with the most modern of technology”.

IS had arrived, and the world was taking notice. But the men in black did not appear out of the blue. They had been a long time coming.

The theology of murder

The ideological or religious roots of IS and like-minded groups go deep into history, almost to the beginning of Islam itself in the 7th Century AD.

Like Christianity six centuries before it, and Judaism some eight centuries before that, Islam was born into the harsh, tribal world of the Middle East.

“The original texts, the Old Testament and the Koran, reflected primitive tribal Jewish and Arab societies, and the codes they set forth were severe,” writes the historian and author William Polk.

“They aimed, in the Old Testament, at preserving and enhancing tribal cohesion and power and, in the Koran, at destroying the vestiges of pagan belief and practice. Neither early Judaism nor Islam allowed deviation. Both were authoritarian theocracies.”

As history moved on, Islam spread over a vast region, encountering and adjusting to numerous other societies, faiths and cultures. Inevitably in practice it mutated in different ways, often becoming more pragmatic and indulgent, often given second place to the demands of power and politics and temporal rulers.

For hardline Muslim traditionalists this amounted to deviationism, and from early on, there was a clash of ideas in which those arguing for a strict return to the “purity” of the early days of Islam often paid a price.

The eminent scholar Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), who founded one of the main schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, was jailed and once flogged unconscious in a dispute with the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. Nearly five centuries later, another supreme theologian of the same strict orthodox school, Ibn Taymiyya, died in prison in Damascus.

These two men are seen as the spiritual forefathers of later thinkers and movements which became known as “salafist”, advocating a return to the ways of the first Muslim ancestors, the salaf al-salih (righteous ancestors).

They inspired a later figure whose thinking and writings were to have a huge and continuing impact on the region and on the salafist movement, one form of which, Wahhabism, took his name.

How so-called Islamic State started – In 3 minutes

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was born in 1703 in a small village in the Nejd region in the middle of the Arabian peninsula.

A devout Islamic scholar, he espoused and developed the most puritanical and strict version of what he saw as the original faith, and sought to spread it by entering pacts with the holders of political and military power.

In an early foray in that direction, his first action was to destroy the tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khattab, one of the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, on the grounds that by the austere doctrine of salafist theology, the veneration of tombs constitutes shirk, the revering of something or someone other than Allah.

But it was in 1744 that Abd al-Wahhab made his crucial alliance with the local ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud. It was a pact whereby Wahhabism provided the spiritual or ideological dimension for Saudi political and military expansion, to the benefit of both.

Passing through several mutations, that dual alliance took over most of the peninsula and has endured to this day, with the House of Saud ruling in sometimes uneasy concert with an ultra-conservative Wahhabi religious establishment.

The entrenchment of Wahhabi salafism in Saudi Arabia – and the billions of petrodollars to which it gained access – provided one of the wellsprings for jihadist militancy in the region in modern times. Jihad means struggle on the path of Allah, which can mean many kinds of personal struggle, but more often is taken to mean waging holy war.

But the man most widely credited, or blamed, for bringing salafism into the 20th Century was the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb. He provided a direct bridge from the thought and heritage of Abd al-Wahhab and his predecessors to a new generation of jihadist militants, leading up to al-Qaeda and all that was to follow.he source of all jihadist thought”

Born in a small village in Upper Egypt in 1906, Sayyid Qutb found himself at odds with the way Islam was being taught and managed around him. Far from converting him to the ways of the West, a two-year study period in the US in the late 1940s left him disgusted at what he judged unbridled godless materialism and debauchery, and his fundamentalist Islamic outlook was honed harder.

Back in Egypt, he developed the view that the West was imposing its control directly or indirectly over the region in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse after World War One, with the collaboration of local rulers who might claim to be Muslims, but who had in fact deviated so far from the right path that they should no longer be considered such.

For Qutb, offensive jihad against both the West and its local agents was the only way for the Muslim world to redeem itself. In essence, this was a kind of takfir – branding another Muslim an apostate or kafir (infidel), making it justified and even obligatory and meritorious to kill him.

Although he was a theorist and intellectual rather than an active jihadist, Qutb was judged dangerously subversive by the Egyptian authorities. He was hanged in 1966 on charges of involvement in a Muslim Brotherhood plot to assassinate the nationalist President, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Qutb was before his time, but his ideas lived on in the 24 books he wrote, which have been read by tens of millions, and in the personal contact he had with the circles of people like Ayman al-Zawahiri, another Egyptian who is the current al-Qaeda leader.

Another intimate of the al-Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden said: “Qutb was the one who most affected our generation.” He has also been described as “the source of all jihadist thought”, and “the philosopher of the Islamic revolution”.

More than 35 years after he was hanged, the official commission of inquiry into al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 concluded: “Bin Laden shares Qutb’s stark view, permitting him and his followers to rationalise even unprovoked mass murder as righteous defence of an embattled faith.”

And his influence lingers on today. Summing up the roots of IS and its predecessors, the Iraqi expert on Islamist movements Hisham al-Hashemi said: “They are founded on two things: a takfiri faith based on the writings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and as methodology, the way of Sayyid Qutb.”

The theology of militant jihadism was in place. But to flourish, it needed two things – a battlefield, and strategists to shape the battle.

Afghanistan was to provide the opportunity for both.

Rise of al-Qaeda

The Soviet invasion in 1979, and the 10 years of occupation that followed, provided a magnet for would-be jihadists from around the Arab world. Some 35,000 of them flocked to Afghanistan during that period, to join the jihad and help the mainly Islamist Afghan mujahideen guerrillas turn the country into Russia’s Vietnam.80

There is little evidence that the “Afghan Arabs”, as they became known, played a pivotal combat role in driving the Soviets out. But they made a major contribution in setting up support networks in Pakistan, channelling funds from Saudi Arabia and other donors, and funding schools and militant training camps. It was a fantastic opportunity for networking and forging enduring relationships as well as tasting jihad first hand.

Ironically, they found themselves on the same team as the Americans. The CIA’s Operation Cyclone channelled hundreds of millions of dollars through Pakistan to militant Afghan mujahedeen leaders such as Golbuddin Hekmatyar, who associated closely with the Arab jihadists.

It was in Afghanistan that virtually all the major figures in the new jihadist world cut their teeth. They helped shape events there in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a period that saw the emergence of al-Qaeda as a vehicle for a wider global jihad, and Afghanistan provided a base for it.

By the time the Taliban took over in 1996, they were virtually in partnership with Osama Bin Laden and his men, and it was from there that al-Qaeda launched its fateful 9/11 attack in 2001.

The formative Afghan experience provided both the combat-hardened salafist jihadist leaders and the strategists who were to play an instrumental role in the emergence of the IS of today.

Most significant was the Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who more than anybody else ended up being the direct parent of IS in almost every way.Zarqawi

A high-school dropout whose prison career began with a sentence for drug and sexual offences, Zarqawi found religion after being sent to classes at a mosque in the Jordanian capital, Amman. He arrived in Pakistan to join jihad in Afghanistan just in time to see the Soviets withdraw in 1989, but stayed on to work with jihadists.

After a stint back in Jordan where he received a 15-year jail sentence on terrorist charges but was later released in a general amnesty, Zarqawi finally met Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1999. By all accounts the two al-Qaeda leaders did not take to him. They found him brash and headstrong, and they did not like the many tattoos from his previous life that he had not been able to erase.

But he was charismatic and dynamic, and although he did not join al-Qaeda, they eventually put him in charge of a training camp in Herat, western Afghanistan. It was here that he worked with an ideologue whose radical writings became the scriptures governing subsequent salafist blood-letting: Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir.

“The brutality of beheading is intended, even delightful to God and His Prophet,” wrote Muhajir in his book The Theology of Jihad, more generally referred to as the Theology of Bloodshed. His writings provided religious cover for the most brutal excesses, and also for the killing of Shia as infidels, and their Sunni collaborators as apostates.

The other book that has been seen as the virtual manual – even the Mein Kampf – for IS and its forebears is The Management of Savagery, by Abu Bakr Naji, which appeared on the internet in 2004.of Savagery, a virtual manual for jihadists

“We need to massacre and to do just as has been done to Banu Qurayza, so we must adopt a ruthless policy in which hostages are brutally and graphically murdered unless our demands are met,” Naji wrote. He was referring to a Jewish tribe in seventh-century Arabia which reportedly met the same fate at the hands of early Muslims as the Yazidis of Sinjar did nearly 14 centuries later: the men were slaughtered, the women and children enslaved.

Naji’s sanctioning of exemplary brutality was part of a much wider strategy to prepare the way for an Islamic caliphate. Based partly on the lessons of Afghanistan, his book is a detailed blueprint for provoking the West into interventions which would further rally the Muslims to jihad, leading to the ultimate collapse of the enemy.

The scenario is not so fanciful if you consider that the Soviet Union went to pieces barely two years after its withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Naji is reported to have been killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan’s Waziristan province in 2008.

Iraq fiasco

The fallout from the 9/11 attacks changed things radically for the jihadists in late 2001. The US and allies bombed and invaded Afghanistan, ousting the Taliban, and launching a wider “War on Terror” against al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden went underground, and Zarqawi and others fled. The dispersing militants, fired up, badly needed another battlefield on which to provoke and confront their Western enemies.

Luck was on their side. The Americans and their allies were not long in providing it.

Their invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was, it turned out, entirely unjustified on its own chosen grounds – Saddam Hussein’s alleged production of weapons of mass destruction, and his supposed support for international terrorists, neither of which was true.003

By breaking up every state and security structure and sending thousands of disgruntled Sunni soldiers and officials home, they created precisely the state of “savagery”, or violent chaos, that Abu Bakr Naji envisaged for the jihadists to thrive in.

Iraq was on the way to becoming what US officials are now calling the “parent tumour” of the IS presence in the region.

Under Saddam’s tightly-controlled Baath Party regime, the Sunnis enjoyed pride of place over the majority Shia, who have strong ties with their co-religionists across the border in Iran.

The US-led intervention disempowered the Sunnis, creating massive resentment and providing fertile ground for the outside salafist jihadists to take root in.

They were not long in spotting their constituency. Abu Musab Zarqawi moved in, and within a matter of months was organising deadly, brutal and provocative attacks aimed both at Western targets and at the majority Shia community.

Doctrinal differences between the two sects go back to disputes over the succession to the Prophet Muhammad in the early decades of Islam, but conflict between them is generally based on community, history and sectarian politics rather than religion as such.

Setting himself up with a new group called Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Tawhid means declaring the uniqueness of Allah), Zarqawi immediately forged a pragmatic operational alliance with underground cells of the remnants of Saddam’s regime, providing the two main intertwined strands of the Sunni-based insurgency: militant Jihadism, and Iraqi Sunni nationalism.

His group claimed responsibility for several deadly attacks in August 2003 that set the pattern for much of what was to come: a suicide truck bomb explosion at the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed the envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 20 of his staff, and a suicide car bomb blast in Najaf which killed the influential Shia ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim and 80 of his followers. The bombers were salafist jihadists, but logistics were reportedly provided by underground Baathists.

The following year, Zarqawi himself was believed by the CIA to be the masked killer shown in a video beheading an American hostage, Nicholas Berg, in revenge for the Abu Ghraib prison abuses of Iraqi detainees by members of the US military.

As the battle with the Americans and the new Shia-dominated Iraqi government intensified, Zarqawi finally took the oath of loyalty to Bin Laden, and his group became the official al-Qaeda branch in Iraq.

But they were never really on the same page. Zarqawi’s provocative attacks on Shia mosques and markets, triggering sectarian carnage, and his penchant for publicising graphic brutality, were all in line with the radical teachings he had imbibed. But they drew rebukes from the al-Qaeda leadership, concerned at the impact on Muslim opinion.

Zarqawi paid little heed. His strain of harsh radicalism passed to his successors after he was killed by a US air strike in June 2006 on his hideout north of Baghdad. He was easily identified by the tattoos he had never managed to get rid of.

The direct predecessor of IS emerged just a few months later, with the announcement of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) as an umbrella bringing the al-Qaeda branch together with other insurgent factions.

But tough times lay ahead. In January 2007, the Americans began “surging” their own troops in Iraq from 132,000 to a peak of 168,000, adopting a much more hands-on approach in mentoring the rebuilt Iraqi army. At the same time, they enticed Sunni tribes in western al-Anbar province to stop supporting the jihadists and join the US-led Coalition-Iraqi government drive to quell the insurgency, which many did, on promises that they would be given jobs and control over their own security.

By the time both the new ISI and al-Qaeda leaders were killed in a US-Iraqi army raid on their hideout in April 2010, the insurgency was at its lowest ebb, pushed back into remote corners of Sunni Iraq.

They were both replaced by one man, about whom very little was publicly known at the time, and not much more since: Ibrahim Awad al-Badri, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Six eventful years later, he would be proclaimed Caliph Ibrahim, Commander of the Faithful and leader of the newly declared “Islamic State”.

 

Territorial takeover

Baghdadi’s career is so shrouded in mist that there are very few elements of it that can be regarded as fact. By all accounts he was born near Samarra, north of Baghdad, so the epithet “Baghdadi” seems to have been adopted to give him a more national image, while “Abu Bakr” evokes the first successor to (and father-in-law of) Prophet Muhammad.

Like the original Abu Bakr, Baghdadi is also reputed to come from the Prophet’s Quraysh clan. That, and his youth – born in 1971 – may have been factors in his selection as leader.

All accounts of his early life agree that he was a quiet, scholarly and devout student of Islam, taking a doctorate at the Islamic University of Baghdad. Some even say he was shy, and a bit of a loner, living for 10 years in a room beside a small Sunni mosque in western Baghdad.

The word “charismatic” has never been attached to him.

Who is the leader of IS?

Image caption29 June 2014: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi makes a rare appearance in public

As a youth, Baghdadi had a passion for Koranic recitation and was meticulous in his observance of religious law. His family nicknamed him The Believer because he would chastise his relatives for failing to live up to his stringent standards.

Who is Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?

But by the time of the US-led invasion in 2003, he appears to have become involved with a militant Sunni group, heading its Sharia (Islamic law) committee. American troops detained him, and he was reportedly held in the detention centre at Camp Bucca in the south for most of 2004.

Camp Bucca (named after a fireman who died in the 9/11 attacks) housed up to 20,000 inmates and became a university from which many IS and other militant leaders graduated. It gave them an unrivalled opportunity to imbibe and spread radical ideologies and sabotage skills and develop important contacts and networks, all in complete safety, under the noses and protection of their enemies.

Baghdadi would also certainly have met in Camp Bucca many of the ex-Baathist military commanders with whom he was to form such a deadly partnership.

The low-profile, self-effacing Baghdadi rang no alarm bells with the Americans. They released him, having decided he was low-risk.: A “university” for future IS leaders

But he went on to work his way steadily up through the insurgent hierarchy, virtually unknown to the Iraqi public.

By the time Baghdadi took over in 2010, the curtains seemed to be coming down for the jihadists in the Iraqi field of “savagery”.

But another one miraculously opened up for them across the border in neighboring  Syria at just the right moment. In the spring of 2011, the outbreak of civil war there offered a promising new arena of struggle and expansion. The majority Sunnis were in revolt against the oppressive regime of Bashar al-Assad, dominated by his Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shia Islam.

Baghdadi sent his men in. By December 2011, deadly car bombs were exploding in Damascus which turned out to be the work of the then shadowy al-Nusra Front. It announced itself as an al-Qaeda affiliate the following month. It was headed by a Syrian jihadist, Abu Mohammed al-Julani. He had been sent by Baghdadi, but had his own ideas.

Jostling with a huge array of competing rebel groups in Syria, al-Nusra won considerable support on the ground because of its fearless and effective fighting skills, and the flow of funds and foreign fighters that support from al-Qaeda stimulated. It was relatively moderate in its salafist approach, and cultivated local relationships.

Al-Nusra was slipping out of Baghdadi’s control, and he didn’t like it. In April 2013, he tried to rein it back, announcing that al-Nusra was under his command in a new Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (Syria or the Levant). Isis, or Isil, was born.

What’s in a name?

During the short and turbulent period over which it has imposed itself as a major news brand, so-called Islamic State has confused the world with a series of name changes reflecting its mutations and changing aspirations, leaving a situation where there is no universal agreement on how to refer to it.

After emerging in Iraq as the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), its spread to Syria prompted the addition of “and al-Sham”, a word that can mean Damascus, Syria, or the wider Levant

Many chose to use the easy acronym Isis, with the “S” standing either for Syria or al-Sham, though the US administration and others opted for Isil (the “l” standing for “Levant”). Both are still widely used though technically outdated

In Arabic the same acronym can come out as Daash, sometimes spelled Daesh in English; it has passed into common usage among many Arabs, but is disliked by the organisation itself, which sees it as disrespectful of the “state”; although Daash has no meaning in Arabic, it also has an unpleasant sound to it, which may be why American and Western officialdom often use it

After further expansion of territory and ambitions, the movement dropped geographical specificity and called itself simply “the Islamic State”; Much of the world was politically reluctant simply to call it that, for fear of implying legitimacy

The BBC and others have generally opted for calling it the “self-styled” or “so-called” Islamic State on first reference, and IS thereafter

But Julani rebelled, and renewed his oath of loyalty to al-Qaeda’s global leadership, now under Ayman al-Zawahiri following Bin Laden’s death in 2011. Zawahiri ordered Baghdadi to go back to being just the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) and leave al-Nusra as the al-Qaeda Syria franchise.

It was Baghdadi’s turn to ignore orders from head office.

Before 2013 was out, Isis and al-Nusra were at each other’s throats. Hundreds were killed in vicious internecine clashes which ended with Isis being driven out of most of north-west Syria by al-Nusra and allied Syrian rebel factions. But Isis took over Raqqa, a provincial capital in the north-east, and made it its capital. Many of the foreign jihadists who had joined al-Nusra also went over to Isis, seeing it as tougher and more radical. In early 2014, al-Qaeda formally disowned Isis.

Isis had shaken off the parental shackles. But it had lost a lot of ground, and was bottled up. One of its main slogans, Remaining and Expanding, risked becoming empty. So where next?

Fortune smiled once more. Back in Iraq, conditions had again become ripe for the jihadists. The Americans had gone, since the end of 2011. Sunni areas were again aflame and in revolt, enraged by the sectarian policies of the Shia Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki. Sunnis felt marginalised, oppressed and angry.waves a flag while standing on a captured government fighter jet in Raqqa, Syria, 2015

When Isis decided to move, it was pushing at an open door. In fact, it had never really left Iraq, just gone into the woodwork. As it swept through Sunni towns, cities and villages with bewildering speed in June 2014, sleeper cells of salafist jihadists and ex-Saddamist militants and other sympathisers broke cover and joined the takeover.

With the capture of Mosul, Isis morphed swiftly into a new mode of being, like a rocket jettisoning its carrier. No longer just a shadowy terrorist group, it was suddenly a jihadist army not only threatening the Iraqi state, but challenging the entire world.

The change was signalled on 29 June by the proclamation of the “Islamic State”, replacing all previous incarnations, and the establishment of the “caliphate”. A few days later, the newly anointed Caliph Ibrahim, aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, made a surprise appearance in Mosul in the pulpit of the historic Grand Mosque of Nour al-Din al-Zangi, heavily laden with anti-Crusader associations. He called on the world’s Muslims to rally behind him.

By declaring a caliphate and adopting the generic “Islamic State” title, the organisation was clearly setting its sights far beyond Syria and Iraq. It was going global.

Announcing a caliphate has huge significance and resonance within Islam. While it remains the ideal, Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders had always shied away from it, for fear of failure. Now Baghdadi was trumping the parent organisation, setting IS up in direct competition with it for the leadership of global jihadism.

A caliphate (khilafa) is the rule or rein of a caliph (khalifa), a word which simply means a successor – primarily of the Prophet Muhammad. Under the first four caliphs who followed after he died in 632, the Islamic Caliphate burst out of Arabia and extended through modern-day Iran to the east, into Libya to the west, and to the Caucasus in the north.

The Umayyad caliphate which followed, based in Damascus, took over almost all of the lands that IS would like to control, including Spain. The Baghdad-based Abbasid caliphate took over in 750 and saw a flowering of science and culture, but found it hard to hold it all together, and Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols in 1258.

Emerging from that, the Ottoman Empire, based in Constantinople (Istanbul), stretched almost to Vienna at its peak, and was also a caliphate, though the distinction with empire was often blurred. The caliphate was finally abolished by Ataturk in 1924.

So when Baghdadi was declared Caliph of the Islamic State, it was an act of extraordinary ambition. He was claiming no less than the mantle of the Prophet, and of his followers who carried Islam into vast new realms of conquest and expansion.

For most Islamic scholars and authorities, not to mention Arab and Muslim leaders, such claims from the chief of one violent extremist faction had no legitimacy at all, and there was no great rush to embrace the new caliphate. But the millennial echoes it evoked did strike a chord with some Islamic romantics – and with some like-minded radical groups abroad.

Four months after the proclamation, a group of militants in Libya became the first to join up by pledging allegiance to Baghdadi, followed a month later by the Ansar Beit al-Maqdis jihadist faction in Egypt’s Sinai. IS’s tentacles spread deeper into Africa in March 2015 when Boko Haram in Nigeria took the oath of loyalty. Within a year, IS had branches or affiliates in 11 countries, though it held territory in only five, including Iraq and Syria.

It was in those two core countries that Baghdadi and his followers started implementing their state project on the ground, applying their own harsh vision of Islamic rule.

To the outside world, deprived of direct access to the areas controlled by IS, one of the most obvious and shocking aspects of this was their systematic destruction of ancient cultural and archaeological heritage sites and artefacts.

European Space Imaging, Digital Globe

Some of the region’s best-known and most-visited sites were devastated, including the magnificent temples of Bel and Baalshamin at Palmyra in Syria, and the Assyrian cities of Hatra and Nimrud in Iraq.

It wasn’t just famous archaeological sites that came under attack. Christian churches and ancient monasteries, Shia mosques and shrines, and anything depicting figures of any sort were destroyed, and embellishments removed even from Sunni mosques. Barely a month after taking over Mosul, IS demolition squads levelled the 13th Century shrine of the Imam Awn al-Din, which had survived the Mongol invasion.

All of this was absolutely in line with IS’s puritanical vision of Islam, under which any pictorial representation or shrine is revering something other than Allah, and any non-Muslim structures are monuments of idolatry. Even Saudi kings and princes to this day are buried without coffins in unmarked graves.

By posting videos of many of these acts which the rest of the world saw as criminal cultural vandalism, IS also undoubtedly intended to shock. In that sense, it was the cultural equivalent of beheading aid workers.

And there was a more practical and profitable side to the onslaught on cultural heritage. In highly organised manner, IS’s Treasury Department issues printed permits to loot archaeological sites, and takes a percentage of the proceeds.

That is just the tip of the iceberg of a complex structure of governance and control put in place as IS gradually settled into its conquests, penetrating into every aspect of people’s lives in exactly the same way as Saddam Hussein’s intelligence apparatus had done.

Captured documents published by Der Spiegel last year give some idea of the role of ex-Baathist regime men in setting up and running IS in a highly structured and organised way, with much emphasis on intelligence and security.

Media captionHow is Islamic State run?

Residents of Sunni strongholds like Mosul and Falluja in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria, found that IS operatives already knew almost everything about everybody when they moved in and took over in 2014.

At checkpoints, ID cards were checked against databases on laptops, obtained from government ration or employee registers. Former members of the security forces had to go to specific mosques to “repent”, hand over their weapons and receive a discharge paper.

“At first, all they did was change the preachers in the mosques to people with their own views,” said a Mosul resident who fled a year later.

“But then they began to crack down. Women who had been able to go bare-headed now had to cover up, first with the headscarf and then with the full face-veil. Men have to grow beards and wear short-legged trousers. Cigarettes, hubble-bubble, music and cafes were banned, then satellite TV and mobile phones. Morals police [hisba] vehicles would cruise round, looking for offenders.”

Media captionCitizen journalists from Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) describe life in the IS-controlled city

A Falluja resident recounted the story of a taxi-driver who had picked up a middle-aged woman not wearing a headscarf. They were stopped at an IS checkpoint, the woman given a veil and allowed to go, while the driver was sent to an Islamic court, and sentenced to two months’ detention and to memorise a portion of the Koran. If you fail to memorise, the sentence is repeated.

“They have courts with judges, officials, records and files, and there are fixed penalties for each crime, it’s not random,” said the Falluja resident. “Adulterers are stoned to death. Thieves have their hands cut off. Gays are executed by being thrown off high buildings. Informers are shot dead, Shia militia prisoners are beheaded.”

Severed heads on park fences: A diary of life under IS

An activist based in Raqqa from a group called Al-Sharqiya 24 has been keeping a diary of what life is like under Islamic State group rule.

Life under ‘Islamic State’: Diaries

 

There are IS departments that carry the organization’s grip into every corner of life, including finance, agriculture, education, transport, health, welfare and utilities.

School curricula were overhauled in line with IS precepts, with history rewritten, all images being removed from schoolbooks and English taken off the menu.

“One thing you can say is this,” said the Mosul resident. “There is absolutely no corruption, no waste (knowing the right people and pulling strings). They are totally convinced they are on the right track.”

Image caption.ly produced by IS, showing group’s aspirational takeover of all lands historically controlled by caliphates and Ottoman Empire

One recent story tells a lot about IS and its ways.

As Iraqi security forces were pressing forward in areas around Ramadi earlier this year, civilians were fleeing the battle – and IS fighters, losing the day, were trying to sneak out too.

Two women, running from the combat zone, approached a police checkpoint.

As they were being waved through to safety, one of the women suddenly turned to the police, pointed at the other, and said : “This is not a woman. He’s an IS emir [commander].”

The police investigated, and it was true. The other woman was a man, who had shaved, and put on makeup and women’s clothes. He turned out to be top of the list of wanted local IS commanders.

“When IS arrived, he killed my husband, who was a policeman, raped me, and then took me as his wife,” the woman told the police.

“I put up with him all this time, waiting to avenge my husband and my honour,” she said. “I tricked him into shaving and putting on makeup, then denounced him to the police.”

What is life like for women under IS?

Media captionNour is a woman from Raqqa, the so-called Islamic State’s capital inside Syria

“Nour” is a woman from Raqqa, the so-called Islamic State’s (IS) capital inside Syria. She managed to escape the city and is now a refugee in Europe, where she met up with the BBC.

This story is based on her experiences and those of her two sisters, who are still inside the IS-held city.

Taking on the world

Having taken over vast swathes of territory in Iraq with their lightning offensive in June 2014, the militants might have been expected to calm down and consolidate their gains.

But, like a shark that has to keep moving or else it will die, IS barely paused before initiating a new spiral of provocation and reprisals that was predictably to draw it into active conflict with almost all the major world powers.

Already, the June offensive had threatened the approaches to Baghdad, prompting the Americans to start bringing in hundreds of military advisers and trainers to see how to help the struggling Iraqi army.

Just two months later, the attack on Kurdish areas in the north triggered US air strikes in defence of the Kurdistan capital, Irbil, and then to help stave off the threat of genocide to the Yazidis. Fourteen other nations were to join the air campaign.

Ten days later, IS beheaded James Foley and the others followed, in line with the doctrine of exemplary brutality as punishment, deterrent and provocation. The most shocking was to come some months later, with the burning alive of the downed Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Shock intended.

The US-led bombing campaign was extended to Syria in September 2014 after IS besieged the Kurdish-held town of Kobane on the Turkish border. Coalition air strikes turned the tide there. IS lost hundreds of fighters killed at Kobane and elsewhere. More revenge was called for. IS turned abroad.

From the declaration of the caliphate until early 2016, some 90 terrorist attacks were either carried out or inspired by IS in 21 countries around the globe, from California to Sydney, with an estimated 1,400 victims killed. The attacks carried the same message of punishment, deterrence and provocation as the hostage beheadings, while also demonstrating IS’s global reach.

At the same time, they carried through the militants’ doctrine of distracting the enemy by setting fires in different locations and making him squander resources on security. For IS, “the enemy” is everybody who does not embrace it. The world is divided into Dawlat al-Islam, the State of Islam, and Dawlat al-Kufr, the State of Unbelief.

The most consequential of these atrocities were the downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai on 31 October 2015 and the Paris attacks on 13 November, provoking both Russia and France to intensify air strikes on IS targets in Syria.

The lone-wolf massacre at a gay club in Orlando, Florida, on 12 June 2016, while apparently inspired rather than organised by IS, would undoubtedly further stiffen the US’s already steely resolve to finish the organisation.

Had IS gone mad? It seemed determined to take on the whole world. It was goading and confronting the Americans, the Russians, and a long list of others. By its own count, it had a mere 40,000 fighters at its command (other estimates go as low as half that).in Russia, in November 2015

Could it really challenge the global powers and hope to survive? Or could President Barack Obama fulfil his pledge to “degrade and ultimately destroy” IS?

Final showdown

If there seems to be something apocalyptic about IS’s “bring it on” defiance, that’s because there is.

When the organisation first brought out its online magazine – a major showcase and recruitment tool – just a month after the “caliphate” was declared, it was not by chance that it was named Dabiq.

A small town north of Aleppo in Syria, Dabiq is mentioned in a hadith (a reported saying of the Prophet Muhammad) in connection with Armageddon. In IS mythology, it is the scene where a cataclysmic showdown will take place between the Muslims and the infidels, leading to the end of days. Each issue of Dabiq begins with a quote from Abu Musab Zarqawi: “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify – by Allah’s permission – until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.”

The prospect of taking part in that final glorious climax, achieving martyrdom on the path of Allah and an assured place in paradise, is one of the thoughts inspiring those heeding the IS call to jihad.

That could help explain why the organisation seems to enjoy an endless supply of recruits willing to blow themselves to pieces in suicide attacks, which it calls “martyrdom-seeking operations” (suicide is forbidden in Islam). Hundreds have died in this way, and they happen virtually daily.

It’s one of the elements that makes IS a formidable fighting force that will be hard to destroy even in strictly military terms.

The Baathist legacy at the core of ISand direct IS

IS is in many respects a project of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s outlawed Baath party, but now with a different ideology. Former agents or officers of Saddam Hussein’s regime dominate its leadership… They represent a battle-hardened and state-educated core that would likely endure (as they have done through US occupation and a decade of war) even if the organisation’s middle and lower cadres are decimated.

Is Islamic State invincible?

 

The head of security and intelligence for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, Masrour Barzani, tells the story of a frustrated would-be suicide bomber who screamed at his captors: “I was just 10 minutes away from being united with the Prophet Muhammad!”

“They think they’re winners regardless of whether they kill you or they get killed,” says Barzani. “If they kill you, they win a battle. If they get killed, they go to heaven. With people like this, it’s very difficult to deter them from coming at you. So really the only way to defeat them is to eliminate them.”

Probably for the first time in military history since the Japanese kamikaze squadrons of World War Two, suicide bombers are used by IS not only for occasional terrorist spectaculars, but as a standard and common battlefield tactic.

Virtually all IS attacks begin with one or several suicide bombers driving explosives-rigged cars or trucks at the target, softening it up for combat squads to go in. So much so that the “martyrdom-seekers” have been called the organisation’s “air force”, since they serve a similar purpose.

Formidable though that is, IS as a fighting force is much more than a bunch of wild-eyed fanatics eager to blow themselves up. For that, they have Saddam Hussein to thank.

“The core of IS are former Saddam-era army and intelligence officers, particularly from the Republican Guard,” said an international intelligence official. “They are very good at moving their people around, resupply and so on, they’re actually much more effective and efficient than the Iraqi army are. That’s the hand of former military staff officers who know their business.”

“They are very professional,” adds Masrour Barzani. “They use artillery, armored vehicles, heavy machinery etc, and they are using it very well. They have officers who know conventional war and how to plan, how to attack, how to defend. They really are operating on the level of a very organized conventional force. Otherwise they’d be no more than a terrorist organization.”

The partnership with the ex-Baathists, going back to Zarqawi’s early days in Iraq, is clearly a vital component in IS success.

But that does not mean its fighters are invincible on the battlefield. The Kurds in north-east Syria were fighting IS off with no outside help for a year before anybody noticed. And even now, IS makes what would conventionally be seen as costly mistakes.

 

In December 2015, they lost several hundred fighters in one abortive attack east of Mosul alone, and probably 2,500 altogether that month. In total some 15,000 are estimated to have been killed by Coalition air strikes since August 2014.

But they seem to have little difficulty making up the numbers. With a population of perhaps 10 million acquiescent Sunnis to draw on in Iraq and Syria, most recruiting is done locally. And if IS remains in place, there will soon be a new generation of young militants.

Media captionIS’ brainwashing of children

“I didn’t join out of conviction,” says Bakr Madloul, a 24-year-old bachelor who was arrested in December at his home in a Sunni quarter in southern Baghdad and accused of taking part in deadly IS car bomb attacks on mainly Shia areas, which he admits.

Bakr says he was working as a construction foreman in Kurdistan when IS took over Mosul. He was detained for questioning by Kurdish security, and met a militant in jail who persuaded him to go to Mosul, where he joined up with IS and manned a checkpoint until it was hit by a Coalition air strike.

He was then sent back to his Baghdad suburb to help organise car bombings. The explosives-packed vehicles were sent from outside Baghdad, and his job was to place them where he was told by his controller, usually in crowded streets or markets.uring his time as an IS operative

“Only one of the five car bombs I handled was driven by a suicide bomber,” he says. “I spoke to him. He was 22 years old, an Iraqi. He believed he would go to paradise when he died. It’s the easiest and quickest way to Heaven. They strongly believe this. They would blow themselves up to get to Heaven. There were older ones in their 30s and 40s.”

“I asked my controllers more than once, ‘Is it OK to kill women and children?’ They would answer, ‘They’re all the same.’ But to me, killing women and children, I didn’t feel at all comfortable about that. But once you’re in, you’re stuck. If you try to leave, they call you a murtadd, an apostate, and they’ll kill you or your family.”

Bakr knows he will almost certainly hang. I asked him if he would do the same things over if he had his life again. He laughed.

“Absolutely not. I would get out of Iraq, away from IS, away from the security forces. I took this path without realising the consequences. There is no way back. I see that now.”e will probably be executed

But up in Kurdistan, another IS prisoner, Muhannad Ibrahim, has no such regrets.

A 32-year-old from a village near Mosul with a wife and three children, he was a construction worker for a Turkish company when IS took over the city. Two of his older brothers had died fighting the Americans there in 2004 and 2006. He joined IS without hesitation and was commanding a small detachment when he was captured in a battle with the Kurds.

“We were being oppressed by the Shia, they were always insulting and bothering us,” he says. “But that’s not the main motivation, religious conviction is more important. All my family is religious, praise be to Allah. I came to IS through my faith and religious principles.”

“If I had my time over again, I would take the same path, the same choices. Because I am convinced by this thing, I have to go to the end. Either I am killed, or Allah will decree some other fate for me.

Taming Mosul

Defeating IS militarily is less about its own strengths and vulnerabilities than it is about the deficiencies of the forces arrayed against it. IS is as strong as the weaknesses of the failed states whose collapse into “savagery” has left room for it to take root and grow.

Iraq and Syria have to be the primary focus, as the commander of Coalition forces, Lt Gen Sean MacFarland, spelled out in February 2016:

“The campaign has three objectives: one, to destroy the Isil parent tumour in Iraq and Syria by collapsing its power centres in Mosul and Raqqa; two, to combat the emerging metastasis of the Isil tumour worldwide; and three, to protect our nations from attack.”

It goes without saying that Coalition air strikes, deadly and effective as they are, have their limitations. Only in co-ordination with cohesive, motivated ground forces can the territory taken by IS be regained. And that’s the crippling problem, in both countries.

The Kurds in the north of both Iraq and Syria have made considerable progress in pushing IS back from areas they regard as theirs, with the help of Coalition air strikes. But they are neither capable of going all the way, nor should they: in both countries, they would stir up acute communal sensitivities in the Sunni Arab areas where IS is rooted.

Pro-government forces in Iraq largely dislodged IS from Diyala province and the Tikrit area north of the capital in 2015, but that was mainly the work of Iranian-backed Shia militias who leapt to the defense of Baghdad and the south as IS descended in June 2014 after the army collapsed.

Using them in mainly Sunni areas is fraught with risk.

Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar to the west, was recaptured at the end of 2015 in an offensive spearheaded by the government’s US-built Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), with the Shia militias kept out of this Sunni stronghold. The city was left in ruins, its entire population fled.

When that even more iconic Sunni citadel, Falluja, became the focus of the next government offensive, launched at the end of May, the limitations of the official state forces soon became even more apparent.

The CTS spearheaded the advance from the south, but on other fronts, it was primarily the Iranian-backed Shia militias which were fighting their way in around the other sides of the city, backed by an array of government units and some anti-IS Sunni tribal elements.

The militias were not supposed to enter the limits of the city itself, but they swiftly took control of the deeply Sunni surroundings, amidst allegations of abuses against civilian males detained for vetting as IS suspects.

The Falluja battle did not augur well for the much bigger challenge awaiting in the north – Mosul, something like 10 times the size, and the real core of the IS state enterprise.

The Americans would clearly have liked Mosul to be retaken by the end of 2016, as a legacy item for President Obama.

But the ferocious battle for Falluja would inevitably take a toll on the CTS, whose already limited numbers could not be easily or swiftly replenished. The alternative, to accord an even bigger role to the Shia militias in this heavily Sunni area, could be laden with perilous consequences.

Over in Syria, IS was also under pressure by mid-2016. Something of a race was developing for the group’s supposed headquarters at Raqqa.

Despite objections from their Turkish Nato allies, the US-led Coalition was providing backing with air strikes and advisers to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), largely composed of seasoned Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) fighters leavened with some Sunni Arab elements, as they slowly eroded IS control in northern border areas controlling the approaches to Raqqa.

At the same time, Syrian government forces supported by Iranian-backed Shia militias and Russian air power were starting to thrust eastwards from Hama towards Raqqa.

Who would get there first, and with what consequences for the future shape of Syria?

The civil war truce engineered by the Russians and Americans in February had largely broken down, and the Geneva peace talks had stalled, leaving all the cards up in the air in a conflict whose outcome has always defied prediction.

But even if IS was to lose all its territory in Syria – still a distant prospect in mid-2016 – it is much less deeply embedded in the Sunni population there than in Iraq. Disgruntled Syrian Sunnis have many other vehicles for pressing their grievances against the Assad regime.

So it keeps coming back again to Iraq, and specifically, to Mosul. Ten times the size of Raqqa. And that’s not the only reason for its significance.

“Mosul is the beating heart of IS,” says a senior Western official in northern Iraq. “IS is essentially an Iraqi creation. The tragic reality is that at the moment, it is the main Sunni political entity in Iraq. From the West, it’s looked at as a kind of crazed cult. It’s not. Here in Iraq it represents an important constituency. It represents a massive dissatisfaction, the alienation of a whole sector of the population.”

“That’s not to say that the people in Mosul are enthusiastic about IS, but for them, it’s better than anything that comes from Baghdad.”

But if a Mosul offensive does go ahead, the fear is that a wrongly-conceived short-term victory, if it is achieved, will turn into long-term disaster, given the total lack of national reconciliation between Sunnis and Shia in the wake of the sectarian carnage that followed Saddam’s overthrow in 2003.

Sunni grievances in Iraq are such that if IS did not exist, it would have to be invented. Without reconciliation and a sense of Sunni empowerment and partnership in a credible national project, IS in some shape or form will always be there, just as the Taliban are now resurgent in Afghanistan despite everything that was done to oust them.

But the Iraqi expert on radical movements, Hisham al-Hashemi, believes that IS could be badly damaged if the Coalition succeeds in one of its top-priority tasks – to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Leaders have been killed before, and replaced with little obvious effect on the course of history. But Hashemi believes Baghdadi is different.

“IS’s future depends on Baghdadi,” he says. “If he is killed, it will split up. One part would stay on his track and announce a new caliphate. Another would split off and return to al-Qaeda. Others would turn into gangs following whoever is strongest.”

“The source of his strength is that he brought about an ideological transformation, blending jihadist ideas with Baathist intelligence security methods, enabling him to create this quasi-state organization.”

Hashemi believes only Baghdadi can hold it together. There have been numerous false reports of him being hit in air strikes, but he appears to be stubbornly and elusively still alive, not seen in public since that mosque appearance in early July 2014.

The Americans are unlikely to rest until they have killed Baghdadi, not least because of their belief that he personally repeatedly raped an American NGO worker, Kayla Mueller, and then had her killed in early 2015.

But even if they do get him, and even if IS does break up, the Sunni problem in Iraq will not go away.

Capitalizing on chaos

IS had in any case been busy spreading its bets and developing other territorial options beyond the “parent tumour” of Iraq and Syria.

Libya proved the most promising. It had just the kind of failed-state anarchy, the “savagery”, that left room for the jihadists to move in, forging alliances with local militants and disgruntled supporters of the overthrown regime of Muammar Gaddafi, just as they had done in Iraq.

IS signaled its arrival there in typical style, issuing a polished video in February 2015 showing a group of 21 bewildered Egyptian Christian workers in orange jumpsuits being beheaded on a Libyan beach, their blood mingling with the waters of the Mediterranean as a warning to the “crusader” European countries on the other side of the sea.

The man who voiced that warning was believed to be the IS leader in Libya, an Iraqi called Wissam al-Zubaydi, also known as Abu Nabil. By coincidence, Zubaydi was killed in a US air strike on the same day IS struck in Paris, 13 November 2015.a video, posted online by Libyan IS supporters, showing “Islamic police” in the city of Sirte

The US and its allies were powerless to halt IS advances in Libya.

The group took over a big stretch of the coast around the central city of Sirte, which was to Muammar Gaddafi what Tikrit was to Saddam Hussein. Another American air strike in February killed (among nearly 50 other people) Noureddine Chouchane, reputedly an IS figure responsible for the deadly attacks on Western tourists in his native Tunisia.

By the summer of 2016, however, the militants were under pressure in Libya too. Militias loyal to the Government of National Accord, which had been born out of UN efforts in late March, were pressing in on Sirte.

But Libya remained a deeply fragmented country, and its new government far from powerful or universally accepted. There would likely continue to be pockets of chaos there for the jihadists to exploit.

And there was no shortage of other possibilities already beckoning – Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia… wherever there are dysfunctional states and angry Muslims, there are opportunities for IS, competing strongly with a diminished al-Qaeda as a dominant brand in the jihadist market.

Adding the extra risk for the West, that that competition could be another spur for spectacular terrorist attacks which they know are being actively plotted.

Clearly, IS has lost a lot of ground since it reached the high tide of its expansion in 2014 and it is under daily pressure wherever it exists.

But the outside powers, working with whatever local forces on the ground they can muster, will have to sustain a monumental effort if they are eventually to succeed in completely uprooting IS militarily, a prospect still far from achievement.

If that were to happen, IS would of course mutate back into the shadows as a sinister terrorist outfit with global reach, either plotting or inspiring spectacular strikes both in Middle East conflict countries and in the West, something that is already happening.

With no territorial base, its already diminished appeal and credibility as an idealised Islamic state would more or less evaporate.

But other voids that it has filled, and the failures and dysfunctions which enabled IS to happen, would remain, because they have been largely unaddressed.

Battle for minds

In the first 18 months after the declaration of the “Islamic State”, the number of foreign fighters making their way to join jihad in Syria and Iraq rose dramatically. The New York-based security consultancy Soufan Group estimated that 27,000 foreign jihadists had made the trip from 86 countries, more than half of them from the Middle East and North Africa.

Clearly, the caliphate had appeal, despite – perhaps in some cases because of – its graphically publicised brutality. A tribute to its extraordinary skill in using the internet and social media as a propaganda and grooming tool.

Ten months after vowing to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the organisation, President Obama ruefully acknowledged that IS “has been particularly effective at reaching out to and recruiting vulnerable people around the world including here in the United States, and they are targeting Muslim communities around the world”.

And he put his finger on the real challenge, monumentally greater than the comparatively simple task of defeating IS militarily:

“Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas, a more attractive and more compelling vision,” he said.

 

The complex art of IS propaganda

On a relatively normal day… there was a total of 50 distinct pieces of propaganda. The photo reports and videos included depictions of an IS offensive in northern Syria and eulogies for the dead in Salahuddin… Overwhelmingly, though, the propagandists were preoccupied with a carefully refined view of ‘normal’ life.

Fishing and ultraviolence

 

The problem is that when disenchanted people in the region look around them – especially the young, the idealistic, or the hopeless unemployed who have no future – they see scant evidence of “better ideas” or attractive and compelling visions.

They see the ruins of an “Arab Spring” which raised hopes only to dash them cruelly.

The brutal, corrupt dictatorships which it shook have either fragmented into chaos and sectarian and tribal upheaval, like Syria itself, Libya, Yemen and (with Western intervention) Iraq, or the “deep states” of their former regimes came back, even more harshly in the case of Egypt, more gently in the case of Tunisia.

While many of the European jihadists may have heeded the call for other reasons, socio-economic factors play an important part in radicalising some of the Arab jihadists, and will continue to do so unless addressed.

Why IS still attracts recruits from Europek her toddler son to Syria to join IS, was jailed after returning to

The flow of recruits, both fighters and families, leaving their homes in Europe to live under so-called Islamic State rule in Raqqa in Syria has slowed dramatically.

“It reached its peak in 2013-14, when it was far easier for jihadists to cross the 822km-long (510-mile) Turkey-Syria border, when IS propaganda on social media went largely unchallenged, and when IS was on a roll militarily, seizing ever more territory across northern Syria and north-western Iraq.

“While all three of those factors have now changed to the detriment of IS, the underlying factors propelling young Britons and Europeans towards joining the group have not gone away. So what are they?

Islamic State: What is the attraction for young Europeans?

One of the biggest contingents is from Tunisia, where a detailed survey in the poorest suburbs of the capital Tunis showed clearly that the radicalization of young people there had far less to do with extreme Islamic ideology as such than it did with unemployment, marginalization and disillusion after a revolution into which they threw themselves, but which gave them nothing, and left them hopeless.

A rare insight into the types of people who volunteer to join IS came with the emergence in European media in March 2016 of batches of what are believed to be “secret” IS files with personal details of recruits.

The data from 2013-14 purported to identify members from at least 40 countries. It included names, addresses, phone numbers and skill sets – a potential treasure trove for intelligence agencies trying to track and prosecute nationals who have signed up with the group.

IS is also filling a desert left by the collapse of all the political ideologies that have stirred Arab idealists over the decades. Many used to travel to the Soviet Union for training and tertiary education, but communism is now seen as a busted flush. Arab socialism and Arab nationalism, which caused such excitement in the 1950s and 1960s, mutated into brutal, corrupt “republics” where sons were groomed to inherit power from their fathers.

In this vacuum, IS took up the cause of punishing the West and other outsiders for their actions in the region over the past century:

the carve-up by the colonial powers 100 years ago, drawing a border between Iraq and Syria which IS has now erased

the creation of Israel under the British mandate for Palestine, and its subsequent unswerving political and financial support by the US

Western (and indeed Russian) backing for corrupt and tyrannical Arab regimes

the Western invasion and destruction of Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts, with the death of uncounted thousands of Iraqis

the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisoner abuse scandals….

The roots of IS also lie in a crisis within Islam.

“Isil is not Islamic,” said President Obama, echoing statements by many Western leaders that “IS has nothing to do with Islam”.

It has.

“It is based on Islamic texts that are reinterpreted according to how they see it,” says Ahmad Moussalli, professor of politics at the American University of Beirut. “I don’t say they are not coming out of Islamic tradition, that would be denying facts. But their interpretation is unusual, literal sometimes, very much like the Wahhabis.”

Hisham al-Hashemi, the Iraqi expert on radical groups, agrees.

“Violent extremism in IS and the salafist jihadist groups is justified, indeed blessed, in Islamic law texts relied on by IS and the extremist groups. It’s a crisis of religious discourse, not of a barbaric group. Breaking up the religious discourse and setting it on the right course is more important by far than suppressing the extremist groups militarily.”

Because ancient texts can be interpreted by extremists to cover their worst outrages does not implicate the entire religion, any more than Christianity is defined by the Inquisition, where burning at the stake was a stock penalty.

Extremist ideas remain in the dark, forgotten corners of history unless their time comes. And IS time came, with Afghanistan, Iraq, and everything that followed.

“Salafism is spreading in the world, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Arab countries,” says Prof Moussalli.

He blames the Saudis for stifling the emergence of a moderate, democratic version of Islam, the “alternative Islamic discourse” to salafism that President Obama would like to see.

“A moderate Islamic narrative today is a Muslim Brotherhood narrative, which has been destroyed by the Gulf states supporting the military coup in Egypt,” says Prof Moussalli, referring to the Egyptian military’s ousting of the elected President Mohammed Morsi, a senior Muslim Brotherhood figure, in July 2013.

“We lost that opportunity with Egypt. Egypt could have paved the way for real change in the area. But Saudi Arabia stood against it, in a very malicious way, and destroyed the possibility of changing the Arab regimes into more democratic regimes that accept the transfer of power peacefully. They don’t want it.”

Saudi Arabia’s ultra-conservative Wahhabi religious establishment and its constant propagation have raised ambiguity over its relations with radical groups abroad. Enemies and critics have accused it of producing the virulent strain of Wahhabism that inspires the extremists, and even of supporting IS and other ultra-salafist groups.

But Jamal Khashoggi, a leading Saudi journalist and writer who spent time in Afghanistan and knew Bin Laden, says that simply is not true

“We are at war with IS, which sees us as corrupt Wahhabis.” he says.

“IS is a form of Wahhabism that has been suppressed here since the 1930s. It resurfaced with the siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 and spread here and there. But Saudi Arabia didn’t back it at all, it saw it as a threat. So it’s true that salafism can turn radical, just as the US right-wing produces some crazy lunatics.”

Hundreds of people died in a two-week siege when extremist salafists took over the Grand Mosque, the holiest place in Islam, in protest at what they saw as the Kingdom’s deviation from the true path.

More recently, Saudi Arabia’s security forces and its Shia minority have in fact been the target of attacks by IS, and the kingdom has executed captured militants. It has an active deradicalization programmer.

Media captionSaudi Arabia’s ‘creative approach’ to deradicalization

But Mr Khashoggi agrees that the Saudis made a huge mistake when they backed the overthrow of the elected Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt and the subsequent crackdown on the movement, which has pushed political Islam into the arms of the radicals.

“There were no pictures of Isis, Bin Laden or al-Qaeda in Tahrir Square,” he says. “It was an opportunity for democracy in the Middle East, but we made a historical blunder for which we are all paying now.”

But the Kingdom’s extreme conservatism, its distaste for democracy, and its custodianship of the shrines in Mecca and Medina to which millions of Muslims make pilgrimage every year, have made it one of the main targets for calls for an unlikely reformation within Islam as part of the battle to defeat IS and other extremist groups.

“We must accept the fact that Islam has a crisis,” says a senior Sunni politician in Iraq.

“IS is not a freak. Look at the roots, the people, the aims. If you don’t deal with the roots, the situation will be much more dangerous. The world has to get rid of IS, but needs a new deal: reformation, in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, al-Azhar [the ancient seat of Sunni Islamic learning and authority in Cairo].”

“You can’t kill all the Muslims, you need an Islamic reformation. But Saudi and Qatari money is blotting out the voices so we can’t get anywhere. It’s the curse of the Arab world, too much oil, too much money.”

 

Regional rivalry

IS is at the heart of yet another of the region’s burning themes – the strategic geopolitical contest, the game of nations, that is taking place as Syria and Iraq disintegrate.

When the US-led coalition destroyed the Iraqi state in 2003, it was breaking down the wall that was containing Iran, the region’s Shia superpower, seen as a threat by the Saudis and most of their Sunni Gulf partners since its Islamic revolution in 1979.

Iran had for years been backing anti-Saddam Iraqi Shia factions in exile. Through those groups, the empowerment of the majority Shia community in Iraq after 2003 gave Iran unrivalled influence over Iraqi politics.

The arrival of the IS threat led to even more Iranian penetration, arming, training and directing the Shia militia who rose in defense of Baghdad and the South.

“If it weren’t for Iran, the democratic experiment in Iraq would have fallen,” says Hadi al-Ameri, leader of the Iranian-backed Badr Organization, one of the biggest Shia fighting groups.

“Obama was sleeping, and he didn’t wake up until IS was at the gates of Erbil. When they were at the gates of Baghdad, he did nothing. Were it not for Iran’s support, IS would have taken over the whole Gulf, not just Iraq.”

For Saudi Arabia and its allies, Iranian penetration in Iraq threatens to establish, indeed largely has, a Shia crescent, linking Iran, Iraq, Syria under its minority Alawite leadership, and Lebanon dominated by the Iranian-created Shia faction Hezbollah.

From the outset of the war in Syria, the Saudis and their Gulf partners, and Turkey, backed the Sunni rebels in the hope that the overthrow of Assad would establish Sunni majority rule.

So then a north-south Sunni axis running from Turkey through Syria to Jordan and Saudi Arabia would drive a stake through the heart of the Shia crescent and foil the Iranian project, as they saw it.

That is essentially what IS did in 2014 when it moved back into Iraq, took Mosul and virtually all the country’s Sunni areas, and established a Sunni entity which straddled the suddenly irrelevant border with Syria, blocking off Shia parts of Iraq from Syria.

If IS had just stayed put at that point and dug in, who would have shifted them? Had they not gone on to attack the Kurds, the Americans would not have intervened. Had they not shot down a Russian airliner and attacked Paris, the Russians and French would not have stepped up their involvement.

“Had they not become international terrorists and stayed local terrorists, they could have served the original agenda of dividing the Arab east so there would be no Shia crescent,” says Prof Moussalli.

We may never know why they did it. Perhaps their virulent strain of salafism just had to keep going: Remaining and Expanding.

Could they now just row back and settle in their “state”, stop antagonising people, and eventually gain acceptance, just as Iran has after its own turbulent revolution and international isolation?

It seems unlikely, for the same driving reasons that they made that escalation in the first place. And even if IS wanted to, the Americans also seem set on their course, and they have proven implacable in their pursuit of revenge for terrorist outrages.

But what is the alternative? Given the problem of assembling capable ground forces, can the Americans be complicit in a takeover of Mosul by Iranian-backed Shia militias, and of Raqqa by Russian- and Iranian-backed Syrian regime forces or other non-Sunni groups like the Kurds? Is their hostility to IS so strong that they would watch the Iranians connect up their Shia crescent? And would the Saudis and Turks go along with that?

There are no easy answers to any of the challenges posed by IS in all the strands of crisis that it brings together.

That’s why it’s still there.

 

Islam—Facts or Dreams?

Islam—Facts or Dreams?

February 2016 • Volume 45, Number 2 • Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review Institute

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. A graduate of Columbia College, he received his J.D. at New York Law School. For 18 years, he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, and from 1993-95 he led the terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. Following the 9/11 attacks, he supervised the Justice Department’s command post near Ground Zero. He has also served as a Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and an adjunct professor at Fordham University’s School of Law and New York Law School. He writes widely for newspapers and journals including National ReviewPJ Media, and The New Criterion, and is the author of several books, including Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotages America.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 24, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

In 1993 I was a seasoned federal prosecutor, but I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much. Consequently, when I was assigned to lead the prosecution of a terrorist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and was plotting an even more devastating strike—simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex on the East River, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters—I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in this terrorist cell were Muslims; that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace.

Unlike commentators and government press secretaries, I had to examine these claims. Prosecutors don’t get to base their cases on assertions. They have to prove things to commonsense Americans who must be satisfied about not only what happened but why it happened before they will convict people of serious crimes. And in examining the claims, I found them false.

One of the first things I learned concerned the leader of the terror cell, Omar Abdel Rahman, infamously known as the Blind Sheikh. Our government was portraying him as a wanton killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. Far from a lunatic, however, he turned out to be a globally renowned scholar—a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law.

I immediately began to wonder why American officials from President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno on down, officials who had no background in Muslim doctrine and culture, believed they knew more about Islam than the Blind Sheikh. Then something else dawned on me: the Blind Sheikh was not only blind; he was beset by several other medical handicaps. That seemed relevant. After all, terrorism is hard work. Here was a man incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization—he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. Yet he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell. Was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was conceding?

Defendants do not have to testify at criminal trials, but they have a right to testify if they choose to—so I had to prepare for the possibility. Raised an Irish Catholic in the Bronx, I was not foolish enough to believe I could win an argument over Muslim theology with a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence. But I did think that if what we were saying as a government was true—that he was perverting Islam—then there must be two or three places where I could nail him by saying, “You told your followers X, but the doctrine clearly says Y.” So my colleagues and I pored over the Blind Sheikh’s many writings. And what we found was alarming: whenever he quoted the Koran or other sources of Islamic scripture, he quoted them accurately.

Now, you might be able to argue that he took scripture out of context or gave an incomplete account of it. In my subsequent years of studying Islam, I’ve learned that this is not a particularly persuasive argument. But even if one concedes for the purposes of discussion that it’s a colorable claim, the inconvenient fact remains: Abdel Rahman was not lying about Islam.

When he said the scriptures command that Muslims strike terror into the hearts of Islam’s enemies, the scriptures backed him up.

When he said Allah enjoined all Muslims to wage jihad until Islamic law was established throughout the world, the scriptures backed him up.

When he said Islam directed Muslims not to take Jews and Christians as their friends, the scriptures backed him up.

You could counter that there are other ways of construing the scriptures. You could contend that these exhortations to violence and hatred should be “contextualized”—i.e., that they were only meant for their time and place in the seventh century.  Again, I would caution that there are compelling arguments against this manner of interpreting Islamic scripture. The point, however, is that what you’d be arguing is an interpretation.

The fact that there are multiple ways of construing Islam hardly makes the Blind Sheikh’s literal construction wrong. The blunt fact of the matter is that, in this contest of competing interpretations, it is the jihadists who seem to be making sense because they have the words of scripture on their side—it is the others who seem to be dancing on the head of a pin. For our present purposes, however, the fact is that the Blind Sheikh’s summons to jihad was rooted in a coherent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. He was not perverting Islam—he was, if anything, shining a light on the need to reform it.

Another point, obvious but inconvenient, is that Islam is not a religion of peace. There are ways of interpreting Islam that could make it something other than a call to war. But even these benign constructions do not make it a call to peace. Verses such as “Fight those who believe not in Allah,” and “Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war,” are not peaceful injunctions, no matter how one contextualizes.

Another disturbing aspect of the trial against the Blind Sheikh and his fellow jihadists was the character witnesses who testified for the defense. Most of these people were moderate, peaceful Muslim Americans who would no more commit terrorist acts than the rest of us. But when questions about Islamic doctrine would come up—“What does jihad mean?” “What is sharia?” “How might sharia apply to a certain situation?”—these moderate, peaceful Muslims explained that they were not competent to say. In other words, for the answers, you’d have to turn to Islamic scholars like the Blind Sheikh.

Now, understand: there was no doubt what the Blind Sheikh was on trial for. And there was no doubt that he was a terrorist—after all, he bragged about it. But that did not disqualify him, in the minds of these moderate, peaceful Muslims, from rendering authoritative opinions on the meaning of the core tenets of their religion. No one was saying that they would follow the Blind Sheikh into terrorism—but no one was discrediting his status either.

Although this came as a revelation to me, it should not have. After all, it is not as if Western civilization had no experience dealing with Islamic supremacism—what today we call “Islamist” ideology, the belief that sharia must govern society. Winston Churchill, for one, had encountered it as a young man serving in the British army, both in the border region between modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the Sudan—places that are still cauldrons of Islamist terror. Ever the perceptive observer, Churchill wrote:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. . . . Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Habitually, I distinguish between Islam and Muslims. It is objectively important to do so, but I also have a personal reason: when I began working on national security cases, the Muslims I first encountered were not terrorists. To the contrary, they were pro-American patriots who helped us infiltrate terror cells, disrupt mass-murder plots, and gather the evidence needed to convict jihadists. We have an obligation to our national security to understand our enemies; but we also have an obligation to our principles not to convict by association—not to confound our Islamist enemies with our Muslim allies and fellow citizens. Churchill appreciated this distinction. “Individual Moslems,” he stressed, “may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen.” The problem was not the people, he concluded. It was the doctrine.

What about Islamic law? On this topic, it is useful to turn to Robert Jackson, a giant figure in American law and politics—FDR’s attorney general, justice of the Supreme Court, and chief prosecutor of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. In 1955, Justice Jackson penned the foreword to a book called Law in the Middle East. Unlike today’s government officials, Justice Jackson thought sharia was a subject worthy of close study.  And here is what he concluded:

In any broad sense, Islamic law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge—all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire—reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western law.

Contrast this with the constitution that the U.S. government helped write for post-Taliban Afghanistan, which showed no awareness of the opposition of Islamic and Western law. That constitution contains soaring tropes about human rights, yet it makes Islam the state religion and sharia a principal source of law—and under it, Muslim converts to Christianity have been subjected to capital trials for apostasy.

Sharia rejects freedom of speech as much as freedom of religion. It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as between Muslim and non-Muslim. It brooks no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It is a comprehensive framework for human life, dictating matters of government, economy, and combat, along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do so.

Even if this is not the only construction of Islam, it is absurd to claim—as President Obama did during his recent visit to a mosque in Baltimore—that it is not a mainstream interpretation. In fact, it is the mainstream interpretation in many parts of the world. Last year, Americans were horrified by the beheadings of three Western journalists by ISIS. American and European politicians could not get to microphones fast enough to insist that these decapitations had nothing to do with Islam. Yet within the same time frame, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded eight people for various violations of sharia—the law that governs Saudi Arabia.

Three weeks before Christmas, a jihadist couple—an American citizen, the son of Pakistani immigrants, and his Pakistani wife who had been welcomed into our country on a fiancée visa—carried out a jihadist attack in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people. Our government, as with the case in Fort Hood—where a jihadist who had infiltrated the Army killed 13 innocents, mostly fellow soldiers—resisted calling the atrocity a “terrorist attack.” Why? Our investigators are good at what they do, and our top officials may be ideological, but they are not stupid. Why is it that they can’t say two plus two equals four when Islam is involved?

The reason is simple: stubbornly unwilling to deal with the reality of Islam, our leaders have constructed an Islam of their very own. This triumph of willful blindness and political correctness over common sense was best illustrated by former British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith when she described terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity.” In other words, the savagery is not merely unrelated to Islam; it becomes, by dint of its being inconsistent with a “religion of peace,”contrary to Islam. This explains our government’s handwringing over “radicalization”: we are supposed to wonder why young Muslims spontaneously become violent radicals—as if there is no belief system involved.

This is political correctness on steroids, and it has dangerous policy implications. Consider the inability of government officials to call a mass-murder attack by Muslims a terrorist attack unless and until the police uncover evidence proving that the mass murderers have some tie to a designated terrorist group, such as ISIS or al Qaeda. It is rare for such evidence to be uncovered early in an investigation—and as a matter of fact, such evidence often does not exist. Terrorist recruits already share the same ideology as these groups: the goal of imposing sharia. All they need in order to execute terrorist attacks is paramilitary training, which is readily available in more places than just Syria.

The dangerous flipside to our government’s insistence on making up its own version of Islam is that anyone who is publicly associated with Islam must be deemed peaceful. This is how we fall into the trap of allowing the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamic supremacist organization, to infiltrate policy-making organs of the U.S. government, not to mention our schools, our prisons, and other institutions. The federal government, particularly under the Obama administration, acknowledges the Brotherhood as an Islamic organization—notwithstanding the ham-handed attempt by the intelligence community a few years back to rebrand it as “largely secular”—thereby giving it a clean bill of health. This despite the fact that Hamas is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, that the Brotherhood has a long history of terrorist violence, and that major Brotherhood figures have gone on to play leading roles in terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda.

To quote Churchill again:  “Facts are better than dreams.” In the real world, we must deal with the facts of Islamic supremacism, because its jihadist legions have every intention of dealing with us. But we can only defeat them if we resolve to see them for what they are.

 

Hard Lessons on Education

Editorial

Gates Foundation failures show philanthropists shouldn’t be setting America’s public school agenda

Bill and Melinda Gates talk to reporters about their foundation in New York on Feb. 22. The two are co-chairs of the largest private foundation in the world. (Seth Wenig / Associated Press)

The Times Editorial Board  6/1/2016

Tucked away in a letter from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation last week, along with proud notes about the foundation’s efforts to fight smoking and tropical diseases and its other accomplishments, was a section on education. Its tone was unmistakably chastened.

“We’re facing the fact that it is a real struggle to make system wide change,” wrote the foundation’s CEO, Sue Desmond-Hellman. And a few lines later: “It is really tough to create more great public schools.”

The Gates Foundation’s first significant foray into education reform, in 1999, revolved around Bill Gates’ conviction that the big problem with high schools was their size. Students would be better off in smaller schools of no more than 500, he believed. The foundation funded the creation of smaller schools, until its own study found that the size of the school didn’t make much difference in student performance. When the foundation moved on, school districts were left with costlier-to-run small schools.

Then the foundation set its sights on improving teaching, specifically through evaluating and rewarding good teaching. But it was not always successful. In 2009, it pledged a gift of up to $100 million to the Hillsborough County, Fla., schools to fund bonuses for high-performing teachers, to revamp teacher evaluations and to fire the lowest-performing 5%. In return, the school district promised to match the funds. But, according to reports in the Tampa Bay Times, the Gates Foundation changed its mind about the value of bonuses and stopped short of giving the last $20 million; costs ballooned beyond expectations, the schools were left with too big a tab and the least-experienced teachers still ended up at low-income schools. The program, evaluation system and all, was dumped.

The Gates Foundation strongly supported the proposed Common Core curriculum standards, helping to bankroll not just their development, but the political effort to have them quickly adopted and implemented by states. Here, Desmond-Hellmann wrote in her May letter, the foundation also stumbled. The too-quick introduction of Common Core, and attempts in many states to hold schools and teachers immediately accountable for a very different form of teaching, led to a public backlash.

“Unfortunately, our foundation underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement the standards,” Desmond-Hellmann wrote. “We missed an early opportunity to sufficiently engage educators — particularly teachers — but also parents and communities, so that the benefits of the standards could take flight from the beginning.

“This has been a challenging lesson for us to absorb, but we take it to heart. The mission of improving education in America is both vast and complicated, and the Gates Foundation doesn’t have all the answers.”

It was a remarkable admission for a foundation that had often acted as though it did have all the answers. Today, the Gates Foundation is clearly rethinking its bust-the-walls-down strategy on education — as it should. And so should the politicians and policymakers, from the federal level to the local, who have given the educational wishes of Bill and Melinda Gates and other well-meaning philanthropists and foundations too much sway in recent years over how schools are run.

That’s not to say wealthy reformers have nothing to offer public schools. They’ve funded some outstanding charter schools for low-income students. They’ve helped bring healthcare to schools. They’ve funded arts programs.

The Gates Foundation, according to Desmond-Hellmann’s letter, is now working more on providing Common Core-aligned materials to classrooms, including free digital content that could replace costly textbooks, and a website where teachers can review educational materials. That’s great: Financial support for Common Core isn’t a bad thing. When the standards are implemented well, which isn’t easy, they ought to develop better reading, writing and thinking skills.

And foundation money has often been used to fund experimental programs and pilot projects of the sort that regular school districts might not have the time or extra funds to put into place. Those can be extremely informative and even groundbreaking.

But the Gates Foundation has spent so much money — more than $3 billion since 1999 — that it took on an unhealthy amount of power in the setting of education policy. Former foundation staff members ended up in high positions in the U.S. Department of Education — and, in the case of John Deasy, at the head of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The foundation’s teacher-evaluation push led to an overemphasis on counting student test scores as a major portion of teachers’ performance ratings — even though Gates himself eventually warned against moving too hastily or carelessly in that direction. Now several of the states that quickly embraced that method of evaluating teachers are backing away from it.

Philanthropists are not generally education experts, and even if they hire scholars and experts, public officials shouldn’t be allowing them to set the policy agenda for the nation’s public schools. The Gates experience teaches once again that educational silver bullets are in short supply and that some educational trends live only a little longer than mayflies.