Vox Popoli

A most excellent parody of Hugh Hewitt:

Here’s the objective measure: When was the last time that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Medved, Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer and me all focused on the same subject and all agreed on the merits? It is literally impossible to imagine a more wildly diversified group of 50-something Republican pundits. Even in our most agreeable moments we are endlessly roiled in rancorous disagreements on everything, from the NFL replay rule to the merits of the Four-In-Hand versus the Windsor knot, yet here we spoke with one unanimous, harmonious voice:

Rush Limbaugh: “Pretty good speech. I think it will help him.”

Sean Hannity: “I didn’t see it myself, but Lee Greenwood told me it was nice.”

Michael Medved: “I think it probably helps Romney with Evangelicals.”

Fred Barnes: “I’d venture Romney will probably pick up 2 to 4 points in the next Iowa poll.”

Charles Krauthammer: “He certainly didn’t hurt himself.”

Me: “As the magnificence of His words burst forth, I fell to my very knees and wept with utter overwhelming joy; not just for me, but for the entire human race.”

That’s about as reasonable and convincing as any argument I’ve heard yet for supporting Mitt Romney. He’s tall! He has executive hair! He is opposed to murdering children, at least, he is today! And he wears some seriously awesome underoos!

Actually, I would think much better of Romney if he simply admitted to wearing Joseph’s Secret, and said “Look, we all believe in something halfway crazy, this just happens to be my particular idiom. At least it’s men’s underwear, you know it could be a lot worse.”

We thank the Good Fraters for bringing this special moment in political history to our attention.

Actually, Rotten Tomatoes has it Narnia 76, Compass 43. I can’t say that I’m surprised that The Golden Compass is failing at the box office. One can’t expect any more from a third-rate Lewis rip-off, its muted anti-Christian theme notwithstanding. I only wish they had done it as the openly hate-filled propaganda vehicle it was originally conceived to be.

Nor am I saddened at the disaster that was the feeble attempt to put The Dark is Rising on film. (RT: 13!) All you had to know that it would bomb was that the director moved the story to America; when will filmmakers learn that “relevance” to the modern movie-goer is completely beside the point? People go to movies to ESCAPE their daily lives, not to relive them.

There’s so many great stories out there, it’s such a pity that Hollywood is so determined to ruin them by putting them through its peculiar filter. The only rule of success in entertainment is this: no one actually knows anything. But sticking with the story that made the movie possible in the first place instead of having an incompetent writer rewrite it does make for a pretty good guideline.

That being said, I’m rather looking forward to seeing Prince Caspian. Judging by the trailer, it looks like the combat will be more reflective of LOTR than The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

It’s always amusing to watch atheists attempt to use logic. It’s rather like watching an orangutan try to waltz. Consider the most recent example here, courtesy of Anon, who insists that atheism is growing rapidly and may make up more than one-third of the world’s population:

There are probably over 1 billion agnostics and atheists in the world today. In fact, there may be over 1 billion agnostics and atheists in China alone….

Specifically, atheists comprised only .2 percent of the world’s population in 1900, whereas atheists now probably comprise 15% to 35% of the world’s population….

But the percentage of atheists in the world may not be as high as 35%. A lot depends on the percentage of Chinese that are atheists. A recent poll estimated that only 31 percent of Chinese 16 or older are religious, putting the number of believers at roughly 400 million. The rest of Chinese would presumably be atheists, agnostics or those who haven’t thought about the issue, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese. So maybe 800 million to 900 million Chinese are atheists or non-theists….

By my calculations that is 15% of the world’s population. But if there are 800,000 million Chinese atheists, I wouldn’t be surprised if you get to 2 billion atheists total in the world, because there is such a larger percentage in Japan, Korea and Europe. And there are probably 25 million to 30 million in the US. A lot of Japanese are Shinto. They don’t believe in God. It is ancestor worship….

Anon makes all the usual errors. In this case, it’s clearly logical ineptitude, whereas in others, it is outright intellectual dishonesty. In any case, here are the logical blunders he makes as he attempts to avoid stumbling over his own words:

1. Failing to distinguish implicit Low Atheism with explicit High Atheism. Of course, this is only done when attempting to inflate atheist numbers, the two are always held to be two different groups when adding the two groups together demonstrates that atheists have lower IQs and greater criminal proclivities. In reality, High Atheists only account for around one-twentieth of the collective non-religious, secular population. The greater Church of Secularism is much larger than the small, but influential denomination of High Church Atheism.

2. Mutating definitions of atheism. Anon asserts that there is no God, but then backtracks and says that atheism is a mere lack of belief in God. Both of these definitions dance around the fact that most atheists also include a lack of belief in the supernatural, the human soul and anything immaterial as inherent aspects of their atheism.

3. Mathematical generalities. Forget “probably”, I can state with absolute, 100 percent certainty that between 0 and 100 percent of the world’s population is atheist. This is only marginally less meaningful than saying “atheists now probably comprise 15% to 35% of the world’s population”. One cringes at the thought of asking Anon for his estimate of the actual probabilities of that “probably”.

3. Attempting to claim the practitioners of Chinese folk religion, Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto as atheists. This is absurd on its face, but more importantly, it is a demonstration of a Christopher Hitchens-like self-refutation that completely demolishes his own argument if accepted. Anon is trying to claim atheism is growing globally based on the idea that it once accounted for only .2 percent of the world’s population in 1900, but this argument relies on counting the estimated 12.69 percent of the global population that practice those Eastern faiths as theists in 1900 and atheists a century later. Sam Harris makes a very similar mistake on this basis in his second book.

4. Ignorance of demographics. There is a great detail of data indicating that neither atheist societies nor individuals are capalbe of reproducing successfully. Most secular researchers fail to note that atheists and the irreligious convert to religion in the years after college as readily as theists convert to atheism during college. I am myself an example of this, as are both of my college roommates. It would be interesting to study the twin phenomenons and see how they relate when combined with reproductive tendencies.

5. Ignoring the development of new and numerically less-significant religions. The supposed growth of atheism from .2 percent to 2.35 percent is impressive. Even more impressive is the growth of hitherto nonexistent religions from 0 to 2 percent. And as it stands, according to the 2005 Encylopedia Brittanica, there are still nearly twice as many people around the globe practicing indigenous tribal religions as there are atheists.

But even if one assumes that atheism has grown quickly over the past century, this is much more indicative of its relatively trivial status than anything else. Many small companies have growth rates that dwarf those of Intel, Microsoft and Apple combined; it would be mathematically impossible for Christianity to grow anywhere nearly as fast as either Atheism or Scientology.

As I have stated previously, the New Atheism is actually indicative of a peak, not a trend. I’d still be interested to see projections from those who believe otherwise, though. If atheists are now, on average, 25 percent of the global population – the second largest “faith” group in the world – what do you project will be the global percentage of atheists in 2050?

In any event, the reliability with which one can count on atheists making the same logical and factual errors over and over again leads me to wonder if perhaps they are evolutionarily challenged in ways other than the merely reproductive.

In China it is known as the “sacred doctrine” and it has become one of the country’s bestselling books. Yet it has nothing to do with the thoughts of Chairman Mao and its teachings have been in conflict with the forces of Communism for generations.

Demand for the Bible is soaring in China, at a time when meteoric economic growth is testing the country’s allegiance to Communist doctrine. Today the 50 millionth Bible will roll off the presses of China’s only authorised publisher, Amity Printing, amid public fanfare and celebration….

Authorities at the officially approved Protestant and Catholic churches put the size of China’s Christian population at about 30 million. But that does not include the tens of millions more who worship in private at underground churches loyal to the Vatican or to various Protestant churches.

This sort of thing, which is also in evidence in countries from Nigeria to North Korea, makes a complete mockery of the idea that secularism is a growth stock. As with most stock markets, the public get the most excited about a stock when it has reached its peak.

History moves in waves and cycles. Dawkins’s misguided belief in historical progress towards secularism is perhaps the most fundamental example of his near-complete historical ignorance, to say nothing if his inability to do the demographic math. There are more Christians in atheist China than there are atheists in America. In two generations, there will be more Christians there than there are atheists in all of the lands formerly known as Christendom.

The reason that feminism has gotten as far as it has is because far too many men simply have no balls. Or self-respect:

Betty Friedan ruined a Super Bowl party in my very own home by wearing a black leather miniskirt and swinging her (not bad) legs clad in fishnet stockings back and forth in front of the TV screen so that nobody could see the plays. She radicalized a sizable bunch of neutral men into committed anti-feminists that day.

I had to laugh when I read this. I’m trying to imagine what would have happened to any woman who tried to do that when the White Buffalo, Big Chilly and I were watching a pre-season game between Carolina and Seattle, perhaps the two NFL teams in whom we are collectively the least interested. I can’t, to be honest, but direct action would be taken with alacrity.

However, I do know that if any woman – or man, for that matter – tried to do anything like that during the Super Bowl, we would have stripped them naked and thrown them outside. In January. In Minnesota.

And I’m not exaggerating. During past Super Bowl parties hosted at the Digital Ghetto, certain men were forced to strip, don a pink taffeta gown and dive into snowdrifts from a second-story deck for far less egregious offenses. Not that I’m naming any names, Mr. Big City Investment Banker… although BCIB did salvage a few shards of dignity by doing a flip instead of the basic bellyflop.

Mitt Romney, creative theologian:

Romney was also right that “every single human being is a child of God.” This is at the root of the belief system of many liberals who are religious. Romney was echoing — unconsciously, to be sure — none other than Bill Clinton, who declared in a 1992 campaign speech that “all of us must respect the reflection of God’s image in every man and woman.”

John 8:42-47
The Children of the Devil
42Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. 43Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. 44You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! 46Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me? 47He who belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.”

Now, let me point out that the reason I’m not supporting Mitt Romney has nothing whatsoever to do with his religion. I’d vote for an atheist libertarian a hundred times over before I’d even think about the possibility of supporting a big government Baptist like the Huckster or a Rockefeller Republican like Romney. Also, I have no doubt that many Christians will have more than a few reservations about various elements of my theological interpretation of the Bible, and furthermore, it is not within my capacity to judge whether Mitt Romney is a Christian or not.

It is, however, quite clear that his declared theology as revealed in his speech yesterday is at some variance with the Bible. I have no idea if this is more reflective of his Mormonism or his being a politician; the fact that he shares that belief with Bill Clinton tends to suggest the latter.

Plastic Christmas trees? It’s an idea less palatable than a Hannukah ham:

Last year, an estimated 9.3 million artificial trees were sold in the United States, up 2 million from five years ago. And while the real tree harvest was triple that, the numbers are of major concern for growers because artificial trees can be used year after year. It has reached a point where half the trees put up in American households are made of plastic, industry experts say. The rest of the bad news for growers is that it is getting harder to tell which trees are real.

I’m sorry, but if you’re going to put up an artificial Christmas tree, you might as well just go with a menorah or an aluminum pole. Now, I respect those Christians who elect to focus solely on the spiritual aspects of Jesus Christ’s birth, but if you’re going to celebrate the traditional ones as well, by all means do it right!

I’d like to say that I’m shocked that a left-wing ex-priest with a radio show in San Francisco would be indicted on child porn charges. I’m not shocked, but I am a little surprised, since a more natural association with the words “liberal”, “ex-priest”, “San Francisco” and “indictment” would be “child molester”. Although, I suppose this fails to take into account the fact that the man is a talk show host, not a teacher:

In a shocking development from San Francisco, longtime liberal talk show host Bernie Ward has apparently been indicted on charges related to child pornography.

I’m not sure that his lawyer’s proposed “writing a book” defense is likely to be all that effective, though. If it is, publishers will soon be inundated by a tidal wave of book proposals about selling cocaine for the Medellin cartel.

In order to help the various new readers who are likely to stumble upon this place once the book comes out, I thought it might be helpful to provide a basic cast of characters to serve as a reference work. If there’s someone you think should definitely be on it, please nominate them in the comments here along with a short description, two sentences max. They can be past or present regulars, who knows, perhaps some old friends will come back to visit.

For example, one might consider Nate aka Der Hausfrauhrer. Cowboy, motorcycle aficionado and Keeper of the Harem. Likes: motorcycles, women, the Tennessee Titans. Dislikes: Yankees, damn Yankees and bringing up the rear in the VPFL. Red Flags: The War of Northern Aggression. Or Bane, aka The Reaper’s Hairball. Ex-soldier, full-time sociopath and dedicated admirer of peasant women. Likes: guns, women, Red Alert. Dislikes: people. Red Flags: Yes.

Only Voxologisti require AKA, as this will be a link to their blog. Nominate away and don’t nominate yourself.

Another week, another public shooting. One can only conclude that either there is a new federal gun control law in the works or the Supreme Court has already decided to announce that there is no individual right to bear arms, all emanations, penumbras and Constitutional text notwithstanding:

A man opened fire with a rifle at a busy department store Wednesday, killing eight people in an attack that made holiday shoppers run screaming through a mall and barricade themselves in dressing rooms. The young shooter, who left a note predicting, “Now I’ll be famous,” wounded five others, two critically, then took his own life…. The shooter, identified by police as 20-year-old Robert A. Hawkins, was found dead on the third floor with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

So, what are the odds that the late and unlamented Mr. Hawkins was:

a) an evangelical Christian
b) a practicing Jew
c) a Muslim
d) an agnostic or non-practicing individual raised religious
e) a militant atheist

All of these options are of course possible, but they are not equally likely. We shall wait and see….