Why do economic achievers, like George Soros for instance, who made their splendid fortunes because they had the freedom to do so, want to close that freedom to others? Or to put it another way, why do some who have benefited spectacularly from capitalism then go and vote for socialism and promote anti-free market causes?

We don’t know the answer to that question. There are a number of possible reasons, one of them being that a person might be very good at making money and yet be quite stupid.

Here’s an example of a German magnate who believes that individuals should not be allowed to make decisions for themselves, that bureaucrats know what is best for everybody, and the state should control and distribute the resources of the nation. He speaks for hundreds of millions of Europeans, which is why many European countries – Greece is a case in point – are facing economic ruin.

The story is told in Investor’s Business Daily. We emphatically agree with the editorial opinion.

An ultrawealthy German criticizes private charity, saying it takes “the place of the state.” More disturbing than the statement itself is the sad fact that many in the Western world agree with him.

Der Spiegel reported last week that “Germany’s super-rich have rejected” an invitation to join Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s “Giving Pledge,” in which the wealthy promise to give away a majority of their fortunes “either during their lifetime or after their death.” Wealthy Germans, Spiegel says, believe “donations shouldn’t replace duties that would be better carried out by the state.” Among them is a bitter Peter Kramer.

“I find the U.S. initiative highly problematic,” Kramer, a Hamburg-based shipping magnate, said in a Spiegel interview. “You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the U.S.A. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That’s unacceptable.”

What is apparently acceptable to these wealthy Germans is the unlimited authority of the state and the prerogative it’s given itself to restrict people’s choices.

“It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires,” Kramer continues. … “What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?”

Is it legitimate for the state to demand wealth from some so it can give it to others? …

Money handed out by the state is taken from productive citizens, then distributed through the corrupt and inefficient system of politics … It’s a system based on coercion. …

Even better than private charity is private enterprise. Markets meet needs by creating wealth and growing economies. No system can match capitalism in its ability to bring prosperity to so many.

While there’s a place for charity, it’s merely a patch and should be used with great care. There’s no place, though, for forced redistribution. What’s chilling is that so many still believe there is.

Of extraordinary interest, we think, is an essay by Anthony Daniels in The New Criterion, titled Ayn Rand: engineer of souls. (We cannot link to it, but it’s easy to find.)

We are admirers of Ayn Rand, but not uncritically. We believe, as she does, that capitalism is the only creator and sustainer of prosperity. We despise religion as she does. Like her we value reason. Her enormous novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have probably won more believers in capitalism and devotees of personal liberty than any other book in any language, even surpassing Hayek’s essential text The Road to Serfdom; and for that she deserves lasting honor.

But her vision of humanity has a comic-book hyperbole about it which keeps her out of the rank of great writers. Her heroes are too big, too superior to us and everyone we’ll ever meet, to be likable. They inspire awe but not affection. We can be sure they’d look down on us if they knew us. We cannot emulate them, we can only wonder at them. They are like gods. They are intensely romantic, and romanticism is the enemy of reason.

Anthony Daniels lists her virtues and vices:

Rand’s virtues were as follows: she was highly intelligent; she was brave and uncompromising in defense of her ideas; she had a kind of iron integrity; and, though a fierce defender of capitalism, she was by no means avid for money herself. The propagation of truth as she saw it was far more important to her than her own material ease. Her vices, of course, were the mirror-image of her virtues, but, in my opinion, the mirror was a magnifying one. Her intelligence was narrow rather than broad. Though in theory a defender of freedom of thought and action, she was dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant, not only in opinion but in behavior, and it led her to personal cruelty. In the name of her ideas, she was prepared to be deeply unpleasant. She hardened her ideas into ideology. Her integrity led to a lack of self-criticism; she frequently wrote twenty thousand words where one would do. …

A passionate hater of religion, Rand founded a cult around her own person, complete with rituals of excommunication; a passionate believer in rationality and logic, she was incapable of seeing the contradictions in her own work. She was a rationalist who was not entirely rational …

He goes on to paragraphs of stronger condemnation. He finds “horrible” cruelty in her. He perceives that though she was fanatically anti-collectivist, and though she had fled from Soviet Russia to the freedom of America, Stalin’s Russia remained within her.

Her unequivocal admiration bordering on worship of industrialization and the size of human construction as a mark of progress is profoundly Stalinist. Where Stalinist iconography would plant a giant chimney belching black smoke, Randian iconography would plant a skyscraper. (At the end of The Fountainhead, Roark receives a commission to build the tallest skyscraper in New York, its height being the guarantor of its moral grandeur. According to this scale of values, the Burj Dubai would be man’s crowning achievement so far.) Industrialists are to Rand what Stakhanovites were to Stalin: Both saw nature as an enemy, something to be beaten into submission. One doesn’t have to be an adherent of the Gaia hypothesis to know where this hatred of nature led.

Finally, Rand’s treasured theory of literature, what she called Romantic Realism, is virtually indistinguishable from Socialist Realism …

Rand’s heroes are not American but Soviet. The fact that they supposedly embody capitalist values makes no difference. Rand fulfilled Stalin’s criterion for the ideal writer: she tried to be an engineer of souls.

The analysis is not unjust.

But the recruiting sergeant to the Army of Light does not have to be the best exponent of the cause for which it fights.

While acknowledging and regretting all her faults, we keep, for her success as a dedicated recruiting sergeant, an abstract monument to Ayn Rand in our personal Hall of the Defenders of Individual Freedom.

Jillian Becker   June 19, 2010

On Thursday May 6, 2010, a general election will be held in Britain. It’s likely that the Conservative Party will win with a small majority.

It will make little difference who wins and who governs. None of the parties has a policy that can save Britain from its deepening economic crisis or from its future as a predominantly Muslim country under sharia law.

Here is an address I delivered at a conference of Conservatives in London in 2008. The figures were accurate then according to each country’s published statistics, and they haven’t changed significantly.

My prognosis for Britain and Europe is profoundly depressing. I wish it could be otherwise.

*

The people of Europe are dying out. In that sense it could be said that Europe is coming to an end. The continent is entering a new phase of its history and is already being called by a new name: Eurabia.

Here are the facts and figures:

The birth-rate by which a population is merely stabilized, not increased however slightly, is 2.1 births per woman.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some European figures:

Austria 1.3

Britain 1.77

Czech Republic 2

France 1.9

Germany 1.37

Greece 1.29

Italy 1.2

Ireland 1.87

Netherlands 1.73

Norway 1.81

Poland 2

Russia 1

Spain 1.1

Sweden 1.75

These are all declining populations. Some are declining more steeply than others. Russia’s population will be halved in 50 years, while Poland’s half-life will take a little longer.

It’s hard to imagine what if anything could halt the decline. A sudden explosion of births, with most women of child-bearing age having numerous children in the next couple of decades? Too late. A mass return of European descendants from the New World to the ancestral lands? Yes, but as unlikely to happen as a miracle.

What is actually happening to swell the numbers is an accelerating growth of the Muslim immigrant populations. In Britain today the average age of the non-Muslim population is 41, the average age of the Muslim population is 28. This order of difference is typical of all West European countries. In all of them, furthermore, the Muslim birth-rate is higher than the native birth-rate. It means they have not long to wait for their Muslim majorities. Europe is being Islamized, to become in all likelihood a Muslim-dominated continent by the end of the century [revised estimate - by the middle of the century]. We can now see – we can hardly miss seeing – the change in our cities. Though it seems to have come upon us suddenly, it has been growing for decades. It is about 20 years since the Islamic Foundation issued a declaration from Leicester that the Islamic movement is ‘an organized struggle to change the existing society into an Islamic society based on the Koran’.

Realistically we must confront the demise of our political power and reconcile ourselves to a loss of liberty, because, barring a miracle, Islam will not transform itself into a force for the protection of individual freedom. By no stretch of the imagination can Muslim law, sharia, be described as liberal.

Here are a few examples of it: Women must obey their husbands who should beat them if they do not. Women must cover their heads and figures in public. Thieves must have hands and feet cut off; adulterers are to be stoned to death; unmarried fornicators lashed with 100 stripes; homosexuals burnt, stoned, or dropped from a height; apostates killed. Criticism of the Prophet Mohammed is apostasy. Non-Muslims must convert to Islam, or be killed, or, if Christian or Jewish, may pay a tax called the jizya and so be suffered to live, not as citizens but as dhimmi, subjugated and abased persons forced to submit to numerous laws which mark and preserve their inferior status.

We could cling to a hope that sharia law will not be imposed on our grandchildren, or that if it is, it will be in some modified form. We may surmise that Muslims born and brought up here will be influenced by our values and modes of thought to the extent that they themselves come to prefer our common law to sharia. For this to happen they would have to be thoroughly secularized en masse. In such a development lies our best chance of remaining free. But how probable is it? We can only read the existing signs and they do not inspire optimism.

To some degree young Muslim men in Britain are already secularized. In English cities they can be as enthusiastic Saturday-night bingers and brawlers as their native English counterparts, the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol notwithstanding. But they are inclined to adhere to Islamic customs, as in marriage for example, expecting their wives to remain in a traditionally subservient role. Importantly, the imams still have power to influence the communities, and it is largely because Muslim communities have been established in geographical enclaves that their power remains strong.

Successive British governments have failed to integrate Muslim immigrants. They have preferred, in accordance with the ill-thought-out ideology of ‘multiculturalism’, to permit and even approve the establishment of ethnic enclaves. Yet these are ghettoes of a kind, and the policy itself is, in effect, segregationist, or what might be called apartheid-lite. It has meant that there are areas into which the police are reluctant to enter, so that ‘honour killings’, forced marriages, child marriages, wife beatings and burnings, separation according to gender in schools and offices, are often – no one knows how often – practised with impunity.

Then there are the madrassas. Some 700 [many more now in 2010 - JB] of these religious schools have been established in Britain, at least a few of them with tax-payers’ money. They teach fundamentalist doctrine, including the complete subjugation of women, and the waging of jihad, holy war.

We are often told that Islam means ‘peace’, but it does not. It means ‘submission’. We are told it is a ‘religion of peace’, but it was spread by the sword. Our experience of it in recent years has been traumatic. What Islam has shown us of itself is that it is murderous, destructive, cruel and terrifying, bringing death and agony to many places in the world, including New York, Madrid, and here to us in London.

Conquest of the rest of the world by Islam is ordained by its holy book, the Koran. There it is written that the highest duty of the ‘true believer’ is to wage war against infidel lands – such as ours – until they become part of the realm of Islam and their populations are converted. Every Muslim must participate in the war. Those who do not actively fight must assist those who do in whatever ways they can. Refusal is punishable by mutilation or death.

‘O you who believe! Fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find hardness in you’ (sura 9.123). ‘Those who fight Islam should be murdered or crucified or their hands and feet should be cut off on opposite sides’ (sura 5.33). ‘Let those who fight in the way of Allah, who sell this world’s life for the hereafter; and whoever fights in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, We shall grant him a mighty reward’ (sura 4.74).

This last injunction with its promise of reward fully authorizes suicide bombing. It is the standing order for such atrocities as those of 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London.

We have heard from imams and sheikhs that other injunctions abrogate these; or that we must not take them literally. But the important point for us is that there are Muslims who obey them literally. We can hardly avoid noticing, belatedly but plainly at last, that not only are we being colonized by Islam, but at the same time we are being subjected to jihad.

The violence can only get worse, the attacks more destructive, possibly obliterating millions. The President of the Islamic State of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claiming to be divinely inspired, is threatening to unleash nuclear war. He has the capability of producing nuclear warheads, and Western Europe, we are told, is within range of his missiles. The nuclear bomb is the greatest boon for furthering jihad that has come into Islam’s possession in all the fourteen hundred years of its history. Can we doubt that he will use it?

Jillian Becker    May 3, 2010

Books I recommend:

Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Regnery, Washington D.C., 2006)

Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (Doubleday, New York, 2006)

Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli, New York, 2002), The Force of Reason (Rizzoli, New York, 2006)

Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Cranbury, New Jersey, 2005)

Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (Gibson Square, London, 2006)

David Solway, whose insights often impress us, has today done us the honor of linking to one of our posts in a new article of his.

The article is at Front Page, titled Is the U.S. Too Big to Fail? Here’s a part of it (but read it all). The link to our post, Speaking of Secession, [April 7, 2010] comes with the words “parting of ways” in the third paragraph:

The Bridge Mix of social, political and economic programs—redistribution of wealth, a bloated bureaucracy, reduction of military power, amnesty for illegals, toleration of inimical communities, government takeover of the marketplace, ideology supplanting pragmatics—adopted by the American liberal-left and rapidly being put in place by the current administration are hurtling the nation toward its moment of truth when it will have to decide whether it survives as the United States of America or devolves into something that, until just a few years ago, would have been almost unimaginable.

Often what seems to be inconceivable is only the prelude to what may well become unavoidable. And in the case of America such a scenario is all too possible. For America has only three options looming before it in a rapidly foreclosing future. The best case scenario is that, assuming a concerned citizenry, the growing Tea Party movement, a return to strict budgetary rectitude and a revival of the wisdom of the Constitution and the Founders, the United States may weather the storm of social and political dismemberment it is presently undergoing and recover its essence as a constitutional republic. To accomplish this aim, however, the policies of the Obama administration must be resisted at every turn. What Henry David Thoreau wrote in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience in 1848 has a proleptic ring to it and is truer today than it ever was: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

On the other hand the calamity of disintegration, as happened to the Soviet Union not so long ago, is a deeply troubling likelihood. The drive toward secession or what is called “disunion” along red state/blue state lines appears to be acquiring strength by the day. It is in the air. The threat of dissolution cannot be wished away or conveniently ignored. Whether such a parting of ways can be achieved peaceably and rationally or would entail violence and bloodshed remains an open question. But what resembles a bitter marriage between cultural incompatibles, the statist Left and the conservative Right, who have nothing to say to one another and disagree on just about everything, makes an eventual divorce by no means unthinkable. The clash between a pervasive scavenger mentality of collective entitlement and the ancestral belief in the values of personal initiative and individual responsibility cannot, it increasingly appears, be resolved amicably.

The third possibility is that America under the stewardship of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party will become an impoverished, socialist, Muslim-friendly country, much like the United Kingdom today or Sweden tomorrow, with devastating consequences for the majority of its citizens. As David Horowitz remarks of the U.S., “its constitutional order is threatened by a political left whose values remain socialist and whose agendas are subversive.” Such is the fundamental transformation promised by the Democratic candidate five days before his election: the intent to legislate outcome at the expense of input, to ensure a syndicalist homogeneity of status among the population while installing a privileged managerial class in the seats of power, and ultimately to transform America’s most industrious entrepreneurial sector into over-taxed and over-regulated obsolescence. Where have we seen this before?

These, then, are the three alternatives between which America will have to choose: recovery, dissolution, socialism. Regarding the latter two, to cite Aeschylus …,  it’s “either way, ruin.” Clearly, the moment of decision is not far down the road. Even a one-term administration for Barack Obama and his cohorts may be sufficient to wreak irreparable damage; a two-term presidency would probably spell the end of the noble and unique American experiment in republican democracy. For there can be little question that Barack Obama and the Democratic ascendancy together form the single greatest disaster to befall the United States in the modern era. If the country does not right itself sooner rather than later, it will find itself broken down the middle or wake up one day to discover that it is now nothing more than another socialist or quasi-Marxist Republic, which is a republic in name only.

Thoreau is on the mark again. Deploring the effects of a “wordy” and ever-compliant Congress which had “not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and freedom” and which was devoid of “talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufactures,” he argues that without the “seasonable experience…of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.” And we remember, too, that the United States was a much smaller political entity in 1848 than it is in 2010.

Now is not the time to take refuge in the smug conviction of indestructibility. America is not too big to fail and it may well be too big not to fail. But one thing is undeniable. As it approaches the eleventh hour, its survival depends on a determined and informed citizen “army” of genuine patriots capable of restoring the practical ideal of limited government  …

Is the Tea Party movement the only truly spontaneous uprising of a great part of a nation in all recorded history?

It arose and spread with amazing speed. It inspires ever more supporters. No one worked at it. No one manipulates it. It could surely only have arisen where there was an existing spirit of freedom among the people, and a consciousness of the profound value of freedom. And that could only be in America.

It intends and does no harm to any person, only to oppressive impoverishing government. It unites men and women of widely diverse occupations and backgrounds. It is peaceful and good-humored – yet there is passion in it too, as shows in this article by Sandy Rios from which we extract a part:

This president should never have been elected… he does not love this country like you do or I do … Could an enemy do more to dismantle and destroy it? His mentors from the earliest years were leftists … from his mother and father to his Communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. Barack Obama has never been enamored with the America he has never known. The hero of his mentors was the old Soviet Union. Why else would he bargain away our nuclear power to Russia, an entity far past its prime except for the romanticism that comes with being raised with Marxist ideals?

Why else would he implement economic policies that create and sustain unemployment, institute unsustainable debt, reward non-contributors and punish the ambitious, wealth creators? Why else would he dismantle the world’s greatest medical system, dooming healthcare to mediocrity, medical innovation and research to a standstill, hamstring the nation’s space exploration, prevent the exploration of our own energy supply … implement crippling cap-and-trade policies to further break our economic backs, all the while feigning he’s doing the opposite?

We will not survive the policies of this president. If we don’t rise up as our forefathers did 234 years ago, we will lose what they sacrificed for and, make no mistake, many of them lost almost everything they had in the pursuit of freedom. We will have lost the freedoms they sacrificed for in addition to what we have worked to achieve, but most of all lost that which our children and grandchildren will never have even experienced.

We are at a tipping point. Either we turn this American ship around quickly, or we will all go down with it. …

Out with the czars … the sexual radicals like Kevin Jennings, “Safe School Czar” who believes in sex between children and adults. And Chai Feldblum who wrote the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to assure that people of all sexual deviancies cannot be discriminated against even in public schools.

Out with the tyrants in Congress who would punish corporations who dare to disagree with the administration’s policies.

Out with the leaders of ACORN and the SEIU who break the law to steal elections and destroy American institutions with impunity.

Out with the lawyers at Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder who protect terrorists and put their own citizens at risk … who release members of the New Black Panthers charged with intimidating voters while placing law abiding citizens on special watch lists.

Out with a president who treats our friends like enemies and our enemies like friends … who bows to the Saudi Prince and the Chinese President, who gives flowery speeches to the Arab world claiming America is a Muslim nation, while disrespecting and degrading our own traditions. …

Out with a president who wishes his nation weaker … one who sets about to make it so.

Yes, the tipping point is fragile and if we tip the other way, we will find out readily what it’s like to not be a military superpower, as terrorists and rogue nations gladly take us up on our weakness.

We will find out what sustained and increasing unemployment is like, what poverty for more Americans looks like—more stores boarded, more businesses failing, more government handouts until they dwindle when there are no more so-called rich to provide them. We will find out what less freedom to express ideas and opinions is like, restrictions on conservative talk radio and alternative media, minimal healthcare, seniors neglected and dying earlier, the privileged political class at the front of the medical lines—all lines for that matter. And the American ship sinking into the abyss of poverty and obscurity.

What separates us from those two paths? It is, simply put … the Tea Party movement. It is their insistence on continuing to be able to speak the truth, to make their own choices, to voice their opposition to a tyrannical government, to defend the constitution and exercise their First amendment rights in public protest.

Who do you think is energizing this country? Is it the politicians in Washington? Is it the Republican leadership? No, they are motivated by this movement. While some have been lulled to sleep by the opium of power, others want to do what’s right and the energy of the Tea Party Patriots has given them the courage to speak up and fight.

Yes, the Tea Party movement is unique. May it provide an example to be followed by oppressed people in other times and places.

[Photo: John Lawrence]

Antony Flew, the philosopher, atheist, and defender of freedom, died on April 8, 2010, at his home in Reading, England. I knew him, to my pride and delight, for many years. We would meet a few times a year (we both served on the Council of the Freedom Association, as I still do), and wrote to each other frequently about books, events, issues, campaigns, tactics. On politics and religion we saw eye to eye. We were both atheist conservatives. He was a classical scholar, more widely and deeply erudite than anyone else I’ve ever known. And he had the humility of true greatness. When I asked him to write the introduction to a new edition of a book I was editing on, and against, Karl Marx (The Red Prussian, by Leopold Schwarzschild) he told me that he was not the best person for the task, and gave me a short list of experts who, he insisted, knew more than he did and whose names would better grace the book. Only when they’d all declared themselves unable or unwilling, Antony said he would “do his best” to write a good introduction – and a very good introduction it is.

Obituaries on both sides of the Atlantic say that Antony Flew was the world’s most famous atheist, and that he suddenly changed his mind and declared that God exists after all.

It is true that he did say this. But he never said it when he was in his right mind.

It would have been unkind of me to write what I am about to write while he was alive. Yet I think it is absolutely right that I say it now, because it’s necessary to do him justice. So I declare that the reasoning by which he arrived at his certainty that God does not exist was never cancelled or reversed by the sloppy arguments of his senility.

Of his many books, the one that matters most for his reputation as an atheist is God & Philosophy. It was first published in 1966. Later editions appeared at intervals, the last in 2005. To judge by the new introduction he wrote, he was as sure of his atheism then as he had been in 1966.

In 2007 a new book appeared under his name titled There is a God. The subtitle crows: How the world’s most notorious [sic] atheist changed his mind. The authorship is ascribed to Antony Flew “with Roy Abraham Varghese”. But no one who has read God & Philosophy with attention could possible believe that There is a God was a product of the same intelligence. Either the powers of Antony Flew had faded away, or some other mind engendered this work. In fact, both those things happened. It has emerged that he did not write it. He had spoken, and other hands had written. He could not even remember what was in it. And of that failure of memory and general weakening of his mental faculties, the actual writers had taken advantage.

There is a God is distinctly written for an American readership. It refers, for instance, to the Red Sox. I’d have bet a mint that my friend Tony Flew had no idea who the Red Sox are – Chinese school-boys, he may have supposed.

According to Dr Richard Carrier, who tried to ascertain from Professor Flew himself whether he had really “found God”, the authors of There is a God are Roy Abraham Varghese who is known for his work on “the interface between science and religion”, and Pastor Bob Hostetler – two people with a big blunt axe to grind.

Carrier’s detailed account of how Flew claimed he was, but then again was not, converted to belief in a creator-God when certain scientific facts were brought to his attention, makes the whole sorry story plain. Carrier records that the philosopher admitted to finding the subject “too hard” to deal with; that he failed to remember anything about There is a God; that he repeatedly contradicted himself. He tells us about the bewildered old man being awarded a prize by an Evangelical Christian University. (The Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, bestowed on him by the university of Biola at la Mirada, California.) The prodigal son returned! Much rejoicing in Christian circles. As if the willingness of a senile man to concede – on and off – the existence of a creator-God, were all the proof they needed to shout in the face of atheists and sceptics: “There, you see? If even he can see it now, you should not have the hubris to think you know better and continue to deny it!”

How insecure these believers must be in their belief!

Carrier writes: “It is certainly possible that Flew looked at ten drafts [of There is a God]. I see no reason to believe Flew was able to understand or even recall what he read.” Flew admitted to having “a nominal aphasia”. But it was more than “nominal”. “Flew could not even recall the arguments of the book , not just who made them or what his sources were.”

Carrier found that whenever Professor Flew himself stated his position, it was always to reaffirm his atheism. Statements to the contrary were never made by him directly, though one at least, firmly insistent that he really had changed his mind, was put out by the publisher on his behalf.

However, I know it was not a total scam. I know that at times he did think he had changed his mind.

I saw him soon after the book appeared and asked him was it true he now believed in God.

“Yes,” he replied, “but not the Monster”.

I understood of course what he meant by “the Monster”. He had rejected the Christian God while still in his teens because he could not reconcile the evil in the world and hell after it with a beneficent deity. Such a deity could only be a Monster. His father, a Methodist minister, was distressed by young Antony’s rejection of his faith, but Antony said, as he was to repeat throughout his life, that he had to go “where the evidence leads”. Now he told me, only the existence of “an intelligence” can explain the nature of the universe. This intelligence, this non-monstrous god, made the laws of nature and then had nothing more to do with his creation – the theological position known as deism.

In God & Philosophy, there is a section on “Order and Design”, in which the author asks the question: “Does order in nature itself presuppose an Orderer?” Elegantly and fully he reasons over a few pages that it does not. (This is not the place to quote his reasons, but I hope to whet some appetites for seeking them in the book.) “So we conclude that order in the universe by itself provides no warrant whatsoever for trying to identify an Orderer.”

The meticulous arguments are abandoned as though they had never been made, in the later book There is a God. The reason given there for belief in a creator God, is that the author has learnt about DNA, about its “enormous complexity”, and sees that there must have been an Orderer who made the universe! He also sets out the “fine-tuning” argument. Both the arguments, from “irreducible complexity” and “fine-tuning” have been thoroughly refuted.

Then there is the “Stratonician presumption”, as Flew himself named it after the Greek philosopher Strato of Lampsacus, the third head of Aristotle’s Lyceum, who formulated it. The presumption is that in explaining the world you can do without entities that are not necessary for the completeness of the explanation. In God & Philosophy, Antony Flew does not find it necessary to call in God or gods.

But suddenly, in There is a God, such a supernatural being becomes essential to explain the world’s existence. *

From Antony’s point of view these pressing believers had not done him a disservice. He told me that there was to be a TV documentary about him and his conversion. He was innocently surprised at the attention he was getting, and the unexpected windfall it brought with it. He was paid what seemed to him a very large sum of money. He had never been a rich man, and he was happy for his wife and daughters that they would have this fund at their disposal. (This most generous-hearted of men was painstakingly frugal: every letter he posted was in a re-used envelope with a label stuck over the old address.)

So there’s the picture. A pair (or more?) of American Christian Evangelicals (and a Jewish theologian and physicist, Gerald Schroeder) had worked on him rather than with him, when he had become mentally frail, to produce this cancellation of a lifetime’s thought. In his dotage, these Evangelicals battened on to him, dazzled him with science that was utterly new to him – the big bang, DNA – and rewarded him like a Pavlov’s dog when he gave the response their spin elicited. He was subjected to intellectual seduction, much as Bertrand Russell was by Communists in his senile years.

What seems to me intolerably sad and wrong is that the reputation Antony Flew ought to have, as an atheist philosopher who brilliantly defended atheism throughout his long and distinguished professional life, is now to be replaced by a phony story that he who had been a convinced atheist changed his mind. Is the man who defended atheism better than anyone since David Hume, to be remembered as a deist?

Is this to be allowed to happen – that he be remembered as a man who saw the error of his atheist ways and became persuaded that there was a God – simply because he suffered a softening of the brain in his last years? The truth is that the Antony Flew who conceded the existence of a “creator-intelligence” was not “the Flew” – as he liked to allude to himself – that he had been at the peak of his powers. His faculties were deteriorating, his memory came and went unreliably, he was confused, bewildered and – because he was in a state of decline – taken advantage of.

His handwriting became shakier. He put letters to other people in envelopes that he addressed to me. (They probably got the letters I was supposed to receive.) When I sent him the print-out of an article I had written deploring the Islamization of Britain, he sent it back to me a few weeks later as an article of his own that he would like me to comment on. When he was to meet me and a few colleagues at a certain old club on Pall Mall (the famous street of clubs in the heart of London) which he must have visited dozens or even hundreds of times, he couldn’t find it. A search party rescued him and brought him to the meeting. He had become unsure of himself. He did not always remember, or possibly even grasp, points put to him in a discussion.

But what an enthusiast he forever was for ideas! His face would light up, his voice grow urgent with excitement. A passionate intellectual who was always gentle, always courteous even in the heat of argument, Antony Flew was the epitome of a reasonable man. Or I should say that is what he had been, and that is the way he should be remembered, this great philosopher and atheist. (His country bestowed no honors on him. I think he should have been made Companion of Honour, which is in the sole gift of the sovereign. England deserves her great men ever less!) Even those who disagree with his atheism must surely acknowledge in the name of justice and decency that his achievements, not his late and lamentable capitulations which seemed to cancel them, should be what he is remembered for.

Jillian Becker  April 18, 2010

*

*Here is a sample of the “reasoning” of these Christian ghosts, writing in the name of Professor Flew:

“I put to my former fellow-atheists the simple central question: ‘What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a reason to at least consider the existence of a superior Mind?’

Easy reply: manifest purpose.

They state in his name that the immaterial, ie mind, cannot come out of the material.

Reply: How can the material come out of the immaterial – ie matter out of “Mind” or “God”?

The press was excluded from  the “nuclear conference” that Obama held with fellow dictators and other heads of state. This surely indicates over-caution on his part – up to now he could obviously rely on most of the press to defend him no matter what outrages he commits. Why did he think they’d let him down this time? Was he saying things that even his shills and sycophants would find hard to spin to his greater glory?

Rich Galen writes at Townhall:

The “leader of the free world” was putting on a clinic for some of the world’s greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press.

No reporters were permitted in the sessions, and the amount of time the press was permitted to be in contact with any national leader was measured, literally, in seconds.

This was a summit to deal with the control of nuclear materials…

Like them or not, the tiny White House press corps is the eyes and ears for the other 300 million of us. Ignoring, hiding from, shutting out, and refusing to let those handful of people do their jobs on our behalf is a significant – a very significant – red flag.

If Barack Obama were simply exhibiting contempt for the press corps he might find many who agree with him. But, Obama is revealing disdain for the concept of being President in an open society.

The national press corps – whether they want Obama to succeed or fail – cannot ignore his scorn for the First Amendment.

Every other freedom depends upon it.

The Dictator threw a few remarks to the public which he allowed to be conveyed by the press. At RedState, Lori Ziganto comments on one of them:

Yesterday at his nuclear conference, Obama said the following …

“Whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower.”

Whether we like it or not. That’s like what Mommies say when telling you to eat your yucky vegetables. Would he prefer that we be vulnerable and weak? Heck of an American Can-Do attitude, Barry!

It is, of course, being spun by those who still insist that we need to be above it all as “Oh, he meant we are drawn into conflicts due to being a superpower.” While perhaps true, one need only look to Obama’s associations and his very actions to see what he truly meant and what he believes.

Obama does not believe in American Exceptionalism and he is actively pursuing its decline. There, I said it. He has surrounded himself with people who hold these same beliefs. Further proof is evidenced by a speech – to young students – that his Science Czar gave the other day.

The Obama administration’s top science and technology official, who has argued for the economic de-development of America, warned science students last Friday that the United States cannot expect to be “number one” forever. “We can’t expect to be number one in everything indefinitely,” Dr. John P. Holdren said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

We can’t expect to be number one in everything indefinitely. Because that would be meany pants, I suppose. And “not fair.” This isn’t the first time John Holdren has espoused such views. … Holdren argues for a redistribution of wealth achieved in part by green policies. Oh yeah, he also says that America isn’t really Exceptional. …

We’ve seen everything that we warned prior to the election coming true. Obama, his administration and the Democrats are trying to Europe-inize us with a federal government involved and in control of every aspect of our lives, a weakened military, attempts to morally equate America with our enemies and a belief that America is not special.

Well, it is special. America IS that shining city on the hill. It is a beacon of light for the rest of the world and it shall remain so, despite their best efforts to “hope and change” that.

The writer goes on to praise the contrasting attitude of a conservative Republican whom we think very highly of:

Liz Cheney called all this at last year’s RedState gathering… Thus, I’ll leave off with her words from the speech she gave last August:

“We know that freedom isn’t free, that America’s armed forces are the best fighting force the world has ever known. And finally, we know that America is the best nation on earth, the best that has ever existed. We believe in her goodness, her strength, her hope and her example — for all who seek freedom in every corner of the world. Those are conservative values. Those are American values.”

There is the difference. We believe in America’s goodness and strength. The Obama administration believes that to be a detriment.

She also said:

“He cannot attempt to stand above America and our enemies. America needs a Commander-in-Chief, not a global community organizer. The purpose of diplomacy is not to be liked. The purpose of foreign policy is not to get applause in foreign capitals. The purpose of having a Commander-in-Chief and pursuing a national security strategy is to defend America’s interests, aggressively, effectively and unapologetically. If the American President doesn’t do this — who will?”

We will, Liz. We, the people, will.

In an article titled Good Riddance, Thomas Sowell rebukes the Republican Party for its weak inclination when in power to govern like Democrats, in this candid assessment of the harm retiring Justice Stevens, a President Ford appointee, has done:

When Supreme Court Justices retire, there is usually some pious talk about their “service,” especially when it has been a long “service.” But the careers of all too many of these retiring jurists, including currently retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, have been an enormous disservice to this country.

Justice Stevens was on the High Court for 35 years– more’s the pity, or the disgrace. Justice Stevens voted to sustain racial quotas, created “rights” out of thin air for terrorists, and took away American citizens’ rights to their own homes in the infamous “Kelo” decision of 2005. … In the Supreme Court case of Kelo v. City of New London … Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the Supreme Court opinion that expanded the Constitution’s authorization of seizing private property for “public use” to seizing private property for a “public purpose.” And who would define what a “public purpose” is? Basically, those who were doing the seizing. … Just who was this provision of the Constitution supposed to restrict? Answer: government officials. And to whom would Justice Stevens defer: government officials. Why would those who wrote the Constitution waste good ink putting that protection in there, if not to protect citizens from the very government officials to whom Justice Stevens deferred?

John Paul Stevens is a classic example of what has been wrong with too many Republicans’ appointments to the Supreme Court. The biggest argument in favor of nominating him was that he could be confirmed by the Senate without a fight.

Democratic presidents appoint judges who will push their political agenda from the federal bench, even if that requires stretching and twisting the Constitution to reach their goals.

Republicans too often appoint judges whose confirmation will not require a big fight with the Democrats. You can always avoid a fight by surrendering, and a whole wing of the Republican party has long ago mastered the art of preemptive surrender.

The net result has been a whole string of Republican Justices of the Supreme Court carrying out the Democrats’ agenda, in disregard of the Constitution. John Paul Stevens has been just one.

There may have been some excuse for President Ford’s picking such a man, in order to avoid a fight, at a time when he was an unelected President who came into office in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace after Watergate, creating lasting damage to the public’s support of the Republicans.

But there was no such excuse for the elder President Bush to appoint David Souter, much less for President Eisenhower, with back-to-back landslide victories at the polls, to inflict William J. Brennan on the country.

In light of these justices’ records, and in view of how long justices remain on the court, nominating such people was close to criminal negligence.

If and when the Republicans return to power in Washington, we can only hope that they remember what got them suddenly and unceremoniously dumped out of power the last time. Basically, it was running as Republicans and then governing as if they were Democrats, running up big deficits, with lots of earmarks and interfering with the market.

But their most lasting damage to the country has been putting people like John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.

Last night (Thursday April 8, 2010) at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Liz Cheney made a speech all Americans need to hear.

The Washington Post reports:

“It seems to be increasingly clear that there are three prongs in the Obama doctrine: Apologize for America, abandon our allies, and appease our enemies.”

America’s allies, she said, have been met by “humiliation, arrogance and incompetence.” She attacked Obama for the administration’s “shabby” treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and “especially dangerous and juvenile” behavior toward Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.

“There is a saying in the Arab world that it’s more dangerous to be America’s friend than it is to be our enemy,” she said. “I fear very much that in the age of Obama, that’s proving to be true.”

She was sharply critical of the administration’s policy toward Iran. “In this administration’s dealings with Iran,” she said, “the deadlines are meaningless, the sanctions worthless and the speeches pointless.”

Apologize … Abandon … Appease. Three As for Obama’s foreign policy failures.

The abandonment of allies (and nuclear deterrence), and the appeasement of enemies may be the most dangerous, but the apologies are the most infuriating. What are these countries that America needs their approbation?

Are they more free?

More just?

More successful?

More innovative?

More trustworthy?

More generous?

More powerful?

More prosperous?

Why should America need to beg or buy their favor?

And one more question:

How about Liz Cheney for President in 2012?

Shock? Horror? Or did some see it coming?

Under the leadership of David Cameron, who now emerges as extremely dangerous, or stunningly stupid and ignorant, or both, the BRITISH CONSERVATIVE PARTY has moved to the left of the Labour Party!

The Party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher has been won over by the revolutionary theories of Saul Alinsky, of whom Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are disciples [see our post The radicals who rule, March 31, 2010].

The Conservatives have totally abandoned their traditional adherence to the principle of individual freedom and embraced egalitarian collectivism.

This is from the Conservative Party’s website:

The new policies announced as part of the Big Society plan include:

“Neighbourhood army” of 5,000 full-time, professional community organisers who will be trained with the skills they need to identify local community leaders, bring communities together, help people start their own neighbourhood groups, and give communities the help they need to take control and tackle their problems. This plan is directly based on the successful community organising movement established by Saul Alinsky in the United States and has successfully trained generations of community organisers, including President Obama.

This is from the speech in which David Cameron announced his big idea, to turn the whole of Britain over to what Americans will recognize as a government-sponsored version of ACORN:

In the United States the energy, enthusiasm and passion of community organisers has fired up whole neighbourhoods to take control of their destiny.

We want to see that right across the UK.

So we will use revenue from the Cabinet Office FutureBuilders programme, a programme the National Audit Office has criticised for its poor delivery, and redirect it to training thousands of new community organisers in the years ahead. …

To teach potential community organisers how to identify the doers and the go-getters in each neighbourhood and recruit them to their cause.

To teach them them how to bang heads together to get things done.

Indeed, Barack Obama trained as a community organiser in Chicago.

And I hope that in the years to come, a similar inspirational figure will emerge from community work in our inner cities – and go from the back streets of Bradford or Bolton or Birmingham all the way to Downing Street.

But I know the arguments that some people make – that this sort of community co-operation will only happen in the richest areas. (?! -JB]

In building the big society, I want to make sure that Britain’s poorest areas do not get left behind as they too often are today.

So again, we will take money from the Futurebuilders programme, and direct it to community organisers, social enterprises and neighbourhood groups in our most disadvantaged areas.

This is the big society made real – devolving power to the people while using the state to encourage social action and help the poorest.

And this is from Melanie Phillips’s comment in the Spectator:

Ye gods. Rub your eyes, folks. Saul Alinsky?? …

The seditious role of the community organiser was developed by an extreme left intellectual called Saul Alinsky. He was a radical Chicago activist who, by the time he died in 1972, had had a profound influence on the highest levels of the Democratic party. Alinsky was a ‘transformational Marxist’ in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, who promoted the strategy of a ‘long march through the institutions’ by capturing the culture and turning it inside out as the most effective means of overturning western society. In similar vein, Alinsky condemned the New Left for alienating the general public by its demonstrations and outlandish appearance. The revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception. Its proponents had to cultivate an image of centrism and pragmatism. A master of infiltration, Alinsky wooed Chicago mobsters and Wall Street financiers alike. And successive Democratic politicians fell under his spell.

His creed was set out in his book ‘Rules for Radicals’ – a book he dedicated to Lucifer, whom he called the ‘first radical’. It was Alinsky for whom ‘change’ was his mantra. And by ‘change’, he meant a Marxist revolution achieved by slow, incremental, Machiavellian means which turned society inside out. This had to be done through systematic deception, winning the trust of the naively idealistic middle class by using the language of morality to conceal an agenda designed to destroy it. And the way to do this, he said, was through ‘people’s organisations’.

Community organisers would mobilise direct action by the oppressed masses against their capitalist oppressors…

The British Conservative party has signed up to the revolutionary Marxist politics of Saul Alinsky and his seditious strategy of using ‘community organisers’ to turn the people against the state and against the bedrock moral and social values of their country – and it is almost certainly too ignorant, lazy or stupid to realise that this is what it means.

British voters might now decide to return the Labour Party to power after all, as the lesser of two leftist evils! But it’s more than probable that Gordon Brown, or whoever succeeds him, will also embrace the community organizing idea.

So expect the launching of the USK – the United Soviet Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

After which, the ESU – the European Soviet Union?