A man has made a compelling documentary about the impact Dennis Prager has had on his own intellectual and spiritual journey.  It's called Baseball, Dennis & the French and you can check out the trailer below:

One interesting thing about this entire project to me personally is the fact that the producer/director was led to his Christian faith by the radio show and writings of a Jewish intellectual (Dennis). Just a neat tidbit, in my opinion.

The favorite line of an increasing number of Center-Right politicians and pundits goes something like this: "This election is all about the economy, and so social issues - issues of morality - are going to have to take a back-seat."  To put it in terms everyone can understand: Mitt, not Rick (Santorum or Perry).

Seems reasonable, right?  I mean, the economy is, shall we say, lackluster, and it seems as if the #1 topic on peoples' minds is - to quote the previous Madame Speaker of the House - "jobs, jobs, jobs!"

But are we setting up a false dichotomy, one in which "morality" and "economics" are needlessly (and some might say "foolishly") separated?  Are we recklessly forgetting that neither Party ever wins national elections without an animated and motivated base, and that the bases of each are animated and motivated by "social issues" more than anything else?

I am fine with Mitt Romney being our nominee in 2012, and my concern is not simply that Republicans will fail to meet the seemingly mandatory quota of "Pro-Life" and "Traditional Marriage" references in stump speeches.  What troubles me is the thought that many on the Center-Right don't see the inseparable connection between morality and economics.  We're in a "long war" against the irreconcilable wing of Islam externally, but here at home we're in an intellectual - nearly spiritual - battle for the hearts and minds of millions of people who typically vote liberal/Democrat and who have become convinced that the federal government is their caretaker and friend.

Writing in his Break Point commentary today, Chuck Colson drives home this very point in a clear and articulate way:

Doesn’t anybody get the connection between the social issues and economics issues?

One candidate who does, Rick Santorum had the courage to link the two in a recent Iowa town hall meeting. (And before I go on, please, folks, I’m not endorsing him or anyone. I never do.)

Here’s what Senator Santorum said:

“Yes, [the election is] about growth and the economy, [but] it’s also about what is at the core of our country . . . faith and family. You can’t have a strong economy, you can’t have limited government if the family is breaking down and we don’t live good, moral, and decent lives.”

Precisely right. And what does he get for his remarks? Backhanded compliments for his showing in Iowa and a stern warning from, among others, the conservative National Review:

Here’s what the National Review wrote online: “In a general election…where the focus is almost certainly going to be on economic issues, it is questionable whether Santorum’s relentless focus on social issues will play well with independent voters, especially in the crucial suburbs.”

Hogwash. If the nation’s current economic crisis has taught us anything, it’s that a healthy economy cannot thrive in the midst of moral breakdown. Ethical failures on Wall Street, Main Street, and Capitol Hill put us into this mess we’re in today, as I’ve said many times before.

Again, I don't care if Rick Santorum isn't the GOP's primary victor.  As an evangelical conservative I honestly don't.  Politicians matter, but ideas, ideals, and values matter more.  We should be diligent in selecting the candidate we will end up voting for in the primary and general election, but we should be ever-vigilant for opportunities to make the moral case for free enterprise and, as the good folks at The Acton Institute put it, the "Free and Virtuous Society."

Colson continues:

But how about some facts? I’ll have the citations for you at BreakPoint.org: Take incarceration rates: something Santorum has alluded to and I’ve seen with my own eyes: “Young men who grow up in homes without fathers are twice as likely to end up in jail as those who come from traditional two-parent families.” And “70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes.”

How about education? 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. And children from low-income, two-parent families outperform students from high-income, single-parent homes.

I could go on and on.

Do you think that crime rates, incarceration, low educational achievement, out of wedlock births, affect the economy and government spending? Of course they do and the statistics prove this!

If you want a healthy, thriving economy you’ve got to have a strong moral societal foundation. And any so-called “conservatives” who think otherwise are simply deluding themselves; the two issues simply can’t be separated.

I couldn't agree more.

What say you?  Is Colson over-stating his case?

President Reagan sums up how I feel about the Christmas season in this brief national address he delivered in 1981:

For more on the TRUE meaning of Christmas, here's Pastor John Piper:

God bless you, your family, and the United States of America!

By: R.J. Moeller

------------------------

As most of you already have heard, Christopher Hitchens, the renowned British journalist/atheist/author, died of pneumonia Thursday night at a hospital in Houston, TX.  Mr. Hitchens had been battling cancer of the esophagus for more than a year now.  He went from looking like this:

...to this (and in a relatively short amount of time):

When I heard the news late Thursday night, I was listening to a local radio station while driving home from seeing a very stupid movie (the new Mission Impossible) and instantly my mood went from silly anger about Tom Cruise's sub-par film to true, genuine sadness for the family of Mr. Hitchens.  Chris' brother, Peter, is actually an outspoken Evangelical Christian and talented writer in his own right.  I thought of the numbing pain a Believer must feel when a sibling or parent who does not share their faith passes away.  I thought about the the fact that if the Bible is indeed true, and Christopher did not change his mind about Jesus Christ before succumbing to his illness, then he is in Hell right now.  There is no way around it: this is a tough pill for anyone to swallow.

Christianity is often attacked for supposedly being "callous" with its "fire-and-brimstone" teachings on eternal punishment for those who reject God in this life.  Perhaps some of those charges are true.  Perhaps many are not.  What I do know is this: It is important for all of us to come face-to-face with the implications of the things we say we believe in, and for me, last night, hearing about the death of Christopher Hitchens, was yet another one of those moments.

I honestly never hated "Hitch" (as he was known to his friends).  In fact, I adored his writing style and prose.  He was a complex man and a supremely talented communicator.  His columns were a delight to read and I re-posted some of them on this very site over the past 4 years.  I don't wish to run down his entire biography here and now, so for more on that I would recommend this review of his autobiography Hitch-22 at National Review Online ("His Own Drum") from last year.  The guy had an incredible life and for all intents and purposes, practiced what he preached.  In a strange way, despite his militant atheism and predominantly liberal political views, I respected that fact.

I respect consistency, probably because of how inconsistent I know I am in my daily life.

Hitchens hated religion, hated the idea of a Higher Power, and was unrelenting in his critique of all religious faith.  He wrote a famous book a few years back entitled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Those are, in my opinion, unnecessarily strong words to describe something more than 95% of all humans who have ever lived have practiced.  Belief in some sort of Higher Power is as natural as breathing.  Even the suffering we see screams of an "evil" that can't adequately be described in humanistic, secular terms.

Religion is not the problem.  Bad values and a distorted worldview are.  Everyone believes in something.  Even atheists like Hitchens do not want anarchy, and if you are to avoid anarchy, people must have something to believe in.  We need a right and wrong.  Atheists look at that and say, "See, it's just an evolutionary defense mechanism that people form religions...it's all about controlling the masses."  Notice that they do not say, "So let's abolish all institutions and live like feral pigs."  They instead say, "I know a better way for people to live and will now work to see it implemented."  Christopher Hitchens had a "moral code" and set of values he lived by, he simply thought it superior to the Judeo-Christian traditions and teachings that have largely defined the Western culture he was a benefactor of.  But he still believed in something.

As Bob Dylan sang, "You gotta' serve somebody."

I'm not saying that Chrisopher Hitchens did not understand this.  I truly think he did.  My real problem with Hitchens' writings on religion (and the writings of those like him through the ages) is not that he hated Christianity, but is the trickle-down secularism it produces in the hearts and minds of others (most notably, young people).  Because so much of the mainstream media and so many members of modern academia agree with his worldview, Hitchens was able to reach millions of impressionable young minds with a biased message that passed itself off as an un-biased - scientific even! - appraisal of the natural world.  Meanwhile, stuffy old Christians are perpetually framed as those "world is flat", out-of-touch, close-minded bigots whose time has passed.  Of course many brilliant defenders of theism (i.e. William Lane Craig, Jay Richards, etc.) have challenged and debated men like Hitchens, but never are those men of faith given the same prominence and respect in the culture at-large as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Sam Harris are.

But I'm not here today to feed you nothing but sour grapes.  As I've already stated, Christopher Hitchens was a phenomenal talent and man of conviction (however wrong those convictions might have been).  He was willing to anger liberals with his support for unpopular positions like the War on Terror and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was unafraid of what either side had to say about him. Hitchens was even willing to take on the sacred cow of late-night fake-news programming hosted by the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

He was witty, engaging, and mesmerizing when you got the chance to see him interviewed on TV or YouTube clips.

I recommend this one to you:

In closing: I'm sorry he's gone.  My thoughts and prayers are with his family.  My deepest hope is that he called out to his Maker before the end.

You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls.

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

I came across this interesting piece at National Review Online and thought it more than worth sharing.  Basically, it is a recounting of what it took to get A Charlie Brown Christmas on the air.  There was plenty of controversy in 1965 surrounding the decision to broadcast something so blatantly Christian (with a passage from Luke read aloud by one of the characters, no less).

An excerpt:

Few headlines about network television make me giddy. Fewer still make me hopeful that all is good in the world. But back in August of 2010, I read the following headline from the media pages with great excitement: “Charlie Brown Is Here to Stay: ABC Picks Up ‘Peanuts’ Specials Through 2015.” The first of these to be made, the famous Christmas special, was an instant classic when it was created by Charles Schulz on a shoestring budget back in 1965, and thanks to some smart television executives, it will be around for at least another five years for all of us to see and enjoy.

What people don’t know is that the Christmas special almost didn’t happen, because some not-so-smart television executives almost didn’t let it air. You see, Charles Schulz had some ideas that challenged the way of thinking of those executives 46 years ago, and one of them had to do with the inclusion in his Christmas cartoon of a reading from the King James Bible’s version of the Gospel of Luke.

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

As far back as 1965 — just a few years before Time magazine asked “Is God Dead?” — CBS executives thought a Bible reading might turn off a nation populated with Christians. And during a Christmas special, no less! Ah, the perils of living on an island in the northeast called Manhattan.

And here is the portion of the Charlie Brown special that was so controversial:

When you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. We can not only vote in elections at the ballot box, but we can vote with our dollars, our TV-viewing decisions, and with an email or two to networks and their sponsors. There are some battles worth fighting, and defending the Christ in Christmas is perhaps one of them.

Just up today over AEI's Two Cents blog is my most recent column in the on-going "Why I'm a Christian and fan of the free market" series I started earlier this spring.  This week I delve into the I Samuel 8 account of the Israelites demanding that they be given a king to rule over them.  Mankind seems to have a deep-rooted desire to be lorded over, and as often as they can, they give their freedoms away for a song (or the promise of security).

Call me biased, but it's a really interesting piece, and you can read the entire thing right here.

Enjoy!

After a rousing Easter service and traditional meal with my family (albeit at Chilis because my mom was under the weather and couldn't cook and my tweenage sisters love queso dip), I was perusing Easter Sunday news headlines and came across this Yahoo News story out of Vatican City.

Pope Benedict XVI marked the holiest night of the year for Christians by stressing that humanity isn't a random product of evolution.

Benedict emphasized the Biblical account of creation in his Easter Vigil homily Saturday, saying it was wrong to think at some point "in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it."

"If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature," he said. "But no, reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine reason."

While I am not Catholic, I would wholeheartedly agree and endorse these comments should they have come from any faith tradition.  Pope Benedict is a wise, godly man, and clearly articulated my general worldview (which you can read more about in my Mere Conservatism: Theology essay).  I believe that his message to the world on Easter is one that resonates with millions of Americans.  If we could put aside all our pre-conceived notions of what it means to be a Christian - notions that often spring from negative experiences we may have had with those who, rightly or wrongly, call themselves "Christian" - I believe that most of us would acknowledge a faith in a loving, personal, Creator God.

Today and Christmas are two of the only times each year that many attend a religious service.  Even non-believers like to gather together for Easter.  All the secularization of the holiday aside (pictured right), people know that today is a special day.  A day to be with family.  A day to go to church.

If God is worth paying attention to on "high holy days," perhaps He has something to offer the other 363.

Happy Easter and God bless!

My man Dennis Prager provides a wonderful service via his YouTube channel "Prager University."  In five short minutes, Dennis explains significant issues of life, love, and politics in a succinct, ascertainable way.  In the clip below Prager makes his case for what he considers to be the most important verse in the Bible.

Genesis 1:1 - In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Ricky Gervais, the creator of both the British and American versions of The Office, is an outspoken and articulate (and funny) atheist.  He lets his feelings be known in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal yesterday.

Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless. People who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith.” I still give my logical answer because I feel that not being honest would be patronizing and impolite. It is ironic therefore that “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe,” comes across as both patronizing and impolite.

Arrogance is another accusation. Which seems particularly unfair. Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leach down your trousers and pray. Whatever you “believe,” this is not as effective as medicine. Again you can say, “It works for me,” but so do placebos. My point being, I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.

While Gervais breaks very little new ground in terms of arguments against the existence of God in his piece, there are a few points that I think are worth responding to.

He is spot-on when he says that the existence of God is "not subjective."  It is either true or it is false.  But when he wraps his claims in the deceptively warm blanket of "science" he walks on to a very rickety plank.  The small sliver of explanations that science can give us for how the laws of the universe (i.e. gravity) work is, to my mind, greatly over-shadowed by the fact that scientists will never be able to answer the all-important "Why?" question. And eventually we come to realize that the "Why?" question is everything.  Someone who is simply satisfied to learn how wildebeests migrate, or stalactites form in a cave, or when to hit the cut-off man in a play in the outfield is the kind of un-thinking, dispassionate person I don't want to ever be.  I want to know why I am here.  Science has no answers in this regard and, therefore, is helpful only up to a certain (and definitive) point.

And let me quickly (and forcefully) state here that science is in no way contradictory to a belief in God.  Was Newton being a hypocrite when his passion to learn and study God's creation led him to the "discovery" of physics?  What about all of these guys?  No good, because they believed in an Intelligent Designer?

He pits the two against one another purposefully, as most secularists do, so that younger people will be intimidated away from challenging science/scientists or coming up with new ideas on how the natural world points to a Creator for a new generation.  If you can silence the voice in someone's head that has questions about science, while at the same time discouraging young people from thoughtfully investigating faith, the ruminations of a stand-up comedian (as well-read as he may be) sound much more official and intellectual.

Belief in science alone is a belief too.  To say that there was nothingness in the non-universe, and that something came from nothing and made everything is a belief.  I don't care who you are, or how funny your sit-com's have been.  It is a belief, plain and simple.  And even when you look at basic scientific facts - take the human cell, for example - we see a complexity and creativity that points directly to a complex and creative mind/purpose/being.  Please understand that I'm not jumping to the Christian God of the Bible here: just defending the existence of a Higher Power.

Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.”

The "burden of proof" Gervais is really alluding to is the concept that is known as "the problem of evil."  And it is an entirely fair thing to bring up.  How could a good God allow such pain and suffering to exist?  When atheists talk about proof for God, they almost always are inferring this deeper question.

This is neither the time nor the place to tackle that immense and heavy issue, but for the purposes of this brief response to Gervais, allow me to fully embrace that the Believer does (in a sense) have a burden of proof in the "Does God exist?" debate.  We must give an account for suffering and why bad things happen.  But the atheist and non-believer must give an account for why all good things happen.  Where does love come from?  Why are we happy?  Why do people willingly sacrifice their lives for their nation?  Why do we weep when when our child gets married?  How could the power and complexity of emotions, emotions that lead us to make choices that harm ourselves for the sake of those we love, be said to be nothing more than "natural selection" doing "its thing"?

As an atheist, I see nothing “wrong” in believing in a god. I don’t think there is a god, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a god...

You see, growing up where I did, mums didn’t hope as high as their kids growing up to be doctors; they just hoped their kids didn’t go to jail. So bring them up believing in God and they’ll be good and law abiding. It’s a perfect system. Well, nearly. 75 percent of Americans are God-­‐fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God-­‐fearing Christians. 10 percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.

Atheism, in the cool, hip, trendy sense of the word, is a relatively new concept.  In the 20th, and now 21st, century people like Gervais love to retro-actively re-write history, and this history always makes the free-thinking atheist look progressive and the reason we have light-bulbs and sliced bread (while belief in a Higher Power would have, so the argument goes, kept us in the Dark Ages).  Religious people have been at the forefront of every great scientific, societal, legal, political, and cultural movement of the last 2,000 years.  Atheism brought us Marxism, Communism, Socialism (something a Brit like Gervais knows all about), and more than 100 million murdered human beings in the last century alone.

The God-less Soviets (from 1917 to 1987) murdered at least 62 million of their own people.  Between 1948 and 1987 the Communist leaders in China murdered more than 75 million of their own people.  You can find some other fairly staggering statistics at this site, run by University of Hawaii's Professor Rudolph J. Rummel.

So to throw around numbers of those incarcerated who claim to be religious seems silly.  If only 10% of people are atheists, and yet they managed to murder more people in a shorter amount of time than any other group in human history...I'd say a "I rest my case" is in order.

My point isn't that Believers are guiltless or are instantly better people or anything of the sort.  But to pin all crime and human suffering on the religious, while atheists get to wear really neat-looking scarves and drink lattes and condescendingly poo-poo the out-dated notions of Neanderthals like me because of incorrect or out-of-context "facts" isn't going to cut it in the world of serious discussion and discourse.  Not on my watch.

Gervais goes on to give the account of the day he stopped believing in God.  He was 9 years old, he claims, and sitting at the kitchen table drawing pictures of Jesus for a Bible-study lesson his mom had him do:

There I was happily drawing my hero (Jesus) when my big brother Bob asked, “Why do you believe in God?” Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. “Bob,” she said in a tone that I knew meant, “Shut up.” Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong it didn’t matter what people said.

Oh…hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

So much of who we are goes back to the experiences of our childhood.  Gervais was soured on religious faith early in life because no adults in his life could give him solid, thoughtful answers for why it was they believed in God.  So along comes his "cheeky" brother who lends some influential advice about God's existence and now, some 40 years later, we are treated to an editorial from the man whose brother, had he been a thoughtful Christian, might have inspired his sibling to be the next Charles Spurgeon instead.  I'm not trying to defeat Gervais' arguments by point to his childhood, but I do think it important to note that he even admits that the genesis for his skepticism (and eventual atheism) were the under-informed beliefs of his poor religious mother and the "witty" interjections of his equally under-informed (but much more influential) older brother.  Young boys want to be like their brothers or older guys they know, not like their mothers.

Wow. No God. If mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? Yes, of course, but who cares? The gifts kept coming. And so did the gifts of my new found atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. I learned of evolution -– a theory so simple that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals and us –- with imagination, free will, love, humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.

Those are great things to be enjoyed in life, but they are also utterly meaningless if we are here by chance and turn into worm-food when we die.  Without a God, without a Higher Power, there is no purpose.  Plain and simple.  You can "create" your own purpose and live for that, but the intellectual honest atheists acknowledge that life is dead if there is no God.  Sure you can have fun and enjoy beer and pizza, no matter what you believe.  But again I ask: why should there be any good, enjoyable things in this world at all?  We know there is pain and suffering, and we know there is joy and love, but why?  To what end?  If nothing happens when I die, and this life is as fragile and relatively insignificant as the atheist makes it out to be, why waste my time on beer that will give me a headache, pizza that will give me a stomach ache, and love that will give me heartache?

And what is more, atheists in modern times seem unwilling to "eat, drink, and be merry" and rather choose to be involved with the removal of God from our money, national anthem, court-houses, historical narrative, and national consciousness.  They are not content, as Gervais insists, to eat pizza and drink beer and listen to killer tunes.  They are all the time and actively attempting to undermine religion, push social and political causes, and lecture the rest of us on the morality of "going green" and "saving Darfur."

But why take care of a planet that houses empty souls?  Why save people from genocide when it would take troops and money and time that we shouldn't waste if we really believed all humans are collections of randomly gathered protoplasm?

The moment we begin to describe something as "good" or "bad", "right" or "wrong", we are now talking about something bigger (and beyond) man.

I think Gervais is sincere in his beliefs, but they are just as readily described as "beliefs" as anything I (an evangelical conservative) claim to be true.  The best defense is a good offense.  If you are religious, know what you are talking about.  Be ready to give an account for the things you believe.  Little kids like Gervais are listening and absorbing our conversations.  They are judging whether or not the things you teach actually mean anything to you in your personal life, and if you can explain (and defend) them in your public life.

Ricky Gervais doesn't believe in God, but God, who is good, still believes in him.

At a gas station in Pompano Beach, FL an armed gunman was talked out of committing a robbery by the station's manager, 20 year old Nayara Goncalves.  Ms. Goncalves is a Christian and shared her faith with the would-be assailant and eventually the perpetrator calmly left the store.

Don't believe me?  Here's the video to prove it:

It's not every day that reminding someone of the personal God of the universe will stop them from committing a crime...but on the days it does work, I sleep a little more soundly that night.