If you filled up you gas tank in the last four days, the tally just might be enough to convince you that Ben Stein is on to something when he says it’s time for a radical rethinking of our habits as they relate to energy (specifically oil) consumption:

Gasoline is unimaginably important in our lives in the United States. Without gas in virtually limitless supply, and at prices we could afford, American life would change. We could no longer afford to live so far from one another and from our jobs. We could no longer afford to cruise in cars incomparably larger than those of our counterparts in Europe and Asia. In a way, we would stop being America as we know it.

Maybe this would be a good thing. After all, do we really need to have a 6,000-pound S.U.V. take a 100-pound high school student across town to buy a Diet Coke? Do we really need cars so big that they have flat-screen televisions for the children in the back? Do we really need to pour so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? And it’s certainly not great to belch out immense quanta of carbon monoxide, a deadly poison.

Stein’s New York Times piece offers some compelling advice for dealing with the gas crunch. Read it.

Finally, a List of ‘Worst Cities’ Detroit isn’t on:

http://www.neatorama.com/2008/05/13/the-worst-cities-in-america/

HT: Joe Carter: Evangelical Outpost

Philosophy professor Edward Tingley on how agnostics and atheists are not true skeptics:

All of the people who say that they are “atheists through skepticism, because they see no evidence that God exists,” are patently unthinking people, since by virtue of turning skeptic, no one has ever done anything–employed any logic, gathered any evidence, found any way forward–to reach a conclusion about whether God exists. So these atheists have not reached a conclusion; they have made a commitment.

What the scientific skeptic ought to say is this: “Having examined the hard evidence, we declare that route to be exhausted. The only kind of evidence for God’s existence that counts will have to be of some other kind–if there is any other kind.”

That would be reasonable. And it would be a fine thing for a skeptic to doubt that there is any evidence besides the standard, demonstrable kind–and there are skeptics who do so. But all those who, just because they doubt it, run home with the question answered are frauds like their agnostic brethren if they still call themselves scientists.

HT: Joe Carter: The Evangelical Oupost

It’s crass statements like the following that make it difficult (but not impossible) for me to value even the very relevant writing coming out of the Emergent crowd:

Beware of any literature that starts with these words: “Jesus was the greatest leader of all time.” The sentiment behind those words may be true, but the point they make is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if Jesus was the greatest leader of all time. Jesus is our leader (and, in a holy sense, we’re stuck with him).

An otherwise excellent perspective on our Evangelical tendency to “Americanise” Jesus is immediately deflated in the first paragraph because of an Emergent tendency to crassness and irreverence. That won’t stop me, however, from recommending you read the whole piece. I am, after all, an open-minded cranky Calvinist. 

Stuart Taylor (Nonresident Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and Contributer to National Journal) has what is perhaps the best perspective I’ve read on the implications of the California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. It should be noted that Stuart Taylor is a supporter of legalizing gay marriage.

The first half of the Taylor piece is an excellent argument for judicial restraint, giving compelling evidence that the California Supreme Court overreached its powers in its “gay marriage” decision. The second half is well-informed prognastication on how the outcome of the presidential election will effect the make-up of the Supreme Court.

Taylor concludes that a Democrat majority in the Senate will prohibit McCain from getting any truly conservative nominees to the Court confirmed. Conservatives wonder whether McCain would be inclined to nominate true conservatives irregardless of the Democrats. Obama, on the other hand, would be an outright disaster for a strict constructionist view of the Constitution, nominating justices who rule “from the heart” rather than from the text of the Constitution:

…justices who fit Obama’s description might well invent federal constitutional rights not only to gay marriage but also to Medicaid abortions, physician-assisted suicide, human cloning, and perhaps free medical care, food, and housing for poor people; strike down the death penalty (as Stevens recently advocated) and laws making English the official language; ban publicly funded vouchers for poor kids to attend parochial schools; bless ever-more-aggressive use of racial and gender preferences; and more.

The California Supreme Court decision on “gay marriage” stands as a model for the kind of judicial fiat we can expect if this country elects Barack Obama president. Stuart Taylor breaks down why that decision is a disaster in these relevant graphs:

I wholeheartedly support gay marriage. And I am happy for the many gays who rejoiced at the California Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision on May 15 ordering the state to stop calling committed gay couples “domestic partners” and start calling them “married.”

So why do I see the decision as an unfortunate exercise in judicial imperialism? Let me count the ways. Then I’ll touch on how it could be a harbinger of the constitutional innovating that we might see if the next president engineers a strong liberal majority–a likelier prospect than a strong conservative majority–on the U.S. Supreme Court.

. . . . . . . .

The steady accretion of both state and federal judicial power since the 1950s has left a malleable mass of hundreds of precedents straying ever-further from the original understanding of the constitutions and laws they purport to be “interpreting.” This made it easy for the California court to take the leap–as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had done in 2004–to overriding the state’s voters on gay marriage in the guise of enforcing “the ultimate expression of the people’s will.”

. . . . . . . .

The California court’s majority descended into especially slick sophistry when it suggested that the many gay-rights reforms that the state’s elected branches had already adopted were not a reason to let the democratic process work but rather a mandate for judicial imposition of gay marriage. The message to voters in other states may be: If you give the judges an inch on gay rights, they will take a mile.

. . . . . . . .

This is not to deny the importance to many gay couples and their children of being officially recognized as “married.” They should be treated as married. But to decree this by judicial fiat has large costs to democratic governance. Judicial power to override the deeply felt values of popular majorities should be used sparingly, to enforce clear constitutional commands or redress great injustices, not deployed whenever the judges think they can improve on the work of the elected branches or accelerate progressive reforms already under way.

Also troubling is the majority’s eagerness to move beyond enforcing substantive rights into dictating what words the government must and must not use: Same-sex couples, the majority ruled, have a “fundamental right … to have their official family relationship accorded the same dignity, respect, and stature as that accorded to all other officially recognized family relationships.”

This urge to regulate government speech resonates with the logic of those federal judges who have sought to strip “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance. Can court-ordered erasure of “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency, and perhaps a judicial rewrite of the National Anthem, be far behind?

HT: Rod Dreher: Crunchy Con

Memorial Day weekend seems the appropriate time to release a recommended list of books for your summer reading. 

1. Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
2. A Quest for More: Living for Something Bigger Than You by Paul David Tripp
3.  For Us and for Our Salvation: The Doctrine of Christ in the Early Church by Sephen J. Nichols
4. Embryo: A Defense of Human Life by Robert P. George
5. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
6. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini
7. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis
8. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O’Connor
9. Death in Holy Orders (Adam Dalgliesh Mystery Series #11) by P. D. James
10. Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming by Bjorn Lomborg
11. The Innocence of God by Udo Middelmann
12. Religion and the Rise of Western Culture by Christopher Dawson
13. Jesus Made in America: A Cultural History from the Puritans to the Passion of the Christ by Stephen J. Nichols
14. The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (Early American Studies) (Early American Studies) by John Fea
15. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller
16. The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World by David Wells
17. Christ and Culture Revisited by D. A. Carson
18. The Great Exchange: My Sin for His Righteousness by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington
19. The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright by John Piper
20. In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement by J. I. Packer and Mark Dever

For weeks now I have been wondering out loud why presidential candidates find it necessary to lower the standards of the presidency by making appearences on the basest of television venues. In recent weeks John McCain has ventured into the hostile environs of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report, and now in what must confirm McCain’s insatiable appetite for self-flagellation, this week he made a very painful appearence on the Ellen Degeneres show where he endured a verbal flogging around the issue of traditional vs. homosexual marriage:

Rather than defend marriage on moral principle as the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation, the establishment of the home as the basis of a civil society, and as a union entered “before God” and in accordance with His laws, McCain offers a compromise which suggests that marriage is first and foremost a “legal agreement” for the purpose of sharing insurance and decision-making, the benefits of which are readily available to same-sex couples. Such a position denies conservative principles relative to the defense of traditional marriage, the first principle of which that marriage is fundamentally about reproduction, providing a context for the stability of society in the rearing of children who have been birthed as a result of the sexual union of a man and a woman.

Ellen denies this fundamental principle of marriage, arguing for same-sex marriage on the basis of erotic love, grounding her argument in the mistaken idea that marriage is a civil right that has been denied to sodomizers and lesbians in the same way this country denied the freedom of slaves and the suffrage of blacks and women:

I think that it is looked at, and some people are saying the same, that blacks and women did not have the right to vote. I mean, women just got the right to vote in 1920. Blacks didn’t have the right to vote until 1870, and it just feels like there is this old way of thinking that we are not all the same. We are all the same people - all of us. You’re no different than I am. Our love is the same.

There is absolutely no correlation between the equality denied blacks and women and marriage being denied to sodomizers and lesbians. All humans, regardless of ethnic or gender differences, have been enowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights on the basis of their common HUMANITY. When Ellen argues that “we are all the same people” she is absolutely correct that in terms of our HUMANITY we are all equal, but she misapplies the equality standard to SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, insisting that there is no difference between the erotic love of homosexual persons and that of heterosexual persons. She couldn’t be more wrong.

Ellen is equal to me in terms of personhood and the individual human rights that accompany personhood. It is a fundamental denial of the human person to deny blacks and women equal status. But no one is denying Ellen and her lover status as persons or the rights that inure to them as human persons. The rights of marriage inure to those who can meet the biological standard necessary for entering a physical union that, with all biological standards being equal, can produce offspring. This is fundamentally the nature of marriage.

To say that because we share the same rights as human persons makes us fundamentally the same in nature and physicality is illogical. I am not the same as Ellen in terms of sexuality. She is a female and I am a male, and as such there are fundamental differences BIOLOGICALLY between us. The female body is capable of carrying and bringing to life the seeds of reproduction, a feat my body cannot accomplish. Have my rights therefore been violated? Obviously not. You can’t fool Mother Nature (i.e., GOD).

To argue that same-sex attraction is a fundamental human right in the same way suffrage is, is nothing more than changing the subject. John McCain allowed Ellen to change the subject and in doing so demonstrated that he is a poor apologist for conservatism on one of the key issues that really, really matters. The only response he could muster was to congratulate Ellen on articulating her position in a very eloquent fashion. Too bad he failed to articulate his position at all.

From the Steven Curtis Chapman website:

NASHVILLE, TN…5/21/08… At approximately 5pm on the afternoon of Wednesday May 21st, Maria Sue Chapman, 5 years old and the youngest daughter to Steven and Mary Beth Chapman was struck in the driveway of the Chapman home in Franklin, TN. Maria was rushed to Vanderbilt Childrens Hospital in Nashville, transported by LifeFlight, but died of her injuries there. Maria is one of the close knit family’s six children and one of their three adopted daughters.

More than five years ago, Chapman and his wife MaryBeth founded The Shaohannah’s Hope Ministry after bringing their first adopted daughter, Shaohannah, home from China. The ministry’s goal is to help families reduce the financial barrier of adoption, and has provided grants to over 1700 families wishing to adopt orphans from around the world. Chapman is a five-time GRAMMY ® winner and 54-time Dove Award winning artist who has sold over 10 million albums and garnered 44 No. 1 singles.

The Chapman’s have posted this memorial video of Maria at their blog:

The unveiling of An Evangelical Manifesto, drafted by Dr. Os Guinness with the affirmation of a nine-person steering committee, nearly all of whom we might readily identify as firmly on the Religious Left, has caused no small stir among those whom we might readily identify as firmly on the Religious Right. Some of its critics have concluded the document is the Religious Left’s “broader agenda” come to life, an attempt to solidify a moderate to liberal political agenda in the evangelical conscience. Space will not permit even a cursory summary of the Manifesto’s salient points. Suffice it to say it is a document with a clear articulation of the gospel in the Reformation tradition, a call to evangelicals to return to living the gospel as a priority, and in the living of it, to impact culture through the power of the gospel as politically engaged followers of Jesus Christ.

Almost immediately the Manifesto was judged (condemned?) on the basis of who did or, more importantly to its detractors, didn’t sign it. Within hours of its release the “I follow James Dobson” crowd was pitted against the “I follow Jim Wallis” crowd (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:12) in complete contradiction to the spirit of the Manifesto expressed in its call for both sides to please stop screaming at each other. I’ll leave it to the reader to ascertain which side is screaming loudest.

It’s somewhat pathetic, isn’t it, that rather than making our initial judgments on the merits of the Manifesto we choose first to skip the document altogether and go straight to the signatories to ascertain whether or not we will agree with its contents based on who affixed their names. This tendency is precisely what ails the evangelical movement. Loyalty to personality has replaced commitment to principle. Whether I allow my name to be seen with yours is determined more by your view of global warming, which may be different from my own, than it is by the distinctives of the gospel. It also betrays an inability to think for ourselves.

Two primary reasons come to mind as an attempt to explain why conservative evangelicals are skeptical about the Manifesto. For one, it calls into question our own allegiance to an entrenched political philosophy that has been extremely effective at electing conservatives yet equally ineffective at implementing substantive cultural change. As a case in point, Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land in spite of 35 years of conservative evangelical political engagement. During this same time one state has legalized same-sex marriage while nine others provide the legal rights afforded married couples to same-sex unions, stopping short of calling it marriage. America has seen no substantial change in rates of divorce or the abortion rate. Sexual promiscuity is still encouraged in our public schools through “health clinics” and condom distribution. Our children still have unfettered access to the most virulent forms of pornography in the name of “freedom of expression.” What have conservative evangelicals to show for our political efforts in terms of real change? The Manifesto forces us to face up to some very inconvenient truths and we naturally recoil.

Secondly, many conservatives panning the Manifesto may be doing so because they weren’t included in the three-year process of drafting the document. Given the documents’ call for a move away from Left vs. Right distinctions, it is somewhat unthinkable that Dr. Guinness and his nine person steering committee could not acquire representative voices from among prominent politically engaged evangelical conservatives. However, in a recent interview with Dr. Albert Mohler, Os Guinness readily admitted that he ought to have sought his input by sending him a copy of the Manifesto. The fact that Dr. Mohler’s insight was not sought, along with others who share Dr. Mohler’s worldview, is disappointing, but shouldn’t be the Manifesto’s death-knell.

As an aside, the fact that the steering committee included no African-Americans and no women should assuage the fears of many conservatives that the Manifesto is committed only to being politically correct.

My own view is that Dr. Os Guinness’ Evangelical Manifesto has been the subject of an often ill-tempered criticism by many, some of whom immediately wrote it off by reading into it an assumed liberal political agenda. The Manifesto couldn’t be clearer that it isn’t taking sides:

Christians from both sides of the political spectrum, left as well as right, have made the mistake of politicizing faith; and it would be no improvement to respond to a weakening of the religious right with a rejuvenation of the religious left. Whichever side it comes from, a politicized faith is faithless, foolish, and disastrous for the church – and disastrous first and foremost for Christian reasons rather than constitutional reasons.

Contrary to the assessment of some conservative commentators, nowhere does the Manifesto condemn evangelical political engagement. Rather it rightly points out that political engagement, while certainly the duty of every Christian citizen, is not the priority of the Church. In calling for the Church to rise above the din and the noise of politics, some have characterized the Manifesto as a demand for Christian withdrawal from the political process. Some read Dr. Guinness’ call for “civility” as a call for compromise on the issues important to conservatives, a ruse to get us to drop our guard on abortion and same-sex marriage while the liberals change the priorities to global warming and AIDS/HIV. Only a subjective reading of the document could lead anyone to that erroneous conclusion.

In reality the Manifesto pricks our consciences by pointing out that the place of the Word in the pulpit as the authoritative voice for moral and spiritual change in the at-large culture has been drowned by pro-family political action committees to which the Church has abdicated its prophetic office. We declare in our creed that we have no king but Jesus, yet betray by our actions that our hope is firmly rooted in the outcome of the next presidential election. We have taught our people how to vote (and for whom to vote) all the while leaving them clueless as to how to pray (and for whom to pray). While we frantically sort through labels to determine whether we are on the right, left, or middle we are deaf to the Word which calls us to be above (cf. James 3:13-18).

Nothing I have said here should be interpreted as suggesting the Manifesto is above thoughtful analysis. My chief concern is that in attempting to ascertain what the Manifesto means by what it says, we have often assumed that what it clearly says cannot indeed be what it means. We have allowed our prejudices against some who signed it to call into question the integrity and intentions of those who wrote it.

No one connected with the drafting of the Manifesto claims for it a Divine imprimatur, as if Dr. Guinness has just returned to us with face aglow from Sinai having received the Manifesto on tablets written with God’s own finger. It is, after all, a human document with equally human short-comings. But then again, so was Luther’s 95 Theses. History gives witness to the truth that reformational statements rooted in Scripture endure while those committed to a political agenda quickly fade. History will judge where the principles articulated in An Evangelical Manifesto have their roots.

In his first public statement on the controversy surrounding his prayer as Honorary Chairman of the National Day of Prayer, Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias strongly responded to criticism that his prayer intentionally excluded the name of Jesus while a guest on The Paul Edwards Program in Detroit.

The transcript is below. The audio is here.

EDWARDS: You conclude your book, Dr. Zacharias, The End of Reason, by saying that “in the end the choice we face is really not between religion and secular atheism” but rather “between Islam and Jesus Christ,” a very bold statement for Jesus Christ. I know that you are a man committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and committed to the person of Jesus Christ, you have defended Jesus Christ ably as a Christian apologist around the world. I don’t know if you are even aware of the controversy that’s surrounding the National Day of Prayer and the way that prayer was concluded. Could you bring some clarity to us around that issue?

DR. ZACHARIAS: I don’t read and track all those things because…you know there’s a story, Paul, that when Christians are attacked, how they react. One of my friends years ago told me, he said, “Ravi, remember how donkeys fight and how horses fight.” He says, “When donkeys are attacked they turn their backs to each other and face the oncoming onslaught and end up actually kicking each other to death. When horses fight they form a circle, face each other and kick against the attacks.”

Whatever attacks have been coming, they’re fighting, really it’s a donkey-type battle; and it is so tendencious, so distorted, so false that it’s really not worthy of my response. I have not read them directly but people, my friends, have sent it quoting to me. Some of my Indian convert friends are horrified at this kind of behavior by so-called “Christians,” and they even wonder, you know, if some of them would have ever come to Christ if this is the version of Christianity they’d seen. This is the version of Christianity, by the way, Mahatma Gandhi saw, this kind of hostility even within the ranks. If they had an issue I think they could have dealt with it in a gracious way.

Here’s the story, Paul: When the National Day of Prayer was formed, Yvonette Bright struggled with bringing this in, and after President Reagan got it through - barely got it through in time, Evangelical leaders got together and realized that the ONE prayer that had limitations, just the one prayer of the Honorary Chairperson, would be limited because it goes into the Congressional Record; that no distinctive name could be used that would make it appear that Congress is supporting one religion over against the other, face a law suit and it would be finished.

My messages are not controlled. All of the venues that people pray, all of the other prayers there are not controlled. The Honorary Chairperson is restricted in this one protection, this distinctive, so that it doesn’t get banned. And people like this who cry out don’t realize the privilege we have of being there. And if they keep on crying out we’ll be evicted and ultimately it will be a hostile voice and a foreign voice of a different god that will take over in a totalitarian way.

I began my prayer with “Holy Father.” No other worldview will begin that way. And actually the way I prayed it at the White House itself (it was the only venue I prayed it at) was “In your precious and Holy Name.” And “God’s Holy Name” is revered. And “Holy Father” has only one Name. It is not the Islamic god. It is not the pantheistic god. It is no other reference. It is, I think, people who really want to argue on the minutia and forget the bigger picture. They want to win a battle and lose a war.

I risk my life every day, Paul. When I’m overseas (I could play some of my voicemails to you), threatened because of my defense of Christ all over the globe. To be hit by a group like this is so pathetic that I have received letters from friends all over the world, especially those from other faiths, who are shocked at what they hear. And the comments I will not even repeat sometimes on the air because of what it is they have been astounded it at.

I’m sorry that this has happened. They will not hear from me. You are the first one to ask me publicly on this and I appreciate it. But I don’t go to their blogs. I don’t go onto the Internet at all. If they want to make a living off something like this it’s their perogative. My staff is just shocked at it. We will march on. Christ is the only way to salvation and we only come to God through His Son, and that’s why we call Him, “Holy Father.”

EDWARDS: One blog actually reported, Dr. Zacharias, that you did not pray in the National Day of Prayer official event, but you’ve just said that you did.

DR. ZACHARIAS: I prayed at the White House. I prayed at the White House, which is the only place where it officially then actually goes into the record. I went from there over to the Pentagon, Paul, to be rushed through there. We got in late. It was raining. I literally had one minute to sit down.

When I finished at the Pentagon we were whisked back, Beth Moore, her husband, my wife and myself; got in to the Cannon House (Office Building). I was to come on in half an hour, so even the program was not given to me. And I just leaned over and noted quickly… said, “Will you be able to deliver your keynote right now?” So I quickly picked up my Bible and notes and delivered the keynote. I didn’t even know I was supposed to pray. Had I known I was suppose to pray I would have been happy to do that. No problem with it, because all of the other prayers were going to be given the liberty, mine was going to be “In God’s Holy Name” or “Your Holy Name” after I addressed Him as “Holy Father.”

It was thirty minutes later after I sat down when I was looking at the program and finally asked why and where all this was adjusted and found out Congress people could not show up, that I found that it said, “Message” or “Keynote and Prayer.” I had no idea. I was just given…my idea was to pray at the White House, to speak at the other two (the Pentagon and Congress). Had somebody even whispered and said, “Could you please close in prayer with your prayer?” I would have been happy to do it.

How these contingencies are taken and distorted into the image that is given, it just tells you what a deadly force the media can be when they take issues and distort them.

I’m not ashamed of that prayer. I hope and pray that they ask me again someday, and I will comply wih their strictures again, for the privilege of preaching the Gospel. Next Thursday Focus on the Family will be broadcasting that message. Anybody who has a problem with that message, and thinks the trade-off is not worth it, then I will just take issue with them and wish them well on a different path. It is not mine.