From Little Green Footballs, this example of Obama’s abysmal incomprehension of terrorism:

Eight days after the atrocities of September 11, 2001, Barack Obama wrote a piece for the Hyde Park Herald—and blamed the attacks on “a failure of empathy.”

Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.

We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.

Obama’s comments display an appalling disconnect from reality.

Osama bin Laden came from one of the richest families in the world. None of the 9/11 attackers were poor; if anything, they could be considered “middle class.” Ringleader Mohammed Atta was educated as an architect in the West.

Almost everything Obama wrote in this article was proven wrong. And he gave absolutely no consideration at all to the ideology of radical Islam, which is much more to blame than any imaginary “poverty” or “lack of empathy.”

And now he’s within reach of the presidency.

 go here and see appalling pictures of Muslim savagery .

 That always delightful writer, P.J.O’Rourke, has his own take on it.  Read what he says here. 

 The British police cave again to outrageous Muslim demands. Now their dogs must wear socks. 

Read about it here. 

Who is it that orders the police to grovel like this? Is it Britain’s clueless Home Secretary? Or is it the unbelievably weak Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair?

 German government funds paid for a conference in which an Iranian spokesman advocated the destruction of Israel.

Read about it here.  

 He wants it to be applicable in certain areas, namely financial dealings and marriage. Sharia marriage law permits polygamy, child marriage, and easy divorce for husbands only – all against British law. 

A shadow cabinet member (Conservative!) thinks he’s right, but wants one law to govern everybody. So does she mean that sharia should be the law of Britain in its entirety?

Find the puzzle at the end of this report. 

 Beyond Opinion: Living The Faith We Defend   by Ravi Zacharias   Thames Nelson 2007  360 pages

God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?  By John Lennox    Lion Hudson 2007 192 pages

The Christians whose essays make up the collection in Beyond Opinion maintain that they are in possession of truth. The mystical triune God of Christianity is true. The (patched-together and internally contradictory) New Testament is true. The intention of their ‘apologetics’ in this volume is to explain how best to proselytize – or evangelize, as they prefer to call it – among certain specified non-Christians. In particular they frame arguments to be used in persuading ‘postmodernists’ (using their opaque jargon) , atheists, ‘youth’, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and devotees of the New Age Movement (which is to say, neo-Marxists). The evangelists insist, not surprisingly, that arguments should be tailored to fit the target group, and provide the arguments they think will do the trick in each case. But nothing they say proves the truth of their own belief.

Repeatedly they allege that people who oppose them do so in anger.  Atheists in particular are described as angry. The implication is that the Christian message is rejected because of some emotional block rather than for good reason.  Any arguments that non-believers are quoted as uttering are neatly and conclusively countered, but in the case of atheism the swiftly demolished arguments are not of a sort that an intelligent atheist would actually put forward.  They are straw men – easily, as straw men always are, blown down.  They speak of atheism as ‘a movement’ and ‘a belief system’; descriptions that indicate how little they understand it.

The case for atheism can be simply made.  If A tells B that something exists which is not manifest, A must prove it. It is not for B to prove that the something does not exist. Has God been proved to exist? No. Without that proof, God remains an opinion, and an opinion is not a truth however many people hold it, and however passionately it is held. 

The only essay interesting to me is Challenges from Science by John Lennox. It is a précis of his book, God’s Undertaker, which contains the arguments some scientists make for ‘intelligent design’ – aka God.

Lennox is a fellow in the philosophy of science at Green College, Oxford, and a Cambridge-qualified mathematician. Some of his arguments are indeed challenging, especially the one – very detailed in the book – about the complexity of DNA. I’ll not try to summarize it, nor to answer it.  A very good answer may be found at www.talkorigins.org.

All I will say about it here is that once again, as a proof of the existence of God, it fails.  But even if for some it succeeds, the only God it  ‘proves’ is a Mind that started up the world, made it out of nothing, and with the most complicated ‘design’ imaginable, launched life on this planet.  This sort of belief in a God who started everything and then did nothing more about it is called ‘deism’. But John Lennox is not a deist. He is a Christian and accepts wholeheartedly the theology of Christianity.  For this he requires no scientific proof. One cannot but suspect that John Lennox finds the hand of God in DNA because he looked at it through the eyes of one who already believed in the Christian Deity.

Essentially Lennox’s argument for maintaining that science fits better with theism than with atheism, is that the universe has been rationally constructed, so a rational being must have constructed it. 

There was a time, hundreds of years long, when the philosophers of the ancient world had a real secret to keep. Pythagoras is thought by some to be the first discoverer of the secret, but there may have been others before him who knew it.  He knew it for sure, and kept it. Plato knew it and kept it, and so did all the other wise men. We all know it now. It’s the simple fact that the square root of 2 is an irrational number. The ancient philosophers feared that if ordinary men, who surely believed that the world was rationally made, found this out, they would go mad.  Of course we know perfectly well that ordinary men wouldn’t have stirred a hair if that terrible truth had been revealed to them. It was only the brave philosophers themselves who were disturbed by it. They were the ones who wanted to believe that the universe is rational.  But they knew that it isn’t.   

 The almost incredible weakness of the British authorities – in this case the police – when confronted by protest from Muslims is illustrated yet again here.

 Read this discussion of a book by a Muslim on how Islam can and should conquer the world.  

Only the US stands in its way, the book’s author believes, and that will change when President Bush has gone.

 Read here how the nefarious and ghastly UN Human Rights Council once again proves that it stands against humanity, justice, truth and decency.