Posted on 06/30/2006 12:42:04 AM PDT by nickcarraway
The most amazing thing about Godless is the amount of intellectual meat Ann Coulter has packed into its pages.
Godless: The Church of Liberalism
by Ann Coulter
(Crown Forum, 310 pages, $27.95)
What's most amazing about Ann Coulter's book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, is the amount of intellectual meat she packs into 281 breezy, barb-filled pages. Among the topics the blonde bomb-thrower discusses in some depth are the following: liberal jurisprudence, privacy rights and abortion, Joe Wilson's modest career and inflated ego, and the solid record of failure in American public schools. The topics of Intelligent Design and Darwinism, to which the last eighty pages of text are devoted, are analyzed in even greater detail.
As one would expect from an author with a legal background, Supreme Court cases are high on Coulter's hit-list -- especially the idea of a "living Constitution." Citing various cases-in-point, Coulter shows that this popular doctrine is nothing more than a paralegal pretext for making the Constitution say whatever liberal judges want it to say. Though such a philosophy grants to the nation's founding document all the integrity of a bound and gagged assault victim, it at least has the virtue of mirroring liberals' self-referential view of morality.
Another dogma that Coulter skewers is the liberal commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Punish the Perp." This counterintuitive principle not only rejects the link between incarceration and lower crime rates, it also permits benevolent judges (like Clinton federal court nominee Frederica Massiah-Jackson) to shorten the sentence of child rapists so that other innocent children can pay the price for society's sins.
An unexpected bonus in this chapter is the author's extended sidebar on Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of Boston who, as his own correspondence shows, knew Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty but chose, for ideological and financial reasons, to portray them as innocent victims. In a related chapter, "The Martyr: Willie Horton," Coulter provides detailed information about Horton's crimes, Michael Dukakis' furlough program, and the precise nature of the Horton ads aired in the 1988 presidential campaign
CONTINUING THE RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, Coulter asserts in chapter five that abortion is the "holiest sacrament" of the "church of liberalism." For women this sacrament secures their "right to have sex with men they don't want to have children with." A corollary of this less-than-exalted principle is the right to suck the brains out of partially born infants. How far liberal politicians will go to safeguard this sacrament whose name must not be spoken (euphemisms are "choice," "reproductive freedom," and "family planning") is shown by an amendment offered by Senator Chuck Schumer that would exclude anti-abortion protestors from bankruptcy protection. How low these same pols will go is illustrated by the character assassination of Judge Charles Pickering -- a man honored by the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers but slimed by liberals at his confirmation hearing as racially insensitive. Coulter notes that the unspoken reason for this "Borking" of Pickering was the judge's prior criticism of Roe v. Wade.
The single chapter that Coulter's critics have honed in on is the one that exposes the liberal "Doctrine of Infallibility." This religiously resonant phrase applies to individuals who promote the Left's partisan agenda while immunizing themselves from criticism by touting their victim-status. In addition to the 9/11 "Jersey Girls," Coulter identifies Joe Wilson, Cindy Sheehan, Max Cleland, and John Murtha as persons who possess, at least by Maureen Dowd's lights, "absolute moral authority." Curiously, this exalted status isn't accorded victims who don't push liberal agendas. Perhaps the fact that Republican veterans outnumber their Democrat counterparts in Congress, 87 to 62, has something to do with this inconsistency.
Coulter's next chapter, "The Liberal Priesthood: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Teacher," focuses on the partisanship, compensation, and incompetence level of American teachers. A crucial statistic in these pages concerns the "correlation [that exists] between poor student achievement and time spent in U.S. public schools." In this regard, comments by Thomas Sowell and Al Shanker stand out. Sowell notes that college students with low SAT and ACT scores are more likely to major in education and that "teachers who have the lowest scores are the most likely to remain in the profession." From a different perspective, the late President of the American Federation of Teachers stated, with refreshing bluntness, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." The words of John Dewey, a founder of America's public education system, also fit nicely into Coulter's state-of-the-classroom address: "You can't make Socialists out of individualists -- children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent." Coulter responds, "You also can't make socialists out of people who can read, which is probably why Democrats think the public schools have nearly achieved Aristotelian perfection."
The last third of Godless focuses on matters scientific. Chapter seven, "The Left's War on Science," serves as an appetizer for Coulter's evolutionary piece de resistance. Prior to that main course, Coulter provides a litany of examples that illustrate the left's contempt for scientific data that doesn't comport with its worldview. Exhibits include the mendacious marketing of AIDS as an equal opportunity disease, the hysterical use of anecdotal evidence to ban silicon breast implants, and the firestorm arising from Lawrence Summers's heretical speculation about male and female brain differences.
THE REMAINING CHAPTERS OF GODLESS all deal with Darwinism. Nowhere else can one find a tart-tongued compendium of information that not only presents a major argument for Intelligent Design but also exposes the blatant dishonesty of "Darwiniacs" who continue to employ evidence (such as the Miller-Urey experiment, Ernst Haeckel's embryo drawings, and the famous peppered moth experiment) that they know is outdated or fraudulent.
Within this bracing analysis, Coulter employs the observations of such biological and philosophical heavyweights as Stephen Gould, Richard Dawkins, Michael Behe, and Karl Popper. The price of the whole book is worth the information contained in these chapters about the statistical improbability of random evolution, the embarrassing absence of "transitional" fossils, and the inquisitorial attitude that prevails among many scientists (and most liberals) when discussing these matters. Unlike biologist Richard Lewontin, who candidly admits that a prior commitment to materialism informs his allegiance to evolution, most of his colleagues (and certainly most of the liberal scribblers Coulter sets on the road to extinction) won't concede that Darwinism is a corollary, rather than a premise, of their godlessness.
Coulter's final chapter serves as a thought-provoking addendum to her searing cross-examination of evolution's star witnesses. "The Aped Crusader" displays the devastating social consequences that have thus far attended Darwinism. From German and American eugenicists (including Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger), to Aryan racists, to the infanticidal musings of Princeton's Peter Singer, Darwinian evolution boasts a political and philosophical heritage that could only be envied by the likes of Charles Manson. Yet it is a history ignored by liberals for whom Darwin's theory provides what they want above all else -- a creation myth that sanctifies their sexual urges, sanctions abortion, and disposes of God.
Coulter's book is clearly not a systematic argument for the idea that liberalism is a godless religion. Indeed, prior to the material on evolution, the concept is treated more as a clever theme for chapter headings than as a serious intellectual proposition. In those final chapters, however, Coulter manages to present a cogent, sustained argument that actually begins to link modern liberalism (or more specifically, leftism) to an atheistic perspective. At the very least Coulter succeeds in raising an important issue -- namely, that American courts currently ignore the religious or quasi-religious character of a philosophy that pervades public institutions and is propagated with public funds. This fact, if honestly recognized, would render contemporary church-state jurisprudence untenable. A Court taking these arguments seriously would have to recognize that all philosophies, including "liberalism," swim in the same intellectual current as religion.
THUS FAR, THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA have focused almost all their attention on Coulter's take-no-prisoners rhetorical style -- and particularly on the "heartless" remarks about those 9/11 widows who seem to be "enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." Clearly, diplomatic language is not Coulter's forte, as one would also gather from this representative zinger: "I don't particularly care if liberals believe in God. In fact, I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven."
What undercuts the liberals' case against Coulter on this score, however, is their own (not always tacit) endorsement of vile epithets that are regularly directed against President Bush and his supporters by the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and a gaggle of celebrity politicos. Coulter employs the same linguistic standard against liberals (with a touch of humor) that they regularly use (with somber faces and dogmatic conviction) when they accuse conservatives of being racist homophobes who gladly send youngsters to war under false pretences to line the pockets of Halliburton executives. Hate-speech of this stripe is old-hat for leftists.
Until Air America, Helen Thomas, and most Democrat constituencies alter their rhetoric, I see no reason for conservatives to denounce Coulter for using, more truthfully, the same harsh language that leftists have employed, with no regard for accuracy, since the time of Lenin. When liberals denounce communist tyrants as fervently as they do real Nazis, then it will be time for Coulter to cool the rhetoric. Until that time her "verbal reprisals" serve a useful function within an intellectual marketplace that resembles a commodities pit more than a debating society.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, California. He is a regular columnist for San Diego's North County Times. His book reviews have also appeared in the American Enterprise Magazine, First Things, and Touchstone.
Stuart Smalley is a caring nurturer, a member of several 12-step programs, but not a licensed therapist...
>>What is our 'purpose'?<<Ummmm... squash it like a bug?
To please God. Why does a man make a motorcycle or a teddy bear? Does the bible not say we are made in God'd image? It makes it easy to understand the concept of making us - with a free will - to choose to have a relationship with him. And those of us that refuse? Well, if you made some self willed creature to have a relationship with you and after you created it it said "bug off" and walked away, what would you do with it?
Look - the analogy simply does not hold up when the thing you create is a sentient being, with a mind of their own. When two parents intentionally produce a baby because they wanted a baby to love and to love them back and eventually care for them in their old age, and the baby grows up to be an adult who (for whatever reason) rejects their parents, do the parents have the right to kill their child?
How about ontongeny recapitulates phylogeny for a big one.
If you don't buy evolution, there are other theories - intelligent design, special creation, theistic evolution ....
Depending on your age, most of us will know with utter clarity in less than 50 yrs or so what the correct answer is. Until then, you have your conviction and I have mine -- but that makes neither one of us more or less intelligent.
If you want to call all creationists luddites of flat earth types, how about my husband who graduated first in his class from MIT - he's neither dumb or ingnorant. My biggest problem with the evolutionary debates is that if you don't agree with the evolutionists on the board, you are a knuckle dragging neanderthal with the sophistication of a 3 yr old. Simply not true.
And by the way -- I believe I have remained civil, not called any one names, etc, which is more than I can say for the way I've been treated in the last few hours.
Your quotes were from 1974 and 1925. You do realize, of course, that biological science has progressed a long way in the last 32 years?
You could always pull the old "sic the villagers on it while it's holed up in a windmill" ploy.
That was an observation, not a theory. And it's not completely wrong. The fetal stages of many animals resemble one another; mammals start with gill arches, for instance.
If you don't buy evolution, there are other theories - intelligent design, special creation, theistic evolution ....
Do you have any POSITIVE evidence for any of these, or does your "faith" in them rest simply upon a critique of evolution?
Origin is a matter of faith.
Hebrews 1:
"10": And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands:
"11": They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment;
"12": And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.
"Evolution cannot be "proved." Nothing in science can be "proved." Science is pretty much based on statistical probabilities, and those are based on evidence."(Junior)
"We rely upon evidence and theories are built and tested to explain the totality of that evidence." (Junior)
"No view, dealing strictly with the concept of origins (which is beyond the purview of empirical investigation) can be classified as “science.” Science is based upon observation, experimentation, etc. From the nature of the case, that which cannot be examined and tested cannot be called “science” legitimately." (Wayne Jackson @ Christian Courier)
Dr. Francisco J. Ayala (University of California – Irvine), a supporter of the N.C.S.E., whose name is listed on their letterhead: “A hypothesis is empirical or scientific only if it can be tested by experience….A hypothesis or theory which cannot be, at least in principle, falsified by empirical observations and experiments does not belong to the realm of science” (American Scientist, Nov/Dec, 1974, p. 700; emp. WJ).
Dr. Robert Jastrow, Professor of Astronomy and Geology at Columbia University (an agnostic), in discussing the evolutionary view of the spontaneous origin of life on earth has said this: “The [evolutionary view of life’s origin] is also an act of faith. The act of faith consists in assuming that the scientific view of the origin of life is correct, without having concrete evidence to support that belief” (Until the Sun Dies, New York: Warner Books, 1977, p. 52; emp. WJ).
Dr. Louis More of Princeton wrote: “The more one studies paleontology, the more certain one becomes that evolution is based upon faith alone…” (The Dogma of Evolution, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1925, p. 160; emp. WJ)."
If you don't buy evolution, there are other theories - intelligent design, special creation, theistic evolution ....
None of these are 'scientific' theories.
"It is important to know whether I should start ignoring you now, or wait till later."
Start ignoring me now. It will be better for both of us.
Besides, if you read the WHOLE article, you'll see she got her numbers of cancers and birth defects egregiously wrong. But hey, don't let that get in the way of your worship of the goddess.
Quote mining statements dated no later than 1977 does not show that the theory of evolution is false.
>>Yes, he was. Unfortunately, your ignorance of history is not exactly shocking.<<
No, he wasn't. Judge a tree by it's fruit. ANYONE can CLAIM to be Christian. It does not make it so.
And judging Christ and His teachings by the actions of some deranged man that CLAIMS Christ is not an effective intellectual course of action.
Sheesh. Snap out of it man.
>>That's awful selfish of the Almighty, don't you think? Is God so shallow He has to be given His props by mere mortals?<<
You presume to judge God based on some moral standard you got from...where?
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Many of us are not yet at the "beginning" stage.
>>Name one.<<
Name one what?
>>If nothing has changed, then why has the bible undergone thousands of changes?<<
Do you have examples not translationally related?
>>hmmm. The Church has accepted heliocentricity over geocentricity. The Church has accepted evolution or instant creation.<<
What you seem to see as "The Church" used to also teach that the sun revolved around the earth, even though the Bible does not teach that. I don't have a lot of respect for "the Church" to which you refer. The Church, as described in the bible however, is a completely different "Church".
Judge a tree by it's fruit. His remarks go counter to Christianity. He was as much a Christian as the lead character in Clockwork Orange turned to Christianity in prison.
Many claim to be Christians. It does not make it so.
Please see my posts on the various additions and deletions of whole sections of the bible.
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