According to the Greek myth, Icarus was the son of Daidolos, who invented wings, gluing their feathers together with wax.  Icarus took his father’s invention and, disregarding his warning, in his arrogance flew too close to the sun. The heat of the sun melted the wax, the feathers came apart, and Icarus fell into the sea and drowned.  Professor Chantal Delsol, professor of philosophy at the University of Marne-laValée near Paris, has written a most remarkable investigation of “the search for meaning in an uncertain world.”  The symbol of the fallen Icarus indicates her understanding of modern Western man, infatuated with his achievements, with his progress, which had become the very meaning of life for him.  Now he has suddenly discovered their emptiness and vanity and has begun to fall into the sea of meaninglessness.  Mme Delsol sees two losses: The first came when Western civilization abandoned the Christian religion which for so long characterized it, a process that had already begun with the Renaissance and which took on great momentum with the Enlightenment of the 18th century.  After the Enlightenment came the vision of endless Progress, through man’s untutored reason “come of age.”  It required no supernatural or mystic guidance.  Thanks to this Progress, our traditional handicaps and dangers were in the process of being overcome, and ultimately we could expect to live in a perfect world, i.e., in Utopia.

Unfortunately—inevitably, a Christian thinker who survived the Enlightenment would say—progress towards a utopian society has been slow, faltering, and often stalls, marred by the reality that few children of the Enlighten-ment recognize, namely, the fallen nature of man.  The theological assertion that man is capable of good, but inclined to evil, has been verified time and time again.  The nineteenth-century idealistic philosopher Fichte believed that the State can and should help humans to overcome this weakness and to act in the altruistic manner which ought to be natural for them.  As moderate efforts by the State to “help” in this way continued to fail, more drastic means were adopted in an effort to bring about the “New Order.” This expression was a slogan of Adolf Hitler, not a very good omen.1  The Soviet Union sought to bring into being the “New Communist Man,” with the falling away of the State in the perfection of the Communist dream.

All energetic attempts to overcome the consequences of the Fall of Man produce totalitar- ianism, of which Nazi Germany and the Communist U.S.S.R were dreadful examples.  Now Western man, having dismissed religion from his thought-world and having experienced all too fully the horrors that the utopian dream of endless Progress can bring, is at a loss for meaning and purpose. His ideals are gone, his dreams shattered.  Progress continues, but each new advance makes the hope that it will bring an ultimate answer harder to hold. Medicine is a good example.  Progress in medicine has achieved victory over one disease after another, lengthening human life well beyond past experience and expectations, seeming to promise victory over death itself as one deadly disease after another is eliminated.  Unfortunately, the very progress of medicine brings with it a development that seems to emphasize the meaning-lessness of human life.  As the French hematologist, Dr. Paul Bernard, wrote in the 1970’s in The Grandeur and Misery of Medicine (France), by extending human life while at the same time failing to reproduce in sufficient numbers, the human race will soon be confronted with a large population of healthy “old ga-ga granddaddies,” living out their years in physical isolation from their diminished families in a growing mental twilight.  By a kind of perverse logic, the triumph of medicine in prolonging life is leading to demands for medical “termination.” Euthanasia, by whatever name it may be called, is homicide, whether from a tenderhearted but false sense of mercy or a hard-headed realistic desire to cut costs.

Diminishing Returns, Diminishing Possibilities  

The flaw in medicine does not lie in its discoveries and advances, but rather in the unspoken but implied promise of fundamentally changing the human condition and achieving endless life.  Of course, no physician or medical school actually promises that, but the way in which medical advances are announced and lauded strongly suggests it.  Unfortunately for those who place their hope in progress of this sort, even if every deadly disease of today should be conquered, the human body is not capable of living forever on earth.  With new forms of liberty and license come new problems such as the horrible plague of AIDS, which is not caused by sexual conduct, but which is clearly spread by promiscuity, especially homosexual promiscuity. From a Christian perspective, the promise of achieving endless life on earth, if it could ever be fulfilled, would be a deadly drug, concealing from men and women the wonderful hope that they are made for fellowship with their Creator in eternity, not for an endlessly prolonged life with other aging creatures here on earth.

In the West, the constant progress of democratic “liberty” has led to license, and the endless expansion of entitlements is creating demands and expectations that no sustainable system of taxation can finance.  Even as we seek to expand democracy over the entire world, by force if necessary, in the Western democracies we are running up against problems that cannot be remedied by the further expansion of privileges and entitlements.  In the countries of the West, democracy began with a limited franchise, in which citizens had to meet numerous qualifications to participate in the democratic process.  Sometimes they had to be property owners, usually they had to be taxpayers, sometimes soldiers, and always they had to be adult males. First the voting rights of property owners were extended to all adult male citizens, then to all adults of both sexes, then to 18-year-old citizens.  Is there no natural limit to this expansion?  Now cries are being raised to lower the voting age to 16, perhaps to 14, and in some areas, to extend the franchise to non-citizens, even to accidental or illegal immigrants.  Even if this expansion goes to the point of allow everyone to vote who is old enough to punch a ballot, it is evident that it will not lead to continual improvement.  As wonderful as the freedom to vote was when citizens first began to obtain it, today, as it is being extended almost beyond recognition, it is becoming less meaningful.  In many democratic countries, large numbers of citizens no longer vote at all.  This is like what happened to the once precious Roman citizenship, so prized by the Apostle Paul.  A century and a half later, the corrupt Emperor Commodus extended it to everyone in the Empire, and at that point it meant nothing.

Today in the great democracies of the West, a paradoxical situation exists:  the franchise is being constantly expanded, but participation in elections is declining.  In the United States, we now have the “motor voter” law, by which people can register to vote when they apply for a driver’s license.  The self-evident implication is that the right to drive appeals more than the right to vote—especially for teenagers, of course, but not only for them. Even of those who register, usually only a minority will actually vote.  In the Virginia Democratic primary of 2004, which was a signal victory for candidate John Kerry, only about ten percent of those eligible actually voted.  The last three American presidents have been elected by minorities among the ballot cast, and by even smaller minorities of those entitled to vote.

It is hard to avoid the impression that the right to vote, once so precious that it had to be earned and defended by force of arms, is less and less prized today.  Democracies are replacing it by rights of another kind, vigorously demanded by the public, even by non-voters.  The exaltation of democracy—Mme Delsol calls it sacralization—has been accompanied by the sacralization of rights.  In the democratic nations of the West, the rights of man, which began as freedoms, are being not only extended, but also transformed. Now they have become entitlements. Anything to which we have a right must now be provided for us. Tolerance, Prof. Delsol notes, has become legitimization; legitimization means the right to something made available by the government.

The Transformation of Tolerance

Tolerance once meant a willingness to endure someone or something of which one did not approve.  “Religious tolerance” meant that Christians would get along with Jews, and vice versa, but it did not mean that the Christians would cease to believe that Jews need Christ, nor that Jews would cease to believe that Christians worship a man.  Now religious tolerance has come to mean seeing no difference, as though religion really did not matter: everyone must approve of everyone else’s beliefs, which means that his own mean little to him.  As Jean-Paul Maisonneuve, S.J., wrote, towards persons, tolerance is a virtue, but towards concepts and behaviors known to be wrong, it is cowardice, a lie, and a crime.  In this sense, tolerance does not mean respect for other persons, but disrespect for one’s own traditions and beliefs, making them less important than styles of clothing.  Demands for tolerance in American public life have come to mean the relentless eradication of the symbols of what was once America’s most common religion, Christianity, and by implication, to say that Christianity itself is meaningless or harmful.

Tolerance has come to mean legitimacy and approval.  What ever is tolerated must be considered legal. Thus Prof. Delsol writes:

The exponential accumulation of rights comes partially from the other ways in which we confuse non-prohibition with legitimization—in other words, the way in which we suppose that anything that is tolerated should be facilitated or even encouraged.  A type of behavior, however, can well be permitted—in the name of individual liberty—without actually being legitimized or facilitated by law or material aid, for the reason that it has negative consequences that can be identified.  But our contemporary believes that any tolerated behavior should be legitimized and consequently supported by the provision of the means necessary for its practice.

This extension of tolerance to legitimacy and even to material aid is precisely what we see going on in the United States with so-called “gay marriage.”  Homosexuality is increasingly tolerated, therefore approved, therefore legitimated, and finally, by the creation of “gay marriage” or a legal equivalent, those who practice this particular “life style” receive the benefits long associated with true marriage. Prof. Delsol continues:

This way of thinking results from the disappearance of an objective “good” and the general refusal to establish a hierarchy of acts.  And in conjunction with this is the movement from essential tolerance, based on the idea of the equal dignity of persons, towards procedural tolerance or relativism, based on the idea that all lifestyles are of equal value.

Inspired by the former ideal of tolerance, it is conceivable that we should indeed become indignant to see homosexuals considered pariahs, while at the same time thinking that if we legitimatize homosexual behavior by considering it of equal value to heterosexual behavior, we ruin our society’s future, and we must therefore refuse to legalize gay marriage and the adoption of children by homosexuals [both of which have already been done or are under way in the United States...editor]. But our contemporary revolts against this type of proposition because his tolerance is based on the idea that all behavior is equal, rather than on respect for the individual, irrespective of the value of his behavior.

In other words, as Mme Delsol clearly points out, now an individual is no longer respected for his innate dignity as a human being.  If this were the case, his dignity could potentially be jeopardized by bad conduct, by cowardice, or by other dishonorable behavior. It would be necessary to judge him by his behavior. Instead, we have now agreed that no behavior is actually dishonorable (except, of course, for cigarette smoking, or for using politically incorrect expressions).  To make this clear, our tolerance of formerly condemned behavior is not based on the view that we must respect every individual and give him or her the right to live and act as he or she pleases.  If that were the case, we should then be morally obliged to criticize wrong behavior.  Instead, it is based on the loss of a shared sense of the “good,” by which one could condemn some behaviors and approve of others.  Because this type of tolerance is not based on the dignity or value of the individual as created in the image of God, it does not extend to the unborn child.  Because the developing human being has no innate dignity, the unborn child will not be protected.  Therefore unborn children can be “terminated” with scarcely a thought.  Because all conduct must be tolerated, the woman or girl will be permitted to have him aborted, and perhaps to go on to conceive another “fetus” to be aborted in turn.  Repeat abortions are more common than we would like to think.

Democratic Weakness

Throughout human history, real democracy has seldom existed, and when it was established, it seldom lasted long.  It was never based on what we might call mathematical equality.  The right of citizens to participate in government depended on the possession of particular qualifications, often including honor.  In the democratic city-states of ancient Greece, the franchise was limited.  Those entitled to vote were few in number.

As the philosopher Plato feared, Greece’s democratic institutions were fragile; Athenian democracy did not last long.  By contrast, England, a “constitutional monarchy” without a written constitution, has maintained a high degree of democratic rule, in part because it has never been totally democratic, as the presence of the queen and the House of Lords makes evident.  In the early United States, direct, total democracy did not exist: the upper house of the legislature, the Senate, was not chosen by popular suffrage at first.  Now that Senators are chosen by popular vote, the Senate still is not fully democratic if by that we mean “one man, one vote.” “One man, one vote” exists on a state-by-state basis, but not nationally. The number of Senators elected per voter is far higher in states with small populations than it is in the most populous state, California.  Thus, in terms of voting for a Senator, the citizen of Wisconsin is many times more powerful than the citizen of California.

The most powerful institution in the country is the United States Supreme Court, the members of which are not elected and cannot be removed. (Although theoretically a Justice can be impeached, the aura that surrounds the Court makes this all but impossible.)  The supremacy of the Supreme Court effectively transforms us from a federal republic or real democracy to what might be called a judicial theocracy.  Recent decisions of the U.S. and state courts are making the general public aware of this internal contradiction in our self-styled democracy, but the chance of a real change seems slight.

Just as there is danger in having absolute supremacy in one human authority, be he a king, a dictator, or the Supreme Court, there is a danger in trying to achieve an absolute democracy with mathematical equality for all residents. The country that attempted to establish perfect, mathematically equal democratic structures was not the new American republic, but France, where the effort first led to the Reign of Terror, then to the Empire, and then passed through one more period of rule by an emperor, two kings, and another emperor, before arriving at the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics.  The American republic has survived for more than two centuries because no one institution has had absolute authority.  Sadly, today the time-honored system of checks and balances is failing, because there are neither checks nor balances for the federal courts.  The courts are not executive in nature and can only determine cases that are brought before them, but they do have tremendous, irrefragable power to transform or destroy our nation’s most honored and valuable practices and traditions.  The fact is that as these lines are being written, the U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to consider the “constitutionality” of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and almost certainly the nature of marriage as well reveals its awesome power to destroy.  After “abolishing” God, or at least all reference towards him in the public square, it may well go on to abolish marriage as God established it, to change its essential meaning to accommodate a “life style” that the Bible calls abominable and natural law contra naturam.

Back to Icarus

 Icarus Fallen presents a compelling picture of the disorientation of 21st-century Western man. After having abandoned religion and experienced the disastrous debacles of totalitarian attempts to create a Utopia on earth, he enjoys generalized tolerance and multiple entitlements, but his existence has lost all meaning.  More than once the author hints that a return to the Christian religion of the past would be healing, but she seems to believe that this is impossible: it’s too late.  On the whole her attitude is like that of most if not all Europeans, who no longer see a return to Christianity, much less an actual revival, as a possibility.  In the United States, traditional religion is under attack, but it is still holding out and, in some cases, advancing.  Americans who have not abandoned hope in God are still around to say, “We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know who holds the future.”

METHODICAL METHODIST MADNESS  

On March 20 a church court “acquitted” a self-professed, “married” lesbian minister of lesbianism, a behavior prohibited by the Methodist Book of Discipline, which declares homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teachings.”  The thirteen-pastor jury declared that the church “did not present sufficient clear and convincing evidence to sustain the charge.”  It is hard to imagine what evidence could be considered clear and sufficient when Ms. Karen Dammann, the woman in question, professed her lesbianism three years ago, having lived with Meredith Savage for nine years, and having “married” Ms. Savage in Portland, where officials have been allowing that travesty.  Her counsel, the Rev. Robert Ward, asked jurors to adhere to church principles on inclusiveness and justice, not to the letter of church rules.  “We need to be careful about creating rules that exclude people,” Mr. Ward said.  “You are faced with a choice:  make love plain, and to do what is right.”  But how is anyone supposed to know what is right?  Do not worry about what the Methodist Book of Discipline says, just about the concepts of “inclusiveness and justice” that you wish to read into it.  No doubt the thirteen jurors were guided by the way in which the Supreme Court interprets the U.S. Constitution, rejecting things that it actually says and making it say what they please instead.  The following day Ms. Dammann’s acquittal was celebrated at her church in Ellensburg, Washington, where she used to preach.

Mrs. Patricia Miller, executive director of the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church, declared, “I think the issue is, a part of the jurisdiction has broken covenant with the rest of the church and has decided to go the way of the world, as opposed to being faithful to and abiding by church discipline.”  The issue will be taken up at the church’s next general conference, which begins April 27 in Pittsburgh.  As Professor Chantal Delsol points out in Icarus Fallen, our modern rootless society confuses tolerance with legitimization, not recognizing that some things that may be tolerated simply must not be legitimized, because of their destructive effect on the entire commonwealth.  As she goes on to say, tolerance followed by legitimization is then followed by entitlement, which is where we are with the cascading creation of “gay marriage.”  Methodists used to speak of the “Wesleyan quadrilateral,” Bible, tradition, experience, and reason.  The Dammann decision throws out the Bible, tradition, and reason, and time will soon reveal that it is throwing out experience as well.

SUPREME ARROGANCE

As reported earlier, last year the Ninth Federal District Court in California ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance might not be used in public schools as long as it includes the words “under God.”  Dr. Michael Newdow, a California physician, brought the suit to court on behalf of his daughter (dare we say, illegitimate daughter, as her mother was not married to her father?).  With the help of the usual anti-God suspects, led off by the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, Dr. Newdow won a judgment from the federal court of the Ninth District and “under God” was removed form the pledge in nine Western states.  Now the Elk Grove school district of Sacramento County has appealed, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.  Justice Antonin Scalia has recused himself on the grounds that he has already publicly criticized the decision of the lower federal court.  The Court, with only eight voting justices left, will be able to decide whether it will affirm the arrogance of a California doctor who thinks that his own daughter’s rights can only be safeguarded by changing the mores of the nation.  She must not be offended, indoctrinated, converted to belief in God, or merely led to question her father’s atheism.  Will it decide to affirm him in his arrogance, disregarding the will of approximately 90 percent of the American people, as indicated by a recent poll? It is possible, scholars say, that the Court will decide to sidestep the issue on the grounds that the father had no standing to file for his daughter, inasmuch as he had not yet been granted her custody.  It is possible that the justices will decide that the words are merely a permissible example of “civic deism” and do not establish a religion.  (If they did establish a religion, what religion would it be?)  It is also possible that the eight justices will show their own supreme arrogance by giving Dr. Newdow his way, by granting a single parent with disputed custody of his child the power to destroy a national consensus, the power to establish atheism.  The only permissible way not to establish a religion would then be to establish atheism.  Dr. Newdow’s fight for his daughter, incidentally, is rejected by her, for she has become a Christian along with her mother, who still has custody, and she wants to say the pledge.  If Dr. Newdow has his way, she and all of the other children of the country will be allowed to say it only in their closets.

What will the Supreme Court do?  Whatever it wishes. But there is a limit, given not by the Constitution, but by the order of “Nature and Nature’s God.”

The Supreme Court, whatever powers of   imagination it may draw upon to make the Constitution say what it does not say, does not have the power to abolish God.  God, however, does have the power to abolish a Constitution that dishonors him, a Court that interprets it, even to abolish an entire nation that once used to ask for his blessing, but now spurns both God and his blessing as unconstitutional.

INTERESTING POOR, UNINTERESTING POOR  

During the late winter of 1999, the United States, spearheaded by Secretary of State Madeline Albright, decided to make war on Yugoslavia.  This decision, made under President Bill Clinton, involved attacking a nation that had never made any threatening move towards us, indeed, which hardly seemed in a position to do so.  We attacked with the support of other members of NATO and with the approval of the United Nations Security Council.  Yugoslavia’s Serbian majority was accused of genocidal attacks on the ethnic Albanian Muslims of Kosovo.  U.S. and other NATO forces pounded Serbia from the air, with total immunity for the attackers, for more than seventy days, until the Serbians finally yielded.  In general, the Western media supported our “air campaign” and looked on the results with satisfaction.  Serbia hardly makes the news columns today, even when the Kosovars sack and destroy Serbian homes, watched without interfering by French “peacekeepers.”  The extremely one-sided coverage in the Western media served the purposes of NATO, always taking the side of the Albanians and portraying the Serbs as deserving the worst that could be done to them.  Today Serbia is largely forgotten, or attention is turned farther east to Iraq.

This brings to mind the observation made by the French jurist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul, who observed that there is a distinction between the interesting poor and the uninteresting poor.  He said that the interesting poor are those whose misfortunes can be trumpeted to the world, for the benefit of world Communism; the uninteresting poor are those whose misfortunes interest only themselves.  Ellul’s observation may have been plausible in the 1970s, but today there is no world Communist movement.  Why are the poor Kosovars interesting while the poor Serbs are simply poor?  Can it be for the same reason that the poor Palestinians are interesting, while the Israelis they assault are uninteresting?

From this perspective, the Israelis today, although they are not at all poor by contrast with the surrounding populations, might as well be “uninteresting,” and their Palestinian neighbors the interesting ones.  How many times have we seen photos of a Palestinian child killed, or Palestinian women weeping, compared to photos of Israelis in similar situations?  The Israelis, like the Serbs, are stereotyped as the oppressors, the Palestinians as the victims.  In the United States, apart from Jewish people, Israel’s chief supporters are conservative Protestants, “fundamentalists,” and members of the “religious right.”  The liberal Protestant denominations, very favorable to Israel at the time of its establishment, are increasingly pro-Palestinian, perhaps because they dread being found in company with fundamentalists.  Are our media somehow disposed to be favorable to the Muslims and hostile to both Christians (Serbs) and Jews (Israelis)?  Inasmuch as Islam is at the present not a “religious menace” to us, threatening to assert itself in law, as Christianity is sometimes thought to be, perhaps sympathy to Muslims in this context simply expresses suspicion of Christians, especially of the more conservative type.  But then why favor Palestinian Muslims over Israelis?  Can it be that the general tendency of conservative American Protestants to defend Israel somehow makes Israel guilty of guilt by association, and hence creates sympathy for the Palestinians as “interesting poor” and hostility to the uninteresting Israeli victims of suicide bombers?  This probably is not the reason for coldness and suspicion towards Israel in the American media; it is too fanciful. 

And Now, Iraq

For some reason, the U.S. led assault on Iraq is less popular in the media than our “air campaign” in Serbia was.  We do not have a great love for the people of Iraq and certainly not for their deposed dictator, Saddam Hussein. Why then is there so much suspicion of American efforts to establish democracy in the conquered nation?  Can it be because the Serbians under attack were Europeans of Orthodox Christian heritage, and thus legitimate targets, while the Iraqis are mostly Arab Muslims?   Even today Serbians receive little or no favorable attention in the press. When the ethnic Albanians of Kovoso, whose misfortunes under the Serbs were front-page news for days on end, murder and rob Serbs, it is hardly noticed by our media.  In the case of our war on Iraq, we had the support of Great Britain and several smaller powers, but were opposed by France, Germany, Russia, and Pope John Paul II and did not have Security Council approval.  History will eventually hand down a reliable verdict on the factors that impelled the United States to take the actions launched in response to the atrocious terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Today, however, Americans are engaged in their traditional ritual of finding someone in politics to blame (just as Prof. Delsol observed in Icarus Fallen). As these lines are being written, the U. S. Congress is engaging in one of America’s traditional spectator sports: look beyond the perpetrators, who are out of reach, and try to identify someone among the victims who can be blamed for the injury.  Neither the Defense Department, nor the F.B.I., nor the President, nor the Congress, nor the Boy Scouts of America, is responsible for the terrorist atrocities: the terrorists are.  After the Oklahoma City bombing, the media tried to pin some kind of responsibility on the “Christian right.”  Fortunately the convicted perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, did not display any ties to that group.  In the case of world terrorism, the ties to Islam are clear.  Far from all Muslims are extremists, but so far the extremists are all Muslims.  Most, perhaps all of the Muslim religious spokesmen who become vocal on the issue, praise the suicide bombers as martyrs, rather than denouncing them as criminals.

It is hard to imagine that our media have a pronounced sympathy for Islam. In fact, most seem to have a strong aversion to any religion whose adherents take it seriously.  Christianity is the one that could be a real threat here and now—opposing “gay marriage” and abortion, favoring “under God,” and other politically incorrect causes.  Since Christianity is viewed as a continuing threat, the media will favor Islam.  The Muslims are interesting, the Christians are definitely uninteresting, and Israel and the Jews, opposed by the Muslims, are too close to the right-wing Christians.

IN ADDITION TO WHICH  

•The following news item appeared in reports from Washington dated April 1, 2004:  The Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4, after a brief discussion abolished God.  “There is no mention of God in the U S. Constitution,” the majority opinion read.  Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who dissented, argued, “The Constitution does not mention love either.  Do we abolish love too?” The incident was reported in the following ways in leading periodicals, beginning with L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper:  DIO ABOLITO.  PAPACY DENIES RESPONSIBILITY.  Other important media sources carried similar reports: U.S.A. Today: GOD ABOLISHED.  NASCAR SCHEDULE CANCELED. The Wall Street Journal: GOD ABOLISHED. The New York Review of Books: GOD ABOLISHED.  NEW LEFT BEHIND SERIES PROMISED. New York Times: GOD ABOLISHED.  DETAILS ON p. D-11.  Harvard Law Review: GOD ABOLISHED.  CONSTITUTIONALITY OF DECISION QUESTIONED. Washington Post: GOD ABOLISHED.  WOMEN AND MINORITIES HARDEST HIT.

•The Passion of the Christ has been an incredible film-making success, and we know that part of the reason lies in the vociferous protests made against it by Abraham Foxman and others who saw it as anti-Semitic or at any rate likely to stir up anti-Semitism.  Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code has been an equally amazing publishing success. Unfortunately, unlike Gibson’s The Passion, which presents the last hours of Christ’s life on earth exactly as they are described in the Bible, Brown operates very largely in the area of fiction; errors are easy to find, but the most serious fault of the book is that it spreads historically and theologically false assertions about Jesus Christ.  It really is blasphemous.  When Salaam Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, he was immediately cursed and threatened with death by loyal Muslims.  Dan Brown has been rewarded with great fame and huge royalties by less than loyal “Christians” who are happy to find excuses, however fictional, not to have to take the Bible seriously.

•According to the Italian thinker Felice Balbo, modern society has replaced the ideal of “the good life” with that of “well-being,” which means the maximum satisfaction of one’s appetites.  Having done this, we cease to speak of true and false, but rather of that which is “important” or “insignificant,” “original” or “banal,” “dogmatic” or “heretical,” “sincere” or “demagogic,” “progressive” or “reactionary.”  As we examine the accusations and self-justifications being thrown about in the current election campaign, very little attention is being given to saying what is true, and much to saying what will be effective.

•The dreadful attack on four American civilians working in Iraq on March 31 was portrayed in full color in the U.S. media, with exuberant witnesses on the scene.  Who takes these pictures?  Do the terrorists have their own news service?

Endnote

1 A similar vision, the “New World Order,” was used by the first President Bush, probably without thinking of the idea’s odious ancestry.

Notes on Sources

For “The Fall of Icarus,” see Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen. The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World (Wilmington, Delaware, ISI Books, 2003), p. 125 et passim; for “Methodical Methodist Madness,” see Associated Press reports, the Charlotte Observer, Sunday, March 21, p. 23A, and Monday, March 22, p. 6A, and Icarus Fallen, loc. cit.