Godless

I finished Ann Coulter's "Godless, The Church of Liberalism a few days ago, and enjoyed the book very much. It was my first Father's Day present purchased with my son's own money and carried out with his own Amazon account, so that may have biased me a bit!

My first reaction is how the MSM and even many folks on the right treat Ann as a pariah and either don't mention her at all, or point out how "divisive" she is. Meanwhile, on the left, Al Franken has moved back to MN and is considering a run for Senate, and at least local lefties are writing him up as a legitimate candied. Michael Moore sits next to former president Jimmy Carter at the 2004 Dem convention. At best, both these guys are equivalent bomb-throwers to Ann and I'd argue far worse.

I have a bit more authority to say that than something like 99% of people, since I've actually read them both, as well as Ann. I don't claim to unbiased, but I'm willing to see what the other side puts out. To the extent Ann is less than perfect on her facts, the MSM and the left is very happy to air anything that is even a potential issue, even though it may not actually affect the truth of her conclusions. (To whit, a lot of time spent by Franken on the fact that the NYT reported Dale Earnhardt's death, but Ann said they didn't ... BUT, the point is that the NYT and the folks on the left miss the importance of NASCAR and things like values ... which is pretty much true, even though she got a fact wrong).

However on the left, the book points out again and again how "fake but true" is pretty much as true as anything ever gets from the left. The fake Bush National Guard documents used as support by CBS are the clearest recent example, but Willy Horton, Anita Hill, the Kerry Military record and defense thereof and even a significant portion of the "evidence" in support of evolution are also in that camp. The left is the bastion of "if it is repeated enough times, it will become true". Thus there are certain phrases like "the failed economic policies of the '80s" or "the discredited charges of the Swift Boat Veterans" that are uttered enough times so the left and a huge chunk of bleating MSM sheep in the masses believe them simply because they are certain that it MUST be true.

I was most surprised to see her takedown of evolution evidence that has been finally reported in the NYT as being a hoax, only because they are concerned that the number of hoaxes out there in evolution textbooks make evolution look pretty bad as it is challenged by Intelligent Design. It is pretty clear that in order to claim that there ISN'T any intelligence behind the universe is at least as big a "faith statement" as to claim that there is. Ann makes the point that evolution is the creation story of the state religion of liberalism, so no discussion can be allowed in the schools whose primary purpose is to convince young minds of the unnatural path of liberalism.

I loved her start to chapter 8; "Even if evolution were true, it wouldn't disprove God. God has performed more spectacular feats than evolution. It's not even a daunting challenge to a belief in God. If you want something that complicates a belief in God, trying coming to terms with Michael Moore being one of God's special creatures."

Having been hammered with the fundamentalist view as a child, it took a long time to move my own puny picture of "how big is God" beyond the little fundamentalist view from either the left or the right, that "if evolution is true, there is no God". We tend to spend a lot of time listening to fundamentalists from the left wing that control the MSM and the educational institutions of America bluster from the "evolution is true, there is no God"! Side of that equation. We spend less time, but still a significant amount listening to some Kansas fundamentalists of the right scream "God is real, therefore evolution is false"!

Her first statement is that "Survival of the the fittest" is a better statement for some pseudo-science like astrology than for something that claims to be actual science. It is a tautology. How would one disprove it? Find a species that wasn't fit that was still alive? Have the humans all commit suicide? But wait, I guess that would make us unfit. It is like saying "Tallness of the tallest", it doesn't add a single thing to the discussion, yet it is repeated as holy writ.

She points out that a random process would throw off TONS of "unfit or less fit" intermediate forms in it's unordered, undirected, non-striving way. There are no such forms in the fossil record. There are a lot of attempted excuses as to why not, and some hoaxes attempting to create some since the lack of such fossils is an extreme embarrassment. It would be as if Einstein did E=MC**2, pointed out what it should mean when we measured things to prove it, but then the things DIDN'T come to pass. For Einstein, the "theory" DID bear out (and still does) as more data could be gathered. For Darwin, it has not ... BUT, the godless liberals are left with no other creation story, so they keep using only one they have, and defending it harder.

She goes in detail through Piltdown Man, peppered moths and Nazi Earnst Haeckel with his drawing of the stages of embryo development mirroring the stages of evolution. His drawings are a hoax, but what is always funny to me is how often the left chooses to lift ideas that they like from Nazi's, then cover up that they are Nazi ideas, while in parallel trying to create links from people on the right to Nazis even where they don't exist, or are weak at best. They know what evil is, they want to use it when they can without taint, yet link the innocent with it whenever they can.

She closes off the book with a discussion of the obvious point that if there is no God, then there is no morality at all beyond the current whim of whomever can get power, and "survival of the fittest". Peter Singer, Princeton "ethics" professor that believes in infanticide and killing the "unfit elderly" for humans, "equal rights" for apes, not allowing humans to eat meat, but allowing beastiality; is used as an example of what "anything goes" really means. The MSM ignores that this man has written books on all these topics and still sits in a position at a major US university in spite of a few courageous folks like Steve Forbes stopping any of their funds from supporting the school as long as he holds his position. In the church of liberalism though, the only God is "anything goes", and Singer is an example of where we are headed if we don't heed the warnings that Ann Provides in this excellent (and fun) book.