Dennis Prager's case for God

I think, after today, I'm going to try to stop writing about Dennis Prager. I have conservative friends who deeply respect him, and I admit to being somewhat confused by that: To me, his liberals are always straw man liberals (who always seem to be pulling the country toward Stalinism) and his atheists are always straw man atheists. We won't even talk about his straw woman feminists. There's always an audience for such things, of course, but the people who give credence to Prager are usually thoughtful. I'm obviously missing something.

If Prager has or attempts a moral imagination that lets him consider lives and viewpoints other than his own in non-hyperbolic, non-stereotypical fashion, it is not evident in his writing. And while I admit that my conservative friends might say the same thing about me from time to time, the effect of Prager's style is that it is impossible to really constructively disagree. That means he's mostly irritating, and almost never—in my experience—thought provoking.

His style is on display in an NRO column about why the Higgs Boson discovery is meaningless, particularly if there is no religious belief accompanying it.

One must have a great deal of respect for the atheist who recognizes the consequences of atheism: no meaning, no purpose, no good and evil beyond subjective opinion, and no recognition of the limits of what science can explain.

Prager's case for God boils down to this: Without God there is no meaning, therefore God. 


In other words: He starts from a debatable premise, then makes a conclusion that doesn't necessarily proceed from the premise.

I don't want to be an evangelistic agnostic. If Dennis Prager finds his meaning in the existence of God, well, good for him. I suspected he's joined by the vast majority of Americans, the vast majority of people. And again: Good for them.

But it seems that what Prager is ultimately saying is that my life is meaningless, probably even to me, because I don't infuse it with religious belief. And I reject that idea: Yes, my first years out of the church were a little confusing because I'd relied on that framework for such a long time. Since I left the church, I've gotten married and, with my wife, had a son. I endured a couple of tough years, and somehow didn't throw myself off a bridge. These are not acts of nihilism. I take satisfaction and find meaning in them, but I don't attribute a Larger Meaning to them. That's OK.

I also recognize that Prager and folks who think like him might think I protest too much. That's OK, too.

'The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama': A discussion

The following is a chat transcript with my friend Lex Friedman about Tom Junod's Esquire piece examining how President Obama uses drone warfare—and how his actions might be infringing on American civil liberties.

Lex: So I read that long long piece you linked yesterday.

  About the Lethal Presidency.

  I am above making a joke about how the worse crime by far is the overwrought writing style the author brought to the piece.

 me: Heh. Fair enough.

9:24 AM Lex: I understand the author's argument.

  But I do not agree.

 me: How so?

9:25 AM Lex: I see targeted killings as he (negatively-ish) paints the administration as seeing them: an evolved form of war. Instead of killing soldiers with little stake in the battle, or putting our own soldiers with limited stakes at direct daily risk, you go for the people who are actively involved in plotting against you.

9:26 AM If we grant the president the right to send troops to fight wars—and we do!—then we're trusting him with lots of lives on both sides.

  If this approach means that fewer people die overall, which I think it does, I like it.

9:27 AM me: There are two issues, one narrower but perhaps more important.

 Lex: That said, I probably come down on the wrong answer on this question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

9:28 AM me: Three, three issues. American citizenship, Obama's honesty, and blowback.

9:29 AM Lex: I gotta tell you, the American citizenship issue doesn't faze me at all. Plenty of Americans criticize America all day. If anyone, American or not, is inciting or directing violence against Americans, I don't treat those instigators any differently from anyone else inciting same.

9:31 AM me: The first is the biggest: The president has reserved to himself the right to assassinate an American citizen who is not currently engaged in the field of battle. He's furthermore done that without an explanation of the legal standards involved beyond a "trust me" vibe that sets a bad precedent. I don't trust individuals; I trust processes. We don't know what the processs is. And I don't trust Obama's successors, particularly, to have the power that his precedent grants them--at least not without some ability to restrain or review it. There's a saying in the legal profession: "Hard cases make bad law." Well, al-Awlaki's assassination might be making bad law for the rest of us.

9:33 AM 
2. Obama's honesty: The administration has reported that civilians aren't really killed in these attacks. Part of the way it arrives at that conclusion is by deciding that any "military-aged male" in the vicinity of a targeted bad guy is ipso facto a bad guy. Maybe, but maybe not. That underlying assumption reduces my trust in the president.

 Lex: Even that argument doesn't faze me. Whether Obama makes it a policy/precedent or not, the next better or worse guy could have done the same. There was no precedent for preemptive strikes until W made it. My point being, president precedent doesn't mean much to me, because any new president can set it.

9:35 AM me: 3. Blowback: The use of drones is narrower and more targeted than sending armies to conquer foreign lands. But if your family is on the receiving end of a bomb, it's not going to feel narrower. It only takes a few pissed-off individuals to make an attack of some kind, and I fear that the parameters of the drone war have grown so expansive that the benefits of "narrowly" targeting individuals have been somewhat diminished. That's my weakest argument, because there ARE bad guys out there, but it remains a concern.

9:36 AM Regarding precedent: You're right, to an extent, but also not: Precedent does matter: Even the George W. Bush felt compelled to couch his actions by citing instances from World War II and the Civil War.

9:37 AM And here's the thing: I wouldn't have trusted George W. Bush with these powers. I didn't. So I'm hard-pressed for a logical reason (other than my faith in the good-guyness of Obama) to trust this president with them either. In fairness, I don't think I can.

9:38 AM Lex: I didn't trust W sending the forces of which he was commander in chief into battle.

9:39 AM I'm opposed to all state-sponsored killing, really. I oppose the death penalty, I oppose war, I don't like any of it. The idea that we can kill people, as a nation, frightens and disgusts me all the time. But I recognize that in the current world order, it's not going away any time soon / ever.

  And if the options are the Old Way and the New Way, I prefer the New Way.

  Even if the New Way merely puts a dent in the Old Way.

9:42 AM me: Hey: I'm a lapsed Mennonite. My instincts are still toward pacifism, but I also recognize that's not the way the world works. Maybe what Obama is doing is the best we can realistically hope for. And for that matter, I'll even concede that the Bush Administration—while it gleefully grabbed for a chance to strengthen presidential prerogatives—also had a deep fear of inadvertently allowing another 9/11. The incentives are aligned toward security, not civil liberties. But I don't want to surrender the civil liberties without a fight.

9:43 AM Lex: I naively support civil liberties for good people, and not for people who want to kill good people.

  I say "naively" because someone has to decide which are the good people.

  I think it's a guarantee no president will ever order a drone strike against a friend of mine.

 me: Right. We do civil liberties for everybody, in part, so that good people can feel free to exercise their goodness.

9:44 AM And in most cases, there's a defined process for denying the bad guys of their liberties. When it's skipped or fudged, that's when I get nervous.

Latest podcast: Robert Draper

Ben and I chatted with Robert Draper for the latest podcast, on his newest book about the House of Representatives. It's a good read, and a good discussion. Take a listen here.

Netflix Queue: 'Goon'

Not a bad flick. Not a masterpiece, but it's the kind of thing I can see 17-year-old guys gathering in basements to watch for the next couple of decades:



I'm not really a hockey fan, and it's hard to watch this movie without thinking of guys who have sacrificed their health--and maybe even their lives--to this kind of way of living. But 'Goon' does (or almost does) one really interesting thing: It asks us to consider the options available to people who simply aren't that gifted. For Sean William Scott's Doug Glatt, the option is to fight. And that's about it. We're allowed to see him use that option as a kind of triumph for the little guy. But it's hinted to us--through Liev Schreiber's character--that what comes after isn't so pretty. But mostly we're meant to have a good time, so those themes are touched upon lightly. Like I said: Not a great movie. But not the worst, either, if you're prepared to stomach some extreme profanity and a little ultraviolence.

How books—even cookbooks—make our worlds bigger.

I felt a sense of loss this morning, reading in the New York Times that the western wildfires had destroyed the Flying W Ranch in Colorado.

Why the loss? I'd never personally visited the ranch. As a child, my mom had the "Cow Country Gourmet" cookbook—essentially a compilations of recipes from the Flying W Ranch. It seems to me that she used it regularly, though my memory might be faulty on that front.

But I remember staring at the cover from time to time: What kind of world did it come from, that one could have a sit-down dress-up dinner under the open sky? Next to cattle? In front of a teepee?

 I've never personally opened the cookbook to make a recipe from it. Yet that cover, which got a little bedraggled over the years, burned itself into my mind's eye. It made the Flying W Ranch—or some fantasy version of it, at least—a part of my childhood. I am sad to see it go.

Netflix Queue: 'Wing Chun'

Yes, we've been watching a lot of Chinese movies lately. Here's one of my favorites on Netflix: It's got young Michelle Yeoh, young Donnie Chen—in the only movie that I've seen of his in which I find him halfway charming—and orchestrating it all: Woo-ping Yuen, the man who choreographed the stunts in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the "Matrix" films, and "Kill Bill." This early-1990s pic doesn't have the production values of those films—listen to the cheesey soundtrack music above—but the fight choreography is inventive. Don't expect anything epic or narratively complex: This is a light comic piece in the tradition of "The Legend of the Drunken Master." It's a trifle, but a fun, well-made trifle.

'Jayhawkers' on Kickstarter

I'm not in the habit of pimping my friends' work, as a rule, but my former Lawrence Journal-World colleague Jon Niccum contacted me to let me know about a movie project he's working on—one that's crowdsourcing its funding from Kickstarter.

The movie is called "Jayhawkers," and yes it's got some University of Kansas stuff going on, but it also sounds pretty cool. It tells the story of how Wilt Chamberlain went to KU—changing not only college basketball, but helping alter race relations in Lawrence, Kan.:

The movie’s emotional climax comes during the triple overtime 1957 National Championship bout between the Jayhawks and their bitter rivals from The University of North Carolina, a game that is decided in the final seconds, and one that has been called the greatest in college history.

Jayhawkers tells the powerful fable of how a small group of unlikely allies modernized college sports and changed a small Midwestern town, serving as a parallel to the Civil Rights movement that would transform an entire American society.

The director is Kevin Wilmott, who is on faculty at KU, but who has also done a fair amount of film work—including the acclaimed movie "CSA: The Confederate States of America" that reimagined American life as if the Confederates had won the Civil War.

The producers are trying to raise $50,000 in production costs. I've pledged a little bit; if you think the movie or its production team sound interesting, they can use the help. The deadline is Aug. 2.