A Blaze of Glory and A Chain of Thunder by Jeff Shaara

During the 150th anniversary of Gettysburg, I heard lots of recommendations of books related to the civil war. Somewhere, I heard about a set of fact-based fictional books telling the stories of the battles in the west. I read both A Blaze of Glory and A Chain of Thunder by Jeff Shaara. The third and fourth books are still to come.

A Blaze of Glory specifically deals with the Battle of Shiloh on the Tennessee/Alabama border. A Chain of Thunder details the siege of Vicksburg. Both use both actual historical figures as well as fictional characters. 

Because reality has a large cast of characters, the first book had me confused. Too many people with too similar names. I learned my lesson and in the second book I kept a list of characters and some identifying characteristics. This made the books so much more understandable. 

I recommend these books because telling history in this way can be much more memorable than a dry history book. I certainly learned a lot more about the two battles in a way that will stick better than simple facts and figures. In addition, he focuses on the battles in the West because the East got a lot more press. These battles my be known to us by name, but the details are few.

He treats both the Union and the Confederacy as equals, with no appearing to take sides. I realized after a while that he was jumping back and forth from one side to the other with each new chapter. This gave the book a “meanwhile, back at the farm” kind of feel that gave humanity and credibility to both groups. He details the thoughts and actions of both generals and townspeople, thereby linking these two diverse groups as well.

I’m curious to see what the next two books will be about. 

Darwin's Doubt by Stephen Meyer

I was so excited to read Darwin’s Doubt by Stephen C. Meyer. I’m not sure where I got the recommendation, but apparently many people have heard of Meyer and were interested in his book. It proved a fascinating read and I bookmarked it galore!

He explains the title and thesis of the book in the prologue, “This book addresses Darwin’s most significant doubt and what has become of it. It examines an event during a remote period of geological history in which numerous animal forms appear to have arisen suddenly and without evolutionary precursors in the fossil record, a mysterious event commonly referred to as the ‘Cambrian explosion.’ As he acknowledged in the Origin, Darwin viewed this event as a troubling anomaly -- one that he hoped future fossil discoveries would eventually eliminate.”

In short, has the Cambrian explosion been explained satisfactorily? Or does Darwin’s doubt still stand? The rest of the book explores various explanations and the reasons they fall short of explaining this perplexing period in the fossil record.

Despite Darwin’s theory of slow, gradual changes that he believed would show up in the fossil record, scientists are forced to confront an actual record in which, “the first animal forms seemed to spring into existence... as if from nowhere.” The problem of the Cambrian record is that, contrary to Darwin’s theory, whole phyla spring into existence and then diversify into orders, families, genus, and species. Darwin’s theory expostulate that the opposite would be true. The actual fossil record is upside-down compared to the theory.

Scientists, believing the theory before the facts, searched for some pre-Cambrian ancestor that would explain the explosion. They encountered a dilemma, however. The creatures of the Cambrian were highly differentiated. An ancestor that showed early traces of the specific differentiations could not be a common ancestor for all the wildly different phyla. An ancestor that was simple enough to conceivably evolve to all the other diversified life forms leave no evidence of evolving into the more complex creatures. Not only were there no “missing links,” logically, there couldn’t be. What kind of a creature could instantly give rise to a widely diversified group of animals?

Since the fossil record simply cannot and will not explain the Cambrian explosion, scientist postulated another theory of “deep divergence.” Basically the different anatomical features were percolating in the DNA, waiting to be expressed many generations later. Yet knowing what we do now about genes, this theory ran into serious problems. Even starting with the assumption that there MUST be a common ancestor, geneticists could not agree on the sequence in which the DNA evolved. Various attempts led to confusing and contradicting “timelines” of evolution. Deep divergence has proven to be a dead-end.

So back to the fossil record. Apparently, scientists cannot even agree on the basic “Tree of Life” we’ve seen in all the high school textbooks. Analyzing anatomical vs. molecular differences led to different evolutionary timelines. Differences in traits appear to be randomly distributed among different animal groups. Some animals are similar in one way and completely different in others, while being similar in other ways to a very different, unrelated group. This makes grouping them difficult enough, but to determine which trait came first has proved impossible. Basically all that the trees show is that we assume there IS a tree of animal divergence. They are not proof in themselves. 

The frustration of explaining the Cambrian explosion has led to the theory of punctuated equilibrium. Basically the theory states that evolution occurred in rapid stops and starts. Changes would be occurring under the surface only to pop out in what appears to be a great rush of new traits. But this theory suffers from lack of ANY intermediary specimens and the begs the question of HOW does this happen. Can changes burst on the scene as the theory proposes? Why does an organism keep genetic changes that are not manifest physically in the hope that someday they will be relevant? In addition, this contradicts Darwin who proposed natural selection, long periods of time, and multiple generations as the way traits are kept and passed on. If the trait is buried, waiting to burst out, what does natural selection have to work with? This theory simply returns us to where we began. 

Onto other issues that cannot explain the Cambrian explosion. Darwinists (or neo-Darwinists as they are called who deal with DNA and genes in a way Darwin could only speculate about) believe that given enough time and enough generations, the DNA will randomly combine to create a fortuitous adaption. Yet if DNA is the language of life, as it has been called, what other language can tolerate random changes without destroying meaning? He gave a great example to illustrate this. Suppose we start with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and seek to change it into Hamlet. These two are actually very similar and contain many of the same words and construction. Imagine making one or even multiple changes to Macbeth, that not only do not destroy the meaning, BUT ACTUALLY IMPROVE IT. Imagine if each change brings us closer to Hamlet. We also need to be careful, lest we at any time degrade the meaning, for that is the instant death of our project. And this is with an “intelligent designer.” Now imagine doing it randomly. It is simply not possible. In fact, random changes to the DNA to create meaningful and beneficial traits has been rejected because of its absolute impossibility. In Darwin’s time, when genes and DNA were as yet undiscovered, he can be forgiven for theorizing that random mutation was a possible explanation for evolution. Today’s scientists do not have that luxury. 

In addition, random beneficial adaptation alone are not enough to produce a trait that can be passed on. Just about every biological structure is so complex that it requires multiple components to function correctly. Can random genetic changes produce beneficial traits that are detrimental individually, but in concert produce good effects? Can evolution occur in different areas simultaneously and produce groups of characteristics? He likens it to improving a machine, while it is running! Imagine creating a better braking system on a car while driving it on the highway. This is the path to certain death. Yet evolutionists would have us believe that not only did these complex features arise in tandem, on-the-fly, without killing the host, but that it happened over and over again. This simply does not comport with reality.

In running the numbers to see if this kind of evolution, with only two coordinated mutations, is even possible, mathematicians found that it would require huge population sizes and/or extremely long waiting times. We would actually need times that far exceeded the evolutionary age of the earth or population sizes that far exceed the number of organisms that have ever existed. Obviously, this is a high hurdle. 

Yet scientists, working from a theory backward to find the facts, have repeatedly insisted that this is how life must have come into being. One Nobel-prize winning study showed the effects of induced mutations on fruit flies. The researchers were able to induce some pretty spectacular and interesting mutations, yet in every instance, all the mutants died or were sterile as a result. Not once did a mutation prove beneficial. And this was directed by intelligence. In fact they discovered a great paradox, “to evolve any body plan, mutations expressed early in the development must occur, must be viable, and must be stably transmitted to offspring...” Yet these kind of mutations have never been shown to be tolerated. Thus Darwinism fails within its own framework.

Meyer than goes on to catalogue the epigenetic revolution. This startling research tends to show that something other than and outside of DNA is driving embryonic development. The epigenetic revolution introduces a whole new level of complexity that Darwinists have to overcome. “If DNA isn’t wholly responsible for the way an embryo develops... then DNA sequences can mutate indefinitely and still not produce a new body plan, regardless of the amount of time and the number of mutational trials available to the evolutionary process.”  The more we know, the more Darwin’s concern about the Cambrian explosion becomes more of an obstacle.

In fact, now that we know that DNA is very hard to change at the embryonic level in a way that is beneficial, and that processes outside of DNA affect embryonic development, we have also discovered that the cells seem to have an ability to engineer genetic changes in order to remain viable. But rather than provide another possibility for evolutionist mechanisms, these facts just open up a whole new set of questions. Where did the cells get the information that allows them to pre-program and re-engineer their DNA?

Of course the obvious answer is that life has been designed. This would necessitate a designer. Some Darwinists acknowledge that life at least looks designed. But they insist that is an illusion, that random mutations and natural selection have the ability to mimic design. But what if it actually is designed?

Meyer introduces a logic that is part of the historical scientific method. Basically it logically analyzes backwards, since it is by definition trying to discover what happened in the past. He uses abductive reasoning to state: 

1. If the world was designed, it would look like the world we see. 
2. We see the world having the appearance of design. 
3. Therefore it’s possible that design has occurred. 

This form of reasoning cannot provide certainty, but only strong possibilities. Then we can compare all the competing theories to see which is most plausible. We must use a “cause now in operation” when engaging in historical reasoning. We can clearly see how design works in the world around us. We know our technology has been designed and no one would assume it just evolved naturally and randomly. We know we design with a pre-determined purpose. We know with the right information, we can create a code that works. In short, even the skeptic has to admit that the world looks and acts designed. Intelligent design appears to be the best answer to how the world came to look designed.

Meyer then details all the ways the theory of Intelligent Design (ID) answers the conundrum introduced with the Cambrian explosion. ID explains the “persistent morphological isolation of animal forms,” “the increase and layering of functional information,” “the ‘top-down’ pattern of appearance,” and “the discrete appearance of new innovation.” These are all features of the Cambrian explosion and features of designed systems.

Because science has limited itself to the natural and material, it has willfully blinded itself to the metaphysical as explanatory. It has willfully blinded itself because it chooses not to even consider the existence of the divine. Meyer includes this perfect quote from Richard Lewontin, 

     “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the  methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” 

But is it true science if it begins with preconceived notions of what is and what is not acceptable truth?

Imagine if science tolerated metaphysical explanations if they clearly provided coherent answers to the questions. Rather than focus of the “how” we might free ourselves to ask “why?” We might try to dive deeper in the purpose and meaning of our world. Rather than try to fit the facts into a pre-conceived Darwinian framework, we might wonder at the purposes of the Designer. Instead of calling DNA with no apparent purpose “junk DNA” we might come at the question a different way and ask, “What purpose could this DNA have that we haven’t discovered yet?” We would assume it is there for a reason. 

Imagine if we weren’t just an accidental combination of random mutations, but we had a purpose and a reason for existence. It would give meaning to our lives and to science as well. After all, why concern ourselves so much with the “how” when it is all ultimately meaningless anyways? Science has denigrated itself in declaring everything meaningless. ID offers a way to study science with wonder and a sense of marvel as we discover the “why’s.”

I recommend this book very highly, especially to anyone interested in science. It will blow you away! I barely touched on all he had to say!!

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong

I read The Case for God by Karen Armstrong because I generally love this kind of a book. However, this time, not so much. I only got about half way through.

I never got to “the case for God” part, apparently. It felt as if it was simply a history of religious belief in many cultures. 

One interesting chapter, entitled “Silence” detailed a peculiar practice by Christians. Since God is indescribable in any words, that is, they can only hint at the truth of who He is, but not accurately describe him, early Christians felt only silence could reflect truthfully on God. Interesting idea, however, in practice, it looks the same as an unbeliever. So while they make a point, I think God gave us language, inexact as it is, for a reason.

I’m not sure what I was supposed to get out the rest of the book, however.

Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

At 544 pages, Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore looked a little daunting. It was. I’m proud to say I finished it, but it was a long hard slug. I think the unfamiliarity with the history and names between the Biblical time and modern time bogged me down.

That being said, I definitely learned a lot about the history of the city of Jerusalem. 

Montefiore begins the story in the beginning. He begins with Joshua’s conquering of Canaan and march towards Jerusalem. However, he states early on that while he doesn’t find the Bible reliable as a source, it’s pretty much all we have. (He uses the two “contradictory” creation stories found in Genesis as one proof of this assertion. Strike one against him in my book. My bias is showing!). Yet he follows Biblical history and moves quickly into King David’s capture of Jerusalem. “After an extraordinary career that united the Israelites in cast Jerusalem as God’s city, David died, having ordered Solomon to build the Temple on Mount Moriah.” From this history the Jews have claimed Jerusalem as their heritage ever since.

Shortly after Solomon’s death, the kingdom of Israel split into Israel and Judah. The two tribes of Judah retained Jerusalem as their capital. The ten tribes of the northern Israel were conquered by the Assyrians and lost to history. The Kingdom of Judah remained, forming the basis of modern Jewish history. Later this southern kingdom was likewise conquered, but by the Babylonians who destroyed Solomon’s Temple. It was these exile conditions that turned the Jews into a distinct people. “Away from Judah, the Judaens were becoming Jews.” When the Persians conquered Babylon, Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and their homeland. Nehemiah led the rebuilding efforts and successfully defended Jerusalem against neighboring warlords. 

Soon Persia was crushed and Israel found itself under a new empire. Alexander the Great conquered the known world, but dying young, left the region of Israel in the hands of his general Ptolemy. “Jerusalem remained a semi-independent statelet within Ptolemy’s empire... She was not just a political entity but God’s own city ruled by the high priest.” But caught between the Ptolemy dynasty and that of the more northern Seleucid kingdom, Israel would be constantly under attack. Enter a Macedonian challenger, bent on reclaiming the whole of Alexander’s Empire, Antiochus the Great.  His son, Antiochus Epiphanes, would conquer Jerusalem and commit the infamous Abomination of Desolation, desecrating the Temple built by Nehemiah. The Maccabeans scored the famous victory celebrated by Hanukkah, but their power was short-lived.

Another empire, the Roman empire, soon entered the picture and ruled over Israel. They set up a lackey figure, Herod, as a puppet governor. The family of this half-breed Jew would continue to reign for generations. The cunning family knew how to pull the levers of power and ingratiated itself into with whoever was currently heading Rome. 

Into this cauldron of power struggles Jesus is born. Looking at the magnificent temple, rebuilt and remodeled by Herod, Jesus proclaimed, “And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the  desolation thereof is nigh... Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” Jesus foresaw a cataclysmic future for Jerusalem in which the temple was destroyed and the city was in the hands of the Gentiles for some period of time. Yet He appears to prophecy a day at the end of that time when the city would return into Jewish hands. Sure enough, in AD 70, the Romans, in order to quell a Jewish rebellion, destroy the Temple and send the Jews on a world wide diaspora. The gentiles owned Jerusalem. But the scattered Jews vowed year after year at the Passover celebration, “Next year in Jerusalem.” The dream never died.

But the Roman empire would not last forever either. A few hundred years later the empire split in two. Constantine took the reins of the eastern half, and became a Christian. His devout mother traveled to Jerusalem to visit the city where Jesus walked. She led a Christian devotion to the ancient city that exists to this day. As the Christian Roman empire battled to hold onto its land with the neighboring Arabs and Persians, “Jerusalem was about to suffer a rollercoaster epoch that would see her ruled by four different religions in twenty-five years: Christian, Zoroastrian, Jewish and Muslim.” 

The Persians triumphed in the region, but their reign over Jerusalem would soon be contested by the perennial assaults the Christian crusaders, anxious to return the Holy city to Christian hands. Throughout the history of the Crusades, Jerusalem would become ground zero of a perpetual tug-of-war between Christians and Muslims. In fact, because Jerusalem had become holy to the Jews, Christians and Muslims, many times, whoever was in power had to figure out a way to share the city peacefully. Since the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock sit where the Jews Temple once was, many Muslim overlords made sure to allow Jews and Christians times and places to worship in and around these Islamic treasures. Jerusalem would see itself overrun and disrupted time and again over the next several centuries. Peace was a chimera as the three biggest groups of believers, as well as smaller sects like the Armenians, constantly fought for control and access to the holy places. Religious pilgrims constantly flooded the city, leading to chaos and cacophony, while experiencing moving religious awakenings for those who basked in the holiness of the rubble.

This is the part of the book that became overwhelming to me. The writing was brilliant, and the research top-notch, but I simply couldn’t keep track of which faction was which and who was in charge. Basically, I believe that after short-lived Christian victories in the area during the Crusades, the Muslims and specifically the Ottoman Empire came to control Palestine. Some of the rulers were fair, others mistreated the minorities within their borders. But at no time did the Jews control their ancient capital. In fact, while a small contingent of Jews have always lived in Jerusalem, the Jewish concerns became quite secondary to those of the warring Christians and Muslims. 

By the 1600s, Puritan Christians in England began to take up the cause of the Jewish people, torn from their homeland centuries prior. This nascent Zionist movement believed the return of Christ would not occur until the Jews returned to Israel and were converted to Christianity. They glorified Jerusalem and imagined the prophesied return of the Chosen. “As the real Jerusalem decayed, the imaginary Jerusalem ignited Western dreams, encouraged by napoleon’s nasty little Middle eastern war, the decline of the Ottomans -- and the book that Chateaubriand wrote when he got home. His Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem set the tone of the European attitude to the Orient with its cruel but inept Turks, wailing Jews, and primitive but ferocious Arabs who tended to congregate in picturesque poses.” The Zionist fever swept over Britain and soon “a belief in a sacred return of the Jews to accelerate the Second Coming was almost British government policy.” The Prime Minister of the U.K., Benjamin Disraeli believed the best thing to do was buy the land from the Ottomans and restore it to the Jews.

Once again, Christians began flooding into the Holy Land. This time, not as Crusaders, but as evangelists and reformers. The 1800s saw a rise not only in British Protestant evangelism to the Jews, but in Russians protecting the Orthodox and the French protecting the Catholics. Quickly, the city took on international importance as many European nations, all of whom proclaimed Jerusalem under their protection, sent consuls and officials to meddle and reconfigure Jerusalem to suit their own vision. The tensions in the Holy City played out in the Crimean war against Russia by the British and the French. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the European nations fought a world war for control of the region. At this time, wealthy Jews from around the world began to take an interest in restoring their homeland and helping their besieged brethren. The Jews of Jerusalem had been relegated to potential converts or poverty cases. International Jews sought to rectify this injustice and create a strong Jewish faction in the city.

“Throughout her history, Jerusalem existed in the imagination of devotees who lived faraway in America or Europe. Now that these visitors were arriving on steamships in their thousands, they expected to find the exotic and dangerous, picturesque and authentic images they had imagined with the help of their Bibles, their Victorian stereotypes of race, and once they arrived, their translators and guides.” The real Jerusalem of the Arabs and Sephardic Jews was dismissed.  

As anti-Semitic violence grew in Europe at the turn of the century, leading Jews concluded they could not be safe without a homeland. The victims of pogroms, with visions of a utopian Jewish nation began to make their way to Palestine to organize a Zionist nation. One such Zionist, Dr. Chaim Weizmann was able to speak with the most powerful British ministers and win the backing of Britain for a radical plan - to carve out a Jewish nation from the ruins of the declining Ottoman Empire. As WWI commenced, it became in the best interests of the British to make Zionism their official policy. They needed the Jews of Russia and America to keep their respective countries on the side of Britain and against the Germans and their Ottoman allies. By the end of the war, the British troops had routed the Ottoman troops of Jerusalem and controlled the city.

Of course, in Jerusalem, nothing is easy. Riots broke out when the resident Arabs refused to surrender. After Britain regained control, established the Mandate and quieted the city, immigration exploded, both of Arabs and Jews. The large influx of Jews upset the delicate balance the city had enjoyed while the Jews were a small, persecuted minority. A new power-sharing arrangement was in order, but both sides became more entrenched in their respective desire to control the land. The unrest among the Arabs and Jews led the British to try to limit the Jewish immigration and offer the Palestinians their own state. This infuriated the Zionists under Ben-Gurion and was rejected by the Arabs. Now each group had a reason to hate each other as well as their British overlords. British attempts to stop the flood of Jewish immigrants into the territory in order to quell the rage of the Arabs occurred exactly when the Jews most needed the protection of a homeland - 1939. 

World War II raged in Palestine as well as the rest of the world. The British found Jerusalem to be ungovernable as the warring factions continued to attack them and each other. Once the war was over, and the horrors of the Holocaust known, the UN formed a committee to determine the fate of Palestine. David Ben-Gurion announced to the world, “The Declaration of the establishment of the State of... Israel. The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. We did it!” While the Jews of Jerusalem were overjoyed to be granted a UN sanctioned homeland, even one with indefensible borders, the Arabs immediately rejected the UN’s authority to carve up the land. The British departed, leaving the Jews to their fate. 

The surrounding Arab nations immediately attacked. After a nothing-short-of-a-miracle victory in the modestly named Six-Day War, the Jews settled into the business of governing their first sovereign homeland in almost 2000 years. The city of Jerusalem proper presented a challenge. While it was controlled by the Jews, the Arab holy sites sat on the Temple mount. The Israelis decided to give control of the mount to the Arabs while keeping the Western Wall for the Jews. After subsequent battle to retain their sovereignty over the land, the situation of the Jewish nation remains essentially unchanged.

Montefiore sums us the history of Jerusalem thusly: For 1,000 years, Jerusalem ws exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years,Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic; and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer.

To me, the astonishing thing is that the Jews finally regained their homeland after thousands of years out of power. The Bible prophecies this would happen. "So the LORD gave Israel all the land which He had sworn to give to their fathers, and they possessed it and lived in it. And the LORD gave them rest on every side, according to all that He had sworn to their fathers, and no one of all their enemies stood before them; the LORD gave all their enemies into their hand.” Joshua 21:43-44 Today some Christians claim the prophecy is not quite fulfilled because they do not have “rest on every side.” But I believe that today’s Israel is the most secure it has ever been in its 3,000 year history. Their army is feared and respected around the world. They have nuclear technology. Their scientists and engineers consistently rise to the top, world-wide. They have never had this level of control over their destiny since the time of Solomon. 

I think these verses sum it up:

      "Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things?

       Shall the Earth be made to give birth in one day?

       Or shall a nation be born at once?

       For as soon as Zion was in labor, she gave birth to her children."

       (Isaiah 66:8)   

  

     "He will set up a banner for the nations,

       and will assemble the outcasts of Israel,

       and gather together the dispersed of Judah

       from the four corners of the Earth."   

       (Isaiah 11:12)

     "Thus says the Lord God:

     ' Surely I will take the children of Israel

       from among the nations,

       wherever they have gone,

       and will gather them from every side

       and bring them into their own Land."

       (Ezekiel 37:21) 

    

     "And you, son of man, prophesy to the mountains of Israel,

       and say, ‘O mountains of Israel,

       hear the Word of the LORD ...’"

     "But you, O mountains of Israel,

       you shall shoot forth your branches

       and yield your fruit to My people Israel,

       for they are about to come . . ."

     "For I will take you (the children of Israel) from among the nations,

       gather you out of all countries,

       and bring you into your own Land."

       (Ezekiel 36:1, 8, 24)

     "Thus says the Lord GOD:

      ‘Surely I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, 

       wherever they have gone,

       and will gather them from every side

       and bring them into their own Land;’"

       (Ezekiel 37:21)

Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

I LOVE DOWNTON ABBEY! So when I discovered that the creator, Julian Fellowes, was an author, I immediately went to the library to check out one of his books. The first one available was entitled Past Imperfect. 

The novel is an interesting look at the time period just as the society portrayed in Downton Abbey began to collapse, contrasted with today. 

The main character is sent on a mission by an old “frenemy” to discover which old flame of his might or might not have had his baby. If the child, now 40 or so, exists, this eccentric millionaire plans to leave his estate to this heir.

Our narrator accepts the mission because he realizes it will give him a chance to re-encounter old friends and see what’s become of the group that played a large role in his life as a young man. 

As Fellowes jumps back and forth from the past to the present and back again, we encounter two very different worlds. In some ways, we are much the worse, but in others, we realize it was time for some changes. The manners and traditions and time-honored rituals have much to commend them, but the constrictiveness of the old ways certainly hamper those who do not fit in.

I like the book very much. I got somewhat confused by who was who. I should have kept a list of characters and salient facts. I was saddened by the loss that occurred without reflection. Change can be good and is necessary in some instances, but one needs to reflect on the costs incurred as a result of change. To give up that with is not perfect is not necessarily to replace it with the better. It’s possible to lose in the quest for the better and not realize the ramifications of the change until the loss is felt most painfully. 

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Reading The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, a self-described liberal atheist, is a breath of fresh air. He understands conservatives better than most conservatives understand themselves. I love truth and I love clarity (therefore I love Dennis Prager) and for those reasons, this book comes highly recommended. 

Jonathan Haidt is a social scientist, dismayed at the deepening differences between people on the right and left. Being a good liberal and atheist, he believed if only conservatives could be made to understand the liberal position, they would surely shift to the left. What he found however changed his life. Conservatives actually DO understand liberals. It is liberals who are limited by tunnel vision and do not understand conservatives. 

Jonathan Haidt believes humans possess what he calls a Righteous Mind, meaning, “human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical and judgmental.” The task he set for himself was to discover where this moralistic, critical and judgmental mind came from. How did it happen? Was it necessary and could it be changed? His scientific and evolutionary background kicked in as he researched and did his own studies to answer his many questions. Much of the book details those studies and the results. 

Being a good liberal, he assumed most people’s overriding moral concern was whether something was harmful or not. Yet this did not seem to encapsulate all morality. He started studying the source of the righteous mind by telling people “harmless” stories, meaning no one was hurt, yet they sounded wrong for some reason. His first set of stories included one about a family, whose beloved dog had just been accidentally killed by a car, deciding to eat the dog in the privacy of their home. No one else knew. Despite the lack of harm, he was curious about the immediate, visceral reaction of the participants. Without being able to say why, most just KNEW it was wrong. Maybe moral judgments weren’t as rational as scientists liked to think. 

He came to the conclusion, after much research, that moral judgments were far more instinctual than many believed. He developed the metaphor of a rider on an elephant. The rider is our rational brain. The elephant is our instinctual behaviors and beliefs. The rider can try to influence the elephant, but ultimately the elephant is in charge. In fact, most of our moral reasoning, comes AFTER belief, to justify it, and is mostly intended to convince others. Yet it rarely convinces the opposing side. They have their own elephants. It’s why George Will could write, “Hitherto, [conservatives] have thought that the most efficient way to evangelize the unconverted was to write and speak, exhorting those still shrouded in darkness to read conservatism’s most light-shedding texts. Now they know that a quicker, surer method is to have progressives wield power for a few years.” Rational arguments do not convince. Experience and instinct usually lead to moral beliefs. TIme and again, in study after study, he found that rationality was not the way humans reach moral conclusions. Intuition, instinct and “groupish” concerns play a far bigger role.

The more he studied this instinctual morality and looked at studies from around the world, the more he realized that the Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) society he was raised in was too narrowly focused when it came to moral issues. The rest of the world and those in America who were less WEIRD had a much fuller moral realm that consisted of far more than simple harm concerns. 

In fact, he came to discover six areas of what he called Moral Matrixes. These are values that often come into conflict and it is our instincts which naturally lead us to value one over another at a particular time and provide a hierarchy of values. However, while these moral matrixes seem universal to all humans and all cultures, different cultures place different emphasis and priority on different values. The WEIRD culture in particular valued what he labeled “Care” - that is reducing harm. Yet he found others also esteemed other values that liberals had neglected. 

His six matrixes are: 

Care/harm - Is someone being harmed?

Liberty/oppression - Is the government or some other group oppressing another?

Fairness/cheating - Are people being treated with proportionality and getting what they deserve?

Loyalty/betrayal - Does the behavior exhibit signs of loyalty, like patriotism?

Authority/subversion - Is someone subverting authority?

Sanctity/degradation - Are we violating something we as a society hold in high esteem?

Now the dog story could be explained. While no one was harmed, a family engaged in degrading behavior, subverting the community standards, and betraying the memory of their pet. 

The most interesting finding was that while liberals overwhelmingly valued Care/harm, and to a lesser extent Liberty/oppression (when a victim group can be found), and Fairness/ cheating (yet for liberals “fairness” is usually defined as equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity), conservatives valued all six, equally! Conservatives used a much broader matrix when deciding basic morality and weighed each concern against the others. So while liberals claim it is conservative who view the world in very black and white terms, it is actually liberals who judge two-dimensionally. (Yet another example of liberal projection.) He discovered that conservatives, far from simply being mean by not appearing to care about people who are being harmed, are actually concerned with a much farther reaching array of issues. They see “harm” occurring on multiple levels, not just to individual people. 

This explains why a good liberal will decry the use of “Merry Christmas” because it might harm a non-believer, whereas a conservative will understand that society is fragile and tearing down those things that unite it may cause much greater harm to the whole. Conservatives are the guardians of the group, while liberals bemoan the unavoidable injustices that occur to individuals in any society. It’s not that conservatives don’t recognize the harm to the individual. They do. It’s that conservatives see the trade offs involved in rectifying some of those harms. 

Interestingly, he did a study in which he asked people to describe their own views and also the views of the opposing group. Conservatives consistently nailed the liberal position while liberals consistently misunderstood conservatives. Because the moral calculus of the right includes the concerns of the left, the right understands those concerns. The left fails to even acknowledge that the other moral matrixes of the right even exist! So they have no way of empathizing with the positions.

After all his research into studies and philosophers, and his subsequent rethinking of his previous positions, he stumbled upon a book entitled “Conservatism” edited by Jerry Muller. He discovered that “conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed (yes, I thought...see chapter 4). Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience (yes...see chapter 2...and chapter 6). Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize but if we strip these institution of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie [lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or group] and social disorder (yes...see chapters 8 and 11)”

He described conservatism perfectly and was surprised to discover that conservatives were RIGHT!

Conservatives believe in the idea of moral capital. This refers to “the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.” Haidt further states that, “Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy. When we think about very large communities such as a nation, the challenge is extraordinary and the threat of moral entropy is intense . There is not a big margin for error.” 

This explains the panic conservatives feel when they see our nation turning from basic moral principles. The whole group is threatened. Liberals do not understand this because they do not see the bigger picture. Haidt believes, as a leftist, that the “fundamental blind spot of the left” is that they do not consider the effects of their changes on the moral capital of the group.  

In fact, contrary to the left’s usual description of the right as SIX HIRB [Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, Bigoted], he states, “A more positive way to describe conservatives is to say that their broader moral matrix allows them to detect threats to moral capital that liberals cannot perceive. They do not oppose change of all kinds, but they fight back ferociously when they believe that change will damage the institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family) Preserving those institutions and traditions is their most sacred value.” In fact, he comes to the conclusion that by focusing on a very narrow subset of the population that may be harmed by a tradition or institution, liberals risk lowering the overall welfare of the society and may actually hurt the very people they are intending to help.

As a good conservative, I say, “Duh!”

In a nutshell, here are his main points:

1. Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. (Think: rider and elephant)
2. There’s more to morality than harm and fairness. (Beware of moral monists who claim there is only one morality)
3. Morality binds and blinds. (The groupish parts of ourselves ties us to our “team” and it’s hard to separate that out)

Finally, he uses the concept of Yin/Yang to show that the left and the right need each other. The left is good at pointing out the places where the valued traditions and institutions of society may be causing harm. But the right is needed to protect that precious and fragile moral capital. This is a beautiful concept, but it only works if each side clearly sees their role. The left needs to understand that they have a role pointing out harms, but at the same time recognize that the right can have real qualms about the trade-offs involved. The left needs to recognize that it’s not that the right doesn’t care. It’s that the right correctly perceives additional problems can result from the left’s solutions. We are far from this understanding. I think the right basically understands this. After all it is the right that is highly demonized. The left is simply thought to be bleeding-hearts and naive. The right is continuously portrayed as evil.

The right has warned for decades that our social fabric is fraying. They see society as a Jenga tower. If you continue to pull out the pieces, eventually the whole thing crumbles. But we seem to believe the warnings will continue indefinitely. Yet if conservatives are right, one day the final piece will be pulled and the whole thing will crumble. I fear that day has past. Unfortunately Frank Luntz, the famous researcher of attitudes and beliefs, has fallen into a deep funk since Obama’s reelection. He is starting to grasp that we may have gone too far. We may have finally sunk this ship. The attitudes of entitlement he is seeing has him scared and hopeless. Unfortunately all the warnings begin to sound like the boy who cried wolf. So we shut them off and drown them out. We won’t know it’s too late until it’s too late.

Proof of Heaven by Dr. Eben Alexander

I’m fascinated by stories of the afterlife. So when I heard Dr. Eben Alexander being interviewed by Dennis Prager about his book Proof of Heaven, I paid close attention! The subtitle is “A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.” That pretty much explains the premise of the book.

This short, quick read begins with the immediate cause of his near death experience (NDE). He experienced flu-like symptoms, a splitting headache, and back pain out of the blue. After being rushed to the emergency room when a slight touch caused overwhelming pain, he slipped into a coma. The cause was determined, after much testing, to be the extremely rare bacterial meningitis caused by E. coli. With the seriousness with which he presented, his odds of dying shot up to 97% by his 6th day in the coma. His odds of full recovery were so slight as to be called a miracle by his doctor.

Because of the bacteria invading his spinal system, his brain was “bathed in pus” and inoperable in all but the most basic functions. For all intents, the parts of the brain that made him human and himself were inoperable. Therefore, his experiences cannot be explained by some kind of random firings in the brain producing strange visions. (He goes into extensive medical hypothesis for what happened and then debunks them in an appendix.)

He first passed through a very earthy level and time ceased to have meaning. He called this the earthworm view level. He moved to another level, what he called a kind of brilliant darkness filled with living sound. And although he heard no words, he was immediately filled with the thought “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.” In fact, he felt bathed in love. Soon he was able to move to an even higher level full of orbs of light and joy and more music. This is where he felt he experienced God. At some point in his journey, he realized he had a mysterious guide with him. A beautiful girl riding with him on the wings of a butterfly. Yet he felt no sense of himself either. He had no memory of earth or family or even his own identity. He was just part of and connected to the whole universe.

He began to understand things as he had never understood them before. He experienced answers to questions before they could be asked. He felt that truth was so much bigger than we on earth had ever even imagined. And this from a highly educated man. 

Upon his return, he states, “To say that there is a chasm between our current scientific understanding of the universe and the truth as I saw it is a considerable understatement... The physical side of the universe is as a speck of dust compared to the invisible and spiritual part. In my past view, spiritual wasn’t a word that I would have employed during a scientific conversation. Now I believe it is a word that we cannot afford to leave out.”

Although he begins as an unbeliever, he comes back with a deep knowledge of God, whom he refers to as Om. “One of the biggest mistakes people make when they think about God is to imagine God as impersonal. Yes, God is behind the numbers, the perfection of the universe that science measures and struggles to understand. But -- again, paradoxically -- Om is ‘human’ as well -- even more human than you and I are. Om understands and sympathizes with our human situation more profoundly and personally than we can even imagine because Om knows what we have forgotten, and understands the terrible burden it is to live with amnesia of the Divine for even a moment.” 

The ramifications of this statement in light of Scripture are very interesting. Hebrews says we have a High Priest who understands us. Jesus, for the brief moment He is disconnect from the Father on the cross, cries out in despair. That forsakenness is worse than the physically pain He is enduring. Yet we live disconnected from God on a daily business. Oh how much we have lost. 

After 6 days in the coma, Eben’s family began to prepare for his death. They went into his room to pray once more, begging his body to kick in and restart his brain. As they looked deeply into his face, looking for any sign of recovery, he suddenly opened his eyes! 

While it took a little while for him to regain his previous state, he is now fully recovered and determined to share the reality of what he experienced. He first wrote all he experienced and then began to research the phenomenon of NDEs. He wanted to document what he went through before being tainted or influenced by others’ experiences. 

While sharing his story with a doctor friend, most of whom had reacted the way he would have - with skepticism, he saw a strange look pass the man’s face. Finally the friend felt free to detail his own experience with a NDE. His father, dying and in pain for years, suddenly became lucid. He began speaking to the air, but it became clear he was conversing with his long-dead mother. At this point, the friend told his dad it was O.K. It was time to go. The old man closed his eye, fell asleep, and never woke up. Up until this time, the man had no one to share this bizarre story with. Now he had found a kindred spirit.

One thing, however bothered Eben. He did not see anyone he knew on the other side. No one greeted him. No long-dead relatives welcomed him home. He attributed this to the complete loss of identity he experienced and wondered if that was what allowed him to bypass that stage. 

Two years before the coma, he had contacted his biological family (he was adopted as an infant) and found he had full siblings. One had died before he had a chance to meet her. Four months after recovering from the meningitis, they finally sent him a photo of the lost sister. He realized he was looking into the face of his angelic guide! He now felt whole and that he had come full circle. 

His book is a very quick read, very interesting, and very believable. Although his experience on the other side sounds quite fantastical, could it be any other way? Does it meet up exactly with our preconceived notions of heaven? Nope. But parts of his journey ring true to Scripture and serve to illuminate phrases like “caught up into the third heaven” and “being in the spirit.” We see why Paul said it was unlawful for him to describe what he saw when he experience an NDE. How could he accurately describe something that conforms to no known laws on earth? His experience was quite literally “unlawful.” Will we all experience what Dr. Alexander did? I really don’t think so, but he discovered what he needed to discover and returned to spread what he calls, the good news!