April Foolishness

The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God." -- Psalm 14:1

This special edition of CarpeLanam is dedicated to the New Atheists... that rare breed whose motto should really be "There is no God... and we hate Him."

For sheer jaw-dropping audacity, I offer this quote from Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin (taken from Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great about Christianity, to be reviewed at a later time):

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 commitment 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.

I still have C.S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew fresh in my mind, so I can't help but wish a few of these philosophical atheists would join Uncle Andrew, be mistaken for a tree, and get planted (wrong-side up) by some talking animals of Narnia.  It might be the best thing that ever happened to them.

There were several runners-up:

• "Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist." -- Harry Reid, D-NV, decrying the defunding of a cowboy poetry festival.
• India's most recent census reveals a horrific imbalance: 623.7 million males to only 586.5 million women.  Girls are seen as a financial burden and female abortion and infanticide is distressingly common.  The long-run consequences of this are hard to predict, but they can hardly be good.
• The state government of California, for criminally irresponsible financial mismanagement and potholes in I-5 that make me wonder what it will look and feel like after another few years of neglect.  But hey, they have all the social services you could possibly desire.
• Nancy Pelosi and Patty Murray.  Just because this day makes me think of them.