Affadavit

AFFIDAVIT

STATE OF FLORIDA

COUNTY OF PINELLAS

BEFORE ME the undersigned authority personally appeared CARLA SAUER IYER, R.N., who being first duly sworn, deposes and says:

1. My name is Carla Sauer Iyer. I am over the age of eighteen and make this statement of my own personal knowledge.

2. I am a registered nurse in the State of Florida, having been licensed continuously in Florida from 1997 to the present. Prior to that I was a Licensed Practical Nurse for about four years.

3. I was employed at Palm Garden of Largo Convalescent Center in Largo, Florida from April of 1995 to July 1996, while Terri Schiavo was a patient there.

4. It was clear to me at Palm Gardens that all decisions regarding Terri Schiavo were made by Michael Schiavo, with no allowance made for any discussion, debate or normal professional judgment. My initial training there consisted solely of the instruction "Do what Michael Schiavo tells you or you will be terminated." This struck me as extremely odd.

5. I was very disturbed by the decision making protocol, as no allowance whatsoever was made for professional responsibility. The atmosphere throughout the facility was dominated by Mr. Schiavo's intimidation. Everyone there, with the exception of several people who seemed to be close to Michael, was intimidated by him. Michael Schiavo always had an overbearing attitude, yelling numerous times such things as "This is my order and you're going to follow it." He is very large and uses menacing body language, such as standing too close to you, getting right in your face and practically shouting.

6. To the best of my recollection, rehabilitation had been ordered for Terri, but I never saw any being done or had any reason at all to believe that there was ever any rehab of Terri done at Palm Gardens while I was there. I became concerned because nothing was being done for Terri at all, no antibiotics, no tests, no range of motion therapy, no stimulation, no nothing. Michael said again and again that Terri should NOT get any rehab, that there should be no range of motion whatsoever, or anything else. I and a CNA named Roxy would give Terri range of motion anyway. One time I put a wash cloth in Terri's hand to keep her fingers from curling together, and Michael saw it and made me take it out, saying that was therapy.

7. Terri's medical condition was systematically distorted and misrepresented. When I worked with her, she was alert and oriented. Terri spoke on a regular basis while in my presence, saying such things as "mommy," and "help me." "Help me" was, in fact, one of her most frequent utterances. I heard her say it hundreds of times. Terri would try to say the word "pain" when she was in discomfort, but it came out more like "pay." She didn't say the "n" sound very well. During her menses she would indicate her discomfort by saying "pay" and moving her arms toward her lower abdominal area. Other ways that she would indicate that she was in pain included pursing her lips, grimacing, thrashing in bed, curling her toes or moving her legs around. She would let you know when she had a bowel movement by flipping up the covers and pulling on her diaper.

8. When I came into her room and said "Hi, Terri", she would always recognize my voice and her name, and would turn her head all the way toward me, saying "Haaaiiiii" sort of, as she did. I recognized this as a "hi", which is very close to what it sounded like, the whole sound being only a second or two long. When I told her humorous stories about my life or something I read in the paper, Terri would chuckle, sometimes more a giggle or laugh. She would move her whole body, upper and lower. Her legs would sometimes be off the bed, and need to be repositioned. I made numerous entries into the nursing notes in her chart, stating verbatim what she said and her various behaviors, but by my next on-duty shift, the notes would be deleted from her chart. Every time I made a positive entry about any responsiveness of Terri's, someone would remove it after my shift ended. Michael always demanded to see her chart as soon as he arrived, and would take it in her room with him. I documented Terri's rehab potential well, writing whole pages about Terri's responsiveness, but they would always be deleted by the next time I saw her chart. The reason I wrote so much was that everybody else seemed to be afraid to make positive entries for fear of their jobs, but I felt very strongly that a nurses job was to accurately record everything we see and hear that bears on a patients condition and their family. I upheld the Nurses Practice Act, and if it cost me my job, I was willing to accept that.

9. Throughout my time at Palm Gardens, Michael Schiavo was focused on Terri's death. Michael would say "When is she going to die?," "Has she died yet?" and "When is that bitch gonna die?" These statements were common knowledge at Palm Gardens, as he would make them casually in passing, without regard even for who he was talking to, as long as it was a staff member. Other statements which I recall him making include "Can't you do anything to accelerate her death - won't she ever die?" When she wouldn't die, Michael would be furious. Michael was also adamant that the family should not be given information. He made numerous statements such as "Make sure the parents aren't contacted." I recorded Michael's statements word for word in Terri's chart, but these entries were also deleted after the end of my shift. Standing orders were that the family wasn't to be contacted, in fact, there was a large sign in the front of her chart that said under no circumstances was her family to be called, call Michael immediately, but I would call them, anyway, because I thought they should know about their daughter.

10. Any time Terri would be sick, like with a UTI or fluid buildup in her lungs, colds, pneumonia, Michael would be visibly excited, thrilled even, hoping that she would die. He would call me, as I was the nurse supervisor on the floor, and ask for every little detail about her temperature, blood pressure, etc., and would call back frequently asking if she was dead yet. He would blurt out "I'm going to be rich!," and would talk about all the things he would buy when Terri died, which included a new car, a new boat, and going to Europe, among other things.

11. When Michael visited Terri, he always came alone and always had the door closed and locked while he was with Terri. He would typically be there about twenty minutes or so. When he left Terri would would be trembling, crying hysterically, and would be very pale and have cold sweats. It looked to me like Terri was having a hypoglycemic reaction, so I'd check her blood sugar. The glucometer reading would be so low it was below the range where it would register an actual number reading. I would put dextrose in Terri's mouth to counteract it. This happened about five times on my shift as I recall. Normally Terri's blood sugar levels were very stable due to the uniformity of her diet through tube feeding. It is my belief that Michael injected Terri with Regular insulin, which is very fast acting.

12. The longer I was employed at Palm Gardens the more concerned I became about patient care, both relating to Terri Schiavo, for the reasons I've said, and other patients, too. There was an LPN named Carolyn Adams, known as "Andy" Adams who was a particular concern. An unusual number of patients seemed to die on her shift, but she was completely unconcerned, making statements such as "They are old - let them die." I couldn't believe her attitude or the fact that it didn't seem to attract any attention. She made many comments about Terri being a waste of money, that she should die. She said it was costing Michael a lot of money to keep her alive, and that he complained about it constantly (I heard him complain about it all the time, too.) Both Michael and Adams said that she would be worth more to him if she were dead. I ultimately called the police relative to this situation, and was terminated the next day. Other reasons were cited, but I was convinced it was because of my "rocking the boat."

13. Ms. Adams was one of the people who did not seem to be intimidated by Michael. In fact, they seemed to be very close, and Adams would do whatever Michael told her. Michael sometimes called Adams at night and spoke at length. I was not able to hear the content of these phone calls, but I knew it was him talking to her because she would tell me afterward and relay orders from him.

14. While at Palm Gardens, I became fearful for my personal safety. This was due to Michael's constant intimidation, including his menacing body language, vocal tone and mannerisms.

15. I have contacted the Schindler family because I just couldn't stand by and let Terri die without the truth being known.

Your Lying Eyes

As I noted in an essay some weeks ago, people who support evolution have a wondrously strange habit of using language that is diametrically opposed to their meaning. Now, we see this same tendency coming to the fore again, only this time the consequences are somewhat more immediate.
The problem revolves around the meaning of the phrase “vegetative state.” According to the National Institutes of Health, “a persistent vegetative state (commonly, but incorrectly, referred to as "brain-death") sometimes follows a coma. Individuals in such a state have lost their thinking abilities and awareness of their surroundings, but retain non-cognitive function and normal sleep patterns…. Spontaneous movements may occur, and the eyes may open in response to external stimuli. They may even occasionally grimace, cry, or laugh. Although individuals in a persistent vegetative state may appear somewhat normal, they do not speak and they are unable to respond to commands.”
Note that the NIH definition does not say the individual is dead. It merely describes an inability to communicate. This distinction appears to be lost on many. Instead, today’s commentators on the situation want to have it both ways. They want to insist that Terry Schiavo is both alive and dead, sometimes insisting on both in the same sentence.
Take, for instance, Ronald Bailey, Reason’s science correspondent: “So is Terri Schiavo still alive? The odds are way against it. It's time that her long-suffering parents and the grandstanding politicians let her go in peace.”
Or Michael Schiavo himself: "Terri died 15 years ago. It's time for her to be with the Lord like she wanted to be."
Now these statements, and all the statements like it, are absurd. Simply put, there are only two possibilities here: either Theresa Schiavo is a person or she is not there at all - her body is a rather unusual corpse. Despite what biological evolutionists might say to the contrary, there is nothing in between. Either the entity under discussion is a person or not.
Death is the separation of human soul from human body. When the soul leaves the body, the person is no longer in the body. The soul is the organizing principle of the body. When the soul leaves the body, the body decays back into the dust from which it was made. That is death - the divorce of soul and body, the divorce of two entities that were meant to be indissolubly joined. Divorce is a concept that Michael Schiavo and his supporters don't seem to understand very well.
If Terri Schiavo is no longer there, then it matters little what happens to her body. She’s already gone. Her body could be slapped around, burned, kicked like a football, what difference would it make to Terri? She isn't there. If Terri isn't there, Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers are both arguing over a corpse and have been for the last several years. You can’t torture a corpse. You can’t rouse the peacefulness of a corpse. Corpses don’t suffer. Whether her parents get her corpse back or Michael incinerates her corpse today while it still moves, laughs, grimaces, makes no difference at all.
If, on the other hand, her soul has not left her body, then Michael Schiavo is trying to murder Terri and the courts are going along with it.

There is no gray in this matter.
So, why do so many of those who support the removal of the feeding tube insist on using language that both denies and implies that Terri is “there”? For the same reason the evolutionists intentionally use distorting language. They want us to empathize with what it would be like to be in Terri’s state. But that isn’t possible.
If we were in Terri’s state, according to their own testimony, we wouldn’t be aware of it because we wouldn’t be in our bodies at all. We would either be somewhere else (assuming God exists), or we simply wouldn’t be (assuming He doesn’t). This whole argument is not just an attempt to deny Terri's personhood, it is actually much more subtle than that. It is an attempt to pretend that personhood is subject to evolution, that there are various grades, states, levels of personhood.
The assertion is interesting in one respect. The only individuals who have ever raised such an argument have been totalitarians.
Stalin believed there were kulaks and peasants. Kulaks exploited peasants. Kulaks were blood-sucking parasites (his phrasing) and had to be destroyed. Hitler, of course, believed in exactly this distinction, this caste system, even this phrasing, in reference to the groups he disliked as well. Hinduism accepts this kind of gradation among its people, insisting that ninety-five percent of the population exists in order to serve as slaves to the Brahmin caste of the enlightened five percent. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was built on a caste system of Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons, each level less human than the one above it.
The concept is absolutely ludicrous and completely at odds with the facts of Judeo-Christian truth. It is also in perfect harmony with the mindset created by modern science. Ever since the French Revolution, many proponents of science have explicitly attempted to destroy Christianity, the mother who gave science birth. Unfortunately, by attempting to supplant the system of thought that made science possible, scientists have been forced to adopt language that is self-refuting.
Science cannot determine intention, it can never be more than neutral on the subject. However, it also cannot conceive of the universe as purposeless nor is it able to create a purposeless language to describe it.
This is not surprising. Language embodies purpose. We communicate for reasons, not for randomness. It is not possible to describe the universe as lacking in purpose precisely because the use of language presupposes the existence of purpose. Because we are unable to describe a universe without a purpose, and because science cannot determine intention, we know there is an aspect of human knowledge which science cannot plumb. This fact enrages the humanistic rationalists no end. It means science is incomplete. It means God must exist.
We are told that the responses Terry Schiavo makes to her surroundings are random, not directed, that she cannot communicate. Many people have gone to great lengths to insist on this point over and over again for the last several years. Notice that this kind of insistence is rarely necessary when we view a corpse. By the very fact that these movements have to be interpreted again and again, by the very fact that we need to be constantly reminded that what we see is not real, we are reminded of the story of the adulterous man caught in the act by his wife. “Who are you going to believe, honey?" said the man as he looked up from his harlot, "Me, or your lying eyes?”
This debate has been an interesting intellectual exercise, in the sense that watching a man manipulate the placement of a pea beneath several small shells is an interesting intellectual exercise. But, as with the shell game, the point of the current debate is to take something by trickery that cannot be taken in justice. The question is a good one. Who are you going to believe?

End of the Road

What do Judge Moore, Sandra Cano and Norma Jean McCorvey have in common with Terry Schiavo? Each has become a principle actor in the legal test for how far the law can lie.

Private Lies Smash the Law
When Norma Jean McCorvey, the Roe in Roe v. Wade, approached lawyers in order to get an abortion, she lied about how her child had been conceived, asserting she had been gang-raped. Stoned or drunk during most of the proceedings, she never actually got the abortion. She gave her child up for adoption instead. But, when she discovered that her case had gone all the way to the Supreme Court and had resulted in legal abortion in all fifty states, she twice attempted suicide. She was disgusted by how far her lie had been taken. She did not want her name, even in a pseudonym, to be associated with that kind of mass slaughter.

Sandra Cano, the Doe in Doe v. Bolton, had an even worse experience. She wasn’t the one who lied: her lawyers were. All she wanted was a divorce from her husband and custody of her children. Her lawyers forged documents in order to mislead the courts into accepting a case on abortion. They carried this lie all the way to the Supreme Court, duping everyone along the way. The Supreme Court ruling was based on a complete fabrication, but no one knew it except the lawyers who had invented the lie.

Nothing Smashes the Law
Ironically in the summer of 2003, the same summer that both Cano and McCorvey returned to the courts seeking overturn their own Supreme Court victories, another legal controversy erupted. The case of Judge Moore and the placement of the Ten Commandments in his own courthouse eventually resulted in his removal from the bench.

Now, keep this in mind: the legal principle that ostensibly evicted Judge Moore is found nowhere in the law at all. While the Constitution says the federal government may not make a law concerning religion, it does not anywhere say that Church and state must be separate or separated, nor does any other law make such a statement. The celebrated “wall of separation” is simply a personal opinion expressed by Thomas Jefferson in a private letter. It exists nowhere else. Thus, it does not even carry the interpretative weight of the Federalist Papers, the public discussion of Constitutional principles carried on by the Founding Fathers in the newspapers of the day. Judge Moore was removed from his position precisely because he did not disobey any known US law.

Public Lies Smash the Law
Now, watch the progression. Norma Jean McCorvey knowingly lied to her lawyers. Sandra Cano didn’t lie to her lawyers, rather her lawyers lied to both her and the courts. In Judge Moore’s case, it was no longer lawyers who were lying – now it was the judges. Other courts publicly lied about the content of the law itself. But in Terry Schiavo’s case, we have reached the end of the road. Now, the court isn’t even bothering to lie about the law. Now, the law simply isn’t relevant.
It does not matter what the law says concerning minimum standards for Terry’s care. It does not matter what the truth is. Indeed, in Terry’s case, everyone who tells the truth is forbidden to testify. When they do testify, their testimony is thrown out. The law is no longer admissible in court. The truth is no longer admissible in court. There is a reason for this.

Deicide is Suicide
In his book Breaking the Thread of Life, the eminent moral theologian Robert Barry, O.P., demonstrated that pagan societies have always had enormous difficulty respecting human life. Pagans would commit suicide at the slightest provocation, whether to escape shame, pain and suffering, or to promote certain kinds of community values. From the Greek habit of keeping stores of poison available for popular use to the Japanese practice of hari kari, where ever personal suicide was accepted, assisted suicide and socially required suicide always co-existed. The widow had to be strangled, burned alive or buried alive with her husband’s corpse, for if she refused to die, she would be offending the community understanding of marriage. Wives would certainly suffer without their husband, and suffering was evil, so it were best the wives were put out of their misery immediately, even if they were not yet miserable.

This attitude, taken to its logical extreme, permitted human death for any reason or for no reason at all. As Rev. Barry points out, Russian roulette is ancient. In Thrace, a group of boys would hang a noose on a tree with a stone beneath it and draw lots. Whoever drew the short lot picked up a scythe, put his head in the noose and allowed the stone to be kicked out from underneath. He had to cut the rope with the scythe or die, as his friends watched in amusement at his frantic writhings, walking away merrily no matter what the outcome. Human life existed to be enjoyed, and if you did not enjoy your life, others would enjoy your life, and its ending, at your expense. Human life was nothing special.

The influence of Christian thought radically changed this idea. Where Christianity reigned, suicide disappeared. Prior to the Incarnation, it was not uncommon to find entire towns commit suicide on the approach of an armed enemy or in response to the ravages of pestilence and famine. After the Incarnation, a new idea became embedded in western society – suffering might actually be ennobling. It might actually contribute to the honor of the individual, it might have worth. The value of individual life infinitely elevated.

Post-Christian society has not only returned to the pagan notion of human life as valueless, it has actually degraded it more thoroughly. Pre-Christian pagans at least insisted the woman be a widow before she was thrown screaming into the fire. Post-Christian pagans aren’t so punctilious about details. So the husband is alive, so what? All the more reason the wife should die. Instead of throwing the wife alive onto the funeral pyre, just throw her alive into any old fire. The thirst of dehydration lasts enormously longer than the kicks of the hanging man with his blunt scythe, and pagans can take that much more morbid enjoyment in the process as we cluck sympathetically about the sad situation.
As we remove the requirement that God be the basis for the legal system, we remove the requirement that truth be the basis for legal action. At this point, it would not matter if Terry miraculously gained the power of speech tomorrow. The principals plotting her death have become so enamored of their power that even her own spoken testimony would arguably be inadmissible before the court. They need only a doctor who would assert that her plea for life was just an artifact, a spasm of diaphragm muscles that really could not be held to mean anything, regardless of the words they seemed to form. As has already been demonstrated, one can find a doctor who will testify to anything given the right motivation.

Terry is being killed in order to establish a principle: God is dead. Whereas the pre-Christian pagans sought to establish law in harmony with divine principles, but could not do so because they did not fully know God, the post-Christian pagans actively seeks to divorce divine principles from the law because they have learned of God’s existence and they reject Him. As everyone knows, it is easier to destroy than it is to create. Destruction takes no imagination, no power, it takes merely determined blindness, an adamant refusal to accept the reality of anything except one’s own will. We see in this struggle three men – a lawyer, a husband and a judge – attempt to decree the death of a bride. We know God, the Lawgiver, the Bridegroom, the Judge, desires life for this bride. If Terry dies, it is because three human men will what three divine Persons do not.

Florida's Fast Food

“Thank you for coming to Burger Biggie’s. May I take your order?”

“Yes, I would like a Biggie Bun, large fries, and a water, please.”

“Water?”

“Yes, a water please.”

“Alright, hold on just a minute. Doctor!!”

“Doctor?”

“Yes, doctor. As you know, water is a medical treatment. I’m not a doctor and I can’t prescribe that for you. We need to get our doctor out here to assess you and determine if this is appropriate treatment.”

“But, I…”

“Hmmm, what’s all this? I was in the middle of filling an inside straight when you… oh.…. wait… we have another one, don’t we? Open your mouth please.”

“Look, I just wanted to get a meal.”

“Orderlies, hold this man down.”

“Wait, I … wahh, mmfff…mmfff”

“Ah, I see the patient has a sore throat. Has he had trouble swallowing?”

“Well, it’s just a cold, and I…”

“I can’t understand a thing this man is saying.”

“Well if your orderly would keep his towel out of my mouth…”

“I’m sorry, this man needs rehabilitation before he can safely be given a dangerous medical treatment like a Biggie Bun, fries or water. Where is his guardian?”

“My what?”

“You see? He can’t communicate effectively. Bill, you were taking his order. Has he been like this since he came in?”

“Well, he’s certainly disoriented. Seemed shocked when I called for you. He didn’t seem to realize he’s in Florida now. And when he drove up, I couldn’t really understand him through the speaker in the drive-through.”

“Did he swerve around a lot as he drove?”

“Well, doctor, you can see how far he is from the curb.”

“Exactly. Hmmm… well, this is just what I thought. My diagnosis is he’s in a persistent vegetative state. People like him really shouldn’t be behind the wheel. Bill, have you checked his wallet?”

“Let me look – hold him down tight, men… Well, it seems like he’s got several credit cards and about fifty dollars cash.”

“We’ll need a judge to verify that his assets should be transferred to us, but that won’t take long. Judge Drear is in the back office with a pair of aces. Did this man mention anything else?”

“I heard him say ‘it’s all done’, but his enunciation was so bad, it sounded like ‘Biggie Bun’”

“Clearly he wanted to die then.”

“Yes, I would say so.”

“Alright, tie him up and throw him in the back with the others.”

“Hey, doc, can I have the Visa this time? That last guy’s Mastercard was nearly maxed out.”

“Alright, Bill, but I get the cash. I think I can take Judge Drear on this hand.”

The Return of Child Labor

In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in the terrible conditions of the factories than return to school.

— Helen Todd, "Why Children Work," McClure’s Magazine, April 1913

In one experiment in Milwaukee, for example, 8,000 youth...were asked if they would return full-time to school if they were paid about the same wages as they earned at work; only 16 said they would.

— David Tyack, Managers of Virtue (1982)

In an agrarian society, children are producers from almost the time they can walk. They work the farm side-by-side with their parents, thereby both putting food on the table and learning adult methods of thought and speech. Children in such a society are expected to pull their own weight and help provide for the family. In such a setting, the example of adult habits and interactions, specifically the habits of their parents, are constantly before them. Children in an agrarian society are socialized by adults. Prior to about 1820, essentially the whole world was agrarian except for England, which had only just begun industrialization. The agrarian model was how children had always been raised.

This expectation that children should be treated like adults because they had spent the first decade of their life working side-by-side with adults was so common as to merit no discussion at all. Precisely because they were treated as adults, children were expected to master adult subjects. Consider:

• At the age of nine, Samuel Johnson was, according to his own testimony, reading and enjoying Hamlet.
• At the age of ten, David Farragut, the U.S. Navy’s first admiral, was commissioned midshipman on the warship Essex while Benjamin Franklin was helping his father in the chandler business.
• At the age of eleven, the fatherless George Washington started school. Though judged an absolutely ordinary intellect by everyone who knew him, he was already as literate as today’s college graduates before he crossed the threshold. Calvin Graham had enrolled in the US armed forces and won a Bronze Star and Purple Heart in WW II combat in the Pacific. 
• At the age of twelve, John Paul Jones began working at sea as a cabin boy, while twelve-year old Farragut – with two more years of experience at sea under his belt – was already in command of a prize ship captured during a fierce battle in which he actively participated. At this age, Thomas Edison, judged feebleminded by the school, was working on a train, and had started his own newspaper using cast-off type from a printer. Before his thirteenth birthday, his newspaper had five hundred subscribers. Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed to his brother, James, the printer. He was also reading Bunyan, Burton, Mather, Defoe, Plutarch, and works of “polemic divinity” or what we would today call Christian apologetics. Andrew Carnegie was a bobbin boy in a textile factory, and a delivery boy a year later. Abraham Cowley was taking infinite delight in Spenser’s epic poem, The Fairy Queene. In colonial Mexico, young girls were able to marry by age twelve.
• By thirteen or fourteen, Southern women in colonial America could marry.
• At the age of fifteen, Farragut was hunting pirates in the Mediterranean.
• Between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, many young men and women in America were getting married. Compare this to ancient Rome, where a fourteen-year old was given his sword and shield and could legally take a wife.
• At the age of seventeen, George Washington was Virginia’s surveyor general.
• At the age of nineteen, Lafayette was a major general in the French army and a member of George Washington’s general staff.
• At the age of twenty, Alexander Hamilton was leading the retreat from New York. By this age, roughly half of the colonial population was married. At the age of twenty-one, Aaron Burr and Light Horse Harry Lee were leading troops into battle.

One might argue that since adult life expectancy was only about forty-five to fifty years, children in pre-industrial society had to grow up fast. Indeed, this is true. But given that children had grown up this way throughout the entirety of human history, save for the last one hundred years, it might be more accurate to say that industrialization forces children to grow up slowly.

Prior to the advent of “professional” education, agrarian America had an essentially one hundred percent literacy rate, as Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed. The adult was prized for his sound judgement, not his technical skills. Samuel Pepys, president of the Royal Society, the most prestigious intellectual body in Europe, and Secretary of the Admiralty, only learned how to multiply and divide after he assumed the latter office. As the British knew, skill at math is pleasant but not a prerequisite for sound judgement.

Washington, Franklin, Edison, Carnegie, Farragut – their childhoods were not exceptions to the rule. Their lives are examples of the rule that had existed for all of human history. They were doing neither more nor less than any other boy their age had ever done. By the age of twelve, boys were expected to be doing adult work in every aspect of their lives: reading, writing, working – it was all the same. There was no such thing as adolescence because these gentlemen and their colleagues had, by the age of twelve, already entered into manhood. They did this through apprenticeships.

Today, biologists tell us that brain development in adolescents is enormously more complex than we first imagined. Due to the adolescent surge of hormones, the teenage brain is subject to fundamental structural changes that affect how teens think and behave. Their brain is changing.

In an agrarian society, teens living through this extremely malleable period are already in an apprenticeship. They live in the midst of adult supervision and guidance. They perform concrete tasks with concrete rewards. The shopkeeper or farmer to whom they are apprenticed models adult standards in his daily life for the impressionable adolescent, and continues to require of his charge high standards of behavior and a high work ethic.

The young man whose pubescent brain begins to undergo enormous change already has a solid foundation of prior adult work experience and habit. He also has a mentor to emulate. These steady him as his biology catches up with his lived experience. The ever-present adult mentors keep the young man in line and on track while his hands continue the work they have always done and his brain becomes accustomed to seeing the world through the newly-formed eyes of an adult. The apprenticeship system both contained and trained young men as they learned to become what they already were – men.

At first, when agrarian society began to move towards industrialization, the agrarian model of apprenticing youth attempted to follow. Children who had worked in the shop and the fields now began to work in the mines and the factories. But experience soon demonstrated problems with this solution. While the farm had many dangers for an unwary child, the mine and the factory had more. Besides, factory work required obedient workers, a caste system in which the men on the floor obeyed a foreman without question. Yankee farmers abhorred caste systems. They had to be broken to obey the new culture.

In order to break a man, you must break his family. In order to break the family, the members must first be physically separated from one another. Agitation for child labor laws began. Children had to be removed from the workplace for their own safety. These laws required the complete segregation of adults and youth, with the youth being thrown entirely out of work. To answer the problem of newly idled youth, compulsory mass schools were created. Between 1870 and 1920, America followed the European example as every state in the Union passed compulsory schooling laws. Industrialization had already begun to tear at the agrarian model of youth education, but with the advent of mass schooling, the last traces of the agrarian system were wiped out.

Now young men were no longer under the personal tutelage of adult mentors, rather, they were grouped en masse with dozens of other young men going through exactly the same unsettling changes they themselves experienced. Whereas the number of adults to apprentices in a trade shop would generally be roughly comparable, or might in certain situations even provide more than one adult per apprentice, this was most certainly untrue of the school. As a result, the culture young people lived in was no longer controlled by the biologically stable adults, it was controlled by biologically unstable young people. This is the mass school environment.

Worse, the young man in the mass school environment no longer had a fixed concrete purpose in his work. It is often noted that young people are not good at abstractions. The agrarian society remedied that by making sure the apprentice dealt in concrete things; concrete work recompensed with cash payment for the adult work done, payment that fed the family. The twelve-year old knew his worth because the family needed his income. Indeed, in an agrarian society, women and children often generated about half of a family’s income.

In the new mass school system, not only was the income the youth formerly generated now lost, the young man was forced to abstract his formerly concrete life during precisely the time he was least able to manage it. What he was doing in school today would pay off at some nebulous, unknown future date, according to persons unnamed. The young man did not know he was useful. Instead he knew he was not useful, and he would not be useful for at least some unspecified period of time. This culture plays to weakness, not strength. It tears the heart out of a young man.

Now, let us note two things. First, the system of compulsory mass schooling is but a century old. It has not worked at all well for at least half its history, and it is proving incapable of reform. Second, America is now a post-industrial society. The economy has over five times more information and service jobs than it does manufacturing and construction jobs. The workplace is no longer dangerous.

Taken together, these two facts indicate a change should be considered. The child labor laws of the late 1800’s ostensibly protected the youth from the ravages of the factory. But the economic landscape has changed; the rationale no longer applies. The workplace no longer represents a life-threatening danger. Likewise, commentators regularly point out that today’s adolescents feel adrift, left out, purposeless. We can say many things about twelve-year olds like Carnegie, Franklin, and Farragut, but we cannot say they were purposeless.

We have millenia of data to demonstrate that the agrarian model of apprenticeship transforms children into stable adults. An information society can implement that model today. At this point, America has literally no reason not to return to the agrarian model of child-rearing. Mass schooling doesn’t work and has never been successfully reformed. The child labor laws are anachronistic. Why do we retain either?

This essay constitutes part of the forth-coming book, Deception: Catholic Education in America. It is scheduled for release in August, 2005 from Bridegroom Press.

An Evolving Discussion

The recent column on the way evolution takes over theological language created quite a furor. Not since I pointed out the problems with Islamic sharia have I seen such heated replies. The objections were interesting, if only because they so completely missed the point.

Objection 1: How dare you attack the fact of evolution! You are just a creationist religious nut!
Reply: As I pointed out, I find both creationism and evolutionism very silly and highly amusing. While evolution can certainly affect the size of a finch’s beak, there is little evidence it does anything beyond that. No one has seen a macro-sized creature evolve from one species into another in the lab, no matter how many years they’ve worked at it. Even today, fruit flies are still fruit flies and have never become anything else. No scientists has observed evolution create new species, only variations within a species. Although it may well be correct, it has not yet been proven, it is not a fact. Sorry, but the scientific method requires the alleged change to be observed. It hasn’t been. It has just been hypothesized.

Saying this does not make me a creationist. I am not. Scripture is entirely about man’s relationship to God, thus it says nothing about dinosaurs. Creationists can't use Scripture to explain the presence of large, reptilian bones in the ground, and they should stop trying. Similarly, evolutionists, can't use science to explain the existence of human persons, since “person” is a theological term.
The argument between Luther and Voltaire was absurd from its beginning, and the creationism versus evolutionism argument is just a variation on the theme. It doesn’t matter who wins an argument when both sides are wrong.

Objection 2: Your supposed etymology of the word “person” is wrong. It is not a Christian or a theological term, it was used before Christianity ever took it over.

Reply: The modern English word person arose when modern English did, in about the16th century, in the middle of a Christian millennium. If you are talking about derivation, the word person is derived from (take your pick of theories here): (a) the Etruscan term phersu, meaning the image of a masked dancer, (b) the Greek prosopon, meaning the mask an actor wears or (c) the Latin persona meaning the role a stage actor took. Which is correct hardly matters. In each instance, the term refers to the part (role) played or the mask worn, not the substance of the actor. Even Roman law usage follows this understanding.

Put another way, using the word person in reference to the substance of a person, instead of just the mask, role or act a person put on, is decidedly Christian. The idea that the person is a substance is due entirely to Christian theology, and this theological understanding was held wherever Christianity dominated human culture from the second century to the time of Descartes, Locke and Hume at least. That is, the theological meaning of person encompassed Europe and good chunks of Asia for over a millenia. It entirely drove out the pagan notion.

Objection 3: Not true! The legal definition of “person” is not theological.

Reply: Well, it isn’t now. The English system of law always recognized only human beings as persons. Corporations were at best “artificial persons,” i.e., corporations had no divinely ordained rights because they had no relationship with the divine. They were purely human inventions. Most of America’s Founding Fathers hated corporations, because they had such enormous control in pre-Revolutionary America. But, with the rise of industrialization, railroad lawyers finally managed to accomplish in American courts what the evolutionists are now trying to accomplish in American culture.

Due to the facts of history, American courts consistently refused to award corporations personhood. As Thom Hartmann demonstrates in his book, Unequal Protection: the Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights (Rodale Books, 2002), the railroads got around this by paying off a court reporter. The reporter deliberately lied in his summary of the 1886 Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad. Though that decision said nothing about corporate personhood, the court reporter wrote a summary of the opinion which said in part, ““The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment…which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Harvard graduate and court reporter Davis (who had close ties with railroad industry) knew full well that lawyers often depend more on case summaries than the case law itself. Based on a pre-trail comment by the judge, that summary accomplished the job. It was good enough. Judges and lawyers used the summary to argue that corporations were real persons, pretending this was settled case law. No public discussion or decision needed to be made. It is an interesting coincidence that this “personhood by judicial fiat” entered the law at the same time Darwinian (that is, evolutionary) eugenics was all the rage in Europe and America.

Objection 4: You can’t know the evolutionists actually intend to take over the meaning of theological words.

Reply: Only two possibilities obtain – evolutionists are incredibly lazy and stupid or they are intentional liars. Consider the discussion of evolution in the “Intro to Evolutionary Biology” FAQ at www.talk.origins.org. for example, a website that has won three science awards. The essay begins by putting words like “higher” and “lower” in parentheses, to make clear to the reader that these words are not correct when used in reference to evolution. So far, so good.

But, within a few paragraphs, the quote marks suddenly disappear. The author begins describing bats as selfish and altruistic without any quote marks to indicate his mis-use of the words. He realizes he has to explain himself, so he writes the following amazing statement:

“The words selfish and altruistic have connotations in everyday use that biologists do not intend. Selfish simply means behaving in such a way that one's own inclusive fitness is maximized; altruistic means behaving in such a way that another's fitness is increased at the expense of ones' own. Use of the words selfish and altruistic is not meant to imply that organisms consciously understand their motives.”

Let’s count the errors. First, it isn’t the connotations that are the trouble, it is the denotations – that is, the definitions – that hobble the biologist, as any dictionary will show. But, to keep you from going to the dictionary, he quickly provides his own new definitions. And, to further quiet your questioning mind, he ends with a disclaimer saying the words he is using are completely inappropriate.

Now, if you do not intend people to think organisms have consciousness, why intentionally use words that explicitly say they do? Aren’t there enough words in the English language, the largest language in the world, to do the job you want? Are evolutionists incapable of understanding how antonyms work? Can’t they figure out how to open a thesaurus (hint: put the shovel away, it isn’t a dinosaur). And, remember, he intentionally used antonyms to his real meaning but didn’t put them in quotes – he just used them straight out, as if they really applied. If instructors with these habits aren’t lazy idiots, then they are clearly intentional liars. Choose whichever conclusion you find more charitable.

Objection 5: Nonsense! Your entire argument is that use of a metaphor (anthropomorphism) negates an entire argument.

Reply: Read a little more closely. Note what the evolutionist on talk.origins did. He did not just use the metaphor and stop there (which might have been defensible, although that is arguable). Rather, he used the metaphor, remarked that the metaphor was the opposite of his intended meaning, and then he redefined the words he used in the metaphor so it wasn’t a metaphor anymore.

By redefining the words to strip out all references to purpose, references which were integral to the original meaning of the word, he isn’t using a metaphor. We think it’s a metaphor because we can’t get the original definitions out of our heads, but it isn’t. He redefined the words. Why do that, unless you intend your hearers to make this error? Why do that, unless you want to make an absurd theory palatable by dressing it up in what is now, through the new fact of the redefinition, nothing but a false connotation?

As the Marines say, “Once is bad luck, twice is coincidence, but three times? That’s enemy action.” Supporters of evolution have been doing this for decades. This is double plus un-good.

Objective 6: But biologists do not deny the existence of individual organisms (including humans), nor do they deny the existence of perception, emotions, language, the mental concept "table," or any other part of human experience!

Reply: And therein lies the inconsistency. If the component parts of the universe have no purpose associated with them, then how can purpose suddenly appear in the universe? If I said I knew my biological parents were blood type O, but I knew I was AB, a biologist would shake his head. Type O is recessive – it is the absence of certain proteins on the blood cell. Type AB is the presence of those proteins. You can’t get presence from absence. Two type O’s can only beget a type O.

What is true for the expression of genes is also true for the expression of purpose. Biologists cannot deny in DNA what they admit in the person who embodies it.

Ultimately, the theory of evolution has a problem, a problem it cannot overcome. It doesn’t make sense. It describes a world without purpose, and no one – not even the evolutionists – can consistently envision such a world. A world without purpose is so alien to human thought that even those who claim to espouse the idea find themselves returning again and again to words that speak of purpose in order to explain it. Though they hate doing it, though they try mightily to avoid it, they can’t help it. There is nowhere else to go.

Even redefining words in order to strip them of purpose does not entirely do the trick. Like the little red quark that keeps blinking in our mind’s eye long after we have told ourselves that a quark’s “color” is a figure of speech, a calculating device and nothing more, so the words evolutionists attempt to redefine – words like selfish and altruistic, higher and lower, good and bad - keep whispering into our ear. “Purpose,” they whisper, “It all has purpose.”

Evolving Lies

As even disinterested observers admit, any theory that has to account for both Giganotosaurus and Genesis is going to require nuance. Unfortunately, the people involved in the evolution-creationism debate tend to lack the quality to a startling degree. As a result, the evolution-creation debate is extremely silly and wildly amusing. But, that having been said, one side has waged a dirty fight, and it is time that we who watch the struggle with popcorn in hand insisted on fairness all around.

Have you heard of The Selfish Gene? It is Exhibit A in the gallery. The problem lies precisely in the title of Richard Dawkins’ book, and I use the verb “lies” most deliberately. You see, Dawkins gets in an illegal kidney punch on the creationists before you even open the book.

He isn’t alone. When we read through the evolutionist arguments, we hear constantly of “the evolutionary imperative to preserve the individual” or “self preservation is the first law of nature." We hear about good genes, bad genes, junk genes, advanced species, less advanced species. There is only one thing they don’t mention. This whole line of conversation is a lie.

Every time a supporter of evolution speaks this way, he is explicitly denying the evolutionary theory he pretends to support. But how can this be? Dawkins seems quite the supporter of evolution.

He is. And that’s the problem.

You see, Dawkins, Gould, et. al., are quite willing to punch the daylights out of a creationist and knock him to the mat, but they don’t fight clean. They simply refuse to stay in their own corner of the English vocabulary while the referee is giving the count. Let me explain.

Take the word “good”. Something can only be good if it has a teleology, a purpose. That is, something is good only insofar as it is a necessary component towards achieving a good, as opposed to a bad, end. But here’s the kicker. In order to have a purpose, there must first be an intellect and a will. That is, you must be a person. Only a person can have a purpose. Tables don’t have a purpose. They don’t think, “I suppose I will support the dishes for breakfast today.” Tables just are. “Good” is a value judgement persons use when they consider the use of an object in reference to the purpose they have in mind. The words “good” and “bad” have no meaning apart from persons.

Now, there’s a debased word: “person.” What is a person? The word “person” is a strictly theological term, developed in the second century to describe the three Persons of the Trinity. There is one God, but three Divine Persons. The three Persons of the Trinity are distinguished only by their divine relations. Human persons are in the divine image and likeness. A human person is a created entity that is called into a relationship with the Divine Persons of the Trinity by the Trinity Himself. We humans are persons only because we are called to participate in communion with the Original Three Persons.

This is very important. From the creationist’s point of view, if God didn’t call us into relationship with Himself, we would be animals, not persons. Because God is Himself, because He calls us, we become ourselves, persons.

So Dawkins cheats when he uses the word “selfish.” "Self" can only be distinguished through personhood. In a room filled with inanimate objects, none of the objects think, so none of the objects have a "self-ness." It is only persons who make the distinction between "self" and "other." This is precisely because we, as human persons, are defined only by our relationship to the Three Divine Persons. Divinity is wholly “other” compared to my puny “self.” That’s how I know my self exists – I ain’t Him, so I must be me. The logic is impeccable.

The World According to Evolution

But, the whole point of evolutionary theory is to explicitly deny the need for persons at all, human or divine. Thus, evolution necessarily and specifically must deny the idea of "self." Evolutionary theory teaches one foundational truth: everything depends on the random interaction of chemicals, interactions completely unaffected by the presence or absence of personhood, self-ness or anything like it. Evolution insists on this foundation, in fact.

But, without persons, evolution has no teleology, no purpose. Thus, atheistic evolutionary theory specifically denies that evolution is either good or bad. According to the theory, evolution simply is. It isn’t headed for an endpoint. It doesn’t have a purpose. Evolution doesn't select good traits or bad traits. It is a mindless process. It can't select. It just is.

Even if it could select, there would be nothing to select. There are no good or bad traits. There are traits that survive and traits that do not survive. Just because a trait survives does not make it good - the trait may only be useful in a highly specialized niche which is swiftly disappearing, and the species with the trait will therefore disappear as the environment changes. The same is true for a trait that does not survive. Complexity only means the trait is probably newer, but newer is not better, nor is older worse. Everything is just a random swirl of chemicals, no meaning, no purpose, no end, no "higher forms" versus "lower forms" of life. Even life is not better or worse than being an inanimate object. Everything just is.

The Lab Test for Sin

So, when evolutionists use the word “imperative” in regards to evolution, they are lying. As Merriam Webster points out, the word “imperative” is drawn from the Latin imperare, "to command." It means: “of, relating to, or constituting the grammatical mood that expresses the will to influence the behavior of another; expressive of a command, entreaty, or exhortation; having power to restrain, control, and direct; not to be avoided or evaded : NECESSARY [an imperative duty].”

“Will,” “influence,” “entreaty,” “restrain”… all of these words require purpose, each requires an intellect and a will. A tree doesn’t command. A fungus does restrain. Bacteria are agents of influenza, not influence.

Evolutionists know all this, but they insist on using language that pretends otherwise.

When evolutionists start talking about "self," "selfishness," “good,” “bad,” or anything remotely touching on personhood, they have – by that fact - stopped using the language of evolution. Poorly-schooled students of evolutionary theory may think they are still discussing evolution, but evolutionary theory specifically denies that they are. The students have anthropomorphized the discussion, pretended a will and intellect are present when none are, they have brought in a factor that is completely extraneous, absolutely irrelevant, to the evolutionary discussion. They are, in short, discussing theology, not science.

But evolutionists don’t just pull this trick when discussing DNA. They do the same things when discussing animals. They claim, for instance, that animals make and use tools. But the words “make” and “tool” imply purpose. Only persons have purposes. Certainly we can observe that an animal acts in a specific way, but that does not prove the animal has intentionality. Vines grow toward the sun. Do they intend to grow towards the sun? No. Even if they did, there is no way to prove it scientifically.

Funhouse Mirrors

Science cannot test for intentionality. If science could test for intentionality, then it could test for that subset of intentionality known as disordered intentionality.

Put another way, if you can scientifically prove that apes act intentionally, then you can scientifically prove apes can sin. In fact, if you can prove intentionality, you can prove apes do sin. If you can prove it for apes, you can prove it for men.

I've heard science make a lot of claims, but I've never heard a scientist claim he could demonstrate through lab technique what is a sin and what is not. Yet this is precisely the claim that scientists make when they claim that apes, dolphins, orangutans, tangerines, pick your favorite animate or inanimate object, make and use tools. They are claiming that they can test for intentionality, for sin.

They see an ape take an action - it throws a stick. They anthropomorphize that action (which is not science), saying "Wow, we throw sticks too!" Then they claim that science has demonstrated something when, in fact, the scientist has really only observed and anthropomorphized. Just because a scientist does something doesn't make it science.

In fact, we could extend their reasoning to show the fallacy. I fall down. So do apes. So do unbalanced bricks. Thus, all three must be persons.

See how easy it is? I simply have to begin the observation with the assumption that the things I am comparing myself to possess an intellectual state like mine. By the very fact that anyone assumes this kind of similarity, this kind of connection between the actions of bricks, apes and man, those actions are anthropomorphized. Thus, the scientist assumes what he set out to prove: apes are persons.

"But wait," says the scientist, "I have further argument!"

"Oh?" I reply, "And what might that be?"

"Apes, bricks and persons are all made out of the same subatomic particles! See, this proves definitively that all three are persons!"

Well, no, it doesn't. But this is essentially the DNA argument. So we share much of the same DNA (and all of the same subatomic particles) with apes. So what? Personhood is a function of God's divine call to us to share intimate communion with Him. That call is completely independent of whether or not we have a particular somatic structure or particular material components. Personhood is a gift from God, it is not a consequence of the particular arrangement of components in material reality. Personhood is bestowed from above, it does not bubble up from below.

Why do they think apes are persons? Because they do bad things? So do virii and tsunamis. Oh, so apes have a brain? Very nice - so does an ant. Oh, so it's a rather complex brain? Yes, so is that of a human corpse. So it's a rather complex living brain? Yes, I suppose it is. And?

And... And... AND... So what?

Brains are tools for the intellect. The intellect is an aspect of the immortal spiritual soul. The brain is not itself the intellect, it is the mediating tool the intellect makes use of in human beings to express itself. Strictly speaking, the brain is not necessary for the possession or expression of a person’s intellect.

God is Three Persons. God is also anencephalic, but He seems to get on just fine without a brain or even a skull to house it in. So do the angels. So do we. If you don't think so, talk to the saints in heaven. God is Three Persons. He has no DNA. Angels are persons, they have intellect and will. They have no DNA. Human beings in heaven are persons, and they are totally separated from their DNA. Personhood, intellect, will, these things are from God. God gives us an intellect and a will so we can respond to His call to enter relationship with Him. Personhood, intellect, will, this is a theology discussion, not a science discussion.

The Language of Kudzu

So why do smart people keep making extraordinarily stupid mistakes of language? The first question is obvious: are these mistakes? Evolutionists are not stupid. They know perfectly well they are mis-using the language. In their own texts, they even go out of their way to point out that their own use of these theological terms is not correct. They put the theological words in quotes, they warn the reader that evolution really doesn’t have intentionality, nor does anything that is subject to evolution (including us?). They knowingly, routinely encroach on theological discourse; they knowingly, routinely violate the very science they claim to want to explain.

The scientist might argue that he is simply using the theological word in a new, narrowly scientific technical sense. Alright. It is certainly the case that words change in meaning over time. But, the fact is, due to cultural usages, words have meanings that are independent of what anyone might want them to mean.

Take, for instance, the way particle physics has taken over the use of the word "color" for quarks. “Color” in the macro universe refers to specific wavelengths of light. Quarks are not photons, so speaking of a quark’s “color” has no relevance or reference to color as a child with a box of crayons knows color. Intellectually, everyone who has ever read an article about quarks knows this.

But the word "color" is so culturally laden that any use of it, even in a context in which the original definition clearly has no application, causes the person encountering the word to react in a certain way. When we see the word “color” next to a quark, we inevitably picture the quark as a pinhead speck of a specific color - red or blue or green - even though we know intellectually that this is perfectly silly. Quarks don’t emit photons, they don’t have color in a macro-sense.

Now, in physics, this double meaning of “color” is not a problem because mentally visualizing a red quark doesn't interfere with the quark concept. None of the calculations involved, none of the discussions concerning the particle, touch on anything remotely close to the original meaning of the word "color." The habit of the mind to visualize the color is slightly annoying, but nothing more.

But with evolutionary theory, it is different. Evolutionary theory intentionally and repeatedly mis-uses theological terms, terms relating to the person. It specifically attempts to take over the use of the theological vocabulary critical to expressing the very ideas it attacks. It intends to destroy the ability to speak of divinity or personhood at all. Evolution supporters simply co-opt all the words we use to discuss theological concepts, and then they implicitly define those words in ways which divorce them completely from the original theological concepts they were meant to express. And they do this despite the fact that the discipline itself denies it needs those terms.

Like kudzu, the foreign vine in the Southern United States that covers over and destroys everything it touches, evolutionary theory has invaded the English language and stripped it of all theological meaning.

Now, I don’t mind hearing a good discussion of evolution. But I strenuously object to the intentional destruction of the English language. If you want to discuss evolution, go right ahead. But stop taking and using words that don't belong to the lexicon of evolution.

In evolution, things happen, neither good nor bad, just things. There is no self. There are just chemicals. That's it. Talk about evolution correctly or don’t talk about it. Those who don't stick to correct language, go crazy. Worse, they drag the rest of us with them. I, for one, don’t want to go.

The Best of Modern Science

There are times when reality is just too belly-shaking hilarious. Take the recent case of Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten, a distinguished German anthropologist from the University of Frankfort who was noted for his Cuban cigars, large gold watches and prediliction for Porsches. Trained at UCLA, he emigrated back to his homeland thirty years ago and quickly became a leading light in European anthropological circles. Recognized as an expert in radio-carbon dating, he established the ages for hundreds of specimens from Europe and Africa during the course of his career.

There was only one problem. Over the course of thirty years, he lied about the age of every specimen he touched.

Yes, it seems the good professor was so incompetent he didn’t even know how to run his own carbon-dating machine. He plagiarized papers, he plagiarized fossils, he invented whatever dating he thought he could get away with, he sold artifacts to the highest bidder and – this is the interesting sidenote – he even lied about his lineage. It seems he wasn’t really descended from one of the old Prussian generals. Instead, his father was actually a Nazi, which, perhaps, explains why enormous amounts of documentary evidence concerning gruesome Nazi experiments in the death camps were apparently shredded under his thirty-year watch.

No doubt about it – it’s been a rough week for anthropology in Frankfurt.

"Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago," said Thomas Terberger, the archaeologist who discovered the hoax. "Prof Protsch's work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had co-existed, and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish."

Chris Stringer, a Stone Age specialist and head of human origins at London's Natural History Museum, said: "What was considered a major piece of evidence showing that the Neanderthals once lived in northern Europe has fallen by the wayside. We are having to rewrite prehistory."

The creationists are, of course, in paroxysms of ecstasy. The scientists are downcast, but have not lost hope. Even though the entire discipline now resembles a suicide bomber after the smoke has cleared, even though every anthropology textbook is now as accurate as a Superman comic, yes, even now, there are many who come to the defense of science in this, it’s darkest hour. They point out that while science can take wrong roads, the fact that scientists discovered the error proves that, in the final analysis, science is able to get the job done.

Thank God! We should remember it only took science three decades to whisper, “Hey… Johann… that von Zeiten guy… yeah, the guy who trained the last two generations of anthropologists… well… well, maybe he isn’t really an anthropologist! Maybe he’s really a secret Nazi who is infusing vaguely anti-Christian Aryan migration theories into scientific discourse. Maybe the scientists are so open to it that they accept it without question! Maybe… maybe…oh, say it ain’t so, Johann!”

Now, it must be admitted that archeologists are getting better at discovering fraud. When the illustrious theologian, scientist and swindler Teilhard de Chardin discovered Piltdown Man’s jaw, back in 1913, it took forty years for anyone to figure out that the archeologists had been hoaxed.

When today’s creationists pin them on that point, the illustrious Ph.D.’s (and they really are Post-hole Diggers, in this case) vigorously defend themselves by pointing out that they never had access to the Piltdown bones themselves, so they had no real way of verifying the claim until the 1950’s. The Piltdown bones were locked in the British Museum, you see, and no one was permitted to handle them. Archeologists were forced to work from plaster casts, with just a quick glance at the bones themselves to verify things.

So... Well... that clears things up, then. And when you think about it, that explanation is very comforting, really. Archeology is apparently such a well-developed science that when someone says “Pay no attention to the bones behind the curtain” they don’t… pay… any… attention… to the bones! It would be easier to accept that this was just a simple, honest mistake, the kind anyone could make day-in, day-out for… well, for longer than it took to wage all of the wars staged in Europe over the last two centuries combined. Yes, as I say, it would be easy to accept the Piltdown explanation… if Piltdown had been a one-time occurrence.

But now it isn’t. This time around, the brown-nosed diggers had access to everything, and it still took them thirty years to figure out that the skull von Zieten dated as being 27,000 years old actually dated to about 1750 and still smelt of decaying flesh. Hmmm… how to explain that…. Hmmm…. well, everyone knows the hayfever season in Europe just never seems to end… and there was that really bad cold going around the department… and...

So, it took forty years in the 1900s, thirty years today… at this rate, in only another couple of hundred years, we can expect our archeologist friends to be able to nail down swindles in less than a decade. Yes, things are definitely looking up for the sciences.

But now there are impertinent types at every door, asking questions like, “What kind of discipline has experts who take thirty years to figure out they are been lied to by a man who can barely turn on the major tool in their trade? Is this a normal thing in science – thirty years to detect a fraud? Is archeology really a science?”

And, we are all forced to leap to the defense of our poor Neanderthal-discovering colleagues and insist (I swear this is an actual quote), “"He was perfect at being evasive… He would switch from saying 'it isn't really clear' to giving diffuse statements.”

So, there you have it. In order to verify an archeological discovery, all you have to do is ask the guy who makes the discovery. If he double-dog swears that he isn’t making it up, and spits besides, well, who can question that? These ancient standards of archeological research must be respected.

Given such high scientific standards, how was von Zeiten found out? It’s simple, really. It’s not like anyone suspected anything. No, it was much more prosaic than that. Another Frankfurt professor just needed to pin down a date more precisely and decided to send one of von Zieten’s artifacts in for another test. When confronted with the University of Oxford’s radically newer date, von Zieten insisted Oxford was wrong: they had failed to remove shellac preservative from the specimens. To drive home his assertion, he made a striking point, "Unfortunately, archaeologists and most anthropologists do not study physics or chemistry and therefore they cannot make judgments on carbon dating… Wrong measurements are made in all laboratories."

That was in 2001, which just goes to prove that archeologists aren’t complete fools. It took them only another three years to figure out that maybe they had been duped.

This kind of audacity must be respected. Von Zieten understood his colleagues perfectly. He was so close to retirement he could even afford to tell them exactly how he had swindled them, secure in the knowledge that it would be several more years before they would move against him, assuming they ever did.

People will soon begin to claim von Zieten was not a real scientist, but this is absolutely false. In a world that believes embryonic stem cell research is superior to adult stem cell research, insists a woman in Florida who responds to visitors is essentially dead, or asserts that there is no child in the womb, von Zieten is the pre-eminent scientist. He proves what the embryo researcher, the judge, the abortionist already know: lie big enough, invoke science often enough, and no one dares to question what you say. No one but those damned Christians, and who believes them?

Sophistication

A woman in Florida and a man in Rome have more in common than one might imagine. With the Polish release of Pope John Paul II’s newest book, Memory and Identity, we see first-hand what the Pope felt minutes after the bullet pierced his flesh. He recalls the pain, the blood loss and the slow drift into unconsciousness, a coma so deep, with blood pressure so dangerously low, that his attending physician recommended last rites be prayed.

Today, we see the Pope decades later experiencing the ravages of Parkinson’s disease - the mask-like, expressionless face, the hand tremors, the slow, garbled speech and the difficulty walking. What if time had flowed differently? It is impossible not to consider how similar his life today is to that of Terry Schiavo, the ciminal Florida courts want to kill. Her crime? Being inconvenient.

Schiavo’s coma, which some have implied may have been the result of a violent assault, has been the source of a seven-year controversy in the United States. Her husband received millions of dollars in a medical malpractice settlement for her treatment and rehabilitation. He has spent all of those millions in executing lawsuits aimed at making sure she never receives the rehabilitation treatment necessary to allow her to communicate again. Instead, he has been attempting to have her executed through court-sanctioned starvation/dehydration. While roasting her in an oven would accelerate the dehydration process and would certainly be about as comfortable, that remedy has not yet been suggested by her husband or the courts, although the possibility is not to be ruled out.

The attempts on her life remind us of the attempts on the Pope's life. According to the press releases, one of the things the Holy Father remarks on in his book is the enormous puzzlement Mehmet Ali Agca, the professional Turkish assassin who made the attempt on the Pope’s life. When the Pope visited Agca in jail following his recovery from the wound, Agca still could not figure out what had gone wrong. He was a professional assassin, a skilled marksman who had planned the event down to the smallest detail. He emptied his gun at the Pope from a distance of less than a few dozen feet, but only managed to hit him twice. Worse, his quarry survived. Agca simply could not get over the fact that he had failed to take his victim’s life.

If the Parkinson's-ravaged Pope had been shot by Agca while in the Florida panhandle, he would undoubtedly be in greater danger of losing his life than he had been in Rome in 1981. In Florida, as the Pope slipped towards death, there would be no shortage of people calling for the removal of John Paul II’s feeding tube. Even during his recent bout with the flu, so famous a Catholic as William Buckley took the time to write a column expressing his desire that the Pope die.

The Pope has suffered from Parkinson’s for roughly the same length of time Terry has suffered from the presence of a husband who wants her dead. The main difference is this: many medical experts agree Terry can be rehabilitated and restored to greater physical mobility, greater ability to communicate with those around her. No one holds out that hope for the Pope. All of this provokes meditation on the dignity of the human person.

I once had a discussion with one of the most enormous contradictions possible today: the atheistic Jewish philosopher. In the first century, he would have been stoned by his brothers for apostasy. Today, as he proudly announces, rabbis consult him.

During the course of the conversation, the professor insisted there was no such thing as human nature, nor was there such a thing as the natural law. He insisted that law drew its source only from the consent of the people, who agreed on how best to run the world. Government was his God – he thought every malady could be solved simply through the application of the people’s agreed-upon will, as expressed in governmental policy.

Now, “natural law” is only this: it is the natural right order to which all things, including human beings, conform. In other words, “natural law” simply means “justice.” Human nature is nothing more than the fact that all men have both certain natural needs and the power of reason, that is, the power to recognize what is really good for man in terms of those needs.

My atheistic Jewish friend (I simply cannot type those words without feeling the weight of that oxymoron) opposed the idea because it tasted too much of Christian monotheism. Now, certainly the idea can be found in Christian thought, but it is not unique to that thought. It can also be found in Judaism, in the pagan discourses of Plato, in the philosophers of India and China. Still, the whole thought of a God who actually has authority was more than he could bear.

But, to be fair, his way of approaching the world has at least as long a lineage. The Sophists of ancient Greece founded the concepts he espouses. Plato merely reacted to the pre-existing “sophisticated” concept, as it were. It is, perhaps, no surprise to find that Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines the meaning of the words “sophisticate” this way: “to alter deceptively; especially : ADULTERATE, to deprive of genuineness, naturalness, or simplicity; especially : to deprive of naïveté and make worldly-wise.”

This Sophistic concept, the concept that law ultimately derives from man, the rejection of the idea that law is an image of a greater Being, has always been fought by men who know the law reflects something higher, deeper, broader than just man in himself. As the great philosopher Mortimer Adler points out, “If justice is relevant to man’s condition, then the natural law is likewise relevant.”

The great irony in our conversation revolved around the militant Judaism, bordering on bigotry towards Catholicism, my atheistic friend displayed while he simultaneously dismissed the natural law. Let me explain.

The Sophists argued that since fire burns equally well in Greece as in Persia, but the laws of Greece are not the same as the laws in Persia, this demonstrated that there was no human nature and no natural law. For them, these facts demonstrated that law is mere convention, whim, the fancy of the masses that holds today and may be the opposite tomorrow. Law is morality, and law is what the people say it is.

Meanwhile, the great natural law thinkers, men like Augustine and Aquinas, Locke and Kant, point to those same human laws as examples of the problem. The natural law tells us what we need and what harms us, but it is left to human law to work out the details for each situation. Their understanding holds out a nuance that sophism does not contain: when the law of man is not in conformance with the natural law, then it is no law at all, and need not be obeyed.

For Sophists, justice and law are identical. For natural law thinkers, justice is not the same as law. But today’s Sophistic philosophers, the secular humanists who would place government where God is, and make it the arbiter of life and death, want to insist that morality, that “values,” is not the same as legality. That is, they recognize the distinction natural law makes while rejecting natural law itself. Why would they adulterate, why would they sophisticate, their philosophy this way?

Because it is too stiff a drink to take straight. You see, my atheistic Jewish friend is militantly anti-God and pro-Jewish, in the sense that he sees everything in terms of the Holocaust. For this man, who never experienced the camps or the enormous assistance the Catholic Church alone rendered to Jews who were attempting to escape Nazi depredations, the Holocaust is a defining experience.

But the question Mortimer Adler asks, the question Catholics ask, the question orthodox Jews ask, the questions secular atheistic humanists refuse to face is precisely this, “On what grounds could a decent German citizen in Nazi times justify his opposition to the laws of the land? On private sentiments or merely personal opinion? Even purely inner resistance to iniquity must be rooted in firmer ground.”

If there is no human nature, if there is no natural law, there is no basis to make a distinction between morality and legality. One may say many things about the eugenics movement which began with Malthus and Darwin, grew in the forced sterilization laws so popular to the America and American law schools of the 1920’s, and found its full flower in the Nazi death camps, but one must insist on this: the Germans, like the Americans, like the English, took great pains to keep everything legal. Before each turn of the screw, the law that permitted the screw to be turned was first carefully discussed and legislated into existence. Man made law on his own authority, without respect to the natural law divinely ordained or the human nature which is its divinely established basis.

This lies at the basis of the court animosity towards Terry Schiavo, the secular Jewish animosity towards the papal comparison between abortion and the Holocaust, and the philosophy professor’s animosity towards all things Catholic. The Holocaust has become the touchstone for my atheistic friend precisely because the minority of atheistic secular humanists among his people have gone to great pains to make it so. The secularists view the Holocaust as a particular sign that God does not exist, for if He did, He surely would have done something to stop it.

The insistence that Terry is worth saving because God says she is, the insistence that children in the womb are worth saving because God says they are, the insistence that God wants to save every one of us from our sins, these things are all vicious slanders from the Sophisticated point of view. The secular humanist view is, as Merriam-Webster points out, “worldly-wise.” Perhaps this is why the greatest Jewish philosopher of all warned, “Unless you become like a little child, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Studying the Quran

Talk to a Muslim about religion and one of the first arguments he will raise concerning the advantages of being Muslim is the Quran. According to Muslims, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles became corrupted and are untrustworthy. They will use, as their evidence, passages which seem to contradict one another, passages which seem to call into question Jesus’ divinity and the fact that we have literally dozens of different English Bible translations. Further, they will point out that the Quran has been kept pure from the moment it was delivered to Mohammed, this purity maintained by requiring thousands of children in each generation to memorize the entirety of the book.

This contention lies at the basis of Islamic belief (note that the word “lies” is really very appropriate). Let’s consider the facts.

The Original Revelation
Every prophet in the Old and New Testament received Holy Scripture directly from God Himself. According to Mohammed’s own testimony, however, he is the only prophet in history not to receive revelation directly from God. He was given the Quran by an angel while meditating in a cave in the desert. But that’s not all.

You see, Mohammed is the first person in recorded history to mistake a messenger from God for a demon from hell. According to his own testimony, he at first thought this angel was a demon, from whom he ran and hid in fear. But there’s more.

Mohammed only realized his error after his wife - who never saw or heard the supernatural messenger - convinced him otherwise. Now, the visions that Mohammed received included the understanding that the testimony of a woman is worth only half that of a man, so it is unclear why Mohammed accepted her testimony, but he did. He would have written the vision down, but he couldn’t because he was illiterate. So others had to write the visions down as he dictated them.

Compiling the Quran
Unfortunately, the secretaries he used were not very particular about what they used for writing materials. Palm leaves, the shoulder bones of half-eaten camels, whatever came to hand was sufficient. These written surahs, or verses, were left lying around in no particular order during Mohammed’s life. Eventually, after his death, they were gathered up and thrown into a chest, but not before some were eaten by a farm animal.

After Mohammed died, his followers did begin memorizing the Holy Quran. Unfortunately, it does not appear they were all memorizing the same version. By the time of the third Caliph, Uthman, the differences between the various oral versions of the Quran were so great that various Islamic tribes were ready to start a war over the problem.

Caliph Uthman solved the problem by having all the versions of the Quran gathered together. Any verse to which two people could attest as having come from the prophets’ mouth was retained. Everything else was burned. This resulted in many people asking where some of their favorite verses had gone.

Now, it is important to remember that Mohammed was the last and greatest of the prophets. Caliph Uthman never claimed divine inspiration, nor does the office of Caliph carry with it the charism of infallibility or anything like it. So the obvious question arises: how do we know Uthman burned the right things? Is it possible he burned all or part of the real Quran while retaining a false Quran? After all, he was not guided by God, as Mohammed was.

There is strong evidence that he did burn valid versions of the Quran. Mohammed himself is reported to have said that the Quran might be read in any one of seven different dialects, each with a different meaning. Uthman burned six of them. But he got away with it. The version he didn’t burn was the one that stuck. This is the version that has been memorized by generation after generation of Muslims, so that no (further) error might creep in.

But let us ignore the fact that the Quran is a book dictated to scribes by a man who was only indirectly a prophet through visions from an angel of questionable character (questioned by Mohammed himself, in fact), vouched for by a woman who had never seen the angel, written by numerous secretaries on numerous odds and ends which eyewitnesses attest were not correctly gathered together, some portions eaten by animals, the rest compiled together after the only true eyewitness was already dead, thus resulting in numerous versions, almost all of which were burned by a man who was not guided by God in deciding which ones to burn, the same man who we know from eyewitnesses had already left verses out.

Let’s ignore all that and assume the Quran came from God and was protected by God in its compilation so that we have the one true Quran today.

Ok.

Give me a minute…

Ok….

It’s all gone. I’m ready. Now, let’s look at the Quran itself.

The Content of the Quran
The first thing we notice is, Allah seems to get things confused sometimes. For instance, Sura 5:116 says the Christian Trinity is composed of God, Jesus and Mary. Hmm… Even Catholics wouldn’t go along with that description. We could attribute the error to Mohammed, except that would be blasphemy, or we could attribute the error to the scribes, except they seem to be quite consistent in their errors, since the same mistake is made in Sura 5:77 and 4:169. Hmmm…. Well, at least we know why Moslems frequently ask Christians if they really think Mary is God.

But there’s more. In some cases, the Suras are contradictory. For example, Sura 2.219 absolutely forbids drinking wine, but Sura 16.67 says that drinking wine is healthy. Adam is said to have been created from clay (23.12); from sperm (77.22); and from primeval water (21.31; 25.56; 24.44). Perhaps all three simultaneously? We don’t know. Now, it is true that Sura 2:105 says "Whatever verses we [Allah] cancel or cause you to forget, we bring a better or its like." (though why Allah refers to himself in the plural if God is not Trinitarian is something of a mystery, but let us pass on). We can only wonder why Allah needs to revise His revelation so often?

And when was it His revelation? At the risk of receiving part of Salmon Rushdie’s fatwah, we must point out that absolutely reliable Muslim sources (al-Tabari, Waqidi and Ibn Sa'd) describe a problem regarding Sura 53, the infamous Satanic Verses. While Mohammed was conversing with Meccan leaders next to the Kaaba, he began to recite Sura 53 – the angel Gabriel’s (?) first visits to him. The original wording was: "What do you think of al-Lat and al-Uzza And Manat the third beside? These are exalted Females, Whose intercession verily is to be sought after."

Unfortunately, these favorable references to Meccan pantheistic goddesses, and their favorite goddesses no less, was in total opposition to Islamic monotheism. Gabriel apparently visited Mohammed later and yelled at him for getting the verse wrong. Gabriel then gave him the true verse, a verse that denigrated the goddesses. Islamic scholars say the false verse was put in his mouth by Satan.

But if we believe Islamic scholars, one of two things would seem to be true, or perhaps both together: either Mohammed deliberately lied to the Meccans in order to curry political favor or Satan influenced his revelation as easily as God did. In either case, it puts both the content of the Quran and Mohammed’s status as prophet into serious question. This would perhaps be something we could overlook as a one-time error, if it were not for the whole structure and tenor of the Quran itself.

No one who has studied the Quran can disagree with a simple fact: all the passages that preach tolerance are early (Meccan) Suras, and all the passages that recommend killing, decapitating and maiming are late (Medinan) Suras. How might we interpret that fact? Well, one way is to remember that in the early years Mohammed was politically weak and set upon by numerous foes. During this time, Allah had him preached tolerance of belief and being kind to the weak. When he gained the upper hand and began to militarily crush anyone who opposed him, Allah suddenly changed the tenor of revelation to emphasize the holiness of crushing anyone who opposed him. This is why Islamic scholars can range from the mildest of the mild all the way to Osama bin Laden. It all depends on what verses you want to emphasize.

The Quran Has Many Versions
And this leads us to perhaps the biggest problem with the Quran, one with which our Protestant brethren are all too familiar. There may be one literal version of the Quran, but how many de facto versions are there? Put another way, how does a good Muslim know which verses are more important? The closest thing Islam has ever had to a central authority is the Caliph.

The first Caliphs were both spiritual and temporal leaders of Islam, but as intrigue and assassination hewed through the ranks of believers and Islam shattered into warring factions each intent on putting their man into the Caliphate, it subsequently became a purely political office. By the 1600’s, it was just an empty figurehead office, by the beginning of the twentieth century, there was no one to fill it at all. The caliphate has been empty for over a century and it will remain so – it would be impossible for the various Islamic sects to agree on a successor.

So, there are now as many versions of the Quran as there are imams to interpret it. If one imam or group of imams says this Sura is more important than that one, and another group says something else, what are we to do? There is no one to adjudicate between the two groups, no one who can exert authority and say with authority that one group is wrong while the other is right. Thus, when modern commentators claim to oppose Islamic fundamentalism, it simply isn’t clear what they mean. Are the fundamentalists the ones who insist on the primacy of the Meccan verses or are they the ones who insist on the primacy of the Medinian verses?

Islam, Orthodoxy and Protestants

Roughly half of America dislike everything George Bush says, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t the President of the United States. This is a point too few people keep in mind. Take, for instance, the example of Stas, a very nice Orthodox man, who read my recent piece on concerning the Muslim reporter who implicitly threatened to kill me and nuke America. He thought the piece excellent except for my statement that the Pope was the head of Christianity: “As for the Pope, 1 billion various protestants and 300 million Orthodox don't follow his words and that's half of Christianity.” To keep things honest, a Mormon and a Protestant also voiced essentially this disagreement.

I could have pointed out, as I do here, that his statement proves nothing about either the Pope or the President, but I demurred. Instead, I merely pointed out that there are no major theological differences between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, apart from a minor theological point concerning the generation of the Holy Spirit and his aforementioned quibble concerning the Pope. He insisted I was wrong, and in attempting to demonstrate his case, he inadvertently made a connection between Orthodoxy and Islam that I had read about, but never really seen in action before.

He sent a lengthy quote from an Orthodox text that said in part, “The East developed a mystical approach to theology: God cannot be known intellectually but only experientially. This approach to theology, known as the negative way, affirms that God is above human language and reason. "The negative way of the knowledge of God is an ascendant undertaking of the mind that progressively eliminates all positive attributes of the object it wishes to attain, in order to culminate finally in a kind of apprehension by supreme ignorance of Him who cannot be an object of knowledge."

In other words, God is a mystery. This means that He is beyond our intellectual comprehension. He is totally and "wholly other," not only invisible but inconceivable. Pseudo-Dionysius (c. late fifth, early sixth centuries), the father of the negative way, explains it by pointing to Moses' ascent on the mountain in order to meet God.

Orthodox theology distinguishes three aspects of God's being: (1) the indescribable and inaccessible divine essence (ousia); (2) the three divine Persons (hypostases); and (3) the uncreated energies (energeiai) inseparable from God's essence (as are the rays of the sun from the sun itself) in which He manifests, communicates, and gives Himself.”

Now, the “negative way” is a perfectly valid approach to God that has long been used in both Western and Eastern mystical theology. However, as the quote indicates, Eastern theology relies on the concept to an enormously greater extent than does Western theology. One might ask how the East knows to distinguish ousia, hypostates, and energeiai if God is “inconceivable,” but this is a picayune debating point and not the real point of this essay. What we should pay attention to today is the close connection this has to a very important aspect of Muslim theology.

Muslims insist that God is completely other. He is not knowable, He is not a family or communion of Persons. His fatherhood is not like our fatherhood, His love is not like our love, His transcendence places Him beyond anything we can understand. In this heavy emphasis on God’s otherness, Islamic theology bears a marked resemblance to Orthodoxy.

Why does this matter? Because it is perhaps the single most serious impediment to evangelizing a Muslim. Since the Orthodox accept the Trinity, their over-emphasis on transcendence is not a serious problem. But when Christians talk about Christianity between themselves or with the members of other faith traditions, the appeal to a shared experience of love is compelling. “You know how well (or badly) your father treated you? If your father treated you well, then he showed a small example of God the Father’s love for you. If he treated you badly, you know that his mistreatment of you was an injustice precisely because you already have some experience of the justice and mercy of God the Father’s love for you – the comparison between your human father and your divine Father is built into your heart and soul.”

That kind of discussion always takes place fairly early in the evangelization process, and most people of other traditions, whether Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, pagan or something else, understand the analogy. With Moslems, this approach doesn’t work because their theology explicitly denies it from the beginning.

“God’s love is not like my father’s love. God is not a family of persons. Human families have nothing in common with God. The relationship between God and man is the relationship between master and slave. He loves us as a master loves his slave, cares for us as a master cares for his slave, we owe him obedience as a slave owes his master, not as a son owes his father.” This is the reply of the Muslim to that particular Christian evangelistic approach.

This is, perhaps, why the Muslim world is so hard to evangelize. When faced with this reply, the Orthodox Christian is rather stumped for an answer. He can’t very well disagree with the emphasis on transcendence – he has the same emphasis himself. But he also knows there is something absolutely wrong with the argument, and since the Orthodox emphasize experiential knowledge over intellectual investigation, he can’t put his finger on what that might be nor can he explain it to his Moslem opposite.

Since Orthodoxy has been the flavor of Christianity closest to Islam for most of its existence, the Muslims have, in a certain sense, been inoculated against Christianity. When we receive a vaccine, we get enough of the virus to promote a systemic physical defense against it, but not enough to make us sick. Similarly, the Orthodox provide Islam with just enough Christian doctrine to know how to refute Joe Christian, but not enough to be converted by that doctrine. Indeed, strong historical arguments have been made to suggest Mohammed got most of his theology from a really bad mix of Jewish, Orthodox and heretical Christian theology.

So, how do we evangelize Muslims? That’s an open question. Very few Christians have really done it successfully. I suspect, however, that success relies strongly on studying Islam and trying to find points of correspondence between Islamic and Christian theology.

For instance, I was recently asked by a Muslim why Catholics pray to saints – they aren’t divine. Why not approach God directly? Does God need an intermediary?

I nearly laughed out loud when I saw the question, if only because this is precisely the kind of thing Protestants constantly ask. I pointed out to him that Mohammed received his vision from an angel. Why didn’t he receive communication for the composition of the Quran directly from God? Abraham dealt directly with God. Moses dealt directly with God. Mohammed didn’t. Why not?

So, why does God allow intermediaries? Because once God creates us, we need to praise and glorify Him. God didn’t need to create us, but once we are created, we only reach our fulfillment in glory by properly acknowledging Him. We do this by acting as intermediaries, bringing others closer to Him, asking Him for things because by these requests we acknowledge Him as the source of all things. Asking other people to intercede for us is a way of acknowledging that they, too, were made by Him, it assists them in fulfilling their need to glorify God. God doesn't need intermediaries, but we need to be intermediaries and have intermediaries in order to properly glorify His creation of us, so God - in His infinite mercy - permits it.

When we realize that Islam sees Mohammed as the prophet of whom Moses spoke, when we understand that part of Islam’s apologetic against Christianity is built on showing how dissimilar Jesus is to Moses while showing how similar Mohammed is to Moses, we realize a weakness in their theology. Any discordance that exists between Mohammed and Moses is a demonstration that Islam is false because it demonstrates the prophet - the intermediary - may be false. Muslims know this. Any concordance that can be shown between Christianity and Islam is proof that Christianity is true, at least to the extent the concordance exists. Muslims know this too. So, by breaking apart the ties between Moses and Mohammed, by emphasizing the ties between Christianity and Islam, it is possible that converts can be made.