Echoes in Eternity

This is a very good piece in the Wall Street Journal on the dearth of mature men in today's society.

What explains this puerile shallowness? I see it as an expression of our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men. It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.
...
Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.

They might as well just have another beer.

Ted Haggard has started a new church just down the road from his old one, four years after being caught going to homosexual prostitutes for drugs and sex. Based on this Wall Street Journal article about his rapidly growing church, it doesn't sound like he has really understood the gravity of his sin or the freedom offered from the Gospel. In fact, this article combined with some prior comments I've heard from him suggest that he listened to all the wrong counseling in the years since his fall.

Mr. Haggard plays up his new regular-guy image. At the picnic, he asked a friend whether anyone noticed he had said "hell" in the sermon—and not in a Biblical context.

"I cuss now," he said proudly.

Mr. Haggard said he believes people trust him more as a pastor since his spectacularly public fall. Strangers, he said, keep pulling him aside, asking advice about their personal struggles.

"It's amazing. People tell me everything," Mr. Haggard said. "That never happened when we were respectable."

Now, it is certainly true that churches can fall into the trap of viewing the pastor as saint. But this seems more along the lines of the pop cultural idea that authenticity is the most important value in life. As long as you're sincere and genuine, it doesn't matter what you do or say. Of course, such thinking usually ends just short of giving Hitler a pat on the back.

Throughout his "recovery," I've seen and heard little from Haggard that put the focus on anyone but himself... certainly Christ wasn't given much of a nod. May he yet realize where his righteousness truly comes from.

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto on the "melt-down" of global warmism:

This column was scoffing at global warming back when global warming was still cool. But even we have been surprised at the extent of the past three months' "meltdown" of global warmism, to use the metaphor that everyone seems to have settled on.

As we've written on various occasions, we didn't know enough about the substance of the underlying science to make a judgment about it. But we know enough about science itself to recognize that the popular rendition of global warmism--dogmatic, doctrinaire and scornful of skepticism--is not the least bit scientific. The revelations in the Climategate emails show that these attitudes were common among actual scientists, not just the popularizers of their work.

Still, we would not have gone so far as to say that global warming was just a hoax. Surely there was some actual science to back it, even if there was a lot less certainty than was claimed.

Now, though, we're wondering if this was too charitable a view. London's Sunday Times reports that scientists are "casting doubt" on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's "claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution," a claim the IPCC describes as "unequivocal"...

Meanwhile, the BBC carries an extraordinary interview with Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the central Climategate figure. In the interview, Jones admits that the periods 1860-80 and 1910-40 saw global warming on a similar scale to the 1975-98 period, that there has been no significant warming since 1995, and that the so-called Medieval Warm Period calls into question whether the currently observed warming is unprecedented.

And then there's this exchange:

When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over," what exactly do they mean--and what don't they mean?

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

So "the vast majority of climate scientists" don't think the debate is over? Someone had better tell the IPCC, Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee and most of our colleagues in the media, who have long been insisting otherwise--and indeed, who continue to do so.
...
Even Phil Jones acknowledges climate science is rife with uncertainty, but global warmism's popularizers refuse to brook any doubt or acknowledge that the "consensus" they have touted is a sham.

And they used to call us deniers.