The cardinal and the Discovery Institute

It turns out that the strange New York Times opinion piece by high-profile Roman Catholic cardinal Christoph Schönborn seemingly endorsing "Intelligent Design" creationism (the claim, taken seriously by no mainstream biologists, that scientific evidence supports miraculous intervention in the process of evolution) was in fact written without direct Vatican approval (though the Vatican hasn't disavowed it as far as I know), but with the urging and assistance of the Discovery Institute, an American organization dedicated to getting this brand of crackpottery into science classrooms.

With due respect, I think that this pretty much invalidates Reed Cartwright's generous reading that the op-ed was not intended to endorse ID creationism. He makes a game attempt at reasserting this, though.

Talking about this subject frequently gets people into trouble with words, especially political writers who are nonscientists. The words "creationism" and "Intelligent Design" seem to imply on their face nothing more than the idea that a deity created the world, which, depending on how you define the deity, could be compatible with just about any empirical evidence. But in practice the terms refer to much more specific claims than that, claims that run directly counter to modern science.

I read Schönborn's editorial as taking statements of the late Pope John Paul II that more or less asserted compatibility between science and theism (though they were elaborately phrased and a little hard to parse), and twisting them into outright endorsements of a modern politically influential pseudoscience. On the other hand, it's safe to assume that an archbishop and cardinal is better at exegesis of papal pronouncements than I am.

Batman Listens to Speeches

We just saw Batman Begins. It's not bad, mostly because of some great performances from the supporting cast, particularly Michael Caine who utterly steals the movie as Alfred the butler, Liam Neeson as the creepy vigilante sensei gone bad, and Tom Wilkinson as a mob boss who turns out to be the lowest rung in a Lensmen-like Ladder of Villains (give that man's dialect coach a medal). The cinematography and design are great, and I liked the portrayal of Batman as a kind of boogeyman who snatches bad guys up into the shadows before they can blink; that pretty effectively conveyed the idea that Batman's supposed to be scary rather than just sort of gothic.

Boy howdy, though, this movie sure does love its speeches. Everyone young Wayne meets is irresistably drawn to declaim at him for a couple of minutes about the nature of justice, vengeance and power (it's especially painful when Katie Holmes does this). It's an interesting theme, but less telling and more showing would be nice. One thing I liked about Gary Oldman as good cop Gordon is that he's the one guy who doesn't blabber on forever; his one extended comment at the very end actually makes an interesting point that I didn't expect the movie to bring up.

Christian Bale is pretty good as Bruce Wayne, but as Batman he uses this Cookie Monster voice that is more silly than scary. Also, it's jarring that in a movie that tries so hard to give logical explanations for everything in Batman's world, the climactic evil plot is such a piece of nonsense.

As movies about Batman go, Batman Begins is one of the better ones; it certainly holds together better than Schumacher's two and probably better than Burton's. (I do have a soft spot in my heart for the Sixties movie made between seasons of the goofy TV series, which probably just marks me as Not A True Batman Fan.)

As comic-book-superhero movies go, I wouldn't say I enjoyed Batman Begins nearly as much as either of Sam Raimi's terrific Spiderman movies, either of Bryan Singer's nifty X-Men movies, or, for that matter, The Incredibles, which I think deserves to be judged as a straight superhero story and is actually one of the best ever made.

No other gods

William Raspberry quotes Kevin Hasson, advocate for public religious expression, who is upset about the court ruling prohibiting display of the Ten Commandments in a courtroom. Toward the end he expresses a noble sentiment:

"Writ large, that is the solution to the culture war: Respect for others' consciences, even when we're sure they're wrong, is contagious. Not because it's nice. Rather, it's contagious because it conveys an important idea:

"Whether it's a tradition as old and venerable as Buddhism or as new and flaky as parking-barrier worship doesn't matter. Because of how we're made, we are each free -- within broad limits -- to follow what we believe to be true in the manner our consciences say we must...."

That's just it, though. The First Commandment (by the prevailing Protestant count, at least) is "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me." It says right there in stone that you don't have the right to be wrong. It's pretty unambiguous about that. And it's not a subsidiary proviso; it's the first one.

This is the whole problem, the question of how tolerant we have to be of intolerance. In the United States we allow individuals the right to express intolerance within fairly wide boundaries, and I wouldn't want to change that, as weird and dangerous as it may seem to people in some other Western democracies. But is it intolerant to be intolerant of intolerance in an official government context?



I should be fair to Mr. Hasson and mention that he seems to object not so much to the specific case as to the "predominantly religious purpose" language in the majority opinion. He goes on for a while about the difference between the words "temporal" and "secular"; I always thought they were synonyms derived from roots meaning almost the same thing, but apparently the word "secular" is secretly anti-religious because somebody or other decided to translate it into Arabic as "godless". It's a bit of a head-scratcher.

Anyway, he seems not to get the civil libertarians' case at all. Nobody (well, almost nobody) is trying to expunge religion from public life. The whole reason the Founders wanted government secular was to keep government from messing with their public religious expression. It's resulted in a highly religious population with many sects and denominations that nevertheless has essentially no tendency toward sectarian bloodshed.

In most countries where the government does officially mess with religion, religion in public life is either (a) in decline, or (b) bad for you if you express the wrong kind—and in case (b) the tendency is not toward highly ecumenical definitions of what is the right kind. I don't see why the most publicly religious people in America sometimes fail to see the connection. If I really wanted to destroy American Christianity I'd start by demanding that the government officially endorse it.