When I showed her this, my girlfriend asked if I had alerted the respectable media. Actually, I found it via Ed Brayton’s blog, which has gotten some wonderful guest-bloggers while Ed goes off to Vegas to gamble.
Also from one of Ed’s guests is a post on Obama’s decision not to investigate Bush war crimes. It contains this giggle-worthy line from Obama:
I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.
Any glittery rhetorical use of the word “forward” is cliche enough to have gotten spoofed by the Simpsons back in the 90′s (“spinning, spinning, spinning, into the future,” anyone?) It’s a lame excuse to do nothing about crimes which could just as (il)legitimately be used for common murder.
On a completely unrelated note, Vic Reppert recently linked to the 48 Laws of Power, which includes this advice: “Preach the Need for Change, but Never Reform too much at Once.”
By the way, The 48 Laws of Power was one of the required textbooks for William Dembski’s course on Critical Thinking at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Yes, I know that sounds like the setup to a joke. The stated Course Objective was: “The goal of this course is to help students become adept at making a persuasive case for the truth of the Christian worldview.”
In Dembski’s defense, one of the other main textbooks he used for the course is Nancey Murphy’s Reasoning and Rhetoric in Religion, which I’ve skimmed through and found to be actually pretty good. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for something by an intelligent Christian. It’s much better than the recent books by Tim Keller, Francis Collins, and Alister McGrath, or anything I’ve read by Alvin Plantinga. But Murphy’s book is not in any way a book of apologetics. Its purpose is to help seminary students with critical thinking. She has a good analysis of what’s wrong with Anselm’s ontological argument, for instance.