Sometimes I collect and log thoughts I don’t want to discuss at full length.  So you may consider today’s post a sheaf of promissory notes.

Loving One’s Enemies.  After the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, the victorious Allies embarked on the Marshall Plan to help their former enemies rebuild their economies and institutions.  I have sometimes wondered a victorious Israel might be able to accomplish something like that in Gaza.  Of course such a plan could work only if Hamas were entirely uprooted and eradicated, for if permitted a hand in rebuilding, those currently in power in Gaza would rebuild nothing but the capacity for more terror.  Unfortunately, it now looks as though Israel will not be permitted to finish the job, so my speculations are probably moot.  A Marshall Plan for Gaza might have been impossible anyway, for it is much easier for the people of a territory to accept help from those who merely put an end to their campaign of extermination, as happened in Europe, than to accept it from the very people they had tried unsuccessfully to exterminate.  But one may dream.

The Administrative State.  I carelessly remarked to someone the other day that the administrative state is out of control.  What made the remark fatuous is that the administrative state is designed to be out of control -- to be as autonomous, as free from checks and balances, as anything in government can be.  Elected officials pass by like rain showers; bureaucrats endure like glaciers.  Laws are highly visible; regulations are too numerous to keep track of.  Theoretically, legislators can override administrative decisions; in reality, they like having someone else to take the heat for them.  Voters mutter against big government; but the agencies generate their own constituencies, which are much more highly focused and committed.  So of course the administrative state is out of control.  What else should anyone have expected?  That it will one day collapse is a certainty.  Whether it can be cut down to size before that happens is a much harder question.

The Limits of Law.  All law is premised consciously or unconsciously on moral judgments.  Yet as Prohibition taught us, or should have taught us, law cannot punish every sin or suppress every vice, and attempting the impossible may make matters worse.  Sometimes, when I make such observations, people draw the strange conclusion that even certain forms of murder should be legal.  No, allowing people to kill the very young, the very sick, and the very weak isn’t like allowing people to drink more than is good for them.  If we refuse even to protect innocent life, we may as well give up having any laws at all.  In the case of abortion, a sounder deduction from the fact that law cannot punish every sin would be that only the practitioners of this grisly trade should be punished, not their dreadfully misguided clients.  Leave the women to the judgment and mercy of God.  As pro-lifers have always maintained.

A Strange but Common Combination.  Not long ago a young woman lambasted me for defending the Israeli effort to eradicate Hamas, declaring that I was championing murder.  She insisted that all humans are naturally loving and peaceful – and yet at the same time, defended the rape and murder spree of the terrorists themselves, not to mention their other attacks and atrocities over the years.  Am I alone in finding it difficult to reconcile these two views?  She said I am a poor excuse for a Christian.  No doubt I am.  But I don’t think that’s why.

Ears Too Pure to Hear Unwokeness.  There is nothing surprising in the fact that people don’t like hearing views with which they disagree.  The surprising thing is how difficult some folk find it to hear such views at all, even when their ears seem undamaged.  For example, if I remark that men tend to be more aggressive and women to be more nurturing, I can expect to be told that I consider women inferior.  No.  In some ways they are superior.  But I refuse to judge women by the standards of men – and to do that, I think, really is to consider them inferior.

You aren’t indoctrinating me enough.  Over the years, the distribution of my teaching evaluations has always been bipolar.  I receive both strong praise and strong criticism, and not a lot in between.  That hasn’t changed, and in most ways, neither has my teaching.  What’s new is the character of some of the complaints.  They used to focus on things like my grading, my assignments, or my lecture style.  In recent years, though, I have sometimes been told that I’m a poor teacher because I’ve expressed skepticism about one or another conventional progressive dogma.  One student, who didn’t even take my course, complained to my dean because he had hunted down my blog and didn’t like it.

Parasitism.  Deism is parasitic on Christianity.  When people in a Christian culture lose their faith, they become Deists.  But as Christianity loses cultural influence, people do not become Deists; they repaganize.  That is, they no longer merely deny biblical faith -- they reject the natural law, place other gods in God’s place, and deny their need for His grace.  It may seem strange that it is even possible to deny something like the natural law.  Isn’t it a human universal?  Yes, but our fallen condition produces two universals, not one.  One is the law written on the heart, which is ultimately impossible to erase.  The other is the desire to erase it, which is equally inexorable, for we are at war with ourselves.  The best of the old pagan philosophers clearly recognized the first universal, but they were only dimly conscious of the second.  They seemed to think that the problem was merely that some people aren’t virtuous enough.