North Western Winds

More Hallowe'en stuff . Also, this . Creepy! Happy Hallowe'en, everyone!

There is an interview with CS Lewis' adopted son Douglas Gresham here . Gresham is an advisor on the upcoming movie, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . An excerpt: What is the least understood or least recognized aspect of Jack's character? Gresham : His humor. Everybody sort of pictures Jack as this dour professor, isolated in the ivory towers of academia of Oxford. But in fact he was this enormous bon vivant . He could tell great stories. On the drive coming out to Oxford, taking Jack back after a weekend or a holiday, I'd go along for the ride. We'd stop somewhere at a pub for a pork pie and a pint, and within minutes, Jack would have the public bar surrounded by builders, workmen, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, roaring with laughter and enjoying every story he was telling them. And he would be laughing with them, conversing as equals with them. Nobody ever sees this in modern depictions of Jack. People would say, "Who's the guvnor? He's a r...

Well, this looks like it will be interesting. About Pajamas Media Pajamas Media is a new blogging venture designed to bring together the internet’s brightest minds and most compelling content into a single source that will, in turn, complement and re-define journalism in the 21st century. Upon its official debut in November 2005, Pajamas Media will feature content from over 70 noteworthy bloggers . The company was founded in 2004 by acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson, software designer, musician, and author of Little Green Footballs. Apparently the name will be changing, but we don't yet know to what. Canadians take note, Angry in the Great White North is a part of this. His profile is here . Here are two more worth a look: Surfeited with Dainties by freelance writer Michael Brendan Dougherty, because you can't have too many well written conservatives on your blogroll. Albion's Seedlings , for history buffs with an interest in the...

Trinity Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity , if I haven't mentioned it already, follows the common tactic of exploring and slowly unpacking The Apostles' Creed . Almost two hundred pages in and we've only got the following part of the creed covered: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty." He spent a lot of time talking about what belief is and its rationality, before moving on to consider what the concept of God is, why God is one and why "Father." I've now gotten to the part of the book where Ratzinger is laying the ground for a discussion of "Jesus Christ, His only son, our Lord..." In other words, Ratz is now discussing the concept of the Trinity; why the One God is said to have three persons. It's a famously and notoriously difficult doctrine but he handles it well: The point at issue here is whether man in his relations with God is only dealing with the reflections of his own conciousness or whether it is given to hi...

With all of the action going on down south on who should succeed justice Sandra Day O'Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court, it's a good time to reflect on what the Law is, what we expect from it, and why it is such a compelling subject. At Right Reason, Edward Fesser defends GEM Anscombe from Simon Blackburn and in so doing, offers a succinct description of the Natural Law tradition : since the natures of things are just the forms in which they participate, and forms are, on the classical metaphysical picture in question, eternal in the way that mathematical truths have traditionally been taken to be, there is a sense in which the moral truths entailed by our having a certain form are necessary truths. Of course, that we exist at all is not a necessary truth, but a contingent one; and of course, it is also true that there could have been creatures that were like us in some respects but not others. But given that we do in fact exist, and that we have the specific characteristics we ...

My Blahg is running The Canadian Blog Awards again this year. I know that last year I said I would have nothing to do with them in 2005. That was after Robert was particularly nasty and threatening to a US blogger. Two things have made me decide to ease off on Robert a tad. I've been nominated in a new category this year - Best Religious Blog and I think it's good to have Canadian religious blogs recognized. There are seven blogs in that cateogory thus far and maybe you have never heard of them, and maybe this is a chance to find and recognize new talent and new efforts. There's quite a variety so far. A couple of Christian blogs including a Lutheran minister and one that looks like it might be quite left . There's also a cynic and I must add that I'm quite pleased to see him in this category. My money's on Kathie Shaidle to win. She probably is the most well known of the bunch and she's certainly prolific. The whole thing runs until December 11, a...

Derb on parents and proms : Exhibit B: The parents of Uniondale, N.Y. This middle-middle-class Long Island suburb has a Roman Catholic high school whose principal has canceled this year's senior prom on grounds of excess. Says he: "Twenty years ago, seniors went to the beach after the prom and then to someone's house for breakfast. From that, it's turned into a weekend-long orgy..." He blames the parents, who are apparently willing to bankroll $1,000 formal-wear outfits, limos, after-prom house rentals and booze cruises, and the like. Wow. We didn't even have proms in England back when. School ended, everyone went home. That was it. The whole prom thing seems as weird to me as some New Guinea mating ritual. My first real impression of a school prom was the one in Carrie - probably not the best impression to have. Anyway, these parents ought to be ashamed of themselves. What are they thinking of? Probably something like: "If I don't do this for Kyle/A...

A small snip from Ratz's Introduction to Christianity : For Christianity, the explanation of reality as a whole is not an all embracing conciousness or one single materiality; on the contrary, at the summit stands a freedom that thinks and, by thinking, creates freedoms, thus making freedom the structural form of all being. I think that's terrific but I also read the two pages that lead up to it. Perhaps it looks like so much air to you, dear reader. It evades the pits of material determinism (a form of being that can't know itself can't be free; freedom that is the product of accident also cannot be free) and ideal determinism (a form of being utterly determined by another cannot be free). It posits that reality is self aware and, being self aware, is capable not only of exersizing freedom, but of granting it to its creations such that they are "made in God's image." An important caveat is that freedom cannot here be understood to mean "anything ...

Good bloggers are golden. I hope Bill Vallicella has plans to write for a long time. Bill on Superstition : Is there a difference between religion and superstition, or is religion by its very nature superstitious? There seem to be two main views. One is that of sceptics and naturalists. For them, religion, apart perhaps from its ethical teaching, is superstitious in nature so that there could not be a religion free of superstition. Religion just is a tissue of superstitious beliefs and practices and has been exposed as such by the advance of natural science. The other view is that of those who take religion seriously as having a basis in reality. They do not deny that there are superstitious beliefs, practices, and people. Nor do they deny that religions are often interlarded with superstition. What they deny is that religion is in its essence superstitious. Indeed, a philosophically sophisticated religion such as Roman Catholicism specifically prohibits superstitious beliefs and p...

The separation of Truth and Piety Ratz's book continues to have my attention: Early Christianity boldly and resolutely made its choice and carried out its purification by deciding for the God of the philosophers and against the gods of the various religions. Whenever the question arose as to which god the Christian God corresponded, Zeus perhaps or Hermes or some other god, the answer ran: To none of them. To none of the gods to whom you pray but solely and alone to him to whom you do not pray, to that highest being of whom your philosophers speak. The early church resolutely put aside the the whole cosmos of the ancient religions, regarding the whole of it as deceit and illusion, and explained its faith by saying: When we say God, we do not mean or worship any of this; we mean only Being itself, what the philosophers have expounded as the ground of all being, as the God of all powers - that alone is our God... The choice thus made meant opting for the logos as against any kind...

My books arrived today. Here are my selections and why I chose them: C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church , by Joseph Pearce. Pearce seems to be making a career out of literary biographies. I read and enjoyed his book on Tolkien when Lord of the Rings movies were out. This one examines how it is that Lewis was a high church man and yet was never Catholic (unlike Cardinal Newman , for example, who famously jumped from the Anglican ship). I am also looking at his book on Chesterton. The Fourth Crusade , by Jonathan Phillips. The fourth Crusade never actually made it to the Holy Land. For some reason or other, they sacked Constantinople instead. This is one of the major reasons for the first split in Christian history, the one between East and West. There simply has to be a story here. A Mighty Fortress: A History of the German People , by Steven Ozment. There's a lot of German and germanic culture in my family. I'd like to understand it in a wider and broader scope. The Histor...

Bill has a post about his commenters and comment policy. I liked these points especially: 4. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or editing or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship . People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate. To make the latter point perfectly clear: I am under no sort of obligation to provide anyone with a forum. 6. Some undesirables: The skimmers , those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues , those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil . The illogical . The politically correct . Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: t...

I am toying around with Google's Gmail service. I think web based e-mail has some advantages over app based mail. The first web based e-mail that I used was Hotmail, which I only left when I began blogging. I wanted one interface where I could get my personal and blog mail and Hotmail didn't seem to offer a way to do that, but Mozilla's Thunderbird did. Now I'm messing with Gmail and wondering the same thing. Is the only way to do this to create a second Gmail account and have all of the mail from it sent to the first account? I know I can send mail from the designated main account using a number of "from" and "reply to" addresses. Getting it all to arrive in one place looks trickier. Is there a simpler way than what I'm suggesting? It is getting to be a challenge to keep up with all changes the tech world is sending out way. As I'm trying to figure this mail thing out, I am just beginning to "get" the RSS feeds thing. I'...

I've been mucking about with my template a bit of late, trying to tidy up and add some new content. You probably noticed the new masthead last week, as well as the new avatar for myself. Today I added two new sections on the right hand column: "Art and Media" and "Quicklinks." Quicklinks isn't actually new, although it's got different stuff in it and a higher profile now. It's stuff I like that doesn't fit anywhere else. Art and Media is for sites that have, or are about... well, Art and Media. That means film, photography and artistic images. I've always tried to incorporate visuals into NWW and I'm hoping maybe now I'll have more at my fingertips to choose from. The image above is from Flickr and I think it's terrific. Kudos to the photographer, Yolise . While I'm giving credits, I should also mention that the masthead uses wallpaper from Vladstudio , where you can get some neat wallpaper for your computer. The avatar is ...

Speaking of children, here's a German book for kids that shows where they come from . It's pretty, um, thorough. My question is, is allowing kids books like this a good thing? I see a pro life angle here is what I'm getting at... Tip: Althouse

From the conclusion of Chapter One of Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity : Christian faith is more than the option in favour of a spiritual ground to the world; its central formula is not "I believe in something", but "I believe in you ." It is the encounter with the man Jesus, and in this encounter it experiences the meaning of the world as a person . In Jesus' life from the Father, in the immediacy and intensity his converse with him in prayer, and, indeed, face to face, he God's witness, through whom the intangible has become tangible, the distant has drawn near... He is the presence of the eternal itself in this world. In his life, in the unconditional devotion of himself to men, the meaning of the world is present before us; it vouchsafes itself to us as a love that loves even me and makes life worth living by this incomprehensible gift of a love free from any threat of fading away or any tinge of egotism. ... Christian faith lives on the d...

I fear I will be plucking a lot of quotes from Ratzinger's book if he keeps up this level of exposition. From the pages of Chapter One, "Belief in the World Today": Man does not live on the bread of practicability alone; he lives as man and, precisely in the intrinsically human part of his being, on the word, on love, on meaning. Meaning is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists. Without word, without meaning, without love he falls into the situation of no longer being able to live, even when earthly comfort is present in abundance... meaning is not derived from knowledge. To try to manufacture it in this way, that is, out of the provable knowledge of what can be made, would resemble Baron Munschausen's absurd attempt to pull himself up out of the bog by his own hair. I believe that the absurdity of this story mirrors very accurately the basic situation of man. No one can pull himself up out of the bog of uncertainty, of not be...

I'm glad to see this settle the question at last. My blog is worth $264,204.72 . How much is your blog worth? It's based on this .

Cinematical on the video game based movie , Doom: Doom isn’t operatically bad; it’s just derivative, inert and dull – it feels like the third sequel to a film that never existed . Even The Rock – a screen presence (I’m not going to hurt myself by stretching to call him an actor) who’s proven he has the goods in films like the far superior action-burger The Rundown – can’t bring things to life, even with the relish he brings to saying nonsense like “[expletive deleted]!” Books may tell us something; movies may show us something, and games may let us do something – even if “something” is nothing more than twitching fingers on the keys to plug monsters in their hideous heads and pausing to reload. But Doom is the worst of both worlds – all it offers us is shooting and shouting, while strapping the audience firmly in the passenger’s side with nothing to do but watch and yawn . Pop-culture observers ha...

Still on the first chapter of Raztinger's book, but I want to stop and share this. It's a bullseye, I think: The Italian philosopher Giambattista (1668 - 1744)... was the first to formulate a completely new idea of truth and knowledge and who... coined the typical formula of the modern spirit when it comes to dealing with truth and reality. Against the Scholastic equation verum est ens (being is truth) he advances his own formula verum quia factum . That is to say, all that we can truly know is what we have made ourselves [ie. what we can see: seeing ~ making. -ed.]. It seems to me that this formula denotes the end of the old metaphysics and the beginning of the specifically modern mind... For the ancient world and the Middle Ages, being itself is true... apprehensible, because God, pure intellect, made it, and he made it by thinking it. To the creative original spirit... thinking and making are one and the same thing. His thinking is a creative process. Things are, because t...

A link from NRO's The Corner . I'm lost for words. ROFL! Sweden's Feminist Party (yes, that's right) is imploding: Susanne Linde, a former member of the liberal Folkpartiet, left on Monday, accusing Feminist Initiative figurehead Tiina Rosenberg of being an inflexible hard-line bully who is attempting to purge the party of more liberal voices. “One is not worth very much if one is a white, heterosexual, middle-class woman, in her eyes,” said Linde about Rosenberg, a professor of gender specialising in “queer studies” at Stockholm University, who has reportedly said women who sleep with men are betraying their gender. Linde was followed on Wednesday by Helena Brandt, party treasurer, who accused the leadership of obsessing over homosexual, bisexual and trans-sexual issues. She claimed that ordinary members have no say in decisions and that men are discriminated against by being limited to 25% of leadership positions. Brandt said she felt “conned...

This is the meanest, stupidest, most cringe inducing thing I have read in a very long time. Shame, Mr. Morford , Shame. Morford is mortified that people have more children than he thinks is OK. He's also peeved that those who have many children don't agree with him about many things. Where is, in other words, the funky tattooed intellectual poetess who, along with her genius anarchist husband, is popping out 16 funky progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring to answer the Duggar's squad of über-white future Wal-Mart shoppers? Where is the liberal, spiritualized, pro-sex flip side? Verily I say unto thee, it ain't lookin' good. I'll tell you where, Mr. Morford. She does not exist. She and her serial husband squad chemically neutralized or aborted their kids so there'd be money for a Bimmer in the garage. So they could have the latest computer. And, yes, so they could have the latest clothes and the latest haircut you nincompoop. Hey...

Stephen Bainbridge , on the Miers nomination: Roe is a morally significant but jurisprudentially minor aspect of the broader problem that has preoccupied conservative legal thinkers for the last several decades. The really consequential questions go not to issues like the right to privacy, but to more fundamental institutional issues such as the respective roles of courts and legislatures . I've said it before, but it bears repeating, that Wickard v. Filburn matters a good deal more than Roe . Put another way, Roe is a symptom. In order to treat the underlying problem, a judge needs to know more than just whether she thinks abortion is good or bad. She needs a developed and thoroughly worked out constitutional philosophy. ... In short, even if Harriet Miers votes to overturn Roe , she could easily still turn out to be a disaster for conservatives if she fails consistently to adhere to the triad of originalism, textualism, and traditionalism that should properly constrain judici...

Ann Althouse writes, and I concur: I'm very aware of the reasons given for the importance of reading novels, and I've been influenced by this sort of thing for most of my life. I've never snobbily turned up my nose at novels, like Mr. Collins. I've always had the impression that the best people read novels. That has motivated me to try to be the sort of person who reads a lot of novels. Great mental powers, knowledge of human nature, and wit and humour are also displayed in well-chosen language in works of nonfiction and even in blogs or in live conversation. And novels also contain plenty of foolish notions, tedious observations, phony depictions of human nature, and awful writing . I'm most interested in learning about things that are true and hearing great ideas, and I have never found novels to be a particularly rich source. Of course there are the emotion-stirring stories, but for that, there are so many movies to see, nearly all of which are fiction. But I fi...

Fun with hermeneutics Here's a little conceptual mind game for you. In this excerpt from Francis Beckwith's article in Touchstone , replace the word "scripture" with data and the word "Church" with science. [John Paul] is saying that biblical scholars and systematic theologians who think they can extract doctrine from Scripture unaided by the resources of philosophical analysis are kidding themselves, and are not doing a service to the Church. There are two reasons for this. First, such a scholar, whether he knows it or not, approaches the biblical text with a cluster of assumptions—a philosophy—about the accessibility of theological truth as well as about texts and their meaning not derived from the biblical text itself. Second, when reading the Bible, he is confronted with scriptural truths that call for a philosophically informed and coherent theology by which to understand and make sense of them. ... An interpreter of Scripture must be conscienti...

There is an interview with George Weigel in The Brussels Journal on the subject of his most recent book (which is on my hit hit list just as soon as there is a paperback available). An interview with George Weigel Paul Belien : The title of your book – The Cube and the Cathedral – is a metaphor. Can you explain what these images stand for? George Weigel : The book began in my mind when I was in Paris in 1997. I visited the Great Arch of la Défense, this angular, rationalistic, stunning piece of contemporary design which imagines itself to be a human rights monument. Moreover I noticed that all the guidebooks boast that all of Notre Dame – tower, spire and all – would fit inside this cube. That popped a question into my mind: what culture is better able to provide the foundations for the human rights that this monument celebrates: the culture of the cube, rationalist, sceptical, relativist, secular, or the culture that produced the “holy unsane...

I thought all of these were great. From The Maverick Philosopher : After knowing one another for a long time, three clergymen -- one Catholic, one Jewish, and one Episcopalian -- have become good friends. When they are together one day, the Catholic priest is in a sober, reflective mood, and he says, "I'd like to confess to you that although I have done my best to keep my faith, I have occasionally lapsed, and even since my seminary days I have, not often, but sometimes, succumbed and sought carnal knowledge." "Ah well," says the rabbi, "It is good to admit these things, and so I will tell you that, not often, but sometimes, I break the dietary laws and eat forbidden food." At this the Episcopalian priest, his face reddening, says, "If only I has so little to be ashamed of. You know, only last week I caught myself eating a main course with my salad fork." Taken from De Civiatate Dei : Two priests were going to Hawaii on vacation and d...

Action Philosophers is a comic book series by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey. From what I can see in the previews, it's irreverent but true to history. Might be a great way to get the foot in the door as far as philosophy is concerned. There are previews on the website, including one on Augustine. Btw, there is an answer to the Greek kid's question (click to enlarge).

Via Cox and Forkum . Mark Steyn says it with words: I underestimated multiculturalism. After 9/11, I assumed the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition would be made plain: that a cult of "tolerance" would in the end founder against a demographic so cheerfully upfront in their intolerance. Instead, Islamic "militants" have become the highest repository of multicultural pieties. So you're nice about gays and Native Americans? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti- masochists. And so Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic "rebel forces." You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and that's just the way the Western media intend to keep it.

Father Jim Tucker , who is a young priest and a libertarian , reflects: I've found it interesting to notice the extremely divergent reactions provoked by what might (now) be called "over the top" elements of the Catholic religion. I'm not referring such extravagantly over-the-top dogmas as the Incarnation of God the Son or the General Resurrection, but rather of non-essential elements from the man-made periphery. Papal tiaras, for instance, or episcopal cappe magne, or birettas, or fiddleback chasubles. One could add, in addition to these sartorial extravagances (which, prior to our lackluster day, would once have hardly raised an eyebrow among Catholics), processions with holy relics, odd local customs, Trappist sign language, bone churches, Epiphany chalk, or blessings of animals on St Francis' Day. As far back as I can remember, I've always loved these things. And many readers have responded to the blogposts on these subjects in much the same way as one of ...

Quotable blogs Vomit the Lukewarm : I don't ever seem to have the same idea of what "profound" means as the Philosophers I tend to converse with. Most of them seem to think that "profound" means "unanswerable". This has never been my experience. The profoundest things are usually the simplest things; the words we all know and use a thousand times a day . Something isn't profound because you can never find a reason for it- this is more typical of irrational and silly things. A question is profound because you can contemplate the answer forever, and always find new things to it. It is a sham profundity that can never begin to know- the true profundity is the kind that never ceases to know something new. Burn Cells Brained Out is teacher in a private Catholic school: I crave more in the way of discussion and debate than I get in my day to day life. I haven't yet resorted to making hand puppets for each of the Pre-Socratic philosophers and talki...

From Harvard via Burkean Canuck : Conservatism is... closer to the mission of the university than liberalism is. Liberals, insofar as they are progressives , believe that it is possible to eliminate prejudice from society. When prejudice is gone, truth prevails, and there is no need to reconsider the errors of the past. Progress is irrevocable, and inquiry shrinks to whatever questions remain unsettled. Conservatives, believing that it is not possible to eliminate prejudice, are more tolerant than liberals; they expect society to be, and remain, a mixture of truth and untruth. Conservatives may be prejudiced themselves, or they may be just tolerant of prejudice in others. If society will always be a mixture of truth and untruth, it may be necessary to see what sort of untruth is politically compatible with truth, and what sort is not. The truth is greater than the sum of its parts and together we are strong, even if we bicker a lot. Progressives whittle the truth back until it is just ...

Archaic relic that I am, NWW does not use gender neutral phrasing . Or B.C.E. / C.E. in the place of B.C. / A.D. Changing established practices in order to curry favour with political trends is bad policy; tomorrow's new-niks will bury you with the same principle, ensuring that no text will be easily comprehensible a few generations into the future. Failure to distinguish between something that disagrees with you because it is an evolved artifact, and something that disagrees with you because it is the result of someone's intent to disagree with you, is seriously second rate. It's delusional paranoia, or it's pathetically cliqueish. Marxist conspiracy rubbish is a dress on a pig lamenting that there are no hammers for the left handed. But - the rules of the game seem to be changing . Rejoice, the establishment is being challenged (OK, it's being ignored ). Or, mourn the coming balkanization of language and culture. Editorially, I don't answer to anybody her...

Turning a blind eye History.net looks back on Admiral Nelson, who figures as large as any absent figure can in the Aubrey - Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian, which I am currently reading (and will be for a while; there are twenty of them). This is amusing: The vitriol abated in 1801 when Nelson, who had been appointed Vice Admiral of the Blue on January 1, again sailed into battle, this time against the Danes. At the Battle of Copenhagen Nelson turned a potential disaster into victory. His superior, Admiral Hyde Parker—whom Nelson held in low esteem—signaled the British fleet to retreat. Nelson, convinced he could win, is reputed to have put his telescope to his blind eye and said, “I really do not see the signal.” The story goes that from this act, the expression “turning a blind eye” entered the English language. What was of consequence was Nelson’s victory and the reward of promotion to viscount. And this is important: In 1805, Spain w...

The irrepressible Theodore Dr. Dalrymple, of no religious faith, eviscerates Gregory Paul's ballyhooed "scientific" study showing that religion will make you poor and stupid. The Victorian militant atheist Charles Bradlaugh, who went on tub-thumping speaking tours, used to stride onto the stage, take out his pocket watch and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. His survival at the end of the minute was, for him, proof positive that God did not exist. Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, tried to prove the inefficacy of prayer, at least to his own satisfaction, by comparing the life expectancy of the British royal family--whose health was prayed for in churches throughout the land--with that of other members of the aristocracy. Finding no difference, he concluded that prayer was not an effective means of prolonging life. Very much in the same tradition, Gregory S. Paul, writing in the Journal of Religion and Society , attempts to prove that religious b...

Reciprocal Altruism and Catholic Social Justice I have casually mentioned in these Darwin posts - and probably in others as well - that a study of Darwin, and of sociobiology in particular, was one of many things that prompted me to take religious ideas seriously and investigate them instead of taking the cues and admonitions of the beautiful people that there was nothing to be seen there, at least not in the Judeo Christian tradition. Puzzlement ensues when I say that because Darwin is commonly taught to have "proven" that evolution is and can only be unguided. Darwin is "proof" that morals have no anchor in the real world and that life is so bloody that it can have nothing to do with any Christian God. Leaving aside the question of "random" mutation, which I've had enough of for the time being, the idea that Darwinism can have nothing to do with acts of selflessness - what used to be called altruism or virtue - has been behind the times since the...