Nietzsche has been dead for more than a hundred years, yet today his reputation is higher than ever. Indeed Nietzsche is probably the leading philosopher to whom liberal intellectuals and academics look for inspiration and guidance. For example, the late Robert Solomon of the University of Texas at Austin, in his book Living With Nietzsche, proclaims Nietzsche to be the most insightful and relevant thinker for our time.

How can this be? Nietzsche was openly and contemptuously opposed to most of the cardinal tenets of modern liberalism. For instance, he hated democracy and equality and proclaimed both to be the pathetic legacy of Christianity. He denounced socialism in even-more-harsh terms, declaring it fit for only cows and women. Speaking of women, Nietzsche was not exactly a feminist. Among his pungent sayings: "Whenever a woman is a scholar there is usually something wrong with her sex organs." Or, "When thou goest to woman, do not forget thy whip."

In addition, Nietzsche exalts what he terms "master morality" and condemns what he terms "slave morality." And what is slave morality? Basically it is the liberal virtue of compassion which Nietzsche treats entirely as a vice. For Nietzsche it is the losers of society--the slaves--who have invented compassion as a virtue in order to tie down the masters who rightly and uninhibitedly dominate them. Nietzsche views slave morality as motivated by resentment, jealousy and inferiority complex all masquerading as righteousness. You cannot embrace Nietzsche's doctrine without seeing, say, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King in an entirely new light.

Moreover, Nietzsche condemns compassion even on the part of the giver. Nietzsche argues that "to see others suffer does one good" and that "to be unwilling to help can be nobler than the virtue which jumps to help." Nietzsche declares that compassion, far from being praiseworthy, is actually a cunning way for people to make themselves feel superior to others, and then to congratulate themselves for being in a position to help those lower people. Again, one comes away from reading Nietzsche with a far less benign view of people like George Soros and Nancy Pelosi.

So why does the cultural left, as represented by liberal intellectuals like Solomon, love Nietzsche so much? I think there are two reasons. The first is that Nietzsche is a rabid atheist. Not only does Nietzsche declate that "God is dead" but he also insists that Western society must rid itself of all vestiges of Christian morality. This goes way beyond atheists like Richard Dawkins who feebly proclaim themselves "cultural Christians."

Second, Nietzsche is an unabashed elitist. He contrasts the elite with what he terms "the herd." This is a wonderful distinction that enables half-educated liberals to say to themselves, "Hey, when Nietzsche scorns the herd he must be talking about my parents and my pastor and all those people who think that I am a selfish loser and a nerd. And when Nietzsche praises the lone rebel who dares to reject morality in the name of a higher conscience, well, he must have had me in mind!"

P.S. Read the childish and abusive reaction from atheists (including some who can do no better than pretend to be me) to see that this analysis strikes a chord. "When you cannot answer a man's argument, do not panic. You can always call him names."

This week on Babble: Melissa Rayworth's dispatch "The Sleepless Generation," about how today's parents are afraid of sleep-training (aka, Ferberizing, cry-it-outing) their children and how, as a result, a lot of kids aren't learning how to put themselves to sleep.

Her sidebar about why new parents are especially anxious about this time-honored method is kind of fascinating. Here are two of her five reasons why Gen-X parents are so reluctant to let their kids cry:

I turned on the television in my hotel room Monday night, and sure enough, there was Richard Dawkins on the Bill Maher show. With those two atheist know-it-alls, I knew I was in for something especially dark and perverted, and I wasn't disappointed. Dawkins--speaking from England and wearing his trademark scowl--remarked to Maher's great amusement that he was going to have witnesses and camera crews to record his death. Why? Because apparently religious types keep saying that atheists convert on their deathbed. Dawkins wants people and film crews there to verify that he isn't going to convert. What bravery! What intellectual panache!

Lab-trained atheists like Dawkins, who have hardly any knowledge of history, seem to think that transcendence--the notion of something eternal, something "higher" than this life--is an invention of revealed religion. This is pure ignorance. An ethical code like Confucianism preserves transcendence without recourse to the gods. We also find this concept in Indian philosophy, quite apart from Hinduism. Even the Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who were hardly religious in the sense that we understand the term, resolutely affirmed the idea of eternal truths and transcendent realities. And here is the romantic poet Wordsworth, hardly a Christian, writing that "our destiny, our nature, and our home is with Infinitude--and only there."

In his latest book A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor discusses how transcendence is not merely about the afterlife or the next world. The idea has for two thousand years given depth to our terrestrial existence. For instance, transcendence implies that life has meaning beyond our everyday ups and downs. Transcendence also affirms cosmic justice: there is a final reckoning in which earthly wrongs will be corrected and everything will be turned right-side-up. In life, we know that this is not always the case. So transcendence gives us what Kant called "a reason to hope."

What happens when you get rid of transcendence? Nietzsche worried that you get petty, narrow, selfish and grasping human beings, what he termed the "last men." The last man has no higher aspirations but only thinks of his own comfort, lust and acquisitions. His morality is largely a pose, designed to make himself feel good. He cheats on his wife and enriches himself under the table while making exhibitionistic donations to the United Way. He is fiercely defensive about his vices and pathologies, and responds very angrily when they are pointed out. No, I'm not naming names here and so you shouldn't think "Bill Clinton." I am thinking of a social type that Camus regarded as modern European man. Camus described modern man as one who thinks no higher thoughts but merely "fornicates and reads the newspapers."

What Nietzsche and Camus regarded as a horror, the writer Michael Kinsley seems to regard as the most successful products of the Baby Boom generation. In an article in the April 7, 2008 New Yorker, Kinsley describes the great Baby Boom challenge: not to save the world or to ennoble your soul but merely to live the longest. This is a game you win not by having the most money or the most toys but by outlasting your cohort. If your genital equipment is still working, Kinsley suggests, so much the better. To bring Clinton into the discussion at last, if the Arkansas wonder can make it into his eighties and still speak at the World Economic Forum and get babes, he will be crowned master of the Baby Boom universe. Kinsley's article is titled, "Mine is Longer Than Yours," and you can read it here.

Kinsley himself has Parkinson's Disease, and he frets that he is falling behind in the Baby Boom race. Even his article shows traces of this atrophy: notwithstanding a few halting attempts, it is notably lacking in Kinsley's usual smart-alecky tone. I guess it's not so easy to crack jokes when your voice is failing and your body parts are giving up. Yes, it's sad. For Kinsley the solution lies entirely in pills and cures that he hopes will extend his tenure on the track a little longer, although he fears that modern science won't come through in time for him. And here is what I find most unfortunate: entirely missing from Kinsley's article is any notion of a universe beyond himself, of any transcendent hope that can sustain him when other earthly prospects are running down.

This is the pathos of secularism, a predicament that I wish Kinsley, Dawkins, Maher, Hitchens and others would recognize. If they were open to transcendence, they might find themselves with an altered outlook even in this life. Kinsley might find genuine consolation and meaning, even in the midst of suffering. Hitchens might drink for pleasure, not to destroy his body and drown his desperation. Maher's corrosive narcissm might let up enough to permit real happiness to sneak in. Dawkins might lose his constipated expression and actually smile once in a while. It all seems very improbable, I know, but miracles do happen.

We just ran a story on Babble called "The Grinch: Why I won't let my child believe in Santa," by a mother who has decided to tell her child the truth about Santa from the get-go. Here's a piece of her argument:

I am a woman who likes to give credit where credit is due. I send my thank-you notes to the right people, and I would like my daughter to do the same. I would like to thank my child directly for being good. And if I spend hours finding, wrapping and presenting a series of gifts to my child, then I would like her to know they are from me. We still have a tree and gifts and gingerbread. It doesn't make the season any less magical.

We just ran a story on Babble.com that tackles what for Generation X has become a taboo subject: discipline.

Kathryn J. Alexander's "The War on No: Is 'child-centered' parenting producing a generation of brats?" says that the emphasis in recent years on making children feel secure has had an unfortunate consequence: kids who have never heard the word "no," and so who are unprepared for the real, "no"-filled world.

She writes:

While watching the Top Standup Videos of the 2007, you will find currently sitting in third place is this comedic gem about Nationalism from Doug Stanhope.

Careful, strong language.
Enjoy.

Not sure if this deserves third place? Well Mr. Bean on an invisible drum kit is sitting in fourth...also very amusing.

Mind my rant here, but with all the wars and madness in the world right now what is driving me the most insane today is the recent changes to the Comedy Central website.

Last month I was in online video heaven after The Daily Show put their entire archive online; what a magical concept. I could go back and re-watch history from my favourite news satirist. This archive was a great tool for delivering better blog posts for you. For example, when the topic of money being spent on the war came up recently, and it reminded me of an older TDS clip where Stewart mocked the amount of money that was being spent. The clip was quite significant as it reminded us of the small price tag that was promised before the war started. So, to anybody who bothered to read my blog post about the money being spent on war, the reader was rewarded with an archived Daily Show clip related to the topic.

I watch Jon Stewart every day and when I read the news I often am reminded of a classic TDS clip, like the example above shows, adding historical clips can help complete a blog post and gives the reader a little bit more back story on current events.

Well, you may have heard that many countries are starting to close their broadband borders. Countries like Iran, Burma and China naturally censor the outside world from many of their websites, but now Viacom has decided to import the same mentality to America. For the past couple of weeks Viacom and Comedy Central have begun blocking International users from viewing their websites. First it was comedycentral.com, then it was indecision2008.com, and now thedailyshow.com. Each one has been blocked for me and anybody else who does not live in the USA. Viacom blocked internet users from uploading their clips to websites like myspace.com and youtube.com and now they are blocking internet users from even watching the clips on their own website. What ever happened to the spirit of the internet? Sharing!

Does Viacom not want international internet users hearing the voice of Jon Stewart? Well an Aussie friend of mine and the founder of Videosift.com has written an open letter to Viacom in regards to the current block on the comedy central website, please read it and please digg it.

I say we Canucks have to respond, let's block the famous "Vancouver Otters holding hands" clip. Nah, we won't do that, we're too nice.

The following is adapted from my new book What's So Great About Christianity. For more information about the book, see my website dineshdsouza.com.

Bestselling atheist tracts like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great portray religion as an unreasonable form of "blind faith," often leading to fanaticism and even violence. Some of these atheists call themselves "brights," implying that they are the smart people who base their opinions on reason and science and don't fall for silly superstitions. But for all their credentials and learning, the atheists have been duped by a fallacy. This may be called the Fallacy of the Enlightenment, and it was first pointed out by that great Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that human beings can continually find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. The Enlightenment Fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, that human knowledge is constrained not merely by how much reality is out there but also by the limited sensory apparatus of perception we bring to that reality.

Consider a tape recorder. Being the kind of instrument it is, a tape recorder can capture only one mode of reality: sound. Tape recorders can "hear" but they cannot see or touch or smell. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond the reach of a tape recorder. The same, Kant says, is true of human beings. The only way we apprehend reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that our five-mode instrument for apprehending reality is sufficient for capturing all of reality? What makes us think that there is no reality lies beyond our perception, reality that simply cannot be apprehended by our five senses?

Moreover, the reality we apprehend is merely our experience or "take" on reality. How can you know that your experience of things is in any way like the things-in-themselves? Normally you answer this question by considering the two things separately and then comparing them. I can tell if my daughter's drawing of her teacher looks like the teacher by placing the portrait and alongside the person. I compare the copy or portrait with the original.

Kant points out, however, that we can never compare our experience of reality to reality itself. All we have is the experience, and that's all we can ever have. We have only the copies, but we never have the originals. So we have no basis for presuming that the two are even comparable. When we equate experience and reality, we are making an unjustified leap.

It is essential to recognize that Kant isn't diminishing the importance of experience or what he called the phenomenal world. That world is very important, because it is the only one our senses and reason have access to. It is entirely rational for us to believe in this phenomenal world and to use science and reason to discover its operating principles. But Kant contended that science and reason apply to the world of phenomena, of things as they are experienced by us. Science and reason cannot penetrate what Kant termed the noumena: things as they are in themselves.

Some critics have understood Kant to be denying the existence of external reality or of arguing that all of reality is "in the mind." Kant emphatically rejects this. He insists that the noumenon obviously exists because it is what gives rise to phenomena. In other words, our experience is an experience of something. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see Kant as positing two kinds of reality: the reality that we experience and reality itself. The important thing is not to establish which is more real, but to recognize that human reason operates only in the phenomenal domain of experience. We can know of the existence of the noumenal realm, but at this point reason has reached its limit.

In Kant's view, the limits of human reason cannot be erased by the passage of time or by further investigation and experimentation. Rather, they are intrinsic to the kind of beings that humans are, and to the kind of apparatus that we possess for perceiving reality. The implication of Kant's argument is that reality as a whole is, in principle, inaccessible to human beings. Put another way, there is a great deal that human beings simply will never know.

So powerful is Kant's argument here that his critics have been able to answer him only with derision. When I challenged Daniel Dennett to debunk Kant's argument, he posted an angry response on his website in which he said several people had already refuted Kant. But he didn't provide any refutations, and he didn't name any names. Basically Dennett was relying on the argumentum ad ignorantium-the argument that relies on the ignorance of the audience. In fact, there are no such refutations.

Although Kant's argument seems counterintuitive-in the way that some of the greatest ideas from Copernicus to Einstein are counterintuitive-no one who understands the central doctrines of the world's leading religions should have any difficulty grasping his main point. Kant's philosophical vision is entirely congruent with the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

It is a shared doctrine of those religions that the empirical world we humans inhabit is not the only world there is. Ours is a world of appearances only in which we see things in a limited and distorted way, "through a glass darkly," as the apostle Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians 13:12. Ours is a transient world that is dependent on a higher, timeless reality. That reality is of a completely different order from anything we know, it constitutes the only permanent reality there is, and it sustains our world and presents it to our senses. Christianity teaches that while reason can point to the existence of this higher domain, this is where reason stops: it cannot on its own investigate or comprehend that domain.

Thus when Christopher Hitchens and other atheists routinely dismiss religious claims on the grounds that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence," they are making what philosophers like to call a category mistake. We learn from Kant that within the domain of experience, human reason is sovereign, but it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason.

When atheists summarily dismiss the immortality of the soul or the afterlife on the grounds that they have never found any empirical proofs for either, they are asking for experiential evidence in a domain which is entirely beyond the reach of experience. In this domain, Kant argues, the absence of evidence cannot be used as the evidence for absence.

Notice that Kant's argument is entirely secular: It does not employ any religious vocabulary, nor does it rely on any kind of faith. But in showing the limits of reason, Kant's philosophy "opens the door to faith," as the philosopher himself noted.

So the new atheists and self-styled "brights" can do their strutting, but Kant has exposed their ignorant boast that atheism operates on a higher intellectual plane than theism. Rather, as Kant showed, reason must know its limits in order to be truly reasonable. The atheist foolishly presumes that reason is in principle capable of figuring out all that there is, while the theist at least knows that there is a reality greater than, and beyond, that which our senses and our minds can ever apprehend.

Not sure if I have already posted this documentary on this blog; I know I have on my old one. It's a fascinating documentary about the psychoanalysis and subsequent manipulation of the masses. Below is the first episode which is about an hour long, but the rest is on Google if you get right into it. Naturally, wikipedia has a page set up already about this film.

This segment introduces Sigmund Freud's American nephew, Edward Bernays, and explains how he virtually became the founder of Public Relations. Bernays, employed as an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson during the First World War, was behind promoting the idea that the America was fighting not to restore the old empires, but to bring democracy to all of Europe. After witnessing Wilson's extreme popularity at the post-war 1926 Paris Peace Conference, Bernays decided to employ the same type of propaganda (rebranded as "Public Relations") he had developed during the war to herd the populace toward mass consumerism.

Full episode is below

Thanks to the Internet, working at home has become an option for many of us. And that's great, right? We get to be around our kids more. We get to be there when FedEx shows up. We don't have to comb our hair. But as author Steve Almond writes on Babble.com, in his essay "Around the Clock," it's way harder than people who don't do it think it is.

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me how lucky my wife and I are that we "get" to work at home as parents, we wouldn't have to work at all. No, we could just sit around doing blow and paying one of the Bush twins - the undrunk one - to watch our ten-month-old.

What's your obligation to other parents whose child may have the same disorder as yours? That's the dilemma posed by "Dear Stranger: Your child is autistic, just like mine," a personal essay by Amy Lutz that just ran on Babble. She encountered a family that reminded her a lot of her own:

Friday evening and time to relax, sit back and enjoy the philosophy of Alan Watts. This clip is title "Life and Music" and was animated by Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

Interested in More Watts? There are of clips plenty here on the Google.