Cliff: No, don’t buy that.

Look through that Bailey piece again:

“A year ago, I asked Kristol after a lecture whether he believed in

God or not. He got a twinkle in his eye and responded, ‘I don’t

believe in God, I have faith in God.’ Well, faith, as it says in

Hebrews 11:1, ‘is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of

things not seen.’ But at the recent AEI lecture, journalist Ben

Wattenberg asked him the same thing. Kristol responded that ‘that is a

stupid question,’ and crisply restated his belief that religion is

essential for maintaining social discipline. A much younger (and

perhaps less circumspect) Kristol asserted in a 1949 essay that in

order to prevent the social disarray that would occur if ordinary

people lost their religious faith, ‘it would indeed become the duty of

the wise publicly to defend and support religion.’”

Here we have a guy who plainly doesn’t believe in God, but who thinks

that well-padded intellectual elitists like himself ought to evade the

issue in public for fear of demoralizing the proles and perhaps

jeopardizing some padding thereby. I can’t think of anything nice to

say about that; and in fact, the only things I CAN think of to say

would not be suitable for a family website.

I can’t see the parallel with your argument. Infinity is whatever it

is, and whatever can truly be said about it, is true. I might indeed

take different tacks in explaining it to different persons; but if I

thought that P were a true proposition about infinity, I should not

affirm P in the privacy of my chambers, while denying or evading it in

the public square, which is the kind of thing Kristol & Himmelfarb are

doing. A noble lie is still a lie.

These are the people who are pushing “intelligent design” in the

conservative movement. Not only am I glad and proud to have spoken

out against this preposterous hoax, I wish I had done so more

forthrightly. These are people filled up to their meritocratic

nose-holes with contempt for ordinary people. That’s conservatism?

Ptui, I spit.