Lolo Jones vs. Fast Women

              According to the self-appointed track and field geniuses and athletic performance gurus in the MSM, American hurdler Lolo Jones, the American record holder in her event, an athlete who missed a gold medal by just a quarter second, would have run faster, and maybe have gotten an Olympic medal, if she hadn’t been so virginal.  Her critics apparently think that, if you sleep around a lot, you hurdle more quickly

As a former decathlete, I disagree.  While sleeping around might make one a fast woman, it doesn’t make one faster. 

Genesis and the Free Market

My friend and former colleague, economist Charles Van Eaton, reminds me that the historical account of the transaction between Abraham and Ephron in Genesis 23 is a useful ancient example, perhaps even a prototype (not his word), of exchanges in a free market, and that such market exchanges are nearly as old as recorded history itself.

         Free market exchanges require but a handful of crucial, or irreducible, elements: (1) reasonably well-defined property rights, (2) freedom of exchange, (3) basically reliable protection against fraud, and (4) a stable and useful medium of exchange, all of which are present in the Biblical text before us.  Here’s what I mean:

         (1) Even among the ancient Hittites, we find reasonably well-defined property rights.  The Hittites understood both ownership and, in that light, who owned what.  In this case, the field and cave in question belonged to Ephron (v. 7), as everyone knew.  Once the sale had been made, it belonged to Abraham (vv.16-18).

         (2) Freedom of exchange appears here in the unfettered and uncoerced negotiations between Abraham and Ephron (vv. 10ff.).  Both men made offers and counter-offers until they reached a mutually agreeable price.  If, at any time, the negotiations took a turn either of them disliked, or if they could not reach a mutually satisfactory conclusion, bartering would cease.  Either one could have stopped the process at any moment.  But they did not.  They kept at it until they reached a mutually satisfactory price, one agreeable to both.  Abraham liked the price, and so did Ephron.  Thus, when this transaction was complete, both considered themselves better off.  Each considered himself a winner:  Ephron preferred to have the money rather than the land, Abraham the land rather than the money.  In order to close the deal, both had to get what they preferred, and they got it. (Notice this interesting historical point:  As seen from the perspective of the seller, ancient Hittite negotiation proceeded from the bottom price upwards; our negotiation, as seen from that same perspective, proceeds from the highest price downward.)

         (3) Surrounded as they were by the elders of the city, men who sat daily at the city gates, both Abraham and Ephron had many witnesses to their transaction, witnesses who could repeat later what they saw now, witnesses whose testimony would help suppress fraud and double-dealing, witnesses invoked for precisely such purposes by Ephron as a means to allay Abraham’s fears (vv. 11, 12).  We have the same today, in signed and witnessed contracts, in testimony given under oath in court, and in judicial pronouncements backed by law enforcement.

         (4) The two men carried out their negotiations using the local currency, in this case pieces of silver.  The text does not say who minted the coins, but that is of little importance.  Whoever minted them, whether done publicly or privately, the folks themselves validated it by using that currency as the medium of exchange.  It did not have to be silver, of course.  It could have been gold, or copper, or even cattle and sheep (though it is difficult to make change with livestock).  All it needed to be was acceptable to both sides, which normally means that it is convenient, durable, and portable.  We have the same today in the coins and dollars we use, though our government continues to monkey with our currency’s value by printing trillions and trillions more dollars at will, thus lowering the value of each one.   

Paul in Athens (part 3)

The general tone and tenor of Paul’s Areopagus speech was one of condemnation and opposition.  In Corinth, it continued.  Paul was not looking for common ground.  He was not building bridges.  Pagan beliefs and practices were his target, not the object of his affirmation.  The perverse beliefs of the Greeks are what separated Paul from them.   Their beliefs were not a truth they and he both owned, but the foolish and wicked errors he intended to correct.  He did not reach out to them on the basis of their beliefs.  He condemned their beliefs.  They returned the favor.

Paul knew the options that fallen life gives us in this regard:  Either we worship God or we worship things that are not God.  To worship God, requires the mediation of Jesus Christ -- a mediation both of knowledge and of salvation -- of which the Greeks philosophers had neither.  In order to fill that staggering lack, Paul determined to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  In this regard, just as it was with Jesus Himself, nothing about the god of Aristotle or Plato crossed Paul’s lips.  At the shocking sight of idolatry surrounding him on all sides, Paul’s spirit convulsed and wretched within him, just as ours ought to do within us.

But rather than wretch and convulse, some Christian theologians and apologists attach themselves to Greek errors both for apologetic purposes and for theological method.  Paul did not.  Rather than attaching his preaching and his apologetic to their idolatries, he pointed out to them their superstition and their ignorance and, in order to heal what ailed them, he directed them to Christ and the resurrection.

Paul’s speech was iconoclastic.  Because the Athenian marketplace reflected the hearts of those who made it and who frequented it, Paul cast down their gods, not from pedestals made of marble, but from pedestals in the human heart.  Paul knew that their invocation of an unknown god was a sham and a pose.  He knew it was a suppression of the truth.  It was an evasion of their obligations before the one God Who is.  It was a substitution of a false god for the real God.  It was not innocent; it was as wicked as it was false.  Suppression, evasion, substitution:  It was what Cornelius Van Til said it was: “culpable ignorance” (Van Til, Paul at Athens, p. 11).  In Paul’s own words:  “Where is the wise:  where is the scribe?  where is the disputer of this world?  hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?  For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God it pleased God through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe.” (1 Cor. 1: 20, 21).

Do not miss Paul’s point:  The wisdom of God decreed that, by means of the wisdom of the world, the world could not know God.  Natural theology simply does not lead to knowledge of God.  To say otherwise is to oppose both Paul and God.  Human wisdom, whether Aristotle’s or someone else’s, is more than merely challenged; it is exposed, debunked, and rejected.  The Greeks, known for their supposed wisdom, could not locate even its beginning (Psalm 111: 10).

Rather than endorsing their natural theology, from verses 24 onward, Paul used it as a weapon against them, resisting them and refuting them, sometimes with their own words and ideas.  He directed them to seek God (v. 27), implying quite clearly that by their philosophy and religion they had missed Him.  Paul told his Greek listeners that, despite their excessive religiosity (v. 22), they failed to know God, and that they were ignorant (vv. 23, 30), in response to which he placed before them the resurrected Jesus as Lord.  Concerning Jesus, Paul mentioned that He is fully human and, as such, is subject to death, and that he is Judge of the world (v. 31).  Apart from knowing that, they could not and did not know God.  No one can.  They were estranged from God, and, by rejecting Paul’s message, remained so.  They demonstrated that amusement and novelty (v. 21) are not the same as the pursuit of Truth.  When the Truth Himself appeared in Paul’s speech, they mocked it and turned away (v. 32).  That was where their natural theology led them.  That is where it always leads.  Nevertheless, despite their failing and their rejection of the truth, even when it was proclaimed directly before them, the Greeks thought they offered God authentic worship.  Paul, in order to puncture their bubble of delusion, highlighted their ignorance.  By limiting himself here primarily to highlighting their ignorance, Paul declined to trace out in fuller details the whole litany of their evils and errors the way he did in Romans 1.

According to F. F. Bruce, Paul “does not argue from ‘first principles’ of the kind that formed the basis of various systems of Greek philosophy; his exposition and defense of his message are founded upon the biblical revelation and they echo the thought, and at times the very language, of the Old Testament writings.  Like the biblical revelation itself, his speech begins with God the creator of all, continues with God the sustainer of all, and concludes with God the judge of all” (Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free, p. 239).  To be sure, Paul finds his preaching text in an altar dedication.  But that they know they do not know God, and that he knows they do not know God, is hardly an endorsement of their natural theology.  Rather, their ignorance offers him a chance to explain to them the history of salvation, which, in this speech, finds its climax in Christ, just as it does in Paul’s epistles.

Paul in Athens (part 2)

(Yesterday I posted a brief introduction to Paul's speech in Athens from Acts 17.  Today I give a verse-by-verse explanation of that speech.  I strongly recommend reading the Biblical text along side its explanation.  Tomorrow I plan to articulate the theological implications of Paul's speech.)

 

Upon entering Athens, Paul’s spirit stirred within him (v. 16).  The word translated here as “stirred” is the Greek word from which we get our word “paroxysm.”  Athenian idolatry made Paul shudder.   He was appalled at the extent to which they worshipped the work of their own hands.  He was in a city full of idols the way a forest is full of trees.  The tense of the Greek verb here indicates that, for as long as Paul continued to behold the idols that surrounded him on all sides, his revulsion and disgust continued along with it.  His response was no mere passing emotion or superficial reaction, but a deep and abiding state of mind triggered by the collision of his theological commitments with the pagan surroundings.  What he saw, he “looked upon with abhorrence.  They were to him impersonations of everything evil; they expressed the deification of lust, cruelty, revenge, fraud, malice, and falsehood, and the deification of those evil things, not in the far-off past, but now at the moment enthralling and debasing the souls for which Christ died; so his spirit was stirred, the spirit of the faithful and devout Jew, on whose heart was written that law of God, ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them.’ . . .  No matter how divine the beauty, their use was accursed” (Sadler, Acts of the Apostles, p. 328).

“What will this babbler say?”  the Greeks around him asked (v. 18).  The word for “babbler” is “seed picker,” which is “a small finch, here standing for those gossip mongers who scuttled about the agora picking up news, novel ideas, they could pass on to other “chattering parasites” (Plumptre, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 27).  Their description of Paul in such terms, of course, was evidence of their contempt and ridicule.

The Greeks leveled against Paul the same sort of charge leveled earlier against Socrates:  He seemed to them to set forth strange gods (v. 18).  Conversely, they seemed to Paul to do exactly the same.  They were no more respectful of his views and his God than he was of theirs.  They thought as they did about Paul because he preached Jesus and the resurrection (v. 18), a notion they considered bizarre and impossible.  They themselves called it “strange,” which tells us that, to them, Paul’s gospel was not a mere continuation or supplement to their pre-existing beliefs, and they told him as much.  Their view of the relation between their beliefs and Paul’s is quite distant from the view held by modern advocates of natural theology and the way they tend to meld biblical theology and natural theology indiscriminately together.

According to some commentators, because the Greeks employed the plural word “gods” here, they believed that the anastasis (resurrection) which Paul preached in conjunction with Jesus, was itself a separate deity (cf. Sadler, Acts of the Apostles, p. 330) a fact indicative of the depth of delusion to which their minds had become habituated by their worship of false gods, and not an indication of how their false gods prepared the way for the gospel.  For bringing up these  “strange things” (v. 20), Paul was brought to Mars Hill, where he was given the chance to explain himself.

Perhaps because he rankled at their arrogant depiction of his teachings as “certain strange things” (which is the sort of demeaning epithet Greeks might use of barbarians), and because of his abiding disgust at their idolatry, Paul addressed that idolatry first:  “I see that you are excessively superstitious” (v. 22), he said, an opening not well-suited to win their approval.  Nor was it intended to win it.  Paul was not at all tolerant of those who rejected the resurrection:  Against such views Paul was vehemently opposed, calling those who thought that way “fools” (1 Co. 15: 35, 36).

Paul’s use of confrontation here is not unique for him.  A man who called even his own Galatian friends and converts fools (Gal. 3: 1), and who corrected the apostle Peter himself in front of his friends (Gal. 2: 11ff.), would not, and did not, shy away from pointing out to the Athenian philosophers who came to hear him speak that they were “excessively superstitious,” a tactic fully in keeping with his clothes-rending rant against idolatry earlier in Lystra (Acts 14: 8ff.) and his subsequent denunciation of what passed for wisdom in Corinth (1 Cor. 1: 17 – 2: 8).  His blunt, confrontational style was sometimes considered “contemptible” (2 Cor. 10: 10).  Perhaps his Greek auditors thought it so this time.

To Luke, the author, the degenerate condition of Greek thought and religion was obvious:  The pursuit of truth in Athens had shrunk to nothing more than a frivolous chase for novelty, he says (v. 21).  With that polluted and shrunken context as the background, Luke explains that, to Paul, Athenian religion was a religion of ignorance (v. 23).  But Paul was there to dispel their ignorance, and he told them so.  He was there to declare to them the truth about the God of whom they were so shamefully ignorant, the God Whom both the Greeks and their renowned philosophers did not know.  To Paul, their religion was characterized by “ignorant reverence” (v. 23), and ignorant reverence is not real worship, and it is not knowing God.

Naturally, his explanation was not well received.  As Plumptre explains, “That any human teacher should have power to proclaim that ‘Unknown God’ as making Himself known to men, was what neither Epicureans nor Stoics had dreamt of” (Plumptre, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 284).

But to Paul, the case was completely different.  He knew what they did not know and could not know:  He knew God.  He knew God because he knew Jesus and the resurrection -- without which God remains unknowable and unknown.

Of course, Paul was not always so.  When confronted by the Lord Himself while on the way to Damascus, the first thing Paul asked was “Who are you?” (Acts 9: 5).  He had to ask because, like the Athenians to whom he now was speaking, he simply did not know.  He did not know even though he was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee” (Phil. 3: 5), none of which brought knowledge of God, and all of which his Athenian hearers lacked.

In addition to attacking their ignorance, Paul attacked (1) their temples, (2) their worship, and (3) their arrogance.   Surrounded on all sides as he was by buildings dedicated to false gods, Paul told the Athenian philosophers that God does not dwell in temples made with hands (v. 24), something he heard personally from Stephen, the Christian proto-martyr, over whose execution Paul had presided (Acts 7: 48).  In his statement against their temples, Paul employs the words of Isaiah 42:5.   Then, echoing Psalm 50: 9-12, Paul further insisted that God is not worshiped with the work of human hands, as if He needed anything (v. 25).  Interestingly, the word Paul uses here for “worship” he also uses in Romans 1: 25, in reference to worshiping the creature more than the Creator, and in 2 Thess. 2: 4, in reference to worshiping the man of lawlessness.  Finally, Paul tells them that God has made of one blood all nations (v. 26) -- a view to which no self-regarding Athenian could consent.  The distinction between the barbarians and themselves seemed too radical, too obvious, and too persistent for the Athenians to overlook.   They thought that overlooking that distinction was to think of themselves as no better than benighted slaves.  But to Paul, these alleged distinctions were meaningless (Gal. 3: 28).  He undercut their arrogance by including them in the same boat as all other peoples and all other nations.  By explaining that God had made all nations of one stock, and had set their national and historical limits, Paul was drawing upon the Genesis account of creation and, it seems, upon Deuteronomy 32:8 and Job 12:23.

Paul then re-emphasized his contention that under God we all are in the same condition.  God has made us all one, Paul said, and He has providentially laid out his plan for the nations -- where they should live and when they should flourish -- as well as the reason for it all:  that under his guidance we might grope after him (vv. 26, 27).  That is, God controls the history of all nations.  Because He does, human history is a school, a vale of soul making, in which we all must detect the impossibility of ever satisfying the longings and “gropings” (v. 27) of the human heart with the gods of our own making.  They should “seek the Lord,” he told them (v. 27), as well as how that seeking and groping ought to be done (vv. 30, 31).  By explaining to his hearers some of the things God does in human history, Paul is distancing himself quite radically from the Epicurean god, who is detached and aloof from human life, a god absorbed in nothing so much as sloth and cosmic disregard.  

Having hit them twice, once with their own ignorance and once with their likeness to all other persons under God, Paul hits them again, this time with their own writers:  Quoting Aratus (from Paul’s own home region of Cilicia), and perhaps Cleanthes’ hymn to Jupiter, Paul asserts that we all live in the light of God’s omnipresence, because we all are his children (vv. 28, 29).  But because God is who He is, and because God does what He does, to worship humanly devised images and idols is ignorant and irrational (v. 29).  So, despite all their providentially bestowed advantages, they were still ignorant.  In His mercy and patience, however, God momentarily overlooked their universal ignorance and postponed judgment.  He has done so, Paul tells them, with the purpose of eliciting their repentance (vv. 30, 31).   Had God not mercifully and momentarily overlooked their ignorance, his justice long ago would have crushed them under the weight of their own idolatry.  Now, absent their repentance, nothing was left but judgment.  The historical evidence of God’s plan in all this is the resurrection from the dead of the very man who will be universal judge (v. 31). 

At the mention again of bodily resurrection from the dead, the Greek philosophers had had enough.  They mocked.  They subjected Paul to derision.

Paul left. 

From Athens, Paul traveled to Corinth, where his stance toward the alleged wisdom of Greek philosophy remained the same as it was in Athens and before:  antagonism and opposition – a stance notably distant from the theological implementation and apologetic incorporation practiced by contemporary natural theology devotees.

Paul in Athens (part 1)

While the Greeks were eager to hear new and unusual ideas (17: 22), they often were slow to accept them.  Paul’s ideas, in the main, they did not, and could not, accept.  To them, Paul’s ideas were brazen and bizarre.  The Greeks could see no connection between their idea of God and Paul’s.

They were right.

Paul understood as much, which is why he aimed to address them on the basis not of their knowledge but of their ignorance -- on the basis of a god they did not know, and knew they did not know (v. 23).  When Paul did so, he did not resort to talking about Aristotle’s uncaused cause, his unmoved mover, or his self-thought thought.  Instead, Paul told them about Jesus and the resurrection.  He did so because that is how God is known, and because that was something about which they knew precisely nothing.  They did not know that God Himself had become flesh and blood, that He was crucified by Roman soldiers, buried in a borrowed Palestinian tomb, descended into Hell, and returned to physical life again on the third day.

In his Areopagus address to the Greeks, Paul began with Greek ignorance.  Such ignorance is not common ground, but its absence.  Ignorance is the hurdle God must leap, the canyon God must cross, the raging river He must swim, if ever we are to know Him -- and that is the basis upon which Paul proceeds:  God has reached out to us in Jesus and the resurrection.  Though the defenders of natural theology might think natural theology provides a connection between God and us, Paul knows it does not. 

Thus, when Paul deals with the pagan Greeks, he deals with them as persons who must be told about what even they admit is an "unknown God."  When he sets about explaining this "unknown God" to them, he references Jesus and the resurrection.  He does so because God is known in Christ, in history.  Paul declines to begin with Greek philosophy and the Aristotelian ways of talking and thinking about God with which his listeners were most familiar.  Nor does Paul begin with the god of the Stoics or the deities of the Epicureans.  To begin there is not to begin.  Paul’s speech “was addressed to philosophers who thought they had risen above the religion of the multitude, and who had not reached a knowledge of the true God” (Lindsay, Acts of the Apostles, 2: 83).  On this point, Paul is clear and unequivocal:  “The Greek by wisdom knew not God” (1 Cor. 1:21).  Aristotle was no exception, nor were any of his followers.

Greek thought is a world away from Paul’s.  For example, the Greeks often thought of death as something like a friend, which is a logical consequence of believing in the immortality of the soul.  But the Christian way is not immortality of the soul but the bodily resurrection of the dead, which is why Paul preached Christ and the resurrection to them, and which also is why the Greeks ridiculed and rejected him.   To them, it all seemed so crass and irrational.  To them, Paul was a “babbler,” someone who set forth both “strange gods” and “strange things”  (vv. 18, 20).  So they mocked him (v. 32).  To them, one simply could not get from Paul’s allegedly crude views to theirs.  To the ancient Greeks, who knew their own thought best, no bridge existed between their theology and Paul’s -- even though so many modern apologists’ mistakenly assert otherwise.

To put it the other way round, Aristotle’s god is a god who cannot, did not, and will not become flesh, a god who cannot die and therefore cannot rise again.  At least the Greeks with whom Paul disputed in Athens understood this, even if so many modern Christians do not.  The Greeks rejected Paul’s assertions about the God of history and how He could be known, notions that to them were foolish and incompatible with the god (and gods) in which they believed.  They did so because, when you cling to Aristotle’s god, you reject Christianity’s central affirmation:  “the Word became flesh:” He lived; He died, He rose again.  Yet, Aristotle’s god is the darling of so much that passes for Christian apologetics, and has done so since the days of Thomas Aquinas.

Recall that the earliest Christians fought a life and death struggle against docetism, which denied the incarnation.  They realized clearly that if docetism’s central tenets ever gained sway, the faith was dead.  Yet the very docetic god the early Christians rejected has become the bridge between the Faith and the world, at least as the Christian advocates of natural theology now practice their craft. 

The essential historicity of redemption for Christian and Jew like is an absurdity to the Greek.  As Oscar Cullmann explains it,  “For the Greeks, the idea that redemption is to take place through divine action in the course of events in time is impossible . . . In the Primitive Christian preaching, on the contrary, salvation, in keeping with the Bible’s linear understanding of time, is conceived strictly in terms of a time process . . .Whoever takes his start from Greek thought must put aside the entire revelatory and redemptive history.”

Cullmann is right, which is precisely why, when Paul wants to unveil “the unknown god” for his Greek auditors, he does so by explaining Christ and the resurrection to them.  Not to do so would be to junk Christianity itself, which Paul will never do.  Not to do so would be to join Aristotle and his lackeys in pursuit of unhistorical uncaused causes and unmoved movers, whatever they might be, and to reject “the consistently historical method of revelation,” solely by which Paul knows God at all (Cullmann, Christ and Time, pp. 52, 53, 56, 60).  God is known through the history of his redemptive actions, which, Cullmann insists, must unfold in time (Cullmann, Christ and Time, p. 92).  In short, what was unthinkable for Aristotle and so many of the ancient Greeks was absolutely necessary for Biblical Christianity.

Ned Stonehouse agrees:  There is “nothing to suggest that Paul acted on the assumption that he needed only to supplement what the heathen already knew or to build upon a common foundation.” Rather, Paul capitalizes on their assigning an altar to an unknown god in order “to pronounce censure upon the Athenians” and to describe “their religion bluntly as one of ignorance” (Stonehouse, Paul Before the Areopagus, p. 18, 19).  In the past, Paul told them, God reacted to their ignorance with patience and forbearance.  That time is over.  The time for repenting their wickedness and ignorance has now arrived (v. 30).  The philosophy and religion to which their suppression of divine truth had led them left them predisposed against such Pauline suggestions.  So they mocked.

Who Pays?

(1) If someone cannot pay for a service, then someone else -- not government -- has to pay for it.  Government does not pay for anything.  It uses the power of coercion to force some other citizen(s) to foot the bill.  The only money government has or can get is money it takes from citizens.

         (2) Health care is not a right because health care is a service provided by others.  We have no right to their work.  That is, we have no right to force others to do work for us.  If we could compel the work of others at our will, they would be slaves.  Your doctor is not your slave.  Neither is your grocer, your plumber, or your auto body repairman.  If you want health care, you must be willing to pay for it, just like you must be willing to pay for it if you want a muffler, a television, a computer, a cell phone, or groceries.  Those things all come at a price.  Someone must pay that price.  The only real question is, "Who ought to pay for it?"

         (3) Without exception, every public policy hurts someone.  If you decide to hurt someone by law or by policy, you'd better have a remarkably good moral and political reason.  Frankly, there just aren't any good reasons of that sort because to discriminate by law against the successful is an evil.  You must not target others by law because of their bank account any more than you ought to target others for their skin color or their gender.  Evil is evil regardless of your intentions. Good intentions don’t mend the matter at all.

         (4) If you want government involved in this issue at all, it should be involved only as a way to prompt or promote voluntary charity.  By that I mean that government should give tax breaks to those who voluntarily decide to assist the less fortunate in their time of need, whether that need be for health care, groceries, housing, etc.  The generosity of the American people is legendary.  Government, therefore, should be creating incentives that set that charity loose to do well the things for which government is shockingly ill-suited, things like charity.  

Why Statistical Disparity does not Equal Discrimination

         Because no two human beings are exactly alike, no two groups of human beings are exactly alike either.  That’s the consequence of what some call “the snowflake principle” of human life:  While we all are alike in some ways, no two of us are quite the same.  We have different talents, backgrounds, attitudes, habits, goals, inclinations, beliefs, and friends.  Because we do, we experience different outcomes and results, which in turn yield differing socio-economic statistics about us.

         That’s another way of saying that statistical disparity does not equal discrimination, the way that so many on the left frequently assert.  Differing outcomes can imply many things, discrimination is just one of them.   Let me give you four examples:

         (1) Let’s say that a major American city has a population that is 80% black.  Let’s say as well that its police force is 80% white.  (The numbers here are purposely exaggerated in order to underscore the point.  No major American city and its police force are so disproportionate).  One could not, from those data, conclude that the police force discriminates against minorities in its hiring or promotion practices.   If, in urban black culture, the police force is held in low regard, then black youths, whether male or female, will be less likely to want to grow up to be police officers.  They will choose other options, however wise or unwise.  If, at the same time, in white urban culture, the police force is held in much higher regard, then, predictably, far more white youths will aspire to that career than do their black counterparts.  The difference in outcome here is rooted in cultural values, not discrimination.  That would be the case even though minority applicants to the police force, and minority applications for promotion within it, actually receive preferential treatment such that a test score for them yields better results than the same score does for whites.  Statistical disparity, even radical statistical disparity, does not mean discrimination.  It might actually indicate preference. 

         (2) If, as studies show, educational expectations within the Asian–American subculture tend to emphasize mathematics and the hard sciences, and if, in the African-American subculture, those preferences tend toward the social sciences; and if the hard sciences pay more money than do the social sciences, then it is not a matter either of hiring or payroll discrimination that Asian-Americans with graduate degrees in mathematics and the hard sciences make noticeably more money per year than African-Americans with graduate degrees in the social sciences.  Their two cultures’ differing values and expectations dictate the outcome, not discrimination.

         (3) If black drug offenders go to jail more often than white drug offenders and serve more time when they do, that statistical difference does not prove discrimination.  To prove discrimination, one must ask and answer many other previous questions before deciding the issue.  For example, one must take into account things like mandatory sentences and recidivism.  If drug usage or drug arrests are less frequent in predominantly white jurisdictions than in black ones, and if judges in those predominantly black jurisdictions are more inclined to render stricter sentences as a result, it does not mean the judge is racially prejudiced.  It might mean the judge is quite concerned for public safety and the rule of law, even if, in a nearby jurisdiction, judicial discretion is exercised more leniently.  Or if a judge works within a jurisdiction that has mandatory sentencing requirements in such cases, and if the mandatory sentences are harsher than those in other, non-mandatory, jurisdictions just over the state line, and if the offenders here are predominately black, it does not prove racial discrimination.  Or if whites are less inclined to be repeat drug offenders (and therefore are more likely to get lighter sentences as a result), it does not prove racial discrimination if their average sentence is lighter than the average sentence of their black counterparts.  Racial discrimination is but one of many possible explanations.  Statistics alone cannot establish the fact.  Things like recidivism need to be considered in the mix.  In a system like ours, with multiple jurisdictions, all of which work on varying bases, differences in sentencing inevitably emerge.  To label them discrimination is reckless and goes beyond the evidence.

         (4) Or, simply because the average salary of women is 60-70% of the average salary of men in the same field (The exact percentage is always changing.), it does not mean that sexual discrimination is the reason.  On average, women work fewer hours per day and fewer days per year.  They also work fewer total years and take more time off during those years than do men.  As a result, they make fewer dollars per hour, week, and year than do men.  But when those differences are erased, when women have the same education as their male counterparts, and when they have the same work experience and work record, they actually make 102% of what men make, and have done so for nearly 30 years.  Statistical disparity is not proof of discrimination.

         Discrimination is easy to assert.  Our leftist friends do it all the time.  But it is notoriously difficult to prove, and invoking mere statistical disparity does not prove it.   

         I am not saying something so silly as that there exists no discrimination in America.  It does exist, and you might be surprised where to find it.