I would not go so far as to argue that there’s a “new agnosticism” on the rise. But I think it’s time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as “a theism”—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing. But the question presents a fundamental mystery that has bedeviled (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle to Aquinas. Recently scientists have tried to answer it with theories of “multiverses” and “vacuums filled with quantum potentialities,” none of which strikes me as persuasive.

— Ron Rosenbaum in Slate today.

“The Supreme Court ruled here that you have a fundamental right to own and bear arms, and that means at the national level it’s harder — whether it’s Republicans or whether it’s the [National Rifle Association] — to throw that claim out: If Democrats are in charge. they’re going to come get your guns,” said the aide. “It pretty much took that off the table.”

Anonymous Democratic aide in Politico arguing that the Supreme Courts McDonald v. Chicago decision is a boon to them because it takes the gun issue off the table. This assumes of course that no Democrat or liberal group criticizes the decision and/or says it should be overturned. Oops.

Be on the lookout folks.Commissioner Gordon is using the batsignal as we speak.

Over at RealClearPolitics.com, Jeremy shows that, contrary to what Bob Dole once said, sometimes the vice presidency does involve some heavy lifting:

At this point in 2010, things are looking so bad for President Obama’s party that a loss of only 26 House seats would be seen as a resounding victory and a slap in the face to obstructionist Republicans and tempestuous tea partiers. If Obama can escape blame for the abysmal state of the economy, the current thinking goes, then his party might escape with only minimal losses.

So Biden has been assigned to make a new push for the effectiveness of the stimulus bill. The other week at a press conference, he said, “Folks, the act is working,” and touted some of the benefits of the stimulus package that Congress passed at Obama’s urging in 2009. For instance, much of this construction that is lengthening commutes across the country was funded by stimulus dollars. USA Today reported that Biden “went on at some length about how people at kitchen tables across America don’t know or care whether new jobs at factories, grocery stores and elsewhere were created because of the Recovery Act, they just know that jobs are coming back.”

But there are good reasons to suspect that this gambit will not work as well for Obama as it did for Reagan. Samples explains that though Reagan’s approval rating had slipped leading up to the 1982 elections, a slim majority of voters still approved of the job he was doing. Obama’s approval rating is lower. It’s in the high 40s according to the RCP Average and some individual polls show him dipping into the low 40s.

From the Washington Post’s lengthy obit of the long serving Senator Robert Byrd comes this fascinating glimpse of what John Derbyshire once referred to as the “old, weird America.”:

Robert Carlyle Byrd was born Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. on Nov. 20, 1917, in North Wilkesboro, N.C. When his mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, his father sent the 10-month-old child to live with an aunt and uncle, Vlurma and Titus Dalton Byrd, in Stotesbury, a coal-mining community in the hills of West Virginia.

Despite living relatively close by, Sen. Byrd’s true father, who spent much of his time trying to build a perpetual-motion machine, never made an effort to see his son, who was 16 before he learned his real name. He didn’t learn his real birth date until 1971, when an older brother told him. Sen. Byrd discovered that he was nearly two months older than he thought. (Emphasis added.)

The nurse in this famous Times Square V-J Day photo, later identifed as Edith Shain, died today at age 91. The story behind it is almost as good as the picture itself:

Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured the shot, which was first published in Life Magazine a week later. The nurse’s identity was unknown until the 1970s, when Shain wrote to Eisenstaedt that she was the woman in the photograph.

In his autobiography “The Eye of Eisenstaedt,” the photographer writes: “I was walking through the crowds on V-J Day, looking for pictures. I noticed a sailor coming my way. He was grabbing every female he could find and kissing them all — young girls and old ladies alike. Then I noticed the nurse, standing in that enormous crowd. I focused on her, and just as I’d hoped, the sailor came along, grabbed the nurse, and bent down to kiss her.”

Well played, sailor. Well played.

Shain later got married and is survived by three sons, six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

And the sailor? He has never been identified.

When the towers of the World Trade Center fell on Sept. 11, 2001, Clarence Wolf Guts asked his son to call the U.S. Department of Defense to see if the country needed his code talking abilities to find Osama Bin Laden.

Wolf Guts was in his late 70s at the time, so his son, Don Doyle, did not make the call, but said the request personified his father’s love of country.

“He still wanted to help. He was trying to still be patriotic,” Doyle said.

Wolf Guts, 86, the last surviving Oglala Lakota code talker, died Wednesday afternoon at the South Dakota State Veterans Home in Hot Springs.

A Native American code talker from World War II, Wolf Guts helped defeat Axis forces by transmitting strategic military messages in his native language, which the Japanese and Germans couldn’t translate.

“He’s the last surviving code talker from the whole (Lakota) nation. It’s going to be a little like the passing of an era,” Doyle said.

Read the whole obit here.

Magician/comedian/Showtime program host Penn Jillette talked with Vanity Fair recently. One of the things the interview touched one was the mysterious disappearance of an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit that poked fun at the Catholic Church from a DVD release. Penn said nobody at Showtime told him it was getting left off, but he wasn’t upset because he felt the episode was already dated anyway. This led to an interesting discussion on religion, cultural tolerance and freedom of speech:

Jillette: As you know, there are hundreds of people involved in a corporation, and I guess somebody at Showtime decided it was for the best to leave it off the DVD. And maybe it was for the best. I’m always surprised when the corporate world does stupid things, because they’re often not very stupid in hindsight.

Vanity Fair: Like when South Park did an episode portraying Muhammad in a bear costume and Comedy Central said “Whoa, Nellie?”

Jillette: I think that said more about the Islamic group that made death threats against Trey and Matt than it does about Comedy Central. I believe very much that the most damning thing you can say about Muslims is that you’re afraid to say anything because they’ll hurt you.

Vanity Fair: As opposed to other religions?

Jillette: I will forever stick up for Catholics and Christians in general. With a small number of very horrible exceptions, they do play by the rules.

Vanity Fair: That’s a curious sentiment from somebody who’s gone out of his way to make fun of religion.

Jillette: I do believe that a belief in god is crazy, but that doesn’t mean that the people who believe in it are crazy. Those are two different things. Ideas can be stupid and crazy and the people who hold those ideas are not necessarily stupid and crazy.

Read the whole thing here. Skip the intro though. The author/interviewer is a raging douchebag.

Somebody airbrushed the cigar out of an iconic picture of Winston Churchill that was on display in front of the Winston Churchill’s Britain At Wartime Experience museum. And nobody is fessing up. The London Telegraph has the story:

John Welsh, manager of the museum, admitted he was shocked to learn of the alteration, but declined to reveal who was responsible for the display and for enlarging the image.

He said: “We’ve got all sorts of images in the museum, some with cigars and some without. We’ve even got wartime adverts for cigarettes in the lift down to the air-raid shelter, so we wouldn’t have asked for there to be no cigar.”

Don Robinson, who owned the museum before passing it to a charitable trust 20 years ago, added: “If we’d known we would have said: ‘No, it stays as it is.’ Everything we do we try to do accurately and the cigar symbolises Churchill.”

The alteration of the original image, taken in 1948 during the opening of a new military headquarters, was noticed by David McAdam, a visitor to the museum.

He told the Daily Mail: “I pointed out this crude alteration to a museum steward who said she hadn’t noticed the change before, nor had anyone else pointed it out.

“So much for the notion that only communist tyrants airbrushed history.”

Alan Packwood, of the Churchill Archives Centre, said he was not aware of any previous case where Churchill’s cigar had been digitally removed from a picture.

The original photo and the airbrushed version are above. I think the proper punishment for the politically correct wuss who did this would be rum, sodomy and the lash.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty on what Alvin Greene’s improbable victory in the South Carolina Democratic primary reveals about our politics: Nobody really knows anything:

There’s an intriguing contrast between Greene’s absentee campaign and the tactics of his rival. In making the charge that something suspicious happened, Rawl campaign manager Walter Ludwig bragged, “We did do 220,000 robocalls (including one with Rep. John Spratt), and sent out about 250,000 e-mails in the five days before election.” For perspective, only about 170,000 people voted in the senatorial primary.

Are there any forms of campaigning less desired these days than unsolicited robocalls and e-mails? Is it possible that some of Rawl’s outreach methods proved irritating enough to drive some voters to support Greene, even if they knew nothing about him?

Greene’s fairy-tale mystery victory is one of the most joyfully refreshing developments in modern politics, because it subversively suggests that everything we think we know about campaigns, elections, and democracy itself might be completely wrong. The voters may ignore almost everything we have been conditioned to consider important metrics in modern campaigning. Greene managed a runaway victory without television or radio advertising, a website, voter contact lists, any identified campaign staff, any yard signs, any bumper stickers, any get-out-the-vote operations — hell, as far as anyone can tell, Greene has no discernable positions or platform! He’s got . . . a name, and a check for the filing fee.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call it joyous, but it does shine a welcome light on the fact that a lot of the rituals involved in modern politics — advertising, debates, editorial endorsements, campaign rallies, etc. — impact things a lot less than a lot of professional political types would like you to believe.