Maverick Philosopher

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Chimes and Bells

Antar Blue, The Chimes of Freedom.  A very competent cover of the Byrd's version of the great Bob Dylan anthem.  The Byrds' version with lyrics.
The Byrds, The Bells of Rhymney
Laura Nyro, Wedding Bell Blues 
Donnie Brooks, Mission Bell  Fleetwood Mac version
Del Vikings, Whispering Bells 
The Edsels, Rama Lama Ding Dong 
Ding Dong the Witch is Dead!

I'm beginning to stretch now . . .

Derek and the Dominoes, Bell Bottom Blues 
Alma Cogan, Bell Bottom Blues

Really stretching now . . .

Tee Set, Ma Belle Amie

Why Blog?

Here's why.

Why I am a Quasi-Atheist*

A guest post by Peter Lupu with some comments in blue by Bill Vallicella.

[This essay is dedicated to the memory of Ann Freitag, my significant other, who passed away on April 17, 2010, 11:30am. She gave me two priceless gifts: Herself and a deep understanding that the love of life is not a mere gesture, but a way of loving every living being.]

The title of this essay expresses what it is like for me to experience an ever ascending spiral of theistic aspirations inhibited by atheist inclinations, and vice versa. My predicament is both intellectual as well as existential. It is a blending of the two that fuels a restless existence, one which propels me to journey on this ascending spiral of unfamiliar territory towards an unknown destination.

I. Why I am not an Atheist

Let me begin with atheism. Atheism is first and foremost a rejection of theism. However, the rejection of theism itself springs from several often misunderstood sources. A deep and personal disappointment with a particular religion frequently converts into a fervent rejection of theism and all that it means. A second source may begin with a genuine delight in the achievements of science which now and then, and quite unnoticeably, spills over into a materialistic metaphysics. The latter, in turn, bluntly opposes theism’s commitment to a transcendent reality. Thus, what starts as a delight in the potential of inquiry to unlock the mysteries of the physical universe migrates into an impatient and often mocking rejection of anything non-physical. Theism is a casualty of such a sentiment.

How Does a Direct Reference Theorist Deny the Existence of God?

First of all, how does an atheist deny the existence of God? Well, he might just assertively utter

1. God does not exist.

But suppose our atheist is also a direct reference theorist, one who holds that the reference of a name is not routed through sense or mediated by a Russellian definite description that gives the sense of the name. The direct reference theorist denies the   following tenet of (some) descriptivists:

The referent of a name N is whatever entity, if any, that satisfies or fits the descriptive content associated with N in the mind of the speaker of N.

For example, on the descriptivist approach there is associated with the name 'God' a certain concept in the mind of the person who uses the name, a concept which includes various subconcepts (immaterial, unchanging, omnibenevolent, etc.). The name has a referent only if this concept is instantiated. Further, nothing having a property inconsistent with this concept can be the referent of the name. Now if our atheist were a descriptivist, his denial of the existence of God could be expressed by an assertive utterance of

2. The concept of an immaterial, omniqualified, etc. being is not instantiated.

Clearly, if one's denial of the existence of God is to be true, the existence of God cannot be a presupposition of one's denial, as (1) seems to suggest; so (2) seems to be a well-nigh mandatory rewrite of (1) that avoids this well-known difficulty pertaining to negative existentials.  Whether or not God exists, the concept God exists, and is available to be the subject of judgments.  We cannot say of God that he does not exist without presupposing what we aim to deny; but we can say of the concept God that it is not instantiated. 

But our atheist is a direct reference theorist, and so cannot avail himself of (2). He cannot say that the nonexistence of God is the noninstantiation of a certain concept.  This is because the direct reference theory implies that the referent of a name can exist whether or not it instantiates any of the concepts associated with the use of the name.  The theory implies that 'Socrates' names Socrates even if it should turn out to be false that Socrates was the teacher of Plato, the wife of  the shrewish Xanthhippe, snubnosed, a stone-cutter by trade, etc.,  etc. 

On the direct reference theory, for 'God' to have a referent it suffices that (i) there be an initial baptism of some being as 'God,' (ii) there be an historical chain whereby this name gets passed down to the present user; (iii) each user in the chain have the intention of using the name with the same reference as the one from whom he received it. Thus it is not necessary that the referent of 'God' fit any concept of God that the end-user might have.

Now the direct reference theory has an advantage I have already noted.  It allows a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim to be referring to the same being when they utter sentences containing 'God' despite the fact that  their conceptions of God are quite different.

How then does the direct reference theorist deny the existence of God?  Since his denial cannot be about a concept of God, it must be about the transmission of word 'God'  anits equivalents in other languages.  He must deny that the name 'God' was ever introduced in an initial baptism; or he must deny that the historical chain is unbroken; or he must deny  that all the various users had the intention of using the name with the reference of the one from whom they received it.

But how can the nonexistence/existence of God hinge on such linguistic and historical facts? The nonexistence of God, if a fact, is an objective fact: it has nothing to do with the nonexistence of some initial baptism   ceremony, or some break in a link of name transmission, or some failure of intention on the part of the name-users.

More fundamentally, is it not just absurd to hold, as direct reference theorists seems to hold, that it is not necessary that the referent of  'God' fit ANY concept of God that the end-user might have? For that seems to imply that anything could be God. Could God be Abraham's fear during a lightning storm on a high mountain? Obviously not. Why not? Because 'God' used intelligently encapsulates a certain descriptive  content or sense that constrains what can count as God.

What am I failing to understand?

Gale on Baptizing God

Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge UP, 1991), p. 11 :

     First, because God is a supernatural being, he seem to defy being
     indexically pinned down or baptized. There are no lapels to be
     grabbed hold of by a use of 'this.' Some would contend that we can
     ostensively pin down the name 'God' by saying 'this' when having or
     after just having a mystical or religious experience, in which
     'this' denotes the intentional accusative or content of the
     experience. This would seem to require that these experiences are
     cognitive and that their objective accusative is a common object of
     the experiences of different persons as well as of successive
     experiences of a single person.

Suppose Abraham or someone has an experience the intentional object of which he dubs 'God.' Suppose the experience is not 'cognitive,' i.e., not veridical: nothing in reality corresponds to the intentional object, the accusative, of the experience. Then there will not have been a successful reference to God. Successful reference is existence-entailing: If I succeed in referring to X, then X exists. Pace Meinong, one cannot refer to what does not exist. Reference is in every case to the existent. It therefore seems that Gale is right when he says that a successful baptizing of God requires the veridicality of mystical experience.

Andrew V. Jeffrey (Faith and Philosophy, January 1996, p. 94) responds to Gale as follows:

     . . . the religious language-game could be played as if theistic
     experiences were both veridical and cognitive even if they were
     not; i.e., people could play the referential game even with a
     radically misidentified referent.

It seems to me that this response misses the point. Suppose the referent has been radically misidentified: Abraham dubs his Freudian superego, or an overwhelming sense of anxiety, or what have you, as  'God.' Then no successful reference will have been achieved. Is a long disquisition necessary to explain that God cannot be a feeling of anxiety?

And if you say that all baptisms are successful in that, after all, something gets baptized, then I say that this shows the utter hopelessness of the causal theory of reference. For the question to be   answered is this: How in the utterance of a name does the speaker succeed in referring to an object? Under what conditions is successful reference achieved? A theory that implies that one always succeeds, that there are no conditions in which one fails to succeed, is worthless.

Ataraxia and the Impossibility of Living Without Beliefs

John Lennon bade us "imagine no religion."  But why single out religious beliefs as causes of conflict and bloodshed when nonreligious beliefs are equally to blame?  Maybe the problem is belief as such. Can we imagine no beliefs?   Perhaps we need to examine the possibility of living belieflessly.  In exploration and exfoliation of this possibility we turn  to the luminaries of late antiquity.

A concept central to the Greek Skeptics, Stoics, and Epicureans, ataraxia (from Gr. a (not) and taraktos (disturbed)) refers to unperturbedness, freedom from emotional and intellectual disturbance,   tranquillity of soul. Thus Sextus Empiricus (circa 200 Anno Domini) tells us in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book One, Chapter Six, that  "Scepticism has its arche, its inception and cause, in the hope of attaining ataraxia, mental tranquillity." (Hallie, p. 35) The goal is not truth, but eudaimonia (happiness) by way of ataraxia (tranquillity of mind). The central means to ataraxia and happiness is the suspension (epoche) of beliefs, not all beliefs, but those that transcend the mundane and give rise to   contention and strife. To use some contemporary examples, beliefs about abortion, gun control, capital punishment, wealth redistribution, illegal immigration, foreign policy, the nature and existence of God etc. lead to strife and in extreme cases bloodshed. Given the difficulty and seeming irresolvability of the issues, the skeptic enjoins suspension of belief for the sake of ataraxia.

Now freedom from disturbance is clearly good, but is it the highest good? Is the highest life the beliefless life, the life that strives after the highest attainable degree of suspension of belief in respect of contentious matters?

One question is whether it is even possible to live without contention-inspiring beliefs. If it is not possible, then the beliefless life cannot be an ideal for us. 'Ought' implies 'can.' If we ought to do something, then it must be possible for us to so it. The same holds for ideals. Nothing can count as a genuine ideal for us unless its realization is at least possible by us. Now I have argued elsewhere that not even the skeptic can avoid some contention-inspiring doxastic commitments. So I maintain  the view that the beliefless life is not possible for us and hence not an ideal for us either.

But even if the beliefless life were possible for us, it would still not be choice-worthy. For our very survival depends on our knowing the truth about matters difficult to discern. For example, is global
warming real, and if it is does it pose a threat to human survival? What about the threat to civilization of militant Islam? How much of a threat is it?

These two issues are extremely contentious. Acrimonious and ataraxia-busting debate rages on both sides of both of these issues.  But obviously it does matter to the quality of our lives and the lives of our children and other world-mates what the truth is about these questions. It certainly made a difference to the quality of the lives of the workers in the Trade Towers on 9/11 that militant   Islamofanatics targeted them. Their quality of life went to zero. Just one bomb can ruin your entire day.

So how could it possibly be right to say that the highest life is the life of belieflessness? If I suspend belief with respect to every contentious matter, every matter likely to induce mental perturbation,
not to mention bloodshed, then I suspend belief with respect to the Islamofascist threat. But then I show indifference to my own  well-being. It doesn't matter whether you agree with me about the
threat of militant Islam. Perhaps you are a leftie who thinks that global warming is more of a threat. Then run my argument using that example.

Mental tranquillity is a high value, and no one who takes philosophy seriously can want not to possess more of it. But it cannot be the highest value. The happy life cannot be anything so passive as the  life of ataraxia. We need a more virile conception of happiness, and we find it in Aristotle. For the Stagirite, happiness (eudaimonia) is an activity (ergon) of the soul (psyche) in accordance with virtue   (arete) over an entire life. His is an active conception of the good life even though the highest virtues are the intellectual virtues. The highest life is the bios theoretikos, the vita contemplativa. Though contemplative, it necessarily involves the activity of inquiry into the truth, an activity that skepticism, whether Pyrrhonian or Academic, denigrates.

A Searle-y Objection to the Causal Theory of Names

Yesterday I argued that whether 'God' and equivalents as used by Jews, Christians, and Muslims refer to the same being depends on one's philosophy of language.  In particular, I suggested that only on a causal theory of names could one maintain that their respective references are to the same entity.  The causal theory of names, however, strikes me as not very plausible.  Here is one consideration.

The causal theory of names of Saul Kripke et al. requires that there be an initial baptism of the target of reference, a baptism at which the name is first introduced. This can come about by ostension:   Pointing to a newly acquired kitten, I bestow upon it the moniker, 'Mungojerrie.' Or it can come about by the use of a reference-fixing definite description: Let 'Neptune' denote the celestial object   responsible for the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus.  In the second case, it may be that the object whose name is being introduced is not itself present at the baptismal ceremony. What is present, or observable, are certain effects of the object hypothesized. (See Saul Kripke Naming and Necessity, Harvard 1980 p. 79, n. 33 and p. 96, n. 42.)

As I understand it, a necessary condition for successful reference on the causal theory is that a
speaker's use of a name be causally connected (perhaps indirectly) with the object referred to. We can refer to objects only if we stand in some causal relation to them (direct or indirect).  So my use of 'God' refers to God not because there is something that satisfies the definite description or disjunction of definite descriptions that unpack the sense of 'God' as I use it, but because my use of 'God' can be traced back though a long causal chain to an initial baptism, as it were, of God by, say, Moses on Mt. Sinai.

If this is what the  causal theory (or at least the Kripkean version thereof) requires, then the
theory rules out all reference to abstracta: Fregean propositions, numbers, sets, etc. But it also rules out reference to future events.

Suppose meteorologists predict a hurricane that has the power to wipe out New Orleans a second time. Conservatives to a man and a woman, they introduce the name 'Hillary' for this horrendous event, and they introduce it via some appropriately complex definite description. (They can't point to it since it doesn't yet exist.) The meteorologists continue with their work using 'Hillary' for the event in question. Since the event lies in the future, there is no question of its causing directly or indirectly any use of the name 'Hillary.'  Nor is there any question of the name's being introduced on the basis of effects of the event.

What we seem to have here is a legitimate use of a proper name that cannot be accounted for by the causal theory. For the causal theory rules out reference to a thing or event to which one does not stand in a causal relation. This suggests that there is something very wrong with the theory. (See John Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge 1983, p. 241.)

The God of Christianity and the God of Islam: Same God?

One morning an irate C-Span viewer called in to say that he prayed to the living God, not to the mythical being, Allah, to whom Muslims pray. The C-Span guest made a standard response, which is correct as far as it goes, namely, that Allah is Arabic for God, just as Gott is German for God. He suggested that adherents of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) worship the same God under different names. No doubt this is a politically correct thing to say, but is it true?

Our question, then, is precisely this:  Does the normative Christian and the normative Muslim worship numerically the same God, or numerically different Gods?  (By 'normative Christian/Muslim' I mean an orthodox adherent of his faith who understands its content, without subtraction and without addition of private opinions.)  Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic.  So if Christian and Muslim worship different Gods, then one is worshipping  a nonexistent God, or, if you prefer, is failing to worship the true God.

1. Let's start with the obvious: 'Allah' is Arabic for God.  So if an Arabic-speaking Coptic Christian refers to God, he uses 'Allah.'   And if an Arabic-speaking Muslim refers to God, he too uses 'Allah.'  From the fact that both Copt and Muslim use 'Allah' it does not follow that they are referring to the same God, but it also does not follow that they are referring to numerically different Gods.  So we will not make any progress with our question if we remain at the level of words.  We must advance to concepts.

2. We need to distinguish between the word for God, the concept (conception) of God, and God.  God is not a concept, but there are concepts of God and, apart from mystical intuition, we have no access to God except via our concepts of God.  Now it is undeniable that the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God partially overlap.  The following is a partial list of what is common to both conceptions:

a. There is exactly one God.
b.  God is the creator of everything distinct from himself.
c.  God is transcendent: he is radically different from everthing distinct from himself.
d. God is good.

Now if the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God were identical, then we would have no reason to think that Christian and Muslim worship different Gods.  But of course the conceptions, despite partial overlap, are not identical. Christians believe in a triune God who became man in Jesus of Nazareth.  Or to put it precisely, they believe in a triune God the second person of which became man in Jesus of Nazareth.  This is the central and indeed crucial (from the Latin, crux, crucis, meaning cross) difference between the two faiths.  The crux of the matter is the cross. 

3. Now comes the hard part, which is to choose between two competing views:

V1: Christian and Muslim worship the same God, but one of them has a false belief about God, whether it be the belief that God is unitarian or the belief that God is trinitarian.

V2:  Christian and Muslim worship different Gods precisely because they have different conceptions of God.  So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.

There is no easy way to decide rationally between these two views.  We have to delve into the philosophy of language and ask how reference is achieved.  How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the (extralinguistic) world? In particular, how do nominal expressions work? What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else?  What makes my use of 'God' (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?

4.  It is reasonable to hold, with Frege, Russell, and many others, that reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's satisfaction of a
description associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression's sense. If we think of reference in this way, then 'God' refers to whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community.

Given that God is not an actual or possible object of (sense) experience, this seems like a reasonable approach to take.  The idea is that 'God' is a definite description in disguise so that 'God' refers to whichever entity satisfies the description associated wth 'God.'    Now consider two candidate definite descriptions, the first corresponding to the Mulsim conception, the second corresponding to the Christian.

D1: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is unitarian'

D2: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.'

Suppose that reference is not direct, but routed through sense, or mediated by a description, in the manner explained above.   It is easy to see that no one entity can satisfy both (D1) and (D2).  So if reference is routed through sense, then Christian and Muslim cannot be referring to the same being.  Indeed, one of them is not succeeding in referring at all.  For if God is triune, nothing in reality answers tothe Muslim's conception of God.  And if God is unitarian, then nothing in reality answers to the Christian conception.

And so, contrary to what Miroslav Volf maintains, the four points of commonality in the Christian and Muslim conceptions listed above do NOT "establish the claim that in their worship of God, Muslims and Christians refer to the same object." (Allah: A Christian Response, HarperCollins 2011, p. 110.)  For if reference to God is mediated by a conception which includes the subconcept triune or unitarian, the reference cannot be to the same entity.

A mundane example (adapted from Kripke) will make this more clear.  Sally sees a handsome man at a party standing in the corner drinking a clear bubbly liquid from a cocktail glass.  She turns to her companion Nancy and says, "The man standing in the corner drinking champagne is handsome!"  Suppose the man is not drinking champagne, but sparkling water instead.  Has Sally succeeded in referring to the man or not?  Argumentative Nancy,  who knows that no alcohol is being served at the party, and who also finds the man handsome, says, "You are not referring to anything: there is no man in the corner drinking champagne.  The man is drinking sparkling water.  Nothing satisfies your definite description.  There is no one man we both admire.   Your handsome man does not exist, but mine does." 

Now in this example what we would intuitively say is that Sally did succeed in referring to someone using a definite description even though the object she succeeded in referring to does not satisfy the description.  Intuitively, we would say that Sally simply has a false belief about the object to which she is successfully referring, and that Sally and Nancy are referring to and admiring the very same man.

But note how this case differs from the God case.  Both women see the man in the corner.  But God is not an object of possible (sense) experience, of Kant's moegliche Erfarhung.  Hence the reference of 'God' cannot be nailed down perceptually.  And so it seems that what we succeed in referring to is whatever satisfies the definite description that unpacks our conception of God.

5.  My tentative conclusion, then, is that (i) if we accept a description theory of names, the Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being when they use 'God' or 'Allah'  and (ii) that a description theory of names is what we must invoke given the nonperceivability of God.

If, on the other hand, 'God' is a logically proper name whose   meaning is exhausted by its reference, a Kripkean rigid designator,  rather than a Russellian definite description in disguise, then what would make 'God' or a particular use of 'God' refer to God?

A particular use is presumably caused by an earlier use. But eventually there must be an initial use. Imagine Moses on Mt. Sinai. He has a profound mystical experience of a being who conveys to his
mind such locutions as "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me." Moses applies 'God' or 'Yahweh' to the being. But what makes the name the name of the being? One may say: the fact that the being or an effect of the being causes the use of the name. 

But a certain indeterminacy seems to creep in if we think of the semantic relation of referring as explicable in terms of causation. For is it the (mystical) experience of God that causes the use of 'God'? Or is it God himself who causes the use of 'God'? If the former, then 'God' refers to an experience had by Moses and not to God. Surely God is not an experience. But how can God be the cause of Moses' use of 'God'? Causes are events, God is not an event, so God cannot be a cause.

If these difficulties could be ironed out and a causal theory of names is tenable, and if the causal chain extends from Moses down to Christians and (later)to Muslims, then a case could be made that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all referring to the same God when they use 'God' and such equivalents as 'Yahweh' and 'Allah.'

So it looks like there is no easy answer to the opening question.  It depends on the resolution of intricate questions in the philosophy of language. 

Ed Schultz Plays the Race Card

 Ed Schultz:  "The Republican Party Stands for Racism."

For more examples of leftist scumbaggery, see my Race category.

Another example of why calls for civility are silly.  You must not be civil to moral scum.  You must denounce them and their lies.  When they lie about us we must tell the truth about them.  Every time.  For they believe in the Communist principle of the Big Lie: tell a big enough lie, repeat it enough times, and people will believe it.

 Michelle  Malkin: "The race card is not the last refuge of liberal scoundrels but the first refuge."

 

Codex Vallicellianus

A curious bit of lore, of interest perhaps to only one reader of this weblog, the reader who is also its writer, is that the Bibliotheca Vallicelliana in Rome houses a Vulgate version of the Bible described
here as

     V, or Cod. Vallicellianus (ninth century; at Rome, in Vallicelliana), a Bible; Alcuin's type.

When I was last in the Eternal City, in 1990, my Roman meanderings led me to the library in question, but I arrived during the long afternoon siesta. I spoke to the attendant via an intercom, but she wouldn't let me in despite my surname. The good lady was enjoying her leisurely work pause and no doubt reflecting on:  Dolce far niente which is Italian for "Sweet to do nothing."  It is a saying I recall from my childhood.  My paternal gradfather Alfonso had it emblazoned on the pergola he built  behind his house. 

Of Gods and Men

This appears to be a movie worth seeing.  Discussion by Rod Dreher in The Gethsemane of the Monks.  Resist not the evildoer and let yourself be slaughtered?

'Frege' on the Trinity

Peter Lupu writes,

The following are some recent thoughts about the Trinity. Let me know what you think.

The three expressions of the Trinity: ‘The Father’, ‘The Son’, and ‘The Holy Spirit’ all refer to the same divine being namely God. Thus, with respect to reference, each pair of expressions forms a true identity. However, they have different senses in Frege’s sense. The three senses are as follows:

1) The sense of ‘The Father’ is the will of the divine being to love, atone, and forgive. Call this the divine-will.  

2) The sense of ‘The Holy Spirit’ is the will of a non-divine being when and only when it genuinely aspires to be like the divine with respect to its moral identity and worth. Call this the inspired-will.

3) The sense of ‘The Son’ (i.e., the person of Jesus) is when the divine-will and the inspired-will coincide in a human person such as Jesus. Thus, Jesus is a moral-exemplar (Steven’s term) of a case when the divine-will and the inspired-will seamlessly coincide.

The senses of the three expressions of the Trinity are different. Therefore, while identities among each pair with respect to their senses are false, identities with respect to their referents are true.

It warms my heart that  a Jew should speculate on the Trinity on Good Friday.   Rather than comment specifically on the senses that Peter  attaches to 'the Father,' 'the Son,' and 'the Holy Spirit,' I will  address the deeper question of whether the logical problem of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity can be solved by means of Gottlob Frege's distinction between the sense and the reference of expressions.

The Logical Problem of the Trinity

Our question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.  See here for details.  How can the following propositions all be true?

1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Holy Spirit is God.
5. The Father is not the Son.
6. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

If we assume that in (2)-(7), the 'is' expresses absolute numerical identity, then it is clear that the septad is inconsistent.  (Identity has the following properties: it is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals and by the Necessity of Identity).  For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity.  But this contradicts (5).

So we have an inconsistent septad each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.  The task is to remove the contradiction without abandoning orthodoxy.  There are different ways to proceed.  Here I consider only one, the Fregean way.  (Of course, Frege himself did not address the Trinity; but we may address it using his nomenclature and conceptuality.) 

The Fregean solution is to say that 'Father,' 'Son,' and 'Holy Spirit, are expressions that differ in sense (Sinn) but coincide in reference (Bedeutung).  Frege famously gave the example of 'The morning star is the evening star.'  This is an identity statement that is both true and informative.  But how, Frege asked, could it be both?  If it says of one thing that it is identical to itself, then it is true but not informative because tautological.  If it says of two things that they  are one thing, then it is false, and uninformative for this reason.  How can it be both true and nontautological? 

Frege solved his puzzle by distinguishing between sense and reference and by maintaining that reference is not direct but routed through sense.  'Morning star' and 'evening star' differ in sense, but coincide in reference.  The terms flanking the identity sign refer to the same entity, the planet Venus, but the reference is mediated by two numerically distinct senses.  The distinction allows us to account for both the truth and the informativeness of the identity statement.  The statement is true because the two terms have the same referent; the statement is informative because the two terms have different senses.  They are different modes of presentation of the same object.

Now let's apply this basic idea to the Trinity.  To keep the discussion simple we can restrict ourselves to the Father and the Son.  If we can figure out the Binity, then we can figure out the Trinity.  And if we restrict ourselves to the Binity, then we get a nice neat parallel to the Fregean example.  The Frege puzzle can be put like this:

a. The Morning Star is Venus
b. The Evening Star is Venus
c. The Morning Star is not the Evening Star. 

This parallels

2. The Father is God
3. The Son is God
5. The Father is not the Son.

Both triads are inconsistent.  The solution to the Fregean triad is to replace (c) with
c'.  The sense Morning Star is not the sense Evening Star.

The suggestion, then, is to solve the Binity triad by replacing (5) with
5'. The sense Father is not the sense Son.

The idea, then, is that the persons of the Trinity are Fregean senses.  To say that the three persons are one God is to say that the three senses, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, are three distinct modes of presentation (Darstellungsweisen) of the same entity, God.

Why the Fregean Solution Doesn't Work

Bear in mind that we are laboring under the constraint of preserving orthodoxy.  So, while the Fregan approach is not incoherent, it fails to preserve the orthodox doctrine.  One reason is this.  Senses are abstract (causally inert) objects while the persons of the Trinity are concrete (causally efficacious).  Thus the Holy Spirit inspires people, causing them to to be in this or that state of mind.  The Father begets the Son.  Begetting is a kind of causing, though unlike empirical causing.  The Son loves the Father, etc.  Therefore, the persons cannot be Fregean senses.

Furthermore, senses reside in Frege's World 3 which houses all the Platonica necessary for the semantic mediation of mental contents (ideas, Vorstellungen, etc.) in World 2 and primary referents in World 1.  Now God is in World 1.  But if the persons are senses, then they are in World 3.  But this entails the shattering of the divine unity.  God is one, three-in-one, yet still one.  But on the Fregean approach what we have is a disjointed quaternity: God in World 1, and the three persons in World 3.  That won't do, if the task is to preserve orthodoxy.

At this point, someone might suggest the following.  "Suppose we think of senses, not as semantic intermediaries, but as constituents of the entity in World 1.  Thus the morning star and the evening star are ontological parts of Venus somewhat along the lines of Hector Castaneda's Guise Theory.   To say that a sense S is of its referent R is to say  that S is an ontologcal part or constitutent of R.  And then we can interpret 'The Morning Star is the Evening Star' to mean that the MS-sense is 'consubstantiated' (to borrow a term from Castaneda) with the ES-sense.  Thus we would not have the chorismos, separation, of senses in Worldf3 from the primary referents in World 1: the senses would be where the primary referents are, as ontological parts of them. 

But this suggestion also violates orthodoxy.  The persons of the Trinity are not parts of God; each is (identically) God.  No proper part of a whole is identical to the whole.  But each person is identical to God.

I conclude that there is no Fregean way out of the logical difficulties of the orthodox Trinity doctrine.  If so, then Peter's specific suggestion above lapses.

 

Easter Morning Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 15:14

Biblia Vulgata: Si autem Christus non resurrexit, inanis est ergo praedicatio nostra, inanis est et fides vestra.

King James: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

Orthodox Christianity stands and falls with a contingent historical fact, the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. If he rose from the dead, he is who is said he was and can deliver on his   promises. If not, then the faith of the Christian inanis est, is vain, void, empty, delusional.

Compare Buddhism. It too promises salvation of a sort. But the salvation it promises is not a promise by its founder that rests on the existence of the founder or on anything he did. For Christianity, history is essential, for Buddhism inessential. The historical Buddha is not a savior, but merely an example of a man who saved himself by realizing his inherent Buddha-nature. The idea of the Buddha is enough; his   historical existence unnecessary.  'Buddha,' like 'Christ,' is a title: it means 'the Enlightened One.'  Buddhism does not depend either on the existence of Siddartha, the man who is said to have become the Buddha, or on Siddartha's  becoming the Buddha.

Hence the Zen saying, "If you see the Buddha, kill him." I take that to mean that one does not need the historical Buddha, and that  cherishing any piety towards him may prove more hindrance than help.  Buddhism, as the ultimate religion of self-help, enjoins each to become a lamp unto himself. What is essential is the enlightenment that one either achieves or fails to achieve on one's own, an   enlightenment which is a natural possibility of all. If one works diligently enough, one can extricate oneself from the labyrinth of samsara.  Oner can achieve the ultimate goal on one's own, by one's own power.  There is no need for supernatural assistance.

Is this optimism justified? I remain open to Christianity's claims because I doubt the justification of self-help optimism. One works and works on oneself but makes little progress. That one needs help is   clear. That one can supply it from within one's own resources is unclear.  I know of no enlightened persons.  But I know of plenty of frauds, spiritual hustlers, and mountebanks.

Both Buddhism and Christianity are life-denying religions.  But while Christianity denies this life for the sake of a higher life elsewhere and elsewhen, Buddhism denies this life for the sake of extinction.  The solution to the problem of suffering is to so attenuate desire and aversion that one comes to the realization that one never existed in the first place.  Some solution.  And yet there is much to learn from Buddhism and its practices.  They are the two highest religions.  The two lowest are the religions of spiritual materialism, Judaism and Islam, with Islam at the very bottom of the hierarchy of great religions. 

Islam is shockingly crude, as crude as Buddhism is overrefined.  The Muslim is promised all the crass material pleasures on the far side that he is forbidden here, as if salvation consists of eating and drinking and endless bouts of  sexual intercourse.  Hence my term 'spiritual materialism.'  'Spiritual positivism' is also worth considering.  The Buddhist is no positivist but a nihilist: slavation though annihilation.

Admittedly, this is quick and dirty, but it is important to cut to the bone of the matter from time to time with no mincing of words.  For details see my Buddhism category.

Note: By 'orthodox' I do not have in mind Eastern Orthodoxy, but a Christianity that is not mystically interpreted, a Christianity in which, for example, the resurrection is not interpreted to mean the   attainment of Christ-consciousness or the realization of Christ-nature.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Religious Themes

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky.
Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus.
Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord.
George Harrison, My Sweet Lord.
George Harrison, All Things Must Pass.

 

Is Everything in the Bible Literally True?

Of course not. 

If everything in the Bible is literally true, then every sentence in oratio obliqua in the Bible is literally true.  Now the sentence 'There is no God'  occurs in the oblique context, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"  (Psalm 14:1)  So if everything  in the Bible is literally true, then 'There is no God' is literally true and the Bible proves that it is not the word of God!  Again, at Genesis 3:4 the Bible reports the Serpent saying to the woman (Eve), "You surely shall not die!"  So if everything in the Bible is true, then this falsehood is true.  Ergo, not everything in the Bible is literally true.

Someone who concedes the foregoing may go on to say, "OK, wise guy, everything in the Bible in oratio recta is literally true."  But this can't be right either.  For the Bible tells us in oratio recta that light was created before sources of light (sun, moon, stars) were created. The creation of light is reported at Genesis 1:3, but the creation of sources of light occurs later as reported at Genesis 1: 14-17.  Obviously, light cannot exist before sources of light exist.  So what the Bible reports on this head is false, if taken literally.  Furthermore, if the sun does not come into existence until the fourth day, how can there be days before the fourth day?  In one sense of 'day,' it is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its setting.  In a second sense of 'day,' one that embraces the first, a day is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its next rising.  In either of these senses there cannot be a day without a sun.  So again, these passages cannot be taken literally.

But there is a deeper problem.  The Genesis account implies that the creation of the heavens and the earth took time, six days to be exact. But the creation of the entire system of space-time-matter cannot be something that occurs in time.  And so again Genesis cannot be taken literally, but figuratively as expressing the truth that, as St. Augusine puts it, "the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time." (City of God, XI, 6)

And then there is the business about God resting on the seventh day.  What? He got fagged out after all the heavy lifting and had to take a rest?  As Augustine remarks, that would be a childish way of reading  Geneis 2:3.  The passage must be taken figuratively: ". . . the sacred narrative states that God rested, meaning thereby that those rest who are in Him, and whom He makes to rest." (City of God, XI, 8)

What is to be taken literally and what figuratively?  ". . . a method of determining whether a locution is literal or figurative must be established.  And generally this method consists in this:  that whatever appears in the divine Word that literally does not pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative." (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book Three, Chapter 10)

This method consigns a lot to the figurative.  So it is not literally true that God caused the Red Sea to part, letting the Isrelites through, and then caused the waters to come together to drown the Pharaoh's men?

 

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of  iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of  it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed  part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The  whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is not  more at least [at last?] than that of privation. This stage has to  be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron  is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real   proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

Christianity is the ultimate in "heterogeneity to the world," to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard.  God becomes man in a miserable outpost of the Roman empire, fully participates in the miseries of human embodiment, is rejected by the religious establishment and is sentenced to death by the political authorities, dying the worst sort of death the brutal Romans could devise.  Humanly absurd but divinely true?

What if God was One of Us?

What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home?

 

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

Here are two passages from Chapter Two of John Stuart Mill's magnificent On Liberty (emphases added):

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. [. . .]  We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

[. . .]

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be  questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

Evaluation of the First Passage

As sympathetic as I am to Mill, I am puzzled (and you ought to be too) by the last sentence of the first quoted passage.  It consists of two claims. The first is that  " We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion . . . ."   This is plainly false!  The opinion of some Holocaust deniers that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz is an opinion we can be sure is false.  We are as sure of this as we are sure of any empirical fact about the past.  Or suppose some fool denies that JFK died by assasination or maintains that McCain won the last presidential election.  Those are  fools' opinions we  know to be wrong. There is no lack of examples.   What was Mill thinking?  "We can never be sure," he writes.  A modal auxiliary married to a negative universal quantifier!  To refute a 'can never' statement all you need is one merely possible counterexample.  Think about it.

Mill's second claim is that even if we are sure that an opinion we are trying to stifle is false, stifling it would nevertheless be an evil.  Mill is here maintaining something so embarrassingly extreme that it borders on the preposterous.  Consider again an actual or possible Holocaust denier who makes some outrageously false assertion that we know (if we know anything about the past) to be false.  Suppose this individual has the means to spread his lies far and wide and suppose that his doing so is likely to incite a horde of radical Islamists to engage in an Islamist equivalent of Kristallnacht.  Would it be evil to 'stifle' the individual in question?  By no means.  Indeed it could be reasonably argued that it is morally imperative that such an individual not be permitted to broadcast his lies.

How could anyone fail to see this?  Perhaps because he harbors the notion that free expression is unconditionally worthwhile, worthwhile regardless of the content of what is being expressed, whether true or false, meaningful or meaningless, harmful or innocuous.  Now I grant that  freedom of expression, discussion, inquiry and the like are very high values.  I'm an Enlightenment man after all, an American, and a philosopher.  Argument and dialectic are the lifeblood of philosophy.  But why do we value the freedom to speak, discuss, publish, and inquire? 

I say that we value them because we value truth and because the freedom to speak, publish, discuss, and inquire are means conducive to the acquisition of truth and the rooting out of falsehood.  It follows that we do not value them, or rather ought not value them, for their own sakes or unconditionally.  We ought to accord them a high value only on condition that they, on balance, lead us to truth and away from falsehood.

So the Holocaust denier, who abuses the right to free speech to spread what we all know (if we know anything about the past) to be falsehoods, has no claim on our toleration.  For again, there is no unconditional right to free expression.  That right is limited by competing values, the value of truth being one of them.  The value of social order is another. 

As I see it, then, Mill makes two mistakes in his first passage.  He fails to see that some opinions are known to be false.  Now there may not be many such opinions, but all I need is one to refute him since he makes a universal claim.  I will of course agree with Mill that many of the doctrines that people denounce as false, and will not examine, are not known to be false.  The second mistake is to think that even if we know an opinion to be false we have no right to suppress its propagation. 

Now of course I am not claiming that all, or even most, known falsehoods are such that their propagation ought to be suppressed.  Let the Flat Earth Society propagate its falsehoods to its heart's content.  For few take them seriously, and their falsehoods, though known to be falsehoods,  are not sufficiently pernicious to warrant suppression.  Obviously, government censorship or suppression of the expression of opinions must be employed only in very serious cases.  This is because government, thought it is practically necessary and does do some good, does much evil and has a tremendous capacity for unspeakable evils.  It was communist governments that murdered 100 million in the 20th century.  And when the Nazis stripped Jews of their property and sent them to the Vernichtungslager, it was legal.  (Think about that and about whether you want to persist in conflating  the legal and the moral.)

Mill's mistake, as it seems to me, is that he allows NO cases where such suppression would be justified.  And that is a position whose extremism condemns it.  Toleration extremism, to give it a name.

Evaluation of the Second Passage

Mill only digs his hole deeper in the second passage.  "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."  Surely the bolded principle is a bizarre one.  Consider respect for human life.  Respecting human life, we uphold a general prohibition against homicide.  But it is not plausibly maintained there are no exceptions to this 'general'  prohibition where the term does not mean 'exceptionless' but 'holding in most cases.'  There are at least five putative classes of exceptions: killing in self-defence, killing in just war, capital punishment,  abortion, and suicide.   Now suppose someone were to apply Mill's principle (the one I bolded) and argues as follows: "Unless the reasons against killing humans are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."  Would you not put such a person down as a doctrinaire fool?   He holds that if it is wrong to kill human beings 'in general,' then it is wrong to kill any human being in any circumstance whatsoever.  It would then follow that it is wrong to kill a home invader who has just murdered your wife and is about to do the same to you and your children.    The mistake here is to take an otherwise excellent principle or precept (Do not kill human beings) and remove all restrictions on its application.

There are plenty of counterexamples to Mill's bizarre principle that "unless reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."

We conservatives are lovers of liberty  and we share common ground with our libertarian brethren, but here we must part company with them.

 

The God of Philosophy and the God of Religion

Steven Nemes by e-mail:

 

In posts of months past you claimed there was no distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; they're the same thing, if God can be called a thing at all; you asked for an argument that they were [not the same], if I am not mistaken. Here is my attempt to satisfy that request.

 

The God of the philosophers is immutable, as a result of his simplicity; this implies that he cannot be affected and respond to the goings on of the natural order, including us. Whatever happens in the natural order, God is [not] changed or affected in response to it. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, however, does seem to be so affected, on any reasonable reading of the relevant religious texts: in Christianity, he enters into the world to provide a means of salvation from sin, which presupposes his consciousness of sin freely committed by created agents; in Judaism, I would guess, he talks to and responds to the prayers of prophets and great leaders, destroys civilizations because of their sins (which again is an instance of responding to occurrences in the natural order), etc. I won't talk about Islam because I don't know enough. 

 

In short: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob seems to be affected in various ways and acts in response to goings-on in the natural order, whereas the God of the philosophers, by his very nature as immutable, cannot be so affected. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob offers a way of salvation because of human sin, and promises judgment in the future for those who don't repent; the God of the philosophers, on the other hand, cannot be said to do anything in response to what goes on in the natural order.

 

[. . .]

 

Your argument is this:

 

1. The God of the philosophers is ontologically simple, and therefore immutable: he cannot change, and so cannot be affected by anything that occurs in the created realm.

2. The God of the monotheistic religions is not immutable: he affects and is affected by goings-on in the created realm.

3. If there is a property P such that x has P but y does not, then x is not identical to y. (Contrapositive of the Indiscernibility of Identicals)

Therefore

4. The God of the philosophers is not identical to the God of the monotheistic religions.

 

The argument is valid (correct in point of logical form) if 'God of the philosophers' means 'God as conceived by the philosophers' and 'God of the montheistic religions' means 'God as conceived within the monotheistic religions.'  And I do think that is what you mean by the phrases in question. (Correct me if I am wrong.) 

 

But whether or not the argument is valid, it is not probative because the first  premise is false and the second is dubious.

 

Ad (1).  Only some philosophers hold that God is ontologically simple; Alvin Plantinga is a prominent contemporary theist who does not.  One cannot therefore build ontological simplicity into the definition of 'God of the philosophers.'  As for immutability, some philosophers think of God as mutable, Charles Hartshorne, for example.  So one cannot pack immutability into the definition either.  And similarly for other attributes.  For some, there are broadly logical limits on divine power, for others there are no limits on divine power. There are different views about the omni-attributes.  There are different views about the divine modal status.  There are different views about how the causa prima is related to the realm of secondary causes, etc.

 

The point is that 'God of the philosophers' does not pick out some one definite conception of God.  There are many philosophical conceptions of God even within monotheism.  There is no God of the philosophers if the phrase means 'God as conceived by the philosophers.'  Premise (1) therefore rests on a false presupposition.

 

I read 'God of the philosophers' differently.  What the phrase refers to is an approach to the divine reality, the approach by way of discursive reason applied to the data of experience, the approach exemplified by Aquinas in the Five Ways, for instance.  Or the approach exemplified by Descartes in the theistic arguments of his Meditations on First Philosophy.  The God of the philosophers, then, is God approached by way of discursive reason.  It is essential to realize that what Aquinas, Descartes, and others were groping towards using their unaided discursive intellects was not a concept, an idea, an ens rationis, or anything merely immanent to their own thinking. It was nothing merely excogitated, or projected, or abtract, or merely immanent to their minds.  It was, instead, the real concrete God, transcendent of the mind and independent of all modes of approach thereto.

 

To think otherwise is to commit the mistake I expose in Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers.

 

My claim is that what the philosopher seeks to know by discursive reason is the same as what the mystic seeks to know by direct, albeit nonsensible, experience, and is the same as what the religionist seeks to contact by way of belief on the basis of revelation.  They approach one and the same God, but in three different ways.  To employ a crude analogy: if there are three routes up K2, it does not follow  that there are three summits.  There is and can be only one summit.  Similarly, there is an can be only one God.  Reason, mystical intuition, and faith are three routes to the same 'summit.'

 

Ad (2).  It is certainly true that God is portrayed in many passages of the Bible as changing and thus as changeable.  But it doesn't follow straightaway that the God of religion is changeable.  For perhaps those passages can be taken in a merely figurative way and interpreted so as to be consistent with God's immutability.  Just as one must distinguish between philosophical conceptions of God and God, one must distinguish between Biblical portrayals of God and God.  The God of religion is God as approached via faith in revelation; but what exactly the content of revelation is is something to be worked out by hard theological work.  The Bible does not supply its own theology.  One cannot simply read it and know what it means.  One has toreason about what one reads.  But that is not to say that theology is philosophy.  Theology accepts revelation as data; philosophy does not.

 

Consider Genesis 3, 8:  "And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden."  Obviously, this passage cannot be taken literally, for if so taken, one would have to say that God, a purely spiritual being, has feet.  But if he was walking around on his feet, was he shod or not?  And what was his shoe size?  Were his toenails properly trimmed?  How many corns and calluses did he have, if any?  There must be answers to these questions and a thousand more  if God was literally walking through the garden and making noise as he did so.  And furthermore, he had to have physical eyes if Adam and Eve though they could hide from him behind trees.

 

Since we know that a purely spiritual being cannot have feet, and since we know that only a purely spiritual being could be the cause of the existence of the physical universe, we know that the passage in question cannot be taken literally.  So what exactly the content of revelation is in Genesis and elsewhere is not easy to discern.  But we can be sure that any portrayals of God that imply that he has physical attributes must be taken figuratively so as not to conflict with God's spiritual nature.  It may well be, though I am not prepared to argue it in detail, that portrayals of God as mutable must also be taken figuratively.  So I find your second premise doubtful.

 

So I persist in my view that the 'distinction' between the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is entirely bogus.  In fact my view strikes me as self-evident if one construes the relevant phrases in my way.  The God of the philosophers is the divine reality, if there is one, which is approached by discursive reason applied to the data of experience, with no use being made of the putative date of revelation.  The God of the religionists is the divine reality, if there is one, that is approached via faith on the basis of revelation.  Clearly, there can be only one divine reality.  For if there were two, neither would be divine given that only an absolute reality can be divine and given that the divine is that than which no greater can be conceived.  Since there can be only one divine reality, the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is the same.

The Wages of Appeasement

I am right now listening to Michael Medved interview Bruce S. Thornton, a colleague of Victor Davis Hanson, and author of The Wages of Appeasement.   Here is a Front Page interview with Thornton.  Excerpt:

MT: Could you talk a bit about one of the recurring themes among the three historical examples you write about in the book: a crippling failure of imagination “to see beyond the pretexts and professed aims of the adversary and recognize his true goals, no matter how bizarre or alien to our own way of thinking”?

BT: We in the West assume our ideals and goods are universal. They are, but only potentially: there are many alternatives to our way of living and governing ourselves, most obviously Islam and its totalizing social-political-economic order, sharia law. Suffering from this myopia, we fail to see those alternatives or take them seriously, usually dismissing them as compensations for material or political goods such as prosperity or democracy.

Worse yet, our enemies are aware of this weakness, and are adept at telling us what we want to hear, and using our own ideals as masks for their own agendas. Just look at the misinterpretations of the protestors in Egypt and the Muslim Brothers, not just from liberals but from many conservatives, who have been duped by the use of vague terms like “freedom” or “democracy.”

An important factor in this bad habit is our own inability to take religion seriously. Since religion is mainly a private affair, a lifestyle choice and source of private therapeutic solace, we can’t imagine that there are people so passionate about spiritual aims that they will murder and die in the pursuit of those aims.

I would add to these excellent points the observation that  the failure to take religion seriously is one of the worst mistakes of the New Atheists.  Being both atheists and leftists, they cannot take religion seriously.  (By contrast, most conservative atheists, though atheists, appreciate the value and importance of religion in human life.)  The New Atheists do not appreciate how deep reach the roots of religion into the human psyche.  And so, like the benighted John Lennon, they "imagine no religion" as if their imagining picks out a real possibility.  They fancy that a change in material conditions will cause religion to evaporate.  Pure Marxist folly, I say.  Man does not live by bread alone.  He wants more, whether or not there is anything more.  He wants meaning and purpose, whether there is meaning and purpose.  He is a metaphysical animal whether he likes it or not, a fact to which every mosque, temple, church and shrine testifies.

'Material' as *Alienans* in 'Material Implication'

The topic of conditionals is ancient, not as ancient as Aristotle and logic itself, but damn near: hard thinking on this topic began with the Dialectical School which featured such worthies as Philo the   Logician and Diodorus Cronus, circa late 4th to mid-3rd centuries B.C. In nuce, those gentlemen had wrapped their minds around what much later came to be called material and strict implication, Philo around the former, Diodorus around the latter. The topic of conditionals is also deep and fascinating. But then no topic in philosophy lacks for fascination. The mansion of philosophy has countless rooms, each a labyrinth. Be sure to secure your thread of Ariadne before plunging on . . . .

The other day it occurred to me that 'material' in 'material implication' is best thought of as an alienans adjective. Normally, an FG is a G.  Thus a nagging wife is a wife, a female duck is a duck, cow's leather is leather, and a contingent truth is a truth. But if 'F' is alienans, then either an FG is not a G, or it does not follow from x's being an FG that x is a G. For example, your former wife is not your wife, your quondam lover is not your lover, a decoy duck is not a duck, artificial leather is not leather, negative growth is not growth, and a relative truth is not a truth. Is an apparent heart attack a heart attack? It may or may not be. One cannot infer from 'Jones had an apparent heart attack' to 'Jones had a heart attack.' So 'apparent' in 'apparent heart attack' is alienans.

Now if p materially implies q, does it follow that p implies q? Obviously not. I am breathing materially implies 7 + 5 = 12, but the first does not imply the second. Material implication is no more a kind or species of implication than former wives are a kind of wives, or artificial leather is a kind or species of leather. Just as 'artificial' shifts or alienates the sense of 'leather,' 'material' shifts or alienates the sense of 'implication.'

Material implication is rather a necessary condition any implication must satisfy if it is to be what it is, namely, a genuine implication. For all will agree that in no case does p imply q if p is true and q false. Thus material implication does capture something essential to every genuine implication. But if X is essential to Y, it does not follow that X is a kind of Y.

Once we appreciate that 'material' in 'material implication' is an alienans adjective, and that material implication is not a kind of implication, we are in a position to see that that the 'paradoxes' of   material implication are not paradoxes strictly speaking, but arise from foisting the ordinary sense of 'implication' upon 'material implication.'

Soul Food

People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health.  Underappreciated is a truth just as, if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has its foods and its poisons just as the body does. This   simple truth, known for centuries, goes unheeded while liberals fall all over each other climbing aboard the various environmental and health bandwagons. 

Second-hand smoke the danger of which is negligible much exercises our leftist pals while the soul-destroying toxicity of the mass 'entertainment' media concerns them not at all.

Why are those so concerned with physical toxins so tolerant of cultural toxins? This is another example of what I call misplaced moral enthusiasm. You worry about global warming and sidestream smoke when you give no thought to the soul, its foods, and its poisons? You liberals are a strange breed of cat, crouching behind the First Amendment, quick to defend every form of cultural pollution under the rubric 'free speech.'

Levi Asher Writes Book on Ayn Rand

Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mails:

 

Your blog is just about my favorite philosophy blog on the web -- not because I often agree with your political opinions (I don't) but because you write with clarity, humor and just the right amount of personal touch.  Salut!  I also write about philosophy on my blog Literary Kicks, and you may remember a cross-blog interchange between Litkicks and the Maverick Philosopher over the meaning of Buddhism late last year.

 

I'm writing you now to ask if I could send you a PDF or Kindle copy of my new book Why Ayn Rand Is Wrong (and Why It Matters), which is currently #21 on the Amazon Politics/Ideologies Kindle bestsellers list.  This book offers an unusual and original approach to Ayn Rand's ethical philosophy, and aims to present an alternative conception of practical ethics that cherishes individual freedom while allowing a greater regard for the important place of the collective soul in all our lives. Since you haven't paid much attention to Ayn Rand on your blog, I gather that she is not very present on your philosophical radar, but I hope you'll consider spending a few minutes checking out my short book regardless, because I think this book has wider value as an original approach to popular ethical philosophy.

 

Here is a brief explanation of why I wrote it.  Thanks for your time, and please let me know if I can send a PDF or Kindle version of "Why Ayn Rand is Wrong" for your consideration and/or review.  Have a great day!

Thanks for the kind words, Levi, and do send me the PDF file.  Actually, there has been a fair amount of discussion of Ayn Rand on this blog.  It is collected in the Ayn Rand category.  In early 2009 there was a heated debate here about Rand.  The posts with open comboxes drew over 200 comments.  There were numerous other comments that I deleted.  Rand attracts adolescents of all ages and they tend to be uncivilized.  I was doing a lot of deleting and blocking in early aught-nine.

 

But I agree with you: Rand's ideas ought to be discussed, not dismissed.

Eric Hoffer, Contentment, and the Paradox of Plenty

Eric Hoffer as quoted in James D. Koerner, Hoffer's America (Open Court, 1973), p. 25:

I need little to be contented. Two meals a day, tobacco, books that hold my interest, and a little writing each day. This to me is a full life.

And this after a full day at the San Francisco waterfront unloading ships.  And we're talking cheap tobacco smoked after a meal of Lipton soup and Vienna sausage in a humble apartment in a marginal part of town.  Hoffer, who had it tough indeed, had the wisdom to be satisfied with what he had. 

Call it the paradox of plenty: those who had to struggle in the face of adversity developed character and worth, while those with opportunities galore and an easy path became slackers and malcontents and 'revolutionaries.'   Adding to the paradox is that those who battled adversity learned gratitude while those who had it handed to them became ingrates.

Chutzpah

A kid murders his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the ground that he is an orphan.  That's chutzpah! (via Dennis Prager)

Is College for Everyone?

When I was in the 7th grade my teacher told me I was 'college material,' the implication being that not everyone is.  She was right on both counts.  I was and not everyone is.  But times have changed, and pace Obama, change is not always for the better.  Part of the change for the worse is that the very phrase 'college material' has fallen into desuetude. 

The conceit that everyone can profit from a college education is of course foolish -- which is perhaps why it is is so warmly embraced by liberals, those whose egalitarian instincts are rarely constrained by common sense.  It was foolish when college was affordable and it is multiply foolish now when it isn't.

I now hand off to 'Professor X' whose Atlantic piece, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, is one of the best things I have read on this topic. 

Obama in Cloud Cuckoo Land

People say that Obama is intelligent.  I'll grant you that he is well-spoken: unlike Bush II he doesn't stumble over his words.  Trouble is, Obama's words are mainly  blather.  I fail to discern the substance of intelligence in them.  The man lives in a dream world. He's incoherent and irresponsible, an empty suit, a disaster.  The Anointed One has turned  out to be an emperor without clothes.  The audacity of hope has given way to the mendacity of empty hope and change rhetoric.

Part of the documentation for these assertions is provided by Victor Davis Hanson here.  Study it carefully.

Saturday NIght at the Oldies: Death and Taxes

Blind Lemon Jefferson, See That My Grave is Kept Clean
Son House, Death Letter Blues
Don McLean, American Pie (The Day the Music Died).  Excellent video explication of this wonderful bit of Americana.
Beatles, Taxman
Harrison and Clapton, Taxman

Seneca on Books and the Library at Alexandria

De Tranquillitate Animi, IX, 4 (tr. Basore):

What is the use of having countless books and libraries, whose titles their owners can scarcely read through in a whole lifetime? The learner is not instructed, but burdened by the mass of them, and it is much better to surrender yourself to a few authors than to wander through many.

Well said. But Seneca continues with something that strikes some as dubious:

Forty thousand books were burned at Alexandria; let someone else praise this library as the most noble monument to the wealth of kings, as did Titus Livius, who says that it was the most distinguished achievement of the good taste and solicitude of kings. There was no "good taste" or "solicitude" about it, but only learned luxury -- nay, not even "learned," since they had collected the books, not for the sake of learning, but to make a show, just as many who lack even a child's knowledge of letters use books, not as the tools of learning, but as decorations for the dining room.

It was only for learned luxury? The books were collected non in studium sed in spectaculum? And only forty thousand were burned? See here. Excerpt:

The actual number of books destroyed that Seneca gives is matter of some controversy that we will need to briefly address. In ancient manuscripts it is common for large numbers to be expressed as a dot placed above the numeral for each power of ten. Clearly in copying it is easy to make a mistake with the number of dots and errors by a factor of ten are frequent. That may have happened in the case of On the Tranquillity of the Mind. The manuscript from Monte Cassino actually reads 40,000 books but this is usually corrected to 400,000 by editors as other sources such as Orosius give this figure for the number of scrolls destroyed. I have not seen the manuscript, of course, so do not know if this way the number is expressed. However, even if it was given in words the difference between 40,000 and 400,000 is also pretty small. I propose therefore that the number given by Seneca, and indeed all other ancient sources, should be ruled as inadmissible as evidence because we cannot be sure of what it was originally.

On Comments

From the mail:

. . . I also wanted to thank you for hosting a blog where you disable comments half the time, and I mean that sincerely. I'm very tired of comment-culture, and it's nice to go to an interesting blog where the blogger seems focused on producing thoughtful and interesting things to read, rather than providing raw meat for comment-warriors to spar over.

Looking forward to more, as ever.

 

Never Bullshit! Mitt Romney on Non Sequiturs and the Null Set

Thinking about the mendacity of Obama, Schumer, and Kyl, I was put in mind of a post of mine dated 6 June 2007 from the old Powerblogs site in which I expose some bullshitting by Mitt Romney.  Here it is again.  If you want to be taken seriously by intelligent people, you must never use words you do not understand in an attempt to impress.  The only people you will impress will be fools.  By the way, some feel Romney is a viable Republican pick for 2012.  I wonder.  His being Mormon may not be a problem, but how remove the albatross of RomneyCare about his neck?  We have moved too far in the socialist direction.  We need to move back the other way, toward liberty and self-reliance, and I rather doubt that Romney is the one to lead us.

..............

Governor Mitt Romney was asked the following question during last night's debate:

     We've lost 3,400 troops; civilian casualties are even higher, and
     the Iraqi government does not appear ready to provide for the
     security of its own country. Knowing everything you know right now,
     was it a mistake for us to invade Iraq?

Romney replied:

     Well, the question is kind of a non sequitur, if you will, and what
     I mean by that -- or a null set. And that is that if you're saying
     let's turn back the clock, and Saddam Hussein had opened up his
     country to IAEA inspectors, and they'd come in and they'd found
     that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein,
     therefore, not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be
     in the conflict we're in. But he didn't do those things, and we
     knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in. I
     supported the president's decision based on what we knew at that
     time. I think we were underprepared and underplanned for what came
     after we knocked down Saddam Hussein.

Romney's response was quite good especially given the pressure he was under. But why did he spoil it by inserting unnecessary terminology that he obviously doesn't understand? It makes no sense to refer to a question as a non sequitur. A non sequitur is a proposition that abbreviates or 'telescopes' an invalid argument. For example, 'If the war in Iraq were serious, then we wouldn't be trying to fight it with an all-volunteer force.' That is a non sequitur in that the consequent of the conditional proposition does not follow from the antecedent. Non sequitur just means 'It does not follow.' But an interrogative form of words does not express a proposition. (Possible exception: rhetorical questions; but the question posed to Romney was not  rhetorical.) So to refer to a question as a non sequitur show a serious lack of understanding.

Romney should have replied simply as follows. 'It was not a mistake to invade Iraq since at the time the decision was made, that was the right course of action given what we knew.'

It is also nonsensical to refer to a question as "a null set." For one thing, there is only one null set. Talk of 'a' null set suggests that there are or could be several. More importantly, a question is not a
set, let alone a set with no members. "But isn't a question a set of words?" Well, there is for any question the set of words in which it is formulated, but that set is not identical to the question. But I
 won't go any further into this since, although it leads into fascinating question in metaphysics and the philosophy of language, it  leads away from the point I want to make.

 
"And what point would that be?" Never bullshit! You make yourself look stupid to people who really know. Never pretend to know what you don't know. Don't try to impress people with fancy jargon unless you really  know how to use it. Concern for truth dictates concern for precision in the use of language.

Call me a pedant if you like, but language matters!

Seeds of Hypocrisy

One who strives for the ideal but falls short is no hypocrite, but at a certain point the quantity and the quality of his fallings short must plant in his mind a seed of doubt as to whether he really avoids hypocrisy.  He preaches continence, say, but finds it hard to contain his thoughts, which are not particularly seminal, let alone his sap, which is.

More Than an Animal

Both the realization that one is an animal and the realization that one is more than an animal show that one is -- more than an animal.

World's Oldest Man Dies at 114

"Accept death," he advises.   Easy for you to say, old man.

Why Lie When You Have Good Arguments?

Last week I pointed out Senator Charles Schumer's blatant lie about Tea Partiers.  Apparently, Senator Jon Kyl has also lied and then gone on to justify his lie in a  manner most creative:

. . . Arizona senator Jon Kyl used his time on the Senate floor during a budget debate to claim that abortions make up "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does." When it was pointed out that, in fact, abortion funding constitutes about 3 percent of the organization's budget, Kyl shrugged it off. "It wasn't intended to be a factual statement," he said.

One question is why anyone would lie when they have he has decent arguments.  The use of tax dollars to fund abortion is morally wrong whatever one thinks of the morality of abortion itself.  It doesn't matter how many or how few tax dollars are used.  That's one argument.  A second is that funding outfits like Planned Parenthood is not among the essential functions of government, and that in a time of dire fiscal crisis, government must be pared back to its essential functions.  That's a second argument.  Properly exfoliated, they are powerful arguments.  They won't convince leftists, but then no conservative argument will.  But they will reinforce conservatives in their view and bring some fence-sitters over to our side.

Arguments appeal to our better nature, our rational, truth-seeking nature.

So what does Kyl do? He tells a lie thereby badly injuring his credibility.  Even if Kyl doesn't care about the truth, he ought to care about his credibility, and he must know that to be caught in a lie is to harm it.

So why lie when you have good arguments?

Perhaps it is like this.  "All's fair in love and war" and one of war's casualties is truth.  Politics has nothing to do with truth; it has everything to do with defeating your enemies and gaining or maintaining power.  Politics is about power, not truth.  Politics is war conducted by other means. (I call this the 'Converse Clausewitz principle.')

So perhaps when Schumer and Kyl et al. lie, they make a calculation:  the positive propaganda effect of the lie will offset the negative effect of being caught in a lie, and so lying is conducive to the end in view, namely, defeating the enemy.  Also to be considered is that when politicians  lie they are primarily addressing their constituencies many of the members of which do not care about truth either.  Proof of this is the crap that people forward via e-mail: scurrilous and unsourced allegations about Obama, Pelois and whoever.  When you point out to them that it is drivel, they are unfazed.  For again, it is about winning by any means, and truth doesn't come into it.

Mendacity pays.  Perhaps that is why politicians are so practiced in the arts of deception and prevarication.  They get away with their mendacity and we let them.  They don't care about truth because the people don't and they represent the people.  Maybe we get what we deserve.

Universal Health Care

I'm for it: I want everyone to have health care. But the issue is not whether it would be good for all to have adequate health care, the issue is how to approach this goal. I can't see that increasing   government involvement in health care delivery is the way to go.

Phrases like 'universal health care' and 'affordable health care' obscure the real issue. Who doesn't want affordable health care for all? If you visit the Democrat Party website you will see that they are for 'affordable health care.' That's highly informative, isn't it? It is like saying that one is for peace and against war. Except for the few in whom bellicosity is as it were hard-wired, everyone wants peace. The issue, however, is how to achieve it and  maintain it without surrendering that which is of equal or greater value such as freedom, self-respect, and honor.  And there is where the real arguments begin.

Or it is like saying that one is for gun control. Almost everyone wants gun control. I want it, the late Charlton Heston wanted it, Charles Schumer wants it. That's not the issue. The issue concerns the nature and extent of gun control.  Or it is like saying one is for government.  Except for a handful of anarchists, everyone is for government including libertarians and conservatives.  The issue is not whether we will have government.  The issue concerns it size and scope, power and limits.  When slanderous leftists like Charles Schumer portray conservatives as anti-government we need to call them on their lies. 

And note that health care affordability is only one value. Availability and quality are two others. If health care is provided to all 'for free' just what sorts of care will they receive and what will be the quality of that care? What good is a 'free' hip replacement if you have to wait two years in pain before you receive it? Or a 'free' quadruple bypass operation if you are dead by the time your number is called?  The Canadian snowbirds I talk to don't give me much encouragement as to the desirability of socialized medicine.

Availability of health care  is also affected by the willingness of young people to submit themselves to the rigors of medical school, internship and day-to-day practice.  Remove the incentives (high pay, high social standing, professional status and independence) and you can expect fewer entrants into the field.  Everyone's being insured will not 'insure' that there will be an adequate number of properly trained health care prroviders.

And 'free' to whom? To the unproductive, no doubt. But why should hard-working middle-class types subsidize the bad behavior of those who refuse to take care of themselves?  The primary provider of health care is the (adult) individual, who provides it for himself by taking care of himself: by eating right, getting proper rest, exercising, etc.

The problem here is the liberal mentality. Faced with a problem such as obesity, the liberal wants to classify it as a public health problem -- which is absurd on the face of it. No doubt there are
public health problems, and some of them are getting worse because of a failure to control the borders; but obesity is an individual problem to be solved (or left unsolved) by the individual and perhaps a few significant others. If obesity counts as a public health problem, then how could any health problem not count as a public health problem?

You can see from this example the totalitarian nature of the Left: it would intrude itself into every aspect of your life.  If you let them expand their control of the health care system, they will not rest until they have total control.  Power, as Nietzsche understood, does not seek merely to maintain itself but always to expand itself.  And then the powers that be  will have an ever-expanding rationale for dictating behavior.  Ride a motorcycle?  Then you must not only wear a helmet, but a full-face helmet.  After all, it's for your own good, and since the government pays the bills, they can justify such limitations on liberty on the ground of keeping medical costs down.  Eat red meat? The government might not ban it, but they could very easily slap a sort of 'sin' tax on its consumption.  The more socialized the health care delivery system, the more justification for such behavior-modifying disincentives and incentives.  And so on for any number of activities and dietary preferences. 

The liberal cannot imagine a solution to a problem that does not involve an expansion of the power and intrusiveness of government and a concomitant restriction of the liberty of the individual.

Here is the straight skinny on obesity: if you consume more calories than you burn, then you gain weight. If you burn more calories than you consume, then you lose weight. So if you want to lose weight, eat less and move more. Try it. It works. Of course there are people with special conditions. But I'm talking about the general run of the population. For the most part, people are fat because they refuse to discipline themselves. Liberals aid and abet them in their indiscipline. I am tempted to say that that is part of the very definition of a liberal. The liberal tendency is to shift responsibility from the agent and displace it onto factors external to the agent. So it's Burger King's fault that you have clogged arteries, not your fault.

The problem with liberals is not that they are stupid, but thay they stupefy themselves with their political correctness. The profiling question is a good example of this. Anyone with common sense can see that profiling is an effective and morally acceptable means of both preventing crimes and apprehending criminals once crimes have been committed. But the liberal tendency is to oppose it. Since these opponents don't have a logical leg to stand on, one is justified in psychologizing them.

But I'll leave that for later.

Why Dennis Prager Didn't Major in Philosophy

Just now I heard Prager say on his radio show that he didn't major in philosophy because on the first day of a philosophy class he heard the professor say that what would be discussed in the class was whether we exist.  I'll leave it to you philosophy teachers out there to make of this what you can, though I suggest an important moral or two can be extracted from it.

California Walks the Razor's Edge

Victor Davis Hanson is always worth reading.

Are the Republicans Exploiting the Fiscal Crisis for Ideological Ends?

Many Democrats are arguing that the Republicans are using the current fiscal crisis to further their ideological agenda.  The suggestion is that their stated fiscal concerns hide their real motivations which are ideological.

This fiscal vs. ideological distinction is as bogus as John Kerry's war of necessity vs. war of choice distinction.  Obviously no war is a war of necessity, and every war is a war of choice.  Consider the so-called Civil War of the USA which began on this day 150 years ago.  (So-called because it is better described as a war of secession.  The war was not about the control of the central government in Washington; the war was one of secession: the southern states wanted to secede from the union and achieve independence similarly as the the thirteen colonies wanted to secede from the Crown and be independent of British domination.)  Now the Civil War was certainly not necessary: the North could have let the South secede.  Was U.S. involvement in WWI or WWII necessary?  Obviously not.  And so on.  No war, strictly speaking, is necessary.  You can refuse to get involved in foreign conflicts; you can refuse to defend yourself if attacked.  You can accept dhimmitude.  So every war is a war of choice.   Kerry's distinction is therefore bogus. 

The same is true of the fiscal vs. ideological distinction.  Every fiscal decision reflects underlying ideological commitments, and no ideological commitment is such that its implementation does not cost money.  Obviously, the fiscal policies of both the Republicans and the Democrats are ideologically driven.  It makes no sense to speak of 'politicizing' fiscal decisions since every such decision is already political in nature.  

For example, both the funding and the defunding of NPR, NEH, NEA, Planned Parenthood, etc. are both fiscal and political and reflect different notions  of what  government is for:  what it must do, must not do, and may do.  Imagine  a conservative and a liberal arguing about National Public Radio.

Conservative:  We need government, but "That government governs best that governs least." (Thomas Jefferson).  We need government to do certain jobs that we cannot do ourselves.  But the essential functions of government are limited, and public broadcasting is not one of them.  Public broadcasting may under certain circumstances be a legitimate function of government, but it is obviously not an essential function of government.  There must be limits on governmental power since "Power tends to corrupt, etc."  So, given that we are in dire fiscal straits, and cuts have to be made, and since public broadcasting is not an essential function of government -- though it may perhaps be a legitimate nonessential  function of government under financially rosy conditions --  one of the things that must be done to save money is to zero-out the NPR and PBS budgets.  But there is a further reason to defund these agencies, and that is that they are not fair and balanced: they take a liberal-left stance in their programming.  That would be no problem if they were wholly in the private sector.  But surely it is morally wrong to use taxpayers' dollars to promote partisan sociopolitical views, thereby violating the convictions of the vast number of libertarians and conservatives who hold, rightly or wrongly, that liberal-left politicies are pernicious.

Liberal:  I don't buy any of that.  You conservatives and libertarians think of government as a necessary evil when in fact it is a force for untold good that cannot be achieved in any other way.  We need more government, not less.  A just society is a fair society, and a fair society is one in which wealth and other goods are distributed equally.   A severely progressive tax code may infringe the liberties of certain individuals but it helps in the achievement of material equality which is surely a much higher value than the liberty of the individual.  The wealth of the nation belongs to all of us, and it it legitimate for government to spread that wealth around in an equitable manner.  "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," as a very great man once said. Everyone has a right to adequate health care, for example, and it could easily be provided for all if the rich were taxed at appropriately high levels.  As for NPR, its programming is of high quality precisely because it doesn't have to kow-tow to mass demands of hoi polloi.  It helps enlighten the dumb denizens of fly-over country who cling to their guns and bibles.  Sure it tilts to the Left, but leftism is true.  Public broadcasting, contrary to why you conservatives think, is an essential function of government.  Without it, the masses cannot be properly enlightend and educated.

The point here is that both the conservative and liberal positions are rife with ideological commitments.  So it is asinine and contemptible when Dems claim that Republicans are driven by ideology, or that they are exploiting the fiscal crisis for ideological ends.

I wouldn't be so contemptuous of the Dems if they weren't so bloody mendacious and so blind to their double standards.

Be Hard on Yourself

The better people are hard on themselves.  The exemplify the anti-Bukowski property: they try.  They set themselves difficult tasks and strive to complete them.  They make intellectual, moral, spiritual, and physical demands of themselves.  They are alive to the discrepancy between what they are and what they ought to be.

But they also know how to relax and enjoy life.  Be hard on yourself, but honor yourself and permit yourself a bit of self-congratulation at obstacles overcome and goals attained.  The true conservative knows how to appreciate and enjoy -- and that includes appreciating and enjoying dear old self.

Should Fox Hunting Be Banned?

 Watch those amphibolous constructions, muchachos.

(HT: Seldom Seen Slim)

Big Government on the Brink

We are in deep trouble as Robert Samuelson ably documents in this troubling piece.  So what does Nero Obama do?  He fiddles while Rome burns and its legions get mired in Libyan sand and other sinkholes of the  benighted and backward.  Even if Obama the Irresponsible and every worthless Democrat were sent packing we'd still be in deep trouble.  Meanwhile gold approaches $1500 an ounce.  'Lead'  ain't cheap these days either.  It is a bad sign when gold and 'lead' appear to be wise investment choices. 

Overextended abroad, collapsing within.  The bigger the government, the more to fight over.   It's time for a return to good old American self-reliance. Make your plans and prepare for the worst.

Who is Dave Lull?

If you are a blogger, then perhaps you too have been the recipient of his terse emails informing one of this or that blogworthy tidbit.  Who is this Dave Lull guy anyway?  Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence provides an answer:

As Pascal said of God (no blasphemy intended) Dave is the circle whose center is everywhere in the blogosphere and whose circumference is nowhere. He is a blogless unmoved mover. He is the lubricant that greases the machinery of half the online universe worth reading. He is copy editor, auxiliary conscience and friend. He is, in short, the OWL – Omnipresent Wisconsin Librarian.

For other tributes to the ever-helpful Lull see here.  Live long, Dave, and grease on!

Survivalism

Almost anything can be made into a 'religion.'  (I am using the term very loosely!)  Survivalism, for example.  See J. W. Rawles' SurvivalBlog.com for a taste.  This post provides some insight into the mentality of a distaff survivalist.  It is quite revealing, I think, of both the 'logic' and the propensity for extremism of the survivalist type.  But extremism is everywhere, in the longevity fanatic, the muscular hypertrophy nut, and so on.

But don't get me wrong.  A wise man, while hoping  for the best,  prepares for the worst.  But the prepping is kept within reason, where part of being reasonable is maintaining a balanced perspective.  A balanced approach, for me, does not extend to the homemade rain barrels that the linked-to survivalist lady mentions.  But I do keep a lot of bottled water and other non-alcoholic potables on hand.  Here are some questions you should ask yourself.

1. Are you prepared to repel a home invasion?
2. Do you have sufficient food and water to keep you and your family alive for say three weeks?
3. Do you have the battery-operated devices you will need to survive the collapse of the power grid, and enough fresh batteries?
4. Can you put out a fire on your own? 
5. Do you have a sufficient supply of the medications you will need should there be no access to pharmacies?

These are just some of the questions to consider.  But how far will you go with these preparations?  Will you sacrifice the certain present preparing for a disastrous future that may not materialize?  Wouldn't that be foolish?  Wouldn't it be as foolish as the ostrich-like refusal to consider questions like the above?

And then there is the question of suicide, which you ought to confront head on. Do you want to live in the state of nature after the collapse of civil society?  Under what conditions is life worth living?  Civilization is thin ice, a crust easy  to break through, beneath which is  a hell of misery.  (Yes, I know I'm mixing my metaphors.)  When the going gets unbearable, can you see your way clear to shooting your spouse and then yourself?  Are there good moral objections to such a course of action?

Think about these things now while you have time and enjoy peace of mind.

Thanks, Joe Carter

Joe Carter at First Things links to my The Difference Between Me and You.  Thanks, Joe.  First Things is first-rate. "Then why isn't it on your blogroll?"  Because I'm lazy.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Marvelettes

In the calendrical '60s, before the '60s became the cultural '60s,* there was a lot of great music from girl groups like the Marvelettes.  I spent the summer of '69 delivering mail out of the Vermont Avenue station, Hollywood 29, California.  One day out on the route two black girls approached this U. S. male singing the Marvelettes' tune, Please Mr. Postman.   Ah, yes.  Ever dial Beechwood 4-5789?  Playboy.   Don't Mess With Bill.

*I reckon the cultural '60s to have begun on 22 November 1963 with the assasination of JFK and to have ended on 30 April 1975 with the fall of Saigon.  Your reckoning may vary.

Bill Maher on Islam

As much as a jackass as Bill Maher can be, he's on target in this video.

The Politically Incorrect Incendiarism of Ann Barnhardt

I confine my politically incorrect incendiarism to the occasional lighting up of a fine cigar. In some circles that is 'incendiary' enough.   I don't believe in burning books.  If you want to understand National Socialism, you must read, not burn, Mein Kampf.  If you want to understand Islamism, you must read, not burn, the Koran.  

Ann Barnhardt, Koran-burner, does both.  She reads, then burns those pages that she has marked with strips of bacon.  A pretty lass with balls of brass.  Gypsy Scholar provides commentary and links.  Check it out!  Move over Terry Jones.

Companion post:  Legality and Propriety: What One Has a Right to Do is not Always Right to Do.

Is Obama Bush III?

Those of you who voted for Barack Obama to offset the depradations of the evil Bush II must be gnashing your teeth long about now.  In the main, he's out-Bushing Bush!  It is with a certain amount of Schadenfreude that I contemplate the spectacle of the Bush-bashing boneheads of the Left waxing apoplectic over the antics of Barack the out-Bushing Bushite.  See Lorne Gunter, The George W. Bushification of Barack Obama.

Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) Caught Lying

Here at 3:40:  The Tea Party "has an ideology to get rid of all government."  That's a blatant lie.  A lie is not the same as a false statement.  Every lie is a false statement, but not every false statement is a lie.  A further condition is necessary: one must make the false statement with the intention to deceive.  And that is exactly what Schumer is doing.  His intention is to deceive.  For he is not so stupid as not to know that limited government is not the same as no government.  He knows full well what Tea Partiers and other conservatives advocate.  He's lying to hold onto power.

We need to make it clear to him and his  ilk that when they  lie about us we will tell the truth about them.