Maverick Philosopher

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ordinals and Cardinals > 10

I did zero to ten a couple of years back.  What songs can you think of that feature ordinals or cardinals greater than tenth or ten? Well, racking wracking my brains there's

Connie Stevens, Sixteen Reasons.  With footage from David Lynch, "Mulholland Drive."

Simon and Garfunkel, 59th Street Bridge Song. What a great song!  Slow down you hyperkinetic hustlers, you're moving too fast!

Cannibal and  the Head Hunters, Land of 1000 Dances.  This one goes out to Tom Coleman who probably danced to this at the El Monte Legion Stadium circa '65.  "Be there or be square!"

Question Mark and the Mysterians, 96 Tears.  Is that a Farfisa organ making that cheesy sound?  This one goes out to Colin McGinn.

Bobby Darin, 18 Yellow Roses

Cannonball Adderley, 74 Miles Away

Chicago, 25 or 6 to 4

Frank Zappa, Twenty Small Cigars

Tom Waits, Ol '55

Paul Simon, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

Billy Ward and the Dominoes, Sixty Minute Man

Ike Turner, Rocket 88

Beatles, When I'm 64

Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited.  Alternate bootleg take.  Arguably better than the album version.

And hundreds more . . . 

When Did Sex Begin?

In 1963.  Or at least so we hear from Philip Larkin in his Annus Mirabilis.  It was indeed a wonderful/remarkable year.  I was but a boy in grade school, but old enough to remember all those wonderful songs and not so wonderful events such as the Profumo scandal in Britain.  What ever happened to sex kitten Christine Keeler, by the way?  Brace yourself.

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

A Quasi-Kierkegaardian Poke at Paglia

I have long enjoyed the writings of Camille Paglia.  But while C. P. is a partial antidote to P. C., the arresting Miss Paglia does not quite merit a plenary MavPhil indulgence endorsement.  One reason is because of what she says in the following excerpt from The Catholic Pagan: 10 Questions for Camille Paglia (via Mike Valle):

You grew up as an Italian-American Catholic, but seemed to identify more strongly with the pagan elements of Catholic art and culture than with the church’s doctrines. What caused you to fall away from the Catholic Church?

Italian Catholicism remains my deepest identity—in the same way that many secular Jews feel a strong cultural bond with Judaism. Over time I realized—and this became a main premise of my first book, Sexual Personae (based on my doctoral dissertation at Yale)—that what had always fascinated me in Italian Catholicism was its pagan residue. I loved the cult of saints, the bejeweled ceremonialism, the eerie litanies of Mary—all the things, in other words, that Martin Luther and the other Protestant reformers rightly condemned as medieval Romanist intrusions into primitive Christianity. It's no coincidence that my Halloween costume in first grade was a Roman soldier, modeled on the legionnaires' uniforms I admired in the Stations of the Cross on the church walls. Christ's story had very little interest for me—except for the Magi, whose opulent Babylonian costumes I adored! My baptismal church, St. Anthony of Padua in Endicott, New York, was a dazzling yellow-brick, Italian-style building with gorgeous stained-glass windows and life-size polychrome statues, which were the first works of art I ever saw.

After my parents moved to Syracuse, however, I was progressively stuck with far blander churches and less ethnic congregations. Irish Catholicism began to dominate—a completely different brand, with its lesser visual sense and its tendency toward brooding guilt and ranting fanaticism. I suspect that the nun who finally alienated me from the church must have been Irish! It was in religious education class (for which Catholic students were released from public school on Thursday afternoons), held on that occasion in the back pews of the church. I asked the nun what still seems to me a perfectly reasonable and intriguing question: if God is all-forgiving, will he ever forgive Satan? The nun's reaction was stunning:  she turned beet red and began screaming at me in front of everyone. That was when I concluded there was no room in the Catholic Church of that time for an inquiring mind.

Serendipitous that I should stumble this morning upon Mike V.'s Facebook linkage to the America interview, what with my recent thinking about Luther and Kierkegaard's Lutheranism and both of their opposition to what they take to be  musty Medieval monkishness and mysticism and monasticism with its asceticism and emphasis on works in general, when justification is by faith alone, as they see it. This led to such abuses as the sale of indulgences.  (Later, perhaps, I will quote the relevant S. K. passage.)

But for now a quick poke or two at Paglia.  You know about Kierkegaard's three stages or existence-spheres.  Paglia seems stuck in the first of them, the aesthetic.  The second poke is that she quit Catholicism for a very bad reason, because "there was no room in the Catholic Church of that time for an inquiring mind."  And how did Paglia get to that conclusion?  From a possibly overtaxed nun's impatience with what might have been a smart-assed question from a very bright but also very rebellious and willful girl, who might have given the overworked nun trouble in the past.  (I speculate, of course, but not unreasonably.)  I should think that SEX and the desire to indulge in it had a lot more to do with the quittage than any process of reasoning, however non-sequiturious. Here is an excellent account of the three spheres of (personal, subjective) existence in Kierkegaard by the late D. Anthony Storm:

The Stages

Kierkegaard posited three stages of life, or spheres of existence: the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious. While he favored the term "stages" earlier in his writings, we are not to conceive of them necessarily as periods of life that one proceeds through in sequence, but rather as paradigms of existence. Moreover, many individuals might not traverse a certain stage, for example, the religious. The esthetic sphere is primarily that of self-gratification. The esthete enjoys art, literature, and music. Even the Bible can be appreciated esthetically and Christ portrayed as a tragic hero. The ethical sphere of existence applies to those who sense the claims of duty to God, country, or mankind in general. The religious sphere is divided into Religiousness A and B. Religiousness A apples to the individual who feels a sense of guilt before God. It is a religiousness of immanence. Religiousness B is transcendental in nature. It may be summed up by St. Paul's phrase: "In Christ". It consists of a radical conversion to Christ in the qualitative leap of faith. Kierkegaard also mentions intermediate stages, each of which he calls a confinium, or boundary. Irony lies between the esthetic and the ethical, and humor lies between the ethical and the religious.

There are three existence spheres: the esthetic, the ethical, the religious. The metaphysical is abstraction, and there is no human who exists metaphysically. The metaphysical, the ontological, is, but it does not exist, for when it exists it does so in the esthetic, in the ethical, in the religious, and when it is, it is the abstraction from a prius [prior thing] to the esthetic, the ethical, the religious. The ethical sphere is only a transition sphere, and therefore its highest expression is repentance as a negative action. The esthetic sphere is the sphere of immediacy, the ethical the sphere of requirement (and this requirement is so infinite that the individual always goes bankrupt), the religious the sphere of fulfillment, but, please note, not a fulfillment such as when one fills an alms box or a sack of gold, for repentance has specifically created a boundless space, and as a consequence the religious contradiction: simultaneously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water and yet be joyful. Just as the ethical sphere is a passageway—which one nevertheless does not pass through once and for all—just as repentance is its expression, so repentance is the most dialectical (Stages On Life's Way, p. 476f.).

D. F. Swenson, as quoted by W. Lowrie, defines Religiousness A and B.

Religion A is characterized by a passive relation to the divine, with the accompanying suffering and sense of guilt. But it is distinguished from religion B, or transcendent religion, in that the tie which binds the individual to the divine is still, in spite of all tension, essentially intact.... The distinctive feature of transcendent religion can be briefly stated. It consists in a transformation or modification of the sense of guilt into the sense of sin, in which all continuity is broken off between the actual self and the ideal self, the temporal self and the eternal. The personality is invalidated, and thus made free from the law of God, because unable to comply with its demands. There is no fundamental point of contact left between the individual and the divine; man has become absolutely different from God (A Short Life of Kierkegaard, p. 173f.).

For more on the stages see Stages On Life's Way and Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

More Paglia posts of mine accessible here.

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The Crusades: Misconceptions Debunked

Kierkegaard: "To Hell With the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life

Citizens Lynching Citizens

The Disgraced Irish Catholic Church, Through the Eyes of a Priest

Kierkegaard: "To Hell With the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life

I plan to spend a few days next month at a Benedictine monastery in the desert outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  The suggestion was made that I give some of the monks a little talk.  I think "A Philosopher Defends Monasticism" would be an appropriate title.  So I have been reading up on the subject.

This morning I looked to see what Kierkegaard has to say on the topic of monks and monasteries in his late works For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! They are bound together in an attractive English translation by Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton University Press, 1990).

Of course I did not expect old Kierkegaard to have anything good to say about the monastic ideal, but I was slightly surprised by the harshness of his tone.

I myself am highly sympathetic to the ideal.  Had I been born in the Middle Ages I would have been a monk for sure.  I fantasize my having been Thomas Aquinas' amanuensis and intellectual sparring partner.  And although I love to read Kierkegaard and about him and have been doing so all of my philosophical life, there are two things about him that put me off.  One is his anti-mysticism, which is of course connected with his anti-monasticism.  The other is his anti-rationalism.  But these two add up to a third, his fideism, which I also find off-putting. Well, more on all of this later.  Now let's look at some quotations.

One of S.K.'s objections, perhaps his main objection, to monks and monasteries and 'popery' is straight from Luther:  it is to the idea of earning merit before God by good works:

To want to build upon good works -- the more you practice them, the stricter you are with yourself, the more you merely develop the anxiety in you, and new anxiety. On this road, if a person is not completely devoid of spirit, on this road he comes to the very opposite of peace and rest for his soul, to discord and unrest.  No, a person is justified solely by faith.  Therefore, in God's name, to hell with the pope and all his helpers' helpers, and away with the monastery, together with all your fasting, scourging, and all the monkey antics that came into use under the name of imitation. (Judge for Yourself! 193, emphasis added)

You cannot justify yourself before God by your own efforts: "a person is justified solely and only by faith."  (193) In these later works of direct communication, S. K. speaks in his own voice and is here clearly endorsing the thought of Luther on justification.

A few pages earlier S. K. speaks of the highest life:

No, it is certainly not the highest to seek a solitary hiding place in order if possible to seek God alone there.  It is not the highest -- this we indeed see in the prototype [Christ].  But although it is not the highest it is nevertheless possible . . . that not a single one of us is this coddled and secularized generation would be able to do it.  But it is not the highest.  The highest is: unconditionally heterogeneous with the world by serving God alone, to remain in the world and in the middle of actuality before the eyes of all, to direct all attention to oneself -- for then persecution is unavoidable.  This is Christian piety: renouncing everything to serve God alone, to deny oneself in order to serve God alone -- and then to have to suffer for it -- to do good and then to have to suffer for it.  It is this that the prototype expresses; it is also this, to mention a mere man, that Luther, the superb teacher of our Church, continually points our as belonging to true Christianity: to suffer for the doctrine, to do good and suffer for it, and that suffering in this world is inseparable from being a Christian in this world. (169)

S. K. here sounds his recurrent theme of Christianity as heterogeneity to the world.  The heterogeneity to the world of the monastic life, however, does not go far enough.  A more radical heterogeneity is lived by one who remains in the world, not only living the doctrine, but suffering for it. No doubt that is how the Prototype lived, but he was and is God.  How is such a thing possible for any mere  mortal?

If true Christianity requires suffering for the doctrine, if it requires persecution and martyrdom, then true Christianity is out of reach except for those who, like present-day Christians in the Middle East, are even as we speak having their throats cut for the doctrine by radical Muslim savages as the rest of the world looks on and does nothing.  In the Denmark of Kierkegaard's day (1813-1855), when Christianity was the state religion and the object of universal lip-service, true Christianity was out of reach for S. K. himself by his own teaching.  The true Christian must be prepared for persecution and martyrdom, but it is difficult to see how they can be "inseparable from being a Christian in this world."

So add this persecution extremism to the off-putting factors already listed: the anti-mysticism, the anti-rationalism, and the extreme fideism.

But what a prodigiously prolific writer he was!  What a genius, and what a fascinating specimen of humanity.

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More on "Daily Bread"

From a reader:

Thank you for continuing to examine the important topic of "daily bread." I don't know of any other philosophy blog writer who combines depth, significance, and clarity like you do!

I agree that spiritual needs are primary, that our world is a vale of soul-making, and that there need not be a disjunction between the spiritual and physical aspects of human nature. Passages such as Mt. 4:4,  Jn. 4:10-14, Jn. 6:35, Prov. 4:7 and 16:16, and 2 Peter 1:4-15 seem to emphasize spiritual needs over material needs. Jn. 4:10-14 is particularly interesting.

Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." "Sir," the woman said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?" Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life." (Jn. 4:10-14)

Notice that Jesus states a counterfactual. The woman interprets the statement in material terms. Jesus responds by contrasting the transience of material water with the permanence of spiritual water.

Jesus goes on to say:

"A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth." (verses 23 and 24) Meanwhile his disciples urged him, "Rabbi, eat something." But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about." (verses 31 and 32)

These passages seem to prioritize spiritual development, and to support your spiritual interpretation of "daily bread."

Monokroussos on "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread"

Dennis Monokroussos comments on my latest Pater Noster post (numbering added):

[1] The word generally translated “daily” is indeed an unusual one – epiousios, which is apparently found nowhere else in scripture or anywhere in Greek literature. [2] Even so, the idea that this is spiritual and not physical bread is very much a minority theory, one that’s generally not accepted by contemporary translators. [3] Maybe it isn’t impossible, but feeling compelled to accept such an interpretation to “purify” prayer seems mistaken to me. We are embodied beings, not angels, and God’s creation of the physical world was a good thing and not a Manichean mess to be overcome. Asking God to supply not only our spiritual needs but our physical needs as well seems appropriate. (If God cares about sparrows and the lilies of the field, it isn’t too much trouble for him to be concerned for our general physical well-being as well.)  Moreover, the act of praying for our daily “bread” is a way of acknowledging that even in that respect we are dependent on God. The God of the Bible is not the hands-off god of Plato, Aristotle, and the deists. God is not like the petty deities of the Greek pantheon, but to divest the biblical God of the sort of personal care and love expressed in books like Hosea and in passages like Luke 13:34 and good old John 3:16 misses something important – something literally crucial. Of course, my objections here don’t mean that we should view God as a cosmic ATM. That would be idolatrous. Even so, the possibility of going too far in one direction doesn’t mean that one can’t also go too far in the opposite direction as well.

My response:

Ad [1]. Agreed.  As I wrote a few years back:

The Greek word translated as quotidianum in the Luke passage and as supersubstantialem in the Matthew passage is epiousios. I am not competent to discuss the philology of this Greek word, which may be a hapax legomenon. (Nor am I competent to assess the correctness of the two Wikipedia entries to which I have just linked; so caveat lector!)

Ad [2]. Dennis may be right about this.  I don't know.  But if I'm right, then my being in the minority, the default position for a maverick, is no problem at all.

Ad [3].  Agreed, we are embodied beings, not angels.  (It may even be that we are essentially embodied, or if not essentially embodied, then incapable of a complete existence without a body.) But while we are not angels, we are not mere animals either.  The main point for present purposes, however, is simply that, as physically embodied beings, we need food and water and other material things for our maintenance if we wish to continue as physically embodied beings.

We are further agreed that matter is not evil, and Manicheanism is out.  A physical universe created by a good God is itself (derivatively) good.  (Of course, there are deep and vexing questions that lurk below the surface.  For example, if ens et bonum convertuntur, then evil is privatio boni, and that raises some serious questions.)

So Dennis and I agree on two key points: that (i) we are embodied (and thus in need of ongoing material sustenance) and that (ii) being embodied is not an evil condition as such.  How is it supposed to follow from these two premises that it is appropriate to ask God to supply our physical needs, needs that we have the power to supply for ourselves?

It doesn't follow. We can and must supply our physical needs as best we can by our own efforts.  That is our job, not God's.  God has a role to play, but it concerns our spiritual development.

Here is my take on the Christian message.  We are here below to achieve spiritual individuation.  Spiritual individuation, unlike physical individuation, is a task, not a given.  It is a task we freely undertake or fail to undertake.  We are here to spiritualize ourselves, to actualize ourselves as spiritual individuals. This is a process of theosis, of becoming god-like.  God is the Absolute Individual.  Our task is to become genuine spiritual individuals by participating in the divine Individuality.  This material world is a vale of soul-making (John Keats), a place where we either work at this spiritual individuation or fail to do so.   In this life we are always only 'on the road,' in statu viae.  We are not here to enjoy material goods as ends in themselves as if this world were our final destination. 

In this transient life we must work at supplying our material needs as best we can by our own individual and collective human efforts, not by praying for miracles.  I am not saying that miracles are impossible.  And I am not saying that anyone who, in extremis, a theist in a foxhole, for example, cries out to God for material assistance is doing something morally wrong. In my original entry I conceded that not all petitionary prayer for mundane benefits is objectionable, and that some of it simply reflects, excusably,  our misery and indigence.  My point is that, insofar as we can (individually and collectively) do for ourselves we must do for ourselves, relying on God not for our material needs (except insofar as he created the physical universe within which alone material needs can be felt and met) but for our spiritual needs.

And so I do not see that Monokroussos has given me good reason to alter my interpretation:

"Give us this day our daily bread" is thus a request that we be supplied on a daily basis with spiritual bread that we need every day.  And since we need it every day, we must ask for it every day. But who needs it?  Not the bodily man, but the "inner man" says Cassian.  The inner man is the true man. 'Inner man' is a metaphor but it indicates a literal truth: that man is more than an animal. Being more than an animal, he needs more than material sustenance. 

It is also worth noting that the materialist interpretation of the daily bread petition plays right into the hands of religion's detractors who see religion as a childish and superstitious thing.  There is also this to consider: are there any well-documented  cases of people who were miraculously supplied with physical food after they prayed for it?  But there are countless cases, some in my own direct experience, in which spiritual assistance was provided as a result of prayer.

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Love and Transformation

If you love something, would you want fundamentally to transform it? 

A man meets a woman, gets to know her, and they decide to get married.  On the eve of the nuptials, he announces to her that she is on the brink of a fundamental transformation.  Would you say that he loved her or rather some idea of what he could make her into?

Now take a gander at this minute-and-a-half video clip.

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Modal Axioms

Man is a metaphysical animal.  We philosophers ought to encourage this tendency in our fellow mortals.  This morning's mail brings me a long disquisition by a Spanish lawyer (abogado), Daniel Vincente Carillo, entitled "A New Argument on the Existence of God."  It consists of numerous definitions, axioms, and theorems. I don't have time to comment on the whole thing, which can be found here, but I will remark critically, and I hope helpfully,  on his modal axioms.

Axiom 1

 

An opposite of what is impossible is either possible and not necessary, impossible or necessary (what is impossible is opposed to everything).

 

Better: What is not impossible is either possible but not necessary, or possible and necessary.

 

Example:  I am not impossible because I am possible but not necessary.  God and the number 7 are possible and necessary.

 

Axiom 2

 

An opposite of what is possible and not necessary is either possible and not necessary or impossible (what is possible is opposed to everything, except to what is necessary).

 

Incoherent as it stands.  

 

The possible is the opposite of the impossible.  That is, x is possible iff x is not impossible.  The possible divides into the necessary and the contingent.  The contingent divides into the actual but possibly nonexistent and the nonactual but possibly existent.

 

For example, I am contingent and so is a talking donkey.  The difference is that I am actual but possibly nonexistent while the talking donkey is not actual but possibly existent.

 

Of course, the modality in play here is broadly logical or metaphysical.

 

Axiom 3

 

An opposite of what is necessary is impossible (what is necessary is concomitant with what is possible and what is necessary, and only is opposed to what is impossible).

 

Incorrect.  What is not necessary is either impossible or contingent.  Possibility and impossibility are opposites.  Necessity and impossibility are not opposites.  Why not?  Because the contingent is neither necessary nor impossible. 

 

In the patois of 'possible worlds':  the contingent is that which exists (or is true in the case of propositions) in some but not all possible worlds, whereas the necessary exists or else is true in all worlds and the impossible in none.

 

This patois is a very useful façon de parler for rendering modal relationships graphic. 

 

Axiom 4

 

What is not necessary is contingent.

 

Incorrect.  What is not necessary is either contingent or impossible.  For example, I am not necessary because I am contingent.  A round square is not necessary because it is impossible. 

 

Axiom 5

 

What is contingent is either possible or impossible.

 

Incorrect.  What is contingent is possible but not necessary. The impossible exists or else is true in no possible world whereas the contingent exists or else is true in some but not all possible worlds.

 

Or think of it this way.  The contingent is either actual or unactual, and if actual, then possibly nonexistent, and if unactual, then possibly existent.  For example, your humble correspondent is contingent and actual, hence possibly nonexistent, while a flying armadillo is contingent and unactual, hence possibly existent.

 

Axiom 6

 

What is not impossible is possible.

 

Correct!

 

Axiom 7

 

Everything that exists does so by itself or by another being.

 

Correct!

 

Axiom 8

 

God, the universe, and nothingness, if possible, are the only possible beings.

 

Incorrect or at least highly controversial.  Many philosophers maintain, with good reason, that there are so-called 'abstract objects,' all or most of which are necessary beings.  (Candidates: properties, propositions, numbers, sets.)  Now everything necessary is possible.  So these abstract objects are possible beings.  Therefore, there are possible beings that are distinct from God and the universe.

 

Second, nothing is in no sense a being.  Hence it cannot be a possible being.  It is, however, at least a question whether there could have been nothing at all.  I examine this question in the entry referenced below.

 

UPDATE 2/26:  David Gordon writes,

 

You are of course right that nothing is both contingent and impossible; but this does not show that Axiom 5 is incorrect. "What is contingent is possible" is true; and from this "What is contingent is either possible or impossible" follows. If, as I gather from your account, Carillo denies that the class of impossible contingent things is empty, he is mistaken, but his axiom isn't. One can object to it that it isn't an axiom, as its truth depends on the truth of "What is contingent is possible." This is probably too trivial a point to have written to you about, but I pass it along anyway.

 

The problem is the ambiguity  of Carillo's formulation.  I took him to be saying that some contingent beings are possible while other are impossible -- which is surely false.

 

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Could There Have Been Nothing at All?

Explaining the Obama Admin's Refusal to Identify the Threat as Islamic

I can't do better than Victor Davis Hanson, but I can quote him.  Why won't the current administration accurately label and expose the Islamic roots of  global terrorism?  Hanson proposes the following possible explanations:

I. Strategy

The Obama administration knows full well that the Taliban, ISIS, al Qaeda, Boko Haram and the rest of the pack draw their zeal from the Koran. But to say such might turn off two or three useful constituencies — the hard Left at home that hates any judgmentalism, “moderate” Muslims in the Middle East who are essential to nullifying the “radicals” in their midst, and the global community that is always suspicious when America goes to war against a particular group or ideology. The Obama administration with a wink-and-nod, then, accepts radical Islam as the problem, but for strategic reasons, and in the manner occasionally of the Bush administration, prefers euphemisms. Nonetheless, the administration goes on Predatoring thousands of suspected Islamic terrorists even as it won’t say what its targeted victims all have in common. Given that Americans know that the enemy is radical Islam, why turn off potential allies by reiterating that fact?

Could There Have Been Nothing at All?

As a matter of fact, things exist. But suppose I try to think the counterfactual state of affairs of there being nothing, nothing at all.  Can I succeed in thinking pure nothingness?  Is this thought thinkable?  Is it thinkable that there be nothing at all?  And if it is, does it show that it is possible that there be nothing at all?  Could there have been nothing at all?  If yes, then (i) it is contingent that anything exists, and (ii) everything that exists exists contingently, which respectively imply that both of the following are false:

1. Necessarily, something exists: □(∃x)(x exists).

2. Something necessarily exists:   (∃x)□(x exists). 

(1) and (2) are not the same proposition: (2) entails (1) but not conversely.  If you confuse them you will be justly taxed with an operator shift fallacy.

Phylogenetically, this topic goes back to Parmenides of Elea.  Ontogenetically, it goes back to what was probably my first philosophical thought when I was about eight or so years old.  (Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny!)  I had been taught that God created everything distinct from himself.  One day, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling,  I thought: "Well, suppose God never created anything.  Then only God would exist.  And if God didn't exist, then there would be nothing at all."  At this my head began to swim and I felt a strange wonder that I cannot quite recapture, although the memory remains strong 50 years later.  The unutterably strange thought that there might never have been anything at all -- is this thought truly thinkable or does it cancel itself in the very attempt to think it?

I am torn between two positions. On the one it is provable that necessarily something exists.  On the other, it is not provable.

Here is one sort of argument for the thesis that necessarily something exists and that it is therefore impossible that there be nothing at all.  The argument has the form of a reductio ad absurdum.

1. There are no propositions.  (Assumption for reductio)

2. (1) is either true or false.

3. Whatever is either true or false is a proposition.  (This is by definition.  Propositions are truth-bearers or vehicles of the truth-values.  They are whatever it is that is appropriately characterizable as either true or false.)

Therefore

4. If (1) is true, then there is at least one proposition. (2, 3)

Therefore

5. If (1) is false, then there is at least one proposition.  (2, 3)

Therefore

6. Necessarily, there is at least one proposition.

Therefore

7. (1) is necessarily false.

Therefore

8. It is not possible that nothing exists. 

Skeptical Rejoinder

I don't buy it.  Had there been nothing at all, there would not have been any propositions, any states of affairs, any way things are, any properties, any truth, any Law of Non-Contradiction or Law of Excluded Middle or Principle of Bivalence, any distinction between true and false, any distinctions at all.  There would have been just nothing at all.  Your proof that this is impossible begs the question by assuming or presupposing the whole interconnected framework of propositions, truth and falsehood, etc., including your modal principles and other logical principles. 

You can't prove that there must be something if you presuppose that there must be something.  Circular arguments are of course valid, but no circular argument is a proof.  

At the very most, what you demonstrate is that WE cannot operate without presupposing the Logical Framework -- to give it a name.   At the very most, you demonstrate that the Logical Framework (LF) is a transcendental presupposition of OUR discursive activities, in roughly the Kantian sense of 'transcendental.' You do not succeed in demonstrating that Being itself or any being exists independently of us.  Your proof may have transcendental import, but it fails to secure ontological import.  Why do you think that Being itself, independently of us, is such that necessarily something exists?

For example, you think that there must be a total way things are such that, if there were nothing at all, then that would be the way things are, in which case there would, in the end, be a way things are. But how do you know that?  How do you know that your presupposition of a way things are is more than a merely transcendental presupposition as opposed to a structure grounded in the very Being of things independently of us?

I grant you that the LF is necessary, but its necessity is conditional: it depends on us, and we might not have existed.  For all you have shown, there could have been nothing at all.

Why does it matter?  What's at stake?

Now this is a highly abstract and abstruse debate.  Does it matter practically or 'existentially'? 

If there could have been nothing at all, then all is contingent and no Absolute exists.    An Absolute such as God must be a necessary being. An Absolute functions as the real-ground of the existence, intelligibility, and value of everything distinct from it. If there is no Absolute, then existence is absurd, i.e., without ultimate ground (source and reason), without sense and intelligibility.  Now if existence is absurd, then human existence is absurd.  So if there could have been nothing at all, then human existence is absurd.  This is why our question matters.  It matters because it matters whether our existence is absurd.

Mike Valle on Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit

Could everything have come into being without a cause?  Mike Valle tells me about an annoying interlocutor who thinks it certain that this is impossible because it is certain that ex nihilo nihil fit: from nothing nothing comes.  Mike, if I understand him, doubts the certainty of the principle.  He reasons: had there been nothing at all, then there would have been nothing to prevent something from arising.  In particular, had there been nothing at all, there would have been no such truth as ex nihilo nihil fit.

Mike's reasoning presupposes that it is possible that there be nothing at all.  So his suggestion comports well with the Skeptical Rejoinder above.

As for myself, I am left with the thought that is reasonable to hold that there must be something -- after all I argued the matter out rigorously -- but also reasonable to hold the opposite.  This seems to suggest that here we have a question that reason cannot decide.  So how do we decide it?  By personal decision? By mystical intuition? By acceptance of divine revelation?  In some other way?  In no way?

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Nothing is Written in Stone

Why the Firestorm? Rudy Spoke the Truth that Hurts and Punctured the Obama Myth

Why the furiously intemperate ranting over Rudy's remarks?  After all, the distinguished former mayor of New York City merely articulated what vast numbers of us have suspected or believed for years.  Giuliani had the temerity to speak truth to power and this enraged the Left. (Lefties think they alone own dissent and the right to speak truth to power.)  Fred Siegel:

The ranting has obscured the reasons why so many Americans take Giuliani’s remarks to heart. Starting with his June 2009 speech in Cairo, when he apologized for American actions in the Middle East, Obama has consistently given credence to Islamic grievances against America while showing reluctance to confront Islamic terrorism. In 2009, after Major Nidal Hasan killed 13 American soldiers and wounded 40 others at Fort Hood while shouting “Allahu Akhbar,” the administration labeled the killings workplace violence. In recent months, the pace of evasions has quickened. Obama was the only major Western leader absent from the massive Paris march held in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings. Worse yet, Obama referred to the killings in a Jewish supermarket in Paris as “random” acts of violence.

But this was only the beginning of a string of curious comments and loopy locutions made by the president or his spokespeople in the weeks that followed. While ISIS rampaged across the Middle East, the president told a Washington prayer breakfast that Christians shouldn’t get on their “high horse,” because they were guilty of the Crusades, among other crimes. Not only were the Crusades many centuries past, but they were also a complicated matter in which both sides behaved barbarically.

But that is to understate the matter.  Both Siegel and Giuliani failed to mention a crucial fact, namely, the  Crusades were defensive wars, wars in response to Muslim aggression and conquest.

If You Deny that There is Political Correctness . . .

. . . do you also deny that American talk radio tilts decidedly to the Right?  If you deny either of them then I am the present king of France.

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Denying that There is Political Correctness . . .

Acronyms, Initialisms, and Truncations

Citizens Lynching Citizens

Imagine a history teacher who tells his students that in the American South, as late as the 1960s, certain citizens lynched certain other citizens.  Would you say that the teacher had omitted something of great importance for understanding why these lynchings occurred?  Yes you would.  You would point out that the lynchings were of blacks by whites, and that a good part of the motivation for their unspeakable crimes was sheer racial animus.  In the case of these crimes, the races of the perpetrators and of their victims are facts relevant to understanding the crimes.  Just to describe the lynchings accurately one has to mention race, let alone to explain them. 

I hope no one will disagree with me on this.

Or consider the case of a history teacher who reports that in Germany, 1933-1945, certain German citizens harassed, tortured, enslaved, and executed other German citizens.  That is true, of course, but it leaves out the fact that the perpetrators were Nazis and (most of) the victims Jews.  Those additional facts must be reported for the situation to be properly described, let alone explained.  Not only that, the Nazis were acting from Nazi ideology and the Jew were killed for being Jews. 

According to recent reports, some Muslim jihadis beheaded some Egyptian Coptic Christians on a Libyan beach. Now beheading is not lynching.  And religion is not the same as race. But just as race is relevant in the lynching case, religion is relevant in the beheading case.  That the perpetrators of the beheadings were Muslims and the victims Christians enters into both an adequate description and an adequate explanation of the evil deeds of the former.

This is especially so since  the Muslims were acting from Islamic beliefs and the Christians were killed for their Christian beliefs.  It was not as if some merely nominal Muslims killed some merely nominal Christians in a dispute over the ownership of some donkeys.

Bear in mind my distinction between a 'sociological' X and a 'doctrinal' X.

What did Barack Obama say about this?  He said: “No religion is responsible for terrorism — people are responsible for violence and terrorism."

Now that is a mendacious thing to say. Obama knows that the behavior of people is influenced by their beliefs.  For example, he knows that part of the explanation of the lynchings of blacks by whites is that the white perpetrators held racists beliefs that justified (in their own minds) their horrendous behavior.  And of course he knows, mutatis mutandis, the same about the beheading case. 

He knows that he is engaging in a vicious abstraction when he sunders people and their beliefs in such a way as to imply that those beliefs have no influence on their actions.

Why then is Obama so dishonest?  Part of the explanation is that he just does not care about truth.  (That is a mark of the bullshitter as Harry Frankfurt has pointed out.) Truth, after all, is not a leftist value, except insofar as it can be invoked to forward the leftist agenda.  It is the 'progressive' agenda that counts, first, and the narrative that justifies the agenda, second.  (Karl Marx, 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it."  Truth doesn't come into it since a narrative is just a story and a story needn't be true to mobilize people to implement an agenda. 

There's more to it than that, but that's enough for now.  This is a blog and brevity is the soul of blog as some wit once observed.

What is to be done?  Well, every decent person must do what he or she can to combat the lying scumbags of the Left.  It is a noble fight, and may also be, shall we say, conducive unto your further existence in the style to which you have become accustomed.

Related articles

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Another Double Standard

The Moral Idiocy of Barack Obama

Bernard Lewis, "Jihad versus Crusade"

What ISIS Really Wants

The Crusades Were Defensive Wars

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Weights and Measures

The Band, The Weight

The Byrds, Eight Miles High

The Rolling Stones, Moonlight Mile

The Who, I Can See for Miles

Cannonball Adderley, 74 Miles Away.  So titled because it is In 7/4 time.

Dave Brubeck, Take Five.  So titled because it is in 5/4 time.

Cream, Spoonful.  Heavy, man.

The Lovin' Spoonful, Six O'Clock

Gene Pitney, 24 Hours from Tulsa

Beach Boys, 409. With a four-speed manual tranny, dual quad carburetors (before fuel injection), positraction (limited slip differential), and 409 cubic inches of engine displacement.  Gas was cheap in those days.

ZZ Top and Jeff Beck, 16 Tons.  Tennessee Ernie Ford's 1955 #1 version.

Justin Timberlake, et al., 500 Miles. (From Inside Llewyn Davis)

Bobby Bare, 500 Miles Away from Home

UPDATE 2/23:

Lovin' Spoonful, Full Measure.  Undeservedly obscure.

The God of Christianity and the God of Islam: Same God? (2015)

For Dave Bagwill, who posed some questions in the near vicinity of the ones I will be addressing.  This is a heavily revised version of a 2011 post.  The MavPhil doctrine of abrogation is in effect.  This is a hairy topic; expect a hard slog.  If you prefer a 'leiter' read, a certain gossip site suggests itself.

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

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 of essential tenets, and without addition of private opinions.)  Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic.  So if Christian and Muslim worship different Gods, and a monotheistic God exists, 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 our 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 and religious feelings such as the Kreatur-Gefuehl that Rudolf Otto speaks of, 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 everything 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. 

So while the God-concepts overlap, they are different concepts.  (The overlap is partial, not complete.) And let's not forget that God is not, and cannot be, a concept (as I am using 'concept').  No concept is worship-worthy or anyone's highest good.  No concept created the world.  Whether or not God exists, it is a conceptual truth that God cannot be a concept.  For the concept of God contains the subconcept, being that exists apart from any finite mind.  It is built into the very concept of God that God cannot be a concept.

It is clear then, that what the Christian and the Muslim worship or purport to worship cannot be that which is common to their respective God-conceptions, for what is common its itself a concept.

We could say that if God exists, then God is the object of our God-concept or the referent of our God-concept, but also the referent of the word 'God.' 

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

V1: Christian and Muslim can worship the same God, even though one of them must have 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 must 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 unique 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 with 'God.'   The reference relation is one of satisfaction.  A grammatically singular term t refers to x if and only if x exists and x satisfies the description associated with t.  Now consider two candidate definite descriptions, the first corresponding to the Muslim 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).  For while the descriptions overlap, nothing can be both unitarian and triune.  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 to the 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 else the subconcept unitarian, then 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 mineral 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 mineral water or some other bubbly clear beverage.  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. We don't see God in this life.  Hence the reference of 'God' cannot be nailed down perceptually. A burning bush is an object of possible sense experience, and God may manifest himself in a burning bush; but God is not a burning bush, and the referent of 'God' cannot be a burning bush.  The man in the corner that the women see and admire is not a manifestation of a man, but a man himself.

Given that God is not literally seen or otherwise sense-perceived in this life, then, apart from mystical experience, the only way to get at God is via concepts and descriptions. And so it seems that in the God case 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.  Christian and Muslim  do not refer to the same being because no one being can satisfy both (D1) and (D2) above: nothing can be both triune and not triune any more than one man can both be drinking champage and not drinking champagne at the same time.

If, on the other hand, 'God' is a logically proper name whose reference is direct and not routed through sense or mediated by a definite description, then what would make 'God' or a particular use of 'God' refer to God?

One might propose a causal theory of names.

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 (either directly or indirectly via a causal chain)) 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 the term, 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.

A particular use of a name 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 'YHWH'  to the being he believes is addressing him in the experience. But what makes the name the name of the being? One may say: the being or an effect of the being is simply labelled or tagged with the name in an initial 'baptism.'

But a certain indeterminacy seems to creep in if we think of the semantic relation of referring as explicable in terms of tagging and causation (as opposed to in terms of the non-causal relation of satisfaction of a definite description encapsulated in a grammatically proper name). 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 if God is the cause of Moses' use of 'God,' then the mystical experience must be veridical. (Cf. Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God, Cambridge UP, 1991, p. 11.)

So if we set aside mystical experience and the question of its veridicality, it seems we ought to adopt a description theory of the divinenames with the consequences mentioned in (i) above.  If, on the other hand, a causal theory of divine names 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. 

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Legal Insurrection

My post, Leftists and Civility, was tagged as post of the day today at Legal Insurrection.  I return the compliment by naming it Blog of the Day.

Grammar School

Time was when one actually learned grammar in grammar school.  How many today can distinguish an adverb from an adjective, let alone a gerund from a participle?  Grammar is propadeutic to logic.  It is logical pre-school, a sovereign prophylactic against the nonsense of . . .

I feel a rant coming on.  I think I'll stop.

Ten Ways Men Oppress Women With Their Everyday Behavior

One of them, and one I am guilty of, is

Broplimenting. This is when a guy says something nice to you without asking for your consent first. Men should always ask. “Do you consent to me complimenting you?” before saying anything nice or else it’s assault. No, nonverbal cues don’t count – he still has to ask for explicit consent before offering that kind of affection.

 

I'll have to work on that. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

More here.

You Are Going to Die.

Yesterday I quoted Christopher Hitchens.  He's dead.  In Platonic perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed.  So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.

The ACLU and Mardi Gras

Fat Tuesday, coming as it does the day before Ash Wednesday, derives its very meaning from the beginning of Lent. The idea is to get some serious partying under one's belt just before the forty-day ascetic run-up to Easter. So one might think the ACLU would wish to lodge a protest against a celebration so religious in inspiration. Good (contemptible?) lefties that they are, they are ever crusading against religion. Perhaps 'crusade' (L. crux, crucis) is not the right word suggestive as it is of the cross and Christianity; perhaps 'jihad' would be better especially since many loons of the Left are curiously and conveniently ignorant of the threat of militant Islam and much prefer going after truly dangerous outfits like the Boy Scouts.

The schizoid Left: anti-religious in general, but not when it comes to religion's most virulent subspecies, the fanatic fundamentalism of the Islamo-head-chopper-offers.

If you are going to take umbrage at the creation of a Catholic town, why tolerate Mardi Gras? Why tolerate a celebration which originated in a Catholic town for a purpose that is obviously tied to religion? Inconsistency, or is it the pagan excess that the ACLU types want to celebrate? We can't have prayer or a moment of silence in schools, but drunkenness and debauchery in the streets is de rigueur. Interestingly enough, in 2002, The ACLU sued when a Mardi Gras celebration in San Luis Obispo was denied a parade permit.

Stop Whining, Bostonians: The Great Blizzard of '78 was Worse

I was there. The Great Blizzard of '78 Remembered

That it was worse.

That the NYT's alarmist predictions of no snow are risible given how much of the stuff is visible.

By the way, I loved my years in Boston-Cambridge.  Boston was my Mecca, the hub of the universe.  But I was a young guy, liberal as the young are wont to be, who hadn't yet thought hard and long and in an experience-informed way about political and social questions.  I owned nothing and I paid no taxes.  Quite the contrary: I received food stamps.  I was scraping by on a very low stipend in a very expensive city.  So I applied for, and received, public assistance.  I had no qualms about doing so at the time.  The food stamps allowed me to quit my awful and dangerous job as a taxi driver.  (The only thing worse than a Boston driver is a Turkish driver.)  I used my time well and kept my nose to the philosophy grindstone.  But the point is that I was able-bodied and should not have been allowed on welfare.  Welfare programs breed dependency and lack of self-reliance, among other ills -- which is not to say that there should be no such programs.

What Does It Mean to Say that Nothing is Sacred?

Yesterday I quoted Christopher Hitchens as saying that nothing is sacred.  I now ask what it means to say that nothing is sacred.  I think it means something like the following. Nothing, nothing at all, is holy, venerable, worthy of worship; nothing is an appropriate object of reverence.  (One cannot appropriately revere one's spouse, 'worship the ground she walks on,' etc.) If nothing is sacred, then nothing is so far above us in reality and value as to require our submission and obedience as the only adequate responses to it.

If nothing is sacred, then man is the measure of all things; he is not measured by a standard external to him.  Man is autonomous: he gives the law to himself.  Human autonomy is absolute, the absolute.  There is nothing beyond the human horizon except matter brute and blind.  There is nothing that transcends the human scale.  If so, then it makes sense for Hitchens to maintain that the right to free expression is absolute, subject to no restrictions or limitations:  "the only thing that should be upheld at all costs and without qualification is the right of free expression."

The right to mock and deride religious figures such as Muhammad follows.  For if nothing is sacred, then there is no God, no Allah, and hence no prophets of God.  And of course no Son of God. If nothing is sacred and there is no God, then there is no revelation of God in any form, not in nature, not in a human person such as Jesus of Nazareth, and not in any scripture.  If there is no God, then the Koran and the Bible are not the word of God; they are books like any other books, wholly human artifacts, and subject to criticism like any other books. And the same goes for physical objects and places.  There are no holy relics and holy sites.  Mecca and Jerusalem are not holy because, again, nothing is sacred.  If there is nothing that is originally sacred, then there is nothing that is derivatively sacred either.

One obvious problem with Hitchens' position is that it is by no means obvious that there is nothing sacred.  I should think that something is originally sacred if and only if God or a suitably similar transcendent Absolute exists.  No God, then nothing originally sacred.  Atheism rules out the sacred.  And if nothing is originally sacred, then nothing is derivatively sacred either.  If there is no God, then there are no prophets or saints or holy relics or holy places or holy books.  And of course no church of God either: no institution can claim to have a divine charter.

I reject the position of Hitchens.  I reject it because I reject his naturalism and atheism.  They are reasonably rejected .  But I also reject the position of those -- call them fundamentalists -- who think that there are people and books and institutions to which we must unconditionally submit. Here is where things get interesting.

I do not deny the possibility of divine revelation or that the book we call the Bible contains divine revelation; but I insist that it is in large part a human artifact.  As such, it is open to rational criticism.  While man cannot and must not place himself above God, he can and must evaluate what passes for the revelation of God -- for the latter is in part a human product.

God reveals himself, but he reveals himself to man.  If the transmitter is perfect, but the receiver imperfect, then one can expect noise with the signal.  Rational critique aims to separate the signal from the noise.  To criticize is to separate: the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable, the genuine from the specious.

I insist that religion must submit to rational critique.  Religion is our affair, not God's.  God has no religion.  He doesn't need one.  He needs religion as little as he needs philosophy: he is the truth in its paradigm instance; he has no need to seek it.  Since religion is our affair, our response to the Transcendent, it is a human product in part and as such limited and defective and a legitimate object of philosophical examination and critique.

It is reasonable to maintain, though it cannot be proven, that there is a transcendent Absolute and that therefore there is something sacred.    But this is not to say that what people take to be embodiments of the sacred are sacred.  Is Muhammad a divine messenger?  That is a legitimate question and the right to pose it and answer it negatively must be upheld.  To answer it negatively, however, is consistent with holding that something is sacred.  Is Jesus God?  That is a legitimate question and the right to pose it and answer it negatively must be upheld.  To answer it negatively, however, is consistent with holding that something is sacred.

My position is a balanced one.  I reject the New Atheist extremism of Hitchens & Co.  These people are contemptible in a  way in which many old atheists were not: their lack of respect for religion, their militant hostility to any and every form of religion, shows a  lack of respect for the unquenchable human desire for Transcendence.  Religion is one form of our quest for the Absolute.  This quest is part of what makes a human.  This quest, which will surely outlast the New Atheists and their cyberpunk acolytes, must not be denigrated just because many of the concrete manifestations of the religious impulse are fanatical, absurd, and harmful.

One ought not mock religion, and not just for the prudential reason that one doesnot want to become the target of murderous Muslim fanatics.  One ought not mock religion because religion testifies to man's dignity as a metaphysical animal, as Schopenhauer so well understood.  Even Islam, the sorriest and poorest of the great religions, so testifies.

But while I reject the extremism of Hitchens and Co., an extremism that makes an idol of free expression, I agree that what passes for religion, the concrete embodiments of same, must submit to being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be interrogated, often rudely.  Reason, in its turn, must be open to what lies beyond it.  It must be open to revelation.

Related articles

Is Nothing Sacred?

Bernard Lewis, "Jihad versus Crusade"

First victim of "blasphemy laws" would be Islam itself

What ISIS Really Wants

Required reading.  From The Atlantic, by Graeme Wood.  (HT: Joel Hunter) Excerpt:

Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”

[. . .]

According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”

Is Nothing Sacred?

Near the end of Assassins of the Mind, Christopher Hitchens states that nothing is sacred:

In the hot days immediately after the fatwa, with Salman [Rushdie] himself on the run and the TV screens filled with images of burning books and writhing mustaches, I was stopped by a female Muslim interviewer and her camera crew and asked an ancient question: “Is nothing sacred?” I can’t remember quite what I answered then, but I know what I would say now. “No, nothing is sacred. And even if there were to be something called sacred, we mere primates wouldn’t be able to decide which book or which idol or which city was the truly holy one. Thus, the only thing that should be upheld at all costs and without qualification is the right of free expression, because if that goes, then so do all other claims of right as well.”

Hitchens makes four claims in this passage.  The first is that nothing is sacred.  This ontological claim is followed by an epistemological one: if there were some sacred object, we would not be able to identify it as such.  The third claim, signaled by 'thus,' appears to be an inference from the first two:  free expression is the only thing that should be upheld at all costs and without qualification.  (If it is an inference it is a non sequitur.)  The fourth claim is that all rights depend on the absolute right of free speech.

One obvious problem with Hitchens' view is that it borders on self-refutation.  If nothing is sacred, then nothing should be upheld at all costs and without qualification.  Nothing is worthy of unconditional respect.  And that of course includes the right to free expression.  For Hitchens, however, free expression is an absolute value, one subject to no restriction or limitation.  It is thus a secular substitute for a religious object. A more consistent secularism ought to eschew all absolutes, not just the religious ones.  If nothing is venerable or worthy of reverence, then surely free expression isn't either.  If nothing is sacred, then surely human beings and their autonomy are not sacred either.

In any case, is it  not preposterous to maintain that there is an absolute right to free expression? No one has the right to spout obvious falsehoods that could be expected to incite violence.  Truth is a high value and so is social order.  These competing values show that free expression cannot be an absolute value.

Hitchens claims that we cannot know which religious objects are truly sacred.  He may well be right about that.  But then how does he know that free expression among all other values has absolute status and trumping power?

Finally, since there cannot be an absolute right to free expression, all other rights cannot depend on this supposedly absolute right. But even if there were this absolute right, how would the right to life, say, depend on it?

I think it would be better for Hitchens and Co. to make a clean sweep: if there are no transcendent absolutes such as God, then there are no immanent ones either. Free expression is just another value among values, in competition with some of these other values and limited by them.

Denying that There is Political Correctness . . .

. . . is like a mafioso's denying that there is a mafia.  "Mafia?  What mafia?  There's no mafia.  We're just businessmen trying to do right by out families." Our mafioso might go on to explain that 'mafia' is really just an ethnic slur used to denigrate businessmen of Italian extraction.

This an instance of a rhetorical pattern.  Can we tease out the pattern and present it in abstracto?  Roughly the pattern is this: A person who is something denies that there is that something.  A proponent of a view denies that there is any such view as the one he proposes.  A representative of an attitude denies that there is any such attitude as the one he represents.  An employer of a tactic denies that there is any such tactic as the one he employs.  A performer in a musical genre denies that there is any such genre as the one in which he performs.  (I'll have to check, but I seem to recall that Dylan in his folk phase in an interview denied the existence of folk music.)

For instance, a person who is politically correct denies that there is political correctness.  Note that only the politically correct deny that there is political correctness, just as only mafiosi deny that there is a mafia.  Note also that the denial is not that there are politically correct people, but that the very concept of political correctness is misbegotten, or incoherent, or introduced only as a semantic bludgeon.  The idea is not that a person who is something denies that he is that something, but that there is that something.

But we need more examples.  Some of the people who are proponents of scientism deny that there is scientism.  They may go on to reject the word as meaningless or impossible of application or merely emotive.  But of course there is such a thing as scientism.   Scientism, roughly, is the philosophical thesis that the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge.  Not only is there that view; it has representatives.

Suppose that some conservative denies that there is Islamophobia.  Then  I would have to object.  There are a few people who have an irrational fear of Islam and/or of Muslims.  They are accurately labelled "Islamophobes.'  "Islamophobia' does pick out something real, a 'syndrome' of sorts. 

But of course the vast majority of those who sound the alarm against radical Islam are not Islamophobes.  For their fear of radical Islam and its works is rational.

Other examples that need discussing: white privilege, institutionalized racism, racial profiling. Could one reasonably believe in these three while denying that there is political correctness?

I'd like to go on; maybe later.  But now I have to get ready for an 8 K trail run.

Related articles

Tenured Professor Loses Job over Blog Post

Michael Walzer, "Islamism and the Left"

Residual Politically Correctness Among Conservatives

St. Valentine's Day's Night at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda (2/15):

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata of a Saturday night while listening to sentimental songs  -- is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Related articles

Bob Dylan's 2015 MusicCares Person of the Year Speech

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ramblin' Charles Adnopoz

Saturday Night at her Oldies: Forgotten and Unforgotten Folkies

Crusades Crash Course

Steve Weidenkopf

The Crusades Were Defensive Wars

Thomas F. Madden:

For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Related articles

The Crusades: Misconceptions Debunked

Cops, Muslims, and a Double Standard

C. S. Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism

Leftists and Civility

The Right has not cornered the market on civility, not by a long shot.  But in my experience, liberals and leftists are worse in the civility department than conservatives. If you don’t agree with me on this, then this post is not for you. To try to prove my assertion to libs and lefties would be like trying to prove to them that such major media outlets as the New York Times tilt leftward. To achieve either goal, I would have to possess the longevity of a Methuselah, the energy of a Hercules, and the dogged persistence of a Sisyphus – and I still would not succeed.

So, given that conservatives are more civil than libs and lefties, why is this the case? One guess is that conservatives, for whom there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional ways of doing things, are more civil due to a natural piety with respect to received modes of human interaction. Civility works, and conservatives are chary about discarding what works. They were brought up to be civil by parents and teacher who were themselves civil, and they see no reason to reject as phony or ‘precious’ something that is conducive to good living. They understand that since we live in a world of appearances, a certain amount of concern with them is reasonable. They also understand that by faking it a bit, one brings oneself to actually feel the emotions that one began by faking. For example, by saying ‘Good Morning’ when I don’t quite feel like it, I contribute to my own perception of the morning as good.

But leftists, many of whom are of a rebellious and adolescent cast of mind, have a problem with what they perceive to be phoniness. They are always out to unmask things, to cut through the false consciousness and the bourgeois ideology. Connected with this hatred of phoniness is a keen sensitivity to hypocrisy. So when Bill (William J.) Bennett was caught wasting money on the slot machines in Las Vegas a while back, the libs and lefties pounced and denounced: "Hypocrite!" they cried.

So pouncing and denouncing, they proved that they do not know what hypocrisy is. Although Mr. Bennett’s behavior was suboptimal, it was neither illegal nor immoral: he’s got the dough to blow if that’s his pleasure. Given his considerable accomplishments, is he not entitled to a bit of R & R?

A hypocrite is not someone who is morally perfect or who fails to engage in supererogatory acts. Nor is a hypocrite one who preaches high ideals but falls short. Otherwise, we would all be hypocrites. For if everyone is, then no one is. A hypocrite is someone who preaches high ideals but makes no attempt at living up to them. The difference is between failing to do what one believes one ought to do and not even trying to do what one says one ought to do.

The leftist obsession with perceived phoniness and perceived hypocrisy stems from an innate hatred of moral judgment, a hatred which itself seems fueled by a confusion of moral judgment with judgmentalism.

So perhaps the answer is this. Leftists are less civil than conservatives because they do not see civility as a value. They don't see it as a value because it smacks of a bourgeois moral ideology that to them is nothing but a sham. Adroit unmaskers and psychologizers that they are, incapable of taking things at face value, they think that none of us who preach civility’s value really believe what we are preaching. It really has to be something else, just as the desire for democracy in Iraq really has to be something else: a desire for economic and military hegemony.

How About a Six-Month Suspension Without Pay for Barack Obama?

It's a funny world.  NBC anchor Brian Williams lied about a matter of no significance, in an excess of boyish braggadocio, though in doing so he injured his credibility and, more importantly, that of his employer, NBC.  We demand truth of our journalists and so Williams' suspension is as justified as the Schadenfreude at his come-down is not.  

Journalists are expected to tell the truth.  President Obama, however, lies regularly and reliably about matters of  great significance and gets away with it.  Part of it is that politicians are expected to lie.  Obama does not disappoint, taking mendacity to unheard-of levels.  There is a brazenness about it that has one admiring his cojones if nothing else.  Another part of it is that politicians are not subject to the discipline of the market in the way news anchors are.  Loss of credibility reduces viewership which reduces profits. That's the real bottom line, not the expectation of truthfulness. 

(By the way, that is not a slam against capitalism but against our greedy fallen nature which was greedy and fallen long before the rise of capitalism.  Capitalism is no more the source of greed than socialism is the source of envy.) 

Here is a recent instance of Obama's mendacity.

Obama is a master of mendacity in the multiplicity of its modes.  There is, for example, bullshitting, which is not the same as lying.  Obama as Bullshitter explains, with a little help from Professor Harry Frankfurt.

There is also the phenomenon of Orwellian Bullshit.

Pelosi's Orwellian Mendacity: A STFU Moment documents, wait for it,  Nancy Pelosi's Orwellian mendacity.

"Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread"

I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessory prayer, for another. In many of its forms   it borders on idolatry and superstition, and in its crassest forms it crosses over. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of petty, ego-enhancing benefits, a sort of Cosmic Candy Man, as does the nimrod who prays to win the lottery.  Worse still is one who prays for the death of a business rival.

Perhaps not all petitionary prayer for mundane benefits is objectionable.  Some of it simply reflects, excusably,  our misery and indigence.  (Did not Christ himself engage in it at Gethsemane?)  But much of it is.  What then should I say about the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse petitionary prayer for material  benefits?

The other five petitions in the Pater Noster are either clearly or arguably prayers for spiritual benefits.   In a spiritual petition one asks, not for physical bread and such, but for things like acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive  others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold  shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not so much to be cured of the cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity or with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others.

The fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," translates the Biblia Vulgata's Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie which occurs at Luke 11:3.

At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural, beyond all sublunary substances, and beyond all creatures. To ask for this heavenly bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive.

For a long time I perhaps naively thought that 'daily bread' had to refer to physical bread and the other necessities of our material existence.  So for a long time I thought that there was a tension, or even a contradiction, between 'daily bread' and 'supersubstantial bread.'  A tension between physical bread and meta-physical bread. 

But this morning I stumbled upon what might be the right solution while reading St. John Cassian.  The same bread is referred to by both phrases, and that same bread is spiritual or supersubstantial, not physical.  'Supersubstantial' makes it clear that 'bread' is to be taken metaphorically, not literally, while 'daily' "points out the right manner of its beneficial use." (Selected Writings, p. 30)  What 'daily' thus conveys is that we need to feed upon spiritual bread every single day.  On this reading, the fourth petition is as spiritual as the others, and the whiff of superstition and idolatry that I found offensive is removed.*

This reading also has the virtue of cohering nicely with Matthew 4:4 according to which man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  Not by physical bread, but by meta-physical bread.

"Give us this day our daily bread" is thus a request that we be supplied on a daily basis with spiritual bread that we need every day.  And since we need it every day, we must ask for it every day. But who needs it?  Not the bodily man, but the "inner man" says Cassian.  The inner man is the true man. 'Inner man' is a metaphor but it indicates a literal truth: that man is more than an animal. Being more than an animal, he needs more than material sustenance. 

Addendum on the Literal and the Metaphorical

Here is a question that vexes me.  Are there literal truths that cannot be stated literally but can only stated or gotten at metaphorically?  Can we state literally what a man is if he is more than an animal? Or must we use metaphors?

"Man is spirit."  Isn't 'spirit' a metaphor?  "Man has a higher origin."  'Higher' is metaphorical.  "Man is made by God in his image and likeness."  Aren't 'made,' 'image,' and 'likeness' metaphors?

I once heard a crude and materialistic old man say that if man is made in God's image, then God must have a gastrointestinal tract.  I tried to explain to the man that 'image' is not to be taken in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense.  But I got nowhere as could have been expected:  anyone who doesn't understand right away the spiritual sense of 'made in God's image' displays by that failure to understand an incapacity for instruction.  It is like the student who doesn't get right away what it means to say that one proposition follows from another, and thinks that it refers to a temporal or a spatial relation. 

The question is whether the spiritual sense can be spelled out literally.

___________________

*  For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without  'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the  soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.

President Snark

"Snarkery is a character flaw of thin-skinned insecurity and juvenile mean-spiritedness — and embarrassing in a president."

Tenured Professor Loses Job over Blog Post

"Professor John McAdams is being stripped of tenure by Marquette University for writing a blog post that administrators characterize as inaccurate and irresponsible."

More evidence, as if more evidence is needed, that the universities of the land are increasingly becoming leftist seminaries, hothouses of political correctness.  Story here in The Atlantic.

Hat tip: Tully Borland

Did the Universe Have a Beginning in Time?

Some of you may remember the commenter 'spur' from the old Powerblogs incarnation of this weblog.  His comments were the best of any I received in over ten years of blogging.  I think it is now safe to 'out' him as Stephen Puryear of North Carolina State University.  He recently sent me a copy of his Finitism and the Beginning of the Universe (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2014, vol. 92, no. 4, 619-629).  He asked me to share the link with my readers, and I do so with pleasure.  In this entry I will present the gist of Puryear's  paper as I understand it.  It is a difficult paper due to the extreme difficulty of the subject matter, but also due to the difficulty of commanding a clear view of the contours of Puryear's dialectic.   He can tell me whether I have grasped the article's main thrust.  Comments enabled.

The argument under his logical microscope is the following:

1. If the universe did not have a beginning, then the past would consist in an infinite temporal sequence of events.
2.  An infinite temporal sequence of past events would be actually and not merely potentially infinite.
3. It is impossible for a sequence formed by successive addition to be actually infinite.
4. The temporal sequence of past events was formed by successive addition.
5. Therefore, the universe had a beginning.

Premise (3) is open to a seemingly powerful objection.  Puryear seems to hold (p. 621) that (3) is equivalent to the claim that it is impossible to run through an actually infinite sequence in step-wise fashion.  That is, (3) is equivalent to the claim that it is impossible to 'traverse' an actual infinite. But this happens all the time when anything moves from one point to another. Or so the objection goes.  Between any two points there are continuum-many points.  So when my hand reaches for the coffee cup, my hand traverses an actual infinity of points. But if my hand can traverse an actual infinity,  then what is to stop a beginningless universe from having run through an actual infinity of events to be in its present state?  Of course, an actual infinity of spatial points is not the same as an actual infinity of temporal moments or events at moments; but in both the spatial and the temporal case there is an actual infinity of items.  If one can be traversed, so can the other.

The above argument, then, requires for its soundness the truth of (3).  But (3) is equivalent to

3*. It is impossible to traverse an actual infinite.

(3*), however, is open to the objection that motion involves such traversal.  Pace Zeno, motion is actual and therefore possible.  It therefore appears that the argument fails at (3).  To uphold (3) and its equivalent (3*) we need to find a way to defang the objection from the actuality of motion (translation).  Can we accommodate continuous motion without commitment to actual infinities?  Motion is presumably continuous, not discrete.   (I am not sure, but I think that the claim that space and time are continuous is equivalent to the claim there are no space atoms and no time atoms.) Can we have continuity without actual infinities of points and moments?

Some say yes.  William Lane Craig is one.  The trick is to think of a continuous whole, whether of points or of moments, as logically/ontologically prior to its parts, as opposed to composed of its parts and thus logically/ontologically posterior to them. Puryear takes this to entail that a temporal interval or duration is a whole that we divide into parts, a whole whose partition depends on our conceptual activities. (This entailment is plausible, but not perfectly evident to me.)  If so, then the infinity of parts in a continuous whole can only be a potential infinity.  Thus a line segment is infinitely divisible but not infinitely divided.  It is actually divided only when we divide it, and the number of actual divisions will always be finite.  But one can always add another 'cut.'  In this sense the number of cuts is potentially infinite.  Similarly for a temporal duration.  In this way we get continuity without actual infinity.

If this is right, then motion needn't involve the traversal of an actual infinity of points, and the above objection brought against (3) fails.  The possibility of traversal of an actual infinite cannot be shown by motion since motion, though continuous, does not involve motion through an actual infinity of points for the reason that there is no actual infinity of points: the infinity is potential merely.

We now come to Puryear's thesis.  In a nutshell, his thesis is that Craig's defence of premise (3) undermines the overall argument.  How?  To turn aside the objection to (3), it is necessary to view spatial and temporal wholes, not as composed of their parts, but as (logically, not temporally) prior to their parts, with the parts introduced by our conceptual activities. But then the same should hold for the entire history of the universe up to the present moment.  For if the interval during which my hand is in motion from the keyboard to the coffee cup is a whole whose parts are due to our divisive activities, then the same goes for the metrically infinite interval that culminates in the present moment.  This entails that the divisions within the history of the universe up to the present are potentially infinite only.

But then how can (1) or (2) or (4) be true?  Consider (2).  It states that an infinite temporal sequence of past events would be actually and not merely potentially infinite.  Think of an event as a total state of the universe at a time.  Now if temporal divisions are introduced by us into logically prior temporal wholes such that the number of these actual divisions can only be finite, then the same will be true of events:  we carve the history of the universe into events.  Since the number of carvings, though potentially infinite is always only actually finite, it follows that (2) is false.

The defense of (3) undercuts (2).

So that's the gist of it, as best as I can make out.  I have no objection, but then the subject matter is very difficult and I am not sure I understand all the ins and outs.  

February in the Zone

February brings to the Sonoran desert days so beautiful that one feels guilty even sitting on the back porch, half-outside, taking it all in, eyes playing over the spring green, lungs deeply enfolding blossom-laden warmish breezes.  One feels that one ought to be walking around in this earthly heaven.  And this despite my having done just that early this morning.   Vita brevis, and February too with its 28 days.  The fugacity of February to break the heart whose day is at its center.  It's all fleeting, one can't get enough of it.  Joy wants eternity.

And now, I head back outside, away from this too-complicated machine, to read simply and slowly some more from Stages on Life's Way and to drink a cup of java to stave off the halcyon sleepiness wrought by lambent light and long vistas on this afternoon in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.

Pleonasm

Professor Windbag censured the student's use of 'added bonus' as pleonastic and redundant.

The Moral Idiocy of Barack Obama

Horribile dictu, our president is a moral idiot.  Dennis Prager makes the case clearly and convincingly.

Referring to Islamic violence, the president accuses anyone who implies that such religious violence "is unique to some other place" -- meaning outside the Christian West -- as getting on a "high horse."

Is this true? Of course, not. In our time, major religious violence is in fact "unique to some other place," namely the Islamic world. What other religious group is engaged in mass murder, systematic rape, slavery, beheading innocents, bombing public events, shooting up school children, wiping out whole religious communities and other such atrocities?

The answer is, of course, no other religious group. Therefore massive violence in the name of one's religion today is indeed "unique to some other place." To state this is not to "get on a high horse." It is to tell the most important truth about the world in our time.

[. . .]

Furthermore, it is difficult to see why comparing Muslim behavior today to Christian behavior a thousand or five hundred years ago provides a defense of Islam. On the contrary, isn't the allegation that Islamic evil at the present time is morally equivalent to Christian evil a thousand years ago a damning indictment of the present state of much of Islam?

And as regards the substance of the charge, this widespread use of the Crusades and the Inquisition is ignorant of the realities of both. The Crusades were Christian wars to retake territories in the Holy Land that Muslims had forcefully taken from Christians. Unless the question of "who started it?" is morally irrelevant, and therefore all wars are immoral, the Crusaders' war on Muslims in the Holy Land is a poor example of evil in the name of Christ.

[. . .]

We live in an age of moral idiocy. Moral equivalence is the left's way of resisting fighting evil. It did it during the Cold War when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were morally equated, and it is doing it now when it morally equates all religions and societies. Take, for example, this imbecilic equation by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, defending the president's comments on Islam and Christianity by invoking slavery: "Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now."

There is a major moral crisis in one religion on earth today -- Islam. To say so is not to get on a high horse. It is to identify violent Islam as the greatest evil in the world since Nazism and Communism.

Feser on Sex, Part II

The phenomenal Edward Feser.  How does he do it?  He teaches an outrageous number of courses at a community college; he has written numerous books; he gives talks and speeches, and last time I checked he has six children.  Not to mention his weblog which is bare of fluff and filler and of consistently high quality, as witness his second in a series on sex.  It concludes:

So just what is the deal with sex, anyway?  Why are we so prone to extremes where it is concerned?  The reason, I would say, has to do with our highly unusual place in the order of things.  Angels are incorporeal and asexual, creatures of pure intellect.  Non-human animals are entirely bodily, never rising above sensation and appetite, and our closest animal relatives reproduce sexually.  Human beings, as rational animals, straddle this divide, having as it were one foot in the angelic realm and the other in the animal realm.  And that is, metaphysically, simply a very odd position to be in.  It is just barely stable, and sex makes it especially difficult to maintain.  The unique intensity of sexual pleasure and desire, and our bodily incompleteness qua men and women, continually remind us of our corporeal and animal nature, pulling us “downward” as it were.  Meanwhile our rationality continually seeks to assert its control and pull us back “upward,” and naturally resents the unruliness of such intense desire.  This conflict is so exhausting that we tend to try to get out of it by jumping either to one side of the divide or the other.  But this is an impossible task and the result is that we are continually frustrated.  And the supernatural divine assistance that would have remedied this weakness in our nature and allowed us to maintain an easy harmony between rationality and animality was lost in original sin. 

 

So, behaviorally, we have a tendency to fall either into prudery or into sexual excess.  And intellectually, we have a tendency to fall either into the error of Platonism -- treating man as essentially incorporeal, a soul trapped in the prison of the body -- or into the opposite error of materialism, treating human nature as entirely reducible to the corporeal.  The dominance of Platonism in early Christian thought is perhaps the main reason for its sometimes excessively negative attitude toward sexual pleasure, and the dominance of materialism in modern times is one reason for its excessive laxity in matters of sex.  The right balance is, of course, the Aristotelian-Thomistic position -- specifically, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology, which affirms that man is a single substance with both corporeal and incorporeal activities; and Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theory, which upholds traditional sexual morality while affirming the essential goodness of sex and sexual pleasure.

 

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A New Probabilistic Argument for God

A reader sent me an argument expressed in an idiosyncratic and unnecessarily technical terminology.  But his idea is a very interesting one.  I'll present and then evaluate my version of the reader's argument.

1. There are several actual and many possible positions on the nature and existence of God. Call them God-positions.  One who occupies a God-position takes a stand on the existence of God, yes or no.

2. All but one of these God-positions are theistic: they affirm the existence of God, though they differ as to the divine attributes.

3. Only one of these God-positions is atheistic: only one affirms the nonexistence of God.

4. Exactly one of these God-positions is true.

Therefore

5. The probability that one of the many theistic God-positions is true is much greater than the probability that the one atheistic God-position is true.

Therefore

6. The claim that God exists is much more likely to be true than the claim that God does not exist.

I should think that the first three premises need no support: they are well-nigh self-evident. If support is wanted for (4), it can be found in logic.  By Bivalence, there are exactly two truth-values.  By Excluded Middle, every proposition is either true or not true.

But how is (5) supposed to follow from  (1)-(4)? Here is where I think the problem lies.  Intuitively, (5) does not follow from the premises.

Consider a parody argument.  There are several actual and many possible positions on the nature and existence of the Lost Dutchman Goldmine.  All but one of these LDM-positions are affirmative of the mine's existence; the remaining one is negative.  But only one LDM-position is true.  Therefore, it is more likely than not that the LDM exists.

This is obviously a fallacious argument.  If it is, then so is the original argument. But this leaves us with the task of explaining why both are fallacious.  This is not so easy.

Either the LDM exists or it does not.  At most, these contradictory propositions are equiprobable. (Given my knowledge of the geology of the Superstition Wilderness, I would deny that these propositions are equiprobable; but let's assume that they are.)  The number of different conceptions of the LDM has no bearing on the probability of its existence. One cannot raise (lower) the probability of the mine's existence by adding to (subtracting from) the conceptions of the LDM.  Why not?  Well, if the mine exists, then exactly one of the conceptions is instantiated, and all the other conceptions are uninstantiated.  And it seems obviously true that the probability of some concept's being instantiated does not vary with the number of similar concepts that might have been instantiated instead.

The same goes for God even if the existence and nonexistence of God are equiprobable.  There are many different conceptions of God even within a broadly Abrahamic ambit.  On one conception, God is triune and simple; on another, triune but not simple; on a third, simple but not triune.  And so it goes.  Some hold God to be absolutely unlimited in power; others hold that logic limits God's power.  And so on.  Each of these conceptions is such that, if it is instantiated, then God exists.  But surely the number of God-conceptions has no bearing on the probability of one of them being instantiated.

The Crusades: Misconceptions Debunked

A review by Thomas F. Madden of Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam.  Some excerpts (bolding added):

It is generally thought that Christians attacked Muslims without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them. The Crusaders were Europe’s lacklands and ne’er-do-wells, who marched against the infidels out of blind zealotry and a desire for booty and land. As such, the Crusades betrayed Christianity itself. They transformed “turn the other cheek” into “kill them all; God will know his own.”

Every word of this is wrong. Historians of the Crusades have long known that it is wrong, but they find it extraordinarily difficult to be heard across a chasm of entrenched preconceptions. For on the other side is, as Riley-Smith puts it “nearly everyone else, from leading churchmen and scholars in other fields to the general public.” There is the great Sir Steven Runciman, whose three-volume History of the Crusades is still a brisk seller for Cambridge University Press a half century after its release. It was Runciman who called the Crusades “a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.” The pity of it is that Runciman and the other popular writers simply write better stories than the professional historians.

[. . .]

St. Paul said of secular authorities, “He does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” Several centuries later, St. Augustine articulated a Christian approach to just war, one in which legitimate authorities could use violence to halt or avert a greater evil. It must be a defensive war, in reaction to an act of aggression. For Christians, therefore, violence was ethically neutral, since it could be employed either for evil or against it.  As Riley-Smith notes, the concept that violence is intrinsically evil belongs solely to the modern world. It is not Christian.

All the Crusades met the criteria of just wars. They came about in reaction attacks against Christians or their Church. The First Crusade was called in 1095 in response to the recent Turkish conquest of Christian Asia Minor, as well as the much earlier Arab conquest of the Christian-held Holy Land. The second was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Edessa in 1144. The third was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and most other Christian lands in the Levant in 1187.

[. . .]

And yet, so ingrained is this notion that the Crusades began the modern European assault on Islam that many moderate Muslims still believe it. Riley-Smith recounts : “I recently refused to take part in a television series, produced by an intelligent and well-educated Egyptian woman, for whom a continuing Western crusade was an article of faith. Having less to do with historical reality than with reactions to imperialism, the nationalist and Islamist interpretations of crusade history help many people, moderates as well as extremists, to place the exploitation they believe they have suffered in a historical context and to satisfy their feelings of both superiority and humiliation.”

In the Middle East, as in the West, we are left with the gaping chasm between myth and reality. Crusade historians sometimes try to yell across it but usually just talk to each other, while the leading churchmen, the scholars in other fields, and the general public hold to a caricature of the Crusades created by a pox of modern ideologies. If that chasm is ever to be bridged, it will be with well-written and powerful books such as this.

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Another Double Standard

Michael Walzer, "Islamism and the Left"

Michael Walzer, "Islamism and the Left"

Very interesting.  I am tempted to 'fisk' the whole of it.  We'll see how far I get.

In the three and a half decades since the Iranian revolution, I have been watching my friends and neighbors (and distant neighbors) on the left struggling to understand—or avoid understanding—the revival of religion in what is now called a “post-secular” age. Long ago, we looked forward to “the disenchantment of the world”—we believed that the triumph of science and secularism was a necessary feature of modernity. And so we forgot, as Nick Cohen has written, “what the men and women of the Enlightenment knew. All faiths in their extreme form carry the possibility of tyranny.”¹

BV: Two comments. 

First, what might the triumph of science be if not the triumph of scientism, which is not science, but a philosophical view according to which the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge?  (I provide plenty of nuance as to the definition of 'scientism' in my Scientism category.)  After all, if science triumphs, it triumphs over something, and what would that be?  If you say 'religion,' then I will point out that science and religion are not in the same line of work and so not in competition; hence science cannot triumph over religion any more than religion can triumph over science.  But scientism can triumph over religion because scientism and religions are worldviews. Scientism is logically incompatible with religion; this is particularly clear in the case of theistic religions.  Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism, the ontological doctrine that reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  If naturalism is true, then of course there is no God, and contrapositively:  if there is a God, then naturalism is false. But there is nothing in science that rules out the existence of God.  If you think there is, then you are confusing science with scientism.

Second, while it is true that most if not all religions in their extreme forms carry the possibility of tyranny, this is also true of non- and anti-religious ideologies such as communism.  If one fails to point this out, as Walzer does fail to point it out, then then one can be suspected of a lack of intellectual honesty.  Communist tyranny alone led to the deaths of upwards of 100 million in the 20th century.

Today, every major world religion is experiencing a significant revival, and revived religion isn’t an opiate as we once thought, but a very strong stimulant. Since the late 1970s, and particularly in the last decade, this stimulant is working most powerfully in the Islamic world. From Pakistan to Nigeria, and in parts of Europe, too, Islam today is a religion capable of inspiring large numbers of men and women, mostly men, to kill and die on its behalf. So the Islamic revival is a kind of testing moment for the left: can we recognize and resist “the possibility of tyranny?” Some of us are trying to meet the test; many of us are actively failing it. One reason for this failure is the terrible fear of being called “Islamophobic.” Anti-Americanism and a radical version of cultural relativism also play an important part, but these are older pathologies. Here is something new: many leftists are so irrationally afraid of an irrational fear of Islam that they haven’t been able to consider the very good reasons for fearing Islamist zealots—and so they have difficulty explaining what’s going on in the world.

My main evidentiary basis for this claim is the amazingly long list of links that comes up when you Google “Islamophobia.” Many of them are phobic; I focus on the anti-phobic links, and so I have entered the online world of the left. It is a large and exciting world, highly diverse, inhabited mostly by people new to me. It’s also a little disheartening, because many of the pathologies of the extra-internet left haven’t disappeared online. Obviously, there is no left collective, on or off the internet, but the people I am writing about constitute a significant leftist coterie, and none of them are worrying enough about the politics of contemporary religion or about radical Islamist politics.

For myself, I live with a generalized fear of every form of religious militancy. I am afraid of Hindutva zealots in India, of messianic Zionists in Israel, and of rampaging Buddhist monks in Myanmar. But I admit that I am most afraid of Islamist zealots because the Islamic world at this moment in time (not always, not forever) is especially feverish and fervent. Indeed, the politically engaged Islamist zealots can best be understood as today’s crusaders.

BV:  I wonder if Walzer's fear extends to every form of ideological militancy, including anti-religious militancy such as communist militancy.  If not, why not?  If not, why the double standard?

Walzer needs to be reminded that we conservatives also harbor a rational fear, a fear of leftists who have no problem with using the awesome power of the state to destroy the liberties of individuals.

There is also a distinction that needs to be made and I don't see Walzer making it.  It is the difference between 'rampaging,' say, because your religion enjoins such behavior and 'rampaging' in defense of your life and livelihood and religion.  Islamic doctrine  enjoins violent jihad; there is no Buddhist equivalent. This distinction at the level of doctrine is crucial and must not be ignored.  Doctrine is not mere verbiage; doctrine is at the root of action.

Walzer is equivocating on 'religious militancy.'  If some Buddhist monks go on a rampage, then, that could be called religious militancy, but not in the same sense in which Muslim destroyers of Buddhist statuary or Muslim beheaders of Christians are religiously militant.  For in the latter case the militancy flows from the tenets of their religion -- which is not the case in Buddhism.

Can Islamist zealots best be understood as today's crusaders?  Hardly.  For one thing, this ignores the fact that the Crusades were a response to Islamic jihad.

[. . .]

The Christian Crusades have sometimes been described as the first example of Islamophobia in the history of the West. The crusaders were driven by an irrational fear of Islam.

This is absurd.  The Crusades were a defensive response to a Muslim land-grab.  If someone grabs your land, is your fear of that party irrational?  There is no point in going on with this.  While Walzer is not a bad as the typical leftist loon, he has already made enough mistakes to justify my wishing him a fond fare well.

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Bob Dylan's 2015 MusicCares Person of the Year Speech

Here.  (Link via Frank Beckwith's FB page. Interesting how many conservatives are Dylan fans. Lawrence Auster is another.)

It is a fascinating, rich speech by a living repository of musical Americana and without a doubt the most creative interpreter of our musical legacy, the "bard of our generation" as Auster puts it.   One is moved by the gratitude and generosity Dylan displays  toward the many people over the years who helped him and believed in him, but slightly put off by his digs at his detractors.  He seems to think he has been uniquely singled out for criticism.  "Why me, Lord?"

As I said, a very rich speech.  But every Dylanologist knows that nothing Dylan says about himself or his music should be taken too seriously.  He is a master of many personae and the man himself likes to hide.  As he puts it in The Man in Me:

The man in me will hide sometimes to keep from being seen
But that's just because he doesn't want to turn into some machine.

The best documentation of Dylan the shape shifter and one of the best all-around books on Dylan is David Dalton, Who is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan (Hyperion, 2012). If you were 'in there' with him in the heart of '60s you will delight in this well-written volume.

The speech ends on this note:

I'm going to get out of here now. I'm going to put an egg in my shoe and beat it. I probably left out a lot of people and said too much about some. But that's OK. Like the spiritual song, 'I'm still just crossing over Jordan too.' Let's hope we meet again. Sometime. And we will, if, like Hank Williams said, "the good Lord willing and the creek don't rise."

 

High Water comes to mind. This is a late-career Dylan gem from Love and Theft (2001). A tribute to Charley Patton.  Demonstrates Dylan's mastery of the arcana of Americana. Our greatest and deepest singer-songwriter.

I got a cravin’ love for blazing speed, got a hopped-up Mustang Ford, jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard. I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind, I’m no pig without a wig, I hope you treat me kind, things are breakin’ up out there, high water everywhere.

My favorite verse:

Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5
Judge says to the High Sheriff, "I want them dead or alive"
Either one, I don't care, high water everywhere.

Nosiree, Bob, you can't open up your mind to every conceivable point of view, especially when its not dark yet, but it's getting there.

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Bernard Lewis, "Jihad versus Crusade"

We Americans are forward-looking people, 'progressives' if you will.  ("History is bunk," said Henry Ford.) Muslims, by contrast, live in the past where they nurture centuries-old grievances.  This is part of the explanation of the inanition of their culture and the misery of their lands, which fact is part of the explanation of why they won't stay where they are but insist on infiltrating the West.  Exercised as they remain over the Crusades, lo these many centuries later, it behooves us to inform ourselves of the historical facts.  This is especially important in light of President Obama's recent foolish, unserious, and mendacious comments.

Herewith, then, a piece from someone who knows what he is talking about.  I copied it from this location.

Jihad vs. Crusade

Bernard Lewis/Wall Street Journal, Sept. 28, 2001

U.S. President George W. Bush's use of the term "crusade" in calling for a powerful joint effort against terrorism was unfortunate, but excusable. In Western usage, this word has long since lost its original meaning of "a war for the cross," and many are probably unaware that this is the derivation of the name. At present, "crusade" almost always means simply a vigorous campaign for a good cause. This cause may be political or military, though this is rare; more commonly, it is social, moral or environmental. In modern Western usage it is rarely if ever religious.

Yet "crusade" still touches a raw nerve in the Middle East, where the Crusades are seen and presented as early medieval precursors of European imperialism -- aggressive, expansionist and predatory. I have no wish to defend or excuse the often-atrocious behavior of the crusaders, both in their countries of origin and in the countries they invaded, but the imperialist parallel is highly misleading. The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad -- a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.

At the time of the Crusades, when the Holy Land and some adjoining regions in Syria were conquered and for a while ruled by invaders from Europe, there seems to have been little awareness among Muslims of the nature of the movement that had brought the Europeans to the region. The crusaders established principalities in the Levant, which soon fitted into the pattern of Levantine regional politics. Even the crusader capture of Jerusalem aroused little attention at the time, and appeals for help to various Muslim capitals brought no response.

The real countercrusade began when the crusaders -- very foolishly -- began to harry and attack the Muslim holy lands, namely the Hijaz in Arabia, containing the holy cities of Mecca and Medina where Muhammad was born, carried out his mission, and died. In the vast Arabic historiography of the Crusades period, there is frequent reference to these invaders, who are always called "Franks" or "infidels." The words "Crusade" and "crusader" simply do not occur.

They begin to occur with increasing frequency in the 19th century, among modernized Arabic writers, as they became aware of Western historiography in Western languages. By now they are in common use. It is surely significant that Osama bin Laden, in his declaration of jihad against the United States, refers to the Americans as "crusaders" and lists their presence in Arabia as their first and primary offense. Their second offense is their use of Arabia as a base for their attack on Iraq. The issue of Jerusalem and support for "the petty state of the Jews" come third.

The literal meaning of the Arabic word "jihad" is striving, and its common use derives from the Quranic phrase "striving in the path of God." Some Muslims, particularly in modern times, have interpreted the duty of jihad in a spiritual and moral sense. The more common interpretation, and that of the overwhelming majority of the classical jurists and commentators, presents jihad as armed struggle for Islam against infidels and apostates. Unlike "crusade," it has retained its religious and military connotation into modern times.

Being a religious obligation, jihad is elaborately regulated in sharia law, which discusses in minute detail such matters as the opening, conduct, interruption and cessation of hostilities, the treatment of prisoners and noncombatants, the use of weapons, etc. In an offensive war, jihad is a collective obligation of the entire community, and may therefore be discharged by volunteers and professionals. In a defensive war, it is an individual obligation of every able-bodied Muslim.

In his declaration of 1998, Osama bin Laden specifically invokes this rule: "For more than seven years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples." In view of this, "to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who can, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa mosque and the Haram mosque are freed from their grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim."

Muhammad himself led the first jihad, in the wars of the Muslims against the pagans in Arabia. The jihad continued under his successors, with a series of wars that brought the Middle East, including the Holy Land, under Arab Muslim rule and then continued eastward into Asia, westward into Africa, and three times into Europe -- the Moors in Spain, the Tatars in Russia, the Turks in the Balkans. The Crusade was part of the European counterattack. The Christian reconquest succeeded in Spain, Russia and eventually the Balkans; it failed to recover the Holy Land of Christendom.

In Islamic usage the term martyrdom is normally interpreted to mean death in a jihad, and the reward is eternal bliss, described in some detail in early religious texts. Suicide is another matter.

Classical Islam in all its different forms and versions has never permitted suicide. This is seen as a mortal sin, and brings eternal punishment in the form of the unending repetition of the act by which the suicide killed himself. The classical jurists, in discussing the laws of war, distinguish clearly between a soldier who faces certain death at the hands of the enemy, and one who kills himself by his own hand. The first goes to heaven, the other to hell. In recent years, some jurists and scholars have blurred this distinction, and promised the joys of paradise to the suicide bomber. Others retain the more traditional view that suicide in any form is totally forbidden.

Similarly, the laws of jihad categorically preclude wanton and indiscriminate slaughter. The warriors in the holy war are urged not to harm noncombatants, women and children, "unless they attack you first." Even such questions as missile and chemical warfare are addressed, the first in relation to mangonels and catapults, the other to the use of poison-tipped arrows and poisoning enemy water supplies. Here the jurists differ -- some permit, some restrict, some forbid these forms of warfare. A point on which they insist is the need for a clear declaration of war before beginning hostilities, and for proper warning before resuming hostilities after a truce.

What the classical jurists of Islam never remotely considered is the kind of unprovoked, unannounced mass slaughter of uninvolved civil populations that we saw in New York two weeks ago. For this there is no precedent and no authority in Islam. Indeed it is difficult to find precedents even in the rich annals of human wickedness.

---

Mr. Lewis is professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Winning and Losing

Losing and losers win.

Jerry Lee Lewis, You Win Again. Does old Jerry Lee seem to have a high conception of himself?  An old Hank Williams tune from 1952.

Emmy Lou Harris, If I Could Only Win Your Love

Allman Bros., Win, Lose or Draw

Beatles, You're Gonna Lose that Girl

Beatles, I'm a Loser

Hank Williams, Lost Highway

So boys don't you start your ramblin' around/ On this road of sin are you sorrow bound/ Take my  advice or you'll curse the day/ You started rollin' down that lost highway.

Marty Robbins, Born to Lose

Steely Dan, Rikki Don't Lose that Number.  NIce guitar solo.  It starts at 2:56.

New Lost City Ramblers, If I Lose, I Don't Care

Brenda Lee, Losing You

Assuming the Worst

An outstanding piece by William Kilpatrick.  Read it!

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Another Double Standard

Perhaps you noticed this too.  President Obama refuses to use 'Islamic' in connection with the Islamic State or 'Muslim' in connection with Muslim terrorists.  But he has no problem with pinning the deeds of crusaders and inquisitors on Christians.  This  is a double standard.

Surely, if no true Muslim beheads journalists or crucifies children, then no true Christian commits deeds of equal moral depravity.

A while back Obama made the surprising statement that "ISIL is not Islamic." What was the reasoning behind Obama's statement?  Perhaps this:

1. All religions are good.
2. Islam is a religion.
Ergo
3. Islam is good.
4. ISIL is not good.
Ergo
5. ISIL is not Islamic.

But then, by parity of reasoning,

1. All religions are good.
2*. Christianity is a religion.
Ergo
3*. Christianity is good.
4*. The Crusades/Inquisition were not good.
Ergo
5*. The Crusades/Inquisition were not Christian.

But far worse than Obama's double standard is his profound historical ignorance which any number of commentators have exposed, John Hinderaker, for example.

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Suggestions on How to Study

This is a revised post from September, 2009.  Thanks to V.V. for his interest.

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

A great deal could be said on this topic. Here are a few thoughts that may be helpful. Test them against your own experience.

1.   Make good use of the morning, which is an excellent time for such  activities  as reading, writing, study, and meditation.  But to put the morning to good use, one must arise early.  I get up at 2:00, but you needn't be so monkish.  Try arising one or two hours earlier than you presently do. That will provide you with a block of quiet time.  Fruitful mornings are of course impossible if one's evenings are spent dissipating.  But it is not enough to avoid dissipation.  One ought to organize one's evening so as to set oneself up for a fruitful morning's work.  Alphonse Gratry makes some excellent suggestions in section V of his "The Sources of Intellectual Light" (1862), the last book of his Logic (trs. Helen and Milton Singer, Open Court, 1944).  One of them is, "Set yourself questions in the evening; very often you will find them resolved when you awaken in the morning." (532) Gratry has in mind theoretical problems.  His advice is compatible with Schopenhauer's: One should never think about personal problems, money woes, and other such troubles at night and certainly not before bed. 

2.  Abstain from all mass media dreck in the morning.  Read no newspapers.  "Read not The Times, read the eternities." (Thoreau)   No electronics. No computer use, telephony, TV, e-mail, etc.  Just as you wouldn't pollute your body with whisky and cigarettes upon arising, so too you ought not pollute your pristine morning mind with the irritant dust of useless facts, the palaver of groundless opinions, the bad writing of contemporary scribblers, and every manner of distraction.    There is time for that stuff later in the day if you must have it.  The mornings should be kept free and clear for study that promises long-term profit.

3. Although desultory reading is enjoyable, it is best to have a plan.  Pick one or a small number of topics that strike you as interesting and important and focus on them.  I distinguish between bed reading and desk reading.  Such lighter reading as biography and history can be done in bed, but hard-core materials require a desk and such other accessories as pens of various colors for different sorts of annotations and underlinings, notebooks, a cup of coffee, a pot of coffee . . . .

4.  If you read books of lasting value, you ought to study what you read, and if you study, you ought to take notes. And if you take notes, you owe it to yourself to assemble them into some sort of coherent commentary. What is the point of studious reading if not to evaluate critically what you read, assimilating the good while rejecting the bad? The forming of the mind is the name of the game.  This won't occur from passive reading, but only by an active engagement with the material.  The best way to do this is by writing up your own take on it.  Here is where blogging can be useful.  Since blog posts are made public, your self-respect will give you an incentive to work at saying something intelligent.

5.  An illustration.  Right now I have about a half-dozen projects going.  One is an article for publication in a professional journal on the philosophy of Milton K. Munitz.  What I have been doing very early in the morning is studying and taking notes on four of his books that are relevant to my project.  I write these notes and quotations and criticisms into a journal the old-fashioned way.  Like I said, no electronics early in the morning.  Computer is off and internet connection as well.  This eliminates the temptation to check e-mail, follow hyperlinks, and waste time.  Later in the day I incorporate these hand-written notes into a long blog post I am writing.  When that post is finished and published and I receive some comments, I will then write up the post as a formal article and send it to a journal.

The beauty of this is that one has something to show for the hours spent studying.  One has a finished product in which one's thoughts are organized and preserved and to which one can refer later.

6.  How keep track of a vast amount of resources?  A weblog can be useful as an on-line filing cabinet.  I also keep a daily journal.

The West Is the Best

But the West is in grave danger.  Attacked from without, she is also collapsing from within under the weight of her own decadence.  Can we and it survive?  The short answer is that, while we are running on fumes, they are rich and voluminous and long-lasting.  It will take some time before they and we peter out.  So there is still time to take action.  Decline is not inevitable.  But do we have the will?

Acronyms, Initialisms, and Truncations: Another Look

I suggested earlier that we think of abbreviations as a genus that splits into three coordinate species: acronyms, initialisms, and truncations with the specific differences as follows:

An acronym is a pronounceable word formed from either the initial letters of two or more words, or from contiguous letters of two or more words.  For example, 'laser' is a pronounceable word formed from the initial letters of the following words: light, amplification, stimulated, emission, radiation. And Gestapo is a pronounceable word formed from contiguous letters of the following words: geheime, Staats, Polizei.

An initialism is a string of contiguous letters, unpronounceable as a word or else not in use as a word, but pronounceable as a list of letters, formed from the initial letters of two or more words.  For example, 'PBS' is an initialism that abbreviates 'Public Broadcasting System.'  'PBS' cannot be pronounced as a word, but it can be pronounced as a series of letters: Pee, Bee, Ess. 'IT' is an initialism that abbreviates "information technology.'  In this case 'IT' is pronounceable as a word, but is not in use as a word.  You can say, 'Mary works in Eye-Tee,' but not, 'Mary works in IT.' The same goes for 'ASU' which abbreviates 'Arizona State University.'

A truncation is a term formed from a single word by shortening it.  'App,' for example is a truncation of 'application,' and 'ho' is presumably a truncation of 'whore' (in black idiom).  'Auto' is a truncation of 'automobile,' and 'blog' (noun) of 'weblog.'

Malcolm Chisholm in an e-mail comment objects to my taxonomy, claiming that the classification looks like this:

While my scheme probably has defects of which I am not aware, Dr. Chisholm's scheme is open to objection.  He tells us that a truncation is "formed by taking the first part of each word."  But then 'laser' and Gestapo are truncations, which can't be right.  There is no word of which 'laser' is the truncation as there is a word of which 'hood' is the truncation ('neighborhood'). Chisholm also tells us that an acronym is "formed by taking the first letter of each word."  But Gestapo and Stasi are not formed by taking the first letter of each word.  Stasi is formed from the first three letters of Staat and the first two letters of Sicherheit.  (By the way, the Stasi was much worse than the Gestapo, according to Simon Wiesenthal.)  And what about 'sonar'?  It takes two letters from 'sound' and one each from 'navigation' and 'ranging.'

What's more, I see no point in making acronym superordinate to pronounceable acronym.  That strikes me as a distinction without a difference, i.e., a merely verbal distinction.  As I see it, 'pronounceable acronym' is a pleonastic expression.  But I will irenically grant that there may be no fact of the matter here and that we can slice this bird in equally acceptable ways.  Those who classify the initialism 'SBNR' ('spiritual but not religious') -- the initialism that got me on this jag in the first place -- as an acronym are free to do so.  But I prefer not to since every example of an acronym I can think of is pronounceable.

Perhaps I can appeal to parsimony.  My scheme is simpler than Chisholm's.  His Porphyric tree sports three branchings; mine only two. 

But perhaps I am making some mistake here.  What is wrong with my taxonomy if anything is wrong with it?  But I'm no linguist; I'm merely a philosopher who thinks it wise to attend carefully to ordinary language while avoiding the aberration known as Ordinary Language philosophy.

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Acronyms, Initialisms, and Truncations

Feser on Sex

Old Ed pulls no punches.  In response to Peter Singer's claim that "sex raises no unique moral issues at all," Feser remarks, "I have long regarded this as one of the most imbecilic things any philosopher has ever said."  I agree.  Feser goes on to make a number of important points.