CDs are round, as are wedding rings, tires, and software. Generally, when we put liquids into containers, the containers are round, presumably because edges are easier for leaks. The roundedness is a durable design. We get better mileage out of circular tires than we would out of oval or square ones.
But why is the soul also generally depicted as round?
We typically think of flying saucers as round, presumably to help them with the drag of outer space. But I didn't think there was very much if any drag in outer space.
What exactly does a hard drive look like? Is its central component spherical? When I hear it working inside I hear something whirring about. Is that a circular thing that is circulating? I was drawing an inference between the soul and discs for software yesterday and was asking students whether the soul was harddrive and put in us by God, or was it software put in us by culture and education. Or do we have both? Do they sometimes conflict?
The soul of course can't be proven and therefore in science cannot be brought up without derision. It has no attributes. It can't be smelled, touched, tasted, or seen, and yet it is generally depicted as a circle (similar to the halo, which is a donut shaped circle).
Why do we put information on a disc? Why is the soul where we put our information more or less depicted as software?
Is there some reason that info fits more comfortably on a disc?
Books are rectangular cubes. Shelving is generally rectangular with hard lines, like dressers, and windows are usually rectangular. But as soon as we get toward information in computer storage we are talking circles. Why is that?
Why must the components be circular?
In the brain itself there seems to be convoluted circular passages (the head isn't exactly a sphere, but tends toward sphericality, as squareheads are often thought to be dummies by comparison).
Robots have squareheads in the older versions, but in futuristic vehicles they are more spherical as are our own heads.
In the hippy era people who lived 9 to 5 ratrace lives were configured as squares.
Is there something about the circle that makes it superior to the square, especially for information retrieval? I note that in storage, we generally take discs and place them first in plastic squares, since the edges line up and create an impression of neatness.
Dogs are square, while cats are circular. I don't know what I mean by that. It's just an impression I have. Cats are "groovy" in the old hippy slang, and hippies are considered to be "cats."
I have a number of subsidiary questions, but my central question is as follows. Why is the soul always depicted as circular? Why does software look like a soul? Is there some necessary connection, or is the connection purely accidental?
114 comments:
In my beginning is my end.
In my end is also my beginning.
Kirby,
OK, this should be good for giggles.
I have no clue what you mean when you say that software is round. You're probably confusing the medium (a CD or DVD) with the information it contains. Software, in reality, is just a collection of byte streams.
What exactly does a hard drive look like?M=
Picture a stack of mirror-finished pancakes, but with space between them, and the pancakes very flat and very precise. Or alternatively, a stack of 3-4 CDs, with couple of washers in-between each CD.
When I hear it working inside I hear something whirring about. Is that a circular thing that is circulating?
It's spinning, very fast. A standard hard drive is spinning at 5400 RPM, which is to say, 90 times per second. In effect, each platter is essentially large magnetic tape, but constructed so that each bit can be accessed quickly (because the mechanism exploits the two-dimensional surface of the platter, unlike a classic tape system, which is one-dimensional).
I was drawing an inference between the soul and discs for software yesterday and was asking students whether the soul was harddrive and put in us by God, or was it software put in us by culture and education. Or do we have both? Do they sometimes conflict?
I'm not sure that looking at contemporary computer hardware is going to give you great insight into theological questions, and you neglect to consider the role of our physical nature. In effect, you've shifted the nature/nurture question to a nurture/inspiration question. Something's been gained, but it's worth paying attention to what you might be losing.
Why do we put information on a disc?
When we do, it's technological convenience. Note that SSDs use an entirely different technology that doesn't involve moving parts, and so doesn't have the geometric constraints of a platter. And even in the case of a hard-drive, the mechanism is put inside a rectangular enclosure, again, for convenience (it's easier to mount, and easier to organize the space inside the computer).
Books are rectangular cubes. Shelving is generally rectangular with hard lines, like dressers, and windows are usually rectangular. But as soon as we get toward information in computer storage we are talking circles. Why is that?
Books are square because the binding technology creates a linear constraint. The binding edge then becomes a convenient place for an external label. Being able to place the book on another edge (e.g., for shelving) is a lot more convenient than having to deal with flat stacks, so that constrains another edge. Once you're half-way to a square, our sense of order takes over.
Scrolls are also big rectangles, although we don't usually think of them as such. On the other hand, computer RAM chips are generally rectangular.
I think the real issue here is this: things that are meant to spin are generally circular, things that are stacked/packed are generally rectangular.
In the brain itself there seems to be convoluted circular passages (the head isn't exactly a sphere, but tends toward sphericality, as squareheads are often thought to be dummies by comparison).
I believe that the convolutions are there to increase surface area relative to a given volume. And I think the point to "blockhead" has more to do with materials (wood, vs. brain) than geometry.
A square peg in a round hole.
This may be quite idle to contemplate.
Roundness suggests smooth passage, or slipperiness. Perhaps the soul needs to be elusive to pass from one host to another.
The soul certainly is elusive--no one's ever seen one!
I used to meet crazy people who thought they could see "auras" behind people's heads. A soft blue one was considered the best, and portended a good character, or a good soul, or vibe, or energy center.
It was all nonsense.
Is there a soul in Buddhism? I think there is in Hinduism. Are souls immortal? Is there a limited supply, or do they keep being produced indefinitely. Plato thought the soul inhabited the body, like a spirit, or mist, and it was immortal.
Since Plato didn't understand genetics, he thought the soul brought its accumulated experience with it, along with all the structural information necessary to define character and appearance. If he'd known about genetics, and DNA, I wonder how this would have changed his thinking.
If the creators of the Bible and other holy books had known about contemporary physics and genetics and science, how would they have reacted?
How much of religion is just a hokey explanation for things we don't understand? And how much answers some other need people have.
Is "the need" a kind of proof of the truth of any conjuration to fill an innate tendency? IOW, is humankind's "need to believe in higher agency" itself a proof of the existence of such an agency, or is it just a proof of something we lack?
Should there be any necessary connection between the shapes of geometry (and mathematical formulae), and our theories about an organizing principle in the universe?
Plato thought the soul carried complete information for how to live this life from another world into this one. And then when we died that soul was again intact as it went to be judged before Rhadamanthus.
Augustine was apparently influenced by Plato (Plato was himself influenced by the ancient Egyptians' notion of travel from this world to another one.
The Buddhists have a notion of metempsychosis -- that the soul will travel from one body to another but remain within this plane.
But souls are often pictured as discs -- that can fly.
Like flying saucers, but smaller, and more compact.
We have a number of near synonyms for soul -- we can also say heart, which means more or less the same thing. We can say that someone is soulful and that someone has a good heart, and mean more or less the same thing, too.
Stu said the harddrive looks like a stack of pancakes (presumably circular). Why is the circle seemingly important for storage, or is the circle mostly important for information retrieval of the byte stream?
If the soul has information on it, as Plato thought, and therefore has a byte stream of the perfect forms (including the form of the circle, as well as the perfect form of government, and what constitutes an ideal man or woman or dog), then that must be retrievable information on the soul.
Perhaps computer software is based on the soul by metaphoric analogy (is it important that they shine?), that's what interests me.
A student yesterday (quite bright but very combative) challenged my notion that the hard drive was circular in the pattern of CD discs.
I knew it had to be because of the whirring.
But a stack of pancakes sort of wrecks the analogy.
I wanted students to picture the education as software that you could load into their foreheads.
Versus a harddrive that was already preloaded (the way the commandments are said to be WRITTEN ON THE HEART -- in this case, the soul and the heart again being interchangeable).
The thing is rickety and has all kinds of assumptions in it (I'm not dealing with DNA -- which also has information in it, but presumably not cultural information unless we're Lamarckians, which I think we've already decided as a group that we're not).
My question was how to introduce the notion of epistemology -- which more or less means -- how do we know what we know? Is it downloaded into us by our moms and dads and culture, or is it hardwired, and given to us by God (or nature)?
If you feel bad when a child is injured, in other words, as almost anybody would (let's say a kid gets run over in front of your house -- it's not your kid, but a neighbor kid, maybe one that isn't even a close friend of any of your kids), we would still feel very bad (even if it happened in the street and so we were not in any sense responsible on a legal basis).
We would still feel bad, right?
And why is that? Is that part of our hardwiring, or is it part of culture?
Some people surely wouldn't care. Hannibal Lector types wouldn't care. Manson types wouldn't care.
So did they not get the harddrive, or not get the softdrive, or is there a glitch somewhere in their disc?
I was trying to use software analogies, but this combative student was challenging the sphericality of my metaphor. I thought this was fun, but I didn't have the data to know for certain.
Perhaps the circle is just really finally a metaphor as when GM says that in my beginning is my end, and perhaps that is all that haloes mean.
Alpha and Omega.
But I wonder if there is something along the lines of form follows function in circles holding more information than rectangular objects, or perhaps spinning a sphere on a table is just easy than getting eyes to go across a screen.
John Locke's "blank slate" theory of the mind is the polar opposite of Plato's notion that everything we need to know is already there, we just have to remember it.
Locke leads to historicization of knowledge.
Plato's version of how knowledge is gleaned is timeless and ahistorical.
I don't quite want to give up on the CD and software vs. hardware analogies. They are crude, but still quite useful because they are immediately and widely comprehensible to students.
As our technology approaches the complexity of the brain, we're getting quite close, I would estimate, to the seat of absolute meaning. Zeroes and ones.
Can we expect a time when computers will rival human ratiocination? True rationality and "free will"?
On that day, will all our sentiments and mysteries and conceits evaporate into the ether?
Will it be a day of liberation, or of armageddon?
Kirby,
Why is the circle seemingly important for storage, or is the circle mostly important for information retrieval of the byte stream?
Hard drives are circular because a circle is often an optimal form for things that spin. In the case of a hard drive, using a circle:
1) Maximizes area relative to enclosure size (in effect, the radius of the drive is limited by the distance to the obstruction closest to the rotational axis of the drive). Maximizing area is good, because storage capacity basically works out to area times bit-density, so a physically larger drive can store more information for a given storage technology.
2) Minimizes angular momentum relative to area. This means that the disk can be spun up more quickly, spun down more quickly, and that there's less gyroscopic force generated by the spinning platter (which means lighter mountings, etc.). This, btw, is one of the reasons why drives stack platters -- there's less angular momentum for a given surface area that way. Note that there are some applications (specifically energy storage) where the goal is to maximize angular momentum relative to a given area/weight. This leads to bar-shaped "fly wheels" in evacuated chambers, or circular fly wheels that are fatter at the edge than in the center.
3) A circle means that the read-head cannot not fall off of, or have to climb, any "cliffs." This is extremely important, because the read-head is typically "rolling" on a single layer of air molecules over the surface of the platter. Yes, tolerances really are that close! So surface features of the platter that are more than an air-molecule in height are problematic, and can give rise to "head crashes," which are often fatal for the drive.
Perhaps computer software is based on the soul by metaphoric analogy (is it important that they shine?), that's what interests me.
This is a hard argument to make. Computer software, to a first approximation, consists of a sequence of instructions, and so there's a natural metaphor with recipes. I don't see a natural metaphor between recipes and souls.
A student yesterday (quite bright but very combative) challenged my notion that the hard drive was circular in the pattern of CD discs.
I knew it had to be because of the whirring.
But a stack of pancakes sort of wrecks the analogy.
Here's a nice image of a set of platters, together with the read arm. Here's another, which shows an impressively large stack.
I wanted students to picture the education as software that you could load into their foreheads.
Versus a harddrive that was already preloaded (the way the commandments are said to be WRITTEN ON THE HEART -- in this case, the soul and the heart again being interchangeable).
Ah, what you're trying to get at is a computer's firmware. This is low level code that is stored in non-volatile memory and which gets loaded before the operating system. Firmware does (occasionally) get rewritten, but it is a "read-mostly" medium, whereas hard drives (and main memory) are more balanced between reads and writes.
If there is no necessary reason for the soul to have been depicted as perfectly circular, I wonder why it has always been depicted in that way.
Stu, thanks for all this info on hardware, and firmware. It's amazing, but I have yet to absorb it fully. does firmware also have circular discs somewhere as part of its components?
Hmmm...Why is the soul seen as a circle?
I actually don't have a good picture of the representations you're talking about...
Halos, obviously, but do you mean something else?
Anyway, it probably has at least something to do with the fact that the sun is a circle, and the 'source of all light,' yada yada.
The circle also is a pretty standard way to say 'infinite.'
Stu, do you believe that the Ten Commandments are WRITTEN ON THE HEART by God, or that they are historical constructs?
Do you think with Locke that we are born as blank slates?
Or do you think with Plato that we are born with an understanding of morality that is innate?
Kant also believes we are born with certain innate understandings of morality that allow us to be human together.
Brett, where are you on this?
Curtis?
william?
Picklesworth?
James?
Em?
GM?
Any other takers?
Not sure who's more confused--Sir Faville, or the Kirbster.
Do we see triangles, or Justice, or syllogisms--or "memories" in chromosomes, CF? Or brain scans?
whether one likes it or not, platonism remains a live issue. Whether for mathematicians...or poets. And....what of literary people who would reduce us to..genetics.
Sir F. at times you sound nearly...like yr advancing eugenics of a sort
Big question Kirbster - I tend to think that we've got basic instincts and personality traits - within the same family, one person can be compassionate and empathetic while the other is angry and violent... So I think we are born with tendencies as individuals, and that we are not all born equal in terms of our personalities and appetites.
In terms of principles, I don't think that those are 'written on the hearts of all by God,' because they vary so significantly from one culture to another.
I think that prophets and the Christ communicated principles to humans, and that then such information was spread culturally.
But it's not 'written on our hearts' to, say, not covet our neighbor's wife.
In fact, our instinct is to do just that - and the 'light' that comes down is the cultural knowledge that gets spread which goes Against our baser instincts...
We are born with natural tendencies that can be shaped and guided by our experiences...And then we can learn the principles of God through that which makes us human - our ability to think and consider, to form ideas and turn them into action.
Principles come from the word of God being communicated by one human to another... Old principles mostly, and only very rarely do prophets come along that create new basic principles. (of course, we as humans can Progress to creating societies that better manifest those principles)...
Tendencies come from nature/nurture.
Kirby,
Stu, thanks for all this info on hardware, and firmware. It's amazing, but I have yet to absorb it fully. does firmware also have circular discs somewhere as part of its components?
Disks, as in things that spin, no. But I wouldn't entirely rule out circular
components at the molecular level. I just don't know.
Stu, do you believe that the Ten Commandments are WRITTEN ON THE HEART by God, or that they are historical constructs?
Might I say, neither? It seems to me self evident that the ten commandments, or at least the moral principal that takes our own self interest out of the #1 slot, is something that some people have and others don't. And there are lots of people who benefit from the occasional reminder.
Against the proposition that they're written on everyone's heart is the self-evident need that God had to reveal the ten commandments through Moses as such. If they were written on everyone's heart, this would have been redundant.
Against the proposition that they're historical constructs, we have the consistent revelation of God through history, and I don't buy the notion that God (or our perceived revelation of him) can be reduced to a social/historical construct.
Do you think with Locke that we are born as blank slates?
Obviously, Locke didn't have children. At least not two. The notion that people are blank slates simply does not survive the experience of raising two children.
Or do you think with Plato that we are born with an understanding of morality that is innate?
Some are, some aren't. The Greeks had the notion of Logos -- a moral structure of the universe that pre-existed their Gods, and in some sense was superior to them. This is the point of the magisterial introduction of the Gospel of John -- to appropriate a Greek construct, assign it to the Christian God, and thereby position him as superior to and pre-existing their gods. So there's more here than just Plato.
st thomas aquinas says
and today is his feast day
[we have not superceded his thought
it's merely been ignored]
he saith:
the body is the form of the soul
and in his understanding of the human the soul is the mind is the person
the discipline of making polyhedrons is essentially an effort to understand rectangularity in circular forms
descartes thought the soul was the pituitary gland
there is no technology of the brain
science is an epistemological default mechanism a cognitive distraction on our way to enlightenment which has never occurred
these are the darker ages my friends
all science has become science fiction
and they don't believe it
but it's true
we can ignore most of science now
there's been enough
unless it's divine science
that we need to know more of
our lives our cosmologies are worked out elliptically
the circle game
bedrock and curves
what more is there
the soul has form
but it is nothing hand made
cd(z) are obsolete
are they not
go fish
jh
Kirby, this is a very complex question.
I believe that the context of any interaction between a being--with a given set of DNA--and its "environment" is probably a very complicated mediation, but that the parameters of that mediation can be estimated and extrapolated artificially.
The progress of civilization seems to proceed in fairly predictable ways, as each discovery and invention opens up new avenues of apprehension.
In other words, the language we use to describe phenomena may change through time, but what is being described does not. The universe is dynamic, but its laws should be, from our perspective, static. Nonetheless, our language to describe it does change. I suppose you could even say the human brain will alter the course of our genetic descent over the long run. Human thought can change our shape!
Those who cannot understand how change is just another version of this process, will be trapped in the past. The language of higher physics addresses the same questions as the seers and the Holy Books; but in a different way. It is probably as difficult for the ordinary man today to follow present-day theoretical physics, as it must have been for an illiterate to understand an educated man in the 7th Century AD. Our position with respect to the unknown is always common.
Are we talking about Platonism or Plotinianism? All these circles and squares put me more in mind of Plotinus, the great systematizer of Platonic thought, who kept the light alive through the darkest of the dark ages. The complete works of Plato and Aristotle didn't make it to Europe until Byzantium fell. Is there any sense in which Plato's dialogues represent a coherent philosophy apart from what was done by Plotinians between the eras of Augustine and Aquinas?
Kirk: Aristotelian, empirical, militaristic, tragic-heroic. (and...Christian, though Shatner's not, IIRC)
Spock: Platonic, logico-rationalist-scientist, quietist (usually), hints of the...mystic.
(and not dissimilar from Hamlet/Horatio)
The western Dialectic, in a nutshell
Do you think with Locke that we are born as blank slates?
Obviously, Locke didn't have children. At least not two. The notion that people are blank slates simply does not survive the experience of raising two children.
Are you suggesting that infants have actual a priori...knowledge Stu, or just like pre-set parameters? The first claim is rather difficult to defend. IIRC Socrates shows a geometric drawing to his pupil, and then has him do a deduction, and says.. thus, you have a Reasoning power, apart from the facts presented (which he calls an immortal soul). without the demonstration (and imparting of knowledge) the student would not have known. So I don't think the ancients actually meant ...souls in some supernatural sense (they meant that human rationality was ...perhaps sacred, but ....still based in experience--of some type).
Whether one cares for Locke, there can be no doubt that most of our knowledge derives from experiennce, even if one grants
innate parameters (ie, humans will use language, mathematics, etc; cats and cattle won't). While few would defend a complete behaviorism, Rationalists (including theological ones) tend to ignore that conditioning process.
Neither a BF Skinner, or Chomsky be.
Kirby, I agree with stu and Brett that had there been no revelations of the law, the prophets, and the Gospels the principles set down in the Ten Commandments would be difficult to attribute solely to innate ideas (e.g., Platonic, Cartesian, or of late, Chomskyan), the natural light of reason (Aristotelian), or sense experience and environment (Hobbesian or Lockean).
However, I do tend to prefer Aquinas's eclectic epistemology that begins with the recognition of sense experience of an exterior world and later exhibits a nature, order, and purpose in it for our individual and collective moral being.
Still, it seems that some form of deference to Plato's theory of innate ideas is difficult to discard from moral epistemology, for though specific moral practises vary widely among different cultures, the existence of what philosophers call anterior principles (perhaps akin to Kant's development of the idea of a priori knowledge) from which they are derived (however influenced by historical accidents, traditions, and customs) seems inevitable to avoid the dilemma of an infinite regress. The "I must or should do it!" feature of the human conscience seems inevitable, however it may vary across times and among cultures.
While Locke was certainly no crude or dogmatic behaviourist, I've difficulty in accepting his argument that there can be no defence of innate moral law at the same time as he does not deny there is a natural law anterior to all positive (i.e., man-made) law. How to reconcile?
The Gospel of John, written in koine greek, does not lack for neo-platonic aspects-- Logos, the light-dark symbolism--slightly manichean perhaps?-- the hints of transcendence. Some ...gnostics apparently read it as such . Then the entire New Testament was originally ...koine greek (as was the Septuangint that the Apostles would have been familiar with).
Of course those sorts of heretical views were verboten by the time of Augustine. By Aquinas's time, worthy of torture, as they were for the Billy Bobs of the Reformation (who also brought back the semitic emphasis). The Nag Hammadi discoveries arguably offer some confirmation of the neo-platonic interpretations of the NT.
James, I really don't understand how Locke can argue that there are NATURAL RIGHTS, but that there is no such thing as NATURAL LAW, or any sense of divine law.
It's weird.
does anybody understand this seeming gap in Locke's thinking?
I like the sanity and brevity of his four essential rights:
Life
Health
Liberty
Property
Although in cases where one of these rights stiffarms another one (stealthcare answers the second but violates the third and fourth, for instance), how do we rank them?
If we are born a blank slate, how on earth did we know about the divine rights, especially since Locke appears to have invented them out of thin air?
Craig asks a complex question about Plato and the Plotinus crowd.
The answer is yes, there is a somewhat coherent Platonic theory, especially in the Republic, about aesthetics, politics, ethics, the afterlife, our rationale for being here, what we owe to the state, and so on.
That coherent theory is never denied in any other dialogue.
Plotinus to my mind on the other hand is primarily an aesthetic thinker. I don't know of any contemporary thinker who puts much stock in Plotinus. Do you, Craig?
Stu's recourse to the Ten Commandments being handed down does tend to mitigate the WRITTEN ON THE HEART thesis.
I like that both James and JH bring us back to Aquinas. I like Aquinas.
I tend to discount his thinking on account of his size. He was about 400 pounds.
I find it difficult to take him seriously on that account.
He has a heart attack at 50.
He also talks authoritatively about the afterlife. How can he do this?
But his account of aesthetics is one of my favorites (I've read parts of the summa, and the Eco consolidations of Aquinas' aesthetic theory).
I'm not sure exactly what Catholics use him for, or how he's broken down for them. Do you have something like our Catechism -- a pamphlet that breaks his ideas down into a thirty-minute summary of the Summa?
In every Lutheran pew there is a tiny catechism book that answers almost all questions in a one-sentence response.
What do catholics think of Locke, KO? For that matter, what did Locke think of catholics, or any religious zealots, aka "enthusiasts" ? (Hint: Locke did not care for the "Roman monarchy.")
Faith must be tried at the Court of Reason, said Locke. So much for the dogma of the RCC (or Calvinists). You misread Locke as a conservative when he actually was....classical democrat. His natural rights theory was democratic as well (even a bit...utopian--perhaps a flaw, actually).
He rejects the classical arguments for G*d more or less (tho...IIRC the ECHU correctly he might have accepted the Design arg. in some sense--ie a posteriori justification of...Deus).
Locke was suspected of....skepticism early on. I doubt he was very religious--though perhaps a Deist in some sense (as was his master Newton). At one point he made a slight criticism of Romans 13, did he not? (unlike the protestant zealots of the day). The magistrates were capable of being wrong. As were nobles, and the King himself. Jefferson memorized all that (as did the French encyclopedists).
J,
Are you suggesting that infants have actual a priori...knowledge Stu, or just like pre-set parameters?
Mostly the later. My point is that, if you've raised two children, they've probably been raised in remarkably similar situations, by the same people, and encountered the same communities, etc. And there is still a huge amount of variation in character, intelligence, etc. Personalities tend to manifest themselves at very young ages, and are remarkably resistant to change.
As for a priori intelligence, I would not want to make any strong claims. But I think it's easy to examine infants and be dismissive, when in fact some types of inate knowledge may be revealed later in life. I'll note the emergence of sexual desire at puberty. Our culture immerses children in a sexualized environment, so we're not surprised when children entering puberty sometimes engage in sexualized behavior. But is it really different in other societies? I doubt it. It seems to me initiation of sexual behavior in pretty much all societies, whether they have libertine or repressed public morality, coincides with puberty. Is sexual desire a kind of knowledge? I think it is arguable.
Locke is such a foundational player that you can find almost any interpretation you are looking for -- from hellfire Baptist, to slave-owning capitalist.
How he's read is more often dependent on the writer than on the figure himself.
That is true for many foundational figures -- you can find the whole gamut for writers like Shakespeare, and for figures like Jefferson or Madison.
No one interpretation is the authentic one, and it would take a lifetime of unbiased study (as if anyone is capable of that) to be able to truly get at such a foundational figure.
In the Kloppenberg volume he stated that someone (he didn't say who) had offered irrefutable proof (he didn't say where) of Locke's hellfire Baptist thinking based on individual letters that had been recently discovered.
The book was pretty well-documented except for this one omission. Wouldn't you know it was the one thing I wished to explore further.
Think of the most foundational figure in the entire west (Christ) and how we have 1200 denominations in America, each one arriving at a different perspective. Inside of each denomination the perspectives are split once more.
There are as many perspectives as there are hairs on Brett's head.
There are as many perspectives as there are hairs on Brett's head.
Yes, and there is only one Plotinus. Can you get from Plato to Augustine without going through Plotinus? There were Christians around in the time of Plotinus, using lions on a regular basis to demonstrate the power of their faith.
A century and a half later the lions were as hapless as those in Detroit. It's said that Augustine referred to his mistress, Monica, as The One, an apparent allusion to his familiarity with Plotinus.
Weren't we told by Bill Cosby himself that Texas Instruments was The One? I think that was back in the day when we called our computers word processors.
So you're saying that the number of perspectives is starting to recede, Kirby? :-)
(I'm going to be the virile, bold type, as opposed to the distinguished grey).
gnosticism appears today as full blown science and scepticism - it is the flowering of the pelagian sentiment which holds
we can do it ourselves to heck with a deity...world war 2 is the paradigm for historical development in this regard
plotinus cannot be ignored and his influence even in christian academies was significant - he holds some sway these days for people launching out on spiritualist trends - i dont know if hegel read plotinus but his notion of the absolute is very resonant with the One concept
also in jewish kabbalistic thinking plotinus' system gained some traction although i would have to concede that the efforts within the kabbalistic trends exceded plotinus and took things to another level ( correct me if i'm wrong)
monica (craig) was augustines mother...his mistress is never named ( i researched this once trying to figure out what that was all about)...some feminists took the position that since augustine abandoned the mother of his son they could abandon him - deodatus is augustine's son and we know nothing of what became of him - jaroslac pelikan's treatment of augustine is instructive
the fundamental problem with gnosticism and the work of plotinus is that it holds that a person on his own with his own effort can attain to the essential insight and life of god...and...and the mistake of apprehending life in terms of a crass dualism...holding to the mind as spiritual and everything else as material (and thus not too necessary for much) - and women were allocated to the material world and thus eternally damned and unworthy of the ONe...only men can think ( ahem!)
augustine bought into this for awhile manichaeism being the vehicle of most energetic gnosticism - some will read into augustine and say he never really shrugged off the thought of the manichaens although he refutes this in his confessions ( the first work of personal psychology in the west)- read the wiki stuff on the manichaens
locke could be faulted in assuming a predilection for optimism when thinking of human nature and his thinking it seems to me betrays a subtle gnostic trend...if you're nation is busy imposing its power all over the planet it is easy to be lockean...it's simply locke stocke and barrelle at that point
locke is offensive to basic christian principle
i guess the indigenous folks experienced this offense - they never understood the basis for private property - their values were elsewhere
imposing the grid upon the land of north america is a way of trying to square up the curved character of landscape..but such ignored prophets as john wesley powell advocated for demarcations of land being determined by the landscape itself and not by lines drawn by surveyors...it will take some time but the land will eventually win
...i for one rejoice a little bit when tornadoes whip up
anything with curves is natural
straight lines are abstractions
a child born of good parents but raised by bad parents will betray very little of what the good parents gave him other than the color of his hair and the shape of his brow
are there universal values which apply across the board to all humans in every place...or...are we limited by the genetic and cultural information we get...and left to bumble along in a confused cultural matrix of amorphous soup
it will be helpful to consider that DNA does not exist it is merely a film clip in a long extended piece of work and it indicates nothing other than a few nodules on a blip of a piece of organic stuff...it's an illusion posing as reality
my friend posed this line of robert creeley to his little 2 yr old granddaughter "...the darkness surrounds us, what can we do against it (?)"...the child said - and i quote - "nothing" (!)
if people and communities don't spend some time thinking about the "good" then they will spend considerable time wallowing in the bad
science has no answers
only a series of cognitive distractions
with which we are fated it would seem
to play
if a person in his teen years does nothing but read the great classics
he will find that mathematics in general holds nothing of interest and what's more he will more than likely comprehend from a logical position that mathematics is a mere tool of logic and can be understood in pedestrian terms without the technical symbolism
whereas
a young person educated only in the way of numbers and logic theory and science theory..will remain completely in the dark in regards to the wisdom and wit of dante shakespeare and robert frost
yet the incorporation of numbers into metaphysical inquiry is interesting (gematria is interesting) numerology is tedious and can only ever be hypothetical
nature always wins out
dust and rivers rivers and dust
and somehow
the light shines through
the higher realms of scientific inquiry are actually explorations into metaphysics - do they ever say that - and with far less applicability than the best of medieval metaphysics - i mean who needs a black hole or a muon?
i know a woman who spent her energy trying to get her mentally ill son to comprehend the wall street journal thinking that if he could get a handle on that he could come out of his darkness...well...it never happened
science undermines the best intentions
it's never too late for
cyber-reconciliation
nice dialectic here
jh
Many clever orthodox religious people often make it seem that they are persecuted--the wicked secularists, non-believers, and pagans are at the gates of the faithful, and scientists, Darwinists, empiricists, Christopher Hitchens et al are the Devil incarnate, so forth.
Yet the catholics and protestants (not to say jews and muslims) still greatly outnumber the freethinkers, do they not jh. I don't really care for the Hitchens gang, but...at least they aren't in churches or confession booths, (temples, etc) lying, or worse, ..abusing people (or children).
Merely ...upholding the Liturgy (or Mass, or attending sunday school) does not make someone virtuous, IMHE--actually it's the wise guy types who tend to think ...merely following the rituals will suffice for ..Faith. Lucky Luciano attended Mass regularly. Dick Cheney goes to church every sunday. A fiendish rationalist such as Bertrand Russell rarely if ever did.
J,
Many clever orthodox religious people often make it seem that they are persecuted--the wicked secularists, non-believers, and pagans are at the gates of the faithful, and scientists, Darwinists, empiricists, Christopher Hitchens et al are the Devil incarnate, so forth.
True enough. But many clever secular people do likewise, arguing that they're the enlightened few is a world mired in religious ignorance, etc. I don't know as there's any great insight here. People are often drawn to, comforted by, and affirmed by the support of others who hold similar views. But this same gathering that gives comfort to the like-minded is perceived as threatening by their opponents.
Yet the catholics and protestants (not to say jews and muslims) still greatly outnumber the freethinkers, do they not jh.
As I was saying... Everyone wants to wear the mantle of truth, and to take the role of virtuous underdog.
Merely ...upholding the Liturgy (or Mass, or attending sunday school) does not make someone virtuous, IMHE--actually it's the wise guy types who tend to think ...merely following the rituals will suffice for ..Faith. Lucky Luciano attended Mass regularly. Dick Cheney goes to church every sunday. A fiendish rationalist such as Bertrand Russell rarely if ever did.
I believe this misconstrues the argument. Certainly, I don't see magic in ritual. What I see is a sign of the unity and continuity of a long-lived faith community. Yes, we have our saints and our sinners (indeed, Luther insisted that both characteristics are to be found in pretty much all of us). But worship is an opportunity not only to join together as a community, but to remember why we are a community. The wise-guy who believes that the ritual can be effective without engagement, reflection, repentance, and reformation, in short, in the forms of community without its substance, is showing profound disrespect to very rituals and sacraments that he believes saves him.
jh,
gnosticism appears today as full blown science and scepticism - it is the flowering of the pelagian sentiment which holds
we can do it ourselves to heck with a deity...world war 2 is the paradigm for historical development in this regard
Let me say, with all respect, I believe this claim is simply wrong. There are a lot of potential stances that religion and science can have with respect to one another. Of all of them, confrontation is the least productive, and the least likely to result in mutual comprehension.
It is not as if the problem of "unbelief" is new, any more than the notion that that there are secret sources of knowledge that differentiates its initiates from the benighted masses. Science does not cause either, although it is often exploited by both. So, indeed, is faith, which has been used as a justification for ignorance, and/or as a saving secret.
And I really don't think that trying to blame science for WWII makes an iota of sense. WWII has its roots in delusional racial theories, in economic dispossession, in national pride and shame, in the eternal tension between the vulnerable and their masters, and in pure criminality. Unfortunately, these are not flaws that are specific to that time and place: they've been with us for a very long time, and they're with us still. It is not as if the years before 1500 were models of peaceful intercourse between nations.
science has no answers
only a series of cognitive distractions
with which we are fated it would seem
to play
This seems a curiously narrow assessment of science from someone who benefits from sanitary water supplies and electricity. Indeed, you love books, and value their reading. How many books would have read without the printing press? And I'm not just talking about just Gutenberg, but Linotype too.
if a person in his teen years does nothing but read the great classics
he will find that mathematics in general holds nothing of interest and what's more he will more than likely comprehend from a logical position that mathematics is a mere tool of logic and can be understood in pedestrian terms without the technical symbolism
whereas
a young person educated only in the way of numbers and logic theory and science theory..will remain completely in the dark in regards to the wisdom and wit of dante shakespeare and robert frost
I believe here you're making the error of assuming that all minds work more or less as yours does. I don't accept this. I read great classics voraciously during my youth, but my skills, my vocation, is in mathematics. There is a huge diversity of interests and abilities. We cannot all be monks nor mathematicians. We need farmers, lawyers, mechanics, trash-collectors and translators. Possibly even English professors. All honest work is honorable, and you are in error not to honor the work of honest mathematicians and scientists.
And certainly, there are minds both narrow and broad. It doesn't seem to me that any one calling has a monopoly on either.
it's never too late for
cyber-reconciliation
This was a much better thought that that which preceded it.
persecution is way of life
our culture is replete with it
we'd be nowhere had we not
persecuted the africans and the irish let alone the indiginous
blessed are you when they persecute you
(who said that)
there are no freethinkers
only pretenders
the only way christianity has worked successfully is when people agree that self sacrifice and work and a sense of love are manifest
most everyone in the rc world will agree that mother theresa of calcutta represents the paradigm
this preposterous little nun who believed she could care for the untouchables
the best of catholicsim the best of judaism is in the serious intellectual work of it's thinkers and writers
these people are dismissed at the price of widespread ignorance
is there hypocricy and sin in the synagogue in the confessional during mass...of course there is always has been always will be
if you have not taken pains to get liturgy right if you haven't tried to understand the ritual sense of being human it does little good to try to help you understand
there's a whole world of involvement that most people have absolutely no clue about...liturgy remains fundamental to living life
take a sledge hammer to the square and pound it into the round hole
that's an old fashioned harddrive
jh
"…It’s with Plotinus that a pure optical world begins in philosophy. Idealities will no longer be only optical. They will be luminous, without any tactile reference. Henceforth the limit is of a completely different nature. Light scours the shadows. Does shadow form part of light? Yes, it forms a part of light and you will have a light-shadow gradation that will develop space. They are in the process of finding that deeper than space there is spatialization. Plato didn’t know [savait] of that. If you read Plato’s texts on light, like the end of book six of the Republic, and set it next to Plotinus ‘s texts, you see that several centuries had to pass between one text and the other. These nuances are necessary. It’s no longer the same world. You know [savez] it for certain before knowing why, that the manner in which Plotinus extracts the texts from Plato develops for himself a theme of pure light. This could not be so in Plato. Once again, Plato’s world was not an optical world but a tactile-optical world. The discovery of a pure light, of the sufficiency of light to constitute a world implies that, beneath space, one has discovered spatialization. This is not a Platonic idea, not even in the Timeus."
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/deleuze-on-spinoza-and-plotinus-and-luminosity/
stu
interesting that you would bite
my diatribe is overstated of course
i agree with all your qualifications to my inane position
but
little did you notice that i was perhaps utilizing a dialectical method that you explored way back in the teaparty debate
and i neglected to applaud your cleverness
part of my position is to be in a context where i know that a vast segment of the intellectual )(community}..treats christianity in particular and religion in general in just these easy terms of dismissal
so i guess what i'm doing with this line of argument
(even though i believe you know that i don't believe what i'm writing i'm simply going over the top a little to provke argument
i realize i'm breaking new ground here nobody else seems to expect the ludicrous anymore and i find this a bit disheartening for it could mean the lutheran surrealism is actually and empty vessel
but
nonethe less
where my arguments edge up against truth is i believe
the presumptions of the scientific community to have a "handle" on reality and thus assume a deliberate role in managing the planet
i had a lunch table argument with my abbot once who left probably thinking that i am completely daft but the argument centered around just how much fossil information we have...my contention is that we have a very small bit of a very complicated puzzle and we make inferences about the whole picture based on that minimal amount of information
i mean
compared to all the species and individualse that have ever lived we only have a fraction of the bones and therefor it think it right and just to question the presentation of the big picture as if it were fact
he looked at me as if he had just heard some heresy and needed to worry about the status of my head in the wider church at large
so i'm going to be just dismissing science right and left
i don't care anymore
i think there needs to be a huge challenge to the presumptions of truth
a reverse challenge
and the intellectual tradition of christianity specifically my rc tradition is just the vehicle to bring science to the necessary place for a newworking humility
the only science worth investigating is geology
those people get dirty
the "we know" and "you don't seem to know what we know" attitude of most science writers these days has me dismissing them right and left...if we could only get them to acknowledge the sophisticated work of the preservation and spread of knowledge of all kinds arising from the great libraries which were the work of dedicated religious people
everyone needs to do something
even if that means doing very little
but i ask
if all science were to cease for a year
no labs no speculation no tech experiments
would we be any worse off in a year
i think not
if all the churches closed
ther'd be mayhem
but it might be a good experiment too
i think scientists need to realize just how utterly useless they are before they start their work
i mean artists have to recognize this
why not scientists
my point about ww2 is more about the rise of humanism out of the enlightenment where reason reigns supreme
i lost the huge remainder of this intricately worked out counterdiatribe
what did i say
first
stu
your dialectical brilliance in arguing the teaparty bias and the eefects in our culture was really soemthing to watch unfold
i read it with relish
and i said something about aristotle
the division of physica and metaphysical
it was a good structure then
and it is still good
and jacques maritain
the neglected thinker of the 20th century
who outlined the degrees of knowledge
the hierarchy of learning
natural to the mind of man
in universities today we have placed the physical sciences at the top and realistically they should be at the bottom
and philosophy and theology are for people who simply don't have it in them to be practical when in fact
these are the highpoint of human reasoning
jocoseriousness
james joyce
what else
ah well
tis enough
amen
yr great
jh
jh,
stu
interesting that you would bite
my diatribe is overstated of course
i agree with all your qualifications to my inane position
but
little did you notice that i was perhaps utilizing a dialectical method that you explored way back in the teaparty debate
In retrospect, yes :-).
i realize i'm breaking new ground here nobody else seems to expect the ludicrous anymore and i find this a bit disheartening for it could mean the lutheran surrealism is actually and empty vessel
but
nonethe less
I can cope with the shift. But these are serious matters for me. I don't want to overstate matters, but there is a widespread belief in this country that religion and science are essentially incompatible. Whereas I see in both an honest attempt to perceive the truth, and therefore deeply compatible. It is agnosticism and it's sibling willful ignorance that are the odd men out. The unexpected thing is, many of my scientific colleagues are religious. Traditional religious commitment may be more prevalent in the physical and biological sciences than the humanities or social sciences, contrary to naïve expectations, which perhaps explains why Kirby feels more threatened than I do. I'm tempted to make a distinction here between the search for truth vs. the search for fashion.
Some observations: although scientists seem less likely to be religious than the population as a whole, those that are seem especially committed; most scientists who are skeptical are still deeply ethical, and some are deeply respectful of the religious commitments of those who have them; and finally, the latter category consists largely of lapsed Catholics. My last point is intended to note (a) a potential mission field, and (b) a real world disconnect between a particular body of truth-seekers and the RCC, which I believe can and should be bridged.
where my arguments edge up against truth is i believe
the presumptions of the scientific community to have a "handle" on reality and thus assume a deliberate role in managing the planet
This involves conflating science and technology, but let me accept the conflation as having an internal logic, and work with it. I see science as a very powerful, but morally neutral tool. For example (and to torque off Kirby -- let's call that a collateral benefit), science has determined that anthropogenic factors are a major accelerant of climate change. If we take seriously our stewardship of God's creation, doesn't it make sense that we should employ all of the tools he has given us to do so? And this might involve regulation of carbon emission, etc.
The problem, which I'll freely acknowledge, is that the essential moral neutrality of science and technology also makes it a tool in the hands of those who would exploit God's creation in fundamentally unsustainable ways.
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(2 of 2 -- hope I cut this at the right place...)
i had a lunch table argument with my abbot once who left probably thinking that i am completely daft but the argument centered around just how much fossil information we have
I think you're correct to claim that what we have in the fossil record represents a small fraction of the total number of species, and a practically infinitesimal fraction of the individuals, who have lived and died on earth. But the question isn't whether the filtration rate is small or large, it is in the ability of competing hypotheses to explain the resulting signal.
I'll also note that DNA evidence is a living fossil, better preserved than bones, and which enable us to infer relationships between species and individuals despite the imperfections of the fossil and genealogical records. The question isn't whether Darwin is right or wrong, any more than whether Galileo was right or wrong. The question is how to incorporate the truths they perceived into our faith: our God is a God of Truth, and all Truth ultimately points to God.
i think scientists need to realize just how utterly useless they are before they start their work
Theologians and monks too. And artists, as you properly note. We're all useless before God. The scientists' need for humility hardly distinguishes them from the rest of humanity. Nor do I see the scientists' stance as any sort of outlier. Yeah, we have our loudmouth braggarts. So to do the poets, c.f., the recurring discussion of Ginsberg on this blog. And J is right to note the Hagee's of the world.
my point about ww2 is more about the rise of humanism out of the enlightenment where reason reigns supreme
But is even this fair? It seems to me that humans have always pursued war using whatever justifications and/or technologies can be bent to the purpose, c.f., Archimedes and his mirrors. I'd say that this is characteristic of the human condition, were it not for the evidence of anthropologists that warfare is also a feature of other higher primates ;-). And blaming reason for the Third Reich or Imperial Japan seems not so much ironic as perverse.
and jacques maritain
the neglected thinker of the 20th century
I'll admit: I know nothing of Maritain. I'm willing to learn. Where should I start?
Peace
"""all Truth ultimately points to God."""
Interesting. However, I don't think Evidentialism (including the evidence of evolution..ie fossils) assists the religiously orthodox. Whether via natural or human history, the evidence reveals unending ....chaos, violence, destruction..
In other words however trite it seems, the problem of Evil (or unmerited suffering, etc) --in its evidential form--seems a bit overwhelming for any rationalist theology (including the thomistic form---lest we forget the RCC still claims the entire ...catholic Weltanschauung may be justified by reason alone). Aquinas's Teleological argument may impress some--but on inspection seems rather preposterous. Continuity and order in the natural world does not suffice as proof for ...monotheism--great white sharks show a certain order (as do plagues). It may not suffice for...complete atheism, but the old Aristotelian/Aquinas are ...museum pieces, if that. And it's quite amazing that nearly all orthodox RCC priests still refer to Aq. as the final authority on about any issue
Hegel made some not too PC remarks on the Angelic Doctor--really, Hegel however ....longwinded and obscure did offer some suggestions on how religion might be reconciled with natural science, and also had some inkling of ...evolutionary-process views--though the Absolute should probably not be considered ...synonymous with the Biblical G*d.
J, could you fill us in on where you see Hegel as an improvement on Aquinas, and cite a precise place in a text? I'm curious as to what you saw and where you saw it.
Thank you.
J,
all Truth ultimately points to God.
Hardly original on my part :-). Let me quote Sirach 4:28, "Fight to the death for truth, and the Lord God will fight for you." This is hardly unique in scripture, but I thought it would give jh and you a smile to see a Lutheran quote Sirach ;-).
However, I don't think Evidentialism (including the evidence of evolution..ie fossils) assists the religiously orthodox.
It all depends on how hard they work at it. The word "ultimately" is chosen to make clear that the pointing is not "self-evident." I'm a fairly orthodox trinitarian Christian, but also someone who believes that the neo-Darwinist synthesis (evolution + genetics) is the only theoretical framework that makes biology comprehensible.
Whether via natural or human history, the evidence reveals unending ....chaos, violence, destruction..
Your point seems to be that God has created a world that is different from what you would have created if you were God. Job's argument. But God is who he is, not who we would re-make him to be. There are certainly viable theologies that can accomodate chaos, generally by viewing it as a concommitant of creativity. We cannot be free to chose good unless we're also free to chose evil.
Continuity and order in the natural world does not suffice as proof for ...monotheism
In isolation, no. Together with other sources of truth, yes. I'm not making a holographic argument.
Hegel scholar I'm not, but there are a few remarkson catholics/scholastics in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, such as this:
"After thus dealing with the subject in detail, we must pronounce judgment on the Scholastics, and give an estimate of them. Though the subjects which they investigated were lofty, and though there were noble, earnest and learned individuals in their ranks, yet this Scholasticism on the whole is a barbarous philosophy of the finite understanding, without real content, which awakens no true interest in us, and to which we cannot return. For although religion is its subject matter, thought here reached such an excessive point of subtlety that, as a form of the mere empty understanding, it does nothing but wander amongst baseless combinations of categories. Scholastic philosophy is this utter confusion of the barren understanding in the rugged North German nature. We see here two different worlds, a kingdom of life and a kingdom of death. The intellectual kingdom, which is outside and above, while in the popular conception, is thereby brought within the sphere of the mere understanding and the senses, even though by nature it is purely speculative; and this does not take place as in art, but, on the contrary, after the fashion of ordinary reality. As the relationship of Father and Son, to begin with, appealed to the senses, so the divine world was furnished for the imaginative faculty and for purposes of devotion (in a way unknown to the disciples of Plato) with angels, saints and martyrs, instead of with thoughts; — or the thoughts are nothing but a rubbishy metaphysic of the understanding...."
OR Here:
An important signification of the expression, in the fourth place, is that which it had in the middle ages where, through insufficient knowledge, the scholastic philosophy was designated Aristotelian. The Scholastics occupied themselves much with it, but the form that the philosophy of Aristotle took with them cannot be held by us to be the true form. All their achievements, and the whole extent of the metaphysics of the understanding and formal logic which we discover in them, do not belong to Aristotle at all. Scholasticism is derived only from traditions of the Aristotelian doctrines. And it was not until the writings of Aristotle became better known in the West, that a fifth Aristotelian philosophy was formed, which was in part opposed to the Scholastic. It arose on the decline of scholasticism and with the revival of the sciences. For it was only after the Reformation that men went back to the fountainhead, to Aristotle himself
Voonderbar! A Lutheran boy, but one's who's read the greeks and latin classics (in original)...and a fair amount of the science of the time (...LaPlace one of his mentors, along with the usual philosophical material--and Hegel doesn't admire Kant's TI as much as some may think).
(the RCC still has Hegel stuffed in purgatory. Or is it....Hell)
We cannot be free to chose good unless we're also free to chose evil.
That sounds like Plantinga, who overlooks the entire "natural evil" scenario---plagues, earthquakes, tidal waves, etc., as well as the "collateral damage" point. Were the people imprisoned and killed by nazis and stalinists free to choose ...like anything? Not really. The thousands of iraqi civilians killed were not free to escape, really. So that all counts against the supposed..omni-benevolence (and few would care to believe in a Ghengis Khan deity, would they??)
The Plantinga-style point on "valor" thus doesn't hold much water. That said, I don't think the Evidential problem of Evil (or unmerited suffering as some term it) conclusively disproves....theism, but however trite or obvious, should be considered (..Ivan Karamazov considered it). It seems rather problematic for rational theologians (ie, Design types...and Thomists, IMHE) who believe they can use inductive/a posteriori arguments as proof for G*d's existence.
Considering the EPOE together with the ..textual issue (ie, problems confirming the reliability of the scripture/gospels, probability of supposed supernatural events, etc), and status of other faiths, and any sort of rational theology seems rather unlikely. But...I don't thereby say... meaningless. Perhaps we should view Aquinas's Five Ways and most Rat.Theo as...metaphorical and symbolic, instead of strictly philosophical.
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit does attempt to trace God's philosophy through a study of natural history, or what was known of it when Hegel was composing it in the very early 1800s (published in 1808).
But Hegel also to a very large extent opposes spirit to matter. He has one joke in the book. To my mind it's a very good one, and the best thing in the book, possibly summarizing Hegel's entire philosophy.
He states on about p. 220 (my copy of this book is still in a cupboard in Finland), that anybody who believes in phrenology (how the bumps on our head determine our spirit) deserves a bump on the head.
When we get to Marx some decades after this, he has the famous sentence in the foreword or preface to A Contribution Toward Political Philosophy that it is our material surroundings that determine our spirit, thus supposedly standing Hegel on his head.
However, if Marx is correct in this, it means that we would never be able to change history. We would merely be flotsam and jetsam in the river of history. Hegel's philosophy does to some extent imply this, because he seems to argue from the viewpoint of the Owl of Minerva that everything had a preexisting design, that God was all along in History, and thus no individuals really had anything to do with the slave uprisings in Rome, or with the early Bonapartist revolution in France which Hegel had hailed without really understanding that Bonaparte was about to crown himself Emperor, and quit himself of the rabble of democracy.
The bible, Aristotle, Aquinas, and the rest did not understand ecological history as well as we do now. Why is it a war of teeth and nails, poisonous fangs, and the ability to run for cover? Stu posits that this is an aspect of creativity, and that the incredible armoring and counter-arming that goes on between species is artful, and thus to be admired.
I like this, but I think it's still important to look beyond history to something else having to do with the intrusion into history of God. First, Christ's. Secondly, Luther's. There are of course many other intrusions into history.
Against Hegel's ordering of history there is the notion of something stepping in from outside of history and interrupting the flow. Christ blew apart the Roman empire by announcing new principles, which were distributed by Paul and the apostles.
Luther also redistributed ideas and spirit, even within the RCC.
Mother Theresa is operating on principles unknown to the hierarchy in Rome, unknown to the hierarchies of the caste system in India. She is ministering to untouchables!
Mother Theresa is one individual. Of course, her outfit has an immense institutional history, having to do with the RCC itself. I don't think we can discount the history of the RCC as simply one of monstrous madness (which it had seemed to Luther).
Against Hegel and the orderly progress of history, there is Kierkegaard, and the eruption of single and unique actions by individuals who have made a leap of faith, and brought new principles from outside of history.
If the organization of evolution appears to trot along developing increasing armamentation climaxing in the atomic bombs on Hiroshima but symbolized by the armadillo or the artichoke, there is a countervalent tradition in which the sheep end up winning out at the end of history. This is already announced to an extent when a child triumphs over Goliath.
The spirit is something else.
It is something new in history. We can love each other. It isn't reliable, and it requires a leap of faith, but it represents a new avant-garde -- one that is not military in its intentions, but which nevertheless brings a certain militancy of kindness and neighborliness.
Kindness as an avant-garde action for its own sake: risking everything.
This is why Mother Theresa is a Lutheran Surrealist saint, as is Helen Keller, and Aung Sang Kyi. We are perhaps unable to go there ourselves (reliably) but it does exist! Even the Dalai Lama is there, which is why we support him against the leaders of China like Hu, or the psychotic generals in Burma.
I think somehow the spirit will win. But I don't know what it will mean. I can see the lion lying down with the lamp, and reading pums.
......God was all along in History, and thus no individuals really had anything to do with the slave uprisings in Rome, or with the early Bonapartist revolution in France which Hegel had hailed without really understanding that Bonaparte was about to crown himself Emperor, and quit himself of the rabble of democracy.
That's not exactly sunday school judeo-Christianity is it--the Absolute as a progress, ever-Becoming, developing from lower to higher stages, via struggle, war, national/cultural tensions,--Dialectic. Some might call that a rather Manichean view, in terms of religion (that might seem trite ...so be it). A Bonaparte...appears at a certain stage in Rio Historia; if Deus exists, He allowed it didn't he. The sort of common moralistic objections miss the interesting Process--sort of entropic actually.
J,
That sounds like Plantinga, who overlooks the entire "natural evil" scenario---plagues, earthquakes, tidal waves, etc., as well as the "collateral damage" point.
I don't know Plantinga, but I do know Polkinghorne. What you call "natural evil" seems an overreach. Is our universe a dangerous place? Surely. The death rate is 1, and we who are condemned to the conseqences of this terrible unity resent it. We could have peace between nations, that one glorious day of Jewish myth in which no law of the Lord is broken anywhere, and our species be wiped out by a comet the next morning. Mysterious indeed are the ways of the Lord! But comets delivered water to our planet, and without them, life couldn't exist. Indeed, without comets, dinasaurs might be still be masters of the earth, and humanity not even a flicker in the eye of the tyrannisaurus, your emblem in former days. Plagues, earthquakes, etc., are continually reshaping our planet and life on it, destroying what was, and creating opportunities for what will be. We wouldn't be here without them. And if we don't find a way to take ourselves out, they eventually will. Possibly enabling other creatures to arise in our absence who will know the Lord.
Were the people imprisoned and killed by nazis and stalinists free to choose ...like anything?
What is evil but the choice to do injury to another? Are we subject to the actions of our fellow man? Obviously. Our choices affect more than just our lives. Why blame God for our sin? Our mortal life is in the hands of our fellow man, and subject to the caprese of nature. Life eternal rests safely in the care of the Lord.
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(2 of 2)
That said, I don't think the Evidential problem of Evil (or unmerited suffering as some term it) conclusively disproves....theism, but however trite or obvious, should be considered (..Ivan Karamazov considered it). It seems rather problematic for rational theologians (ie, Design types...and Thomists, IMHE) who believe they can use inductive/a posteriori arguments as proof for G*d's existence.
Fair enough. But why lump me in with them? Do I see Evil in the world? Sure. Do I believe God created evil? That's a harder question. Certainly the capacity to do evil exists in God's creation. It exists in our very hearts... those "secret thoughts and desires that I cannot fully comprehend, but which are known unto you."
There are those who believe that God's plan involves mapping out every detail of earth's history, including their lives. I'm not one of them. God's plan was to create a universe that had all kinds of capabilities and potentials, including life, including creatures like us capable of perceiving and responding to him. As well as robbing, raping, and murdering each another. Chaos is just the word the losers in life's lottery use to describe creation's creative potential. That's not a slam on you: as I said, the death rate is 1. We're all losers.
Considering the EPOE together with the ..textual issue (ie, problems confirming the reliability of the scripture/gospels, probability of supposed supernatural events, etc), and status of other faiths, and any sort of rational theology seems rather unlikely.
I don't agree. Are there textual issues? Of course. But few of any real theological significance, and those that are typically involve the retrojection of later orthodoxies in the text, either accidentally, or out of a false sense of devotion. Textual variants are a problem for literalists, for people who have a "long pen" understanding of what it means to say the Bible is inspired, and who believe that God preserves every word of scripture in its intended form, instead of entrusting his Word to a careless humanity and the ravages of time. Whereas, it seems evident to me that the "careless humanity" theory is a better explanation, with consequences we need to face up to.
I believe that knowledge of God is available to all peoples, and that most religions contain within them a kernel (and often much more) of genuine inspiration. This isn't to say that I think there's a level field, and that all religions are equally valid. But I think it behooves us to approach the religions of others with both humility and confidence: we might hear the Word of God in their witness; they might hear it in ours.
In ways Hegelian dialectic, whether one believes in it or not, also resembles traditional vedic Hinduism, IMHE (as do some of the early greek polytheists). Great cycles, historical epochs, warrior dynasties, flowing in the river of Time. The 1000 names of Vishnu, Kirby. Hegel's the poet's philosopher for that matter. Not Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck or even Loother.
Free will is important in the larger picture.
I liked Stu's notions that apocalyptic type material (volcanos, earthquakes, comets that hit the earth) bring good things sometimes.
I am less sanguine about humanity's disappearance to be replaced by some other creature that knows God. But it's an amazing thought, too.
A poetry contest having to do with basic beliefs, anyone?
The EPOE as an argument against the existence of God places God within the bounds of the laws that He passed onto man, which would make him not-God.
So if you require a faith that would impose human morality on a Godhead, you have already made your decision.
To believe in God is to accept your own incredible smallness of vision and understanding, and to acknowledge something infinite that exists beyond your realm of understanding.
It would be like expecting humans to behave like Atoms...except with an infinitely greater gap, since we're closer in size and scope a single atom than we are to God.
God has blessed us with law and Grace, by giving us an understanding of how best to exist in this world...
But to hold God to following his own commands in terms of 'morality' would be infinitely more ridiculous than expecting a parent to wear a diaper because his kid does...
Or to say that a parent can leave the front yard...
Except, of course, again, 'twould be infinitely more ridiculous.
By expecting of God something akin to human morality, you are unGodifying him, and therefore your argument is basically a tautology - You don't believe in God because you don't believe in something big enough to be outside the bounds of human morality...
Which is to say, you don't believe in God.
It's similar to if you only believe in things that can be gotten to by reason - You then are, by definition, in a state where you do not believe in God.
For if God is that which exists outside of the natural world (the world in which reason holds sway), he can by definition not be gotten to solely through reason.
Nor can He be disproven by reason - if you have faith in something that can be disproven thusly, your faith is in something smaller than God.
There's a reason it's called a Leap of faith, and not a step.
Poets are concerned with ...Naming, are they not, KO?
So...why not...Vishnu as the name for ...the all-pervading Being, instead of the nordic G*d (from gothic, Gott), aka Deus/Dios, etc. Vedic sanskrit dates to what 2000BC (if not earlier): the goth "G*d" was used until after fall of Roman Emp., 400 AD or so.
Moreover the Hindu concept of...G*d is not some Otherworldly old, bearded jewish King pulling the strings but...Being manifested in our earthly reality, in ...Matter, time, and History itself (not unlike Hegel....or Aristotle, in some sense).
for that matter, I doubt most padres quite approve of L's translation of Deus/Theos ("God"....like..Thor?). They burnt 'em at the stake initially (as with the oxfordian --Wycliffe?--who dared to translation the Vulgate into the....anglo pirate's dialect)
So if you require a faith that would impose human morality on a Godhead, you have already made your decision.
You mean...requiring that our ideas of God have some relation to our conceptions of Justice? Yes. That's in the fine print of the New Testament as well, isn't it--"Loving". Even traditional catholics granted that.
Your claim is....stranger (sounds ....Calvinist..or jewish). You worship ...a supposed God-King merely because he's God-king, like Henry VIII on high. Mere obedience. A reasonable believer has faith (...maybe) that Justice exists, like...a universal. Stalins..and Hitlers are in Hell (don't ask where).
For that matter, in the koine Greek of the NT, the word for G*d is... Theos (not the JHVH of the OT either), or rather the germanic word for Theos is...G*d. But that arguably does not translate it sort of like gk. "Ouranon" does not equal ..Hebbin'.
J,
for that matter, I doubt most padres quite approve of L's translation of Deus/Theos ("God"....like..Thor?).
I don't understand your point. The RCC of his day opposed Luther's translation of the Bible into the vernacular, as they did all such efforts. But it seems to me that Luther's translations of various forms of "God" fit both the original and the Vulgate, so there's not much point in singling this out for condemnation.
The Hebrew scriptures use two words for God (I'll transliterate...)
1) Elohiym, a word that usually referred to the one God (Hebrew was the language of the monotheistic Jews, after all), but which could be used generically, c.f., Ps 18:31, "For who is God except the LORD?" The Vulgate translates Elohiym as Deus, a word that was also used to describe the pagan gods; English uses God, and German (Luther 1545) uses Gott. If anything, the German Gott and English God seem less objectionable than the Latin Deus, because AFAIK, the German and English kings never appropriated "Gott/God," and so did not profane their word by applying it to mortals, whereas the Roman Emperors used "Deus" to refer to themselves, and did.
2) Yahweh, the personal name of the Jewish God, which can refer to no other. Generally speaking, translations from the Hebrew have declined to directly translate the personal name of God, honoring the post-exilic Jewish tradition that the one name should not be pronounced, lest it be accidentally profaned. The first translation of the Hebrew scriptures that we have is LXX, and it basically punts, using θεὸς (theos) to translate Elohiym, Yahweh, and Yahweh Elohiym. This reflects Jewish practice, wherein the substitution of Elohiym for Yahweh is made in reading. The Vulgate took a somewhat different path, translating Yahweh as Dominus, a word that roughly equates to the English Lord, in that it can be applied to human rulers, and presumably was applied to the emperors. Tyndale used LORde, and English translations descending from it (the KJV tree) have used variations of this, often using small caps or all caps to distinguish the use (as surrogate for the personal name of God) from the ordinary use of the term to apply to one's betters. Indeed, Tanakh (the Jew Publication Society's translation of the Hebrew Scriptures) uses LORD too. Luther used HERR, using typography much as Tyndale did to distinguish the use of the word in referring to the divine from ordinary uses. I'll note in passing that the Jerusalem Bible is AFAIK the first major English translation of the Bible to simply use the transliterated name "Yahweh," and a few succeeding translations (NJB, HCSB, WEB) have done likewise.
J has come around in fits for many years, and his essential beef is that reason and faith can't be reconciled. I think the rest of us already accept that, but he's a kind of doubting Thomas who wants to believe, but finds rationality to be a stumbling block. I argued with him for years on this point, to no avail. Maybe someone else can explain to him what a leap of faith means better than I can.
Meanwhile, he goes around and around on the topic, sometimes quite brilliantly, sometimes like some kind of bug that's burning on a light and is full of desperate fury.
Not sure what to do with this kind of case. What does the RCC handbook suggest?
I'm not sure that Lutherans are supposed to try to explain anything. But maybe Stu's branch has some kind of inkling what to say in such cases.
Suffice it to say that Luther said you had to be a complete fool to believe in God, and Christ himself said that intelligent and clever people would never amount to anything, and that he was looking for the simple, and the broken, and those who were like children.
J's ferocious intellect won't let him believe.
But nobody comes to God through their intellect.
The first translation of the Hebrew scriptures that we have is LXX, and it basically punts, using θεὸς (theos) to translate Elohiym, Yahweh, and Yahweh Elohiym.
Not exactly. It doesn't "punt": in fact the LXX was a supremely charitable act--the words of the Old Testament Genesis, Exodus, etc...all come from the Greek. There was no "hebrew" language, at least grammatical sort at the time. Greek was the scholarly tongue, from at least 500 BC forward (latin as well).
There were semitic myths, and various dialects, perhaps a few ...potshards, egyptian-jewish markings (the Romans considered Passover a blasphemy of a high sort) , etc with Aramaic as the ..lingua franca in the middle east. The JHVH tetragrammaton was not really a "word" and not written. The myths of the jews were passed via oral tradition, not literary, nor grammatical (as say, the Vedas were, even in 2000 BC or so).
The Greek was an upgrade, and the LXX translation the Ur-text of judeo-christianity. The later texts are all hypothetical (including the Masoretic). Even St. Augustine knew the score on that (and called Jerome a fibber). There was no hebrew New Testament--the early christians all wrote in Koine greek, as the terms show (many of which had no equivalents in...semitic words. Like...Theos). Sunday schoolers just lied to us for years (and...Luther himself was known to tell fibs).
Read a bit of Aquinas's Summa (not my guru, but interesting). There are few references to the OT--some (mainly the later books, Isaiah, Ezekiel, etc) but far more to Aristotle, Augustine, and the gospels of the New Testament--though when in a pinch, St Thomas usually relies on the...Philosopher (Aristotle). In brief... Christianity was about Reason (ie, the Logos), not affirming the dogma of the Torah or mosaic code (which, alas,Lyell and Darwin have now modified rather substantially as well).
Kirby, someone --even a somewhat reasonable Christian, not necessarily a Catholic--should explain to you, KO, the absurdity of...Credo Que Absurdum, since you overlook the EPOE and the reliability of the text issue (ie..miracles), not to say even the Jefferson/Lockean sort of point (ie, Faith shall be subjected to the Court of Reason. moreover, Jefferson excised any and all references to miracles or supernatural from his abridged New Testament).
For that matter, I don't completely dismiss someone like Nietzsche, who had issues, but nothing but scorn for Luther's insistence that "the Just shall live by Faith". When you or a family member's ill, you're not calling your Reverend are you (or priest). You start by calling the Doctor. Even one who celebrates Diwali, instead of Xmas. Modern medicine did not come about via faith, but by years of careful experiments, improved technology, bio-chemistry-- ...Reason, in short.
But that is the circle we keep going around. Medicine also has a kind of faith in it.
In finland, it was the Lutheran doctors who worked so hard to get the passage of children's rights.
They aren't separate.
Why should anyone bother to help another person unless they believe that that person is made in the image of God?
If we are just about being powerful, and all strength to the strong, as Nietzsche said he believed, then of couirse whip the women, injure horses, and smash children with baseball bats while laughing -- the whole Attila the Hun procedure, or the procedure that we now see among the drug cartels of Mexico.
However, if you have faith, it gives you a reason to help others. Not only to not kill, but to help them keep their lives.
We want our cures to work, so we use reason to the extent we're capable.
I've never been able to figure out where the catch is for you. It seems so simple to see that Protestantism quite simply WORKS MIRACLES, as does Catholicism, but it does so with reason as its corollary, rather than as its m.o.
But belief itself can't arrive via reason. Circles amuse themselves. squares go to work every day for forty years to provide for their children.
The triangle exists, too.
It seems so simple to see that Protestantism quite simply WORKS MIRACLES
Tell that to say some of the WASP Vets who returned to the USA missing an arm or leg. All the prayers in the world (even from the most pious of Bapticks) will not grow them new limbs.
Anyway, I don't deny religion may do good. Pragmatically speaking, I believe in the principles of the New Testament. Yet...religious hysteria results in much harm as well. Even J. attends La Iglesia a few times... a decade.
Obviously this is just the usual LS f-ing around. Perhaps take on, say, Hume's essay on miracles (yes, Hume may have been dastardly, ugly, corrupt. Kant and Hegel hated him. That doesn't negate his arguments). The Founders were aware of Hume (though kept it to themselves). Franklin often echoes Humean themes.
Now, I m not saying .."Humean skepticism" is correct (as you probably hastily conclude). Im saying ...even the faithful should deal with the EPOE, and something like Hume's points regarding the...reliability of scriptural testimony (add other fun stuff-- Darwin/Lyell, fossil record, evolution, radiometric dating,..status of other faiths such as Hinduism, Islam, etc).
Via Reason you'll soon discover the absurdity of...Credo Que Absurdum. Believe if you will (or at least respect...the Christian metaphors), but never mistake your faith for a belief which is grounded in Reason, science, and evidence. It's just a....leap in the dark.
J,
the LXX was a supremely charitable act--the words of the Old Testament Genesis, Exodus, etc...all come from the Greek. There was no "hebrew" language, at least grammatical sort at the time. Greek was the scholarly tongue, from at least 500 BC forward (latin as well). And more of the same...
There's some truth in here, mixed in with a heck of statements that few, if any, scholars would accept.
I don't know where you got the notion that there were no Hebrew Scriptures, but it's refuted by the Dead Sea Scrolls, inscriptions, and as well as by ancient histories of the LXX (which characterize it as a translation from Hebrew texts).
I'll try to sort it out, mostly so that others aren't mislead, as we've argued this before. Our names for some of the Hebrew Scriptures books do come from the LXX. That speaks to popularity. The LXX was the Old Testament from the point of view of the Greek-speaking early churches, which came to dominate over Aramaic/Hebrew speaking Jewish-Christian churches.
The Great Isaiah scroll (designated Qa, one of the DSS) is independently dated by carbon-14 and paleography to the second-century BC. The tetragrammaton appears in the Qa, refuting your claim, 'The JHVH tetragrammaton was not really a "word" and not written.'
The myths of the jews were passed via oral tradition, not literary, nor grammatical.
There is copious evidence that this is false. Can you offer anything more than an assertion in support?
The Greek was an upgrade, and the LXX translation the Ur-text of judeo-christianity.
The first part is an opinion, the second part concedes the point you're trying to establish. You can't translate what doesn't exist. That said, LXX certainly was scripture for Greek-speaking early churches, as well as Greek speaking Jewish congregations in the diaspora, but they're not all that there was. The Jews and early Jewish-Christians of the Levant spoke Aramaic in Galilee and Hebrew in Judea. There's no reason to believe that they'd have worshiped in Greek.
The later texts are all hypothetical (including the Masoretic)
The Dead Sea Scrolls are physical artifacts, available to us today. There's nothing hypothetical about them.
Even St. Augustine knew the score on that (and called Jerome a fibber).
Hmm. Looking at The City of God, I see where you got some of your ideas. But even The City of God affirms that the LXX was translated from Hebrew (c.f., Chapter 42). I'll grant that Augustine prefers the LXX to the Hebrew Scriptures he had access to, and he argues that it is the more reliable text.
Modern scholarship sheds some light on this. It argues that there were several major textual variants of the Hebrew Scriptures current in the ancient world (much as there characteristically Alexandrian, Byzantine, and western textual families of the Greet NT). The Masoretic Text derives from the Babylonian family, and the LXX may have derived from another
There was no hebrew New Testament
There are scholars who believe that Matthew was first written in Hebrew, and then rewritten in Greek. This is a minority view, but not nearly as far from the scholarly mainstream as your claims.
Read a bit of Aquinas's Summa
I tried once. Section 1.1.2 (!) has a logical hole you can drive a truck through. Sideways. It put me off the project. Anyway, Aquinas comes about a millenium too late to be a primary witness on this question.
Well, I don't know how many times I have to say it. Reason and faith are inextricably separate.
And yet reason requires postulates. Hume goofed up when he said we could only understand things that are empirical. Kant proves this wrong when he says the human mind is wired to understand time and space (when you ask your friend to meet you for a spot of tea in such and such a Japanese restaurant at such and such you expect her or him to understand the coordinates and to get there if they have agreed or else you drop the friend).
He goes further and suggests we have moral reason that is universal.
At least within most couples it is, or else the relationship's kaput.
We can also see beauty in the same things, even though there's no way to make beauty empirical. Some people see it, and some don't.
God is similar. Some feel it, and some may really not have anything in them, something in them is missing. So when most people are at a church in tune with God, there may be someone there thinking, but my fingers feel nothing, and my taste buds are empty, so I don't know what these other people are doing.
Hume may have been one of these.
He was a bit of a playboy, too, and his argument may have beent o allow himself leeway in that regard. But let's say he felt no guilt, and didn't care about the commandment against adultery, let's say he would go with Nussbaum even toward the polygamy notion, or even with the Arabs toward 72 virgins on a plate --
People are made differently. I can't explain this.
It's like a blind person who claims there is no such thing as sight. What can I say?
for him, there isn't.
J seems to think that because Faith does not come from Reason, it therefore must exist only in the absence of reason.
This is logically unsound. I'm sure Stu or JADL might be able to name the fallacy, since they're smarter than I am.
Nobody here would expect that our faith would regrow body parts.
Of course we go to the doctor for physical problems in the natural world...
I think there is something telling about the way you use ellipses, J... Your pauses come in unexpected, abnormal, seemingly unnecessary places. I am pleased to see that your rhetoric has become clearer, more substantive, and less aggressive - yet there still seems to be a disconnect.
Reason and faith are worlds apart, like ethics and aesthetics.
They have something to do with one another, but we mere mortals can't quite close the gap.
Some genius some day probably will, or maybe the species is developing toward that point.
At this point, we are definitely a primitive bunch of clodhoppers hellbent on destruction but with some beautiful dreams that have nothing to do with the way we generally act.
This is why Luther insists on LAW.
We cannot depend on people to behave as if they are saints.
I have never in my life known anyone who could reasonably be considered a true saint.
Well, I dee see an aquacephalic once, in the Baltimore Aquarium.
Kirby,
Reason and faith are inextricably separate.
Separate? Perhaps. But deeply, deeply intertwined. Clearly you can't make the leap from reason to faith by reason alone. But this hardly means that once the leap is made, reason can't serve faith, build faith, and defend faith.
I'll grant that faith alone suffices for child. And many Christians, remembering Mark 10:15 = Luke 18:17, "Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it," believe that Christian obedience requires setting reason, with its claims and obligations, aside.
I believe this misconstrues Jesus's intent, which is made clearer by considering the pericope in its entirety: "People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, 'Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.' And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them." Who brought the children to Jesus? People. Their parents. They did not come of their own, but were brought to Jesus, to receive his touch, his blessing. It is their parents' faith that made this possible, not theirs. Just as we cannot save ourselves, but require grace as a means to faith. And Jesus's words are in the context of a rebuke to his disciples (whom he called as adults, after all!): don't get between me and the people I'm here to save! Don't erect barriers of age or understanding.
I think we should remember 1 Cor 13:8ff, "Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love." Faith alone yields only faith. The wide-eyed faith of a child begins and ends with adoration. Adoration is a fine thing, but we not children. Faith call us to more. It is through reason, augmenting faith, that we find hope and love in the Christian message.
Clearly St. Paul recognizes the limits of reason. Not all will be revealed in this life, and reason won't change that. In this life, we see only dimly. But not even dimly if we don't look.
Brett,
J seems to think that because Faith does not come from Reason, it therefore must exist only in the absence of reason.
This is logically unsound. I'm sure Stu or JADL might be able to name the fallacy, since they're smarter than I am.
Smarter isn't relevant, and perhaps not even true. Knowledgeable is relevant, but I'm not much help in this specific case. But I see J's error here as essentially a false alternative. If we negate "faith comes from reason," a proposition to which we all assent, we don't get "faith comes from unreason," we get "faith does not come from reason." At which point, all good Lutherans will say, "Of course not. Faith comes from grace!"
I should remember all the logical fallacies. Maybe JADL knows them.
I think it's possible that it's a false dichotomy.
Maybe it's a fallacy having to do with what comes first.
If we can't logically show why we believe something, and the steps that led up to it, then you shouldn't believe or feel it.
This would discount the bolt from the blue which is love.
I wish we knew more about J. All we know is he's a computer guy in a desert, went to UC Boulder, studied logic at some point, etc.
But here we are trying to use reason to induce faith in him, even though we ourselves didn't arrive there in that way. For me it was a bolt from the blue in a Finnish church when my daughter was baptized. It was something I didn't expect. I began to weep uncontrollably.
Quite embarrassing. Everybody pretended not to notice.
I went on like that for weeks.
It was hardly a series of logical steps.
I think that without a bolt from the blue like that, J just won't get it, so maybe we should stop talking about it.
It took me hours to burrow out of the snowstorm that hit in two successive stages here in the Catskills and closed all the schools for two days.
Stu's buried even deeper, according to the weather report on WGN. 2 feet?
We got maybe 16 inches. Today's was much heavier than yesterday's.
I'm also snowed under with paper.
But I should get out from under it all on Friday, and am thinking of a poetry contest to do with axiomatic beliefs.
Or maybe love as belief, or something, to end on Valentine's Day?
I know all the logical fallacies.
Fundamentalist christianity usually involves a host of fallacies--like begging the question. God exists because the ...Bible says so, and anything in the Bible is true? Nyet. Even the catholics avoid that one, and...have attempted to use ...Aquinas Five Ways as rational arguments for God.Not that they've worked (tho....the Arg. from Design might show... something spiritual. Not necessarily judeo-christianity).
And really, Hume's point on miracles, in brief (ignored by Kirby and Brett's laundry lists of ad hominems) was....any text which claims supernatural events occurred is suspect--contra the uniformity of experience. Im not going to outline the entire text, but it's sound legalist reasoning. The testimony of people who refer to ghosts is...inadmissable, at least as evidence. There's other, more viable explanations--mistakes, exaggerations...possibly a hoax. Now, HUme grants people might believe anyway (in...virgin births, dead arising, ghosts, 7 headed demons like Book of Rev.claims, etc) . But their testimony carries no weight;a fortiori, the ancient reports of miracles in both the OT AND NT are not admissable, and also render the texts...suspect. Edward Gibbon agreed with that view as well--as did most of the Founding Fathers.
Re the DSS.
There were no texts found predating the LXX. In fact there were texts which confirmed it---and which suggest that the Masoretic depended on LXX (One reason the Israelis have silenced much DSS talk). For that matter, the texts were usually in Aramaic, the ancient semitic . There is no hebrew before 2nd era BC; which is to say ..after the LXX. For that matter jewish scholars have admitted...the history and archaeology does not support the OT, and argued the earliest sections be viewed as myth, including the "exodus". A Moises may have existed, but probably time of Ramses--and rather curious that nearly all mosaic myths echo the egyptians. My reading leads me to believe that the jews were not even unified until AFTER Alex I, when they were hellenized.
The OT texts to LXX translation also involved much editing/selection. Hume would again hold. We have no way to confirm..anything, and reports of miracles render it suspect; and archaeology does not support the OT (for one, it ignores much of the persians rule, until Alex I).
None of the LS regs have even bothered with the status of other religions, not to say Hume's specific argument contra-miracles and inerrancy of scripture. But ad hom will do (against Hume, or me, or anyone you disagree with).
Finally the research methods of evolution (including radiometric dating)...falsfied the creation account in Genesis. That in itself destroyed the literal, inerrant views of fundamentalists.
Kirby,
I should remember all the logical fallacies. Maybe JADL knows them.
I think it's possible that it's a false dichotomy.
False dichotomy, false alternative. Same thing. Maybe there's a canonical list somewhere. I have a great book on rhetorical logic, at work. Given the weather, it might as well be on the moon.
But here we are trying to use reason to induce faith in him, even though we ourselves didn't arrive there in that way.
If we were doing that, we'd be pretty pathetic. After all, this part of the discussion began the premise that "faith doesn't come from reason," which I think we all believe. I believe that what we're trying to do is to show that reason and faith are compatible, even if one doesn't necessarily lead to the other. Because while reason doesn't lead to faith, a strongly held belief that reason is incompatible with faith can create an obstacle that even grace can't overcome.
Stu's buried even deeper, according to the weather report on WGN. 2 feet?
It's that deep in the city. More like 18" here. I've seen much deeper snows that this in Michigan, but snow this deep really snarls Chicago, which relies heavily on on-street parking and has narrow side streets. A big storm like this, and you have a chicken-and-egg problem: you can't plow until you move the cars, and you can't move the cars until you plow. Anyway, they're expecting to get the arterial streets cleared by evening, and then the hard work of going block-to-block down the side streets can begin.
The University was closed today, for the first time in the 30 years I've worked here. It's closed tomorrow too.
wow
what a discussion
i'm in a state of bewilderment
i've tried to send a few things through
but i've lost whole long comment streams of words
humbly i submit
to the capriciousness inherent
in this toy
this laptop
the reasoning becomes convoluted and i have difficulty weaving through it all for some link to coherence at least people are talking civily which is no mean feat in this
stu
(the degrees of knowledge - j maritain) or
(man and the state)
two good ones
i will hold forth with my rather typical blather about the tradition which informs the way i look at the world
thomas' agenda for knowing is articulated more succinctly in
summa contra gentiles
since the 19th century it has been rather common (j) for catholic theologians who approach the tradition systematically ( they are generally referred to as systematicians ) they use the historical structure of hegel quite unabashedly ( in fact it is a little known fact that almost qnything that reveals itself as valuable in terms of insight is used in catholic ongoing theological debate why these days feminist thinkers lacan derrida etc. - all these thinkers have a way of making their work known in catholic debate...if it poses an important question some catholic thinker will face up to it -- david tracey in chicago has a way of reading and bringing almost everything into his theological vision
thomas
and the tradition he upheld and developed and embellished and made new articualtes the idea of reason as the defining principle for man such that intellectual activity is that which makes us most like god
and love is the summit of that effort we are not free until we are free to love freely - unselfishly
all of catholic theology from the apostolic writers to the tensions of the present day is an exercise in attempting to be reasonable about revelation - to the extent that this has happened at all is quite miraculous - and it continues
faith without reason becomes sentimental piety
reason without faith becomes intellectual tyranny
the fact that we are thinking creatures is a given from the very beginning of christian thought
even christ himself challenged people to think
as he does still
it is one thing to have faith it is another to live by it
and yet another to actually believe that it matters
and yet another thing
to make daily acknowledgement of faith
i think kirby has faith because he experiences surrealism
it is like incense on a very hot day
what goes around comes around
that's a whirling dervish prayer
it's the rational ones i really worry about however
how many squares in a minute circle
can there be
i have no expectation that this is going to get on the comment stream
things whirling in space
i should spend more time fishing
said jesus to peter
anyway
great guy babble over here
anyone got a cigarette
jh
I think trying to reason someone into faith isn't very fruitful.
Apologetics can be an unseemly endeavor.
That being said, defending faith with reason, and pointing out that faith and reason can co-exist, even if faith exists outside of reason, is of some value.
Stu's reason/unreason thing was spot on. And I can't help but wonder if the thing that makes J use ellipses in weird places points to the same quality that makes him read 'Faith does not come from reason' as 'faith comes from unreason.'
My bolt out of the blue came when I was in highschool, trying to fall asleep in the bathroom (it was carpeted, and the sound of the heater was pleasant...[I never said I wasn't kinda weird])
Well, it was either that, or the fact that youth-group girls were prettier and dressed and walked without seeming grotesque.
I think it's possible that it's a false dichotomy.
False dichotomy, false alternative.
No in fact, it's not Stu. You're begging the question again. It's not "Faith or no Faith". Without the religious people defining what...'faith" consists in, that means about 8ere9u7343 or ~(8ere9u7343). When you put "Faith" in a proposition, that points to...what, Stu?
It's...start by defining your terms. Really, I don't think faith can even be defined (and questionable the translation is correct). Even saying...it's a belief of a type doesn't really define "faith". Now, I think there may be a mental act which we can call faith. But how does one know? Sort of like...how do you know the person praying is really .."praying" or just a good actor (and you overlooked another key skeptical point on the....ineffectiveness of prayer. Sort of grim, but any reasonable person must award points in the skeptics' column there. Prayers didnt stop WWI and WWII (and many mamas were praying for the sons, believe it). It may do some good, as a type of meditation...but nuff said)
Belief in itself does not prove anything. And ignores the entire ...reliability of testimony issue. Do you believe the supposed miracles/omens that were reported before Caesar's death really happened? So why....those of New Testament?? As far as the literal, historical reading of the Bible goes, I think the skeptics also have rather compelling arguments. Ancient texts, little historical evidence, reports of the supernatural, possibility of exaggeration, and mistakes. Edward Gibbon himself was...well, he certainly wasn't agreeing to the calvinists (or any fundamentalists) who thought scripture inerrant. Nor were the FOunders of the US.
Kant posits a "synthetic a priori", including spacetime, in hopes of defeating empiricism. Does he succeed? Not in any conclusive sense. Kant scholar Im not, but im pretty sure he was no biblethumper for that matter. HE doesn't accept Aquinas's arguments. Kant rarely writes on theology. The possibility of G*d, soul, Freedom are.... Noumenal. I think he's in the skeptic column, though he had to be a bit careful (was under house arrest for some time). Kant had a bust of Rousseau in his study. He's opposed to the Jerry Falwells or Glenn Becks or Limbaughs of the age.
Reasoned skepticism of whatever sort is not good for business. But "Faith" whatever that is, is.
I have a book at the office called Good Arguments by Connie Missimer, but it's a bit dry. Here's a list of fallacies online that seems fairly complete:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
I think J's major fallacy is to think that if something isn't scientifically sound, then it isn't true. The area of competency for science is relatively small and doesn't take on board morality, for an example.
That said, I don't know what to think of Christ's miracles. A French book I read on Hermes Trimegestes (spelling?) said that this magician (who briefly appears in ACTS) was known for being able to fly, among other wonders. He also created Helen of Troy out of his rib (mirroring Adam in Genesis).
So these sorts of miracles were commonplace, the argument went, and thus the miracles of Jesus were also a pack of lies meant to take in the simpletons.
I basically ignore Jesus walking on water, and multiplying the bread, and even the Resurrection. That is, I don't know if these things are true or not. I don't see why they matter.
What I like is the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments (especially with Luther's positive corollaries), the notion of marriage, and some other things that seem more down to earth.
The more high-flown stuff (including the idea of leaving one's family and going out to help the poor a la Mother Theresa) strike me as being for black belt Christians.
I'm a kind of pink or green belt at best.
I follow the law, I try to help my friends follow the law, and I try to do my job as per the family, and as per my actual job, and I try to do a bit of outreach in terms of conversation starting.
Hume's argument in his book on Miracles (a very brief book) is that since we haven't seen one, then they must not exist.
He also dismisses causality, let's remember. He claims just because we HAVE seen it, doesn't mean it will work that way every time.
That whole period in philosophy is an attempt to get down to the most basic common things. And he goes a bit far and wipes out everything including common sense.
Kant rebuilds a lot of what Hume wiped out, but his books are longer, and a lot trickier.
But it seems to me that both of them have a goal in sight before they begin. Hume was a playboy who wanted to wipe out his conscience.
Kant was a moralist, and wanted conscience back.
In order to understand philosophy you have to begin with what someone wants, and then follow the prestidigitation accordingly.
Plato was a member of the old guard of Athens, so he wanted there to be one truth. Gorgias was an interloper, so he wanted to explode the notion of one truth.
I think it's relevant to understanding where one is going, and how we are actually beholden to emotional commitments to our families, loved ones, and what we are trying to achieve, whether it's a seduction of a maid, or holding a village together, that determines our thinking.
At any rate, en route, we ought to try and keep our moves as clear as possible, I suppose, but also never forget that philosophers are human, and they want something before they begin philosophizing. Philosophers are Fallacious Wrecks (pun on Rex?).
At any rate, I don't like all of Christ's miracles very much. They may be true, who knows.
I also have trouble with string theory and the notion of eleven dimensions, and all that rot that Brian Greene keeps coming out with.
The notion that we are a soap bubble universe in a giant bubble bath of universes.
KO: I think J's major fallacy is to think that if something isn't scientifically sound, then it isn't true. The area of competency for science is relatively small and doesn't take on board morality, for an example.
Not exactly--IM the one who at least considers Aquinas's chestnuts, or the Watchmaker classic (the Lutheran gang isn't). Hume's Dialogues also engaged the question. But in regard to ...the dogma of the old testament, evolution should def. be considered. The world is not 5000 years old or whatever the old biblethumpers said. It's....hundreds of millions of years old. So, Genesis was falsified (or...reduced to myth, along with many other creation myths).Not real fancy, but dems the facts.
Now, some....theologians and philosophers---even scientists-- have attempted to reconcile religion and evolution (and modern science). SJ Gould's NOMA, while not my cup of tea, was an attempt. or Polkinghorne (but I contend Polk. while interesting is not at all an orthodox christian. He denies that "G*d"-- or Brahma, Being, the Absolute, Big Guy -- has...foreknowledge, and really omnipotence. To me, he concedes the chessmatch, right there. If you modify religion to be just "natural laws" then you're not a Christian monotheist (or jew, muslim). Maybe like a deist, or Spinoza sort. Or type of pantheist. But not ...monotheist).
"Morality"'s a separate issue --then, had you read Hume on the fact/value distinction you might have ... Do you mean....the code of the Old and New Testament? Then you're ...back to petitio principi (we've already demonstrated scripture...is fallible, ie, errant) Or do you mean...some rational ethics that can be demonstrated, proven?? Buena suerte with that.
You routinely make Falwell-like moralistic suggestions about people you don't like or who aren't in church with you-- that people who don't go to sundayschool are ...depraved, corrupt, perverted, etc. Baloney. In this day and age, with some many church/clergy scandals--both prot. and cat.--that insinuation means little or nothing. Now, many doubters, agnostics, skeptics, etc may be....corrupt.I don't really care for, say Dawkins. But they're outnumbered, greatly by religious frauds and opportunists of all types. Even a Dawkins hasn't locked ..children in a room and then well, proceeded to give 'em the Royal Nonesuch, as happened in ...Ireland and other places.
The problem is...you don't understand that ...all the Believer has is....Credo Que Absurdum. At least Kierkegaard however...irrational, sort of realized that. He believes in a sort of desperate sense while granting the skeptics' points--that his "faith" cannot be proven via arg. (as per Thomistic sorts), nor historically justified, or even shown to be useful. Nietzsche's mockery of the Kierkegaardian type still entertains. At least SK was an honest madman
J,
Not all Christians are fundamentalistic. Not all Christians are literalist. Indeed, both are small minorities within the faith, albeit minorities that are greatly overrepresented in the US, and especially in the west.
You ask about miracles. I don't know. All we have are the texts. The events themselves are not accessible. The Gospels are unique texts in that are essentially our sole accounts of the life of Christ. But miracles occur in other ancient texts (e.g., acts of the emperors). If I might paraphrase the earliest Christian witness, it is this: the Emperor is not God, God is God, and Jesus, not Caesar, is his son. Part of the way this played out was a self-conscious appropriation to Jesus of titles and attributes that were used to "prove" the emperor's divinity. The Gospels portrayed Jesus performing miracles because the acts of the emperors portrayed them performing miracles.
You make the mistake of judging the Gospels as history, and they are not. The miracle stories in the Gospels typically occur paired with stories that seem closer to historical account, e.g., healings of the blind are coupled with characterizations of the Pharisees as blind. In this way, the miracles represent a commentary on the events they are paired with, a literary device familiar to their contemporaneous audience.
Does this mean I'm agnostic with respect to miracles? No. I'd like to know. But the evidence does not convince me. And I'll note that the creeds don't refer to miracles, and so it is possible to be a perfectly orthodox Christian, and yet to be unconvinced about miracles. Of course, to be an orthodox Christian, you have to believe that Jesus is a person of the one God, and therefore was capable of miracles, whether or not he performed them according to the Gospel accounts. The uniformitarian framework you take can only dismiss claims of divinity, and therefore is prejudiced on the question, and deserves no privileged place. As for me, I take the position that Jesus's real miracle was to change men's hearts, and that the special effects distract moderns from this core point.
There's lots of good scholarship on literary analyses of the Bible. It is very relevant to this discussion.
Regarding your Hebrew fantasies. The DSS manuscripts are certainly older than any extant LXX manuscripts. You slant the field outrageously by standing on the antiquity of the LXX by appeal to history (a history that invariably characterizes it as a translation of Hebrew originals, which you omit), absent manuscripts that predate the DSS, while denying the antiquity of the Hebrew Scriptures, despite extant ancient manuscripts. Indeed, the most ancient LXX manuscripts we have are in the great Christian uncials, and the DSS are four centuries older still.
In the meantime, you're throwing out most of Israel's archaeology (while invoking one little piece), as well as its accepted history, in your effort to marginalize the Jews. Does the archaeology of Israel support the OT? It certainly does not support the OT account of the settlement of Israel, most notably the Joshua/Jericho story. But it does a decent job by historical standards (better than Herodotus, not as good as Thucydides) with later events, especially once you get into the monarchical period. The temple mount exists, as does Hezikiah's tunnel (whose 8th century BCE Hebrew dedication inscription refutes your theories).
Again, you take a false binary view: every witness must either be entirely reliable, or they're entirely unreliable. This isn't the way it works.
I would agree with you that post-exilic Judah/Galilee had a fairly miserable history, and was a "region" more than a nation. They were vassals of the Persians from the return until Alexander the Great, after which they were knocked around between the Seleucid and Ptolemic Empires. There was a brief period of relative autonomy for Judah (but not Galilee) under the Maccabees until they foolishly invited the Romans in.
Kirby,
I basically ignore Jesus walking on water, and multiplying the bread, and even the Resurrection. That is, I don't know if these things are true or not. I don't see why they matter.
Hmm. And you've doubted my orthodoxy. The resurrection is a biggie, Kirby. It's not an optional belief for Christians: review the Nicene creed.
Where there is wiggle room is in interpreting the resurrection. We believe that Christ lives. Some of the gospel accounts seem to be at pains to argue for a corporeal resurrection, e.g., fish for breakfast in John. Of course, John is late, and takes some pains to be anti-docetist, and a corporeal resurrection is rhetorically useful. Earlier accounts, c.f., Acts, have Jesus walking into locked rooms at Pentacost, and so seem to argue against a simple corporeal resurrection. And that whole ascension deal doesn't feel very corporeal to me.
Here is a case where reason lays a trap for the faithful. We confess that Christ lives. Reason insists on knowing the hows and the whys. But we don't have evidence beyond that witness, we can only guess. We're better off saying "I don't know," than in trying to invent pious detail to satisfy implacable reason. We're better off having reason mock us for refusing to carry out the debate solely on it's terms -- foolishness to the Greeks, after all -- than in committing ourselves to defend assertions that are not necessary for our faith.
more times than not jesus states
"it is your faith that has made you whole"...and diverts attention to his divine powers away from himself
he simply restores the balance of natural power and energy by providing solace and encouragement
does he heal does he multiply loaves???
well of course he does
and ye of little faith
could do it too
with a mustard seed
i will never see DNA or a quasar or a genome or a muon or most of what the science world claims really does exist
i'd have to have faith that science is doing something
other than poking and tweeking and appealing for more and more money so they can stay busy
i've never seen a silicon chip
but i have to admit
this laptop somehow blips up words on the screen so soemthing is going on but i have coem to the conclusion that both bill gates and steven jobs are robots
they need to be brought under control
i'm calling for a new inquisition
the last one was sort of cut short
i think it's great that J is back here mucking it up with this group of clowns
seek find
knock open
ask receive
watch out for scorpions
we understand evil as not something inherent
but the result of a "lack" of something a lack of intelligence a lack of love in the heart
the (dark) enlightenment has brought about this notion that we have to "control" nature we will understand it and control - problem is it becomes something we can never fully grasp so we set out to control something out of relative ignorance no matter how good the science - striving to be sensitive to how nature really works and living in accord with the reality she presents is a task few embrace anymore...we're more impressed it would seem with interupting nature...more impressed with the dam than the river...more impressed with pharmeceuticals than with actual good health...more impressed with the spectacle than with the story
gm palmer
a girlfriend from days of yore gave me a parting gift a blank book which i suppose she intended for me to fill
and she wrote on the first page
those words of ts eliot
i just remembered that
i think i never wrote anything in it and i don't know where it is
somewhere there exists an intention
which never sees its object
g*d is immediate
therefore hard to understand
history is a mating dance
of faith and reason
i wonder if people know about the great french thinker gabriel marcel
this guy is interesting
kirby used to ask us what we're reading
now it's all turned to blather
interesting blather
but blather all the same
i wouldn't have it any other way
let us blather on
flash out of the blue a lightening storm in the bob marshall wilderness and a day hiking afterward
swiming in a snowmelt lake
and realizing how grateful i need to be
everyday
chilly
jh
jh
How about posting my responses, KO, like, within a few minutes? Instead of hours. Or perhaps....you've had your fill of Reason, and can go back to un-Reason.
One other thing:
He also dismisses causality, let's remember. He claims just because we HAVE seen it, doesn't mean it will work that way every time.
Another simplification, like your misreading of Hume's essay on miracles, one part of the Enquiry (which is not reducible to just a sentence or two). Moreover, you make the mistake of..ID politics as well. X mentioned Hume. Ergo, he's a Humean scoundrel!. No. But some of DH's arguments...still carry some weight, in regard to religious matters (or, irreligious)--not that most dogmatists know or care.
Hint--the point on causality concerns logical necessity, not ultra-skepticism--in ways, mo' like stoicism. Hume doesn't dismiss causality or science. Natural science does...appear stable (Hume's usually Newtonian) . When X breaks the table, the billiard balls will not likely float up. The gravitational constant, ala laws of Gravity (whatever...that is) will not likely be overturned. But one can't prove that. The boiling point of H20 will not likely change in your lifetime. But...in 1000 years? 10,000? Prove that the future will resemble the past. Even Einstein at times echoes Humean ideas.
And at the level of...social science, and economics, Humean's doubts, and shall we say, awareness of contingency and...early probability (even if he was a gutbucket frequentist) remain relevant. What will be the political situation in a month, KO? Stock market? Wars? Care to wager n next fall's World Series, etc. It's just that...Doubt's bad for bidness. Voltaires and Humes don't move product. Foxnews does.
I personally get rather bored with J when he goes into turtle mode -- pulls way in -- and resembles an army helmet, as the possibility of a conversation turns always into a militant one-sided position. I think JADL used to do that but since it was more or less to my right it didn't seem that awful, and also, was more or less attentuated as a frequent habit over the last year. I'll let these through but I found them irritating and pointless, a mere position-taking, and no willingness to concede anything.
Boring, to my mind.
while I think when the righties do this it's maybe just as bad (I think only the middle matters, as the extremes don't really want a conversation in the first place, or don't think we can meet in the middle).
Whatever.
without vulnerability I don't think we should bother to try to converse -- which is my whole problem with his facelessness to begin with.
I find this kind of sniping to be his whole M.O., especially from behind his wall of anonymity. It's cowardly, and I'm thinking of banning him again.
So, you guys talk to him while it lasts, and maybe he'll move over to your blogs again.
I have been extremely pressed for time, with several manuscripts to get ready for publication, and school starting, and lots of snow to shovel, but I'm out from under paper and snow, and am finding time to think again, so J's utility as a temporary amusement is about over especially as he goes back into reptilian terrorialization mode.
I'd prefer to discuss as humans with faces and souls, I suppose.
I do like the emerging lineup between Catholics and Lutherans, with him taking the Lutheran side, but am not veryhappy to go over the same sophomoric problem about whether or not there is a God.
Of course there is a God. Without some specific basic points of agreement, while we're arguing basic axioms, I think there's no point in trying to converse.
What say you all?
I knew I'd get him to go into turtle mode when I questioned his form of argument, but I didn't expect it to be this total, or this immature in its form.
I feel like I am just talking to an army helmet.
Why do I need this again?
...another non-sequitur. At least maybe engage the points for a sentence or two--ie, the points on miracles showing the unreliability of ...the scriptural narrative or causality, though that's an entirely different matter. I suspect Hume's target in that case was...the Deists of the era (and...possibly Aristotelians who held to a final cause. And in a broad sense at least, Hume was not far from the mark. Einstein and quantum theory replaced the Newtonian "absolutes")
What you call "sniping" is all carefully thought out empirical reasoning. Perhaps somewhat mundane (especially to those of us who actually read the relevant texts 20+ years ago), and not nearly as sexxay as like beat-literature, but ....relevant.
And if you note, Im making a two-prong criticism: one, the historical readings of scripture prove little or nothing (in fact, Id say...they help the skeptics). Two--contra-rationalist theologians/Design types, there are no arguments, empirical or axiomatic, which can prove the existence of a monotheistic God.
At best Design may suggest a possibility of Mind, Ordering principle, emergence as some say, via Evolution. Yet as that philosopher Melville knew, there's no reason that Design might not be something like Queequeg's ..primal spirits, or pantheism... instead of Ahab's ...old testament melodrama.
Really KO, like most fundies, you don't want to examine your "faith." Pat Robertson's not interested in socratic dialogue. He's interested in.....keepin' Christ-Co in business.
...
J,
The world is not 5000 years old or whatever the old biblethumpers said. It's....hundreds of millions of years old.
Uh, no. It's 4.5 Billion years, give or take a fifty million or so. If you're going to play rationalist, you need to get the details right.
So, Genesis was falsified (or...reduced to myth, along with many other creation myths).
Reduced ... to ... myth. Myths are the stories that we use to define who we are. History can be a constituent of myth, but it misses the heart of myth, which ultimately is how the stories are interpreted (whether they're factual or not), and what they come to mean to us. Myth is much more important the historicity of its constituent stories. What matters more? That the earth is 4.5 billion years old? Or that it is part of God's creation? This is a question that "mere myth" answers, and science can't even comprehend.
I contend Polk. while interesting is not at all an orthodox christian. He denies that "G*d"-- or Brahma, Being, the Absolute, Big Guy -- has...foreknowledge, and really omnipotence.
Oh, Polkinghorne is orthodox enough. Christianity's a pretty big tent, despite your joint effort with the Hagees of the world to define it narrowly. Nicene says "pantocrator": "omnipotent," not "omniscient"; "all powerful," not "all knowing." And one might meaningfully distinguish between "weak" omniscience, complete knowledge of the present and past, from "strong" omniscience, which would include complete knowledge of the future too. I think we possess the ability to delight and disappoint our creator, and this is not consistent with foreknowledge. Strong omniscience makes the world a play, which might appeal to Shakespeare, but not to me. I believe our actions, our lives, signify.
How about posting my responses, KO, like, within a few minutes? Instead of hours.
There's history here, of which you're a part. But the short answer is that Kirby has a life beyond this blog. Anyway, I'll take the position that his moderation of comments has been a good thing. It's slowed down debate, and with that the discussion have become deeper and less heated.
Or perhaps....you've had your fill of Reason, and can go back to un-Reason.
Oh, I suspect that the delays aren't uniform. He's slowed me down when I've grow a bit too heated, or too repetitious. I haven't always agreed, but to be perfectly honest about it, I've agreed more in retrospect than in realtime.
It's like your attempting to play chess, KO, and don't know when you're in check, or about to be checkmated, yet continue to proclaim,loudly ...Im winning! (tho others in the room don't know the moves or openings either).
You haven't made any arguments for your own views (which seem to be essentially..."God exists because, I really need that to be True"). See Russell's Teapot however trite for who has the burden of proof (and really for...the problems of both theistic/atheistic arguments).
Nor have your responded to my points--re fallibility of scripture, the EPOE, and no rational theology--all rather traditional skeptical views, seen in Hume, and others (though note I did not say I was an atheist or materialist, but you insinuate it).
In effect you're like doing a Jerry Lewis routine when Im saying...respond to the points , or at least acknowledge them as a pro-theologian does. Plantinga deals with naysayers (and loses, IMHE). Alas, I mistook you for like a Karpov (or wannabe Karpov), when yr...Curly
Uh, yes. Just use a decimal point, Stu. I know the approx age is 4.5 Billion years, and that is still hundreds of millions, like 4500 million. A trivial point, but rather substantial modification of the creationist dogma.
And why...do you again ...beg the question and posit a monotheistic God? Why not...Brahma? Or Primum Mobile? Or Allah? Or the Asuras and Devas? Or...Nada? Or the Justice League? Dogma, Stu--thats what you rely upon. Nearly as pronounced as Curly Olson's. You just won't engage the real issues.
At any rate, I just banned J again. If you guys want to continue to speak with him, he can visit your blogs.
I think of a conversation as something in which many people can learn something, and I don't think of it as a chess game, or some kind of military exercise. He does, with an emphasis on sniping.
I find it boring. He can titillate himself somewhere else.
It is fun to allow the margins in now and then, if only to remember why I have my moderation set to bounce out the marginally human!
J,
A trivial point, but rather substantial modification of the creationist dogma.
And I'd think you were actually making a point here if I thought that Christianity entailed young earth creationism, intelligent design, or any of the varied (and in my opinion, misguided) attempts to read Genesis 1 as science. But I don't.
And why...do you again ...beg the question and posit a monotheistic God?
A good question. I can answer, without any expectation of convincing you. I was raised in the church, a Lutheran of Lutherans, to paraphrase Paul ;-). So Christianity enjoys a home-field advantage where I'm concerned. The biblical message resonates with me. Not as factual history (I can get that from other sources, after all), but as the revelation of the Word of God. It's the core messages of social justice, compassion, and the sense of purpose that comes from being a part of God's creation that speak to me. I've found secular social justice to be a bit fragile. The Word of God keeps me focused on the interests of the powerless: the widow, the orphan, the disposessed, the alien. Without belief in God, social justice is just one person's entitlement against another's, which unfortunately is how Kirby often sees it.
As someone who participates in a religious community, I find meaning in it. It is a big part of who I am. The Word of God, read from scripture, spoken from the pulpit, speaks to me, confronts me, accuses me, and changes me. The word "ritual" is too often paired with "empty" and "dead," whereas "meaningful" and "alive" are my experience. And the Trinitarian God of Christianity touches me at many levels: God the Father created the world, and all that is in it, including us; God the Son lived, suffered, and died as one of us, sanctifying and redeeming the world, and all that it in it, including us; God the Spirit, the person of God who is accessible to us, the spirit of life within us.
Why not...Brahma? Or Primum Mobile? Or Allah? Or the Asuras and Devas? Or...Nada? Or the Justice League? Dogma, Stu--thats what you rely upon.
Well, Yahweh == Allah == God the Father. So I don't have a problem with Allah, although I do find both Judaism and Islam too legalistic, and their perception of God as too distant. But as I said above, "I believe that knowledge of God is available to all peoples, and that most religions contain within them a kernel (and often much more) of genuine inspiration." Do I rely on dogma? Sure. But my dogma's parsimonious: the God in three persons as revealed by the ecumenical creeds, as witnessed to by scripture, through the lives of his believers, and as revealed by my heart.
You just won't engage the real issues.
On the contrary, I have. And indeed, Kirby has. It's almost as if, whenever we say something that doesn't fit your detailed mental model of what Christians belief, you can't process it, and you go on arguing against that model, and trying to project us into it. It's really not a very satisfactory way of debating, and seems a bit disrespectful.
As I said, I prefer Aquinas's recognition of the potential harmony of faith and reason in the pursuit of truth as well as his reasonable demonstrations of the quinque viae ("the five ways") of knowing of God's existence (motion, contingency, chain of efficient causation, imperfection, teleology; and I take these as reasonably-argued "ways" rather than strictly logical proofs). True faith for Aquinas is hardly "blind," but rather an intellectual act of will that is met by God's grace. And some truths, Aquinas holds, are beyond the ability of reason to show, e.g., the Trinity and the Incarnation.
Of course Aquinas also cautions that there are limits to our limited human capability to know God's nature. And this deficiency in human knowledge, along with the problem of evil, the existence of those of other faiths or of no faith, the rejection of the possibility of miracles, etc. seem to accord with Newman's later approaches in "The Grammar of Assent" that assent to faith is more intuitional and probablistic than narrowly deductive in nature. Aquinas is not certainly the only or last word on faith and reason, but his work remains an attractively systematic (though undogmatic) investigation of their natures.
While there are a number of interesting 20th-century philosophical (and especially epistemological) treatments of questions about the relationship of faith and reason, the biological determinism aggressively argued by Dawkins, Dennett, or the Churchlands seems a "case-closed" exercise in dogmatic "belief in disbelief."
I've followed the exchanges here here with interest in stu's, jh's, Brett's, and Kirby's contributions, though on J's, I'll have to confess ambivalence.
The neatest thing to me about Aquinas or Anselm's proofs of God is their beauty. As writers they far outstrip people like Dennett or Dawkins who simply have no loveliness in their sentences and who seem to be as threadbare in their lives as in their prose. Aquinas' incredible joie de vivre is something else. I love it when he asks himself bizarre questions about whether the fingernails will continue to grow in the afterlife (I don't mean in the morgue).
Perhaps one of my great failings is that I don't really concern myself with the afterlife, or whether the Resurrection was literally true (for some reason I do think Christ resurrected, but it's not something I ever think about).
What I like are the sentences that make me cry. Paul's sentences that begin with Love never ends which Stu quoted again yesterday made me bawl. I loved it.
Science, or Hume, or any of the rest of the more scientific thinkers or writers barely mean anything to me partially because they are objective and don't make any appeal to finer emotions.
To me, something has to be beautifully true on an emotional level for it to mean anything to me.
At any rate, I've officially banned J again, and won't let his "thoughts" through. I have had those conversations with college sophomores when I was a college sophomore and still get attempts to take me on in that arena from students, and just find it to be so much white belt gibberish. I'm not interested in going over scientific reasons why the church should be abolished, or why God can not exist because science cannot go into any kind of supernatural by reason of its definition.
It's an endless circle. If you accept science as the be all and end all of experience, then that's all you have.
If you accept intuitive, emotional, and imagination (what Kant calls the noumenal) as a part of experience, then you go the other way.
At any rate, anyone who feels a deep need to continue to speak with him can certainly seek him out.
He's around, just clock on his initial, and you'll have all the screeching and flaming you like to keep you warm on a winter's day.
As for me, I'm bored again.
The debating practice Stu outlines in his last practice is straw man. It's seemingly the way that J does business. I found it nauseating because there was simply no way to break through it. All Christians are Pat Roberts, all Christians are fundies.
I found this annoyingly jejune.
Brett can now step in and say, but not all Democrats are communists, Kirby!
Stand taken, fall invited.
I still do wonder if Obama is a communist.
I'm absolutely certain that most of the blue dog Democrats, and that people like Zell Miller, were not at all communist.
It's hard to tell exactly where the line is between communist and democrat. It used to be perhaps freedom of speech. It seems to me that there is a kind of Democrat who is increasingly willing to not listen to Republicans or centrists, and to be delighted with their CARICATURE of the Republican positions, as opposed to actually listening to them.
Olbermann was way gone in that respect. J was even further gone in that respect.
It makes for impossible conditions.
I grant that the far right has its Hannitys, too, but they don't bother me because they have so little institutional power (it would annoy the heck out of me if someone like Hannity had a strong institutional position at my college).
There are people who are so limited in how they can experience other people's discourse that talking to them is the same thing as not talking to them. It's like talking with the wall.
At any rate, I have to go and coach wrestling since the main coach is sick. I'm trying to remember the sit-out from forty years back!
it seems to me that those people who have stuck with this blog have gone through a realization that nothing needs to be taken that seriously
i will admit J seems to be without the option for ludic understanding
we do need to laugh at our
selves a little more
it was honorable for you kirby to open the door for him
but if the contention is twisting the discussion in a weird or difficult way you have my support in calling it as you see it
it is hard to do behaviour modification in the blogosphere
it seems everyone here has at some point written something that is very funny and that in itself helps us to get along
j has a sense of humour but it has some jagged edges
one thing
the historical-critical approach to scripture arises out of the hegelian world view...as a tool it has afforded us a whole new perspective on undertanding scripture...it is even more powerful when utilized along with theological writings from the theological thinkers
i for one am grateful for the protestant pioneering of that method
it's not the only way to read scripture but it does grant us access to very reasonable questions and insights into the culture politics and religious sense of people 2 3 thousand year ago
forgiveness is always delicate diplomacy
great synopsis of aquinas by jadl
yo
carry on
jh
I think it's interesting that Plotinus was a contemporary of Mani, after whom the Manichaens were named. Mani was just coming into his own as a prophet when Plotinus accompanied the Emperor Gordian on a visit to Persia by way of Assyria and Mesopotamia, perhaps to investigate the crowds Mani was drawing. The assassination of Gordian ended that mission, but it did result in the relocation of Plotinus from Alexandria to Rome. Mani was crucified six years after Plotinus died, but not by the Romans. He occupies a midpoint chronologically and historically between Jesus and Mohammed. Spengler devotes considerable attention to him in his Decline of the West.
The Hannitys have very little influence in academia, perhaps, but he and Limbaugh and Beck are hugely influential wrt our national discourse and the direction of the Republican party - a Republican who crosses Limbaugh is in very dangerous territory.
A democrat who crosses tweedy-weedy from ivorytowerU is fine...
is plotinus a gnostic
it seems to me that you can take plato only so far and you end up with either a stated or an implied dualism
the notion of "gnostic" per se had a nuanced and general sense of a worldview which linked various strains of thought into one category
plato thus plotinus did not see the material world as evil yet they held out the option for the thinking man's world
i'm sure plotinus thought he was thinking in terms of realism
he certainly thought metaphysics was the key
the one
the true
the good
the beautiful
in augustine's shrugging off of plotinus and neoplatonism he also shrugs off manichaeism under the same pretext of epistemological delusion
those who set out to think for themselves who tread the higher ground of independent thought seem to me to end up thinking like plotinus...the hard realism of existential thought appears to me just that....although without recourse for the One or any other metaphysical speculation
it's hard to ignore plato
he persists
aristotle is far less mystical and far more hardnosed about what is and what can be deduced logically
i was intriqued to discover that plotinus had dreams of establishing a platonic state
i should revisit the enneads
it's been ages
it remains obvious that even while plotinus looked upon the christian movement with suspicion still his metaphysics betrayed something resonant with christian thinkers
we're still locked in a struggle of dualistic tension
ever since descarte was put before de-horse
jh
My understanding of the gnostics is that they regarded this world as irredeemably evil -- a prison planet of the demiurge, and that the ten commandments were a hypocritical oath that had to be broken in order to free ourselves of Yahweh, who they regarded as an imposter, and not the true God. They therefore broke the ten commandments in order to attain true freedom. The gnostic libertines under Carpocrates for instance held orgies and masturbated in public, thinking that sexuality was another entrapment set as a snare by Yahweh, and they see the long lists of procreation as symbols of the ways in which Yahweh trapped us on this prison planet.
Plotinus and Plato on the other hand see this world as somewhat good.
My understanding of Plotinus is that he isn't a dualist, as Plato was. He instead sees heaven gradually turning into earth with no clear distinction between the two (Plato seems to argue that this world is totally separate from the world of forms, but that we can remember the world of forms, or rediscover it, or at least that HE could -- the philosopher king could).
Most of what I know about Plotinus came from a lecture by a Blake scholar named Hazard Adams. He was my first philosophy of literature professor in graduate school. He's still a friend of mine.
Another writer -- who was my fellow student then but is now the head of Creative Writing at Brown, a then-Mormon named Brian Evenson, had me once read a paper of his on Plotinus. I got this same sense of gradations in Plotinus from Evenson's paper.
Plotinus' enneads, some say, is the basis for Gurdjieff's weird notion of the enneagram.
I have a copy, but I've never read more than a few pages here and there.
Plotinus disagreed with the gnostics because they argued that there was no possibility of virtue here. Plotinus thought this world susceptible, if that's the word, to virtue?
We could always turn to Wikipedia on Plotinus for a quick update. I won't have time to do that today. Spent some of the morning reviewing the case of the Royalist Cavalier poet Sir John Suckling, trying to establish the source of the rumor that his butler had killed him by placing an open razor in his boot.
Couldn't find the first to make this assertion. It's seemingly copied as a possibility in all the biographies extant, but most believe that Suckling took poison after his attempt to bribe the guards of the Tower to release the Earl of Strafford after Charles I's defeat at the hands of Cromwell.
I took three courses with Prof. Adams. The first was the Early Romantics as an undergrad transferring in from another university. He gave me a D to indicate he didn't really care much for my Don Barthelme routine. I also took Critical Theory as an undergrad and got an A. He liked what I did with DeMan on Shelley. He wasn't so keen on my approach to Byron as a grad student. I liked reading whole poems, even long ones. He liked reading two or three key passages that told you everything you needed to know. I also took Charles Altieri's critical theory course as a grad student.
Plotinus provides access to antiquity without demanding adherence to a particular tradition. He's at once both ancient and quite modern. The Great Books edition is translated by Stephen McKenna, a mainstay in the Synge-Yeats, Anglo-Irish crowd. I can't reach Yeats through Augustine or Scholasticism, but Plotinus somehow gets me There.
I took one or two courses with Hazard, and then a course in contemporary poetry with Altieri. I liked both men, and their courses were terrific.
Altieri had a way of saying astonishing things that really stuck with me. He said once in a conference that the reason everyone likes Kafka is that everyone feels that they are outside the law.
I added a poem yesterday to the contest that seems to come out of a Plotinus type viewpoint. That is, that light DOES filter down here. Plus, I read the Wikipedia article on Plotinus yesterday.
Plotinus said we should try to pick up on the est of what the universe is, and radiate that back to our friends.
There's another new poem by a Mrs. Edge, which I thought reflected the worst of the new anti-American thinking in a nutshell.
Many people think we stole our wealth. That would apply to the Spanish, but not to us.
Our wealth was made through the Protestant work ethic, quite different from the notions of plunder among the Spanish (once the gold ran out, the bottom fell out of their culture).
I felt, Craig, that you tried to mix our culture and theirs through the pieces of eight.
But northern American culture was largely based on farming.
The south used slaves in its larger plantations, but this was a miserable problem that finally the northern farmers had to help them sort out.
Adams excerpted the entire chapter headed On The Intellectual Beauty to represent Plotinus' aesthetics in CTSP. Strangely enough, those seven pages appear to be the only chapter in all six enneads where reference is made to any of the Roman gods. Without the aesthetic there's little basis on which to classify him as a pagan.
Kirby,
Ms. (not Mrs.) Edge's poem was striking. As someone who tends a bit towards cynicism myself, I wasn't particularly taken aback, but that said...
There are some pretty fouled-up things in our history. There are some pretty fouled-up things in everyone's history. I think we need to be realistic about this. Ignoring the judgmental assertions in the poem, the underlying factual assertions (Columbus's genocide Arawaks, the impact of European diseases on native populations who lacked acquired immunity, slavery) are sadly true, and it doesn't make a person into a Ward Churchill to recognize this. At the same time, I think we do our forebearers a disservice by not recognizing their remarkable accomplishments, as well as their failures, of justice and morality.
There certainly is a Fox News view of the world, which couples a superficial and rose-colored view of our history with the viciousness of a powerful elite fighting a desperate battle to retain their power and privilege in the face of escalating and diversifying challenges in the present. These go hand-in-hand, and it's a mistake to view Fox News account of US history as pre-existing: it is being created in the present to serve their needs in the present, to protect their powerful owners and sponsors, to advance their interests. The equally extreme but opposite view of US history represented by Ms. Edge is an attempt to expose that mythology of a triumphalist past as a lie, in order expose Fox New's agenda in the present. And the paradox is by taking such a one-sided position, she's become very much like her opponents, presenting a history that no less of a lie in in representing the complex reality of American History.
I wonder if the problem ultimately is in that we all want to view history as narrative. Histories are not simply collections of facts, they are organized as stories, and we expect our stories to have morals. And the stories we tell in the present are shaped by the priorities of the moment, even if they're stories of the past.
There are a lot of newscasters and anchormen on Fox News and each one of them I see as having a distinct personality and a distinct viewpoint. Hannity and O'Reilly are the most salient newsmen on Fox and their viewpoint is tough, Irish, and Catholic. But they're not alike. O'Reilly is slightly more liberal than Hannity at least in terms of how he views freedom of speech. O'Reilly has a lot more fun than Hannity. He has comedians on. He goes to dinner with Sharpton. He sees people as funny, while Hannity often sees people as a terrible threat.
Diego Rivera is also Catholic, but he's very sympathetic to immigrants from Hispanic cultures.
Beck is wild, seeing conspiracy theories everywhere, most recently imagining the formation of the monstrous symbiosis between Islam and socialism which he sees coming down the pike as only a matter of time. I think he's almost hilarious even to himself.
Greta Van Susteren is obsessed with missing people, esp. women, and has a somewhat feminist impulse. She also belongs to an odd Christian group -- it might be Christian Science, or Scientologist, or something like that, I forget.
I think there are about forty other news anchors on Fox.
Some, like Harrison Fox, a beautiful black lady, don't yet appear to me to be showing who they really are, and perhaps they are just parroting the party line for now. I don't know. It may be that I just haven't gotten used to them yet.
They have a bunch of fiery blond women. What comes across to me is people who are having tremendous fun and trying not so much to save the notion of privilege (a well-known communist critique of liberals), but to save the idea of a work ethic, realistic opinions of self-reliance even for minorities, and a need to understand the law.
The left routinely dismisses Fox News as a pack of crazies but they address serious concerns. 15 states have proposed laws like the one that Obama tried to block in Arizona.
Enormous numbers of the electorate are listening to Fox (by far the biggest name in Cable News), and relatively few are watching MSNBC, which parrots the socialist line.
Alan Colmes is still on, and they have a liberal poll taker named Frnak Luntz or something, who shows what a powerful feeling that Fox and the Republicans are tuning into in Americans. It goes back to self-reliance, wariness, and is against the Pelagian feelgood suicide in the making of the Trojan left who are already celebrating the Trojan horse of multiculturalism, which will turn us into the mess that the rest of the world already is, unless we can show how hollow it all is before it's too late.
I see the conflict between the Republicans and the Democrats as the conflict between those who want a meritocracy, and those who want a hand-out.
I still see the idea that Obama should be the "first" of his kind rather than the "best" possible American leader to be the real crux of the difference.
Many see America as having lied and bullied its way to the top. I still see it as simply the best.
There has to be a reason that every Arabic-speaking country is poor and stupid. It's not that we've stolen their stuff. It's just that they don't educate half of their population, and that half ends up mothering the children. It's like they shoot themselves in the foot so how are they going to get anywhere in the rat race?
The same is true for the Catholic countries, which still lag behind the Lutheran and Protestant countries.
Marxist countries are just plainly stupid, in that they denounce even the possibility of dissidence. Without cultural dissidence, how can any country grow intellectually?
I know the left see Obama as some kind of amazing genius, but on what basis has never been clear to me. Obama has a huge ego, but what exactly is it based on? He published a couple of mindless memoirs. There's nothing in either one that anyone will remember.
He won a Nobel Prize, but then so did a mediocrity like Gore, or Yassir Arafat -- people that are just jokes, and have nothing going for them whatsoever. A pile of losers.
There's an amazing article in the WSJ from February 4, 2011, in the Notable & Quotable, clipped from John Heileman, author of the 2008 campaign book "Game Change," writing in New York Magazine: Jan. 23, 2011:
"Obama rarely consulted outside the tiny charmed circle surrounding him in the White House. 'What you had was really three or four people running the entire government,' says the former White House strategist. ... The president's friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he'd never really had a 9-5 job in his life. Obama didn't know what he didn't know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about [Rahm] emmanuel's replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, 'You know, I'd make a good chief of staff.'"
Obama's a nitwit. Now that the guy has serious problems, and his major bill has gotten weights set on it from over half of the states' filing lawsuits (and winning) against Obamacare on the basis of its unconstitutionality, we are beginning to repeal his most onerous mistakes.
But I don't know why we have to make them. Next time around Palin will come close to winning the Republican candidacy, and maybe win, and possibly even get to be president. She's a doofus. But she'll be the first woman, and many will vote for her on that basis.
Whatever happened to meritocracy? Why are we so afraid of it?
Why do we let all these losers win?
Kirby,
I see the conflict between the Republicans and the Democrats as the conflict between those who want a meritocracy, and those who want a hand-out.
Given bailouts of banks and the automobile manufacturers, persistent efforts to reduce the tax rate on the richest, and the fact that the US government is to a first approximation a mechanism for transferring wealth blue states to red states, I can only agree.
Although I've not contributed to the poetry contests yet, I do read the contributions of others. I thought the effort of Mz Edge (her pseudonym a nudge perhaps to Sylvia Plath's last poem, "Edge")worth a moment's silent chuckle for offering us a quintessential distillation of abject anti-American nastiness. And I look forward to future chuckles at Mz Edge's bilious eructations in verse. Perhaps her next will be up to provoking the odd guffaw or even a precious hoot. Well, ME, bring 'em on!
Fox News might also be seen as one part of the panorama of US broadcast news, discussion, and opinion programmes that for the most part lean liberal to left and in which conservative views are ever marginalised. FN does have its collection of house liberals, though they haven't their own shows since the greasy Alan Colmes left his show-share with the gratuitously pugnacious Sean Hannity (again, we haven't TV, so I only catch snippets of such shows on the internet). Geraldo Rivera (Diego's the Mexican communist muralist) is pretty pugnacious in his own right when he cranks it up on the illegal immigration issue and threatens to spit in the face of the Philippine-American conservative journalist Michelle Malkin.
I noticed the British humourist and motor enthusiast Jeremy Clarkson (his BBC show is called "Top Gear") has been denounced yet again for his un-PC jokes, this time for joking that Mexico has no Olympic team because anyone there who can run, jump, or swim is already across the border.
James, I liked Brett's poem, too. I think it's his best effort ever.
In general, I think the subject brought out the best.
I was hoping GM would weigh in but I think he's in DC for the AWP convention.
I didn't understand Stu's assertion that the blue states' wealth gets redistributed to red states. Did you understand what he meant by this?
Kirby, stu's assertion that the federal government redistributes tax monies from blue states to red has some credence, though it's vastly oversimplified when stated so baldly. It's a tendency, and there are big-state exceptions like Texas and Florida (Georgia is about even). And the the greatest favourable differential is for New Mexico--hardly a red state; other blue states receiving more are Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Vermont, and Pennsylvania in addition to more states often red that went for Obama in 2008 (Virginia, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana).
In quite a number of these red states per capita income is lower than in many blue states, and some of these red states have lower populations but large areas and larger military presences (Alaska). There are a number of other factors that mitigate the weight of the assertion, e.g., the tendency of many retirees to relocate to the warmer (and cheaper) South (thus receiving higher SS and Medicare payments)and the current exodus of persons and businesses from high-tax states (e.g., California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey) to lower that haven't yet been fully reflected in revenue-payments statistics.
James, could you give numbers in one concrete situation, like New Mexico? I don't know anything about this. Does the US govt collect a certain amount of money from states via income and corporate tax, and then redistribute according to need, or according to ability, or what exactly happens?
I assume federal prisons, etc., get money.
What exactly is getting funded by the feds?
do the Republicans and the Democrats want to do this differently?
Kirby, JADL,
I think JADL's analysis of my claim was a reasonable start, but I'd like to push on this a bit further.
Certainly, if you look at low-population states, the existence of large military facilities (North Dakota, Maine, and Alaska come to mind) or a large national laboratory (New Mexico) can skew things strongly towards expenditure. There's less noise in the signal if you look at the big states. Not surprisingly, the largest outlier is DC, which has about $5.50 in expenditures for every $1.00 in revenue. I'm honestly surprised that it's this close, all things considered.
JADL raises Texas and Florida. They're both donor states, but fairly close to balanced. Big blue states like California, New York, and Illinois have a much lower rate of return on the federal tax dollars than they do. Moreover, I'd be reluctant to classify Florida as "red." A fairly standard analysis of Florida is that it's a southern state north of Tallahasse, and a northern state south of Tallahasse. It's balanced, give or take a few chad.
It's also misleading to "flatten" the donor/recipient continuum into two classes. The bias is visible throughout the distribution, e.g., the states near the top of the "recipient" group are clearly "bluer" than the states near the bottom.
My take on the correlation (and it is strong, and striking) between donor/recipient and blue/red is that it has more to do with (a) urbanization, and (b) education, both of which are strongly correlated with taxable income production. I'd discount the military connection because, even though the military budget is a large part of the federal budget, and military bases tend to skew south and therefore red, this is greatly mitigated by the fraction of the military budget that is spent on procurement (vs. personnel costs), and procurements are much more evenly distributed.
This is probably a hard thing to get at, but northern states generally have much larger educational institutions (whole cities built on education, and with it, an enormous military industrial complex, and many other factors woven in).
Think of Boston, for instance, with over a million students, and major universities (Harvard, MIT, Boston U., Boston College, Tufts, and probably dozens of others).
A huge portion of their budgets is either federal or state, am I right?
If you add in things like grants, which at least in the sciences would mean hundreds of millions of dollars.
If you compare a red state like Wyoming, --
Certain groups are more likely to be quite strongly for liberal secular education -- northeastern liberals (Harvard has been secular or strongly secularized since at least the 1870s).
I suppose most of the blue states have gone that route.
It's a vicious circle in that strong secular institutions have driven out and mocked the church bodies that first erected the institutions (Harvard was initially a seminary, as was Princeton, to name two).
As these institutions were the leaders of education (and oftentimes still are), they in turn drive a further wedge between the church-driven (red states are more church-going, and to less secularized denominations such as the Baptists, and other groups including fundamentalists of various stripes).
I suspect that blue state secularization is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that pulls in money which it then disgorges back to the Federal government, which then uses the money for more traditionally red state activities such as involvement in the military (people who are drawn to work in the military are more often conservatives, whereas people who are drawn to work in education are more often liberals).
So I'm still not sure what these correlations mean as they are part of such enormous patterns that it's hard to ascribe any meaningful meaning in them without attempting to skew the funding picture to accord with our own predilections.
The Democratic base is the poor and unemployed to one extent (too often African American, or Hispanic), and the Republican base is probably rural and white and Christian conservative (in terms of numbers).
But other than that, people split according to their values, and often can be swayed one way or another depending on circumstances.
Massachusetts and California can have Republican governors and senators, and liberals like McGovern can come from places like South Dakota.
We're not really very far apart except on a few key issues: abortion, homosexual marriage, AIDS funding versus Lyme Disease funding, and whether or not we should continue to regard the border with Mexico as an open door.
Kirby,
This is probably a hard thing to get at, but northern states generally have much larger educational institutions
I agree (I noted education). And I see in this a working out of the difference between liberal and conservative social views. E.g., in liberal areas, investing in public education makes good sense from a policy point of view, because the increased up-front costs in educating people today will be rewarded by larger incomes, and therefore larger tax yields.
Let's grab some standard numbers. A high school graduate averages about $30K/year. A college graduate (BA/BS) averages about $50K/year. The difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition as SUNY is about $8,500, which we can probably take as a proxy for state support. So the state is investing $34,000, and foregoing 4 years of taxes at $30K. The marginal tax rate in NY is 10.85% (income + sales), so the state expects to pull down an extra $2.2K/year, and so realizes 6.5% return on investment for 40 years. This is just good business, good policy. It's money on the table that liberal states pick up, and conservative states tend to walk away from.
Texas is an interesting story here. Texas, although we think of it as a very conservative state, and a low-tax state as well, has generally subsidized its post-secondary education through oil revenues (much like Alaska), and it has one of the higher urbanization rates among the red states. So Texas looks a bit like a blue state in terms of post-secondary education, which probably explains why it looks a bit blue on the donor/recipient continuum.
If you compare a red state like Wyoming, --
Wyoming has large mineral revenues, and also large agricultural subsidies, which are another major blue-to-red transfer of wealth.
It's a vicious circle in that strong secular institutions have driven out and mocked the church bodies that first erected the institutions (Harvard was initially a seminary, as was Princeton, to name two).
Harvard still has a strong, internationally recognized Divinity School (as does Chicago). Princeton's seems to have forked off into an independent entity. There's an old UC story that captures the perspective. Edward Levi, a jewish president at the University of Chicago in the 60's, once told the faculty of the Divinity School that, while he didn't believe in what they were studying, he did expect them to be the best in the world at it, and they could count on his support to that end.
And I'm fundamentally unconvinced that blue states are more susceptible to secularization than red states; I just believe that they've been more exposed to global secularizing forces, but this is a difference that is going to be erased over the next dozen years. It will be interesting to see how the red states respond.
We're not really very far apart except on a few key issues: abortion, homosexual marriage, AIDS funding versus Lyme Disease funding, and whether or not we should continue to regard the border with Mexico as an open door.
I think we're much further apart than this, but these are important wedge issues. And I also think you're systematically misrepresenting the immigration issue, because Democrats also believe that we should have effective border control and immigration policies, but both parties find it more useful to politicize this issue than to solve it.
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