I’m still struggling with the notion that freedom from the archaisms of religion allows for a more objective and rationally enlightened consensus of morality. The argument is generally couched in terms of an increase in individual freedom by both secularist liberals and libertarians, both of which trade on their appropriations of the word liberty.
But this argument fails in a number of ways. Most importantly because it is spectacularly untrue and self-contradictory. Neither liberals nor libertarians are honest. Both are expressly Utopian, meaning they claim that there is a set of rationally determined circumstances that can achieve the ideal of human equality and individual empowerment, regardless of divisive pre-existing social, educational, cultural, ethnic, racial, economic, and (of course) religious factors. Which is nonsense. It’s not what they really believe.
Libertarians are essentially Randian. (Why did Ron Paul name his son Rand?) Their position is that I should be able to do what I want to do, and you should trust that I’m not actually inimical to the well being of others, even though my core postulate is the supremacy of my own self-interest. It is superficially attractive to many who should know better because it is not intelligent human philosophy but rather an obvious rhetorical opposition to statist control of human actions. In real terms, of course, it is a prescription for state control. When religion, the meta-human anchor that keeps people rooted in enduring values, is done in for its fancied crimes, the rational deciders of objective morality are, by default, human beings. What is the remaining attractor for those rationalists who know better than everyone else? It’s government. Where they get to rewrite all the values as they see fit.
It has become fashionable to deride “reactionaries” who pose the specter of slippery slopes. These don’t really exist, we are told, except as last-ditch arguments made by those who have already lost the debate on the merits. Except that the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is a stunning avalanche of slippery slopes that have consumed entire peoples, nations, and, yes, the oh-so-prized individual as well.
Libertarians are perhaps uniquely lunkheaded in their subjective assessments of the consequences of secular hijacking of the social contract. Motivations and effects of secularists whose views do not accord with their own can be safely ruled irrelevant. Atheist Nazis were irrational in their beliefs and therefore immaterial. Communism in the Soviet Union and China was rationalism deluded by a false economic premise; they failed to understand the libertarian gospel of the Chicago school of economics. Big mistake. Therefore not germane.
What the Randians stubbornly refuse to realize is that for all her later pretensions, Ayn Rand was not writing philosophy in Atlas Shrugged; she was writing a parable. She was reacting against a youth lived in the iron oppression of the Soviet Union, which was bent on exterminating individual identity to replace it with automatons of the state. Which is, in fact, rational, but anti-human. Her book Anthem is the clearest statement of her emotional inspiration. The protagonist learns to replace the statist “we” with the human “I.” When all societal forces are trying to annul your basic human identity, the response is to mount an equally monolithic defense. I matter more than the whole state. Otherwise, I am wholly lost. But her claims to an objective truth that refutes the Soviet truth are rootless. Without God, there is no basis for declaring one right and the other wrong.
Indeed, the Soviet truth makes more sense in a godless universe, especially if all the religions of the world are superstitious malarkey. Without the residue of that superstition in your head, why would you flinch at the sight of a man in uniform shooting a mother and her children in the head? Is the gun aimed at you? No. And which is the more rational response to being concerned that the gun might one day be aimed at you? Fighting for a spurious notion of universal justice, or becoming yourself the man with the gun and the uniform that makes it right?
So the libertarians are lying to themselves in a deep way. Oddly, for example, their positions on abortion, same sex marriage, drugs, and disengagement from the world tend to mirror the positions of liberals with expressly statist goals, and they do not comprehend the contradiction.
Liberals, on the other hand, are fooling themselves in an even sillier way. They talk about equality and social justice and retribution for ancient wrongs, on behalf of all the people who are mired in misery, and not for one moment do they realize that they are themselves disciples of Ayn Rand.
Yes, that’s what I said. From first to last they and their feudal subjects are motivated by pure objectivist self-interest. Despite the gloss of Atlas Shrugged with all its creative entrepreneurs, there is nothing commanding self-interest to be consciously or even neutrally virtuous. Protestations to the contrary are mere pretension or, more bluntly, self-serving PR. Revenge is just as meritorious an aspiration as creativity. How is greed by the talentless subordinate to ambition by the able? It isn’t. We all get only one shot at it. Who cares what happens to the generations after I’m gone?
We’ve had a century to observe FDR liberals and his heirs in action. In all that time, they have never cared about the results of their “reform” efforts or the consequences to the victims, er, beneficiaries of their lordly largesse. The only striking record of accomplishment they have recorded is the continual growth of government, the increase in power located in Washington, DC, the conquest of formerly liberal institutions of higher learning by post-modern nihilism, and the slow deterioration of the journalism profession to concubine of the political left.
It’s no coincidence that the two longest periods of economic depression since 1929 are the FDR administration and the Obama administration. But they’re not failures in liberal minds because both men got reelected. They take credit for JFK even though in today’s terms he would have been a right wing conservative, militant about national defense and devoted to tax cuts as economic stimulus. They don’t care. He’s cover for the whole party because he favored the civil rights movement, which conceals the fact that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed by Republicans in congress, not Democrats. LBJ vowed to end poverty. His urban renewal program knocked down black neighborhoods and began fifty years of government-sponsored Jim Crow legislation, which directly subsidized the destruction of black families, the annihilation of the public school system, and the creation of a permanent underclass of, well, urban sharecroppers, whose only crop is illegal drugs. Sixties liberals still preen over their successful opposition to the war in Vietnam and fail to accept any responsibility for the mult-million murders in Vietnam and Cambodia caused by their humanitarian delusions.
It simply can’t be the case that smart, rich politicians believe any of this crap has worked. Except in the sense that it has kept them rich, powerful, and in office.
But the slippery slopes are everywhere, and they have turned into a federal infrastructure of chutes to ruination and progressively more impossibly steep ladders to individual success.
Rational? Surely they would tell you so. Even as they continue and amplify their efforts to rout God and Christianity from all corners of the nation but the real estate on which churches sit. And contrary to the complaining of our “free press,” they are succeeding spectacularly. 75 percent of black children are born out of wedlock, and lesser but equally frightening percentages are true of other demographics as well, while the studies demonstrate that children of young single mothers are many times more likely to get involved with drugs, gangs, prison, and violent death.
Amazingly, not even the Gollum press, whose Precious plays golf and jets sybaritically around the world while the country disintegrates, retains any capability to see that propaganda about gun control — inspired by the deaths of suburban white children — constitutes any kind of fundamental and anti-moral hypocrisy. It still makes more sense to them that big signs advertising schools as gun-free zones tempt maniacs to invade schools with guns. Meanwhile, gang culture in Detroit and Chicago is killing hundreds of nonwhite children with admittedly illegal guns — which doesn’t occur in the public mind because the press doesn’t report on it.
You see. Liberals care. Ask the New York Times. Ask Harvard professors. Ask Hollywood stars. Ask every comfortable liberal who spews unspeakable hate against all who dare to oppose their fraudulent causes.
Did I forget same-sex marriage? No. Another crock. Professional politicans falling like dominoes to proclaim their support for a reform most have been conspicuously opposed to for ostensibly moral reasons.
How we know that God has been successfully evicted from the machinery of state. The MSM fails to cover the case of two men, legally married to one another, who adopted nine boys and proceeded to molest two or more of them. Trial underway as we speak. Have you heard of it? No. Doesn’t fit the narrative.
Right now, an appalling trial is underway in Pennsylvania in which an abortionist is charged with killing seven but perhaps many hundreds of babies who survived botched abortions by snipping their spinal cords. At the same time, a spokesman for Planned Parenthood in Florida testifies to the state legislature that such decisions belong entirely to the mothers and doctors involved. First, abortion was a right covered by the privacy of a woman’s uterus. But guess what? They never cared about the uterus. Babies who somehow manage to escape the uterus are also subject to termination. Post-Christian rational morality has now accomplished the great leap forward of reverting to the bowels of ancient Roman bathhouses where pagan mothers entombed their smothered unwelcome babies. It’s called progress. Or social justice. Or liberty. Because we’re, you know, so liberal.
Rationalists. What do they do? They argue for an inch and take a mile. The goalposts keep moving, more all the time. How the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into the Gulag Archipelago. That’s no accident. It’s the inevitable product of human hubris by rationalists convinced that they are smarter than multiple millennia of cultural and moral consensus. Some animals are more equal than others. Anybody think Rand wouldn’t agree with that basic proposition?
What makes it so dire and probably fatal is that the media are Randians too. It’s not a good career move to deviate from the approved narrative.
What God used to be for. Something bigger than my career, no matter what it costs me. Yes, there used to be journalistic ethics. But what underpinned those ethics is gone. By post-modern, arrogant consent.
I knew about the Philadelphia abortion case, and the details that are coming out are sickening to the core.
You’re right about the gay couple who adopted and molested, though — I haven’t heard a thing about it, and imagine I never will from the MSM. What happened to ‘if it bleeds, it leads?’ I thought shocking stories got subscribers. Ah, but they know they’ve got us, we’ll watch or log in to their websites no matter what. This just makes me want to double down on my retraction from any kind of mainstream media outlet: TV, internet, radio, all of it.
Crud. Didn’t even see this one. Uh… uh… shit. I’ll try to whip out some thoughts real quick.
I anticipated some of this piece in my response to the last piece. If you want to address this response and that one at the same time, I won’t hold it against you.
“When religion, the meta-human anchor that keeps people rooted in enduring values, is done in for its fancied crimes, the rational deciders of objective morality are, by default, human beings.”
But see, human beings have always decided morality. Whether they understood they were doing it or not, whether they admitted it to themselves or not. This is the error that renders the whole essay moot. But I’ll keep going. God may have been a useful mental tool for early humans (that, er, worked better for some than others), but humans have always been the ones doing the work. It cannot be otherwise.
Don’t believe me? Quick, name a reliable way to determine God’s will. You can’t? There isn’t one? Then… what are we really talking about? I might have an answer.
“Neither liberals nor libertarians are honest. Both are expressly Utopian, meaning they claim that there is a set of rationally determined circumstances that can achieve the ideal of human equality and individual empowerment, regardless of divisive pre-existing social, educational, cultural, ethnic, racial, economic, and (of course) religious factors.”
I think you’re abusing language here. Libertarians (the ones I agree with, anyway, and we’ll get to that) believe their policies will create the ideal conditions, and that the ideal outcomes will for more freely after that– though no serious thinker thinks bad things will totally disappear from human life. The point is to foster human flourishing, not end all human misery. Though, you know, flourishing goes a long way toward that.
Utopian is a popular pejorative, but progress has moved those goalposts quite a ways. The United States of America was Utopian to a “realist” in 17th Century England. Refrigeration was a Utopian absurdity to Jews wandering the desert. History shows that doing enormously better than all of the rest of history has many historical precedents.
“Their position is that I should be able to do what I want to do, and you should trust that I’m not actually inimical to the well being of others, even though my core postulate is the supremacy of my own self-interest.”
Because I am such a naive Randian, I don’t see the contradiction you think is evident. Everyone assumes self-interest necessarily means being destructive of the interest of others. The opposite is true. Because I am a glib naive Randian, I think her creed “neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself” is a exquisite, elegant formulation of the perfect social contract. Crystalline, really. What, above damn near all else, is in your self-interest? CREATING AN CULTURE WHERE PEOPLE DON’T SACRIFICE OTHERS TO THEMSELVES. If you’ll excuse my caps lock.
“Motivations and effects of secularists whose views do not accord with their own can be safely ruled irrelevant.”
Once more: Avowed rationality is no guarantee of authentic rationality. Just as avowed virtue is no guarantee, avowed piety is no guarantee. If I said Islam is proof that theism is evil, and that you were naive to think your preferred theism wouldn’t end the same way, how would you respond? What could you say, other than “Um, Islam doesn’t count”? In fact, you have responded with just that. And in so doing missed the rub entirely. If you judge one God better than another, or one clam for God’s will better than another claim, then whether you know it or not, you have appealed to a standard above God. You say liberals are really Randians? I say you’re really a Transtheist. Great to have you!
“When all societal forces are trying to annul your basic human identity, the response is to mount an equally monolithic defense. I matter more than the whole state. Otherwise, I am wholly lost. But her claims to an objective truth that refutes the Soviet truth are rootless. Without God, there is no basis for declaring one right and the other wrong.”
Living’s objective requirements are the most solid basis there is. In fact, those are the grounds you’re arguing on right this second. No, really! You’re not insisting God’s will be done because it’s God’s will. You’re making a claim that God is necessary for human life. Human life is the goal. Not obedience to God. I just think we oughta skip straight to the requirements and cut out the middle man. Middle God, as it were.
“Indeed, the Soviet truth makes more sense in a godless universe, especially if all the religions of the world are superstitious malarkey.”
If anything, it makes a little less sense. God provides a way for justice to be done after this life. Without God, this life is all we get, and how many millions of Russian subjects were robbed of their lives and will have no recourse ever?
“Without the residue of that superstition in your head, why would you flinch at the sight of a man in uniform shooting a mother and her children in the head?”
Compassion? Empathy? No God required for either of those.
“And which is the more rational response to being concerned that the gun might one day be aimed at you? Fighting for a spurious notion of universal justice, or becoming yourself the man with the gun and the uniform that makes it right?”
Neither. Objectivists don’t talk about “universal” justice. They talk about the justice life requires to work. That’s the point, the real point, of morality: The requirements of human life. Not the satisfaction of some intrinsic metaphysical law. There’s no such thing.
But justice, real justice, is the best option. Seeing as how absolute security is impossible. Maybe you’ll say that’s all the more reason to suit up, get your Kalashnikov, and get the bad law on your side. Except anyone who can see past the short-term will realize it gives people more reason to hate you. And a valid reason at that. Might as well paint a target on your back. How safe did Nazi soldiers feel when Germany surrendered?
And realistically, how is faith not spurious?
“Oddly, for example, their positions on abortion, same sex marriage, drugs, and disengagement from the world tend to mirror the positions of liberals with expressly statist goals, and they do not comprehend the contradiction.”
But, by your own model, as you explain in your very next paragraph, liberals are the ones with the contradiction. Libertarians are consistent in wanting a lessening of state control.
“Despite the gloss of Atlas Shrugged with all its creative entrepreneurs, there is nothing commanding self-interest to be consciously or even neutrally virtuous.”
Except for the unmatched benefit of living in a non-sacrificial culture.
You know, I think that about covers it.
Goodness. You continue to duck all the big questions.
But I’m liking your new civility.
Let’s see. Key points.
No need to make Christianity competitive with Islam when you’re a Christian. Religion isn’t the problem. Islam is. The politically correct nonsense is that virtuous religions accept the virtue of all other religions. Not true. Virtuous religions accept the religion of virtuous religions. Islam does not qualify. They subjugate and kill their women. They urge their adherents to kill members of other religions. Bzzzzz. Wrong answer. Evil religion. No brainer.
Also, the Koran is crappy scripture. A writer’s opinion. Pretty transparently fake. Compare anything in that weird book to the poetry of Psalms, Proverbs, and the Gospel of John. Enough said.
“Justice, real justice…” Oh c’mon. Who’s going to enforce your justice, B? Smart people like you, I suppose. You never address the mechanism by which you replace horrible religion with your superior official morality. If you’re not going to take control, then what? What you fail to realize is that you can’t stamp out religion just because you are superior to it. When the Soviet Union fell, the Russian Orthodox Church emerged as If it had never been suppressed. Think about that. Seventy years of persecution overturned in a day.
Emblematic of your naïveté. You make your arguments as if I’m disagreeing that there’s a rational case to be made for morality. Of course there is. There’s also a rational case to be made for not spending more money than we can possibly raise in taxes. How’s that working out?
I know immediately you’ll respond by saying people are dumb and that’s why they believe in God, contrary to your superior perceptiveness. They should listen to you, no matter how or why. But that misses the point.
The point. People have always been dumb. How in the hell did they ever claw their way up from serfdom to an air-conditioned house in the suburbs, two SUVs, a 46 inch high-def television, cellphones for everyone, and hundred dollar sneakers to go with their breast implants and morning after pills?
You cannot describe any route from mud piles to DMV pensions without referencing Christianity. Can’t be done.
So you just ignore the phenomenon. Fine.
But tell me HOW your superior morality gets impressed on the body politic. I don’t care if you are in some theoretical sense persuasive. There’s just no way you could ever make your moral vision the law of the land without hijacking the law of the land and becoming a tyrant.
Which is the proof of the miracle of Christianity. Somehow it has made dumb people free. Ayn Rand didn’t do that. The only free people she was interested in were Hank Reardon and John Galt.
How you going to implant the individuality gene, son? Don’t tell me it was always there. Your beloved Greeks were slaves for hundreds of years. Pythagoras and Archimedes didn’t save them from that fate. The Greeks fell. Like everybody else.
And don’t tell me we haven’t surpassed them. Don’t. How did that happen? People suddenly forgot about religion and bowed to science instead? That was the great breakthrough? Then why did Einstein protest quantum mechanics by saying, “God does not play dice with the universe.”
Oh. Right. Einstein dumb. Brizoni smart.
Forgive my cheek.
Wrote a comment but it got wiped out b/c I didn’t type in an email address. Argh.
Anyway, sorry I’ve been so busy this week but I at least want to tell you this is an incredible post. Thank you.
Can’t get over this:
http://www.punditandpundette.com/2013/04/photo-empty-media-seats-at-gosnell-trial.html
This is our sick, conditioned society. Lose sleep about Sandy Hook, gay marriage & the Rutgers basketball coach.
Babies getting slaugthered by having their necks cut with scissors? “Meh”. Wouldn’t want to endanger those “women’s reproductive rights”. Ayn Rand was fond of those, too.
No need to make Christianity competitive with Islam when you’re a Christian. Religion isn’t the problem. Islam is. The politically correct nonsense is that virtuous religions accept the virtue of all other religions. Not true. Virtuous religions accept the religion of virtuous religions. Islam does not qualify. They subjugate and kill their women. They urge their adherents to kill members of other religions. Bzzzzz. Wrong answer. Evil religion. No brainer.
Now who’s ducking? Better question: How’s it feel to be a Transtheist? A Christian Transtheist, at that. That’s gotta make for some awkward prayers. “Good job mandating the correct standard of morality, Almighty Lord. Otherwise I’d have to dump you like a hot potato.” Not exactly submissive.
You never address the mechanism by which you replace horrible religion with your superior official morality. If you’re not going to take control, then what? What you fail to realize is that you can’t stamp out religion just because you are superior to it. When the Soviet Union fell, the Russian Orthodox Church emerged as If it had never been suppressed.
Not interested in stomping it out. I just want people to amend it and put it in its proper place. The divine right of kings was once an inextricable part of Christianity. How many devout Christians believe it now? Besides, even you have mostly made the change I think is necessary. You don’t believe anything whatsoever God commands is good because He commands it. In fact, most people believe that. So this isn’t the tall order you make it out to be. Want to believe in God? Fine. But prioritize that shit. Kick the old Ghost upstairs, if you have to. You’ll be in good company. Kicking God upstairs is what made America possible. But maybe it’s time to officially retire Him.
You make your arguments as if I’m disagreeing that there’s a rational case to be made for morality. Of course there is. There’s also a rational case to be made for not spending more money than we can possibly raise in taxes. How’s that working out? I know immediately you’ll respond by saying people are dumb…
Oddly enough, I don’t think that. I think that building a life is hard enough work that most people can’t help but rely on a dedicated minority concerned with intellectual issues. (“Who constitutes this minority? Whoever chooses to be concerned.” – the old bitch) However, I do think everyone should be a little more intellectually concerned than they are now. There’s enough room in the schedule of daily life for that. Little less sitcom watching, little more reading and thinking. Also not too tall an order. The incentive I can offer is liberty, prosperity, and pride.
People have always been dumb. How in the hell did they ever claw their way up from serfdom to an air-conditioned house in the suburbs, two SUVs, a 46 inch high-def television, cellphones for everyone, and hundred dollar sneakers to go with their breast implants and morning after pills? You cannot describe any route from mud piles to DMV pensions without referencing Christianity. Can’t be done.
Jive. You chose to miss my point about Byzantium. They had prosperity, your supposedly essential catalyst of Christianity, AND a wide-open historical window– a door, an arch, a mile-long gate– to make something of it. Where was their progress, as you’ve defined progress? They had none. Christianity didn’t do what you think it did. It had a bit part to play, sure. But only a bit part.
But tell me HOW your superior morality gets impressed on the body politic. I don’t care if you are in some theoretical sense persuasive. There’s just no way you could ever make your moral vision the law of the land without hijacking the law of the land and becoming a tyrant.
There’s this thing, called the democratic process…? That’s how laws generally get changed. Major shifts in law follow cultural shifts. And tyranny would be inimical to the change I’d like to see. Whatever your point is, you haven’t made it.
How you going to implant the individuality gene, son? Don’t tell me it was always there. Your beloved Greeks were slaves for hundreds of years. Pythagoras and Archimedes didn’t save them from that fate. The Greeks fell. Like everybody else.
Christian Byzantium fell too. But I guess we can’t blame them for that? You’ll have to explain that one to me.
Here’s a pertinent quote from an Objectivist. You won’t like it. “The early Christians did contribute some good ideas to the world, ideas that proved important to the cause of future freedom. I must, so to speak, give the angels their due. In particular, the idea that man has value as an individual—that the individual soul is precious—is essentially a Christian legacy to the West; its first appearance was in the form of the idea that every man, despite original sin, is made in the image of God (as against the pre-Christian notion that a certain group or nation has a monopoly on human value, while the rest of mankind are properly slaves or mere barbarians). But notice a crucial point: this Christian idea, by itself, was historically impotent. It did nothing to unshackle the serfs or stay the Inquisition or turn the Puritan elders into Thomas Jeffersons. Only when the religious approach lost its power—only when the idea of individual value was able to break free from its Christian context and become integrated into a rational, secular philosophy—only then did this kind of idea bear practical fruit.”
I know, I know. It’s so ridiculous, you can’t be bothered to explain why.
“Justice, real justice…” Oh c’mon. Who’s going to enforce your justice, B?
Moved this to the end because it’s the real heart of the matter. Who’s gonna enforce YOUR justice, sir? God? Hahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH WOW HOLY SHIT HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Think I fucked up a lung.
You know a little something about the last century, right? You think the takeaway from Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot is that men need God. The real takeaway is that men have no God. God enforces no morality whatsoever. There is no evil so evil that God can be bothered to stop it. “Unmoved mover” indeed. You want men to trust that a God who allowed the Holocaust will suddenly show up and hold them accountable? No fucking sale. That train has left the station, jumped a penny on the track, plummeted off the bridge, and currently lies in an wrecked heap at the bottom of the ravine. Unsalvagable. The line is closed.
Who enforces justice? Who do you think. It ain’t Jesus Christ.
Brizoni, I think you make the same mistake that many are guilty of. I see it in my job all the time, and have begun to realize it is a much larger problem.
The problem is that so many fail to give our ancestors their due. We think those who came before us were idiots, unelightened, or simply ignorant.
I have come to believe that we are not much smarter, wiser, or more enlightened than humans were two or three thousand years ago. We are lucky enough to have more access to information and education, granted. But in the use of logic and ability to recognize truth, we have not improved.
So this is where God comes in. Smarter men than you or I have thought about this for the greater part of their lives. I would not attempt to debate with Thomas Aquinas, and I consider myself a highly logical person.
The universe and the earth are beautiful, but I know that neither one gives a crap about me or all of mankind. It is supreme arrogance to think that we control the climate. It’s all bigger than we can imagine. And the quarks and other sub-atomic particles more complex than we can ever fully comprehend.
Given that, it makes me feel pretty damn irrelevant. What is the point of trying? I used to ponder the possibility that I was created “today”, and that all my memories were simply programmed in my brain, and that other people were simply illusions placed before me. I was simply a “test” being run by more advanced and powerful beings. There is no way to prove your way out of that possibility. Except that it doesn’t feel right. It defies reason, and cheapens life to proceed under that assumption.
So I choose not to behave that way.
In a similar way, I have rationalized that believing in God leads me to a better way of living, thinking, and being. For me, it’s not a fantasy that only applied to our “primitive ancestors”. I give them more crdit than that, and believe that the same rationale still applies today. The way of the world points toward the underlying truth.
Oh. I get it. God doesn’t produce the cultural effects you want. He doesn’t prevent bad things from happening the way you interpret history. You believe he is accountable to your expectations based on your three decades of human experience.
You want God to be Superman, swooping in to save the day, right all wrongs, and promote your utopian dreams. If he doesn’t act like Superman, he doesn’t exist.
Congratulations. You’ve discovered the problem of human suffering. Better late than never.
Oddly, for a man whose philosophical icon was so focused on economics, you missed the concept of opportunity cost. There’s always the cost of what actually transpires, but there’s also the cost of what doesn’t, expressed more poetically as the road not taken.
God didn’t prevent the holocaust and you find him guilty, sentencing him therefore to nonexistence.
Of course, you don’t give any consideration to the fact that the holocaust was stopped in its tracks before the thousand year atheist Reich managed to conquer all of Europe. You also, still, conveniently fail to address the fact that the most monstrous crimes in history were committed in the twentieth century by people who felt they were superior to outmoded notions of God. Yet God is responsible for their crimes if he exists, and if he doesn’t explain himself to you, ta da, he doesn’t exist.
Circular logic. But he has already explained himself. You just don’t choose to hear the explanation. He didn’t rescue Jesus from the cross. The suffering unto death was carried all the way through.
Human beings have free will. Without it we’d be parrot choirs, sweet perhaps but pointless. With free will, we can and do commit terrible crimes and many lesser sins. The human condition is that we all die, with no exceptions. But the conditions — the fact of evil and the certainty of death — also enable us to make brave and noble choices for good.
Sorry if this seems a bit kindergarten, but your bluster makes it necessary. Most of the first apostles were murdered and died in terrible pain. Christianity is not betrayed or disproven by the fact of suffering. God is not invalidated or banished from existence by your toothache, car accident, or tragic love affair.
What I propose is that you look at all your arguments from the other side. As I said before, separation of church and state was never intended to protect government from Christianity. Look at the divine right of kings that way. It wasn’t the church that endorsed monarchy; it was monarchies that used the church to enhance their authority. Has the church ever been corrupt? Sure. It’s peopled by human beings. But the church has outlived every other institution on earth.
You seem upset that the Byzantine Empire didn’t invent steam engines. But technology and prosperity are not the purpose of Christian theology. They’re just a by-product of empowering individuals to fulfill their potential in the context of the inherent equality under God of all souls.
These are not difficult ideas, except that you insist on approaching them bass-ackwards. It took the invention of rational atheism to pioneer the engineered slaughter of millions upon millions of people. To you this is proof that God is an empty concept. You’ve never considered the possibility that without Christianity the casualties of friction between nations would have much much worse far sooner.
I once did a post on the Polynesians, who cooked and ate their enemies on a regular basis. Not all religions are equal. You laugh yourself sick over this simple fact. It’s laughable that Christians believe their religion is correct where others are wrong. You profess to love your country. Well, it’s the only one that was ever organized based on predominantly Christian rather than feudal concepts. Just a coincidence?
Sure. Because that’s how you insist on seeing things. You fail to see the big picture of the human story. There is no utopia. All civilizations eventually fall. Every part of history is a parable, an allegory, a lesson. Our civilization is falling now. You are a part of its descent, one of the prideful scavengers who eat the marrow out of once healthy bones and seek to reign from the trees surrounding the graveyard.
But that’s not a condemnation. Just a statement of truth. You boast of the democratic process as if you understand it better than us old farts, but when the animating spirit of goodness or the desire for goodness is lost through ignorance, selfishness, and carelessness about the value of the cultural continuum, all that remains is the slow unfolding of the lesson and the unintended consequences of the certainties of arrogant usurpers.
However sincere your intellectual convictions about goodness, they are tissue paper compared to the emotional convictions about goodness that built this country and renewed it continually before Ayn Rand wrote her monumentally silly speech about the sacred meaning of the dollar sign.
Your handicap in this argument is that you do not understand, willfully refuse to understand, anything about Christianity, its depth, complexity, beauty, and sufficiency. You’re little more than a sniper firing at shadows like the ones on the wall of Plato’s cave.
My own access to the mystery is limited because I’m not a good enough man, but I am a writer, and I recognize Christianity as God’s novel of our beautiful, accursed race. One simple story that perfectly encompasses everything we’ve ever done and will ever do, and elevates it in transformational ways. It’s too perfect not to be true, even if none of us understands the whole of it. If you ever liked the Boomer Bible, that’s why you did. That was my inspiration, creation of a whole with multiple organizing principles, all of them complete, designed, independent, and simultaneously correct despite their contradictions. Just a tiny tribute to the much greater whole I could occasionally glimpse in the process of writing it, which I gradually came to see as a gift I had been given, not a triumph of my talent.
Don’t expect you to regard this as anything but an old man’s folly. I see where you’re going. It’s okay, part of the sum. The downfall is part of this chapter of the story. I struggle and, yes, suffer, with the personal pain of witnessing this decline and fall, but I also see why and how it is occurring. Your part is unexpected, perhaps, but nothing I could or would ever hold against you. We made you. And you are doing what we made you to do.
It’s not the end of the world. Not Armageddon or the Apocalypse. It’s just the next chapter of the human novel.
Follow your heart. I’m not your enemy. I’m just a splinter you’ll probably carry with you for many years. Doing my part.
Well, seeing as we’re being so civil here (and on a more civil blogging platform, no less), it seems bad form to employ random pseudonyms, so I shall dispense with them.
Robert: An excellent post. As was your previous comment. I wonder if your “access to the mystery” is really as limited as you believe it to be.
Brizoni: Your insistence on depicting Christian morality as being all about the incompetent “Sky Cop” suggests that you are either familiar with only the most aberrant Christian sects, ignorant of Christianity altogether, or simply engaging in caricature for the rhetorical effect. If the last, then I call “bad form”. If the first two, I suggest you learn more about your opponent if you wish to play in this game. This is not a bad place to start.
So long as men are free, they are free to be evil. The Christian story accounts for this. It contains the altogether unintuitive way God has responded to evil. And now we are, if you will, expected to move out of God’s basement and get on with growing up. How we exercise our will doesn’t come from a set of rules or fear of an enforcer. It comes from seeing ourselves in a Story.
It is here that atheism breaks down completely, because atheism has no story. In fact, it says that no stories are true. Life is random, incidental, and cheap… the product of raw undirected evolution. Now, I’ll grant you that you can reasonably get to “I will never live for the sake of another man” from evolution — this is basic survival. All organisms seek self-preservation. It is indeed a reasonable thing to do. But you simply cannot rationally derive “nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine”. Evolution is necessarily about competition — sacrificing others for one’s own survival. Sure, self-preservation encourages some degree of cooperation. And it’s all well and good for you to take such an oath. But it is in human nature (as in all animals) to sacrifice others to satisfy one’s desires. The suggestion you offered that retaliation is an effective deterrent to this instinct is, pardon my harshness, simply asinine. Powerful men have always accepted the risk of retaliation knowingly. Some weren’t up to the challenge. Many were. Whether to satisfy their own base impulses or implement their own vision of a “better world”, the less powerful have always been fodder. Even John Galt fails to live up to his own oath. For when he retreats to his enclave with the other inventors, tycoons, and otherwise “rational” people to let the world burn, he sacrifices the coal miners, the taxi drivers, the owners of falafel stands, the old men who were brilliant once but can no longer recall their own names. They will all suffer so that he can build his new world out of their ashes.
The Christian story is unique in how it addresses this fundamental drive. True, many still refuse to live in light of this reality — in the modern age especially, Christians have been telling the story badly…. But the story remains compelling, and where men have lived by it, freedom and learning have followed. It is not, as Chesterton said, that the Christian ideal has been tried and found wanting — rather, it has been found difficult and left untried. The Story has fallen on dark times… But, as Chesterton also said, “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.”
You have no story, Brizoni. And without a story — a true story — there is nothing between you and the Ubermenschen who will happily sacrifice you for a “higher” order. Technology is rapidly approaching the point at which “Brave New World” or “Gattaca” becomes a reality. Your Asian tigers are larval forms of the hive mind — where individuality means nothing and the survival of the colony is paramount. Your rants on InstaPunk are destroying the very ground you stand on. You say that Robert is right on so many things, but wrong on this one point about God. You are a fool: without this “one point”, there is no Boomer Bible or Shuteye Town or Instapunk. When you deny Christianity, you are denying everything Robert Laird has written. Just keep repeating to yourself, “there are no contradictions”…
Ron:
I know you know me, but do I know you? If I don’t, I wish I did. Some way we can overcome these electronic limitations and talk one to one?
Worse, you write exactly like I do. My sentence structure, my usage, my periodicity, my punctuation. Nobody I know writes like that. Who would do that? Not very many CAN do that. Even your STORY theme is mine. Who are you, Ron?
Tell me at sigmazrn at comcast,net.
I’m extremely impressed with your writing abilities as neatly as with the structure in your blog. Is this a paid subject or did you modify it your self? Either way stay up the excellent high quality writing, it is uncommon to see a nice blog like this one nowadays..
I cooled my jets for a while because I didn’t want this conversation to devolve into a shouting match over current events. Tried to write Wednesday, thinking I’d be ready. I wasn’t. I’ll try again.
There’s an old quote that goes something like “a false idea is half-damned when stated in simple terms.” With his plain outline, Ron half-damns his narrative. Let’s see if we can’t get him the rest of the way.
How we exercise our will doesn’t come from a set of rules or fear of an enforcer. It comes from seeing ourselves in a Story. It is here that atheism breaks down completely, because atheism has no story. In fact, it says that no stories are true.
Wrong. Atheism says no stories with a God are true. See the difference?
Atheism does, in fact, have a story. And it beats the living shit out of theism. Theistic Essentialists claim there’s no significance to human life without God, but they’re as wrong as wrong gets. If there is an omnipotent creator God, nothing means anything at all. With no effort, God can do, or undo, anything He chooses. God can preserve, restore, or obliterate anything at any time. The fact that Christianity postulates eternal and “just” consequences for human behavior is mere inconsistency and, in a literal sense, hypocrisy; omnipotent means omnipotent. Not “kind of potent” or “pretty much potent.” It means no achievement of man’s– spiritual or material– matters at all. It means no man can do for or to another man anything God can’t undo. In a Godful universe, there are no stakes. What good is a story with no stakes?
We can indeed see ourselves in a story without God. And more than see. In a universe with no creator God, the best explanation for our existence is sheer luck. Contrary to Christians and crybaby existentialist Eurofags, this is not cause for despair. Quite the opposite. With no cosmic safety net, and no divinely ordained plan of any kind, WE GET TO WRITE OUR OWN STORY. To whine that atheism has “no” story is like a sculptor whining that the block of marble won’t carve itself, or an author bemoaning an empty notebook, or a painter cursing a new canvas for its blankness. You have quite spectacularly missed the best part of being human.
Here’s how everybody’s story starts: “Because of some stuff that happened before, you got lucky and were born. From there, you proceeded to…” That’s paragraph one, page one of your book. You write the rest. If you need a plot with beginning, middle, and end assigned to you from birth, America really isn’t for you. Believing that freedom exists is kind of a prerequisite to exercising it. But if Christianity really is the only story you personally can live with, whatever. Vaya con Dios. But don’t presume to diagnose the whole of the human race with your sickness.
Now, I’ll grant you that you can reasonably get to ‘I will never live for the sake of another man’ from evolution — this is basic survival. All organisms seek self-preservation. It is indeed a reasonable thing to do. But you simply cannot rationally derive ‘nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine’.
Wrong. You can. Christian apologists are the ones behind the game, and they haven’t begun to run to catch up. They haven’t even looked up to see how far Objectivism has outpaced them. The rational case is simple: Benevolence cuts both ways. Coercion stifles innovation and paints a target on your back. Neither of which benefit you in the long run. A culture that renounces coercion can’t help but embrace innovation. Compare the innovation and advantages of relatively free capitalism to the stagnation of earlier, less free eras. Since we’re recommending books, check out East Minus West Equals Zero, an expose of the almost completely second-handedness of Soviet Russia’s material prowess, such as they had.
Plus, a social contract of benevolence means– sorry if this seems a bit kindergarten– people agree not to hurt other people! Such an environment is an unmatched benefit to any organisms trying to survive. Just about everyone would take that deal if you made it explicit (and the few who don’t therefore fall neatly outside the ethics treaty, and can be dealt with as needed). It also means such a thing as friendly competition is possible, despite your dire vision. Even a committed Christian can see this doesn’t take a God to make it work.
So let’s have no more of this “evolution mandates cruelty” silliness. You can cure yourself of this error by thinking of evolution in terms of blunt consequence, instead of nature dolling out rewards or punishments. Evolution benefits us, but it is not our master. We are not beholden to serve natural selection. That slave mentality is a bad vestige of the God years.
But it is in human nature (as in all animals) to sacrifice others to satisfy one’s desires. The suggestion you offered that retaliation is an effective deterrent to this instinct is, pardon my harshness, simply asinine.
Ah, “human nature.” Because no one listens to “Original Sin” anymore. Nothing quite like being lectured about asininity by a Christian. The possibility of retaliation is actually known to work pretty well. It’s kind of the whole principle on which we’ve based law enforcement. But you know that. You know you’re lying. You know you’re pretending to be stupid to make a stupid point.
Even John Galt fails to live up to his own oath. For when he retreats to his enclave with the other inventors, tycoons, and otherwise “rational” people to let the world burn, he sacrifices the coal miners, the taxi drivers, the owners of falafel stands, the old men who were brilliant once but can no longer recall their own names. They will all suffer so that he can build his new world out of their ashes.
So, to faithfully not sacrifice others to himself, he ought to have… sacrificed himself to them? You living Christian stereotype. After the 60 page speech which outlined Rand’s philosophy– the novel by then is pure parable. Not prescription. Atlas asks one question: What happens when the men of the mind go on strike? The answer is the book’s title.
But the story remains compelling, and where men have lived by it, freedom and learning have followed. It is not, as Chesterton said, that the Christian ideal has been tried and found wanting — rather, it has been found difficult and left untried.
Speaking of bumper stickers! Only through willful self-deception does Christianity pass the test of its own history. For its first thirteen centuries, Christianity was a force for stagnation and ignorance. Then despite Christianity (and despite wars and an especially nasty plague), men start to rediscover knowledge, and Christianity gets the credit? This is not a serious theory of history. This is a lie Christian apologists tell themselves to strengthen and flatter their faith. Only through strenuous omission, acrobatic distortions, and scrupulous cherry-picking of fact is Christianity the hero of the Western story.
Let’s go back to Byzantium. Robert’s evasions of the Christian East have been nothing short of shameful. This is the worst:
You seem upset that the Byzantine Empire didn’t invent steam engines. But technology and prosperity are not the purpose of Christian theology. They’re just a by-product of empowering individuals to fulfill their potential in the context of the inherent equality under God of all souls.
A masterclass in deliberately missing the point. If Christianity as such does “empower individuals to fulfill their potential,” why didn’t it? Where were Christian Byzantium’s empowered individials? Who were their Giottos, their Gutenbergs, their Dantes, their Galileos, their Severetuses? (Severeti?) You know the answer, as much as you try to hide it from yourselves: Christianity is not the force that unleashes human potential. Christianity, when sincerely tried, acts as a pause button on a culture’s status quo. Lucky for prosperous Byzantium. Unlucky for desolate Europe. Learning followed for neither. Until the Western mind, with the invaluable aid of Aristotle, began slowly wriggling out of Christ’s death grip.
In Byzantium, Christianity had six hundred unmolested years– two and a half times as long as America has existed– to make something new and wonderful out of its inhabitants. It did nothing. It has no excuse. Which means Western progress is not essentially Christian. Christianity as such did not lead to the Renaissance. Christianity as such did not spark the Enlightenment. Christianity did not create America. Christianity cannot save America.
You have no story, Brizoni. And without a story — a true story…
A true story, he says. I can’t help but admire the temerity. The Christian story is both bad and false. In addition to not passing the test of history, it inevitably postulates a cruel and capricious God who rewards and punishes based on rules that are, in light of his omnipotence, wholly arbitrary. No one is obligated to waste his time on this primitive nonsense.
That still came out harsher than I wanted. I think I can live with it.
Well. So much for civility. That didn’t last long, did it?
You don’t understand the Christian story, and don’t apparently intend to because responding to a caricature of it is so much easier instead. I get that.
I don’t think you want a discussion, Brizoni. I don’t think you want to test your ideas. Because you know you’re right, regardless of what anyone says.
Your rants seethe with contempt and disdain. So long as that is true, nothing I can say could possibly have any effect on you. In the absence of respect, there can be no exchange of ideas — only insults.
I can only once again point out the irony that the Object of your sneer is itself the foundation for Robert’s whole project. (And which of you has not bitten the hand that fed you?)
Anything I’ve ever posted at you was only and entirely an act of solidarity with Robert and his quixotic tilting at you. But even I am not tenacious enough to continue to engage your flailings. Proceed with your crucifixion… The light will break on you one of these days. But not today.
BTW, I honestly don’t think you know shit about Byzantium. Why don’t you start here. Then, I bet you could find some books. Written by historians, even.
Until the Western mind, with the invaluable aid of Aristotle, began slowly wriggling out of Christ’s death grip.
I really, really tried, but as it turns out I just can’t let this one lie, coming as it does in a paragraph both damning the Byzantines and praising Galileo. It is one of the riper cherries, and thus I will pick it alone and be done.
Firstly, were it not for the Byzantine (Christian) scribes, western Europeans might well have not even known of Aristotle, much less been able to read him in Greek.
Secondly, by Galileo’s time it was Aristotle’s “death-grip” that needed breaking. The hard-to-swallow aspect of Galileo’s arguments wasn’t that they contradicted Scripture, but that they contradicted Aristotle (who had long since been “read back” into Scripture much like modern creationists do with science today). Tycho Brahe (a Protestant) rocked the establishment by observing that the Moon wasn’t perfect after all. But sometimes our little theories are just too tidy to allow facts to get in the way, eh?
And speaking of Galileo… He had supporters in the church, including for a time Pope Urban himself. His real problem was that he was so damn certain that he was willing to stab them all in the back. He was permitted to publish his book, but just haaaaaad to be a dick about it. In his certainty, he mocked those who — despite disagreement and at significant political risk — had offered him a chance to make his case… and the irony is that his primary argument for heliocentrism based on the tides was actually wrong. The whole affair is an illustration of what can go wrong when you let your emotional attachment to your own certainty cloud your judgment.
Here endeth the lesson.
Cherry-picking. It’s so much easier when you know the cherry tree than when all you have is a police sketch of individual suspect cherries.
Brizoni. Don’t know what to say. You’ve become such a boor. A really rotten advocate for your position. Ignorant, arrogant, repetitive, unresponsive, and cartoonish. You’re no philosopher, just an attorney for Randian atheism. You have no narrative, no explanations (of anything) no answers for any serious questions. You do no research, haven’t learned even that the resurrection is a huge problem for even skeptics to overcome. You know no history, you have no beliefs beyond Rand, and yet you are stuffed full of a hostility whose personal origins you dare not share. I despair of you. You write and write and write and it’s all always the same. The most boring shit anyone could possibly imagine. 1.6 percent of Americans are hardcore atheists and you act as if it’s the accepted fact of life. Damn.
I’m so sorry for you.