Pedantic Protestant

Lack of Posting

2006-01-23T17:11:00.000-08:00

While I suffer no narcissistic delusion whereby I imagine that people need a daily Pedantic Protestant posting fix or some sort of Mother Hen action by this blog, it might be a bit helpful to explain the lack of posting over the last month or so.

I'm not getting tired of blogging --- I always have opinions or things to say [whose value is up for debate], but I have been busy. If I have the time to do so, I don't have the mental juice to do so, since the mental juice has been expended on other things --- things that bring in a paycheck.

Right now, I'm playing the game of "Graduate Student" whereby I'm teaching myself a few programming languages, sitting in on two graduate courses, and reading up on some courses that I taught a few years back but, distressingly, have forgotten. It's an existence of pleasurable toil, so don't feel sorry for me. Recently, as well, I was picked up as a full-time consultant at a world-class consulting firm, and this will be my new life and career. I'm presently finishing up some part-time consulting projects that I had before this full-time consultancy came along. Again, I'm not frazzled and working 20 hour days or anything, but my time is fairly well-accounted-for.

To be honest, I don't know what will happen to PP in the near future. We may have dropped down from triple-digit glory to double-digit ignominy as far as readers go, and the lack of posting may have already driven part of the crowd away. Maybe I've driven everybody away, and I'm just talking to myself. Ah, but we won't open THAT can o' worms. :-)

Remember When.....

2006-01-20T19:45:00.000-08:00

Do any PP readers remember when the R's and the D's were haggling over the federal budget surplus, whether real or projected? We needed [so said the R's] to elect R's so that those perfidious D's wouldn't spend it away. After all, a vote for an R is a vote for fiscal sanity, small government, and so on.

But the present federal budget deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars must [somehow] be the D's fault. After all, R's believe in small government and fiscal responsibility. That's what the R's claim for themselves, or at least some of them.

What's the solution? Obviously, we must elect more R's. When the deficit rises [if R habits continue] we can still blame the D's on this issue. They're against smaller government and they want to spend the way that other people breathe --- unlike the disciplined R party...

OK...this is just a mini-rant on my part. It is horribly general, but I'd contend the broad brushstrokes still hit the mark. What's a small-gov't guy like myself to do, apart from cloning Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and replacing the bodies of spendthrift R's with the Paul clones while hoping nobody notices?

The other question with which someone like myself must contend is: do people really want to be free to live their lives and make their choices [and live with the consequences], or do they want to make a claim on the wealth and labor of others for redistribution to their pet principles? I don't know the answer to this empirical question. Maybe other people don't feel so negatively about collectivist thinking, thinking nothing of demanding that others subsidize their lives [and having their wealth in turn redistributed according to the wishes of others]. Maybe we small-l libertarians or "classic liberals" [if I'm using the term correctly] are a very small minority, and we just have to accept that for the time being.

Oh well.

More Comments on Rom 9:5

2006-01-20T16:29:00.000-08:00

The preceding post on Rom 9:5 received some good comments from the small but spunky group of PP blog readers. The comments, being interesting in their own right, should be put forth in a more prominent place. With cutting and pasting, it would be a crime not to do so.

(I) Jason Engwer of NTRMin fame makes the following interesting comments:

****BEGIN ENGWER****

Ignatius, writing to Pauline churches in the early second century, repeatedly refers to Jesus as "God" and as uncreated, an attribute that only God has. Craig Keener writes:

“By the second century Jesus’ deity was widely affirmed by Christians (see Ign. Rom. 3; Eph. 7; Justin Dial. 68:9; Athenagoras 24; perhaps 1 En. 48:5; etc.).” (The Gospel of John: A Commentary, Vol. 1 [Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003], n. 162 on p. 298)

If the relevant passages in Paul are to be considered inconclusive, I would say that the widespread early patristic references to the deity of Christ would favor interpreting Paul in a way that's consistent with that patristic view.

But, as you've shown, the Pauline evidence isn't inconclusive. I would add the following:

“Despite this difference of opinion [over whether Jesus is referred to as God in Romans 9:5], arguments in favor of taking ‘God’ as an appellation of ‘Messiah’ greatly outweigh those that support the alternative. Favoring a comma after ‘Messiah’ (and thus the first option) are several stylistic arguments. First, the words ‘the one who is’ are most naturally taken as a relative clause modifying a word in the previous context (see the similar construction in 1 Cor. 11:31). Second, Paul’s doxologies are never independent but always are tied closely to the preceding context. Third, independent blessings of God in the Bible, with only one exception (Ps. 67:19), place the word ‘blessed’ in the first position. Here, however, the Greek word for ‘blessed’ occurs after ‘God,’ suggesting that the blessing must be tied to the previous context. As Metzger points out, it is ‘altogether incredible that Paul, whose ear must have been perfectly familiar with this constantly recurring formula of praise, should in this solitary instance have departed from established usage.’ Fourth, as suggested above, the qualifying phrase ‘according to the flesh’ implies an antithesis; and Paul usually supplies the antithetical element in such cases, rather than allowing the reader simply to assume it. In other words, we would expect, after a description of what the Messiah is from a ‘fleshly’ or ‘this-worldly’ standpoint, a description of what he is from a ‘spiritual’ or ‘otherworldly’ standpoint; see especially Rom. 1:3-4….Paul almost certainly does call Jesus ‘God’ in one other text (Tit. 2:13). Second, the exalted language Paul uses to describe Jesus [Romans 10:13 and Philippians 2:6 cited] as well as the activities Paul ascribes to him [Romans 1:7, 1 Corinthians 4:4-5, 2 Corinthians 5:10, Colossians 1:16, 3:13, and 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9 cited] clearly attest Paul’s belief in the full deity of Christ….Connecting ‘God’ to ‘Christ’ [in Romans 9:5] is therefore exegetically preferable, theologically unobjectionable, and contextually appropriate. Paul here calls the Messiah, Jesus, ‘God,’ attributing to him full divine status.” (Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1996], pp. 567-568)

“Is Paul actually calling Christ God here [in Romans 9:5]? The question hinges on punctuation. There is no question but that it is better Greek to regard the ho on which follows ‘the Christ’ as referring back to Christ rather than forward to theos, ‘God.’ Furthermore, whenever we find a doxology elsewhere, including in Paul, it begins with ‘blessed’ or some similar term, not with ho on. Those who want to find an independent doxology to God here are hard-pressed to explain why the doxology does not follow this normal pattern. In fact, the one real objection to Christ being called God here is that Paul supposedly does not do so elsewhere. But this is not true. He does do so in equivalent terms in Phil. 2.5-11, and furthermore when he calls Christ ‘Lord,’ he is predicating of Jesus the divine name used for God over and over in the LXX. We find Jesus called divine Lord, indeed confessed as such in Rom. 10.9, and then an OT passage (Joel 3.5 LXX) in which God is called ‘Lord’ is applied to Jesus at 10.13. Paul has christologically redefined how he understands monotheism, and 9.5 is just further evidence of the fact.” (Ben Witherington with Darlene Hyatt, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2004], pp. 251-252)

“Those who dissent [against seeing Jesus as God in Romans 9:5], noting that this is not Paul’s usual terminology, nevertheless concur that a doxology to Christ as ‘God’ remains the most likely interpretation of the grammar (Hunter, Romans, 90; idem, Paul, 62-63).” (Craig Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, Vol. 1 [Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003], n. 196 on p. 302)

“when the early Christians called Jesus kyrios, one of the overtones that word quickly acquired, astonishing and even shocking though this must have been, was that texts in the Greek Bible which used kyrios to translate the divine name YHWH were now used to denote Jesus himself, with a subtlety and theological sophistication that seems to go back to the earliest days of the Christian movement….In 1 Corinthians 8.6 Paul takes the Shema itself, the central daily Jewish prayer and confession of monotheistic faith (‘YHWH our God, YHWH is one’), and gives the two words YHWH (kyrios) and ‘God’ (theos) different referents, so that theos refers to ‘the father, from whom are all things and we to him’ and kyrios refers to ‘Jesus the Messiah, through whom are all things and we through him’….Paul elsewhere takes particular texts which refer to YHWH and uses them, without apology or even much explanation, as texts about Jesus. [Romans 10:13 cited]…Likewise, the whole theme of ‘the day of YHWH’ in the Old Testament has been transposed, in Paul and elsewhere in early Christianity, into ‘the day of the kyrios’, i.e. of Jesus, or into ‘the day of the Messiah’. [Acts 2:20, 1 Corinthians 1:8, 5:5, 2 Corinthians 1:14, Philippians 1:6, 1:10, 2:16, 1 Thessalonians 5:2, 2 Peter 3:10]…The first letter of Peter (2.3) speaks of ‘tasting that the Lord is good’, quoting, in relation to Jesus, what Psalm 34 had said about YHWH. In 1 Peter 3.15 we find a quotation from Isaiah 8.13 in which ‘the Messiah’ has been added to ‘Lord’ to make it clear that what was spoken of YHWH in this Old Testament passage is now to be understood of Jesus the Messiah….He [Paul] had, in the senses we have explored, a different kind of meeting with Jesus, but he quickly came to the conclusion which the others, too, had arrived at: that in this Jesus, now demonstrated to have been Israel’s Messiah all along, Israel’s one true god had been not merely speaking, as though through an intermediary, but personally present.” (N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God [Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2003], pp. 571-572, 576)

**** END ENGWER ****

As a rejoinder to Jason's comments, I'll offer the following points:

(1) I bought the ten-volume Ante-Nicene Fathers set from Hendrickson [get it cheap via Christian Books Distributors] either my last year of grad school or my first year as an academic specifically to see what the early fathers thought of Christ relative to his divinity. Ignatius was quite prolific in referring to Christ as "God" --- not that he identified Christ with the Father, but he upheld Christ's full deity without confounding Christ with the Father.

(2) I for myself don't see this gradual evolutionary development in "the consciousness of the church" [whatever THAT means!] regarding the full deity of Christ. Even as a young boy in Baptist school, I viewed Christ as God. Being a little boy, I didn't have anything resembling Trinitarian orthodoxy [I viewed the Trinity as a three-headed man as a boy], but even then, on my own, I saw the full deity of Christ. This fact is mentioned to explain why I have this particular aversion to the whole dialectic view of church history regarding the deity of Christ.

(3) Related to (2), one of the reasons why the words "Biblical scholarship" don't necessarily impress me is because even a superficial reading of the NT texts puts forth Jesus Christ as God, and as man. This isn't something hidden in the nuances of textual criticism, aorist participles, or in some deep recess of scholarship. It is there for all to see, ponder, believe, or reject.

(4) Jason makes some good points in the quotes above about things that were applied to Yahweh being applied to Christ.

BTW --- if anybody cares to know how I'd debate the deity of Christ with a Unitarian, Watchtower person, Mormon, etc, my approach would be to be as direct as possible: put forth the texts where Christ is explicitly called God and shoot down the objections to them. [There's a reason why the New World Translation of the Watchtower alters John 1:1 and 8:58 and denies the deity of Christ in Titus 2:13 and II Peter 1:1.]

(II) Steve Jackson, who, by the way is a top-500 reviewer at Amazon [last time I checked], contributes the following comment as well:

**** BEGIN JACKSON ****

Larry Hurtado has written some books on how worship to Jesus as God developed (I haven't read them, but they are supposed to be good).

Even Ray Brown in his Introduction to New Testament Christology takes Romans 9:5 to be referring to Jesus as God.

**** END JACKSON ****

My only reply is that I have no problem with a "development of worship." My bone of contention is with anybody who denies that, say, a first century Christian could [at least] say "Jesus is Lord" with the understanding that Jesus was, somehow, himself fully divine. Whether they could express this in dogmatic language or the appropriate terminology is not of concern to me.

As for Dr Brown, he is an interesting fellow. I respect his scholarship and learning, but his NT Introduction hardly presents the conservative case regarding authorship, integrity, and dating, when compared to something like a Guthrie, which I'd contend puts forth both positions.

It also speaks of so-called Roman Catholic orthodoxy when Brown is a member of the PBC. I thought all of those self-appointed Roman internet apologists were always talking about how Rome didn't capitulate to modernism unlike rogue Protestantism. Hmmm....

(III) Another commenter named Dan makes the following point:

**** BEGIN DAN ****

Larry Hurtado's "Lord Jesus Christ" is his most complete and scholarly debunking of "high Christology can't be 1st Century" meme. His new book, "How Jesus Became God" looks like a more popular presentation of the same theme, but I have not read it. I do strongly recommend reading "Lord Jesus Christ" as it is more accessible than most scholarly works on this level, and it comprehensively obliterates the widely accepted view of "high Christology=late. The new book my be just as good, but I haven't read it.

Hurtado's book is extraordinarily important, in my view, as it notonly answers the high Christology question, but it also shows that in spite of assertions thast early Jewish Chrisitans (including Jesus !) would never have claimed to be on the same level as God, htey certainly did in the earliest sources we have. He has not gotten as much attention as N. T. Wright, but he deserves much more.

**** END DAN ****

I haven't read any of the books mentioned [and won't be able to in the near future for very happy reasons], but it is worth passing his comments along in a more conspicuous place than a comment box.

Anyway, I hope that these comments are of interest to any readers here at PP.

A Quick Note on Rom 9:5

2006-01-18T15:14:00.000-08:00

Does St Paul refer to Christ as "God over all" in Romans 9:5?

For a summary of the arguments that Paul is referring to Christ as "God", the reader can see the excellent summaries of arguments in such works as

(i) Cranfield, The Epistle to the Romans, International Critical Commentary, Vol II, pp 464-470.

(ii) Schreiner, Romans, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, pp 486-489.

(iii) M. J. Harris, Jesus as God. This book of mine is boxed up, so I don't have the page numbers. The book is published by Baker [Academic].

(iv) Metzger et al, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd Ed., United Bible Societies.

That Christ is called "God" by St Paul is, I'd contend [based on the above arguments], nearly certain.

What is the main argument against the ascription of full deity to Christ?

Based on my studies of Romans, the argument against full ascription of deity by Paul to Christ is not based on any actual empirical evidence put forth, but by the following assumptions:

(a) Viewing Christ as God was something that evolved over the early centuries.
(b) Paul could not have called Christ "God" so early on.

I note that the UBS Textual Commentary has a majority of its scholars taking the position that Christ is not called "God" because, in their own words, "nowhere else in his genuine epistles does Paul ever deisgnate [Christ] as [God]."

But the Granville Sharp rule [correctly] applied to Titus 2:13 shows that Paul referred to Christ as our "great God and savior." And Titus, we might add, is a Pauline epistle. [I note that a commentator of no less than Cranfield's stature seems to be unaware of just how certain the construction is in Titus 2:13 --- see p. 468.]

On the contrary! exclaims a footnote in the UBS Textual Commentary [p 461] --- Titus is not generally regarded as Pauline, but is deutero-Pauline.

But why is Titus viewed as deutero-Pauline?

Interestingly, one such reason I've seen advanced against Pauline authorship of Titus is that the Christology is too high for a first century writer!

Thus, if this is one of the decisive points against Pauline authorship of Titus, then we seem to have a pretty vicious circle of thinking:

Rom 9:5 does not refer to Christ as God because [despite the positive evidence] Paul does not refer to Christ as God elsewhere in his epistles. Titus has a passage referring to Christ as God, but Titus is deutero-Pauline, not Pauline, because the high Christology of Titus makes it something that couldn't have been written in the first century. Therefore, nowhere in the genuine Pauline epistles, we don't have a specific instance of the full deity of Christ.

That is at least how I understand the argument put forth.

What about the passages in Philippians and Colossians that pretty much predicate properties of the Godhead to Christ without calling him God? These seem to be downplayed in liberal-critical arguments against the thesis that Paul was not referring the title of "God" to Christ.

*****

On another note, the evolutionary view seems to this student to be a priori silly. Why would it take centuries for the "collective consciousness of the early church" --- whatever that abstraction really means --- to come to knowledge of the humanity and full divinity of Christ? Is it really safe to assume that, say, the apostles --- those who were intimates of Jesus for over two years and saw him do things that could only be predicated of God --- did not realize in time that they were dealing with the incarnation of the Yahweh of the Hebrew writings?

We may also consider St Paul. If, as reported in the Acts, he really was specially called and converted by a very singular sort of experience where he directly interacted with the risen Lord, why would it be noteworthy that he perceived, knew, and understood the full deity of Christ?

*****

I'd note that there seems to be such a mass of evidence for the deity of Christ that whether or not we admit Rom 9:5 as evidence for the deity of Christ has no bearing on the question. But, it was interesting to review the UBS Textual Commentary and perceive what I see to be a vicious circle in liberal-critical scholarship.

The Best Seat is in Your Own House

2006-01-16T13:54:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting article/op-ed on movie theaters.

Why PP Doesn't Engage in Sports Betting

2006-01-15T19:25:00.000-08:00

I had Washington over Seattle.

I had New England over Denver.

I had Indy over Steeltown.

I had Da Bears over Carolina.

This was a perfect weekend in the Bizarro-world sense.

PP Pix:
(i) AFC Championship --- Denver over Pittsburgh
(ii) NFC Championship --- Seattle over Carolina

You heard it here first. Now go bet on the Steelers and Panthers.

Bucky Bucks Failure

2006-01-14T21:27:00.000-08:00

A man was born in the late nineteenth century. This man was kicked out of college not once, but twice. He worked in a textile mill and as a meatpacker during this time. After a stint in the First World War, he tried to have success with a company dealing in affordable and light-weight housing. This failed.

At this time, it was the dark height of the Great Depression --- the early 1930's. He was bankrupt and unemployed, living in a certain degree of squalor with inferior tenement housing in Chicago. His daughter died of pneumonia, and our yet-unnamed protagonist felt as if he were the responsible agent --- if he had been a better provider, he could've provided a better home, and perhaps she wouldn't have caught the pneumonia. He then turned to the bottle, which exacerbated his depression and sense of being a total failure.

This is where my memory goes a bit fuzzy. I believe he was standing one winter's night on a bridge somewhere in Chicago, and was ready to end it all. He was, after all, a failure in business, a failure in education, a failure in being a husband and father [at least in his mind]. He was a capital-F Failure in every sense of the word.

At the last minute, for reasons that I do not know, he recanted his suicidal urge. Since he had nothing to lose, for he had not succeded in any tangible way, he decided instead to turn himself into a human guinea pig --- "Guinea Pig B" was how he later described himself. The experiment was to be a lifelong experiment: "to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."

What could such a loser --- indeed, a loser who had nearly committed suicide --- do in the grand human scale of things?

***********

This little PP blog isn't the place to list everything he's done, but we can attempt to list a few of this man's accomplishments [in no special order].

(1) The geodesic dome, which encloses the greatest amount of [cubic] space relative to a given material weight.

(2) The Dymaxion Car, which, so far as I know, is not in any sort of production, but which had a then unheard-of fuel efficiency.

(3) A personal favorite of mine is the Dymaxion Map. I hope that people's browsers let them see the animation from this page. The point of the map is that it avoids the distortion in landmass size for landmasses far away from the equator, such as the extreme distortions given to Greenland and Antarctica by the standard Mercator cartographic projection map.

(4) The Dymaxion House [also the "Bucky House"]. A lightweight, inexpensive, and fairly functional sort of housing or sheltering. Again, I do not personally know if these are in any sort of production anywhere.

When I was a junior-high kid in 8th grade [in the glorious 80's] my mother, for reasons unknown to me, bought me two books by our as-of-yet-unnamed protagonist: Synergetics and Synergetics 2. Those books are boxed up [along with most of my life] in a storage unit nearby, but a perusal of those books shows that the man had some very deep perceptions into the nature of space and the universe, particularly with [I'm struggling for words here] the "tetrahedralness" of many natural phenomena. [That is my neologism.] Despite having a PhD in a mathematical science, I believe that going through his books in the present would still be a real grind-out affair on my part.

I also read his Spaceship Earth, also known as Operating Manual to Spaceship Earth. If I'm remembering the right title, I remember reading one page and thinking that he was a socialist, but then I'd be overwhelmed at his broad visionary thinking. I don't know if his ideas would work in practice regarding transportation, city design, etc, but one should appreciate the fact that he can think through such things.

I've only read a few of his books, so I claim no special expertise in him, merely an appreciation based on what I read over the years [and tried to understand].

***********

Can you guess who our Man of Mystery is WITHOUT an internet search? Who is the man who went from suicide attemptee to full professor in Art and Design, a world-famous man with several honorary doctorates?

Answer: he was known as "Bucky." More formally, he was none other than Richard Buckminster Fuller, or, as he wrote, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983). He was the "Guinea Pig B" --- Bucky the Human Guinea Pig --- in his experiment as mentioned above.

What's the point of this post? There is no hidden point, but I thought it would be interesting to make note of somebody who, by all accounts, was a miserable failure into his thirties, but you'd never know it based on his accomplishments afterwards. You'd think he was groomed for success and fame from day one.

Hopefully, this post is interesting enough to make up for a slow posting week!!

Apologetics Quote from the Past

2006-01-11T18:46:00.000-08:00

But I speak to a great many who have no difficulty on this head, being fully satisfied that the gospel of Christ is a divine revelation. What concern have they with the investigation before us? "Much every way." The question for them to ask, is, on what grounds are we satisfied? Are we believers in Christianity because we were born of believing parents, and have always lived in a Christian country; or because we have considered the excellence and weighed the proofs of this religion, and are intelligently persuaded that it deserves our reliance? I am well aware that there are many truly devoted followers of Christ who have never made the evidences of Christianity their study, and in argument with an infidel, would be easily confounded by superior skill and information; but whose belief nevertheless is, in the highest degree, that of rational conviction, since they possess in themselves the best of all evidence that the gospel of Christ is "the power and wisdom of God," having experienced its transforming, purifying, elevating, and enlightening efficacy upon their own hearts and characters. Did such believers abound, Christianity would be much less in need of other evidence. Were all that call themselves Christians thus experimentally convinced of the preciousness of the gospel, I would still urge upon them the duty and advantage of studying as far as possible the various arguments which illustrate the divinity of its origin. I would urge it on considerations of personal pleasure and spiritual improvement. There is a rich feast of knowledge and of devout contemplation to be found in this study. The serious believer, who has not pursued it, has yet to learn with what wonderful and impressive light the God of the gospel has manifested its truth. Its evidences are not only convincing, but delightfully plain; astonishingly accumulated, and of immense variety, as well as strength. He who will take the pains not only to pursue the single line of argument which may seem enough to satisfy his own mind; but devoutly to follow up, in succession, all those great avenues which lead to the gospel as the central fountain of truth, will be presented, at every step, with such evident marks of the finger of God; he will hear from every quarter such reiterated assurances of: "this is the way; walk thou in it ;" he will find himself so enclosed on every hand by insurmountable evidences shutting him up unto the faith of Christ, that new views will open upon him of the real cause and guilt and danger of all unbelief; new emotions of gratitude and admiration will arise in his heart for a revelation so divinely attested; his zeal will receive a new impulse to follow and promote such heavenly light.

---- Charles P. McIlvaine, The evidences of Christianity; in their external, or historical, division: exhibited in a course of lectures, published [I think] in 1861 or so. [I think the book originally appeared in 1832.]

[Taken from Lecture I]

My friend Tim McGrew recommended McIlvaine's Evidences, having just finished reading them himself. The site at which the link to the book appears has five chapters so far online. It is enjoyable reading --- food for the mind for those who enjoy thinking about such questions.

Twenty Leaky Buckets --- Part 5

2006-01-11T17:06:00.000-08:00

The exigencies of real life have kept me away from my little 10-20 minute blogging sessions as of late, but I have a little bit of time to blog away, so we proceed.

My last "serious" sort of posting was on a pamphlet titled 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity. This pamphlet was chosen because a friend referred it to me, and the sort of arguments presented therein are the sort of arguments put forward in popular culture and by people who affect the pose of modern enlightened thinking.

The pamphlet 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity is here.

Part One, a general discussion, is found here.

Part 1.5 consists of some comments on general village atheist themes and is found here. I enumerated five fallacies that are common to most of the arguments in the pamphlet.

Part 2 gives some quick comments as to why reasons one through five really aren't arguments that cause me, a conservative Evangelical, to think twice. That link is here.

Part 3 deals with arguments six through ten. That link is here.

Part 4 deals with arguments eleven through fifteen. That link is here.

I did a little excursus on the whole affair about two weeks ago.

Let me quote myself to save some time:

*****BEGIN EXTENDED SELF-QUOTE*****

Please keep in mind that the pamphlet gives reasons to abandon Christianity. My question throughout this mini-series is this: are any of the reasons anything to give somebody like myself any sort of pause? Presumably, the pamphlet is written in an attempt towards deconversion, or, to put it positively, anti-Christian evangelism. The intended audience therefore appears to be people who all themselves Christian.

I'm a classical card-carrying evidentialist [and you should be too!]. That means, among other things that the way to attack the historical and evidential basis for Christianity is to argue that the evidence for the supernatural phenomena that undergird the Christian religion is poor, or not as good as that of some other competing worldview. My apologetic is at home with the great English, Scottish, and Irish divines who defended the Resurrection and the veracity of the gospels against the humanists and the deists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Personally speaking, I have little patience with what I understand Reformed epistemology and presuppositionalism to be.

Let's return to the pamphlet. So far, I've argued in Parts 2 and 3 that all we're presented with is a laundry list of sociological claims reflecting nothing more than the pamphleteer's dislike of things. Pointing out that some Christians do things of which the pamphleteer is displeased is not any sort of an argument against Christianity. Imputing the behavior of a subset of self-proclaimed Christians to that of the entire religion and then castigating the religion on this imputed global behavior is likewise a non-argument. Discussing the political differences between Christians and the pamphleteer on issues such as, say, abortion, is a non-argument. Asserting that Christianity does not allow for full sexual fulfillment is also a non-argument relative to an evidentialist like myself.

*****END EXTENDED SELF-QUOTE*****

So, reasons one through fifteen are nothing more than the pamphleteer's self-righteous little rant. Are the remaining arguments any better?

Arguments sixteen and seventeen basically make the claim that Christianity is misogynistic and homophobic, respectively. People can click on the pamphlet link and read these arguments. I wish to make a few general comments in no special order:

(1) Let's assume that the author's claim that Christianity is misogynistic. Somebody like myself [a card-carrying "classical evidentialist," remember] then asks the following questions:

(a) Does this affect the evidence positively or negatively for the empty tomb or the veracity of the gospels?

(b) Does this add to or subtract from the body of evidence for the empty tomb or the veracity of the gospels?

The answer to (a) appears to be in the negative, and the answer for (b) appears to be in the negative unless some sort of argument can be given that the sociological claims made by the argument [which we are assuming as true for argument's sake] have some sort of bearing on the existing body of evidence. No such argument is given.

(2) As a side venture, let's see what scriptural insights the pamphleteer gives to support his claim about misogynism.

(a) Passages like Eph 5:22-23, Colossians 3:18; 1 Peter 3:7; 1 Corinthians 11:3, 11:9, and 14:34; and 1 Timothy 2:11–12 and 5:5–6 are cited as evidence of misogynism.
These passages all deal with the roles of women, either functionally or ontologically, in relation to men and to God. The pamphleteer simply doesn't like the fact that these passages represent a breach of concord with modern-day egalitarianism and feminism, and this outrages him. But, as with other arguments-by-outrage, the pamphleteer merely makes his first-world Western modern view of women the standard of comparison and then judges everything by this standard. He is welcome to do so, but without any sort of argument for why his standards are correct he merely begs the question.

(b) The citation of Rev 14:4 and Job 25:4 are demonstrations of the pamphleteer's incompetence when it comes to basic literacy and context.

(i) Rev 14:4 doesn't deal with the status of women. Depending on what commentaries one peruses in the interpretation of the symbols, defiling one's self with women can mean such things as the pursuit of sexual lusts above all things, or the adoption of pagan belief systems [my view].

(ii) Job 25:4 talks about being born of a woman in the sense of one's being born into sin. All humans are born unto sin: "born of a woman" here seems to be "having human nature coming from the normal course of affairs." This is hardly misogynistic.

The abuse of scripture --- the failing to note context, allusion, and other basic literary devices, the failing to consider the various interpretations and defenses of those interpretations put forward, etc, are all part and parcel of the village atheist mentality.

(c) It is hard to see what the point of the OT citations [Numbers 5:20–22 and Leviticus 12:2–5, 15:17–33] are in terms of arguing the misogyny claim. The only thing that can be said about these is that they again cause outrage in the pamphleteer, but, then again, who cares as far as an argument goes?

(3) Given that I don't base my theology or worldview on what others in the past have written, the evidence for Christianity is unaffected [so far as I'm concerned] even if the point is made that some early writers were misogynistic.

Summary of the sixteenth argument: there is nothing here that makes me view the evidence for the empty tomb and veracity of the gospels any differently than before. This argument, like the others, is another non sequitur, expressing merely the outrage that the Bible does not conform to our modern enlightened sensitivities. But it doesn't get to the heart of things, namely, the actual evidence for the truth or falsity of Christianity.

Let's now turn to the seventeenth argument: Christianity is homophobic.

This argument, like the first sixteen, is itself a non-sequitur relative to the evidence. That is, the evidence for/against the empty tomb and veracity of the gospels is unaffected by the author's outrage that the authors of the various Biblical writings do not have views in accord with first-world secular modern Western culture.

Again, all the pamphleteer has done is to assume his position as the standard of comparison without giving any sort of supporting argument. The idea of the pamphlet is to deconvert Christians --- people like myself --- but as with the first sixteen arguments the pamphleteer has failed to get to the heart of the issue. The pamphlet should be entitled instead What I Don't Like About Some Christians to reflect its sociological emphasis.

BTW --- you have to love the sweeping generalizations given in that paragraph about Christians in general. The implicit claim is that most Christians want State-sponsored execution for sodomy, yet no numbers supporting this claim are given. Ah, but then again, who needs evidence when you're the courageous village atheist pamphleteer who is here as Mother Hen to show we benighted folks the light of Reason?

************

I'm stopping at the end of the seventeenth argument and before the eighteenth because I can only take so much inanity [and it has been 20 minutes or so of blogging --- time to get back to real work].

So far, the pamphlet is, by my count, oh-fer-seventeen in making somebody like myself think twice about the evidence for Christianity. We have seventeen arguments that do not carry any water. They'll sound great at a Freethinker's meeting and the person making such arguments can feel courageous and truly enlightened, but as far as actual content goes, "there isn't a there there."

The last three arguments of the pamphlet will be dealt with in the next installment here. Again, we'll ask the question of just how the evidence for Christianity is affected --- if it is affected at all --- for these three remaining arguments.

[Y'all can wake up now...]

Loving Lost

2006-01-08T17:56:00.000-08:00

Well, the other night I stayed up far too late watching the first two DVD's of Lost. I have never watched the show on television --- I have watched very little television since the mid-1990's --- but walking past the Lost DVD's every time I walk into a Blockbuster store put the idea of renting the DVD's in my mind.

To put it simply: now I see why many people are marking out over the show.

(1) The show is quite addictive --- interesting story, plenty of mystery, tight writing, and characters about whom you're captivated but simultaneously suspicious.

(2) Already after six shows, I have my own theories about the island. Following the suggestion of somebody, I wonder if the people are already dead and in "the next life." There are too many arguments against this though.

(3) "Jane" is somebody about whom I have to know more --- exactly what did she do? In the miracle of Hollywood, somehow, being marooned on an island for a week has helped her complexion.

(4) Mr Locke [I don't know if this is spelled correctly] is probably my favorite character. He says he "looked the island square in the eye" and what he saw was, in his words, "beautiful." There is something rather mystical about him --- he was a cripple but now he walks, and is sort of the survivalist/"bad dude"/quiet hero of the bunch. I still don't know much about his past beyond the flashbacks in the six episodes.

(5) Mr Sawyer embodies self-loathing and situational ethics. I hope he gets what is coming to him.

(6) I'm not really into the Korean couple, the pregnant Aussie, or the black man with his son.

(7) It is nice to see a show without a latent political agenda [so far based on the first six episodes]. I don't want to be lectured on right- or left-wing politics when I'm watching something for the purpose of quality veg time.

(8) It will be difficult to, after watching all of Season One quickly, without commericials, to catch up on Season Two while seeing one episode a week, with commercials. The show really makes you always want more, but, I'd contend that it does so without having to try too hard.

Side note --- I went to go rent the other DVD's of Season One at my local Blockbuster, but they were out. So, I did something I've never done before --- drive to another Blockbuster to secure the DVD's. That means that I'm totally into the show.

The fear of getting into the show is that all of the presently loose ends will not be tied together in a coherent fashion. Some examples of disappointment in my life:

(i) The Prisoner was one of my favorite shows of all time, but the final episode where No. 6 finds out who No. 1 is made very little sense and was such an anticlimax to the show.

(ii) X-Files became progressively more incoherent in its last few years.

(iii) Nowhere Man was cancelled after one season back in '95 on the then-fledgeling UPN network. I totally loved that show. I loved the plot, and it looked tightly written. It made me think. But it would be cancelled.

(iv) I have heard that Arrested Development will not be continued on FOX.

Oh well, I suppose that one should be grateful for the good entertainment that exists without acting as if one has a right to more.

This post has been nothing more than an excuse to procrastinate on some studying, so I'd better get back to work.

The Other Foot

2006-01-06T18:38:00.000-08:00

I used to give three hour lectures when I was an assistant professor. [The classes met one evening per week.] The people who took my courses were professional evening students trying to add an MA degree in mathematics or statistics for various reasons. They'd work a full day, then come for the 5:45-9pm lecture. That's a long lecture.

I've been sitting in on some graduate courses to learn some new things in statistics [my academic field] for an assualt on consulting, industry, or private business, and to keep myself mentally sharp. I notice that I get squirmy --- like a little boy on a long car drive --- about 30 minutes into things. And that is with material in which I'm interested.

Thus, being a student in outlook for the first time since the mid-nineties, I have the nagging feeling that I would not be able to tolerate one of my lectures, even with breaks scattered here and there. I gave good lectures and was reasonably interesting [so I'd say], but in retrospect, those people who survived the full 5:45-9pm lecture watching me throw up all sorts of mathematical statistics items on the board surely deserve some sort of medal, especially if they found me or the material [or, alas, both] boring. I wonder how I'd do in my own course, if such an experiment could be arranged.

Another interesting thing of note: even though I'm in the department where I received an MSci and PhD back in the nineties, I still feel like a graduate student when I'm there. Much like the oft-reported phenomenon of visiting one's parents and feeling like one is a child [instead of an adult], I find myself still unconsciously thinking like I'm 20 years old and just starting out again as a grad student. Nobody treats me like one there, but it is my default mental outlook. Of course, grad school was a very happy time of life [barring a few exams here and there], so perhaps this is some unconscious attempt to recreate Eden.

On a side note, posting may be light for another week or so.

The Thrilling Life of a Pedantic Protestant

2006-01-03T21:43:00.000-08:00

I should've finished up the Twenty Leaky Buckets mini-series a few days back, but, frankly, events have changed somewhat.

I got a Blockbuster card, and, of course, I just had to use it. So, in the evenings, when I get home from the gym, instead of showering and then sitting down for the pleasurable toil of twenty or so minutes of making a weblog entry, I've found that, after showering, the DVD player and the big comfy chair have called out to me.

To be exact, I've been going through Curb Your Enthusiasm season-by-season. After that, I got hooked on Arrested Development.

Actually, I find Arrested Development to be a truly clever show. The characters are simultaneously funny, exasperating, and pathetic, and the one straight man ["straight" as in the comedy "straight guy"] holds together all of the goofy characters. I liken the interplay of the characters on that show to a nice four-voice fugue. It's completely twisted humor, but it isn't scatological...if I can make up terms as I go along, it is a pleasantly subversive show.

Watching those DVD's is infinitely preferable to saying "This is a non-argument that has nothing to do with the evidence for the veracity of the gospels" or "Sociological observations today do not impinge on historical claims of the past" or some other sentence that, if articulated at a cocktail party, will ensure that one will have plenty of space around him while the ladies flock to the guy who brags that his house has tripled in value over the last few years since he put in granite-top counters.

A Blockbuster card might as well say "You are simply not going to get done what you thought you would" on it, because you are simply not going to get done what you thought you would after you walk through a Blockbuster.

Next on the plate: Season One of Lost, if I can squeeze it in.

Anyway, I, uh, need to get, yeah, back to work, yeah, that's, uh, right...back to work....

Non-Christian-Exclusivity of Possible Miracles

2006-01-02T15:14:00.000-08:00

I mentioned this in passing in an earlier thread, but it deserves a thread of its own.

In discussions over the years with those skeptical of Christian truth claims, both live and email, I've run into a certain sort of behavior. The behavior is exemplified in a quote like follows [it comes from an atheist who went to the NTRMin board:]

My first question to you to begin this phase is: What other source of ancient religious propaganda, outside the bible, do you accept as being a report of facts only and containing not the least bit of embellishment or untruth, as you view the New Testament? Your answer will tell me whether your view is based on analysis of the data, or whether you are committing the fallacy of special pleading by asking that we accord the religious propaganda of the NT gospels the special place of "facts-only-reporting" and refusing to grant this huge leap to other non-biblical ancient religious propaganda.

The attitude seems to be that the person who is [in the atheist's mind] truly consistent with the evidence has to admit the high probability of non-Christian miracles having occurred. Usually, this is accompanied by an attitude of "that would be fatal for the Christian."

By way of reply, I'd like to make the following points.

(1) The evidence for the bodily Resurrection of Jesus is not contingent on accepting or denying the high probabilities of pagan miracle claims. Neither the number of eyewitness, nor the veracity of their testimony, are affected by the existence of some body of evidence for a pagan miracle.

(2) More generally, an evidential examination of the Christian worldview does not hinge on the existence of lack of miracles in other worldviews. The high or low probability of the Christian worldview is unaffected by, say, the quality of the evidence for Vespasian's alleged healing of the blind.

(3) Steve Hays adds the following commentary to what I've said:

****BEGIN QUOTE****

I have a few comments on Eric’s helpful remarks.

a.There is not automatic relation between miracle and dogma. If a Tibetan monk were able to levitate, that wouldn’t prove the law of karma or reincarnation or the Buddhist theory of evil. It would be completely unrelated.

b.By contrast, a number of Biblical miracles are parables in action or natural metaphors for a particular teaching or doctrinal claim. In that case, the miracle is a direct attestation to the doctrine which it illustrates.

In order for non-Christian miracles to offer any warrant non-Christian doctrine, there would have to be that kind of internal relation.

c.Likewise, miraculous attestation is, at most, a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of revelation.

d.Scripture doesn’t deny, but rather affirms, that the dark side has some preternatural power. So extra-biblical prodigies, even if ungodly, are consistent with Scripture.

e.Some religious, like Islam, have no miracles. Muhammad laid no claim to be a miracle worker.

f.Other religions have finite gods. Even if their gods were real, they would not be omniscient.

g.The old pagan religions are dead religions. If their gods were true gods, why did their gods allow these old pagan religions to die?

h.In Scripture you sometimes have a prophecy which is fulfilled by a miracle. This would multiply its evidentiary value.

****END QUOTE****

(4) Despite all of the bluster that accompanies Freethinker and skeptical arguments against the major miracle claims of Christianity, I have as of yet to see an actual alleged miracle [versus a hypothetical] put forward that has on par with the evidence for the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

In case anybody is curious what the general thrust of the evidence is, a crude outline of a good portion of it goes something like this:

(a) It was in the Roman and Jewish authorities' interest to produce the body of Christ, but no body was produced.

(b) There was no immediate advantage to proclaiming the risen Lord. On the contrary, there was great social disadvantage.

(c) The risen Lord spent a good amount of time post-Resurrection with the disciples, who were hardly the credulous bunch. [See: St Thomas.]

(d) The apostles and intimate followers of Jesus often died horrible, grisly deaths, not on account of something that they merely thought was true [but could be possibly mistaken] but on account of something for which they possessed first-hand knowledge.

None of this proves anything, but, it does provide strong probability to the truth of the historical claim.

Boo Hoo

2006-01-01T13:03:00.000-08:00

You go 10-6, you miss the playoffs. That's cruel. If only KC hadn't had that stinker at Buffalo, if only KC got to play a third game against the Raiders...

Hand Me Your Car Keys Tonight!

2005-12-31T17:56:00.000-08:00

To the small but spunky readership here at PP, I'd like to wish friend and foe alike a happy calendar year 2006. If you had a bad year, may 2006 be better; if you had a good year, may 2006 be at least as good. Hope your parties are fun too...

Will the PP end up like the lady here by midnight? Will he be slurring words incoherently and saying things like "I pershonally don't like Bahnshen preshupposhishinolishm and his transchen....transschie....[cough] his transchendenshal argument should embarrish thoshe Reshro...Reshormed people..." ?

Answer: only if somebody spikes his Diet Coke with Lime. The PP rarely drinks, not out of some moralistic principle, but out of a general dislike for the taste of alcoholic beverages. [Exception: wine coolers!] In one of the many proofs of his lack of sophistication, he prefers soda pop!

The Really Important Stuff is in Wikipedia

2005-12-30T13:25:00.000-08:00

As of late, a new way to spend a 5-minute break surfing the 'net has been to try typing in obscure references into Wikipedia.org and seeing if somebody, somewhere, at some time, has written on the aforementioned obscure references. Sometimes, there will be an article on something weird that you just wouldn't find in Britannica, while many other times, my faith in human nature is tested by finding detailed articles on things of, shall we say, questionable importance!

Today, however, we hit the jackpot.

Doink the Clown

The Gobbledygooker

Apparently, some people who grew up with the spectacle of pro wrestling felt like the sum total of human knowledge at Wikipedia was not complete without an elucidation of two of the worst pro wrestling gimmicks/angles ever! :-)

Resurrections and Other Singularities

2005-12-30T10:55:00.000-08:00

At the NTRMin discussion board, a skeptic [or atheist] makes the following request to others in a certain thread:

Do you have any non-controversial established cases of resurrection from the dead, so that I might stop seeing Jesus' resurrection as impossible and at least grant that it was within the realm of possibility? I am very quick to conclude that apologists have no proof for resurrection from death outside of the special exception of Jesus precisely because such a thing is an impossibility.

This statement might go over well at a Freethinker meeting, but it has several flaws. These flaws are utterly basic.

(1) The point of the resurrection is that it is a singularity --- it is presented as a unique historical event. What gives it its value, importance, etc, is that something like this does not happen "in the natural course of things." This is one of the capstone demonstrations [if true] of Jesus' divinity, of His being the Son of God.

A category error is committed by demanding that an allegedly singular phenomenon conform to that of something that is already established as being possible in the natural order of things.

BTW --- had Jesus made a future claim on something in the natural order of things, that would, even if it had come to pass, hardly have had any sort of evidentiary value relative to the very strong claim He made regarding his deity and sonship.

(2) The atheist's demand effectively excludes being able to consider any sort of titillating historical singularity. Given that history is full of singular events --- some of them fantastic and thrilling --- we would, following the demand, have to suspend judgement on such items because we don't have other "non-controversial, established cases" of such items.

What matters for the evaluation of an event X is the evidence for it, the veracity of the eyewitnesses, the character, etc. Whether such a thing has happened or not before [or happens later] neither adds to nor subtracts from the value [or lack of value] of the testimony.

(3) To call the resurrection an "impossibility" begs the question, of course. Also, what exactly does the atheist here mean by "impossible" ? Is he speaking in terms of modalities: logically impossible? Is he speaking of a relative here: relatively impossible given a set K of background assumptions?

Certainly, there is nothing logically impossible about rising from the dead.

(4) Apologists have no "proof" of the resurrection, but they have good evidence for the resurrection. The basic points go something like this:

(a) It was in the Roman and Jewish authorities' interest to produce the body of Christ, but no body was produced.
(b) There was no immediate advantage to proclaiming the risen Lord. On the contrary, there was great social disadvantage.
(c) The risen Lord spent a good amount of time post-Resurrection with the disciples, who were hardly the credulous bunch. [See: St Thomas.]
(d) The apostles and intimate followers of Jesus often died horrible, grisly deaths, not on account of something that they merely thought was true [but could be possibly mistaken] but on account of something for which they possessed first-hand knowledge.

BTW --- we should talk in probabilities regarding historical evidence. My general experience with village atheists happens to be that they want proof, and anything less than proof is unsatisfactory. In reality, we deal with probabilities. The divines who defended the resurrection during the Deist Controversy a few centuries back handled [historical] things properly by speaking in terms of probabilities, not dogmatic certainties.

Let's change topic somewhat. In the same thread, the skeptic asks:

My first question to you to begin this phase is: What other source of ancient religious propaganda, outside the bible, do you accept as being a report of facts only and containing not the least bit of embellishment or untruth, as you view the New Testament? Your answer will tell me whether your view is based on analysis of the data, or whether you are committing the fallacy of special pleading by asking that we accord the religious propaganda of the NT gospels the special place of "facts-only-reporting" and refusing to grant this huge leap to other non-biblical ancient religious propaganda.

By way of reply:

(1) Referring to the Biblical texts as "ancient religious propaganda" is well-poisoning. The language tacitly assumes the very question of Biblical reliability is answered in the negative. This however, is the larger issue under discussion.

(2) The charge of special pleading only sticks if the pleading is in fact special. If some other claim X was made of a miracle and it had evidence at the level of (a)-(d) mentioned above, it would be special pleading to make a positive statement on the historicity of the resurrection while making a negative statement on X. So, one must say "put up or shut up" on this point: what other alleged miracles out there have the same standard of evidence?

(3) BTW --- let's say there is an alleged non-Christian miracle X out there with the same degree of evidence as, say, the resurrection. How does this advance the atheist thesis? The evidence for Christianity does not receive its impetus from the claim that miracles are exclusively in the Christian province. The whole posturing by the village atheist is just a red herring.

Example: Let's say that the evidence that Emperor Vespasian healed a blind man is on par with (a)-(d) above. I'd have no problem adding this to my list of "probably true" facts for the world. How does this impinge on evidences (a)-(d) of the Resurrection?

(4) There's something a bit darkly humorous about being lectured to regarding fallacies in the middle of a fallacy filled presentation!

The reader should note that I'm not so much as arguing for the resurrection here as I am merely pointing out very basic flaws in the atheist demands. The author of the quoted portions views himself as a voice of capital-R Reason, not given to superstition, a person who sees through religious propaganda, etc. But in the end, he commits elementary blunders that put the lie to these affectations.

I was going to say something particularly pointed here, but then I realized that I too used to make the same sorts of demands, arguments, etc as an undergraduate [and as a grad student too], and I was possibly a bit more obnoxious about making them. As a side personal note [this has no relevance to the thread but I'll say it nonetheless], it is not flattering to my self-image to realize that I used to posture like this too as a late teen and early twenty-something!!

Chris-tian Ethics

2005-12-29T13:46:00.000-08:00

For allegedly having superior strength, speed, and endurance, and for coming to my blog to inform me of such facts, I wish to inform C. Ryan Jenkins of Sola Gratia that I will terminate him.

It will take a few months in the gym, a few hundred protein shakes, and a large amount of interval training in the Kaleeeforneeeya sunshine, but ahl be baack Chris ... ahl be baaack...

Freedom Frosting on a Collectivist Cake

2005-12-29T12:56:00.000-08:00

From the Conservative Party [United Kingdom] website:

BELIEFS

We believe in the family. But we shouldn’t preach to people about how they live their lives.

We must respond to the challenge of social breakdown by actively supporting marriage through the tax and benefits system. But in a more liberal and less deferential age, we must support all families, for example through childcare, because what matters most is that children are brought up in a stable, loving home.

We believe in personal responsibility. But not in selfish individualism.

So let us tackle the challenge of an increasingly atomised society by showing that personal responsibility is part of a shared responsibility; that we’re all in this together; that there’s a ‘we’ in our politics as well as a ‘me.’

We believe in lower taxes. But not in fostering greed or favouring the rich.

A strong economy needs competitive tax rates and good public infrastructure. So creating economic opportunity for all means fairly sharing the fruits of economic growth between lower taxes and strengthened public services.

We believe in high standards in health and education. But opt-outs and escape routes for the privileged few will never deliver high quality for all.

The challenge is to deliver equal access to first-class public services without burdening today’s generations with higher taxes, or tomorrow’s generations with higher debt. More choice, competition and local autonomy must be matched by strong leadership to raise standards.

We believe in limited government. But rolling back the state must never mean the weak are left behind.

We want civic society to flourish. We must help social enterprises and voluntary organisations do even more to tackle the entrenched problems that affect our communities, believing that there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state.

We believe in national sovereignty. But not in isolation and xenophobia.

Now is the time to fight for an open and flexible Europe, with a high growth, low unemployment future, recognising that Britain has always done best when she engages ethically and enthusiastically with the wider world.

By way of reply via PP Commentary:

The above collection of statements seems [to me] to be distillable into one simple sentence: We want socialism and collectivism but we hope you buy all of the freedom and individual responsibility rhetoric.

(1) Note how after mentioning "Personal responsibility" there is this knee-jerk reaction against "selfish individualism."

Frankly, I contend that we need more selfish individualists out there --- people who worry about themselves instead of poking around in the lives of others. We need more people who tell the state to go away so that they can lead their lives as they see fit.

(2) Note how "personal responsibility" is used in the same breath as "we're all in this together." That's like somebody calling themselves a libertarian collectivist. Words apparently have no meaning.

(3) Note the knee-jerk statement about "not favoring the rich" in a discussion of lowering taxes.

Fact: if you lower taxes, then the upper income folks, who have more possessions and a higher income than others, will benefit. Is this basic economic fact lost on those who wrote this platform statement?

I'm not rich. I don't know if I'll ever rise above the middle class here in the US. [Let's hope!] But I already pay less in taxes than a person making $200k per annum. I wish this latter person had to pay less taxes.

(4) "High standards in health and education" means more government involvement. People rarely do good jobs for free --- it costs money. Where is the money coming from? From taxpayers.

Let's stop using euphemisms for big government --- at least have the courage of your convictions and say what you think without the lofty rhetoric. If the Conservatives want large-scale government involvement in education and health care, they should say so and stop mangling words. At least Labour is more direct about wanting government in almost everything.

(5) "We believe in limited government..." Words truly have no meaning after all of the preceding qualifications above about health care, education, public access, taxation, etc.

This is psychologizing on my part, and thus quite questionable, but when you lack the courage of your convictions, you have to keep telling yourself I'm really a good person after all. Every collectivist qualification of a pro-individual statement feels [to me, I speak for nobody else] like the platform committee members are trying to have the same I'm sooooo compassionate feeling that is ubiquitous in those with more leftist attitudes.

(6) Note how national sovereignty is mentioned, but then in the same breath the knee-jerk response is "but we're not isolationists!" Why, that would be selfish for a country to look out for its own best interests.

******

Just like much of what passes for conservative ideology and policy here in the United States, the platform strikes me as a socialist cake with libertarian frosting. Those like me may at first enjoy the thin layer of frosting, but the cake underneath tastes rather putrid and gives one indigestion.

BTW, I don't want to throw around "socialist" as some sort of epithet. I personally do not like socialism, but if people want to be collectivists, that is their right as free rational agents. What I'm objecting to is the double-speak whereby one talks about freedom, personal responsibility, etc, out of one corner of one's mouth, while out of the other corner you're not saying anything that is different from those who want the loving Nanny State to live our lives for us. Just call it what it is. Present the choices honestly, with no deflecting flowery and lofty rhetoric.

******

As a student of worldviews, politics, etc over my adult life, I've come to the conviction --- and it grows stronger --- that certain ideas are formally and practically antithetical no matter how flowery the language is that connects them. You cannot have freedom, personal responsibility, private property, and so on, but have the State involved in taking your wealth, redistributing it, etc. You cannot have a free society, I'd contend, if government is powerful enough to enforce subsidized this and socialized that. From observing history as well as current affairs, there is no comfy middle ground where you can have "the best of both worlds."

In other words, you can't meaningfully sit on the fence dividing socialism and individualism. Well, you can try, but if you think for a minute about the embracing of contradictions, that fence can't feel too comfortable. Or so I'd contend.

If the Conservatives in Britain are worried about having their message be clear again to voters, they might start with the simple step of not contradicting themselves immediately after each pro-individual statement. I'd like to see our conservatives here in the US should do the same.

Meanie Village Atheists and Pinatas [Excursus on Twenty Leaky Buckets]

2005-12-29T01:34:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, an atheist was mean to me. He denigrated me in the name of Reason.

Atheists are a nasty lot. One of them cut me off on the freeway.

I knew a Freethinker who beat his wife. Atheism is misogynistic.

I see through atheistic communism's lie of equality when I compare the life of the proletariat with those of the commissars.

When I see people die under communist regimes, I know that atheism is cruel and murderous.

Atheism scares children by telling them that they're particles and by not providing an objective justification for right and wrong.

Some atheists practice the dictum "to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs."

One village atheist I knew was sexually repressed and couldn't perform in the bedroom due to her inhibitions.

Bertrand Russell's book has a spelling error on page 32 of my copy of Why I Am Not a Christian.

Some atheists support big-government routines to guarantee "equality" and "justice." They want to make my life their business.

When I see Christians persecuted by atheist regimes, I know that atheism must be false.

******

Aren't those sorts of arguments above pretty silly if I'm trying to talk to an atheist? Seriously speaking, don't you feel as if you need a shower after reading those polemical words against atheism? Upon hearing such anti-atheist arguments, can you not feel your IQ drop a few points, as if you had just watched a three-hanky episode of Oprah?

But our pamphleteer in the Twenty Leaky Buckets series makes those same types of arguments in the cause of deconverting Christians. He makes them with a straight face, shamelessly and boldly.

******

So far, he has not impacted the historical or metaphysical evidence for the Christian religion, despite presenting fifteen arguments. While reading and commenting on his attempts to get at the heart of the evidence for the religion, the image that comes to my mind is that of an uncoordinated and blindfolded kid trying to whack a pinata. However, the kid is facing the wrong direction, and he keeps whacking himself on the back of the head due to an excessive backswing.

Fascination for Fascination

2005-12-28T00:59:00.000-08:00

It's 1983, and you know you totally want to play [Keep Feeling] Fascination over and over on your cassette player...

Seriously speaking, I believe Fascination is one of the catchiest pop songs ever, besides being an exquisite period piece for the glorious early-80's New Wave synth-pop. The main synth-riff is a very fat monophonic analog [?] synthesizer playing D-F-G-G-G-F-A-D with some obligatory cheesy 80's chick vocals. [To avoid confusion, the F, G, and A are the pitches on the same octave as the initial and terminating D.]

Cheesy or not, I played the song 12 times in my car last night. I drove home from a friend's place, which only takes about 10 minutes. But the tune was so catchy [it was #1 in the Dance Club charts back in '83 --- not that I knew that fact 22 years ago] I just drove around the neighborhood close to midnight just to keep listening to the track.

[[Too bad digital and frequency modulation keyboards came along in the mid-80's and pushed the analog synths into the background, but that's op-ed piece for another time here at PP.]]

I Tell It Like It Is

2005-12-26T20:05:00.000-08:00

Tonight's the last episode of Monday Night Football on ABC. When I left, it had nowhere to go but down, being filled with ex-jocks and ex-coaches. In a truly lugubrious display of watered-down journalism, they simply didn't tell it like it is, or was.

Frankly, what pro football has turned into sickens and disgusts me. The NFL is a corporate entity, more marketing than product. They stifle free expression, just as the government tried to stifle Cassius Clay, taking away his right to make a living as a boxer. But I told Cassius that he could rip off my hairpiece if he won the fight.

Over lunch with Commissioner Tagliabue of the NFL, I told him "Paul, when are you and your corporate lackeys going to do something about the game. You're almost as bad as boxing with its alphabet soup agencies! I need a good shower after being associated with boxing, but that's a tale for another time." I said the same thing to the President at brunch this last weekend, and don't think he didn't listen to me.

Sure, I never played the game. But I simply tell it like it is. Dandy Don and ol' Frank --- they're just ex-jocks who don't belong in the booth. Their commentary is so pedestrian that it twaddles the mind of the modern man.

Where's my cigar?! If you moved it, I'll beat you senseless.

Twenty Leaky Buckets --- Part 4

2005-12-26T18:51:00.000-08:00

Taking a few days off from this little mini-series, we return with Part 3.

The pamphlet 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity is here.

Part One, a general discussion, is found here.

Part 1.5 consists of some comments on general village atheist themes and is found here. I enumerated five fallacies that are common to most of the arguments in the pamphlet.

Part 2 gives some quick comments as to why reasons one through five really aren't arguments that cause me, a conservative Evangelical, to think twice. That link is here.

Part 3 deals with arguments six through ten. That link is here.

Please keep in mind that the pamphlet gives reasons to abandon Christianity. My question throughout this mini-series is this: are any of the reasons anything to give somebody like myself any sort of pause? Presumably, the pamphlet is written in an attempt towards deconversion, or, to put it positively, anti-Christian evangelism. The intended audience therefore appears to be people who all themselves Christian.

******

I'm a classical card-carrying evidentialist [and you should be too!]. That means, among other things that the way to attack the historical and evidential basis for Christianity is to argue that the evidence for the supernatural phenomena that undergird the Christian religion is poor, or not as good as that of some other competing worldview. My apologetic is at home with the great English, Scottish, and Irish divines who defended the Resurrection and the veracity of the gospels against the humanists and the deists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Personally speaking, I have little patience with what I understand Reformed epistemology and presuppositionalism to be.

******

Let's return to the pamphlet. So far, I've argued in Parts 2 and 3 that all we're presented with is a laundry list of sociological claims reflecting nothing more than the pamphleteer's dislike of things. Pointing out that some Christians do things of which the pamphleteer is displeased is not any sort of an argument against Christianity. Imputing the behavior of a subset of self-proclaimed Christians to that of the entire religion and then castigating the religion on this imputed global behavior is likewise a non-argument. Discussing the political differences between Christians and the pamphleteer on issues such as, say, abortion, is a non-argument. Asserting that Christianity does not allow for full sexual fulfillment is also a non-argument relative to an evidentialist like myself.

So, reasons one through ten are nothing more than the pamphleteer's self-righteous little rant. Are arguments eleven through fifteen any better?

*****

Argument eleven is that Christianity "has an exceedingly narrow and legalistic view of morality."

Christianity not only reduces, for all practical purposes, the question of morality to that of sexual behavior, but by listing its prohibitions, it encourages an "everything not prohibited is permitted" mentality. So, for instance, medieval inquisitors tortured their victims, while at the same time they went to lengths to avoid spilling the blood of those they tortured—though they thought nothing of burning them alive. Another very relevant example is that until the latter part of the 19th century Christians engaged in the slave trade, and Christian preachers defended it, citing biblical passages, from the pulpit. Today, with the exception of a relatively few liberal churchgoers, Christians ignore the very real evils plaguing our society—poverty; homelessness; hunger; militarism; a grossly unfair distribution of wealth and income; ecological despoliation exacerbated by corporate greed; overpopulation; sexism; racism; homophobia; freedom-denying, invasive drug laws; an inadequate educational system; etc., etc.—unless they’re actively working to worsen those evils in the name of Christian morality or "family values."

By way of reply:

(a) Saying that Christianity produces an "everything not prohibited is permitted" mentality is very reductionistic. Which Christians are we discussing? What about Romans 14, say? What about the interplay between our liberty and the more sensitive consciences of other believers? Etc. Just what is the pamphleteer getting at here?

(b) Apparently, the pamphleteer is getting at the Inquisition and those who justify slavery.

For the Inquisition, let the Romanists deal with that. I'm Evangelical.

For slavery, again, even if we grant the premise here [and I don't in totality], again just what does this have to do with, say, the Resurrection, the veracity of the gospels, etc? We're treated to another instantiation of fallacy (2).

Let's be frank here. The NT and the OT do not conform to libertarian impulses. Paul states roughly that we should be content with our lot in life. Those who are slaves should try to do a good job, but, if they can pursue freedom, so much the better. The brief epistle to Philemon also will not conform to an across-the-board anti-slavery mentality.

The reader must ask himself here: how does this affect the evidence for or against the Resurrection, the veracity of the gospels, etc? My answer is that the eleventh argument is another sociological observation that is a non sequitur relative to the main theme of the pamphlet.

(c) Note that the pamphleteer has this habit of making sweeping sociological claims based on no actual numbers or evidence cited. So when he charges Christians with ignoring what he calls "the very real evils" plaguing society, it is an evidence-free claim.

Also, has the pamphleteer ever heard of Catholic and Christian charities? It seems that the answer is no.

Regardless, even if the worst of the claim of the pamphleteer is correct, so what? This doesn't affect the historical evidence.

It looks like the eleventh time is not the charm.

******

Argument twelve is that "Christianity encourages acceptance of real evils while focusing on imaginary evils."

Organized Christianity is a skillful apologist for the status quo and all the evils that go along with it. It diverts attention from real problems by focusing attention on sexual issues, and when confronted with social evils such as poverty glibly dismisses them with platitudes such as, "The poor ye have always with you." When confronted with the problems of militarism and war, most Christians shrug and say, "That’s human nature. It’s always been that way, and it always will." One suspects that 200 years ago their forebears would have said exactly the same thing about slavery.

This regressive, conservative tendency of Christianity has been present from its very start. The Bible is quite explicit in its instructions to accept the status quo: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation." (Romans 13:1–2)

(a) The pamphleteer is really stuck on sex. Yet he accuses Christians of being monomaniacally focused on sex.

(b) No evidence supporting the contentions in the first paragraph is given. In line with the last sentence of the first paragraph, one suspects that the pamphleteer is just as intellectually lazy as other pamphleteers 200 years ago.

(c) For the second paragraph, what about the the anti-slavery abolitionist factions in the Northern states in the nineteenth century?

(d) Don't you love the context-free citation of Romans without any other consideration of what the NT has to say on the matter?

(e) This is another this-is-what-I-don't-like-about-Christians rant. The evidence for/against the Resurrection, veracity of the gospels, etc, is unchanged.

Yawn.

******

After twelve non-argument arguments, one would suspect that the thirteenth will be equally flabby. And one's suspsicions will be, as will be seen, right on the money.
Apparently, the thirteenth charge is that "Christianity depreciates the natural world."

In addition to its morbid preoccupation with sex, Christianity creates social myopia through its emphasis on the supposed afterlife—encouraging Christians not to be concerned with "the things of this world" (except, of course, their neighbors’ sexual practices). In the conventional Christian view, life in this "vale of tears" is not important—what matters is preparing for the next life. (Of course it follows from this that the "vale of tears" itself is quite unimportant—it’s merely the backdrop to the testing of the faithful.)

The Christian belief in the unimportance of happiness and well-being in this world is well illustrated by a statement by St. Alphonsus:

It would be a great advantage to suffer during all our lives all the torments of the martyrs in exchange for one moment of heaven. Sufferings in this world are a sign that God loves us and intends to save us.

This focus on the afterlife often leads to a distinct lack of concern for the natural world, and sometimes to outright anti-ecological attitudes. Ronald Reagan’s fundamentalist Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, went so far as to actively encourage the strip mining and clear cutting of the American West, reasoning that ecological damage didn’t matter because the "rapture" was at hand.

(a) Note the pamphleteer's focus on sex again. Methinks he is a little single-minded.

(b) Perhaps Christians worry about the life to come because, uh, scripture talks about this to a good degree.

(c) Even if the charge that Christians don't concern themselves with "this life" is true, how is this an argument against, say, the eyewitness testimony or the evidences for the Christian religion? All we have here is yet another thing the pamphleteer, if he's right, doesn't like. Why should I care about his sensibilities, especially when his first thirteen reasons have nothing to do with their actual thesis?

(d) But I'd contend the pamphleteer's claim is not even close to globally true. Those of us who are Biblically literate [unlike the pamphleteer] know that both the OT and NT speak to practical matters and our conduct in "this life" to a good degree. Has the pamphleteer ever heard of "Practical Theology" ?

(e) Somehow, St Alphonsus is taken as representative of Christianity. How?

(f) But at the same time, St Paul tells believers to expect sufferings and even mentions persecution as a sign that believers are, in fact, in the church.

(g) Somehow, without an argument, James Watt is taken as representative of Christianity. How?

Again, this argument doesn't make somebody like me think twice about the evidences for/against Christianity.

*****

Christianity, in the fourteenth argument, "models hierarchical, authoritarian organization."

Before presenting the argument here, we ask, so what?.

How does this claim, even if true, affect the validity of the eyewitness testimony, the veracity of the gospels, etc?

The argument is as follows:

Christianity is perhaps the ultimate top-down enterprise. In its simplest form, it consists of God on top, its "servants," the clergy, next down, and the great unwashed masses at the bottom, with those above issuing, in turn, thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots backed by the threat of eternal damnation. But a great many Christian sects go far beyond this, having several layers of management and bureaucracy. Catholicism is perhaps the most extreme example of this with its laity, monks, nuns, priests, monsignors, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and popes, all giving and taking orders in an almost military manner. This type of organization cannot but accustom those in its sway—especially those who have been indoctrinated and attending its ceremonies since birth—into accepting hierarchical, authoritarian organization as the natural, if not the only, form of organization. Those who find such organization natural will see nothing wrong with hierarchical, authoritarian organization in other forms, be they corporations, with their multiple layers of brown-nosing management, or governments, with their judges, legislators, presidents, and politburos. The indoctrination by example that Christianity provides in the area of organization is almost surely a powerful influence against social change toward freer, more egalitarian forms of organization.

(a) Hmmm, if we model an organization that includes God, one would think God would be on top. How is this shocking?

(b) The pamphleteer doesn't like Romanism. OK, but I thought we were discussing reasons to abandon Christianity, not whether he's going to start donating money to Mother Angelica's EWTN channel.

(c) I must be missing the argument connecting Christianity with the powerful influence against social change towards freer, more egalitarian forms of organization.

It is rather funny, as a Christian and as a small-l libertarian, to see a village atheist write this sort of thing.

(d) We're again struck by the lack of any evidence presented with these sweeping claims.

Zero for fourteen. At this rate, I don't know if I can stomach doing Part 4. What a waste of 20 minutes, even if after a good run and a hot shower.

******

The fifteenth argument is as follows:

15. Christianity sanctions slavery. The African slave trade was almost entirely conducted by Christians. They transported their victims to the New World in slave ships with names such as "Mercy" and "Jesus," where they were bought by Christians, both Catholic and Protestant. Organized Christianity was not silent on this horror: it actively encouraged it and engaged in it. From the friars who enslaved Native Americans in the Southwest and Mexico to the Protestant preachers who defended slavery from the pulpit in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, the record of Christianity as regards slavery is quite shameful. While many abolitionists were Christians, they were a very small group, well hated by most of their fellow Christians.

The Christians who supported and engaged in slavery were amply supported by the Bible, in which slavery is accepted as a given, as simply a part of the social landscape. There are numerous biblical passages that implicitly or explicitly endorse slavery, such as Exodus 21:20–21: "And if a man smite his servant, or his maid with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money." Other passages that support slavery include Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22, Titus 2:9–10, Exodus 21:2–6, Leviticus 25:44–46, 1 Peter 2:18, and 1 Timothy 6:1. Christian slave owners in colonial America were well acquainted with these passages.

(a) Let's say the worst of the pamphleteer's claims are true. Again, what does this have to do with the evidence for Christianity?

(b) Note the equivocation between "slavery" as discussed in a New World and American context and the ANE conceptions and Greco-Roman conceptions of slavery, as if they're the same. Illiterate and lazy, but then again, these are hallmarks of your rabble-rousing pamphleteers.

(c) How does the claim that the Bible "supports slavery" impinge on the evidence for the Resurrection, the veracity of the gospels, and so on? Argument, please.

******

Well, zero for fifteen at this stage.

BTW, I don't take any pleasure out of doing this, but I started it and intend to finish it. One could say that, out of fifteen reasons so far, one could say more, but, and I'll state again, having a big list of reasons doesn't require too much a response if the arguments commit the same few fallacies over and over.

Again, at best, the pamphlet has so far shown that some Christians have been really bad people. This doesn't impinge on any of the historical evidences.

As a closing note, I'm not concerned with defending Christians on some sociological level. The point of the miniseries is to merely ask whether I need, as a conservative Evangelical, to re-evaluate how I view or weigh the evidence for the Christian religion based on these arguments given.

So far, nothing has changed.

BMI: RIP

2005-12-25T18:56:00.000-08:00

[I'm tempted to have another piece of pumpkin pie, so I'll put up a blog post to withstand the craving. Blogging is a good thing by which one can ward off the munchies...]

Have you ever calculated your body mass index [BMI]?

If not, here is a site where you can do so. The categories are: <18.5 = underweight; 18.5-24.9 = normal; 25-29.9 = overweight; and >30 means obese. Feel free to share your BMI with the world!

Last night [Christmas Eve], I was goofing around on the computer and decided to check mine out. I'm 6' and weigh 215 lbs. The BMI calculator says that the PP BMI is a whopping 29.2. According to this scale, I'm barely out of the obese range and am on the outer fringe of the overweight range!

If we accept this, I'm one of those American fatties. From the Wikipedia article on the topic of BMI, a 1994 survey seemed to indicate that three fifths of American males were [at least] overweight, having a BMI over 25; half of American females were [at least] overweight as well.

Consulting various "What weight should you be for your height" calculators, I've seen that 6' large-framed adult males should be around 165 lbs at lowest up to a maximum of 190 lbs.

So, I'm between 25 and 50 lbs overweight according to these scales. I'm obese according to the BMI scale.

******

But are these one-size-fits-all calculators really worth anything? Let's review the facts:

(i) My waist is 32-33". I have no gut whatsoever, and you can see my upper abs.
(ii) I run 30-35 miles per week on a treadmill and the street.
(iii) I play full-court basketball two nights a week.
(iv) I lift weights fairly intensely for about an hour at a time, four or five times per week, usually with the Daveman.
(v) I could crack a 7' mile [and then I'd get sick to my stomach], and could put out at least 15-16 miles with rested legs. [Note: I was so enflamed at being called obese by a BMI calculation that I ran 8 miles around the neighborhood at 10pm on Christmas Eve just to stick it to the BMI calculator.]
(vi) I eat fairly well, eschewing junk food, fast food, sugared colas, etc.
(vii) Resting pulse rate = mid 40's. The nurse stated that was very low, but then I told her about (ii)-(v) above. So, if I understand her correctly, I have a very low resting pulse rate due to all the cardio conditioning.

6' overweight and borderline "obese" people [relative to BMI] are not supposed to have 32" waists while kickin' out half marathons on little more than a whim. Fatties can't crack 7' miles or chug out 7 miles at a sub 8-minute pace.

******

Now I'd like to hit 190 lbs within the next three or four months. That would take me from a good physique to a very good physique or "somewhat ripped." I could run and run and run down to 190, but then I'd lose muscle and strength, so that sort of weight loss is sub-optimal. The trick is to hit 190 while adding to strength. Surely, dropping another 25 lbs [mostly fat, we hope] will push me into the "normal" range on the BMI and out of the "overweight" range?

Well, the BMI calculator gives a BMI of 25.8 once this goal is achieved. Take a good athlete, lop off another 25 lbs, and he drops from 29.2 to 25.8. He's getting close to the "normal weight" category, but he'd *still* be overweight according to the BMI system.

I'd have to drop into the high 170's to low 180's just to get at the high end of the "normal weight" range. The last time I weighed 178 was in 1989-1990 [Age 18-19]and I was bagging groceries for close to minimum wage at a local supermarket. Even with a 29" waist at the time [the good ol' days], I'd still be slightly overweight.

******

Starting February or March, I'm going to go on one of those bodybuilder "shredding" diets [or will try to do so] because I'd like to get my body fat percentage down under 15% or even under 10%. I'm not sure how successful it will be, but it will be an interesting experiment. At 34, you're not getting any younger, and it would be fun just to see how far one can [healthily] go, even though one has the creeping suspicion that you can't keep it under 10% for too long if you want to have a life! Even then, the BMI will probably list me as obese or overweight.

******

Most of the guys I played basketball with and lifted with would also be considered obese by the BMI calculators. When you see some 5' 10" running back who weighs 235 lbs, he's severly obese by the BMI, even though he runs a 4.4 second 40 yard dash. Jerome "The Bus" Bettis, who I believe weighs 250+ lbs, would be moogoo obese by the BMI scale. My favorite NBA player, Peja Stojakovic, who is 6'9" and 220 or so [he's pretty lean], is very close to "overweight" by the BMI scale. Shaq is very obese by this scale.

Some of the bodybuilder types at the health club would also be considered pretty obese by the BMI scale alone, even though they're ripped and anaerobically well-conditioned.

******

The whole little excursion to these sites has been interesting. If the BMI calculation is used as a major or sole determinant of whether somebody is overweight, it is a small wonder that some survey lists 60% of American males as overweight [and 50% of females too].

None of this is to make excuses for, nor to justify, the "fat lifestyle." [Though I've been on both ends of the fence, trust me.] Being overweight is no moral failure [perhaps a failure in other ways though], though chances are that people will find you less attractive in a first world Western culture if you're packing the lbs on. And it is not "society's fault" that people are overweight, either, but people are responsible for their own lifestyles and choices.

Personally speaking, I've been at both extremes, having gone from running 7 miles at a 7 minute/mile pace to a weight that should not be mentioned in polite company! Losing weight is not difficult [most of the time], but, alas, gaining bad weight is not difficult either!

Once again, I wonder if those survey numbers mentioned above really tell the whole story. If BMI is the sole or major numerical measure, then the percentage of overweight/obese people reported is higher than reality. And if healthy athletic people whose doctors commend them on their most excellent health and conditioning are considered obese and overweight by this scale, what value does this scale have?

In the end, it seems that you have to be some really skinny person with non-muscular legs, or some extremely lean person, to meet the BMI's approval. I'm not writing this out of any defensive feeling, [hmmm...typing that sounds defensive], but, c'mon, when a measuring system gives you results and labels that defy in-your-face reality, you just have to wonder.

Anybody else in the same boat?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

2005-12-24T20:11:00.000-08:00

Since the KC Chiefs probably aren't going to make the playoffs, I have to take pleasure in seeing the Oakland Raiders --- representatives of all that is evil and wrong in a fallen world --- have a miserable season. It is all that Chiefs fans can live for, sorry lot that we are.

I'd like to also throw a big BAH HUMBUG in the direction of Denver Broncos fans. You're not in as deep a circle of the Inferno as are Raider fans, but you're still pretty deep down there, to be sure.

Happy Christmas to All

2005-12-24T13:54:00.000-08:00

Pedantonomics --- Part One

2005-12-23T23:45:00.000-08:00

Why is health care so expensive?

This question is asked by many people, often with an indignant tone.

Here are some of the major answers:

(1) Government regulation.
(2) The threat of litigation.
(3) The scarcity of the service.
(4) The fact that doctors are deep in debt upon completion of residency.
(5) The fact that pharmaceutical companies invest [tens of] millions of dollars into experimental drugs for years with no guarantee that the drugs will pan out or be approved by the gov't.

You can't complicate doctor's lives with forms, paperwork, bureacracy, and then tell people that they have a "right" to "free" or "subsidized" health care, and then have an industry dedicated to suing hospitals, physicians, pharma companies, etc, without

(i) decreasing the time doctors have to actually practice their trade,
(ii) causing doctors to have to perform needless tests in order to make them less lawsuit-prone,

and

(iii) causing physicians to be inundated with people who, by virtue of having free or subsidized service, do not treat the service as a rare commodity.

All of these things decrease supply without removing any of the demand. Ergo, the price of health care goes up. This is basic supply-'n'-demand.

Also, when you come out of med school about $150,000 in debt and you start some $30,000 per year residency for a few years where you work 60-80 hour weeks, you're not able to get out of debt. Should somebody who has gone through residency then sell their services for cheap?

Let's say they do. What financial incentive is there to practice medicine then? You go through hell and then you're in debt and you don't make enough money to have a decent life if you want to pay off the debt.

There's a reason why people don't say "I want to flip burgers at McDonald's for my career" and instead think of, say, law, financial fields, etc. The answer is that you make more money in the latter fields [typically].

Now if you remove the financial incentive from medicine, you'll have a shortage of doctors, for people typically don't want to do a lot of work for low pay. Then the supply of doctors diminishes even more, and the cost goes up. The attempt to regulate the cost of medicine will, like most if not all government attempts at regulating prices apart from the free market, make the service or item more expensive.

If you want to "stick it" to pharmaceutical companies and put price caps on their products, or merely to get in the way of the market, you make it unprofitable for a company to pursue research, to take chances, to venture on new drugs. Why should a company spends tens of millions of dollars in R&D hoping that the drug pans out and is ultimately approved by the gov't if it is then forced to sell the drug at a price that does not let them recover the costs that have been built up not only for that drug, but for the other drugs that do not see the light of day?

******

In the socialist world, one doesn't have to worry about these minor details. It sounds good to talk about free health care, income ceilings for doctors, equality, rights to health care, and other fuzzy-wuzzy constructs of an imagination that believes the world must conform to the latest trend of social justice.

Online Christmas Card from PP

2005-12-23T01:54:00.000-08:00

Let's pretend that I bought you a card.

Let's pretend it's a nice card with an exterior that says Merry Christmas.

Let's pretend next that when you open the card, the inside says May your Christmas be blessed!

Let's further pretend that it is signed With great cordiality, the ever-luvin' staff at PP.

Let's pretend in addition that you really like the card, especially the nice red envelope it came in. And observe that great handwriting on the envelope!

Let's pretend too that you put the card up on your mantle because it is such a nice card.

Keep pretending until you throw out all of your Christmas cards. At that point, you can drop the charade.

If you'd like, you have our permission to pretend in addition that you got just the present you wanted sent carefully wrapped in a nice package delivered by a pleasant and courteous UPS or FedEx person at your home on the 24th, with the words Pedantic Protestant being written in the return address window.

******

There's your online Christmas card from the hard-working staff here at Pedantic Protestant.

In the meanwhile, due to increased corporate profitability here at PP, I'm able to make a $100 donation in each of our 100 readers' names to The Human Fund.

Merry Christmas to all readers, and have a fun blessed Christmas! :-)

Twenty Leaky Buckets --- Part Three

2005-12-23T00:24:00.000-08:00

Parts 1, 1.5, and 2 are found here, here, and here, respectively.

Does this pamphlet titled 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity give any good reasons against historic Christianity as held by an Evangelial with a high view of scripture? So far, I've pointed out that the first five arguments in the pamphlet really have no logical or evidential connection with claims such as Jesus rose bodily from the dead, The gospels are historically reliable, etc. On the contrary, the five so-called arguments are nothing more than an inventory of the pamphleteer's lists of things he doesn't like about the behavior of various subsets of self-identified Christians. Since no argument is given as to why the pamphleteer's preferences and sensibilities have any sort of objective justification, nothing in the pamphlet takes hold of my conscience.

Let's return to the pamphleteer's arguments.

*******

(vi) Christianity breeds authoritarianism.

Given that Christians claim to have the one true faith, to have a book that is the Word of God, and (in many cases) to receive guidance directly from God, they feel little or no compunction about using force and coercion to enforce "God’s Will" (which they, of course, interpret and understand). Given that they believe (or pretend) that they’re receiving orders from the Almighty (who would cast them into hell should they disobey), it’s little wonder that they feel no reluctance, and in fact are eager, to intrude into the most personal aspects of the lives of nonbelievers. This is most obvious today in the area of sex, with Christians attempting to deny women the right to abortion and to mandate near-useless abstinence-only sex "education" in the public schools. It’s also obvious in the area of education, with Christians attempting to force biology teachers to teach their creation myth (but not those of Hindus, Native Americans, et al.) in place of (or as being equally valid as) the very well established theory of evolution. But the authoritarian tendencies of Christianity reach much further than this.

Up until well into the 20th century in the United States and other Christian countries (notably Ireland), Christian churches pressured governments into passing laws forbidding the sale and distribution of birth control devices, and they also managed to enact laws forbidding even the description of birth control devices. This assault on free speech was part and parcel of Christianity’s shameful history of attempting to suppress "indecent" and "subversive" materials (and to throw their producers in jail or burn them alive). This anti-free speech stance of Christianity dates back centuries, with the cases of Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno (who was burnt alive) being good illustrations of it. Perhaps the most colorful example of this intrusive Christian tendency toward censorship is the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, which dates from the 16th century and which was abandoned only in the latter part of the 20th century—not because the church recognized it as a crime against human freedom, but because it could no longer be enforced (not that it was ever systematically enforced—that was too big a job even for the Inquisition).

Christian authoritarianism extends, however, far beyond attempts to suppress free speech; it extends even to attempts to suppress freedom of belief. In the 15th century, under Ferdinand and Isabella at about the time of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, Spain’s Jews were ordered either to convert to Christianity or to flee the country; about half chose exile, while those who remained, the "Conversos," were favorite targets of the Inquisition. A few years later, Spain’s Muslims were forced to make a similar choice.

This Christian hatred of freedom of belief—and of individual freedom in general—extends to this day. Up until the late 19th century in England, atheists who had the temerity to openly advocate their beliefs were jailed. Even today in many parts of the United States laws still exist that forbid atheists from serving on juries or from holding public office. And it’s no mystery what the driving force is behind laws against victimless "crimes" such as nudity, sodomy, fornication, cohabitation, and prostitution.

If your nonintrusive beliefs or actions are not in accord with Christian "morality," you can bet that Christians will feel completely justified—not to mention righteous—in poking their noses (often in the form of state police agencies) into your private life.

(a) This is another this-is-what-I-don't-like-about-some-Christians sort of lecture.

(b) Again, if the pamphleteer doesn't like the political actions of some Christians, just how is this an argument against Christianity?

(c) I'm not responsible for defending Rome here. If the pamphleteer has problems with what the Roman Catholic Church has allegedly done in the past, it isn't my prob.

(d) Given that a large segment of Christians, myself included, are libertarian in political view, or at least do not like Big Government, it is rather at odds with reality for the pamphleteer to charge that "This Christian hatred of freedom of belief—and of individual freedom in general—extends to this day" and "If your nonintrusive beliefs or actions are not in accord with Christian `morality,' you can bet that Christians will feel completely justified—not to mention righteous—in poking their noses (often in the form of state police agencies) into your private life."

We have another sweeping claim bereft of supporting data here.

*******

The seventh argument is that Christianity is just plain "cruel":

Throughout its history, cruelty—both to self and others—has been one of the most prominent features of Christianity. From its very start, Christianity, with its bleak view of life, its emphasis upon sexual sin, and its almost impossible-to-meet demands for sexual "purity," encouraged guilt, penance, and self-torture. Today, this self-torture is primarily psychological, in the form of guilt arising from following (or denying, and thus obsessing over) one’s natural sexual desires. In earlier centuries, it was often physical. W.E.H. Lecky relates:

For about two centuries, the hideous maceration of the body was regarded as the highest proof of excellence. . . . The cleanliness of the body was regarded as a pollution of the soul, and the saints who were most admired had become one hideous mass of clotted filth. . . . But of all the evidences of the loathsome excesses to which this spirit was carried, the life of St. Simeon Stylites is probably the most remarkable. . . . He had bound a rope around him so that it became embedded in his flesh, which putrefied around it. A horrible stench, intolerable to the bystanders, exhaled from his body, and worms dropped from him whenever he moved, and they filled his bed. . . . For a whole year, we are told, St. Simeon stood upon one leg, the other being covered with hideous ulcers, while his biographer [St. Anthony] was commissioned to stand by his side, to pick up the worms that fell from his body, and to replace them in the sores, the saint saying to the worms, "Eat what God has given you." From every quarter pilgrims of every degree thronged to do him homage. A crowd of prelates followed him to the grave. A brilliant star is said to have shone miraculously over his pillar; the general voice of mankind pronounced him to be the highest model of a Christian saint; and several other anchorites [Christian hermits] imitated or emulated his penances.

Given that the Bible nowhere condemns torture and sometimes prescribes shockingly cruel penalties (such as burning alive), and that Christians so wholeheartedly approved of self-torture, it’s not surprising that they thought little of inflicting appallingly cruel treatment upon others. At the height of Christianity’s power and influence, hundreds of thousands of "witches" were brutally tortured and burned alive under the auspices of ecclesiastical witch finders, and the Inquisition visited similarly cruel treatment upon those accused of heresy. Henry Charles Lea records:

Two hundred wretches crowded the filthy gaol and it was requisite to forbid the rest of the Conversos [Jews intimidated into converting to Christianity] from leaving the city [Jaen, Spain] without a license. With Diego’s assistance [Diego de Algeciras, a petty criminal and kept perjurer] and the free use of torture, on both accused and witnesses, it was not difficult to obtain whatever evidence was desired. The notary of the tribunal, Antonio de Barcena, was especially successful in this. On one occasion, he locked a young girl of fifteen in a room, stripped her naked and scourged her until she consented to bear testimony against her mother. A prisoner was carried in a chair to the auto da fe with his feet burnt to the bone; he and his wife were burnt alive . . . The cells in which the unfortunates were confined in heavy chains were narrow, dark, humid, filthy and overrun with vermin, while their sequestrated property was squandered by the officials, so that they nearly starved in prison while their helpless children starved outside.

While the torture and murder of heretics and "witches" is now largely a thing of the past, Christians can still be remarkably cruel. One current example is provided by the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. Its members picket the funerals of victims of AIDS and gay bashings, brandishing signs reading, "God Hates Fags," "AIDS Cures Fags," and "Thank God for AIDS." The pastor of this church reportedly once sent a "condolence" card to the bereaved mother of an AIDS victim, reading "Another Dead Fag."(2) Christians are also at the forefront of those advocating vicious, life-destroying penalties for those who commit victimless "crimes," as well as being at the forefront of those who support the death penalty and those who want to make prison conditions even more barbaric than they are now.

But this should not be surprising coming from Christians, members of a religion that teaches that eternal torture is not only justified, but that the "saved" will enjoy seeing the torture of others. As St. Thomas Aquinas put it:

In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful and that they may give to God more copious thanks for it, they are permitted perfectly to behold the sufferings of the damned . . . The saints will rejoice in the punishment of the damned.

Thus the vision of heaven of Christianity’s greatest theologian is a vision of the sadistic enjoyment of endless torture.

(a) Whereas some individual Christians or groups had a low view of sexual relations, the pamphleteer seems to conveniently forget about Paul's admonitions in 1 Corinthians about spouses rendering unto their spouses their sexual due.

(b) The sweeping claim that Christians self-torture themselves over sex is, like the other assertions, devoid of any support.

(c) The anecdote about St Simeon Stylites lends no argument against somebody like myself who looks dimly upon monasticism and ascetism.

(d) I'm not responsible for the Inquisition. And, given that I've burned no witches nor publicly called for their burning, I'm left wondering just what evidence against Christianity the pamphleteer is making. Again --- how does this relate to the evidence for the veracity of scripture and the supernatural historical claims of, say, the Resurrection?

(e) Again, fallacies (2) and (3) are prominently on display here. Somehow, the "God Hates Fags" group's behavior is mysteriously imputed to Christianity-in-general, no argument given.

(f) A pamphleteer picking on St Thomas is rather brazen. The pamphleteer never considers the possibility that if God is perfectly just, good, etc, then Christians cannot help but celebrate and bask in God's judgement, hence under the Christian framework Christians are not acting out of logical character. This of course will, in accordance with fallacy (1), infuriate the pamphleteer's sensibilities, but again, in a formally logical sense, why should I care about his sensibilities when they're proffered without any sort of argument.

(g) The pamphleteer seems unaware that non-Christians sometimes are against abortion. Some atheists support the death penalty.

This is getting tiring, but the show goes on:

*******

The eight argument is that Christianity is anti-intellectual and anti-scientific.

(viii) For over a millennium Christianity arrested the development of science and scientific thinking. In Christendom, from the time of Augustine until the Renaissance, systematic investigation of the natural world was restricted to theological investigation—the interpretation of biblical passages, the gleaning of clues from the lives of the saints, etc.; there was no direct observation and interpretation of natural processes, because that was considered a useless pursuit, as all knowledge resided in scripture. The results of this are well known: scientific knowledge advanced hardly an inch in the over 1000 years from the rise of orthodox Christianity in the fourth century to the 1500s, and the populace was mired in the deepest squalor and ignorance, living in dire fear of the supernatural—believing in paranormal explanations for the most ordinary natural events. This ignorance had tragic results: it made the populace more than ready to accept witchcraft as an explanation for everything from illness to thunderstorms, and hundreds of thousands of women paid for that ignorance with their lives. One of the commonest charges against witches was that they had raised hailstorms or other weather disturbances to cause misfortune to their neighbors. In an era when supernatural explanations were readily accepted, such charges held weight—and countless innocent people died horrible deaths as a result. Another result was that the fearful populace remained very dependent upon Christianity and its clerical wise men for protection against the supernatural evils which they believed surrounded and constantly menaced them. For men and women of the Middle Ages, the walls veritably crawled with demons and witches; and their only protection from those evils was the church.

When scientific investigation into the natural world resumed in the Renaissance—after a 1000-year-plus hiatus—organized Christianity did everything it could to stamp it out. The cases of Copernicus and Galileo are particularly relevant here, because when the Catholic Church banned the Copernican theory (that the Earth revolves around the sun) and banned Galileo from teaching it, it did not consider the evidence for that theory: it was enough that it contradicted scripture. Given that the Copernican theory directly contradicted the Word of God, the Catholic hierarchy reasoned that it must be false. Protestants shared this view. John Calvin rhetorically asked, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?”

More lately, the Catholic Church and the more liberal Protestant congregations have realized that fighting against science is a losing battle, and they’ve taken to claiming that there is no contradiction between science and religion. This is disingenuous at best. As long as Christian sects continue to claim as fact—without offering a shred of evidence beyond the anecdotal—that physically impossible events occurred (or are still occurring), the conflict between science and religion will remain. That many churchmen and many scientists seem content to let this conflict lie doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

Today, however, the conflict between religion and science is largely being played out in the area of public school biology education, with Christian fundamentalists demanding that their creation myth be taught in place of (or along with) the theory of evolution in the public schools. Their tactics rely heavily on public misunderstanding of science. They nitpick the fossil record for its gaps (hardly surprising given that we inhabit a geologically and meteorologically very active planet), while offering absurd interpretations of their own which we’re supposed to accept at face value—such as that dinosaur fossils were placed in the earth by Satan to confuse humankind, or that Noah took baby dinosaurs on the ark.

They also attempt to take advantage of public ignorance of the nature of scientific theories. In popular use, “theory” is employed as a synonym for “hypothesis,” “conjecture,” or even “wild guess,” that is, it signifies an idea with no special merit or backing. The use of the term in science is quite different. There, “theory” refers to a well-developed, logically consistent explanation of a phenomenon, and an explanation that is consistent with observed facts. This is very different than a wild guess. But fundamentalists deliberately confuse the two uses of the term in an attempt to make their religious myth appear as valid as a well-supported scientific theory.

They also attempt to confuse the issue by claiming that those nonspecialists who accept the theory of evolution have no more reason to do so than they have in accepting their religious creation myth, or even that those who accept evolution do so on “faith.” Again, this is more than a bit dishonest.

Thanks to scientific investigation, human knowledge has advanced to the point where no one can know more than a tiny fraction of the whole. Even the most knowledgeable scientists often know little beyond their specialty areas. But because of the structure of science, they (and everyone else) can feel reasonably secure in accepting the theories developed by scientists in other disciplines as the best possible current explanations of the areas of nature those disciplines cover. They (and we) can feel secure doing this because of the structure of science, and more particularly, because of the scientific method. That method basically consists of gathering as much information about a phenomenon (both in nature and in the laboratory) as possible, then developing explanations for it (hypotheses), and then testing the hypotheses to see how well they explain the observed facts, and whether or not any of those observed facts are inconsistent with the hypotheses. Those hypotheses that are inconsistent with observed facts are discarded or modified, while those that are consistent are retained, and those that survive repeated testing are often labeled “theories,” as in “the theory of relativity” and “the theory of evolution.”

This is the reason that nonspecialists are justified in accepting scientific theories outside their disciplines as the best current explanations of observed phenomena: those who developed the theories were following standard scientific practice and reasoning—and if they deviate from that, other scientists will quickly call them to task.

No matter how much fundamentalists might protest to the contrary, there is a world of difference between “faith” in scientific theories (produced using the scientific method, and subject to near-continual testing and scrutiny) and faith in the entirely unsupported myths recorded 3000 years ago by slave-holding goat herders.

Nearly 500 years ago Martin Luther, in his Table Talk, stated: “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has.” The opposite is also true.

(a) Hmmm. I have a scientific doctorate and have written at a high technical level in mathematics, statistics, and philosophy. I happen to know several Christians who are professional philosophers in various areas. But we're the anti-intellectual ones. Uh-huh. Whatever. Thanks for playing.

(b) Again, I'm not responsible for the perceived crimes of Rome.

(c) I would say that a consistent Christian is anti-materialism and anti-naturalism, but not anti-science, unless "science" is a priori taken to be equivalent to applied methodological and/or ontological naturalism. But this rather begs the question, does it not?

(d) Those saliva-dripping bubbles you see coming out your screen are the pamphleteer's frothing here.

Again, where exactly is an argument against, say, the historicity of the gospels or the resurrection, etc, to be found here? Am I supposed to hold the argument up to a mirror and perhaps an actual argument can be read backwards off the reflection? Do I take every fifth letter and form an argument? Where is the argument? We have nothing but rhetoric here.

Basically, Christians are stupid. If you consider the Biblical texts authoritative, you're an ignoramus. The main piece of evidence for these claims is the use of pejorative adjectives by the pamphleteer. One would think that a champion of reason would realize that adjectives do not function as arguments, but one would seemingly be wrong...

*********

The ninth argument deals with sex, namely, the claim is advanced that Christians have "an unhealthy, morbid, preoccupation with sex."

(ix) For centuries, Christianity has had an exceptionally unhealthy fixation on sex, to the exclusion of almost everything else (except power, money, and the infliction of cruelty). This stems from the numerous "thou shalt nots" relating to sex in the Bible. That the Ten Commandments contain a commandment forbidding the coveting of one’s neighbor’s wife, but do not even mention slavery, torture, or cruelty—which were abundantly common in the time the Commandments were written— speaks volumes about their writer’s preoccupation with sex (and women as property).

Today, judging from the pronouncements of many Christian leaders, one would think that "morality" consists solely of what one does in one’s bedroom. The Catholic Church is the prime example here, with its moral pronouncements rarely going beyond the matters of birth control and abortion (and with its moral emphasis seemingly entirely on those matters). Also note that the official Catholic view of sex—that it’s for the purpose of procreation only—reduces human sexual relations to those of brood animals. For more than a century the Catholic Church has also been the driving force behind efforts to prohibit access to birth control devices and information—to everyone, not just Catholics.

The Catholic Church, however, is far from alone in its sick obsession with sex. The current Christian hate campaign against homosexuals is another prominent manifestation of this perverse preoccupation. Even at this writing, condemnation of "sodomites" from church pulpits is still very, very common—with Christian clergymen wringing their hands as they piously proclaim that their words of hate have nothing to do with gay bashings and the murder of gays.

(a) Basically, we have fallacy (1) on display here by the pamphleteer. He doesn't like certain views on sex, and this counts as probative evidence against the truth of Christianity. No justification is offered for why his views on sex are the standard par excellence for evaluating a worldview.

(b) Somehow, the pamphleteer feels as if he can get inside the Biblical author's [or authors'] head [or heads] to find a "preoccupation with sex." No argument is given for why this psychologizing has any connection with reality.

(c) That Rome is against abortion weighs as evidence against the Christian faith exactly how? Argument, please. How exactly do Christians have a "sick obsession" with sex? Argument, please.

BTW --- I reject the premise that procreation has to be kept in mind in sexual matters between spouses. If you want to do it for fun, for pleasure, for intimacy, for communication, there is nothing wrong with that. [Just don't kill a fertilized egg.] So, even if Rome teaches what the pamphleteer claims, I'm not RC, so I don't need to answer for that.

(d) "The current Christian hate campaign against homosexuals." Loaded language is fun, but it can't do the work of an argument. Orthodox Christians look askance at homosexual behavior because scripture clearly presents a negative view of it. The pamphleteer can rend his garment and beat his breast over it, but whether one likes it or not, the question of just how this is evidence against Christianity arises.

(e) Oh, and don't you love the imputation the murderous acts of a few people against homosexuals to Christianity-in-general?

With fallacies (1)-(3) instantiated again, there seems to be nothing here except, as has become the custom, a laundry list of grievances by the pamphleteer. The evidence [or lack therof] for/against, say, the Resurrection, the historicity of the gospels, etc, is unchanged by the first nine arguments presented in the pamphlet.

Perhaps the tenth time will be the charm.

*********

The pamphleteer continues his sex theme: Christianity produces sexual misery.

As a preliminary word [to break up the monotony], we again have fallacy (1) instantiated. Humans like sex. It feels good. It is generally fun.

If a worldview X says "go out and have sex 'til you drop" and worldview Y says "never, ever have sex" [these are extremes], does this fact by itself make X better ontologically supported than Y?

The answer is that X, taken by itself, is at best more consonant with human nature. Now as an ethical program, this might lead to preferring X to Y, everything else being equal. But Christianity, as is any worldview, is more than an ethical program. It is a collection of historical, metaphysical, and ethical theses all bound together.

I may not like being single [and hence celibate], but for me to complain that I'm not being fulfilled and then to use this as evidence against the empty tomb, the cross, the historicity of the gospels, etc, is to commit a non sequitur. Just what does this have to do with the evidence?

Likewise, if the Bible stated [somewhere] that Pedantic Protestants had license to cavort and frolic with any woman at any time, I might be a little less edgy at times, but again, for me to invoke this as positive evidence for Christianity is the same sort of non sequitur.

Basically: who says that a worldview has to conform to your urges? Argument, please.

Let's let our pamphleteer speak for himself:

In addition to the misery produced by authoritarian Christian intrusions into the sex lives of non-Christians, Christianity produces great misery among its own adherents through its insistence that sex (except the very narrow variety it sanctions) is evil, against God’s law. Christianity proscribes sex between unmarried people, sex outside of marriage, homosexual relations, bestiality, (3) and even “impure” sexual thoughts. Indulging in such things can and will, in the conventional Christian view, lead straight to hell.

Given that human beings are by nature highly sexual beings, and that their urges very often do not fit into the only officially sanctioned Christian form of sexuality (monogamous, heterosexual marriage), it’s inevitable that those who attempt to follow Christian “morality” in this area are often miserable, as their strongest urges run smack dab into the wall of religious belief. This is inevitable in Christian adolescents and unmarried young people in that the only “pure” way for them to behave is celibately—in the strict Christian view, even masturbation is prohibited. Phillip Roth has well described the dilemma of the religiously/sexually repressed young in Portnoy’s Complaint as “being torn between desires that are repugnant to my conscience and a conscience repugnant to my desires.” Thus the years of adolescence and young adulthood for many Christians are poisoned by “sinful” urges, unfulfilled longings, and intense guilt (after the urges become too much to bear and are acted upon).

Even after Christian young people receive a license from church and state to have sex, they often discover that the sexual release promised by marriage is not all that it’s cracked up to be. One gathers that in marriages between those who have followed Christian rules up until marriage—that is, no sex at all—sexual ineptitude and lack of fulfillment are all too common. Even when Christian married people do have good sexual relations, the problems do not end. Sexual attractions ebb and flow, and new attractions inevitably arise. In conventional Christian relationships, one is not allowed to act on these new attractions. One is often not even permitted to admit that such attractions exist. As Sten Linnander puts it, “with traditional [Christian] morality, you have to choose between being unfaithful to yourself or to another.”

The dilemma is even worse for gay teens and young people in that Christianity never offers them release from their unrequited urges. They are simply condemned to lifelong celibacy. If they indulge their natural desires, they become “sodomites” subject not only to Earthly persecution (due to Christian-inspired laws), but to being roasted alive forever in the pit. Given the internalized homophobia Christian teachings inspire, not to mention the very real discrimination gay people face, it’s not surprising that a great many homosexually oriented Christians choose to live a lie. In most cases, this leads to lifelong personal torture, but it can have even more tragic results.

A prime example is Marshall Applewhite, “John Do,” the guru of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult. Applewhite grew up in the South in a repressive Christian fundamentalist family. Horrified by his homosexual urges, he began to think of sexuality itself as evil, and eventually underwent castration to curb his sexual urges.(4) Several of his followers took his anti-sexual teachings to heart and likewise underwent castration before, at “Do’s” direction, killing themselves.

(a) Most married Christians I know seem to have [so far as I can tell and have been told] satisfying sex lives.

(b) The pamphleteer takes what he considers extreme or strict positions [that Christians of good conscience can disagree over] and then makes those positions emblematic of Christianity-at-large. Even if he could, so what? We have the non sequitur mentioned above, namely, what does this have to do with the historical, metaphysical, etc evidence for Christianity.

(c) Semantic equivocation is employed by the pamphleteer. Thinking homosexual behavior to be wrong is not "homophobia." Thinking action X is wrong does not make somebody an X-o-phobe.

(d) The thesis that homosexual behavior could be dangerous to one's long term prospects relative to the afterlife offends the pamphleteer. Why should, on a logical level, I accept the pamphleteer's standard? There are lots of things I personally would like to do but can't because scripture clearly states that they're wrong. Is this unfair? Should I go and report God to my local ACLU for violating my rights? Can I sue God for "holding me back" and make Him pay for my subsequent therapy bills?

(e) You have to admire the chutzpah of using the leader of a cult in a giant non-sequitur example that has nothing to do with the evidences for Christianity while keeping a straight face as if you're making an actual argument.

******

I've quickly gone in stream-o'-consciousness fashion through ten arguments asking if these reasons are actually good reasons for abandoning historic Christianity. [And I haven't addressed every point that the author tries to make, to be sure.] Do these arguments present evidence that various supernatural phenomena occurred, that the eyewitnesses to the events are not trustworthy, that scripture is reliable, etc? So far, none of these points has been addressed.

So far, the arguments against Christianity aren't really arguments, but mere inventories of what the pamphleteer doesn't like about various Christians: some are mean, some are authoritarian, some may have sexual hangups, some may feel more special than the non-Christian, some may be anti-intellectual, etc.

Well, in a shocking development, we know that various atheists and leftists are mean, authoritarian, possessing sexual hangups, evidencing a big head because they're the Champions of Reason [self-appointed of course], anti-intellectual, etc. The argument cuts both ways. Actually, the non-argument cuts both ways as well. The behaviors the pamphleteer doesn't like in some are surely manifested in some of those who would have the same worldview as the pamphleteer; you'd be just as silly to use those as arguments against the pamphleteer's worldview.

In all of these arguments the pamphleteer merely compares things with his own standard. The pamphleteer is the point of reference. Now this is fine if the pamphleteer can argue as to why his views are the optimal standard of comparison. All the pamphleteer has really succeeded in doing is pointing out that there are people who behave and think differently than him, and nobody really disputes that. But as far as arguing evidentially against the reliability of the scriptures and the supernatural phenomena that Christianity claims to have happened [not to mention the metaphysical assertions that Christianity entails], we have ten arguments so far that do not hold any water; we have ten leaky buckets.

Will the pamphleteer actually come up with something that functions as an actual argument in reasons 11-20 ? Stay tuned for the next exciting post here at Pedantic Protestant....same PP time....same PP channel.

PP at 34

2005-12-22T14:25:00.000-08:00

I received the following mysterious email from the equally mysterious PP Aging Committee:

Dear Mr Vestrup:

Today you're 34. Happy birthday! We just want to let you know that your survival probabilities have been duly updated and adjusted to take the extra year into account. You're one year closer to your inevitable death --- keep on truckin'!

We have informed your ankles and knees to not recover as quickly from long runs. We've also given them permission to ache every now and then if you push them too hard on the basketball court. We've told your fat cells to stay the course, and we've allocated some muscular areas to be eventual fat parks. Please don't resist.

Your vision has been changed from 20/20 [with corrective lenses] to 20/25. We've changed your grey hair proportion [upward of course] to 28%. Looks like you'll have to use that box of medium-brown "Just for Men" every five weeks now instead of every six weeks.

You will notice too an increased interest in your mutual fund performance and a decreased interest in sports and pro wrestling [really, do grow up sometime]. You might find watching "Matlock" and "The Golden Girls" more palatable too.

Finally, we've increased the number of sentences of yours that begin with the words "Remember when....." and "When I was your age....." by 3.14%. Feel free to reminisce about "the good ol' days" to twenty-somethings.

All in all, enjoy your 35th year of life, and try to avoid major injury [giggle giggle] when running, playing tennis, basketball, or, say, just sitting in a chair!

Sincerely,
The PP Aging Committee

Twenty Leaky Buckets --- Part 2

2005-12-22T13:32:00.000-08:00

At this stage I'll briefly comment on the pamphlet titled 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity. Part 1 and 1.5 of this thread are located here and here, respectively. I'll refer to the enumerated fallacies (1)-(5) mentioned in Part 1.5.

Remember that I'm responding to this as a conservative Evangelical. I don't need to defend charges against positions not held by myself or other informed Evangelicals with a high view of the OT and NT.

(i) Christianity is based on fear.

With all of these arguments, one needs to ask one's self is this or how is this evidence against the classical Christian faith?.

This first argument is as follows:

While today there are liberal clergy who preach a gospel of love, they ignore the bulk of Christian teachings, not to mention the bulk of Christian history. Throughout almost its entire time on Earth, the motor driving Christianity has been—in addition to the fear of death—fear of the devil and fear of hell. One can only imagine how potent these threats seemed prior to the rise of science and rational thinking, which have largely robbed these bogeys of their power to inspire terror. But even today, the existence of the devil and hell are cardinal doctrinal tenets of almost all Christian creeds, and many fundamentalist preachers still openly resort to terrorizing their followers with lurid, sadistic portraits of the suffering of nonbelievers after death. This is not an attempt to convince through logic and reason; it is not an attempt to appeal to the better nature of individuals; rather, it is an attempt to whip the flock into line through threats, through appeals to a base part of human nature—fear and cowardice.

We reply:

(a) Note that instead of dealing with Christianity, the pamphleteer deals with the sociological dimension of Xty ["throughout almost its entire time on earth"]. This has nothing to do with whether Jesus existed, was in fact divine, was crucified, was buried, was resurrected, etc.

(b) The pamphleteer commits fallacy (3) from the previous post in attempting to impute to Xty the behavior of those who "attempt to whip the flock into line through threats, through appeals to a base part of human nature—fear and cowardice."

(c) Yes, the existence of hell and personal noncorporeal evil agents are part of orthodox Christianity. That these concepts offend the pamphleteer in no way aids his cause. Mere outrage at a concept is not an argument. This is an instantiation of fallacy (2).

In the end, it is hard to see how this argument carries any water. Even if the worst claims made are true, this doesn't provide any sort of probative evidence for/against the supernatural-historical claims of Christianity. It's just, in the end, an affectation of outrage.

*****

Argument two is as follows: Christianity preys on the innocent.

(ii) If Christian fear-mongering were directed solely at adults, it would be bad enough, but Christians routinely terrorize helpless children through grisly depictions of the endless horrors and suffering they’ll be subjected to if they don’t live good Christian lives. Christianity has darkened the early years of generation after generation of children, who have lived in terror of dying while in mortal sin and going to endless torment as a result. All of these children were trusting of adults, and they did not have the ability to analyze what they were being told; they were simply helpless victims, who, ironically, victimized following generations in the same manner that they themselves had been victimized. The nearly 2000 years of Christian terrorizing of children ranks as one of its greatest crimes. And it’s one that continues to this day.

As an example of Christianity’s cruel brainwashing of the innocent, consider this quotation from an officially approved, 19th-century Catholic children’s book (Tracts for Spiritual Reading, by Rev. J. Furniss, C.S.S.R.):

Look into this little prison. In the middle of it there is a boy, a young man. He is silent; despair is on him . . . His eyes are burning like two burning coals. Two long flames come out of his ears. His breathing is difficult. Sometimes he opens his mouth and breath of blazing fire rolls out of it. But listen! There is a sound just like that of a kettle boiling. Is it really a kettle which is boiling? No; then what is it? Hear what it is. The blood is boiling in the scalding veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones. Ask him why he is thus tormented. His answer is that when he was alive, his blood boiled to do very wicked things.

There are many similar passages in this book. Commenting on it, William Meagher, Vicar-General of Dublin, states in his Approbation:

"I have carefully read over this Little Volume for Children and have found nothing whatever in it contrary to the doctrines of the Holy Faith; but on the contrary, a great deal to charm, instruct and edify the youthful classes for whose benefit it has been written."

We reply:

(a) Again, this is a sociological claim, not an evidential claim. The empty tomb, resurrection, veracity of scripture, etc, is not affected by the author's outrage at the following events. All this argument shows is that the above anecdote about Hell and children really irks the pamphleteer. But I thought we were talking about evidences for/against Christianity. Must be my mistake.

(b) If Hell is truly as described above, then the citation in the childeren's Catholic book is merely stating something that is true. If Hell is not truly as described above, then that's one freaky excerpt. But again, the so-called argument above doesn't get to whether Hell is or is not truly as described above, so we have more argument-by-outrage here.

(c) Having instantiated fallacies (2) and (3), and having held a belief system responsible for some of its adherents, doesn't it seem rather one-sided for the pamphleteer to ignore the good works of charity done by Rome and other Christians throughout the ages?

******

So far, some under the banner of Christianity have, according to the pamphleteer, preyed on fear and terrorized the innocent. Whether Christianity is actually true or supported by the historical/metaphysical evidence is still untouched. The pamphleteer's main thesis sits at home on a Friday night still waiting by the phone for an actual argument to call up for a date.

*****

Reason number three is that Christianity is based on dishonesty:

(iii) The Christian appeal to fear, to cowardice, is an admission that the evidence supporting Christian beliefs is far from compelling. If the evidence were such that Christianity’s truth was immediately apparent to anyone who considered it, Christians—including those who wrote the Gospels—would feel no need to resort to the cheap tactic of using fear-inducing threats to inspire "belief." ("Lip service" is a more accurate term.) That the Christian clergy have been more than willing to accept such lip service (plus the dollars and obedience that go with it) in place of genuine belief, is an additional indictment of the basic dishonesty of Christianity.

How deep dishonesty runs in Christianity can be gauged by one of the most popular Christian arguments for belief in God: Pascal’s wager. This "wager" holds that it’s safer to "believe" in God (as if belief were volitional!) than not to believe, because God might exist, and if it does, it will save "believers" and condemn nonbelievers to hell after death. This is an appeal to pure cowardice. It has absolutely nothing to do with the search for truth. Instead, it’s an appeal to abandon honesty and intellectual integrity, and to pretend that lip service is the same thing as actual belief. If the patriarchal God of Christianity really exists, one wonders how it would judge the cowards and hypocrites who advance and bow to this particularly craven "wager."

In turn, we say the following.

(a) The first paragraph is a sociological indictment not of a conservative Evangelical like myself, but of two groups: the fear-mongerers and the liberals. I'm neither. Nothing to respond to here.

But let's say I was a member of either of these groups. Again, what does this have to do with the cross, the empty tomb, the veracity of scripture, etc? It's hard to see just how the author's outrage qualifies as an actual argument here.

(b) The second paragraph is classic village atheism. The author's outrage at an argument that he doesn't like [I don't much like the argument either] somehow, in his mind, is evidence against the truth of Christianity. The scholarly response to such an unwarranted leap is this: Whatever, d00d.

*******

The fourth reason to abandon Christianity is the extreme arrogance and egotism it brings about:

(iv) The deep egocentrism of Christianity is intimately tied to its reliance on fear. In addition to the fears of the devil and hell, Christianity plays on another of humankind’s most basic fears: death, the dissolution of the individual ego. Perhaps Christianity’s strongest appeal is its promise of eternal life. While there is absolutely no evidence to support this claim, most people are so terrified of death that they cling to this treacly promise insisting, like frightened children, that it must be true. Nietzsche put the matter well: "salvation of the soul—in plain words, the world revolves around me." It’s difficult to see anything spiritual in this desperate grasping at straws—this desperate grasping at the illusion of personal immortality.

Another manifestation of the extreme egotism of Christianity is the belief that God is intimately concerned with picayune aspects of, and directly intervenes in, the lives of individuals. If God, the creator and controller of the universe, is vitally concerned with your sex life, you must be pretty damned important. Many Christians take this particular form of egotism much further and actually imagine that God has a plan for them, or that God directly talks to, directs, or even does favors for them.(1) If one ignored the frequent and glaring contradictions in this supposed divine guidance, and the dead bodies sometimes left in its wake, one could almost believe that the individuals making such claims are guided by God. But one can’t ignore the contradictions in and the oftentimes horrible results of following such "divine guidance." As "Agent Mulder" put it (perhaps paraphrasing Thomas Szasz) in a 1998 X-Files episode, "When you talk to God it’s prayer, but when God talks to you it’s schizophrenia. . . . God may have his reasons, but he sure seems to employ a lot of psychotics to carry out his job orders."

In less extreme cases, the insistence that one is receiving divine guidance or special treatment from God is usually the attempt of those who feel worthless—or helpless, adrift in an uncaring universe—to feel important or cared for. This less sinister form of egotism is commonly found in the expressions of disaster survivors that "God must have had a reason for saving me" (in contrast to their less-worthy-of-life fellow disaster victims, whom God—who controls all things—killed). Again, it’s very difficult to see anything spiritual in such egocentricity.

Ah, another argument by outrage. Never gets old. And, just like the other million arguments by outrage employed by like-minded critics, it too falls flat on its face.
We counter-reply:

(a) Whether or not the pamphleteer sees anything "spiritual" in Christians grappling or dealing with personal immortality has nothing to do with whether classical Christianity is objectively true.

(b) Perhaps Christians believe that God intervenes in individual matters, even those that might seem minor to others, because that is what scripture clearly teaches.

(c) Perhaps Christians believe that men are "damned important" because, uh, we are "damned important" according to scripture. The pamphleteer, who elsewhere excoriates Christians for hypocrisy, here excoriates those Christians who go by scripture on this point.

(d) Cheap psyhologizing is on display in the last paragraph.

Did you find an actual argument against the truth of Christianity in the fourth argument? No, I didn't either. I found the pamphleteer's angst and dislike of some Christian's behavior whether warranted or not, but I didn't find an argument.

******

Argument five deals with the arrogance and chosen-people mentality brought forth by Christianity:

(v) It’s only natural that those who believe (or play act at believing) that they have a direct line to the Almighty would feel superior to others. This is so obvious that it needs little elaboration. A brief look at religious terminology confirms it. Christians have often called themselves "God’s people," "the chosen people," "the elect," "the righteous," etc., while nonbelievers have been labeled "heathens," "infidels," and "atheistic Communists" (as if atheism and Communism are intimately connected). This sets up a two-tiered division of humanity, in which "God’s people" feel superior to those who are not "God’s people."

That many competing religions with contradictory beliefs make the same claim seems not to matter at all to the members of the various sects that claim to be the only carriers of "the true faith." The carnage that results when two competing sects of "God’s people" collide—as in Ireland and Palestine—would be quite amusing but for the suffering it causes.

By way of reply:

(a) Perhaps Christians refer to themselves as "God's elect" or "God's chosen" because scripture refers to them that way.

(b) That some in "God's elect" might feel intrinsically superior to "the heathens" might be a true sociological statement [it is], but again, it has no logical bearing on the evidences for Christianity.

(c) Did you hear that sound? That's the pamphleteer rending his garment over the problem of competing worldviews in the final paragraph. According to him, the fact that people believe differently and hold to different worldviews is an argument against Christianity.

But, this is self-refuting, for the same argument would apply to atheism --- not everybody is an atheist, nor is everybody in agreement with the pamphleteer's worldview [whatever that might be]. So, is this an argument against the pamphleteer's worldview?

BTW --- even as a liberal atheist undergrad, it struck me as a copout for somebody to complain that there were many competing worldviews, as if that very fact rendered having a thought-out life impossible. When you deal with competing positions, you try to delineate the evidence, arguments for, arguments against, etc and decide on the basis of that evidence. People will do this in politics and other areas, but when it turns to "religion," somehow the rules of argumentation and such go out the window. I've never understood that.

I was hoping to find an actual argument against Christianity by the fifth part of the pamphlet. But, just as I hoped to find a Colecovision under the tree in '83 [or '84], it just wasn't there.

******

Let's offer some brief closing thoughts for Part 2 here.

Like much of village atheist lit and mentality that I've seen, the question of whether Christianity is true, its evidences, etc, is not touched. Instead, we're treated to an inventory of what the VA doesn't like about Christianity. The VA doesn't like Doctrine X. The VA finds hypocrite Y offensive. The VA thinks that behavior Z by group Q of Christians is repugnant. And so on.

These aren't arguments against the veracity of the central historical claims of Christianity. At best, it indicates that there are hypocrites in Christianity. But since when has that been news?

The Christian faith is not based on the sociological outworkings of its adherents. It is based on certain supernatural phenomena in man's history as well as certain metaphysical theses regarding God and reality. To get at the heart of Christianity, one must attack these and stop expressing public outrage over the guy with a Jesus bumper sticker who cut you off on Interstate 80 the other day.

We'll have Part 3 by tomorrow, hopefully.

Airball

2005-12-21T12:27:00.000-08:00

We needed two bombs to win at the gym last night. I ran my guy *hard* off two picks. Fresh in their mind was the previous game's winning bomb dropped by der blogmeister. I got a second of separation in my sweet spot behind the arc, and our talented guard got me the ball. Everything was set for pure stroke-a-licious twine-tickling. After all, have I not shamelessly bragged about my >50% downtown shooting?

Airball.

Did the air pressure change? Did God change the cosmological constant for a few seconds? Did the neutron to electron mass ratio change?

Will I have to enter a witness protection program?

Twenty Leaky Buckets --- Part 1.5

2005-12-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

Before delving into the claims of the pamphlet linked in the previous thread, there are a few more global points I'd like to make regarding my approach to this pamphlet:

(1) I'm an Evangelical. I'm not a Romanist. What Rome has done, is doing, and will do in the future is not something that concerns me so far as defending why I believe what I believe. I'm not RC for several [I'd contend] very good reasons, as illustrated by various posts at various times on this blog. The point of saying this is that the pamphlet makes a big to-do about attacking Rome and her history in various points, and then imputing Rome's alleged sins to Christianity-at-large, and hence to the subset of Evangelicals. Whether the pamphlet is correct on Rome or not is irrelevant to me. Were I a card-carrying Romanist, I'd have to answer these points. But, remembering the second P of this blog's name, I don't think Rome is much worth defending. And even were I to have a lapse of judgement and find Rome worth defending, it wouldn't have any logical bearing on the program of having an Evangelical look at this pamphlet.

On the other hand, if Rome is attacked on a point of commonality between RCism and Evangelicalism, then I'll respond to it. For example, if Rome is attacked for holding to the corporeal resurrection, then, since that is a common point, it is worth defending.

(2) I'm sure I'll mention this not a few times in the following threads, but the village atheist mentality [not to mention the pop culture mentality] seems to think that if X violates some canon of political correctness, "tolerance," or fuzzy-wuzzy conception of reality, then that counts as probative evidence against X. Usually, after imputing some nasty X to the Christian religion, the village atheist rends his garment in an affectation of self-righteous outrage: how dare they hold to X! But, the tacit atheist assumption that the negation of X is true, preferable, etc, like a lonely girl on Friday night, waits by the phone for a supporting argument that simply isn't going to call.

The simple fact of the matter is that reality offers us no promise to conform to our mood, desires, wishes, and so on. There are some "pleasant" things in Christianity, just as there are in atheism. There are some "unpleasant" things in Christianity, just as there are in atheism. Thus, the presence of pleasant or unpleasant thing, by itself, does not broker the issue.

(3) Another feature of this pamphlet is in taking the worst or most extreme cases of sociological Christianity and then inferring from that small subset the general behavior of the superset. Most Christians don't, say, bomb abortion clinics, nor do they yell that God hates, say, homosexuals. This won't stop an eager village atheist from mentioning it as a global "sin of Christianity."

I am always amazed that your village atheists want to go that route anyway, for if we judge atheism by its adherents in communist and socialist societies, atheism comes off at least as badly as does "organized religion." When you see atheist and leftist students walking around in red "Che" t-shirts, you see professors defending Chairman Mao, and you see activists actively describing Cuba as a paradise, say, and then you look at the reality, I'm surprised the village atheist even wants to go there.

(4) Another point worth mentioning is that this pamphlet, just like most other village atheist works, makes a very self-selecting appeal to scholarship in general. In this pamphlet, the Jesus Seminar is treated as the height of science and scholarship, with no evidence of seeing the other positions being presented.

The fact is that, for every position I've studied, some scholars come down on one position, others come down on others. I hold some majority opinions; I hold some minority opinions. I don't need to rely on a scholar's authority when it comes to evaluating evidence, quite frankly. I can do so myself. But, on those issues I've studied, I've read on the competing positions. And, were I to appeal strictly to conservative scholars in a disputation with a village atheist, that would be just as fallacious as the village atheist's self-selecting appeal to, say, the Jesus Seminar.

(5) Well, this is the final point, it seems. Note the context-free citations of scripture used in this and other village atheist materials. It is almost as if context is forbidden in atheist literature, lest the party end prematurely.

One of the advantages of being Biblically literate is that you know the context for most of the little cited snippets, and you can, in most cases, see immediately that the village atheist is not railing against a grammatical-historical reading of scripture, but in some historical personage's misuse of scripture. That the village atheist is too lazy to check context isn't surprising, since intellectual laziness is, so it seems, a natural requirement of village atheism.

The same comments apply to these quickly-compiled lists of alleged "Biblical contradictions." I could find 10 "contradictions" [village atheist style of course] in a few minutes without trying too hard if I want to ignore context.

**************

I've probably missed a point or two, but as I briefly go through the twenty reasons offered by the pamphlet, most of the reasons can be parried by appealing to some combination of some of (1)-(5) listed here. If anybody is following this series of threads [!], try to keep these somewhat in mind.

As I write this, I'm not sure of the value of doing this. It's been done so many times, and reading village atheist lit is a rather depressing affair. I'm rather ashamed to say that, in my undergrad days, I too went through a period of village atheism before becoming, so I'd contend, a good solid atheist.

Twenty Leaky Buckets --- Part One

2005-12-20T11:55:00.000-08:00

I found this pamphlet the other day. As with other atheist polemics I have read, it contains little if any new argumentation on behalf of the atheist thesis [or theses]. The arguments presented here have been heard at university, in coffeehouses, at cocktail parties, or anywhere people want to vent their frustrations at "organized religion."

Every now and then, it is good for a man to examine his views in the face not only of the more respectful academic arguments against him, but also in the face of what is bandied about in popular culture.

This little pamphlet has twenty reasons for, as the title says, "abandoning Christianity." I'll make the argument that none of these reasons, by itself, holds any water.

BTW, before proceeding in this miniseries, something important should be noted beforehand that, so it seems, is often missed. That something is the fact that just because a worldview presents a difficulty is not a global argument against that worldview. At the same time, having a multiplicity of difficulties can be a telling sign that a worldview is not in accordance with the evidence, but a difficulty here and there is not some sign of foreboding doom, for every coherent worldview has its difficulties, which difficulties by themselves seem to pack a wallop.

Next, consider two worldviews X and Y. Suppose that thesis A causes worldview X difficulties whereas thesis A is harmonious with Y. This by itself isn't necessarily compelling evidence for Y over X for the simple reason that there might be some other thesis B that conflicts with Y but is harmonious with X.

Let's try to make this concrete with a simple example. It is often claimed by the village atheist mentality that evil [however defined] is not harmonious with the Christian idea of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God. On a philosophical level, this claim, I'd contend, is false. But let's assume the claim for the time being. At this stage, the existence of what we call evil seems more harmonious with atheism than Christianity, so it seems that there is a point for the atheist. However, if you consider problems of knowledge, of knowing [for example], then the atheist, so far as I can tell, is at a real loss. If we ask for external objective justification of why my killing my neighbor in cold blood is evil and not good, then, so far as I can tell, the atheist is at a real loss compared with the Christian.

Every worldview has its difficulties. This holds of course for worldviews that are not in accordance with reality, but it holds even for the one true worldview. As an undergrad and grad student I spent a few years avocationally studying various worldviews, and, if one examines them carefully, one will find that every single one has an internal tension. People will argue in good faith about the degree of tension, but they're there, whether in Christianity, atheism, existentialism, Buddhism, etc. The trick is, of course is to go with the worldview that has the least tension. [However, nothing says that the worldview with the least tension is the true worldview.]

So far I've been talking in the abstract, and now I wish to return to particulars. This pamphlet which will be very briefly [but we hope fairly] discussed is not chosen for its excellence but for its representativeness of the sort of pop-level atheist arguments I've seen. I've seen these "[insert large #] of arguments against Christianity" not a few times, and I've seen not a few "[insert very large #] of Biblical contradictions" lists. At first, the large number of items in the list presents a sort of intimidation factor [whether intended or not by the author]. The thinking on the reader is of the form even if most items are false or not well-supported, some of it has to be true. After going through a few of those lists, however, my empirical experience is that there are a few fallacies that generate the multiplicity of talking points. This pamphlet has twenty alleged reasons for abandoning Christianity. Are there any strong arguments [they don't have to be compelling, just strong] in the pamphlet?

My answer, which is stated in advance [but after reading the document] is in the negative. This doesn't, by itself, prove that atheism is false, nor does this prove that Christianity is true. What it does show is that, if I'm correct, what passes for pop-level atheist is your typical question-begging emotion-laden drivel that is passed off [even in university settings!] as enlightened modern discourse that has at last shed off primitive superstitions.

Also, switching back to a general observation, much of the atheist literature at the pop-level speaks atheist-speak to atheists. This is hardly useful if you're writing a pamphlet designed to speak to Christians, in particular, to Christians in order to get them to see that their worldview is false, repressive, superstitious, [insert nasty adjective here]. So far as I can tell, this pamphlet is for Christians to read or for people who aren't sold for the Christianity-is-false position.

BTW --- I don't want the readership of PP to think I'm going to spend great amounts of time refuting each point. This pamphlet doesn't take that much work, since many of its points rely on the same fallacies, and one can handle great chunks of it simultaneously. But what I will attempt to do, for my own little intellectual exercise, is to delineate just why the arguments used in the pamphlet have no real buying power for a Christian. This will be stream-o'-consciousness stuff, but, it is really all these poor arguments deserve. I anticipate two, three, or four more parts, though of course I'm trying to get as much done by typing as little as possible!

Article on the Drug War

2005-12-19T16:39:00.000-08:00

The following article is by finance professor Michael Rozeff, and is taken from the Lew Rockwell site.

***************

The War on Drugs may not top the list of most successful programs of the State, but it has got to rank high, right up there with Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, the Cold War, education, and farm subsidies. It has achieved more than any of its most ardent designers and admirers counted on.

This octopus program straddles the length and breadth of the entire country, from sea to shining sea. It depletes every sort of community, from Jacksonville to Los Angeles, from trailer parks in rural Iowa to suburban mansions. Its tentacles extend across oceans and continents, from Afghanistan to Colombia and from Mexico to Burma.

This program is long-lived, now 125 years old at the national level. It dates from the 1880 prohibition of opium imports from China.

This program at one stroke of national law manufactures all sorts of crimes, thereby amalgamating every local police force and justice system into a national apparatus. It provides work, direction, and bureaucracy for countless police, lawyers, and other justice officials.

This program has the vitality of youth, shown by its recent success in fastening itself to terrorism. Narcoterrorism is breathing life into many new careers.

This program supports the work of policy makers and academics of many stripes.

This program secures work for whole departments of government. The Drug Enforcement Administration alone employs 22,000 people and has a $2 billion budget.

This program not only penetrates every voting precinct, but also crosses all the branches of government at every level. Any corporation would be extremely satisfied at such market penetration.

This program affects the pin-striped State Department in its diplomacy, pressure tactics, aid packages, agreements, embassies, coordination and intervention. Bright young faces find their calling in narcopolitics and narcoterrorism.

This program triggers Defense Department involvement overseas via military forces and interventions, foreign bases and use of the most sophisticated electronic devices and aircraft.

This program fosters bigger and bigger enemies to fight in the form of mysterious cartels with foreign names and origins, loaded with huge amounts of money, and capable of outwitting the most stalwart DEA agents – until they are given more money and manpower to fight back.

This program has found an ideal target: prohibiting the production, circulation, and exchange of certain molecules. This target is ever-receding and ever-expanding, thus requiring and justifying ever-larger budgets and expenditures.

This program incentivizes entrepreneurs to create new molecules constantly, thus providing new targets. It encourages ever stronger, purer, and more easily transported versions of the old molecules.

This program fosters ever-stronger laws and abrogations of rights. It amplifies ancient seizure and forfeiture laws into routine tools of injustice. It invades bank records. It expands wiretapping. It turns banks into cash transactions police. It turns dogs into policemen. It turns motorists into suspects with no rights. This program nullifies the Bill of Rights.

This program, as in all wars, generates ever-new rationalizations and justifications, such as fighting drug-related crime, reducing health-related costs, saving children and families, creating drug-free zones in schools, and reducing the drug-related financing of terrorists.

This program fosters ever-more legislative interference with and control over the judiciary. Laws requiring mandatory jail sentences for drug "crimes" multiply and stiffen.

This program fosters more laws and regulations concerning ever-longer lists of controlled molecules, including common medicines and remedies that might be used in the synthesis of other molecules.

This program provides continual political food and sustenance for many politicians. Presidents build and sustain popularity around the War on Drugs. This program provides an easily read signal to the electorate of a politician’s staunch crime-fighting credentials.

This program enhances and encourages crime, mobs, gangs, and violence. It turns whole areas of cities into no-man’s lands. It elevates organized crime syndicates and provides them ready cash.

This program creates the fear and insecurity that government can step in to alleviate. Its advertising campaigns tell of epidemics, waves of drugs, out-of-control drug wars, eradication, aerial spraying, drug horrors. This program brings the State’s authorities into the public schools.

This program attracts youth to the forbidden fruit, who then are more easily trapped into the State’s police, justice, prison, and welfare bureaucracies.

This program creates millions of arrests. It creates a constantly increasing flow of criminals and an ever-rising prison population. It destroys lives and families, creating demands for more social welfare workers and psychiatric personnel.

This program enhances drug-related deaths. It enhances the use of dirty needles. It enhances the spread of HIV. All of this creates more demand for government services.

This program enhances local corruption. It places pressures on local systems, creating demands for national coordination, national efforts and national police forces.

This program creates ever-growing demands for new prisons, supporting prison builders and designers, prison companies, corrections officers, and the many supporting prison services.

This program satisfies the moralistic urges of many voters. It caters to those who identify every law with morality, who deify the State or mix it with their own religion, and those who identify with upholding authority, for better or worse, in sickness or in health.

This program provides a ready source of news items, a steady stream of arrests and raids that are always making the streets of our cities and communities safe due to the unfailing and unflinching efforts of our law enforcement authorities.

For the State, for politicians, for government bureaucracies, and for many others, the War on Drugs is a big success, a program for other government programs to emulate.

For all these reasons, it is not hard to understand why in 2005, the U.S. continues its War on Drugs, even though it inflicts ever-rising harm on many U.S. citizens with no countervailing good to the public at large.

For all these reasons, it’s not hard to understand that when the authorities totally fail at the futile aim of preventing individuals from using selected molecules, when they inflict enormous damage on citizens of the United States, they are succeeding in the War on Drugs. They are accomplishing their aims.

The War on Drugs exemplifies the State strangling the society it governs. It is government of the State’s minions, by the State’s minions, and for the State’s minions. For them, the War on Drugs is a winner.

Mystery 80's Reference Graphic

2005-12-19T01:47:00.000-08:00

This should be a no-brainer.

How To Feel Like A Blob In One Easy Lesson

2005-12-19T01:08:00.000-08:00

Let's say you eat reasonably well, eschewing fast food, sweets, deep fried chicken, etc, and you don't smoke, drink, or engage in risky forms of behavior. Furthermore, assume that you run 6-7 miles 5x per week while lifting weights for about an hour at a time some 5x per week as well. In addition, you play basketball once or twice a week.

You should feel like a reasonably firm fit fellow, should you not? On this level alone, should there not be some pride, as if you're takin' care of biz, at least in this sphere of affairs?

The problem is that, as the adage goes, there is always somebody somewhere who is better, faster, bigger, stronger, [insert comparative adverb here], etc, than you. And, when you run into such a person, or even when you are simply made aware that such people exist [perhaps in profusion], it is rather humbling.

Recently, through a follow-the-link-fest involving a series of internet surfings whose sequential order I cannot remember, I stumbled on a site and message board that is quite the change of pace from my usual news/philosophical/religious fare.

The site is Testosterone Nation.

Having read through a part of that site, I now feel like Jabba the Hutt, the Lord of Lipids and Love-handles, the Doyen of Donuts, the Baron of the Buffet, etc. Readers are encouraged to supply their own alliterative genitive chain here, noting that L, D, and B are already taken.

At that site, you'll read about guys benching 400 pounds, squatting lord-knows-how-many pounds, 5% body fat percentages, rigorously planned diets that leave absolutely nothing to chance, and killer workouts that make my workouts look like girlie-man sessions to me in retrospect. I may have a 32" waist [not bad for 6'] but it ain't no six-pack compared to the Testosterone Nation posters and article-writers! It's fun stuff to read, but very deflating. You get the voice in your head saying You're still a chump, chump!

There are countless articles on nutrition and such, and, not being a logical-deductive discipline but an intensely empirical discipline, it leaves me wondering who is right, or even if there are any sort of universal principles. Then the thought of You could've gotten so much more if only you'd done X instead of Y and eaten Z instead of W enters the mind. These thoughts are invited into the mind by having been stuck at a strength and endurance plateau for a month now.

Anyway, if any fitness enthusiasts* out there can read this site without feeling like you've missed the boat and are not too far beyond the man who goes through a 12-piece x-tra crispy KFC family bucket at one sitting and then loosens the button on his pants [in Bundyesque fashion] while watching ~~pro wrestling~~ mindless TV, you are farther along in the game than I am. Relatively speaking, I feel like El Blobbo typing this post. Fortunately, I can sleep the feelings of inadequacy off....we hope. :-)

[[* ---- by fitness enthusiast I mean somebody with specific strength/athletic/running goals who is actively working towards those goals in the sense of making time in his life to achieve them. I don't wish to convey any idea that I'm some great athlete or budding Mr. Universe. Hardly. Just a thirty-something trying to relive 1989-1994 all over again.]]

Inspiration

2005-12-17T21:38:00.000-08:00

Check out this video of Tiki Barber's workout. [A story is found here.] Note the squatting of 750+ lbs. He's not too far over 200 lbs either for his own weight, so that is some pretty impressive strength. It is rather inspiring, at least if you're getting bored of lifting.

The PP research arm indicates after an extensive two-minute internet search that the record is somewhere between 1000-1100 lbs for a squat. That hurts the knees, back, and every other part of the body just thinking about it. With such huge [the technical term: freakin' huge] legs and thighs, how do these guys find pants off the rack? [Pic: Mr Shane Hamman, seen here squatting 1008 lbs. This photo was taken from the message boards of the Testosterone Nation [!!] site.]

We prefer running, tennis, and basketball here, but it probably takes a lot more work to get to squatting 1000+ lbs than it does putting out 16 miles. We can do the latter, and could never dream of doing the former [nor would we go beyond a fifth of that weight]. And then, as asked before, where would we find pants that fit? That is truly the vexing question, ranking up there with how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and whether Adam had a navel.

Der Kommissar's In Town

2005-12-17T20:22:00.000-08:00

[For Dave and a few others primarily]

Big Boy was on fire the other night, going 6/7 from downtown, which would've been 7/8 from downtown had my toe not dragged the line. This puts me at over 50% from beyond the arc in full-court play for the month at my new health club.

Yes, I keep stats in my head. I'm a nerd. I'm athletic --- but still about as nerdy as you can get. At least I don't keep files on some Excel spreadsheet like my knee-braced 6'5" arch-nemesis "Big Tom" back in the Midwest who holds a 45-2 lifetime record against me in HORSE.

The >50% three-point percentage won't last, obviously. But it's fun to pound one's chest. When you're a 33-year-old 6' white guy who isn't super-fast and whose only semblance of glory was trying out for an NCAA D-II squad, you take whatever molecular scraps of glory head your way before their ephmerality causes them to disintegrate. And, trust me, there's surely a classic 1/15 stinker-of-a-night from downtown coming up soon, surely, when my cohorts will say Just play D and screen, Eric. Note that I won't be posting about that when such a night occurs, but will remain suspiciously silent about the entire affair --- we have an image, a carefully doctored and, shall we say, "nuanced" image to keep here at PP!

[Final note --- there is a not-too-subtle 80's reference in here. Can you find it?]

Questions Seeking Answers

2005-12-17T19:59:00.000-08:00

Why do various religious websites that deny [or impugn the idea] that, yes, an individual can correctly interpret, say, scripture, apart from some group-defined consensus ["the church," "the community of believers," etc] bother to cite scripture references in their posts?

This seems contrary to the notion that such a site is trying to promote. After all, individuals read blogs. I don't know that a church or a community of believers reads a blog and comes to some conciliar decision. To this reader, it seems that scripture is being offered with the sense that I, the individual, am supposed to understand it and see that such blogs are correctly advancing their theses.

Here's another question: what's so special about group thinking? Groups, communities, etc can take wrong turns as can an individual. Sometimes, collective thinking is helpful, sometimes it isn't. What's so special about a church council, etc?

And to boot, how are we supposed to see if a church council or a panel of scholars is indeed correct, plausibly correct, supported by the evidence, etc, if we are denied our own individual judgement on whether the rules of evidence have been followed? Am I supposed to write a blank check to a council or a third rate scholar who substitutes faddery for actual evidence? Am I supposed to join a secondary group that will affirm the primary group? Will this require a tertiary group to affirm the secondary group's affirmation? Etc.

These seem to be rather heretical and backwards questions for certain quarters of the internet.

*******

BTW --- you don't need a doctorate or even a degree in religious studies to evaluate a religious or scriptural argument. You merely need an idea what consitutes an argument and facility with the subject material. Similarly, you don't need a PhD in physics, mathematics, or statistics to see for yourself [if you have the background] that [say] the proofs of my theorems in my book are right. You don't need to be an expert to catch that errant footnote where I claim [falsely] that something tacitly requires the Axiom of Choice [thank goodness it doesn't affect the argument]. You merely need to know that particular area, degree or not. I didn't need a DPhil degree to find Bertrand Russell's essays on religion to be childish and unsupported. I don't need a PhD in religious studies to hold my own with a mainstream scholar on those areas in which I've studied carefully, say, the authorship of the fourth gospel. Despite being trained in mathematical statistics, I've published a modest collection of co-authored papers in analytic philosophy, applied statistics, and mathematical analysis. Nobody claimed that not being "formally trained" with the requisite alphabet soup after the name somehow rendered good work unpublishable. My textbook was in an area in which I had no formal coursework, but was self-taught. So it seems odd to me to see third rate scholars playing the ostentatiousness game with their degrees when serious challenges arise, as if degrees are some sort of club membership for the latest disputation. This is the attitude I see with liberal mainline scholars, and frankly, it reeks of insecurity on their part. I can understand their frustration with bad arguments, but at the same boat, I'd think a well-read undergraduate from a Bible college ought to be able to nail a Jesus Seminar scholar on several points, degree or no.

Narnia, Critics, Cheerleaders, Etc, With An Emphasis on the "Etc"

2005-12-16T23:52:00.000-08:00

I've seen some criticisms of the Narnia films that accuse the film of harboring Christian or Christian-esque propaganda. This criticism is presented as if having such a background is some objectively bad thing.

Frankly, I don't see the big deal either way.

I love Asimov's sci-fi short stories. I enjoyed his robot novels, his Empire novels, and his Foundation novels. You know what you're getting when you read Asimov: a story written from the framework of materialism. For me to complain that Asimov doesn't have a classical supernatural Christian worldview in his stories [or in his life] is rather pointless, since Asimov is what he is, and he has written what he has written. I don't have to renounce the Christian religion to lie in bed late and read a story with atheist metaphysics while deriving pleasure from it, just as I don't have to renounce the Christian religion with its ultimate optimism for the elect to listen to Gary Numan's [see pic] late 70's early 80's robopop with nihilistic lyrics. I don't have to renounce basic human decency when I want to see some pro wrestler piledriven on the concrete by the babyface. The use of magic in a story [or, more true to my idiom, a computer game] doesn't cause my head to rotate while I project green ectoplasm because I've allowed Satan to get a foothold in my inner being [at least not for THAT reason!]. I'm not going to become a Papist merely because I loved Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz sci-fi with its latent Romanism. Etc. It's all entertainment, pleasure, a momentary enjoyment. [And we haven't gotten to playing Double Dragon in the arcades in the late 80's, nor have we discussed playing Streets of Rage as college students on a friend's Sega Genesis.]

As a conclusion, the critics who complain about Narnia and such seem rather inflexible in their ability to enjoy things that don't directly affirm their worldview. Nobody is forcing the critics to go, and, so far as I know, the public didn't subsidize the film. They might try enjoying it merely as entertainment, two hours of eye candy, a day out, etc. That some who vociferously oppose Christianity have to pile on a movie seems to this pedantic Protestant a mark of insecurity or desperation regarding one's worldview.

Anyway, let's change the topic slightly. I'll present some editorial material. [Well, the above is editorial too, so the topic is merely changing.]

I read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe as a young kid in the 70's or early 80's. I even saw the [British?] animated special of it. As a young boy who had no real conscience of his Baptist school background, the story seemed like your typical young adult fantasy fare.

When I was playing the assistant professor game in Chicagoland back in [I think] '01 or '02, I bought the seven-volume Narnia set by Lewis. Over two or three nights in bed, I read the books in the chronological order as the story unfolds. Hence, I read The Magician's Nephew and then read LW&W. Now as being 29 or 30 years old --- I'm getting old when I'm talking about being 29 as a remotely past event ---
I could, after being given a good grounding in classical Christianity, appreciate the framework of the entire collection of stories.

However, I doubt that young children will see the books as stealth Christian theology, but will either enjoy the books or not enjoy the books as their young minds please relative to fantasy. [BTW --- young children need a good fantasy life, as it keeps the imagination going.] Maybe this is too much a projection of my own background, though.

My favorites were Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Last Battle. If I remember my thoughts some three or four years ago, The Last Battle had a pleasant Christian subversiveness to it. Antichrist or the forces arrayed against Christendom are presented in a way in that book that reinforced [whether Lewis intended it or not] the idea that the wisdom of the world and the ideological movers-'n'-shakers of the world are not too different from the dressed-up false Aslan of the book. Oh, without giving any spoilers away, I truly loved the ending of the book as well.

While I like Lewis' writings, I can't say that the Narnia series occupies pride of place in the CS Lewis canon. I'd say that Screwtape Letters occupies pride of place, with the Space Trilogy holding its own as well.

Screwtape Letters really had an impact on me because Lewis' demons said almost word-for-word what my own doubts voiced in the early- or mid-90's, when God reached deep into enemy lines to pluck a know-it-all agnostic from his silly self-stultifying worldview. The demons talking about getting the Christian focused on "real life" instead of esoteric religious thinking, the entire "Christianity and [insert ideology here]" diversion, as well as the articulation of higher criticism, all resonated with a grad student who had suddenly come down with a serious case of religious buyer's remorse. Also, despite being single, the comments on Christian marriage hit a nerve with me as well. While doubting at times that I shall ever empirically test the veracity of Lewis' observations, they seem a priori true.

As for the Space Trilogy books, I consider these most excellent reading. I enjoy all three books, but each needs to be taken on its own terms.

Out of the Silent Planet is, at first glance, an anachronistic piece of storytelling with fantasy overtones. The romanticism of the story is rather ruined by Dr Ransom and others walking around on Mars [Malacandra] as if they're walking around on Earth. But, what is pleasant to read is Lewis' version of other sentient, intelligent, rational life forms who also communicate with Maleldil [hope I've spelled that correctly], Lewis' Yahweh for the series.

Perelandra is, I must confess, a beautiful piece of religious fantasy. It doesn't seem right to call it science fiction. As somebody who has always wondered what would have happened if things had gone differently in the Garden, Lewis presents a scenario with the Green Lady that I find to be re-readable to the nth degree. Those who froth whenever anything Christian or Christian-esque comes along will certainly froth at the extended dialogues in the book where the devil-figure of Dr Weston is tempting the Green Lady to sleep on the fixed land, but for somebody like myself, it is nice to see something good put out by the home team.

That Hideous Strength is a very dark book that, like the old B&W Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes, doesn't cause the reader to "freak out" with a direct display of terror, but rather lets the ideas slowly freak the reader out. The deliciously named N.I.C.E. and its protagonists becomes more and more starkly evil as the story goes along. The story suffers a bit from the dabbling with Arthur and Merlin, but otherwise that sort of book can be read over and over again. BTW --- I've seen the "bad guys" in the book criticized as cardboard straw-men stereotypes. I've also seen this criticism of the villians in Rand's two books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. However, I have known, interacted with, and seen people who speak the same sort of language of collectivism and abstract gobbledygook as do Lewis' and Rand's antagonists.

I wish that there was some way of "wiping" one's mind after reading a really good book, so that one could approach it again and again with a fresh mind. I said the same thing about the old Prisoner episodes as well as the old Star Trek episodes. But, part of the enjoyment, I suppose, comes not from experiencing the pleasure and stimulation that comes while reading a good story, but from recollections of the story and the concomitant pleasure as well. I suppose that, under this extreme scenario, one would only need to own one book. You could read it over and over as if it were new!

Finding Meaning Where There is None

2005-12-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

Here's a follow-up thread to the immediately preceding thread.

***************

My friend Lydia McGrew points this link out to me:

How to Educate an Atheist

Particularly pique-ish to the Pedantic Protestant was the following excerpt:

Singing atheistic songs is a powerful but usually overlooked educational tool. Music brings people together by creating community spirit, stirring the emotions and educating the heart not just the head. Religious leaders understand this lesson very well and use music as an essential part of religions training. Unfortunately, few atheists' leaders have provided moving songs for their groups. However, there is no reason why atheists cannot create new words to the stirring music of hymns. Indeed, this is precisely what Barbara Stocker did in writing new words for the best known of all American hymn tunes, Amazing Grace, which she called Amazing Place (copyright 1998 Barbara Hamill Stocker).

Amazing place, this world I find,
No gods nor creed need be.
I once believed, but now my mind
Unbound, at last is free.

A mind that's free to plan and build
For all humanity
Will find its life and dreams fulfilled
In true eupraxophy

I need not strive for heaven above
Nor fear no hell below.
So free to live in peace and love
In kinship I will grow.

No prayer of mine need e're be heard,
Just rationality,
For reason reigns o'er holy word
For all humanity.

PP Commentary:

(1) The lyric "No gods nor creed need be" is a bit, shall we say, creedal? It reminds me of an ad that I saw for a liberal church once that proudly stated something to the effect that their creed was to be creedless. The lyric probably means no religious creed. But even then, atheism presents itself as a type of negation of Christianity. It is just as "religious" to deny Christianity as it is to affirm it, as the negation of a religious proposition X is itself a religious proposition.

(2) Singing atheist songs, for whatever reason, reminds the PP of communists and collectivsts singing the Internationale. [Scroll to the bottom of that page to see the lyrics.] It just doesn't seem natural.

(3) "A mind that's free to plan and build; For all humanity; Will find its life and dreams fulfilled; In true eupraxophy" sounds rather collectivist, doesn't it? This reminds the PP of some of the great sweeping claims regarding "humanity" in the abstract made by communist intellectuals that he's seen over the years!

(4) The appeal to "rationality" is standard fare for the atheist mindset. They're the rational ones, rah rah rah.

(5) One would think that the atheist, free of the shackles of superstition, blessed with the superrational mind that allows him to see through religion and oppression [not to mention sexism, racism, homophobia, nonecosustainability, logocentrism, etc], would already have a very high morale. After all, you've come a long way, baby, in leaving behind those dead guys who wrote those silly things in the Bible.
Shouldn't you already have a high morale? And as for the idea that songs stir the emotions, isn't emotionalism a charge that the atheist side lobbies relentlessly at Christians? The same comments go as for "educating the heart" above.

(6) For all of the self-congratulatory praises and self-justifications that freethinkers and atheists apply to themselves, some of them sure seem like they want the outward trappings of our Christian superstition. Why not divorce completely from we troglodytic primitives who probably think that there are little angels behind the light switch to make it work?

I've seen the same phenomenon when an atheist eulogizes another atheist. The deceased is spoken of in grand metaphysical terms that are absolutely meaningless [apart from emotional effect] if everything can be explained in terms of matter, energy, space, and time. The man who weeps over his parent and offers grand sweeping spiritual praise, say, should stop weeping. Doesn't he know that his weeping has no ontological basis since his parent, being dead, is no more, and anyway the universe will collapse in a heat death under certain cosmological models, hence no more space, time, etc? The parent really is worthless [as is everybody]. Also, the weeping should stop: it is doubtless explainable as something that conferred some survival advantage to homo sapiens long, long ago.

Today's Brief Thought

2005-12-15T12:34:00.000-08:00

Let's say that nature and matter are all that exist, and let's suppose that I want to argue with, say, a Christian. We'll also assume that I'm a believer that life and consciousness are completely reducible to complicated chemical physical reactions that accidentally arose over time.

Now why would I want to argue with a Christian? Presumably, one would think [unless one has an impish streak], it would be to both uphold my materialism and to polemicize against the Christian's supernaturalism.

But I now seem to run into a real problem. Why should it matter who is right and who is wrong in this scenario? The Christian is a product of a cosmic accident, and, of course, I'm a product of a cosmic accident.

My thoughts are [under the scenario] reducible to chemical reactions and physical processes taking place. How can I ascribe any sense of "right" and "wrong" to reactions and processes? They're just "there," it seems.

Even if I get past that seeming problem, what difference does it make if the Christian is completely wrong? We're historical and cosmic accidents, and soon enough we'll both expire and begin a process of decomposition that is quick measured against cosmic time. It doesn't matter to the rotted corpse what sort of life the rotted corpse lived. And, there doesn't seem to be any justifiable way for those living to obtain some meaning about the formerly living rotted corpse's live, if indeed you can't form value judgements about the behavior of particles.

If, as certain models claim, the universe will collapse back into a singularity, then that would eliminate space-time. What's the difference about whether I dated 10 Playboy Bunnies at once or was a eunuch? "After" the universe collapses back into a singularity, it seems that there is "no longer" any sense of "time" or even "causality."

On the other hand, if the universe doesn't collapse back into a singularity, eventually the heat death of the universe will take place, with temperatures asymptotically approaching absolute zero. In this sort of situation, what difference does it make in the grand scheme of things what I did, what I believed, and so on?

So why am I arguing with the Christian? Do I feel bold about realizing that I'm a cosmic accident? Am I sharing my heroism in "making my own life" with others?

Let's say that I decide not to debate the Christian because my father [say] has died recently. Why am I sad? Being sad is a value judgement --- saying that he meant something to me is ascribing value to him and his actions. But, if I'm correct with the above, there is no question-begging way in which this can be done, so I'm merely an emoting organism acting out in animal fashion what millions of years of instincts tell him to do.

My tears are a chemical and physical process shaped by impersonal forces over millions [or billions] of years. If I want to be consistent I need to tell myself that my sadness over my father is nothing more than an evolutionary mechanism. He was nothing but particles. He is dead, and he now decomposes. For my late father, it doesn't matter what life he lived --- he's dead and he isn't coming back. Why should I truly care? Whether or not I care, I'll be dead soon, and rotting, and it won't have mattered.

Certainly, I can live my live as if I've eked out some molecular amount of meaning in things, but why should that matter if I'm just a cosmic accident in a cold impersonal universe?

[These thoughts are completely stream-of-consciousness, btw. I've never understood the evangelical zeal of, in particular, atheists. It seems that, in the end, they're excited about what is, under their view, ultimately nothing and meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Now if the atheist scenario is true, I still don't see why an atheist should care about convincing me.]

Another Extra-Crispy PP Comment Bucket

2005-12-14T21:28:00.000-08:00

Here are some miscellaneous and unconnected comments about whatever happened to immediately come to mind. I promise nothing regarding profundity.

(1) I'm listening to Dave's "80's Millenium New Wave Party" CD by Rhino Records, in particular, the B-52's Rock Lobster. I have absolutely no idea why this song was a hit. I can understand Devo's Whip It and Madness' Our House being hits, but, I cannot understand Rock Lobster's popularity.

On the other hand, Frank Zappa's Valley Girl is completely hilarious. Totally Zappa.

(2) Has anybody read the anti-chiropractic literature on the internet? I've gone to the chiropractor before, and I've never seen any of them behave in a fashion that those who consider chiropractic to be quackery allege to be a mark of chiropractic care. The way some of this lit reads, it almost implies that most/all chiropractors are quacks. I also notice that the attacks on chiropractic in some of the lit are based on materialistic/Darwinistic rhetoric, with the usual mantra of It's not science thrown around like cheese on a pizza.

BTW --- getting your back and neck "popped" is one thing that feels gooooood, especially if you run 35 miles per week.

(3) When I drive, it seems as if most other drivers on the road are doing everything but concentrating on driving. When not talking on the cell phone, the drivers are bent down trying to dial with the cell phone. When not bent down trying to dial with the cell phone, the driver is reaching for something else.

It also seems more the rule than the exception that when the light turns green, the lead car is about five seconds delayed because, with all the yakking on the cell phone, the driver doesn't notice that, yes, the light has turned green.

Don't take this as an anti-cell-phone rant. Cell phones have a useful role to fulfill, and the market demands them. But, it seems that cell phones have a rather deleterious effect on the driving of many people.

(4) At the gym, it seems that my lifting buddy and I are the last reasonably young guys in the world without pierced whatevers and tattooes. [Is early- to mid-thirties still "young" ? Please say "yes."]

There is nothing morally wrong about pierced whatevers and tattooes, unless, I suppose, the tattoo is something vulgar. But, I've never understood the point of them. Likewise, I don't know what significance a bar through the tongue, lip, nose, nipple, genitals [!!], etc has on appearance. It just looks like it hurts.

(5) Somebody very recently described Aeon Flux to me as a "hot actress running around in a tight formfitting S&M suit" flick. If there was even a molecular amount of desire to see the film before that comment, it has perished. Sci-fi is dead on the silver screen.

(6) Diane crows about gasoline in Chicago being $2.13 a gallon where, out here in my California 'burb, it is $2.19. When it is 60+ degrees in December out here while Diane has to use [shameless pat on back] her $600 snowblower that PP Claus bought for her multiple times per day [/shameless pat on back], we can certainly live with an extra $0.06 per gallon. Enjoy the cheaper gas, Diane. That makes single-digit high temps so totally worth it, like, totally to the max, d00000d. I'll think of that extra $0.06 per gallon when I wear a t-shirt and shorts when running.

Now we completely switch gears:

(7) I don't know if this is heresy, but I believe that, based on studies of Romans stretching over the last few months, the Calvinists have a pretty good case for their exegesis [or exegeses] of Rom 9-11.

(8) The question of predestination, while worthy of study on its own merits, really doesn't interest me. In a functional sense, my coming to faith felt like my decision with my agency. The "feel" of how I was brought back to the church would be the same whether I really did make some "decision for Christ" or whether God reached quite deep into enemy lines to bring me to faith. On a personal level, I don't care much what the answer is. On the theological level, I'd contend that we cannot come to faith on our own agency, but that even coming to faith is itself an act of divine grace, and, ultimately a mystery.

(9) As I've gotten older [mid-thirties, I remind you all again], I've turned slowly into a "mere Christian." Now there is a way to do this properly, and a way to do it improperly.

The improper way is to immediately dismiss any doctrinal controversy and disputation as not being in accordance with good Christian luvin' while adopting some ecumenical posture that competing positions are true while attempting to impress the world with your open-mindedness and tolerance. Perhaps I could start a site with other likeminded people and spout all sorts of pseudointellectual and self-congratulatory nonsense regarding my tolerance and open-mindedness.

On the other hand, as I've gotten older, the haunting awareness of sin and a lack of appreciation for the grace shown by God to the likes of me makes doctrinal disputes over, say, predestination, not wrong, but more of very minor importance. I prefer to deal with the ideas of major importance [at least, what I consider to be the ideas of major importance] --- the issues of authority and scripture.

The above paragraph is not offered in any sort of prescriptive or normative sense that others have to follow, but is merely a comment or opinion, worthy to be placed in a thread called "Another Extra-Crispy PP Comment Bucket."

(10) Steve's line from a thread of his is worth repeating:

When I’m on my deathbed, staring into eternity, it will be quite irrelevant to me and to my Maker whether my passport is stamped with all the right names of all the approved luminaries.

Anyway, that is the latest installment of the comment bucket. I hope nobody expected originality or profundity, otherwise there would be serious disappointment.

Closing with another New Wave reference: everybody Wang Chung tonight!

An Epigram of Martial

2005-12-11T18:06:00.000-08:00

Here is the epigram of the Roman poet Martial that is the basis for the paraphrase given in the new profile to your right.

Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura
quae legis hic: aliter non fit, Auite, liber.

Some of what you read here is good, some is mediocre, and more is bad: a book, Avitus, cannot be made any other way.

This epigram is the sixteenth epigram from Book I of Martial's epigrams, at least if I take the site where I found the translation at face value:

http://martialis.blogspot.com

[[As a side note, having read some epigrams of Martial back in 1989-1990 as an undergraduate, it was impressed on me that man really hasn't changed --- he had the same thoughts and ambitions back then as in our modern era.]]

A Hankering for Harpischord

2005-12-11T00:50:00.000-08:00

Back in graduate school, I switched from the piano to the harpsichord due to a great love for Baroque music, in particular, the keyboard of JS Bach. Playing his harpsichord works on a piano, while enjoyable, just never felt fully "authentic" for my compulsive standards, much as reading, say, the Living Bible doesn't quite compare with the Greek New Testament, even though you get the "same notes" and the "same tune," but without the nuances and subtleties.

My suffering harpsichord teacher [who upon first hearing my efforts to play the harpsichord like a piano player who thought he would immediately conquer the new instrument stated that she desired to run out of the room screaming] got a key for me to have access to the university's rather expensive French double-manual harpsichord. On this magnificent instrument, I often practiced from midnight 'til 3am or so.

During this time, I became very technically adept on the harpsichord, but, due to ever-increasing stage-fright --- an irrationality that conspires against me to this very day --- I went back to the piano, where I felt I had a larger margin for error when performing.

This love affair with the harpsichord lasted about three years. However, I moved near the end of graduate school to another close-by town, and my LCMS parish had a very nice baby grand that begged to have Chopin played. Even Bach sounded good on this piano with the parish's high ceilings ennobling the acoustics. I surrendered my harpsichord room key back to the Music Dept at the university, and, having scratched the harpsichord itch, was happy with Chopin and doing baroque on the piano. Basically, was the best thing about my LCMS parish was the sound doctrine, the godly pastor, and fellow Lutherans --- or was it was the combination of piano and high ceilings!

However, over the last few weeks, for whatever reason, I've re-developed a harpsichord hankering. Diane asked what I'd like for Christmas. Well, here are some pictures of what the PP would like to find under the tree. Take careful note, and you don't have to wrap it for me:

This double-manual beauty just screams to have some three- or four-voice fugues played on it. Perhaps a partita or two, not to mention a few "English" suites and a few "French" suites. Then we could play that lovely A-Major site by Handel with the frolicking gigue. Perhaps we could let our French side come out with some D'Angelbert and Forqueray. We could cross the channel once again with some tunes of Purcell. Of course, the experience wouldn't be complete without some charming and prismatic Protestantista [or even a Papista] to lavish all sorts of superlatives on the harpsichordist. But we're getting a bit off topic now...

Here's a front view of the double-manual beauty. It's only $35,000 or so. After checking beween the sofa cushions, we're only $34,999.68 away from the goal.

This is when I'm tempted to wish that success theology were true. Perhaps that Prayer of Jabez book was right after all...it wouldn't hurt to try once, would it? Perhaps the Turkoman can send me one of those "How To Get What You Pray For" books or gizmos or lucky charms he sells at his Christian bookstore. :-)

Aeon Flux Flex

2005-12-09T21:06:00.000-08:00

Well, I had thought about seeing that Aeon Flux movie tonight, but I wanted to know if I was getting myself into anything that would make the time and money better spent on other things.

I typed "aeon flux movie review" into the Yahoo! search engine. I looked at the first five reviews listed there as well as the Rotten Tomatoes site for a collection of various reviews.

I only saw reviews that at worst said the movie was, well, a stinker, and, at best, it was hopelessly mediocre.

I suppose that time is better spent going to the gym and doing an ab-'n'-arm workout. So, this Friday night will be an evening of curls, extensions, presses, and laterals. How fun... :-(

I am the Eggman, I am the Eggman, I am the Walrus

2005-12-09T15:32:00.000-08:00

Over at the much-more-happening Triablogue, the Turkoman and a poster named Dan are having a little discussion in the comments area.

At one point, the Turkoman begins to suspect that Dan and PP might just possibly be the same person. Online communication being a flat one-dimensional mode of communication, I don't know the tongue-in-cheek factor to this.

But, as stated there:

To Frank: I'm not Dan.

To Dan: I'm not you.

To Myself: I'm frank, but I'm not Frank.

It is a safe bet that we are three distinct beings, not one being manifesting Himself in three hypostases: the Frank, the Dan, and the PP. Think along tritheistic and not trinitarian lines here, fellas.

This reminds me of some lyrics from I am the Walrus:

I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together

In closing, keeping those lyrics in mind, the only response to the good Turkoman is: coo coo coo choo.

BWV 232: Mass in b minor

2005-12-08T16:52:00.000-08:00

Coming from a Lutheran background, and being a baroque sort of guy in my own musical performing, studies, and enjoyment, I'm naturally predisposed to JS Bach's music, both secular and sacred.

I'd talk about his organ works, but right now I'm listening to his famous b minor Mass, BWV 232. If you've never heard the Mass before, you might find it worth while to spend the $15 or so to find a copy on CD. [My version is the Naxos version.]

It is very uplifting, and, like much of Bach's sacred music, one feels a bit more sanctified from having listened to it. Also, one never gets tired of hearing this music. It makes working at the computer while doing humdrum computer things a much more pleasant experience!

As an added PP treat, here's a picture that is believed to be of a younger JS Bach. I also note with a certain puckishness that Bach had other things on his mind than music. With his first wife Maria Barbara, he had some six or seven children. After she passed away in 1720, Bach married Anna Magdalena in 1721, and they reportedly had another thirteen children. Therefore, Bach's rather prolific passions were not, shall we say discreetly, limited to musical desires!

Lutherans vs Calvinists

2005-12-08T11:44:00.000-08:00

Somebody asked in a comment thread where I stand in the current Lutheran vs Calvinist melee. Rightly or wrongly, I'm assuming that this refers to Steve's dealings with various Lutherans at Triablogue. I'll also add that I've only briefly read Steve's blog on this point, so I hardly have anything resembling enough information to make well-informed comments on that matter.

Since I don't have any well-informed comments to make on that matter, I'll attempt to give a general answer indicating where I presently stand.

(1) I used to be a card-carrying orthodox Lutheran, being in the WELS. I like the liturgical style of worship in WELS, and I appreciate the fact that WELS holds its own with all of the modernizing and relativizing forces today. I also have a very high regard for the ministers in WELS.

But I don't think WELS would consider me a true orthodox Lutheran anymore. The reasons would probably fall on the following lines:

(a) I don't think it is clear or obvious that scripture presents the doctrine of the real presence. [I'm not saying that I think the doctrine is false; but I am saying that it isn't obvious from a plain historical-grammatical reading of scripture.]
(b) I don't think it is clear or obvious that scripture presents as rigorous of fellowship requirements as does WELS.

With (a) and (b), I couldn't [by WELS standards] commune at a WELS parish. That's their right to make the rules as such. I can see from where they come on these issues, but I disagree with the certainty with which the conclusions are adduced.

(2) With (1) in mind, I still am sympathetic to orthodox Lutheran theology. My formal background was the three-volume Pieper dogmatics Christian Dogmatics put out by Concordia Publishing House as well as John Schaller's Biblical Christology put out by Northwestern Publishing House. There is still a strong sympathy towards it. If you take Pieper and Schaller as authoritative, the Reformed/Calvinist case doesn't have too many legs on which to stand.

But over the years, I've reached the conviction that the Calvinist case [as I understand it] is a very viable contender as well. More precisely:

(a) It seems that Lutheran theology seems to deal with philosophical constructs from scripture at times, even though this is a charge hurled by Lutherans against Calvinists.
(b) Calvinists seem to have the better philosophical arguments. [But a Lutheran would, as I have done, accuse Calvinists of rationalizing scripture.]

So while there is still some small degree of aversion to saying "I'm Reformed" or "I'm Calvinist" or whatever, I do see from where they come on their points.

(3) If you put (1) and (2) together, you'll come to the conclusion that I'm sorting things out on my own, and you'll be right. Over the years, I've grown less and less interested in systematics and more interested in Biblical theology [though systematics and Biblical theology of course overlap]. So, the idea of universal vs limited atonement just doesn't have any theological sex appeal to me --- all I want to know is whether my sins have been atoned for. The question of the real presence vs memorialism [say] just doesn't grab me, since we are still commanded to partake of the bread and the wine, and, even though I'm not sure of what is going on, I will still attempt to take the elements thankfully and humbly and allowing whatever process or mechanism takes place to reach its goal.

What grabs me are those issues that relate personally and explicitly to me. Thus, justification and sanctification are the sorts of things that catch my eye. The roles of both faith and works catch my eyes. The trustworthiness of scripture holds my attention. I'll freely admit that my theology is very self-centered in the sense that I want to know how it relates to me. When you realize (i) what God's standards are and (ii) just how short you've fallen, despite having all of the advantages and help offered by Him, the conscience rather drives you to not think about non-central matters of doctrine but to the big things just mentioned. At least, that's my opinion.

So, I suppose that, in the end, I'm as of the present a run-of-the-mill conservative Evangelical who likes liturgical worship. But I maintain a very pronounced streak of Protestant pedantry as well!

(4) To be clear, I have nothing against anybody who does worry about the things being debated at Steve's blog and elsewhere. It is just that, for me, my interests have changed over the years, as has the energy level for pursuing such things. I have also indicated that, looking at the last decade, I spent more time on theology than on scripture, which I retroactively view as a mistake in terms of time spent!

After typing all of this, I realize that I really never answered the poster's question of where I stand in the Lutheran vs Calvinist melee. So, I suppose the most charitable way of taking this post is to just put out a "where I stand as of the present" sort of statement for the few readers of this blog.

The Rich Man

2005-12-06T17:01:00.000-08:00

Here is an account from St Mark's Gospel:

The Rich Man

10:17 Now as Jesus was starting out on his way, someone ran up to him, fell on his knees, and said, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 10:18 Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 10:19 You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother.’” 10:20 The man said to him, “Teacher, I have wholeheartedly obeyed all these laws since my youth.” 10:21 As Jesus looked at him, he felt love for him and said, “You lack one thing. Go, sell whatever you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” 10:22 But at this statement, the man looked sad and went away sorrowful, for he was very rich.

10:23 Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” 10:24 The disciples were astonished at these words. But again Jesus said to them, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 10:25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” 10:26 They were even more astonished and said to one another, “Then who can be saved?” 10:27 Jesus looked at them and replied, “This is impossible for mere humans, but not for God; all things are possible for God.”

10:28 Peter began to speak to him, “Look, we have left everything to follow you!” 10:29 Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, there is no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the sake of the gospel 10:30 who will not receive in this age a hundred times as much – homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, fields, all with persecutions – and in the age to come, eternal life. 10:31 But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

What are the salient points of this account of St Mark's? We'll attempt a brief reply.

What must one do to inherit eternal life, i.e., salvation? This is a question that, I would believe, is nigh-universally asked at some level by all men at all times. There is nothing about the rich man's question to criticize, at least at this point of the account.

[As a side note, Jesus in v18 seems to attempt to bring the man to a deduction about His true nature --- i.e. He is more than a good teacher; he is in fact Yahweh incarnate.]

Has the man followed the commandments taken from the decalogue? Yes --- the man has wholeheartedly obeyed all of those laws from his earliest days of cognizance. There seems to be no reason whatsoever to have any a priori suspicion of the man's honesty, and it seems completely natural to give him the benefit of the doubt. He is a model of moral excellence --- at least as far as the commandments given are concerned.

This should be enough, at least to a mind uninformed by Christian revelation. One cannot blame the rich man for feeling a sense of achievement in meeting [at least in his mind] the requirements of Yahweh's law. He has, so far, apparently done all that has been asked by God.

And yet, despite the rich man's moral excellence, he lacks one thing, says Jesus. The completion and summation of his moral excellence will be achieved when he gives away his possessions and merely follows Jesus and places his complete trust in Him not only for his salvation [this was the man's original focus] but also, presumably, for the necessities of physical life itself.

Here is some PP commentary on this point:

(i) Jesus is speaking to the rich man --- his being rich is a vital part of the account --- and His specific command to give his possessions away is not some universal commandment to all Christians. In other words, giving one's items away may or may not be a good work in God's eyes, and it is pressing too much upon the text to make this a call by Jesus for communitarianism, socialism, or a rejection of those material goods by which we are blessed.

(2) The command to the rich man seems specially pointed at the rich man and the rich man alone. Jesus can see the man's earnestness, but, He also can see that, despite his earnestness, the man still is not in a moral position to place a claim on Yahweh so that Yahweh rewards him with eternal life. The rich man, despite keeping the commandments listed, has a weakness --- his inner love of his wealth and possessions. The text does not allow us to do anything but speculate on the nature or depth of this love. Perhaps the rich man, while earnestly keeping Yahweh's law, still harbored a love for his wealth that was deeper than that of the person who reserved their supreme love for Yahweh.

If, instead of the rich man being the protagonist [antagonist?], it were somebody else asking Jesus the question of what one must do to be saved, there would be something different. I have my predilections, you have yours, and that man down there has his. I am not wealthy, and have not had the chance to fall in love with wealth. But I have my own weaknesses, you have yours. Jesus would very well tell each of us a different thing along the lines of But you lack one thing. Go and do X, and then follow Me. The X will differ from person to person, and, for many of us, there might exist a multiplicity --- perhaps a large multiplicity! --- of X's that we too would feel we could not perform.

(3) The rich man went away sad. The only thing about which we can be dogmatic is that, at that time, he could not, so speaking, pull the trigger. Nothing is said about what happened in his future. Perhaps he took Jesus' admonition to heart, perhaps he didn't.

Those of us who have the full revelation of the NT [unlike the rich man] know that, without any doubt, our justification comes through faith in the person and work of Christ --- the God who justifies the ungodly --- and not through a life and series of actions designed to put God in the position where He is obligated to justify us.

At the same time, works do play a role in our salvation in the sense that they vindicate the claim that we have saving faith and are evidence of our sanctification. We are rewarded according to our works, life, etc, even though our justification depends [if we take scripture at face value] on faith alone. The rich man's giving of his possessions away was not the action that would force God's hand, but it would give evidence of the true faith in the rich man, and it is this faith that would save the rich man, not his action.

Similarly for you and me, the X that we would have to do in addition to the commandments [which differs from person to person as we all have our shortcomings], would not, by itself, allow us to claim a justified status in God's eyes, but it would be an expression of our faith and trust in God --- one of the evidences of the Spirit-wrought faith [the only true faith] that justifies men.

(4) I've seen some Roman Catholics use this account to teach that our justification [in the Protestant sense of the word, not the Roman sense of the word] is by some amalgamation of faith and works. And this account, taken by itself, seems to support such a notion in a prima facie sense. After all, Jesus says to do something and then the rich man is saved.

However, those of us living in this particular time have full access to the NT revelation, which includes fuller statements on faith, works, justification, salvation, etc. We have Romans, Galatians, St James, etc, and not just this account. We contend that understanding this account against the full backdrop of the NT does nothing to support the claim that our works play a role in our justification. Of course, supporting this contention takes a very careful study of the NT, something outside the scope of a blog entry!

Let's leave the commentary here briefly and pick up the text back at v23.

The disciples seemingly are present for this interlude, and, despite being intimates of Jesus and being in the innermost circle of God's salvation plan, even they have their sensibilities shocked. This is very noteworthy, and I don't know how often I've seen this point emphasized. These are the very intimates of Jesus, not some people who happened to be present --- surely if they were shocked, so we too, must also be shocked by this account! We all have our X's that, if left to our devices, could never be done, conquered, performed, eradicated, etc --- like the disciples, we too would have to begin to feel very nervous regarding our standing before God!

Jesus doesn't help matters much either by repeating His statement on just how hard it is to enter the Kingdom of God! The comparison he uses [camel through a needle (or rope through a needle)] would seem by itself to imply that the rich man [if not also you and me] has no chance through his external obedience to enter the Kingdom of God. This is confirmed by v.27, where Jesus states that entrance into the Kingdom is impossible for mere humans.

Resuming PP commentary:

(5) What we have here is a fundamental dictum of the Christian religion. We cannot place God in an obligatory position. This bears countless repetition in a world where "being Christian" means [and only means] "being a good guy" or "putting out the luv to everybody." Everybody, from Chairman Mao on one end of the goodness spectrum to Mother Theresa on the other end of the goodness spectrum, fails to force God's hand. St Paul makes this contention in Rom 1-3, summing up his argument with the famous words that there is no one righteous, yea, not even one...no one desires to please God.

The human condition is so mired in sin that, despite outward appearances, we are all in a hopeless situation if left to our own merits.

The disciples at this time may or may not have viewed things in the Pauline fashion I described. But those reading this post live post-Paul, and so we must view things in this fashion if we view Paul as inspired.

(6) At the same time, we must heed St James' admonition between phony faith and genuine faith. A man is not justified by the superficial faith that James describes in chapter 2 of that epistle. The genuine faith that alone justifies [as Paul states it] is accompanied by sanctification and evidence [in God's eyes, possibly not obvious to other men] of the Holy Spirit's work.

(7) St Peter's reaction, v28, is understandable. I personally would say the same thing. The primate of the apostles merely puts out the natural human reaction of acting as if God owes us for doing things.

My speculation regarding human nature is this: except for the most saintly people, every good work done by a believer is marred because at some level the believer consciously or subconsciously adopts the posture of having pleased God in that God will now repay the favor. Conservative Protestants correctly teach justification by faith alone through grace alone, but who among us does not secretly feel proud of our assorted and diverse good works, as if God is now on the credit side of the ledger?

Psalter 88

2005-12-03T20:12:00.000-08:00

There is nothing in scripture that explicitly promises us that we'll get what we want. In fact, the contrary is true.

One interesting place to see the idea of suffering, or merely not getting what you want despite having played by the rules, is given by the 88th psalm in the Psalter. Since my Hebrew is long since gone [and I don't think I was at the stage of doing poetry anyway], I'll present the NET translation of this psalm. After presenting this psalm of modest length, I'll offer some commentary.

*****BEGIN Psalm*****

Psalm 88

A song, a psalm written by the Korahites; for the music director; according to the machalath-leannoth style; a well-written song by Heman the Ezrachite.

88:1 O Lord God who delivers me!
By day I cry out
and at night I pray before you.

88:2 Listen to my prayer!
Pay attention to my cry for help!

88:3 For my life is filled with troubles
and I am ready to enter Sheol.

88:4 They treat me like those who descend into the grave.
I am like a helpless man,

88:5 adrift among the dead,
like corpses lying in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
and who are cut off from your power.

88:6 You place me in the lowest regions of the pit,
in the dark places, in the watery depths.

88:7 Your anger bears down on me,
and you overwhelm me with all your waves. (Selah)

88:8 You cause those who know me to keep their distance;
you make me an appalling sight to them.
I am trapped and cannot get free.

88:9 My eyes grow weak because of oppression.
I call out to you, O Lord, all day long;
I spread out my hands in prayer to you.

88:10 Do you accomplish amazing things for the dead?
Do the departed spirits rise up and give you thanks? (Selah)

88:11 Is your loyal love proclaimed in the grave,
or your faithfulness in the place of the dead?

88:12 Are your amazing deeds experienced in the dark region,
or your deliverance in the land of oblivion?

88:13 As for me, I cry out to you, O Lord;
in the morning my prayer confronts you.

88:14 O Lord, why do you reject me,
and pay no attention to me?

88:15 I am oppressed and have been on the verge of death since my youth.
I have been subjected to your horrors and am numb with pain.

88:16 Your anger overwhelms me;
your terrors destroy me.

88:17 They surround me like water all day long;
they join forces and encircle me.

88:18 You cause my friends and neighbors to keep their distance;
those who know me leave me alone in the darkness.

*****END Psalm

PP Commentary:

(1) This is an incredibly bleak psalm. I don't think it would be wrong to say that the feeling of despair is shot through and through this psalm.

(2) Yet at the same time, the psalmist invokes Yahweh in vv 1-2. This would seem to imply the idea that the psalmist --- despite his angst and distress --- still views Yahweh as the sovereign Lord and Master of all reality, able to do as He pleases in His time.

(3) Especially noteworthy are vv 14-16:
(a) The psalmist accuses Yahweh of explicitly rejecting and ignoring him.
(b) The psalmist has experienced "horrors" that, in some ultimate sense, come from Yahweh.
(c) The terrors and anger of Yahweh overwhelm and destroy the psalmist.

If we take the sovereignty of God seriously, it seems that Yahweh is here presented as the explicit and sole author of the horrors and terrors for which the psalmist laments. While one gets theology from the places where theology is discussed rather than in readings that have a large poetic latitude to them [i.e. Psalter, Ecclesiastes, Job], we cannot, it seems, ignore the charge here that Yahweh is presented as the author of evil.

But, with the NT revelation --- I'm thinking of the close of Romans 8, those of us on the other chronological side of the cross and empty tomb know, if we let Paul speak for himself [and, as Evangelicals say, for the Holy Spirit too], all things work together for the good of those who love God, i.e. those who are [in the Pauline context] justified by faith alone. As a consequence, the travails of this world may rob us of the temporal and often ephemeral bliss of what the world can provide, causing us to cry out to Yahweh just as does the psalmist, but those of us with the NT revelation know that these bad things happen under the umbrella of God's divine sovereignty which extends over all things, in particular, our ultimate salvation.

(4) The psalm does not end with praise or benediction directed towards Yahweh. In fact, the psalm starts out bleakly, stays bleak, and finishes bleakly.

Those of us who affirm the active agency of God in using men to communicate His revelation to us must then ultimately say that this lugubrious psalm is divinely inspired --- God's providence has left us a psalm that is pain from beginning to end. Contrast this with the watered-down success theology and feel-good fuzzies put forth by wimped-out Evangelicals.

(5) At the same time, this psalm is embedded in the Psalter, which contains many more psalms of praise and optimism in Yahweh. In fact, the Psalter contains a very wide range of human emotions, the same range a normal healthy person runs through in his life.

Taking the liberty of posting a relevant comment from an email sent to me by Steve Hays at Triablogue: You wouldn't want more than one of those in the Psalter. But it's striking that inspiration and providence included one--just one--that starts in darkness, gropes around in the dark, and ends in darkness--which no happy ending tacked on. The walk of faith ranges from sunrise to pitch black.

This post was inspired by some private emails with Steve. While I'd instead prefer an attractive single Christian female muse [twenty- or thirty-something], life is not perfect, so I suppose I have to take whatever muse I can find!

Mars Says: It Must Be The Shoes!

2005-12-01T23:40:00.000-08:00

Dear ol' Dave and I headed to the gym tonight for our regular session of lifting and cardiovascular conditioning. With outdoor tennis not an option for the time being, we're back to my true love --- basketball.

[[My love for basketball is a tragic love that can never be fulfilled in its deepest fashion. I'm only 6', and, while not slow, I'm not fast enough to be a profoundly good 6' player, merely a competent one. I still have a collegiate-level shot, being able to stop-n-pop off screens and shoot comfortably from NBA three-point range, but a 6' college player today probably has much superior athleticism.]]

Anyway, just shooting around tonight, the magic returned. I dropped 17 [or 18] threes in a row. That's the most in a row in the last few years. The record of 27 in a row --- set one lonely night back in '89 when I was a team manager trying to sneak on the next year as a 11th or 12th man on our NCAA D-II squad --- appears to be that one singularity that can never be topped. In my early thirties, I'll take 17 [or 18] in a row. We're not sure because Dave and I dispute the count. So, go with 17 to be safe.

The real whopper is that I started some free throws afterward. My record [also back in '89] is 127 in a row. Once you get in a groove, starting a long streak is not as imposing as it seems, especially with somebody under the hoop feeding you the ball. Tonight, it felt as if the record might fall after some 17 years, but on the 89th free throw, the shot was a bit flat, and the streak stopped at 88. It would've been nice to hit triple digits, but we'll take what we can get! I was aided by a very kind roll somewhere when the streak was up in the fifties.

BTW --- free throws and three-pointers can be rather fickle sorts of things. I can usually bust out 20 throws in a row [eventually] before I leave the basketball court, and I can usually bust out a decent streak of bombs [eventually] from beyond the college arc unless I'm having a bad hair day or the legs are just dead. While the feeling is there, one wonders why one just can't duplicate it repeatedly. That's the addictive quality I suppose about hitting a golf ball, shooting a basketball, bowling properly, etc. On paper, it looks like you should be able to do the same thing over and over, but, we can't. Not even the best ones can. But it seems as if you can do it over and over. Hence there is this coming-back-for-more quality to golfing, shooting, bowling, batting, etc.

Oh well, this post keeps me from having to think up some substantial blog entry, and it lets me drop a few more 80's references, so we've killed two birds with one stone.

Cocaine: $170 per gram

2005-12-01T17:37:00.000-08:00

I'd love to see the so-called War on Drugs come to an end. But it continues, and we're told that we're winning and that this government-led War will lead to victory. The following article from National Review attempts to debunk this attitude.

BTW --- I find myself over time having less and less positive feeling towards National Review.

******BEGIN ARTICLE*******

Wishing Drug-Warrior Thinking
No, the U.S. is not winning a battle vs. Coke.

By Ted Galen Carpenter

If you had received a dollar every time a U.S. government official announced that victory was near at hand in the war on drugs, you would be a rich person. The latest "turning point" proclamation came on November 16 when the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy cited evidence that Washington had achieved a breakthrough in the fight to staunch the flow of cocaine coming into the United States.

What caused this burst of optimism? The street price of cocaine rose 19 percent to $170 per gram between February and November 2005. White House officials contend the price increase indicates a shortage of cocaine, thus validating Washington's $4 billion effort to wipe out drug crops in Colombia through aerial spraying. In addition to the price spike, officials assert that the purity of cocaine on America's streets has declined 15 percent — another sign, they say, that supply is dwindling. "These numbers confirm that the levels of interdiction, the levels of eradication, have reduced the availability of cocaine in the United States," White House drug czar John P. Walters boasted. "The policy is working."

Yet the government's own data suggest that such optimism is overblown. For the past twelve years, street prices of cocaine have fluctuated between $120 and $190 per gram. Clearly, a price of $170 is well within that "normal" range. Indeed, the price of cocaine has fluctuated 19 percent or more — both up and down — many times during the twelve-year period. The latest fluctuation is nothing to get excited about.

If one examines the price trend over a longer period, the "achievement" is even less impressive. During the early 1980s, cocaine sold for more than $500 per gram. The long-term trend has clearly been toward lower prices, suggesting that the supply of cocaine has become more plentiful. As Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Lindesmith Center's Drug Policy Foundation, notes: "A small blip upward after so many years of decline in price and increase in purity is essentially meaningless."

Other statistics, including some from the federal government itself, cast doubt on the argument that the cocaine supply coming out of South America is being squeezed in any significant manner. Earlier this year, even after reporting that 336,000 acres of coca plants (the raw ingredient for cocaine) had been eradicated through spraying in 2004, the White House conceded that the amount of coca across Colombia had remained "statistically unchanged" from 2003. The news out of Bolivia and Peru, two other major sources of cocaine, was even worse: According to a United Nations report issued in June 2005, coca cultivation in Peru was up 14 percent from the previous year. In Bolivia it was up 17 percent.

Worst of all, even if by some miracle the supply-side campaign against cocaine (and other drugs) succeeded, it would be a dubious achievement. Let's say cocaine prices returned to the levels of the early 1980s. The inevitable result would be that people who have a cocaine addiction would be driven to commit even more crimes than they do today to support their habit. That would not enhance the peace and safety of America's cities.

The reality is that a supply-side strategy of drug prohibition cannot produce a worthwhile result. If it fails and drug supplies remain plentiful, it is a waste of time and money. If it "succeeds" and creates a supply shortage and a resulting price spike, it drives addicts into lives of greater and greater criminal behavior. One would be hard-pressed to come up with a better definition of an inherently bankrupt policy.

John Walters may boast about the latest alleged triumph in the war on drugs all he wishes. But at best, it is nothing more than a minor, temporary, and dubious achievement in an unwinnable war.

******END ARTICLE ******

PP Goes "New Wave," Adopts Android-Like Persona

2005-12-01T12:59:00.000-08:00

For entirely frivolous reasons, I'm curious if any of the 100 or so readers of this little blog recognize this former pop star. The pics are from 1979 and 1980.

Don't let the mascara and the androgynous look [replete with leather jumpsuits featuring zipper pockets] bother you: it's 1980 and we're going New Wave in this post!

A Worthy Retort

2005-12-01T00:51:00.000-08:00

I asked a basketball friend back in Illinois: So how's your shooting percentage been?

His reply: my shooting percentage remains fairly constant; I shoot 78% of the time I touch the ball.

It's worth posting.

Pedantic Pr0testant

2005-11-30T13:21:00.000-08:00

Apparently, Frank Turk, he of Centuri0n fame, has been clandestinely impersonated by somebody using the handle "Centurion." Frank uses a zero "0" and not an "O" for reasons of which I'm unaware.

Anyway, the editorial and marketing staffs here at PP are holding their breaths while the real culprit is tracked down. From fourth-hand rumors, the staff of CSI: Miami is investigating the scenes of the crimes.

Sci-Fi on the Silver Screen

2005-11-29T22:55:00.000-08:00

I and perhaps a few others will probably see the Aeon Flux movie when it comes out in a few days. We're sci-fi fans, and, while we both have the gut feeling that the movie isn't going to be anything great, we're hoping to have two hours or so of possibly mindless fun.

The movie is being touted as "sci-fi" but it is really some futuristic utopian/dystopian mystery flick, at least if I understand the movie's plot description as put forth on the site. And yes, the heroine is hot, at least from the eye candy perspective.

On the larger scale of things, there really seems to be a dearth of good sci-fi movies out there. I don't consider the Star Wars movies to be sci-fi, but more like "space opera." Having been a fan of Asimov and the golden-age sci-fi short stories, sci-fi, in my book needs a lot more of the sci- than what many consider to be sci-fi material.

It is hard to compile, by the fact that I consider sci-fi to mean that there is some science and such in the work, a list of "great sci-fi movies" because there just don't seem to be that many.

I'd list the following as prize-winners at the 2005 PP Sci-Fi Film Festival:

THX 1138 [Creepy. I think this qualifies as sci-fi. I read the book too.]

A.I. [I was absorbed in this flick.]

Planet of the Apes [Maybe this doesn't qualify as sci-fi and more as adventure.]

The Andromeda Strain [Possibly the purest sci-fi movie ever.]

Minority Report

The Time Machine [and not just because Yvette Mimieux was in the flick either!]

I'm probably missing a few here and there due to a pokey mind [hey it's 11pm].

I'd dearly love to see the robot novels and the Foundation novels of Asimov turned into films. At the same time, my mind can supply better imagery than can today's computer graphics, so it is like a movie in my mind when I read those books.

My main complaint about what passes for sci-fi today is that much of it seems to be an excuse to show off computer graphics and special effects. Frankly, while the eye-candy does produce an Oooooh and Aaaahhh factor, it gets old quickly. What matters, I'd contend, is the plotline, the writing, and story.

For example, I'm a sucker for the old B&W Twilight Zone. I believe I've seen every episode. Now that show is the ultimate budget production. But the writing and ideas were superb and delightfully twisted. Some of the ideas on those old TZ episodes still freak me out, and I'm a grown man.

Fast forward a few years to a good number of original Star Trek episodes. Much of these were interesting for their ideas. Yes, the 60's luvin' and collectivist mentality were on display, but the writing was good. The special effects weren't good enough to where they could dominate the story. Captain Kirk was a man's man. I'm not sure I can in good conscience approve of rampant rolls in the hay with green alien females, but, I found Kirk convincing in his own hammy Shatneresque way.

But what have I seen in the more modern times? Well, for example, I was a high school senior when ST:TNG came out. Wow. Star Trek. New episodes! Hooray! But what did we get? We had political correctness shoved down our throats at times, we had special effects galore, and we had that touchy-feely chick Counselor Troi talking about feelings. Now Troi's character was certainly eye candy, especially when she moved from the skirt to the, ah, form-fitting outfit that, we daresay, fit her ample form quite well. But I'd want to set phasers on "kill" when she'd spout her feeling-based empathetic psychobabble.

BTW --- I watched every episode, obviously. Some episodes were good, but other episodes gave me the feeling of being a dad sitting through his first-grade daughter's school play. I should mention that Picard and Number One always rubbed me the wrong way. I personally detested Number One.

What would I like?

Well, I don't think I've ever seen a romantic comedy --- oh wait, yes, I did once back in college with another Diane. The romance in romantic comedies makes me groan, and the comedy is strangely lacking. Any woman I date who insists that I see a romantic comedy is in effect telling me that the relationship is over. Anyway, I don't care if romantic comedies are consigned to limbo. They waste space. They cause fights in relationships. They're just bad for humanity. So, I guess I'd like romantic comedies to die a quick, efficient Kevorkianesque death.

What I'd really like is a Christian sci-fi movie, perhaps something like CS Lewis' Space Trilogy set to film. I personally have several ideas for a Christian sci-fi novel or series, but I vacillate between how explicitly Christian to make things. But we'd want to work some metaphysics in nonetheless! I've written one dry tome of a book, and perhaps I should pound out a more pleasurable book, though I wouldn't say I have any more qualifications than the next guy apart from a firmly-warranted confidence that I could do something that wouldn't be too bad.

Well, anyway, perhaps I should post some semi-intelligible ramblings on Aeon Flux after I see it. This is when I wish Steve was on the West Coast. I believe he and I could kibitz through the entire movie, exchanging pithy and pointed thoughts on the film. We could at least do as good of a job as those guys in Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Get it?

2005-11-29T17:34:00.000-08:00

You finally did it!

You finally dropped the big one!

[Falling to knees...]

DAMN YOU....

DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!

I'm "It" [Whatever That Means!]

2005-11-28T22:38:00.000-08:00

Apparently the Turkoman of the rapidly-approaching-legendary-status Centuri0n blog has tagged me [among others], making me "it."

What does being "it" mean? If I understand him correctly, it means that I am responsible for giving seven lists, each list containing seven items. Also, if I understand him correctly as well as the woman who tagged him, I don't have liberty in choosing what the lists should be.

At least this isn't like receiving a letter asking me to make seven copies and mail them to others under threat of curses, bad luck, etc! At the same time, Frank is a big-league blogger, so it is an honor for him to make a trip from the city out to the blog-equivalent of the Alkali Flats and call me out.

Since my brain --- which is easily overtaxed at times --- is presently overtaxed with all sorts of mundane matters, it seems like a good way to get two things done at once by blogging a reply and honoring Turk's tagging.

One warning --- this may perhaps be uninteresting reading, so proceed at the risk of falling asleep and having your head smack the desk on the way down. I'm not responsible for any resulting head trauma, so don't sue me.

Seven things to do before death:

(1) Run a marathon.
(2) Be able to say "I made it" in the sense of business and financial success.
(3) Make several albums of varying types of music.
(4) Be a nicer person.
(5) Learn that many people do not view their words as necessarily connected to reality!
(6) [[The Pedantic Protestant had something here that apparently he meant seriously. We here at the PP Editing Committee are rather shocked that he tried to sneak the deleted paragraph past us. Good try, PP, but you can't say that in the Blogdom of God.]]
(7) Make sure I'm really justified! [This is tongue-in-cheek.]

Seven things I cannot do

(1) See how Roman Catholicism of any of its various flavors is strongly supported by the evidence. [This line is just for Diane...]
(2) Understand how the fact that people want something to be true somehow makes it true.
(3) Understand how people think that we need elected busybodies running and regulating our lives.
(4) Instantiate the NT ethos as well as I'm supposed to. [Thank goodness for Romans 7:7-25.]
(5) Resist a cocker spaniel or chubby grey tabby with black stripes.
(6) Watch Oprah without yelling pointed comments at the TV about muddled worldviews.
(7) Have the sort of prayer life I should.

~~Seven things that attract me to my spouse~~

In a way that alternates between felicitous and lugubrious, I say: "N/A" !!

Seven things I say most often

While my vocabulary is hardly Buckleyesque, it is varied enough to where I can't pin down any personal catchphrases. JJ had DYNOMIIIIIITE....Chico [from Chico and the Man] had LOOOOOKING GOOOOOD... Quagmire from Family Guy has ALLLLLLLRIGHT ... Dr McCoy has something like DAMMIT JIM I'M A DOCTOR NOT A TOUR GUIDE FOR THAT GREEN-BLOODED POINTY-EARED HOBGOBLIN.

But I have nothing. Sorry to disappoint.

Seven Books I Love [At least at the time of typing this....ten minutes from now the list could change.]

(1) E. Vestrup's The Theory of Measures and Integration. [C'mon...this was a softball. The book reportedly has proven medicinal value for insomniacs.]
(2) The entire Robot, Empire, and Foundation series [plural] by Isaac Asimov. [Fun reading, but you have to swallow his atheistic materialism for the setting to be viable.]
(3) CS Lewis' Space Trilogy
(4) M. Spivak's Calculus, a book so wonderfully written that my plans to write a calculus book of my own felt futile compared to Spivak's work.
(5) Oh yeah, the Bible. [Almost forgot about that. And at a blog called "Pedantic Protestant" ? That would be inexcusable.]
(6) God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, Neil Manson, editor. IMHO the entire book is worth it for Chapter 10 alone. [Inside joke.]
(7) CEB Cranfield's two volume ICC Commentary on Romans.

Seven movies I could watch over and over again.

I'm not the sort of guy who can watch a movie over and over again. I believe the movie I have conscientiously seen the most times is Ben Hur, and that is a mere three times. Sorry to be a party pooper here. I'll put the lampshade on my head if that helps things, though...

Seven people I want to join in, too

HAHAHAHA, the chain letter stops here. Curse me, promise me bad luck, etc.

On the other hand, if I loop back to somebody who has done the list already, will the resulting logical conundrum cause the universe to crunch back into a singularity? Just checking.

The More Things Change....

2005-11-27T16:49:00.000-08:00

[Primarily for Diane, but also for other readers who have known me for a while.]

1976 [or 1977] The parents go shopping for furniture at some store. They can't locate little Eric. They find him, not sitting in the temple explaining the law to the priests, but in front of a display featuring a Pong Unit.

1978-1979 The parents go to the pizza. But Eric doesn't sit with them. He's playing Sea Wolf, Space Invaders, Asteroids, etc. Of course, he's asking for quarters too.

1979-1983 Shopping at a department store for school clothes or clothes in general [ick!], Eric is found gawking at whatever Atari 2600 games are on display.

1982 Dad goes to a Radio Shack for some phonograph component. Eric looks at the Intellivsion units there.

1987-8 Last year of high school, Eric goes shopping with Mom, looks at Nintendo games.

1998 Diane and Eric go to Target, Eric hovers to where the Playstation games are.

2000-1 Same story, replace Playstation with Dreamcast.

2001-4 Diane and Eric go to a computer store, Eric is in the PC games aisle.

2005 The hero of this post, in his thirties, goes to Best Buy to scout out fridge and television prices. He ends up spending 90% of his time looking at the XBOX 360. In another sociological coincidence, plenty of other twenty-, thirty-, and forty-something males are standing around with a very covetous look in their eye.

Can you, dear reader, spot the pattern here?

The Running Man

2005-11-27T12:07:00.000-08:00

One of my pasttimes is running. Depending on if I was carrying a few extra pounds [or more than a few!] or at a good weight, it was work or pleasurable toil. Regardless, I have found it the best way to keep the weight in check. A 6' male at my weight burns about 1200-1300 calories in a one hour run [according to what I've read] even going at a pokey 10' per mile pace. Besides the caloric burn, speaking only for myself, the running really suppresses the appetite, not in the sense that I decide to go hungry, but it silences the little devil sitting on my shoulder whispering those sirenesque words "Chinese Buffet! Chinese Buffet!" And, given that I love to eat --- ask anybody I know for confirmation --- any sort of appetite suppression is a good thing!

There is this 7.5-mile outdoor circuit that I run on the weekends, and, during the week, I run a treadmill for 60 minutes at the health club. So, the legs are fairly used to a respectable middle-length distance.

Anyway, yesterday, running the 7.5-mile circuit, I had completed one loop, but had this feeling that, yes, I could've pulled double-duty and done the loop a second time, making it a 15-mile day. Back in '00-'01, I was able to pound out 15 miles, and, just as importantly, I still had enough legs to run 7-8 miles the next day. But this gets me thinking: why not prepare for a marathon?

A marathon is something I thought of early in graduate school when I was in really good shape and could run a seven-mile route in under 50 minutes. But with a dissertation and then a life as an academic afterward --- not to mention the cold Chicagoland weather --- the running became a seasonal affair, and, I played basketball anyway, which left no legs for running-for-its-own-sake.

The thing about a marathon is that the very length is psychologically intimidating. Those 15-mile runs were rather boring after the first thirty minutes. And, even if you're in good shape, you're still going to feel rather put out after a 15-mile run. Now tack 11+ miles on to that already-existing feeling.

Another thing, and I'm not sure if this is idiosyncratic or ubiquitous, is the fact that how my legs feel and how they can hold up is something that appears to be at the whim of the gods. My legs can feel great but peter out in a mile or two. Other days, I can go on forever with the same feeling. Some nights at the gym the treadmill is a pleasurable affair [as far as treadmills can be pleasurabe], and other times I'm huffing and puffing within five minutes. The same guy who could truck 15 miles could also just not have it after a few miles on another day.

All of this adds to the psychological intimidation of running a marathon --- not only is it long, but you might very well train and end up with legs that just aren't up for the run come the day of the marathon.

The other psychologically intimidating factor of a marathon, at least for a hack like myself, is the sheer boredom factor. A friend will bike with me as I run the 7.5 mile route, and this makes the hour+ of running bearable. The better the conversation, the quicker the route seems. And, I could see this lasting for two hours.

However, four+ hours of running? Even if the body could take it, it sounds boring. Thoroughly boring. Dreadfully boring. And when you're bored, you begin to think of your joints getting shocked repeatedly with each step, and you begin to feel as if your quads and butt and hamstrings are starting to tighten up, and you begin to notice that your lower back is starting to tighten....

I hope that all the running won't diminish strength and muscle mass. I intend to keep lifting 5x per week. But I've heard that a lot of running diminishes your strength even if you keep lifting. [?]

Anyway, I'm going to train for a marathon and hopefully pound one out in the next calendar year. I'm about halfway there in terms of distance on a good day. But the second half seems rather intimidating.

I suppose you just have to tell yourself that if you can run x miles, you can run x+1 miles when x>13.

Drive-By Comments on Ephesians 1:1-14

2005-11-26T20:45:00.000-08:00

I've been going through Ephesians in my on-again off-again NT studies. Being rather burnt-out on Greek for the time being from doing Romans and the Corinthian epistles, I've just been going through my NET translation of Ephesians, banking on the fact that I went through the Greek of Ephesians a few years back, so it is still in the back of the brain if I need it.

Anyway, let's see what Paul is saying in 1:1-14, and then I'll put up some simple comments that come to mind.

(1) Paul makes the salutation in 1-2. OK, this epistle makes the claim that Paul is the author. He wishes the readers --- who may or may not have been the Ephesians depending on the textual question --- grace and peace.

(2) Turning to vv 3-12 now:

(a) Paul blesses God, referring to Him as "the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Paul notes that God has conferred blessing on the Christian readers of the epistle --- more precisely, God has conferred "every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ" on the Christian readers of the epistle.

(b) But why or how has God conferred such aforementioned blessings? Context seems to clearly indicate that Paul is answering the "how" question just asked. Proceeding, then:

God has conferred great blessings on us:

(i) God chose us in Christ before creation, predestining Christians to adoption as His sons through the person/work of Christ. [3-5]
(ii) God has conferred upon us redemption through the blood of Christ. [7]
(iii) Similar to (i), we have been claimed as God's very own possession "in Christ" by virtue of the predestination mentioned in (i). [11]

(3) Focusing now on 13-14:

(a) "Those who heard the word of truth" seems, according to the NET translation, linked with "when you believed in Christ." Is Paul stating here that truly hearing the word of truth, that is, truly being open to the content of such a message and being able to starkly discern the dichotomies between the gospel and the world, concomitant with belief in Christ?

If I'm understanding the NET correctly here, the answer to the question is yes: truly hearing the message and belief in Christ are simultaneous.

Now, I have no problem with this possibility. In my own lifetime, I'm not sure the true hearing of the message and my belief were simulataneous. Does Paul mean by "true hearing" a sort-of hearing of God's irresistable and effectual call? I'm not quite sure here.

(b) What does seem perfectly clear is that belief in Christ is followed [immediately] by a marking with "the seal of the Holy Spirit." The HS is mentioned as the down payment made by God to us of our inheritance to come eventually at the terminus of time as we know it.

************

Let me offer some comments now, using Eph 1:1-14 as a pretext for making them. So far as I know, there is nothing special about the order of the comments as they're made.

(A) Predestination. I have heard various people over the years stating that the doctrine of predestination [which is, I'd assert, a starkly plain and clear doctrine] is meant as a comfort to a troubled believer who perhaps wonders something along the lines of "Am I really saved?" The idea, if I'm representing it correctly, is that the troubled believer, being a believer, was predestined to believe, and this is supposed to help a troubled soul.

FWIW, I don't find the doctrine particularly comforting, but not particularly troubling either. When I went through a few years' worth of wondering if I was really regenerate or if I had merely deluded myself into thinking I was, thinking about predestination never particularly comforted me. If I was certain that I was a believer, I could take comfort from predestination. But the very question happened to be whether I was a believer, so the doctrine, as I understood it [and still understand it in its simplistic form] offers no comfort.

On a philosophical level, predestination seems quite natural. God, who exists outside of time and indeed created our universe with its inherent sense of time, would at the very least seem to predestine things. On the other hand, predestination's negation would seem to undercut the omniscience [and perhaps the omnipotence] of God. In other words, if God doesn't in His timeless existence see an agnostic graduate student [none other than the PP!] coming to faith sometime in '94 or so, I would seriously have to question God's omniscience.

One other point to make here is that while believers are mentioned to be predestined, nothing is said here about unbelievers being predestined to enmity with God. However, the philosophical paragraph above would seem to imply that unbelievers are predesinted as well to their particular fate, because otherwise, it would seem that the above paragraph, if correct in the former case, would also apply in the latter case, allowing God's omniscience to be questioned.

[I wonder if any pastors use this doctrine for comfort and such in dealing with parishoners who come to them.]

The most likely option is that my amateurish thoughts in matters of free will and causality are verified in their amateurism!

(B) Paul isn't discussing charismata here in 1:1-14 specifically, but he does state that belief in Christ is accompanied with the Holy Spirit. Now in Romans 8 Paul discusses the role of the HS who is already present in the person who is justified by faith alone. One needn't wait for the agency of the HS to begin.

This perhaps seems like a truism, but I've had some fellow Evangelicals tell me that I have to ask God to give me the HS. However, those who believe already have the HS.
[Now, to be sure, some seem to have much more of the HS than I do, but the question isn't about the degree to which the HS' agency manifests itself, but is rather instead a question of mere existence. ] It irks me when I hear people tell other believers to ask for the HS. He's already there, "inside" them.

(C) 1:1-14 seems very heavy in terms of Pauline use of prepositions. Paul didn't write for somebody sitting at a desk in 2005 in a first-world Western culture, but, it doesn't stop me from wishing he were more clear at times!

BTW --- these drive-by comments are spoken with a very tentative stream-o'-consciousness tone, and represent some thoughts being sketched out moreso than serious theological discourse.

Time For Plan B

2005-11-26T19:50:00.000-08:00

[File this under unintentional humor]

In chronological order of things, so far as I can put things together.

(1) Sometime in April or May [?] some fake Dave Armstrong blog goes up. This angers Mr Armstrong, who devotes some posts to the fake blog. Eventually, after much protest, the hoaxster takes the blog down.

(2) I post some threads on narcissism a few months back having nothing to do with Mr Armstrong. Mr Armstrong brings in the accusation that the threads are about him, despite my not mentioning him by name, my not hinting at him, and discussing leftists in subsequent threads. Later, I am accused by Mr Armstrong of thinking of Mr Armstrong in a "secondary" fashion. [I suppose if I deny this, I shall be accused by Mr Armstrong of thinking of Mr Armstrong in a tertiary fashion.]

(3) Recently, Mr Armstrong assembled a rather pathetic compilation of so-called evidence that I was the hoaxster. In fact, Mr Armstrong declared that the evidence was good enough for him. The so-called evidence was dissembled in my post "Press Conference" below. In that thread I also denied being the hoaxster, and I denied having any clue about the hoaxster.

Mr Armstrong also posted a picture of my friend, claiming it was me. [A link to a picture of me is given in the "Stating The Obvious" thread linked below.] This was stated with certainty, an assured result of his not-meticulous-enough ruminations and investigation.

(4) No personal apology so far as I can tell is forthcoming for this charge or the incorrect picture. It isn't too big a deal to me, but at the same time it would've been nice.

(5) Mr Armstrong declares after the fact that the purpose, or one of the purposes, it seems, was to make me deny or confirm being the hoaxster, so that he could put the matter to rest or continue his hunt for the hoaxster. He could've merely sent me a private email [or we could talk live] and handled things like an adult, but he preferred to publicly posture and adopt the affectations of victimhood.

(6) Mr Armstrong puts together a few obvious pieces of information and, so it seems to me, has this attitude that he's "outing" me. Of course, I've stated more than once that anybody who wants to know who I am can ask and I'll tell. See the "Stating The Obvious" thread in which I tell people how to post the pretty-obvious clues together to deduce who I am.

What's the point of all of this? Well, Mr Armstrong's bungled charges apparently caught the eye of the hoaxster, one "Cardinal Neumann." If I understand the hoaxster correctly, he felt bad for my taking the rap [as very well he should].

So in the end, after all of Mr Armstrong's master plan has been carried out, the very hoax blog whose existence Mr Armstrong deplored is back up. It has apparently raised the ire of Mr Armstrong, based on what I saw when I perused his outfit. That is, after (i) posting a false picture of me [a real picture of me is presented in the "Stating The Obvious" thread below], (ii) making a very serious false charge based on the most specious of evidence, and (iii) attempting to "out" me as if it were some big secret [which it has never been], the hoax blog is apparently back up, and the hoaxster has dropped the gauntlet right before Mr Armstrong. Mr Armstrong even provides the link to this hoax blog so that we too can feel his pathos and outrage at the hoax blog.

So Mr Armstrong's original plan failed, at least as far as Mr Armstrong is concerned: false charges and the resurrection of the hoax blog. As the saying goes: it's time for Mr Armstrong to go back to the drawing board.

One Month 'Til Xmas

2005-11-25T13:25:00.000-08:00

This is a friendly PP reminder. Don't let Xmas sneak up on you. Get your shopping in now.

What do you want for Xmas?

Stating the Obvious

2005-11-25T11:44:00.000-08:00

Over at Mr Armstrong's outfit, there appears to be some titillation about my true identity, as if Deep Throat has been revealed to the world. While I often joke about the secret identity, semi-pseudonymity, etc, it is pretty obvious who I am if you put two and two together. I've certainly left behind enough "Easter Eggs" in the posts. I'll walk readers of this thread through them so that they can put everything together.

Back in the early days of PP, with its single-digit readership, I told several people about the blog. The usual blogging suspects have all known since the early days, and not a few comment-droppers here know as well. I even told the Crimson Catholic back in April or May sometime. Sometime in June, Eric Svendsen put up a little thread stating that if people couldn't figure me out, then, well, they have a problem. [That was rather funny.]

That I didn't take myself or the little mystery too seriously comes from a June 3 post, wherein I state the following:

As for my "secret identity," bah humbug. I truly am a nobody relative to the Christian Church, though I'd say I already have a large core of a conservative seminary curriculum thanks to about 6 years of being an automath. I hold no position, no title, in the Church, other than that of a reasonably well-read layman [who can discern or at least claims to be able to discern the structure of an argument]. Well, I was a Sunday School teacher once, and was a dismal failure at it. Actually, in a way, I have a sort-of position in the Roman Catholic Church. Pretty much anybody who wants to know can know whatever they'd like. The main thing about anonymity is not to abuse it and get personal with folks. In this case, it would rather be immoral. One could also say that by not putting my name with things, I don't have the courage of my convictions. Whatever. If my arguments or ideas resonate, they resonate regardless of whether I'm one of [say] Dr Svendsen's multiple personalities or a po-mo trying to imitate a Biblicist. If they fail, they fail on their own merits.

Note the invitation for anybody who is curious. As Fox Mulder would say: the truth is out there. The statement stating "Actually, in a way, I have a sort-of position in the Roman Catholic Church" was said somewhat tongue-in-cheek. If I remember, I was thinking of a few people who had told me that I didn't know what I was talking about regarding liberalism in the RCC and in some RC educational settings. Looking back on it, I should've said something like "I'm closer to the inside of the RCC than you might think." Oh well, what's written is written.

Not that many people asked, btw. That's a sign of a "mystery" for which there is no or little interest!

Let's review some of the Easter Eggs I left behind. If I wanted to stay completely dark and shadowy like some 1940's comic villain or man-of-mystery, I wouldn't have left these eggs behind. In no special order, let's proceed.

The silver-bullet piece of evidence is (1):

(1) In a thread called "Tim on Tim," I also mentioned something to the effect of a McGrew, McGrew, and Vestrup publication in the journal Mind dealing with fine-tuning arguments, and said that perhaps this high view of the paper is due to personal pride!

Now, given that I talk about Tim McGrew as a separate person, and given the clear fact that I'm male, I can't be the L. McGrew [Lydia --- an intellectual titan far beyond me and Tim's wife] of the paper either. So, if there is personal pride in the paper, it seems pretty strong evidence that the person making that statement must be, by simple elimination, one E. Vestrup.

(2) I've stated that I worked at a large Midwestern Catholic university a few times.
(3) I seem to read the Chicago Sun-Times.

This would allow people to possibly deduce that I worked at one of the Catholic universities in Chicago: Loyola, DePaul, and St Xavier [if I remember correctly].

If you put (1) together with (2)-(3), then one E. Vestrup seems to be the culprit or mastermind [depends on who you ask!] behind the PP blog. One could quickly peruse faculty pages at those universities to "pin me down," so to speak.

Here are some other Easter Eggs that might be more subtle:

(4) Those who read the NTRMin message boards probably saw a few posts about my entertaining the idea of a second doctorate in OT or NT studies. In a post called "Theologians Gone Wild!" I state at the end the following:

I've often entertained getting a doctorate in NT or OT, but, if I have to interact with the material as exhibited above as part of my studies and growth, I'd just as well be better off to keep the day job!

Given that I posted at Eric Svendsen's blog from time to time, one might peruse the NTRMin Areopagus board, wherein there is some intro thread somewhere where I introduce myself, stating that I worked at DePaul as an assistant professor and was interested in Christian apologetics [among other things]. The EV there sure sounds a whole lot like good ol' PP, doesn't he?

Some more clues that don't seem too subtle to me, but, then again, I may not be the best judge of these things:

(5) Both PP [here]and EV [at NTRMin] have the authorship of the fourth gospel as their "hobby horse."
(6) Both PP [here] and EV [at NTRMin] seem to make the same references to Wallace's Grammar.
(7) Both PP [here] and EV [at NTRMin] seems to have the same issues with Roman Catholicism.
(8) Both PP [here] and EV [at NTRMin] seem to have low views of pomo'ism.
(9) If memory serves me correctly, EV at the NTRMin board seem to have a libertarian streak. I too have a libertarian streak? What a coincidence....

Note too: [and this is good evidence, I'd say]

(10) They have the same sensibilities when it comes to humor. They're somewhat over-the-top at times.
(11) They both reference Trench and Lightfoot, two 19th-century guys who aren't commonly-dropped names today.
(12) I put up some really goofy phony poem making fun of pseudointellectual poetry early on in the blog [have you ever been to a poetry reading?!?!], and then EV put up some crack at NTRMin about how he hoped that other parts of PP were better than the poetry at PP. Not that many people read the blog back then, so wasn't it a bit, shall we say, suspicious that EV somehow knew what PP was doing? Hmmmm....one just might begin to put two and two together.

There are probably more "Easter Eggs" out there but these are the ones that come immediately to mind. If anybody thinks there is an "Easter Egg" worth mentioning, feel free to drop it in the combox.

I promised a picture a long time ago. The problem is that I don't have anything current. This photo from 2000-2001 [don't remember exactly when] will have to suffice. Unlike my buddy Dave, there is no awful wallpaper in the background! Note St Elizabeth on the far left of the picture trying to sneak in the picture. I think the photo was 2000 or so. The CV there at that page is from, if I remember correctly, 2000. I look much the same today as in that photo. I was in good shape back then and am in good shape now. Vanity says that my face looked a bit puffy in that photo, though. If you see a similar-looking 6' guy at your basketball court shooting comfortably from behind the arc while screening you and backdooring you to death, and if he happens to be rather pedantic....it just might be me.

[BTW --- Feel free to take the MAT 453 take-home exam. IIRC, people had a 90-minute time limit on it. Make sure to derive the hypothesis tests before actually carrying them out! I love mathematical statistics. That would be a topic for a second book in the future.]

Here's another major clue as to my "secret" identity: My favorite book ever written is as follows:

Either I'm the author of that book, or my taste in reading leaves a lot to be desired!

So, with all of this evidence put together, friend and foe alike can say in unison: Dr Vestrup, we presume?

So, can you guess who I am now? I'll give you three guesses and one final hint: my initials are EV. That should allow for a comfortable "educated guess." Those who guess correctly receive a noncorporeal PP Coffee Mug.

People can call me whatever they wish when they comment, btw. Eric, Mr V, Dr V, PP, "Hey You," etc. [My preference: Eric or PP. I never liked "Mr" or "Dr" too much, to be honest. Undergrads and grads just called me Eric or "EV."] "PP" started out as the name of this blog and I was a pedantic Protestant [note the indefinite article]. Soon, either I followed comment-makers' lead or they followed mine and I became the Pedantic Protestant. A similar situation is where people seem to refer to Dr Frankenstein's monster as Frankenstein, whereas Frankenstein was the scientist who created the monster. Same thing here. The blog's name is PP, but I'm Eric, but people [quite understandably] conflate the two --- not that I wasn't having any fun going along with it!!

Anyway, I need to recover 40 or so minutes of holiday time now...hope this reveals the mystery. In the next thread, I'll reveal the plot ending to Lost and tell you who really shot JFK.

Understanding Beer-Drinkers Better

2005-11-24T21:02:00.000-08:00

Having had nothing but water to drink for 11 or 12 days now, and having kicked the soda habit [though the desire is still there], I broke protocol somewhat at Thanksgiving dinner when somebody suggested that I try a certain beer.

Now in the past I have not had much beer:

(i) The taste was too bitter
(ii) I'm a real lightweight when it comes to alcohol

and

(iii) I prefer[red] soda.

With (iii) out of the option, I decided to try some beer. Now not having sugary fizz water on my tongue for close to two weeks, the beer, instead of tasting like paint thinner, actually had a taste to it.

So, in the end, a minor discovery was made. Some beer has a satisfying taste. This beer had a full-bodied taste and it tasted good and felt good going down the hatch.

But as for the quenching capacity, beer still doesn't do as much [IMO] as water. Water is better. However, I'd imagine that a lot of beer drinking is not done for reasons that are strictly thirst-related. If I trust the beer commercials, drinking beer surrounds you with beautiful women and gets you invited to hot, trendy parties moreso than being, say, a rather vanilla Evangelical blogger with his own set of faults. [Another note: these parties are probably more interesting than "Bible Study Night at Josh's apartment" or "Another 60 minutes on the treadmill at the health club."]

Resolved: I'll stop looking at beer drinking people with a puzzled look of wonder. I sort of see why, now.

Anyway, enjoy the rest of T-Day, folks!

Press Conference

2005-11-24T13:08:00.000-08:00

Mr David Armstrong thinks he's rather nailed me on a few things. First, he has a picture up, claiming that it is yours truly. Second, he claims that the evidence points to me as author and perpetuator of a fake Dave Armstrong blog. Third, if I understand him correctly, he seems to believe that my narcissism posts refer to him in some sort of implied or exclusively Armstrong-esque sense, and this counts [in his mind] as evidence that I am the author of the fake DA blog.

The problems with these three claims:

(1) The picture is not of me, but a friend of mine.
(2) I had nothing to do with the fake blog in any way.
(3) The narcissism posts were motivated by seeing leftist activists and professional victims in action.

Let's back these claims up:

(1) The picture of somebody else came in a thread back in August. It was rather fun to put up as my friend and I laughed at the possible choices. Of course, that pic was the only real option, but, not having a good enough picture of myself to put up [vanity on my part!], I hoisted my pal's photo, indicating as such in a later thread. BTW, I hate that wallpaper in the background of that photo.

(2) I'll tackle this in parts:

(a) Mr Armstrong makes hay of the following quote from my June 29 "Bored" thread, where I listed some things to do while bored and getting ready to move. One item was this:

*****BEGIN QUOTE*****

(5)Attempt to drum up readership by being much more provocative.

Here's an attempt at provocation by an admitted novice:

Hey Catholics: You're a bunch of Biblically illiterate Romanist idolators!
Hey Reformed Catholics: You're a bunch of psuedointellectuals!
Hey [insert Catholic apologist here]: Get a real job and stop asking for money!
Hey Atheists: Jesus Saves!
Hey PoMo's: Your purported scholarly writings require the same intellectual rigor as does popping bubble wrap!
Hey James White: You're a narcissistic perpetual victim whose favorite topic is himself! In that regards, you're like Dave Armstrong!
Hey Eric Svendsen: You're a radical sectarian gnostic!
Hey New Yorker: Jets suck, Yankees suck, Knicks suck.... [a Peter Griffin reference]

And so the list could go, but, in the end, it just ain't me. I suppose the PP will have to live in its richly deserved obscurity.

*****END QUOTE*****

Armstrong seems contextually immune here. I was saying things to people that, were I to play provocateur, would certainly get their dander up. For example, I don't consider Svendsen a radical sectarian gnostic, but calling him such would certainly be provocative! Ditto for White. I don't know the man, but I know he's not fond of Mr Armstrong, so this would be how I'd provoke them. I could've used Sippo or Enloe or any other of Dr White's various demons. Armstrong was just the name that came out.

Note that Armstrong leaves out the bolded sentences at the end of the quote, in which I state that "it just ain't me." He seems to be taking it seriously. You'd think the Family Guy reference would make it clear that the whole thing is a not-too-serious what-if scenario.

(b) Mr Armstrong invokes my threads on narcissism. I'm not sure how to prove that my state of mind was X and not Y when writing such things, other than to assert that the follow-up to those threads dealt with leftists and some experiences I've had with them.

What's interesting is that, despite the followup posts on certain leftists and personal experiences, Mr Armstrong wanted to make it about himself, at least, this is what his actions seemed to be from my perspective. This seems to fit right into the narcissism mold described. So, in retrospect, I suppose Mr Armstrong could've been in mind for those threads. I never responded to him because I felt that such a response would be futile, given his propensity to make it all about him. Mr Armstrong's problems are with various comment-makers on the thread --- I never said anything to him. He can take it up with them.

Question: is there perhaps a reason why several people consider Mr Armstrong to fit my generic narcissism profile? Could it possibly be because of the comments that he made there --- turning it into something about him --- reflect what some would consider a regular behavior trait of his?

Question: would this not make some think you're narcissistic when you consider yourself so important that you expect somebody to answer your every charge whenever you make them?

For Mr Armstrong to use the quotes of others as evidence of what I'm thinking is not evidence, but grasping for straws. [EDIT: To be sure, I've long since considered him quite narcissistic, but he wasn't the person, or, more accurately, the type of person I had in mind when doing those threads.]

(c) As for my Pedantic Papist schtick a few weeks back, here's what Armstrong said:

I found PP impersonating what he thinks is a typical apologist-type Catholic and his arguments in defense of Catholicism, in a series of wacko posts designed to make what he felt was serious commentray on Catholic deficiencies.

Armstrong somehow missed the paragraph of mine in the thread explaining the schtick that stated:

What was the point of the whole Pedantic Papist schtick? The answer was merely to have some pointed fun by creating an amalgamation of some of the more obnoxious internet RC's that I've seen. Oh, I suppose getting Diane's goat was a secondary goal too. But, if she knows me as well as she thinks, she already knew that.

An anonymous commentator below made the claim that I was demeaning Catholics. In one sense, the schtick was over the top, but, in an example of art imitating life, the spirit or gist of the arguments that I was using tongue-in-cheek have been put forth to me with a straight face by real, living, breathing Roman Catholics.

Note the phrase "an amalgamation of some of the more obnoxious internet RC's that I've seen." This is not the same as "a typical apologist-type Catholic and his arguments in defense of Catholicism" as Armstrong states.

Somehow, a Protestant blog having a bit of comic relief at some really bad RC arguments counts as evidence towards the thesis that I was the fake Armstrong. That is quite the stretch!

(d) Let me understand Armstrong's use of evidence:

I make up a temporary hoax blog making fun of leftists and progressives

THEREFORE

This counts as evidence that I'm the culprit.

This is hardly compelling, obviously. Or, as another deduction:

The fake Armstrong blog had the same template as Prog Christian

THEREFORE

This counts for evidence that I'm the culprit.

This is not elementary, my dear Watson. If I remember correctly, when you go to change your blog template, the "dots" template is the first template on the upper left corner of the template screen. I changed to the "Dots" template from a black PP-like template when starting Prog Christian. Also, going on memory, I think the Dots template is right near the top of templates when starting a new blog, so it is not great rare event of note that somebody chooses "Dots" when it is right near the top.

I suppose in the end, if Armstrong wants to play the victim and keep accusing me of doing the DA hoax blog, he will continue to do so. But he does so without real evidence and in light of the fact that I know, others know, and God knows that I had nothing to do with that blog. Sorry, Mr Armstrong, you're barking up the wrong tree here.

BTW --- I don't know anything nor do I have any clues about who did it, either.

(3) Here, if Armstrong wants to identify with the narcissism profile in the threads or think that I'm talking about him, that is is prerogative. It unintentionally, in a retroactive sense, makes the threads about him in part, even though I was thinking of leftists.

In the end, Armstrong has no real evidence; what he does have is a bunch of non-evidential pieces. But a load of bad evidence or non-evidence evidence doesn't add up to much of the case, especially since I can say with God as my witness that it wasn't me. If Mr Armstrong wants to put up a photo of a friend of mine, claim it is me [that might insult the friend!], and make rather serious false accusations based on the most tenuous of hand-picked coincidences, well, that's his prerogative too.

Anyway, to all readers and such, happy Turkey Day. To all those watching what you eat, remember that [and I need to tell myself this too] five minutes of eating pleasure are not worth the hours of feeling as if you've "blown it" or having to run that extra hour on the treadmill, so keep up the good fight!

Thanksgiving Turk

2005-11-23T21:52:00.000-08:00

Frank Turk, of Centuri0n fame, has apparently drawn the ire of some people. I'm referring to the Internet Monk and [I believe] various members of the Boar's Head Tavern outfit.

Check out the link and the comments. I find it rather interesting, for whatever reason.

Some brief editorial:

(1) The comment by Phil Johnson of Pyromaniac fame regarding one facet of the pomo mindset merits a hearty amen from this corner. His comment is somewhere down the list there.

(2) It seems to be the case that calling somebody "Truly Reformed" at the BHT seems to be some sort of derogatory slur or a label that is used to do the heavy lifting of an actual argument, much in the same fashion that leftists use the terms "racist" and "sexist" etc as proxies for an actual argument.

Here's an interesting fact: I'm not Reformed, let alone "Truly Reformed," though I have the same sensibilities as does a Turk, Hays, Engwer, Svendsen, White, etc. I have the same sensibilities as does any conservative Evangelical with a high classical view of scripture. For all of the purported bullishness and alleged polemicizing in which these fellows have engaged, I have never had my fur rubbed the wrong way by any of them, and, coming from an orthodox Lutheran background, there's plenty of fur to be rubbed the wrong way by the likes of a Hays or Turk or Svendsen.
But we seem to be at relative peace...condition green as they'd say.

And another point: what's wrong with being "Truly Reformed" anyway? Is it more cool to say you're Reformed but hold to [say] a Barthian view of scripture? Do you get a discount on your latte for saying "We need to incorporate the decline of modernism into our studies" ? Etc. If the Reformed folks are right --- a fact I'm not entirely sure of btw --- one should be "Truly Reformed."

(3) No matter how informal the conversation between adults, bad theology is bad theology. Adding a bunch of cutesy snark to bad theology may make the bad theology entertaining reading, but it is still bad theology. If people want to put up bad theology, that's their right, but they shouldn't act like narcissistic victims if somebody calls them on it.

BTW --- full disclosure --- I've never had any interaction with IMonk or the BHT crowd. This is based on their reaction to what seems like an in-bounds post by the Turkoman.

(4) I get the feeling that orthodoxy is viewed as boring. A high and inerrant view of scripture is considered yesterday's news. It seems much more fashionable to see how much of orthodoxy one can deny and still be considered conservative; it is almost a game now to see how much of scriptural inerrancy and authority can be denied while still allowing one's self to be considered a full Evangelical. This is just an impression for now, perhaps it is wrong.

(5) On a different but Turk-ish note, I note that, whereas the PP Coffee Mug, the PP hooded sweatshirt, and the PP mousepad exist noncorporeally but in a different plane of being, the Turkoman appears to have quite the array of Turkish Delights out there.

(a) I can imagine carrying organic vegetables around in my Centuri0n tote bag to the next love-in or protest.

(b) I don't know what it is, but seeing an Evangelical chick in a "female minion" shirt just might make the heart beat a little faster.

(c) In an odd twist of pricing, the stoner-black Centuri0n tee-shirt is pricier than the Centuri0n polo shirt.

What should Frank add to the inventory of fine Centuri0n gear?

(i) The Centuri0n thong. For the, ah, shall we say, more provocative female blog-readers who want to show it off...

(ii) Frank could put his picture in concentric circles and sell it to the BHT as the Centuri0n dartboard.

(iii) Or, couldn't one market Centuri0n tp. Then his foes can have the satisfaction once or twice a day [if they're healthy] of claiming to....oh never mind, I can't say it in politic fashion.

Views on Scripture

2005-11-23T14:52:00.000-08:00

Somebody asked a while back what my views on scripture happened to be. This is something I was going to address [briefly] anyway, so I'll take this little 20-minute work break to hammer out an answer.

(1) The OT and NT writings are divinely inspired. Paul, for example, wrote [say] Romans in the normal course of affairs, but the Holy Spirit was working through Paul in a manner such that Paul felt perfectly natural while writing the epistle. Whether Paul was aware of the agency of the HS is unknown. The end product is something that is normative.

(2) I hold to all of the traditional authorship and unity claims. Examples:

(a) I hold to the essential Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, allowing for what appear to be obvious later editions. Frankly, I find the documentary and fragmentary hypotheses to be not very-well founded and more driven by naturalistic assumption than be actual evidence.
(b) There was but one Isaiah. No deutero- or trito-Isaiahs in my book.
(c) I hold to the conservative dating of Daniel.
(d) My hobby horse is the fourth gospel. I think John bar-Zebedee's authorship is the best explanation.
(e) All of the epistles claiming that they were written by Paul are authentically Pauline. Of course I allow for the possibility of an amaneuensis [Tertius, say].

(3) I don't have much patience for people who want some of the Bible or certain parts of the Bible and resort to ever-more general philosophizing to get rid of those parts that inconvenience the modern mind.

(4) I chuckle when various internet pseudointellectuals out there talk about hermeneutics and epistemology when they can't even show a rudimentary ability to exegete scripture.

(5) Anytime somebody turns to philosophy when discussing scripture, I take that as their saying "I concede the argument to you."

Now philosophy is a good thing. I have two publications in high-level philosophy venues, which is two more publications than most of the poseurs and pseudointellectuals have on the internet. I've also written a pretty thick grad-level textbook in a top publishing line as well as authored/coauthored 5-6 other published papers in a hard mathematical science, so I'm used to academics. So nobody should accuse me of obscurantism.

But if we're talking about Christian revelation, then the place to go is to scripture, not somebody's philosophical musings. I have my own set of speculations about things for which there is not much info: heaven, hell, the Trinity, etc. But one should not be so arrogant to put these musings on par with those things that God has revealed to us.

(6) Any sort of Christianity that diminishes the centrality of scripture and its normative authority is, at best, a very dangerous Christianity, and, at worst, is a humanistic fraud.

(7) Regarding inerrancy: I subscribe to the Chicago Statement unapologetically. But modernism has so taken its hold in the Church-at-large that to say so invokes certain cries of "fundie!" or "philosophical backwater!" from those who fancy themselves to be our intellectual lights. So be it. I make my stand [for whatever that is worth] with the Chicago Statement.

BTW --- I didn't read the Chicago Statement one day and then decide that, like a woman's handbag or shoes, the CS went well with my idiom. I affirm the CS because it states what I have, for most of my Christian life [11 years or so] naturally held from my own independent thinking and study of scripture. In other words, CS just put my thoughts into writing.

But of course there are problems in scripture. There are a few places where it is hard to see just how, say, two accounts can be reconciled.

But, I treat scripture as any other historical document when it comes to putting things together. There is enough capital built up to where, if I dont see how things piece together, I give scripture the benefit of the doubt and conclude that it is not wise to be dogmatic. The skeptics make good points from time to time. So do conservatives. I have not seen anything yet that seems so unharmonious as to where the burden of proof lies on our conservative side of the fence.

In short, all of these enumerated points are held by the author without any dissonance. Now various statements within scripture make me scratch my head at times, but statements about scripture don't make me scratch my head.

It's a pretty simple affair unless you're a pseudointellectual who is trying to prove something to himself by being a contrarian with views that would make uncritical readers say "That's deep, man."

The Heavyweight Champion of the World Washed My Car

2005-11-22T16:37:00.000-08:00

One of the advantages of being semi-pseudonymous is that I can say things such as "I still watch pro wrestling" without fear of reprisal by those who think that thirtysomethings should be into more "mature" things, such as the Food Network or the Home and Garden Television Channel, let alone the CNBC channel with the stock ticker at the bottom of the page.

I grew up watching pro wrestling. I enjoy the spectacle, the pageantry, the bread-and-circuses atmosphere. Even though it is all fake, the moves are real, the bumps are pretty vicious at times, and the feuds/storylines/angles are still fun to watch. Think "male soap opera." At the risk of creating dissonance in the reader's mind, I used to study Greek and read my Greek NT while watching pro wrestling, so if I ever make a blunder relative to the Greek, perhaps there was some exciting move that pulled my attention from the sacred page to the TV screen.

Anyway...there's a local indy wrestling federation that my friend videotapes from one of the community cable channels. We've watched his tapes for about 3-4 years, and we mark out and pop to the wrestling just like it is '85 again, even though it is completely low-budget stuff.

We tried this last September to hit a live show, but we didn't arrive early enough, and the small warehouse ["arena"] where the wrestling fed holds its live shows was filled with 100 people or so, so I couldn't get in to watch the action. Oh well.

However, I noticed a few months later that the wrestling fed needed some money to pay some rent for the arena [read: "warehouse"] and, to boot, they were having a car wash in a parking lot not too far from where I reside. [Pro wrestlers don't hold bake sales; washing cars is more in line with the idiom.] At the same time, it wouldn't be right to say my car was dirty; it would be more accurate to say that my dirt was car-ish, so the car needed a washing. Apparently some of the wrestlers would be washing cars [remember this is a small indy fed, not the WWE or TNA], so, what the heck....why not?

It turns out that I got there about fifteen minutes after the car wash started. I was the first customer. Alas, there was a problem with one of the hoses, and one of the wrestlers had to get some other hoses, which meant a 90 minute trip for him to pick up more equipment.

As a result, I got to talk for about 90 mintes with one of the legends of the fed as well as with the current heavyweight champion. It was a good 90 minutes of talking shop. It was a genuine Norman Rockwell moment --- twenty- and thirty-something guys hanging out in a parking lot talking about wrestling past, present, and future. I got to ask about where my favorite wrestlers were, what happened to them, etc. I got to ask them how they felt the day after a 30+ minute barbed wire match. I learned how to take a steel chair on the head properly. We talked about wrestling camps and training schools. It was a good conversation.

Well, the hoses arrived some time later, and the 4- [or is it 5- ?] time former heavyweight champ of the fed as well as the current champ of the fed [who takes some of nastiest bumps I've ever seen] washed my car. How many people can say that the heavyweight champs of the world [past and present] washed their car?! Not many, I daresay.

Anyway, I told the Daveman about the car wash, so he marked out and had to get his car washed too. So, we took his car to the car wash, and his car got washed by one of his favorite wrestlers in the fed, a rather athletic high-flying sort of wrestler who can do incredible flips and crazy moves off of the turnbuckles and ropes.

This would've been good enough. But, I was invited to watch a live taping that same night for their two weekly shows. Now I've never been "behind the scenes" relative to wrestling, so it sounded like a hoot. What was I going to do, go out again with another ditzy supermodel? No...a man needs his space. He needs his wrestling.

Well, I ran my 7.5 mile route, lifted, got a salad at Wendy's with Dave, and then headed over to the taping. I watched them plan angles and determine how the matches would end. I talked in appreciable detail to most of the wrestlers in the fed. All of them were pretty nice and social and I complimented them on their crazy stunts, expressing a bit of remorse that they get the $&!^$* beaten out of them for my entertainment, whereas I do nothing but watch from the Barca-lounger. But, they love wrestling.

[BTW --- unless you're a big-name wrestler in a big-name fed, it is one hardscrabble life. Nothing romantic about it. Makes minor-league baseball look like a dream job.]

Dave and I got to go in the ring and see what it was like. There are apparently two types of wrestling rings: the ring that is real [and hurts when you're slammed into it even if you fall properly], and what is called a "training ring" where the floor of the ring has a lot more spring and give. This ring was a training ring, but I wouldn't want to get slammed, suplexed, powerbombed, chokeslammed, piledriven, tombstoned, etc on that canvas anyway. I did ask the 300 lb guy if he could powerbomb Dave in the ring, or, even better, on the concrete, but for whatever reason Dave just didn't seem hip to that idea.

About 10pm or so, their 300 lb behemoth had a match with the reigning champion, and the 300lb guy powerbombed the champ so hard into the canvas of the ring that one of the metal supports of the ring bent and another metal beam actually fatigued and had a tear in it, and the right side of the ring collapsed. File that in "I've never seen that." It was the hardest powerbomb I've ever seen. Even the other wrestlers were marking out to the fact that the powerbomb broke the ring. [I wonder how they'll fix it, or how much it costs, etc. Can't be cheap...] This is the wrestling equivalent of a basketball player dunking and shattering the backboard --- everybody pops and goes nuts 'cuz you don't see it that often.

One of the funny things is that, watching the shows on my pal's VCR made me believe that many of the wrestlers in that show didn't have to act like they were crazy --- they were genuinely crazy in real life. [Anybody who wants to be a pro wrestler with the pain and very low pay is somewhat crazy in my book.] But, being the mark that I was, they were all pretty nice without exception. They can turn the crazy-man persona on and off like a switch.

I had this great angle that I wanted to suggest to the guy who runs the fed, but I forgot what it was, and drove myself crazy. I remember Dave and I laughing at the angle when I first suggested it during a game of tennis. But we can't remember it. We were going to let them use the angle if they thought it was good or funny.

The problem with going behind the scenes is that it de-romanticizes wrestling to a certain degree. Back in '86 or so when I first realized that, no, pro wrestling is not real, that killed much of the excitement for a few years. But as I got older, I just enjoyed the spectacle and athleticism of grown men in tights beating the stuffing out of each other. I loved the feuds, the angles, etc. When you only know the wrestlers as they appear on TV, they seem much more believable. But when you meet them in person and you realize that they're not so big, or, that they're real people, etc, it is harder to suspend your disbelief when watching, say, Zombie Man take on his hated rival The Krushmaster, when you know that Zombie Man's name is Carl, he works construction during the week, and The Krushmaster is Richard, and he and Zombie Man were football teammates and are best friends in real life. It just makes seeing Krushmaster's slamming ZM on a ladder and then ramming his head into the ring post just a little less believable. The disillusionment isn't as drastic as when Neo takes the red pill from Morpheus, but it does kill a bit of the romance.

[BTW --- the wrestlers I spoke with there said that, being in the biz, a lot of the romance of wrestling died with them as well. When they watch the big name feds, they don't get into the storylines, but instead note that Wrestler X made some technical errors in that Irish Whip, or that Wrestler Y didn't take the bump properly.]

All in all, the day was a completely impromptu blast, and, just as nice, my car is clean. The heavyweight champ really got the hubcaps shiny too.

Anatomy of a Mediocre-at-Best Blog Hoax

2005-11-21T23:37:00.000-08:00

Rumor has it --- confirmed through third-hand verification of fourth-hand exchanges of hypotheses --- that the Progressive Christian is a hoax site done for furthering my loopy-at-times sense of schtick and humor.

The rumors are completely correct, as are many rumors. I am the Progressive Christian, or, more accurately, I'm the guy who puts forth the affectations of a fruitcake leftist who drags Jesus into the mix to justify his goofy ideological statements.

I've deliberately made the posts at PC cornier and more over-the-top in their nuttiness, which has made it clear that PC is not a serious individual, but is, as are many sites, a hoax site designed for the amusement of a handful of people. As a result, no comments have been coming in there the last few posts, so nobody is taking the site seriously.

This is probably a wise move on their part.

The problem with doing a lot of leftist and "prog" schtick is that much of leftist and progressive ideology is, in my opinion, already a self-parody of itself. One might think that this would make the hoax less obvious, but the problem with too perfect a parody is that normal, rational people who are bound by the semantic range of words and, say, the law of the excluded middle, quickly grow tired of conversing or interacting with somebody who doesn't give words any meaning and freely contradicts himself from one sentence to the next without even a crimson hue appearing in his cheek.

But in the early days --- a few weeks ago at most --- there was some fun to be had. [And, trust me, I almost spit out my soda or water half the time while laughing during writing those silly PC posts.]

The first post was called Greetings and the content of the post was as follows:

I have gotten really tired of fundamentalist and logocentrist "Christians" acting as if they have sole access to the truth. This blog exists to put forth the real teachings of Jesus, and Krishna, and Mohammed, and Buddha, and all of the other great teachers.

Fundamentalism is a threat to our tolerant and open society. And, as it will be seen, I will be intolerant towards Fundamentalists. There is no contradiction embodied in this. But even if there is, I'm not going to be logocentric.

Note of course the self-stultifying m.o. in the first paragraph. Observe the mere handwaving accompanying the self-stultifying in the second paragraph, the handwaving being "justified" by throwing around the term "logocentric." Intellectuals like that word, for whatever reason.

This sort of silliness at first drew a few earnest commentators. Poor Ken Abbott was the biggest mark, and to be sure I use the term "mark" in the sense that he seemed to take the site seriously. I'd bet the farm he knew after a while that the site was somebody's being very, very, silly. So Ken, wherever you are, I hope you take this as a "laughing with you" and not a "laughing at you" sort of statement.

Ken originally asked: If I understand you correctly, you're going to blog, but you're not going to be concerned about words or language...?

This is a perfectly reasonable question, of course. But PC replied: I'm concerned with tolerance and following Jesus's desire for social justice.

I don't recall Jesus requiring that we act like latent logocentric oppressors. Words and language are useful only as they promote equality, love, and social justice.

Note the entire dodging of Ken's question. It was mere posing, affecting a cool, hip, trendy "thing" and running with it. HAHAHAHA.

Poor Ken, blindsided by PC's immunity to reason, presses on: How do you define "tolerance"? Was Jesus' desire for social justice what got him killed?
Please unpack the phrase "latent logocentric oppressors" for me.

Again, Ken is completely reasonable. What is tolerance? [I ask this to liberals, leftists, etc, and never get much of a workable answer.] What in the world does "latent logocentric oppressor" mean? Who knows? The words sounded good when strung together, so it was easy to type them while emitting audible guffaws. Anyway, PC replied with another silly collection of drivel:

Ken --- you need to take the phrase as a whole and stop worrying about individual words.

As for Jesus, his early career was brought to a tragic end by the right wing factions amongst "organized religion."

Another non-answer by PC! Such a surprise. Now it is true that a word's semantic range is partially determined by context and the surrounding words, so PC's statement, taken innocently, are not damnable. But of course, PC's statement is uttered with this aire of sheer arrogance and condescension so that, functionally speaking, PC gives Ken another blowoff, the polite scholarly version of yelling Up yours! like some New York cabbie. Of course, PC just had to bring right-wing folks and "organized religion" [complete with the melodramatic and the completely useless scare quotes] into the mix for a stunning display of the non sequitur techique!

Ken is now thrown for a loop. He's probably thinking "What a nutball" about PC, but, in charity, he then asks the following:

Okay, then, what's the whole phrase mean? Pardon my ignorance--I'm just trying to follow the conversation.

Why did the "right wing factions amongst 'organized religion'" bring about Jesus' death?

Again, completely reasonable questions. He had more patience than I do in real life!
You'd think that the Progressive Christian, that man of God who embodies all that is progressive and tolerant, would have a substantive answer. You'd be thinking incorrectly, dear readers, for PC issues more boilerplate material:

Modern scholarship has conclusively shown such a thing. We have to read between the lines and perform a structural analysis to see this. A "straight" reading of the text [as fundamentalists do] won't show this, which is why they're completely misled.

I believe this answers your question.

The inspiration for this completely unsubstantiated reply comes from the fact that in my own discussions with people, the things in the text they don't like are "inauthentic" or discussed with the prefacing word-formula "Modern scholarship has shown that ....." which is then followed by some liberal statement that has nothing to go for it other than assumption: "Modern scholarship has shown that 8% of what Jesus is recorded as saying is authentic." Or, for another one, "Modern scholarship has shown that epistle X is not authentically Pauline." Etc.

I'm proud of the dig on fundies and the "straight reading." Of course, the statement itself denigrating "plain reading" is understood by a "plain reading." No self-stultification there. Uh huh. Perhaps PC was speaking that way to condescend to fundies.

Ken then states: No, it doesn't. Neither question was answered.

Of course, Ken is, once again, completely correct. Ken asks good questions, and PC responds with random piles of arrogant, condescending, scholarly b.s.

Then somebody named Kim joins the party. [At least it was a party for me. I'm not sure about Ken, though.]

Two questions:
If you are a "Christian" but you don't use the text of the Bible, then where do you get your direction? A Christian is a follower of Christ and the last time I checked, the life and teachings of Christ are in the Biblical texts.
If you describe yourself as "tolerant" why do you express yourself as so "intolerant" of the evangelical (or as you call them fundamentalist) Christians?
I find your blog to be highly contradictive.
BTW, the last time I checked, the DaVinci Code is listed as a work of fiction not as a historical novel.

Hee hee, more good questions. Of course, without the Biblical texts or some sort of special relevation, one is playing paint-by-numbers with Christianity. And, of course, how can somebody who prides himself in tolerance [whatever that means!] be so intolerant? Doesn't that make the promoter of tolerance a hypocrite? Sure does! But what's a little contradiction or two to stop the Progressive Christian? He responds in turn:

Kim, I believe I have fully deconstructed your questions in a new post at this blog. Please check there.

Ken, I showed some of my friends in critical theory your questions and my answers and we all agreed that I answered them.

To be honest, I'm not sure what thread at PC was meant to respond to Kim. They're all so full of drivel, it is hard to remember which one was meant to perpetuate the hoax. I think the link gives the right one though.

Note the little shot across Ken's bow. Critical theory --- HAHAHAHAHA --- and "my friends in critical theory" --- HEE HEE HEE --- are all comic props for this little hoax. Had to keep Ken on the hook....

Ken was still on the hook, for he replied:

Well, I showed some of my friends who speak the English language my questions and your "answers," and they agree that indeed you did not answer my questions.

On the retort scale, throwing out the West German judge's low score of 5.4 and eliminating the Argentianian judge's high score of 5.9, Ken averages a 5.7 [out of a perfect 6.0] on the retort scale. Good one, Ken!

But of course, illogic --- especially the illogic manifested by PC --- cannot be stopped:

Well, you have your truth, and I have my truth. But my truth is more true than your truth.

The first sentence is a real life living, breathing, quote I have heard more than once from university goofballs over the years as well as various people who consider the embracing of blatant contradiction to be a sign of liberation, freedom, etc. Note that PC, after relativizing truth, takes a decidedly absolutist turn with the second sentence.

Ken then asks: Says who? to the previous comment. This is the natural, logical reply, obviously.

PC's next reply is a bit of an over-reach. See if you can spot the tactical error that destroys his credibility as a serious blogger:

The people at my organic produce co-op, that's who. Anybody with a brain. Anybody who believes in tolerance and inclusiveness.

Need I go on?

In retrospect, the whole organic produce co-op thing was a case of too-much-too-soon. Too stereotypical --- and I've frequented organic produce co-ops enough to say that it is NOT a caricature!!

PC probably shot himself in the foot by mentioning his co-op, but the rest of the post is a gem: more question-begging and condescension-as-argument. Just like the leftists!

Ken may very well be playing along with PC at this stage, sort of the way that the crowd at a wrestling show gives the wrestlers a pop or two even though everybody knows that pro wrestling is fake!

So who died and left you the one to make up the rules? Why are "tolerance" (which we have yet to define) and inclusiveness the virtues that trump all others?

Good questions, Ken. I've asked these too, and received in reply gasps and muted sighs as if such questions are not welcome in polite society. Ken's guess is as good as mine.

PC replies to Ken in a fashion to which I've been replied: That you even ask such a question is proof enough of your intolerance.

At this point poor Ken probably realizes he's dealing with a complete and utter loon, and the comments for the thread cease.

Oh, what a ride.

Another thread of note there was one called The Problem with "Christians". Since it is my material ultimately, I can quote the entire idiotic thread here in its entirety. I'll respond to myself --- surely a self-referential feat of flexibility if there ever happened to be one!

The problem with "Christians" is that they think that they're right and others are wrong. This is not acceptable, nor is it polite behavior in our modern enlightened times.

Of course PC thinks he's right in the second sentence.

Today, I had a discussion with one fundamentalist Christian who told me that Jesus was God. My response was "I'm glad Jesus is God for you." This should have been good enough to drive away this uneducated cretin. However, the cretin then said "He's God for you too."

I don't think I have to rebut this sort of silly "logic." In fact, I won't. It suffices merely to say that just because he thinks that Jesus is God for him doesn't mean that Jesus is God for other people.

HAHAHAHAHAHA. Note the absolute statement in the last sentence. Just because HE thinks X doesn't mean that X is true for all people. PC is arrogating to himself the right to make an absolute statement here but denying the silly fundie's potential to play the absolute-truth game. The waiter has just brought you a plate full of petitioning the principle!

The fundamentalist then countered with the statement "But certain truths are universal."

Wow those fundamentalists are stupid! Them rednecks and their universal truths!

Again, I don't think I have to rebut this sort of silly "logic." In fact, any one of my former Womyn's Studies professors would laugh at this blatant logocentrism. This isn't how educated products of our universities are supposed to think.

I may sound intolerant to say that I find fundamentalists uneducated and not very bright, but sometimes you have to use a justifiable amount of intolerance to fight for tolerance.

C'mon...don't I get point for the spelling "womyn" ? Surely, if you hate me, you must at least give me parody props for this. I've seen elite academics use this spelling, btw. The rest of the snippet is just more "Fundies are hicks" rhetoric.

By saying "Jesus is God," the fundamentalist was dividing people into two camps. One camp might agree with the statement, and another camp would disagree. For example, my environmentalist friends would disagree with the statement. Jesus wouldn't want this sort of divisiveness. Only fundamentalists want this sort of divisiveness.

More unsubstantiated statements. CS Lewis remarked that writing the Screwtape Letters rather ground him down. On the other hand, writing PC posts really picked the mood up, for such posts are easy: type in a lot of feel-good pseudointellectual drivel, hope for a few marks, respond with equal amounts of the aforementioned drivel, repeat, etc.

On a side note, somebody recommended a poster named Sam Hays as a barometer of what fundamentalist thought is out there. I read his "review" of Star Wars. I wonder if we're watching the same film. I for one was appalled at the dearth of people of color and other underepresented people in the film. And, I happen to think that only bad people deal with absolutes. The fact that this reviewer didn't like that statement says a lot about his intolerance. I would advise him (he probably won't listen since he thinks he's right) to perhaps particapate in some sensitivity seminars. Another thing about the film is that it still acted as if light and dark were in opposition rather than 2 sides of the same coin.

Comments here: (i) I deliberately erred by writing "Sam" for "Steve." (ii) Note the intrusion of racial bean-counting into something completely unrelated. (iii) The magic word "tolerance," which PC seems to invoke as if it were the name of Jesus Himself, is also sprinkled in there. (iv) The sensitivity seminars are real features of universities and even the business world, alas. (v) The statement about light and dark, in retrospect, was too boilerplate given all of the other garbage that PC had written.

For more guffaws, check out the comment threads. I'll pull some comments and replies by both marks and the Progressive Christian.

Lindsey asks: Ok, I'll start right out by saying that I'm a Christian. You can see that very easily by looking at my blog. Let me just ask you one question: are right and wrongs absolutes, or relatives?

Good question. Too bad PC spews forth more drivel in reply:

Lindsey ---

Rights and wrongs are what I call "relative absolutes." They're possibly absolute for the person who says something is right or wrong, but their definitely relative for other people who may not agree.

I believe I'm being perfectly clear.

I find at least two self-stultifications going on here. If I try to understand my own words, I get a headache. Of course I was being anything but clear.

But Lindsey presses on:

So you are saying that, for me, right and wrong can be absolutes, but for you they can be relatives? Then there is no such thing as truth. Then there is no law, no order. Then policemen and government and everything that enforces law is, according to your logic, intolerant; after all, they are ENFORCING thier 'view' of 'right' or 'wrong' on US! In your world, there would be utter chaos. You see, Hitler considered murdering millions 'right'. You're saying that it's allright for him to do that, because who is to define what 'right' or 'wrong' is anyway? Right and wrong are real aspects of daily life, not abstract concepts! And if you don't believe they exist, try imagining a world without them... and then think again.

She dares ask PC to think! The nerve of today's women. [Shouldn't they be making me breakfast and doing my laundry?] They challenge a fraud such as the PC. But he's up to the challenge with all of the flair that accompanies his, dare we say, idiom:

Ah Lindsey, you're being so logocentric. You talk about "truth" as if it is some arid, dead proposition. I live it [my truth, not yours, to be sure] every time I tend my organic vegetable garden or recycle some cans of Hansen's natural soda.

I don't see why you bring up Hitler. He was a right wing guy. He went too far with the Jews, even though they're rotten oppressors of the Palestinians. But, if this is the best you have, keep firing away.

But again, that's my truth. Your truth might be different. Jesus would celebrate all truths. That is possibly yet absolutely true in an indefinite sort of contingent fashion.

I think at this stage, this pile of rubbish deserves no comment. BTW --- I'm rather proud of myself for indefatigably coming up with this crap in stream-of-consciousness fashion. The level of pride is somewhere between the pride in being able to walk and chew gum simultaneously and the pride that comes from tying my own shoes.

Lindsey presses on. More good questions. But PC is always ready with a non-answer answer and an affected pose:

Lindsey, you're beginning to border on hate speech, and hate speech is not tolerated here.

Sometimes you have to be intolerant in fighting intolerance so that tolerance can prevail, otherwise being tolerant to intolerance allows intolerance to continue to be intolerant. That should be clear.

As far as the Jesus "quote" you give, I believe real scholarship has shown that that is not one of the "authentic" sayings of Jesus. Critical feminist theology has shown through form criticism and post-structural analysis that statements from Jesus that portray him as anything more than a great teacher or as something unique are later historical additions by the early church. This is because (probably) the early church was trying to be relevant and assertive.

On the other hand "Judge not" is considered authentic. I advise that you follow that.

I'm very proud of this "reply" obviously. :-)

BTW --- anybody who uses the "Judge not" quote of Our Lord gets the following questions from me in real life:

(a) To whom is Jesus saying this?
(b) What is the surrounding context?
(c) What sort of judging here is condemned?

Of course, people who can answer (a)-(c) aren't stupid enough to throw around "judge not lest ye be judged" as if this is their ticket to "Go" and $200 whenever they see something they don't like.

Lindsey --- this is too good to be true --- apologizes for the possible offense. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I did not border on hate speech. But I apologize for offending you. I did not mean to give the impression that I was judging you. I was merely debating and asking questions.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. HO HO HO. HEE HEE HEE. A PP hooded sweatshirt is on its way to Lindsey for her indefatigable spirit and her superior degree of niceness. Hopefully she'll laugh at the joke too. If not, I'll have to surround myself with guys named Biff and Rocko for a while; such gentlemen carry around violin cases, if you know what I mean.

On a serious note, many in the Left try to put us on the defensive. I have to prove that I'm not racist, sexist, homophobic, nonecosustainable, etc. I simply refuse to play that game, and, I will not let somebody wax victimological around me.

Another ~~highlight~~ lowlight of the PC blog include the post titled Let's Get Modern wherein I uncritically spout Jesus Seminar goofiness.

By this time, I had exhausted any sort of goodwill with anybody who posted there. And, of course, this is quite natural, for the Progressive Christian persona is that of a frothing idiot with real issues and insecurities through which he needs to seriously work.

To try to lure more flies in the flypaper, I tried what even then I knew to be a strategy of desperation: starting a mini-feud between the Pedantic Protestant [he's my hero] and PC. The problem is that this is rather obvious or forward.

(i) Why, out of all the goofball lefty blogs out there, would PP pick on PC's blog as compared to some other blog?

(ii) Hmmmm....anybody notice that the posting times for some PP and PC entries are really close to each other, as if it was one guy going from blog to blog on his break or little 10-minute surfing forays on the internet?

Of course, this assumes that anybody cares. That is a most questionable assumption.

The fact is, a few NTRMin folks did care: a very small thread was devoted to discussing briefly whether PC was a hoax or serious. Good ol' Ken of course by then knows the site is a fraud and a marginal excuse [at best] for somebody's humor.

This thread is ridiculously long, and, so I hope, not too self-congratulatory. But, I must mention [it is MY blog after all] the thread of which I am the proudest for the most idiotic parody-but-it-is-really-true post: My Vagina, Your Vagina. Most everything said in that spoof post [but the play is completely real] comes from (i) what I've seen intellectuals saying about the play, (ii) some flyers at my old university that asked really silly questions about vaginas to "stimulate discussion" regarding the play, and (iii) some far-left literature that I don't have access too presently.

[Editorial: The thing about this sort of stuff is that while sexuality is, like anything else, something that can be used for good and for ill, modern life throws it in your face. Sex is everywhere --- radio, TV, internet. (Let's not discuss the unsolicited copious porno spam that ends up in many an inbox, please.) People are naturally "horny," but now we've made horniness something for scholarly and intellectual discussion. Something that should be kept in the bedroom is now in your face 24/7. This would make a good separate thread someday...]

It was heartbreaking to see that post, which took all of five minutes to type, elicit no comments. That's when I realized that the jig was up. Game over, man.

Another stupid post on organized religion followed, and nobody wanted PC's snake oil. Ken had hit the ol' dusty trail by the 50th invocation of the word logocentrist. Lindsey was reduced to apologetic rubble after I accused her of hate speech. PC, in the end, had no friends to make his blog feel like home; he only had his own self-righteous musings. :-(

Well, with PC at death's door, he may as well go out with a bang. To do this, I came up with a post called The Final Solution where I call for the rounding up of "fundies." Complete parody of the Third Reich [obvious by the title of the thread, methinks]. And, in a most fitting tribute to the Left, I adapt the closing quote of Marx's Communist Manifesto. They make a fitting epitaph to the Progressive Christian, the thinker who described himself as "tolerant, open-minded, and not bound by superstitious things like the Bible."

Oh, one more comment to this even more ridiculously long thread: that Progressive Christian's initials were PC [hahahaha] merely happened to work out as a really-funny-after-the-fact coincidence. I'm not that clever...or, if I am, I'm sure not letting anybody know that I'm really that clever.

Recall this post of mine where I coveted the glory of Rev JJ's hoaxiness [is that a word?] much in the way that I totally coveted my friend's Colecovision back in 1983.

In the end, was it worth doing a hoax blog that lacked much of the punch that, say, the "Reverend James Jackson's" Reformed Catholic Pentacostal [sic] blog [see the sidebar here] had?

Probably not.

Will I do something so silly again?

You never know. If I can take a week off and turn Pedantic Protestant into Pedantic Papist, who knows where the oddball humor will strike next?

Perhaps, [cough cough], there is a blog out there [possibly a Roman Catholic blog] that, despite serious appearances, is a hoax? Wouldn't you all be seeing red at that? [That would be rather cruel if people had spent time responding to it, would it not?]

HAHAHAHAHAHA. Don't take the preceding paragraph seriously, please.

Anyway, have a lovely day, and, yes, I am a thirty-something adult male, contrary to the overwhelming evidence provided by this post! :-)

Marking Out to Reformed Rasslin'

2005-11-21T18:28:00.000-08:00

Hello dear readers! I can't post anything of substance today, but I do want to shout out a "hullo" to friend and foe alike.

An interesting post is coming tomorrow. A very interesting post, we believe. Not theological, but this isn't necessarily a theological blog. The post is about pro wrestling, surely an issue of similarly cosmic significance. Other blogs like NTRMin and Triablogue and Reformata, etc, just don't go this deeply into things, which is why the world needs a PP blog or two.

Let that whet your appetite. And imagine me power-bombing annoying Catholic apologists on the concrete, throwing them into the turnbuckle, or pulling a foreign object out of the tights and blindsiding them while Frank Turk and Steve Hays distract the ref! Let's hope the papists don't in turn pull out a steel chair and smash it over my head. [That wouldn't serve ecumenical dialogue and catholicity very well, would it?]

Reds at NEA Cafeteria

2005-11-20T14:33:00.000-08:00

From Bob Novak's column in the Chicago Sun-Times:

********BEGIN SNIPPET********

The District of Columbia cell of the Communist Party USA has been revealed as holding a monthly luncheon in the cafeteria of the National Education Association, without the sponsorship but not with the disapproval of the huge, politically powerful schoolteachers union.

The Communist meetings were reported by Chris Peterson in the Washington City Paper edition of Nov. 11-17. A lawyer attending the September meeting bolted from the cafeteria when he learned a reporter was present.

''We had no knowledge of this,'' NEA spokeswoman Denise Cardinal told this column, ''because the NEA does not screen the patrons of our cafeteria or listen in on conversations. It's open to the public.''

********END SNIPPET********

Does this mean anything? Maybe so. Maybe not. I don't personally see the big deal about it if the NEA spokeswoman is telling the truth.

But it is worth a chuckle for those of us who wouldn't mind seeing the NEA's demise.

Nothing Good To Say

2005-11-19T12:24:00.000-08:00

So I won't say anything for the weekend.

Love for Soda Loses its Fizz, Goes Flat

2005-11-17T18:16:00.000-08:00

File this post under "Lifestyles" or "Narcissism: PP-style." This post has absolutely no theological content, and, doubtless, absolutely no substance. Read only if you're really bored with your life or are in prison trying to pass the time off a 30-year sentence.

Most people have cravings for something, whether it be power, sex, money, the love of others, certain foods, alcohol, etc.

I've never "needed" coffee, tea, booze, power, etc.

My vice, if we ignore hammy and schtickish blog entires, is soda pop. I grew up with it. The fizz is good. The carbonation is even better. I'm in my thirties, and I still get excited to reach into the fridge and pull out a soda.

Now fortunately I have chugged diet soda for the last decade or so. I find non-diet soda to be too sweet for my taste. Diet Coke with Lime has been the drug that gives me my high for the last few years.

Anyway, where is this post going? Well, a friend challenged me to quit soda cold turkey. I should be drinking water instead. And, the friend is correct. She knows of what she speaks. Given that she always saw me with a soda, she thought that, whether it be the caffeine and the sugar, I was mildly addicted to it.

The response: I can quit anytime I want to. Surely, this is the very first time that such a reply has been offered to a charge of addiction.

So, last week, I decided to drink nothing but water for a month. And, I resolved to phase soda pop out of the life.

So, on day 6 of the Great Pedantic Protestant Soda Prohibition [GPPSP], here are some interesting tidbits:

(i) Headaches off and on for the last three days, though today's headache was much more mild and gentle. My body does not appreciate sudden changes in chemistry.

(ii) I gained 10 lbs of water weight in 1.5 days of drinking water and not soda. Now I'm not some huge guy, so that is a lot of weight. The body must have been severly dehydrated.

(iii) In the same respect, I lost 7 lbs of that water in the last two days. BTW --- I ate the same as I had done all of the other days.

(iv) I don't feel thirsty all of the time, but am --- what's the word? --- well-watered. [Hmmm...that makes me sound like a dog or a plant.]

(v) On the other hand, the sleeping schedule has been thrown for a loop. But this could be due to bi-daily workouts at the gym taking their toll after a month too.

(vi) At a friend's place [Dear ol' Dave's place to be exact] on Day 2, I watched DoD chug down a Cherry Coke while I just sat there. Somehow, I didn't cheap-shot DoD and wrest the soda from his hands. Or, to be more civilized, I didn't walk to his fridge and yank out a Cherry Coke of my own. But now I know how the dog feels when it watches humans eat human-food.

The big thing is this: after 5-6 days, while the thought of a soda pop brings the same pleasant anticipatory thoughts as does, say, ravaging a Chinese Buffet with Frank Turk, the urge or craving is mostly gone. Now if God commanded me to down a Cherry Coke for my salvation, I'd certainly do so, but, to tell you the truth, water gets the job done.

The problem is that water is rather boring, vanilla, bland, blase, homebody-ish. Yet it gets the job done. So, after six days, the GPPSP seems to be mostly successful. When the headaches stop completely we'll declare it a raving success. But, what happens when water gets really boring?

Another problem is that everybody I know chugs down the cola. I can relate. Soda pop tastes good, and it has that really nice good burn as it goes down the back of the throat.

But, quoting somebody from the Betty Ford clinic, we just take one day at a time and try to keep busy, and eventually, my almost-dead love for soda pop will finally die, so we hope, a long-deserved death.

Now, I have no idea what it is like for alcoholics. I've never been drunk in my life. I don't even like alcohol, though a wine cooler or a beer is fine at just the right time. [I have no hangups with alcohol, btw. It just isn't my sauce.] Certainly, I'm not wearing week old clothes, rolling in the gutter, with a bottle of Mr Pibb in a brown paper bag. Yet, I'd imagine that for alcoholics who want to kick the sauce, they'd have a much harder time of it.

Oh well, those are today's profound thoughts. Don't let them blow your mind.

Reformata Blog

2005-11-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

C. Ryan Jenkins has put up a new blog, with Paul Helm, Sebastian Heck, Camden Bucey, and Frank Turk [!!] as contributors [I know two of the contributors, have read some material by one other, and don't know anything about Heck nor Bucey], titled Reformata or, for the longer title, Reformata, Semper Reformanda. It looks most excellent so far. And, it apparently has 1000+ daily readers, so my plugging that blog is like the fly trying to make good with the elephant, given that this blog has about 100 or so! The hard part about commending such a blog as Reformata is that it makes this blog look so hack-ish, bush-league, mom-n-pop-ish, etc. It is like the ugly sister pointing the would-be dashing suitor to her homecoming queen and head cheerleader sister.

On a related note, the Epistle of St James is often cited by Roman Catholics as the supreme argument against justification by faith alone. Often we're treated to the contextless quote "A man is not justified by faith alone, but by what he does" accompanied with the smug gotcha! attitude that accompanies a certain portion of internet Romanism.

How does somebody with a high view of scripture reconcile St James and St Paul? Or can they be reconciled? [Perhaps those who argue for the existence of contradictions in scripture are correct.] Or is there some sort of exegetical tension between them that we just have to accept? [I don't agree with this option.] Or perhaps, like some of the more ebullient Romanists I have known, we jettison all of St Paul's statements in favor of one statement of James. Perhaps we have to reinterpret one in terms of the other. Maybe the RC's are correct. Maybe not. Maybe everybody is completely wrong....etc etc etc!!

The solution to this, for myself, has to do the following things:
(i) It must take both Paul and James fully into account, diminishing neither
(ii) It cannot be forced or marked by a sort-of desperate expediency
(iii) It must approach this problem the same way that other exegetical problems are approached.

I've promised Rev. Jenkins for a while that I was going to post a link to a paper of his dealing with this question. Here's the link to his paper. Follow the directions for downloading the Greek and Hebrew fonts so that the Greek words in this paper can appear as they should.

I read through the paper carefully this summer, and, true to form, I've already had a good portion fall through the memory cracks! But this paper, which appeared in the Jan-Mar 2002 BiblioTheca Sacra pp 62-78, does (i)-(iii) above quite nicely, in my opinion. You see sober exegesis, and, even if one disagrees with the assertions that Jenkins makes, one must at least say that he has done his homework on the issue.

You can also find a discussion of this paper in three parts at the Reformata blog. More installments will come, we believe.

Anyway, I believe I have faithfully discharged a long-overdue promise to Rev Jenkins, and now he can withdraw the anathema he pronounced on me!

Self-Stultification, Ahoy!

2005-11-15T17:10:00.000-08:00

It seems that the Progressive Christian --- I note that his acronym is PC --- avoids self-stultifying statements the way that the Titanic avoids icebergs. Or, we could say that PC avoids silly statements the way that Oprah avoids touchy-feely language. Perhaps it would be better to say that PC avoids jibberish the way that flies avoid compost heaps in PC's organic vegetable garden. [Free trade or fair trade veggies? You decide...]

The latest inanity:

Hate speech is anything that offends, hampers, or doesn't fully affirm somebody, their lifestyle, their views, their race, their creed, their sexual orientation, or their religions beliefs.

We need more speech codes in universities and in workplaces so that people can be fully affirmed, and when they are not affirmed, those who are not affirming can be punished. We must make a way for intolerance.

I don't like conservatives and I don't like Christians who believe that the Bible says that homosexuality is wrong. I cannot tolerate people who don't see that Jesus was one of the early socialists. I cannot tolerate people who do not believe in tolerance. They are brownshirts.

Fundamentalists are why there is hate speech. Fundamentalists are why we still need speech codes. Perhaps we will wake up to modern thinking and realize that we don't need fundamentalists in our society.

Some people have commented that PC must be a joke --- a really bad joke, but, there are entire departments of faculty members and their students at universities who really talk like this.

I'm reminded of the villains in Atlas Shrugged. Rand's portrayal of collectivists has been called flat, stereotyped, and over-the-top. But, there are real, living, breathing people in academics and in the world-at-large who talk as if they could be a Randian antagonist. So, I personally am witholding judgement. If it is a hoax, it isn't very funny and the hoaxster[s] aren't very novel. If it is real, well, this is what parents pay $20,000 per year to have their college kids hear and listen to.

Political Labels, Miscellaneous Thoughts

2005-11-14T16:25:00.000-08:00

Somebody named Mark wrote [in part] the following:

To be fair, the word "conservative" is equally empty of meaning. (Conserving what? Go back several centuries, and today's "conservatives" are that time's "radicals"...) "Progressive" works well enough as a shorthand for "things can't stay how they are, and the solutions we need haven't been widely applied before."

And weak argumentation is equally represented on all parts of the political spectrum, as is strong argumentation. Everyone has their blind spots where they have to either wave their hands and admit they don't know, but they can't admit they don't know.

This was in respones to my thread dealing with typical leftist inanity.

I promised a response, noting that I agreed with what I understood the gist of the question to be. I may have promised too much, since I don't have many profundities if any to reply. As a result, I'll just note some talking points.

(1) I agree that today "conservative" is equally devoid of meaning.
(a) Many self-stlyed conservatives support big government as long as the politician advocating it has an "R" after his name.
(i) Many support big public education
(ii) Many support graduated tax rates for higher income people
(iii) Many support gun control measures
(iv) Some I have met in life are adamant that abortion is not the taking of an innocent person's life.

(b) I note that many people consider President GW Bush to be conservative. I, on the other hand, have said not a few times that he isn't.

(2) BTW, as a side note, I don't call myself "conservative" in the Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, William F. Buckley, National Review, Sean Hannity, etc, sense. I'm more accurately described as a "paleocon," or, my choice is "classic liberal." Given that most libertarians I've met have no problems with abortion, I at best grudgingly let myself be called libertarian, though that is no fault of the word "libertarian."

My politics, or more accurately the underlying principles on which they are based, are summed up quite nicely by Bastiat's The Law. I never get tired of linking to this pamphlet.

Economically, Henry Hazlett's classic Economics in One Lesson is a common sense that dispels much of the goofy economic thinking put forth by D's and R's today.

Another side note: I used to do volunteer work for the Republican Party.

(3) I disagree with Mark's view of the word "progressive." I don't see it as meaning "things can't stay how they are, and the solutions we need haven't been widely applied before." This is based on how I've seen self-styled progressives view themselves, as well as the various materials that I've seen them write. Having been on a college campus in some form as a student/grad student/lecturer/asst prof for 18 years, I've had the opportunity to swim in progressive culture.

When I hear "progressive" I view the word as meaning "We need more government." Given that I have a level of distrust of government at any level, I certainly revulse whenever I see a call for more government.

I view progressivism as, at best, naive utopianism, and, at worst, a not-too-subtle idolatry where the State is put forth in the role of God. The State provides, the State nurtures, the State is there for you, and, in Bill Clinton's infamous words, the State feels your pain and wants to wipe away every tear.

This isn't original in any sense, but, it seems pretty clear to me: if the State can provide everything anybody wants, then it is certainly powerful enough to take away what you have.

(4) I don't disagree at all with the statement that weak argumentation is provided by all ends of the political spectrum. I certainly shudder when I see Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity speak for conservatives. I'd much rather have Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell, but they don't seem to be loudmouth-ish enough for the talking-head role.

I'll also note that weak argumentation is not the same thing as having a weak case, and I think the classic liberal position is the strongest insofar as it is most consonant with human nature, and recognizes what men want, and it stays out of their way.

(5) Would I prefer a theocracy? Sure, provided that it was really God running the show. My objections come to when men set themselves up as rulers, almost as God, without express divine warrant.

So, I could stomach a theosocialist society since I trust God and God's direct agents to act in better ways than impersonal committees and people who want merely to spend my money to buy the votes of others.

(6) One thing I've heard from social gospel types repeatedly is that the early Christian Church was socialist. Why, all we have to do is refer to the Acts and see people giving their property, possessions, and money to the Church. Shouldn't we follow their example?

There is a big category mistake underlying all of this. The people who gave their goodies to the Church were [so we presume] doing so willingly and in freedom. They weren't doing so under the threat of force, imprisonment, and confiscation by the State. At PP, we're against forced and compulsory giving. If people decide that they want to give, more power to 'em.

BTW, notice that this is a very selective [not to mention incorrect] use of scripture
by the left. They seem to suddenly go into relativistic fits when scripture speaks clearly against, say, alternative lifestyles.

(7) I suppose I should mention once again my view of what government should do. For me, gov't exists to protect life and property. Gov't does not exist to ensure that I have a certain quality of life, "affordable housing," "subsidized X" [X=health care, insurance, etc], or any other such thing. When we start acting as if people have a right to certain possessions, we set up the stage for a corrupt government, and we open the door wide for all sorts of ambitious people who prey upon that part of human nature that wants something for nothing, or something from somebody else.

This is the best I could do in 15-20 minutes of stream-of-consciousness thought.

PP Comes Out of the Closet

2005-11-12T13:07:00.000-08:00

I'm tired of living in today's culture and feeling as if I'm a second-class citizen.

I'm tired of promulgating a lie and having to hide portions of my life in shadows.

I'm tired of all the secrecy.

Today, I strike a blow for tolerance and self-affirmation. I realize that bigots and people with all sorts of hangups will whisper about me behind their backs, but I cannot hold it in anymore.

I'm going to live my life as I see fit, modern sensibilities be damned.

Thus, to the world, I make the following ~~confession~~ bold statement:

I rather fancy women. And some of them rather fancy me.

This will only enflame the heterophobes out there. I expect hate-mail and threats to beat me up outside of heterosexual establishments, such as sports bars and ACE Hardware stores. This will make people think I'm fashion-challenged, not to mention that many might believe I'm deficient at interior decorating. This will cause people to think that my nails aren't evenly filed nor are my cuticles pushed back properly. Even worse, people might think that I have a hair or two on my shoulder, back, or chest.

But, I bravely press on in a world that would prefer my kind to be silent. I want the world to know that I too groom well, dress well, and put my spices back on the spice rack when I'm done. I clean my ears daily. I too like musicals and can admit that a guy is a good-lookin' dude. And I'm just as hip. I'm taking my courageous stand to Oprah, Jerry Springer, Al Franken, and to whatever progressive visionaries can help me disseminate my newly found purpose in life.

It isn't all about sex. I don't think about sex with women 24/7. My heterosexuality is more than that --- it is a statement about the totality of me. Those who reduce me to "sex with women" are merely showing forth their ignorance and hate.

Someday, it will be permissible for heterosexuals in popular culture to come out and live openly, without fear of being told that we're deficient, needing homosexuals and bisexuals to dress us, decorate our houses, or teach us how to fully find ourselves. But until that day comes, I will just have to be a brave pioneer, a voice in the wilderness, striking a blow for tolerance.

Take me as I am, or don't take me at all.

Self Inspection

2005-11-10T17:19:00.000-08:00

In my continual quest for self-improvement, I have spent the last few days meditating on what it means to be me, how I am me, and how I treat others. "What," I asked myself, "is my worst quality, something that demeans me in the eyes of others?"

After tortured hours of prayer, the answer has arrived. I have consistently spelled judgment as judgement. As I now understand it, judgment without the first e is the proper American spelling, whereas judgement with the first e is the British spelling. I'm a real American [cue '80's Hulk Hogan ring entrance music] so we must spell as Americans do.

Runner-up answer to the self-improvement question: I now put the roll of tp so that the loose end comes down in the front, not the back.

I can feel the self-esteem flooding back already...

Real Vs Phony Charity

2005-11-10T12:49:00.000-08:00

Charity is my giving my resources to others of my own free will. My motivations are supposed to come from the idea that it is the right thing to do. It is the case that men --- sinful corrupt human men, more precisely --- often do charity for the love of men or so that the one doing charity can feel good about himself, placing God [somehow] into the "owe" column of the ledger.

This is a basic definition, but it is lost in today's political climate. It is lost in the mainline church. It is lost in the major political parties [and many of the third-party parties]. The loss of this basic definition entails a loss of freedom for all.

Here are phony examples of charity:

(1) A group of leftist college students or guilt-ridden middle class people demanding "universal health care" or "affordable [read: subsidized] housing for the poor" who lobby the government to

(a) tax people more [who may not want to be taxed more]
(b) regulate people more [who may prefer freedom to regulation]
(c) confiscate already-existing wealth of people [who might not agree with the arguments for universal health care]

in order to pay for the universal health care or the affordable housing. Upon doing this, the college students or the guilty middle-class people sit back and feel as if they are compassionate and more caring than those free-market types.

Spending the money and wealth of others on pet causes is not charity. It is socialism and aggression against both private property and the idea that a man keeps the fruits of his labors.

(2) Gay-rights activists or libertines demand something to the effect that "government provide or subsidize AIDS tests, free condoms, clean needles, etc." When we demand that "government subsidize or provide X," what we are in essence demanding is that the taxpayers and citzenry subsidize/provide X for the group demanding it.

Some facts: I don't force grown men to sodomize each other and penetrate the orifice from which solid waste comes. I don't force horny people --- both heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, trisexual, you name it! --- to have sex with whomever they want, whenever they want, health consequences be damned. I don't force people into situations where good judgement should rule over prudence. Scripture is quite clear about the status of such behavior, but on a secular level, people can do what they please on their private property provided it doesn't harm my person or property.

But this live-and-let-live mentality on the political level is not reciprocated by the promiscuous. Whereas I leave them alone and say that they're adults and can make their own decisions, their activists turn around and complain that this is not enough --- I must support or subsidize their behavior.

But I don't see the activists for these promiscuous groups going out and buying the needles, condoms, tests, etc, themselves. They spend the money and wealth of other people. They want bigger government --- a Nanny State --- to provide these things for them at the expense of others. Instead of asking people to freely contribute, they prefer State-sponsored force.

And, if perchance your local orgy is stocked with state-sponsored condoms, jellies, tests, medications, etc, that is because the government has taken the money by the threat of force and confiscation. But the activists, it is safe to say, will act as if they are fine humanitarians.

Spending the money and wealth of others on your pet causes is not charity. It is socialism and aggression against both private property and the idea that a man keeps the fruits of his labors.

(3) Academics, celebrities, and "the people who care" demand [especially in the wake of our nation's real estate boom] "more rational gasoline prices." The idea is for government to "do something about it" so that more people can afford gasoline prices. One sees members of the US Senate standing by a gas station villifying the gas stations, the refineries, the oil companies, and they threaten more regulation and oversight of the oil industry.

What happens when government tries to "do something about it," whatever the it happens to be? We have price controls, regulations, tariffs, restrictions, etc. These may or may not actually lower the price of gasoline at the pump. But, suppopse that they do.

What has happened? Answer: other people, be it other consumers, other industries, companies, those in trade, etc are negatively impacted in exchange for the lower gasoline prices.

Now it so happens that other consumers, industries, and companies often themselves try to use government to manipulate the market, so in one sense what goes around comes around.

However, here I'm talking about charity versus phony charity. Has anything actually been done that can be considered "charity" if one has merely re-parlayed the cost of gasoline onto the burdens of others? If the Chevron station around the corner from the PP Pad sells gas for $1.25 per gallon because other people [like me] are forced to subsidize the remaining cost, has charity really been performed?

If you're a Democrat, and, most likely, if you're a Republican, you'd probably answer in the affirmative.

We again state the following basic fact:

Spending the money and wealth of others on pet causes is not charity. It is socialism and aggression against both private property and the idea that a man keeps the fruits of his labors.

This next example is for my friend the Turkoman, whose blog has made it to "the show" whereas this blog is still in Rookie League or A-ball, at best:

(4) A celebrity takes it upon himself to end world hunger, or end hunger "for the children." This celebrity possibly donates some of his money and time to the cause. [Nothing wrong yet.]

The celebrity goes and asks world leaders to have their governments pony up the money for this cause. Certain leaders offer millions of dollars to this cause.

This is not charity. Again, money is being taken from those who produce it, and it is being sent abroad. This makes the leaders look compassionate. It gives "the international community" [whatever that is!] something nice to say about those countries who give. But it isn't "the government's money" that is being sent abroad. It is your money, my money, and the guy down the street's money. Perhaps some of us think that throwing money at kleptocracies, foreign aid, etc exacerbates the problem. But our money --- the fruits of our labors --- are being spent by the celebrity, the politicians, etc.

In the end, the celebrity is lauded as a fine humanitarian. The leaders, whatever be their electoral faults, are heralded as compassionate. But the people who really paid for the humanitarianism and compassion are anonymous, merely being the wallet or bankbook for others whose grand scheme of "how life should be" to tap whenever they see fit.

It isn't charity when you spend my money.

**************************

Although I consider Ayn Rand [based on what I've seen] an intellectual fraud relative to ethics and philosophy, she was, in my opinion, dead-on when assessing the final outcome of the creed "To each according to his need." John Galt's description of the auto company after having this creed adopted is where we're rapidly heading.

And whether we call it "socialism," "the welfare state," or, if we go by my favorite abuse of English, "compassionate conservatism," our nation, like most or all of the rest of the world, shall reap the bitter and poisonous harvest of socialism.

Similarly-themed link: Gary North's column at Lew Rockwell, and Ron Paul's latest Rockwell column.

Yes, this thread was somewhat boilerplate material, but, it is [in my opinion] worth saying regularly, since people seem to want to feel good about themselves by using other people and the possessions of other people to accomplish this goal. And, upon doing so, the former group want to be lauded, loved, and recognized as fine human beings, despite doing not much more than posturing.