Keith Olbermann: intellectual firepower on display

Bloggermann: Feeling morally, intellectually confused? – Bloggermann – MSNBC.com

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

This is what they call a straw man fallacy in Debate Club. Note the entire argument is built on the premise that ALL OTHER MEN see something different. Obviously, Rumsfeld is not seeing absolutes where “all other men” see anything else. He is actually seeing what somewhere between 40 and 50% of the voting public see (51%, if we sample around election day every 4 years).

This allows Olbermann to only have to exposit Rumsfeld’s quackiness, which is assumed in the premise, instead of engage his arguments. Which arguements, if you actually read the speech, are mostly just questions Rumsfeld is asking his audience to consider.

Olbermann wants to debate the Secretary of Defense. Not bloody likely, when you fail freshman-level logic.

Cassandra (Villanous Company): on marriage

Villainous Company

The single most important thing any man or woman brings to a marriage is the belief that the marriage comes first: before the children, before their career, before friends, parents, or any other relationship. If you put your marriage first, it will survive.

Simple and true. Beware those who write books trying to figure out what your grandmother could have told you over breakfast biscuits. Marriages fail because they are not important. In other words, when men and women utter vows (there are still vows, aren’t there?) to cherish each other before all else, 50% of them either can’t comprehend their own language, or they are lying.

“We grew apart.” Oh really? Well, you promised you wouldn’t. Especially if you have children, you have a responsibility not to grow apart.  If you wake up one day and discover your life is somehow growing an appendage that is threatening the unity of your marriage, CHOP IT OFF.

Tim Enloe

Societas Christiana » Tim Enloe: Reformed Polemicist, R.I.P.

I never heard of this guy till I stumbled across this post today. I love this so much I just want to memorialize it here, and extract a few quotes that are particularly well-stated. The bold is MINE.

I hereby openly repudiate the entire mode of discourse… the fundamentally adversarial mode and its entrenched negative intellectual and social orientation. I deny that truly constructive, properly Christian discourse with other Christians, and chiefly between Catholics and Protestants, can be carried on from an adversarial standpoint. I want nothing to do with this type of “dialogue.” It is a sham that lives in the worst parts of the past (bitterly carrying on the 17th century Wars of Religion by different means) and the worst parts of the present (taking Fundamentalist Protestantism and Fortress Catholicism as normative).

I hereby formally repudiate that mode of discourse and all my doings from within its paradigm. Although thereare things within the linked materials with which I would probably still agree and things with which I probably would not, I consign the whole mass to the category of “Fruitless Bickering” carried on, at
least from my end, by someone whose priorities were deeply out of
order. For several years, apologetics—chiefly apologetics against
Catholic controversialists on the Internet—virtually consumed my life,
and I believe I was ultimately intellectually and spiritually poorer
for it.

There are certainly times when fighting must occur,
when men must stand up for what they believe is right and, if
necessary, slug it out with other men. However, I do not believe that
the bulk of fighting on the Internet, especially between Catholics and
Protestants, constitutes such times of necessary fighting. To be fair,
the online apologetics community is made up of a variety of people.
Some on both sides have noble intentions and do actually seek
to respectfully and constructively discuss troublesome issues with
their counterparts. I count among my friends a number of Catholics of
this type who have often been most faithful to me by inflicting wounds
that have driven me onward and upward toward Christ. [Edit: Although
truthfully, probably none of these Catholics would consider themselves
“apologists” proper, and apologetics proper does not constitute the
bulk of their Internet activities].

Nevertheless, for the most part Internet apologetics on both sides is a morass of ill-taught, insecure, and intransigent people on both sides. Their incessant bickering in the grand name of “Truth” ultimately reduces to shameless, sinful intellectual and cultural fratricide. There are significant issues between Catholics and Protestants which need to be addressed, and which are very difficult to discuss because of our long legacy of bloodletting and caricaturing of each other. It is difficult to avoid tension when talking about disputed issues of theology, history, and Christian experience in the world. Nevertheless, I deny that these issues can be properly addressed, or that solutions can be found, if discussions are carried on within the war-mongering matrix of apologetics.

Rest, Tim. God, in His mercy, has delivered you from “apologetics.”

Gratitude to impersonal forces? Come on.

TPM Online Article

Great mental convolutions, just to avoid thinking the possibility that God exists. His outline:

• We seem to have an inherent need to give thanks, not only to other humans, but to something or someone larger.
• After modernity, no God is available.
• So, thank impersonal objects.

Yet, at the end of the article, when it comes time for him to actually DO thanksgiving:

So much and many to thank: my parents, people on the other side of the
world, those who set aside and today preserve this area as a state
park, and on and on.

You’ll note he actually thanks people. Not the sun, the microbes, or the ancient dead primate presursors. He caught himself off guard, not thinking about thanking, but actually thanking, and in the absence of an alert internal editor to tailor the spontaneity to fit his mental worldview, it functioned as it is structured to do. His thanker, unleashed, thanked people.

Apparently, then, the subjective need to give thanks, inherent in the human psyche, is inseparable from its object. It is a need to give thanks to a person, and is absurd otherwise. For the materialist, the urge to give thanks to something greater than your friends or your mom has no known function. It is vestigial, like the appendix, but vestigial of some yet to be identified function.

Or, the other explanation, is that it is vestigial of the Person who made us; it is a personal effect of a personal cause. This is what you would consider if you were just following the logic despite your personal, irrational predisposition not to think that thought. Occam’s Razor, anyone?

Bill MacKinnon (from Boar’s Head Tavern) on Gossip

The Boars Head Tavern

I will say this: to the reformed and unreformed, TRs, emergents, and all other church people out there, especially in small churches. The church’s biggest threat is not poor doctrine. It’s not pornography, or relativism, or the emerging conversation or calvinism, or charismania or commercialism. It’s not alcohol or bad music or crappy preaching. It isn’t adultery or persecution.
It is gossip.Gossip is the slow poison from which no church is immune, and which no member (probably) is innocent of spreading (including myself). It has ruined the careers of good pastors and make bad pastors worse. It destroys friendships. It dims the light and makes the salt less savory. It is insidious, and pervasive, and looks to be well nigh incurable.

It is the church’s greatest enemy.

Magnificent. Much of the incessant arguing among Christians, which usually culminates in somebody declaring somebody else a heretic or a cultist, begins in what the initiator thinks is “contending for the truth” but is in fact gossip. And remember, truth is no defense; in any other society in all the universe the first question can be whether what you say is true or not. Only in the Christian church are there additional requirements and this infinitely higher standard is what you would expect from the Kingdom of God on earth. Higher standards: WHAT YOU SAY MUST EDIFY. WHAT YOU SAY MUST ADMINISTER GRACE TO THE HEARERS.

So we are responsible for the interpersonal result of our words, not just the analytical accuracy.  The truth is, you can be a star at internet apologetics and the whole enterprise still be lazy.  You pop out of the womb with the ability to think, but only sanctification grants the ability to love.  Love is the hardest thing you will ever do, and the highest calling bar none.  Winning arguments is a cake-walk in comparison.

Peter Leithart: Modernity as ingratitude

…modern philosophy arises from a rejection of tradition. Modern philosophy is a tradition of the rejection of traditions, or as Gadamer put it, a prejudice against prejudices. Seen from the perspective of Heidegger’s Pietist slogan, modern philosophy arises from a refusal to receive. Descartes sitting in his German room in front of his fire trying to escape every thought he has ever received from outside his own head – that is modernity’s founding act of ingratitude. In this respect, postmodernism (at least in some forms) is an intensification of modernity, an even more radical ingratitude toward the inheritance we have received. And much of modern and postmodern thought and culture have been an exploration and enactment of ingratitude – Freud’s Oedipal complex, Harold Bloom’s literary Freudianism, the various revolutionary ideologies and movements that have drenched the past centuries in blood, etc. (link)

This is even more profound than Leithart realizes. What is true of the philosophers is true of man in general.

In fact, in Romans, Paul places the failure to thank God at the beginning of the cascade down into moral decadence which marks entire cultures, ending in widespread disorder of the affections (i.e. homosexuality).

At the stage of natural theology, when the child (and father of the man) who may never have been exposed to biblical revelation gazes out on the starry sky, his heart takes an epistemological fork which biases his every knowing act from that point on. He will either suppress the thankfulness that arises naturally within his bosom, and therefore of necessity replace it with something else, or he will address the unknown Person who made the big pretty thing before him.

Then, for the next 70 years, he extrapolates that primal epistemological act in a life-long confirmation bias.

Friday’s Child, W. H. Auden

(In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945)

He told us we were free to choose
But, children as we were, we thought—
“Paternal Love will only use
Force in the last resort

On those too bumptious to repent.”
Accustomed to religious dread,
It never crossed our minds He meant
Exactly what He said.

Goethe on assimilating Tradition

“What you have inherited from your forefathers, you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.”

Tradition is what you inherit; dead tradition is what you fail to win for yourself.

Alan Jacobs: that dialogue is between persons, not words on a page

Goodbye, Blog – Books & Culture

I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as “that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation.” For Lewis, the issues that divided Catholics and Protestants, that led to bloodshed all over Europe and to a seemingly permanent division of Christians from one another, “could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure.” Instead, thanks to the prevalence of that recent invention the printing press, and to the intolerance of many of the combatants, deep and subtle questions found their way into the popular press and were immediately transformed into caricatures and cheap slogans. After that there was no hope of peaceful reconciliation.

This is really quite a remarkable point. The Web is notorious for nastiness in dialogue (cf “flame war”). There is now distance between the persons in the conversation, and this distance allows us to get away with, now, what we never could in face-to-face talk.

It’s not that the technology causes the nastiness.  The natural corruption in the heart of man is facilitated by the technology, which allows him to function subpersonally.  Schism is facilitated. And – and! – this had a parallel in the emergence of the printing press, which allowed people to combat disembodied opinions, wordy ghosts with whom there was no real covenantal obligation to come through disagreement to Christian unity.

Bonhoeffer called forgiveness without cost “cheap grace”. This cold polemics is cheap in the same way; you get the feeling of having “contended for the truth”, without the cost of loving.  The perennial agon of love, that which makes it love and not just words on a page, is  having to hold unity during a difficult conversation, without either compromising or verbally killing.  Success here results in new truth and new friends.  The other way just makes another denomination, with your name on it.

Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.