Josh: on the stupidity of American Christian politics

Cruising Down the Coast of the High Barbaree

The more I hear Obama talk about what he thinks, the more I realize he’s basically the love child of Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson. I mean, if he was any more of a socialist, he’d probably campaign wearing a red armband. The sad thing is that his greatest flaw is attracting a noticeable Christians to him.

See, it’s a funny thing about Christians. If you can couch a skull-crushingly stupid idea in religious terms, you will invariably get large numbers of them to sign up for them. This goes across all spectra. Socialism is for the effete, overeducated Christian what faith-healing is for the backwoods dispensationalist.

Scalia: “I dissent.”

Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of- powers principles to establish a manipulable “functional” test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson’s opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.

The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today. I dissent.

From Ennui to Angst

The pagan world crippled us with meaninglessness.  Now that the Jews rescued us from the fatalistic pagan circle and gave us a history that is going somewhere, the somewhere is the new crippling presence.   Meaning that is not doctrinally clear is as oppressive as ennui.  Now that we are all headed for a Final Evaluation, we (religious and secular alike) are crippled by the worry: “am I doing what I should be doing?”   Even modern secular atheists have imbibed the feeling of an impending assay,  which is just the ambiguous moraine of the doctrine of the Last Judgement.

Groundhog Day

The one unique lesson from the history of the West is a 6,000 year lesson.   You are doomed to have to learn it again if you have rejected the doctrine of Judeo-Christian exceptionalism.  Please don’t take another 6,000 years to learn that there is no pathway to meaning either in ecstasis or induction.

Drawing, 2

The lilac leaf is not interesting aside from the wind, nor is the wind visible aside from the leaf, but the shape of the wind in the lilac will hold me here for hours.  It is the dance of the parts with each other, frozen in a moment, that we have the privilege to feel with our pencil.

We only feel it, darkly, like Helen Keller felt the hands of her teacher, groping with the pencil or the brush inside the swishing swirling world.

Conspiracy Theorists and Intelligent Design

1.  The uncritical attribution of malignant design

I know a man who is paranoid.  I don’t mean he is sometimes anxious that others are out to get him, or that he is occasionally dramatic about threats.  No, he is paranoid, which means he observes a phenomenon, and then projects onto the unseen backstage of that occurrence a malignant conspiracy, without evidence, and as a matter of routine.  He is certain of the conspiracy he sees.  He has no moments of uncertainty about his interpretations, no doubts like the rest of us struggle with.

We underestimate the strength of the paranoid view.  We should not think the conspiracy theorist simply looks at the evidence the rest of us see and mis-interprets it — no, quite the opposite.  He does not need evidence of any kind.  The existence of evidence for a malignant design in one instance does indeed fuel his delusion in the next instance, but the absence of evidence today does not diminish his paranoia tomorrow.

Because it is bred in his bones.  It is the color of his glasses, not the color of the world. The conspiracy theorist is seeing his own soul, draped over the contours of the world.

Paranoia has nothing to do with intelligence, or education, or training in critical thinking.  The man I know is smart and terminally degreed in the sciences, and quite successful in his field.

Argumentum Perrenia

OK, so I made the Latin up…perpetual arguments, the ones that have been going on long enough that everyone should have figured out the debate is not actually progressing in either of the two antagonistic directions.

Here is the short list, you could add your versions of these:

• Whether God exists, or not
• Whether the cosmos appears intended, or not
• Whether physical objects are connected to supra-physical entities, or not
• Whether immateriality exists, or not
• Whether disinterested love exists, or not
• Whether freewill is an illusion, or not

By now you are ready to say “nominalism vs. realism, in different forms”.  Well, sure, but what is not as commonly understood is that repeated patterns of logic do get clarified and then named over time, but not “solved”, and that it is the naming that is useful.   We name logical patterns in order both to use and to avoid them, to push off from them, move beyond them.  As long as we did not understand the pattern “nominalism vs. realism” we were doomed to rehearse it in perpetual ambiguity.

These perpetual questions are remarkeable for the naive optimism that attends them, at first.  It is youth that thinks “soon, just around the next corner, there will be the final definitive fact or argument that will finally clinch my side of the argument.   One more book, one more essay, one more seminar.”   But, no.

Forer effect

Read the paragraph before you click the link. Does it describe you fairly well? Ok, now click the link.

Forer effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.