Darwin, The Map, The Model, The Mystery

I attempt to argue endlessly that if there was no God to reveal religion, human social culture could never have grown beyond the hunter gatherer.  Ideologies like modern "liberalism", Communism, Socialism, Capitalism, etc, simply will not do because they lack the enforcement of an eternal all knowing, all powerful God that is going to see when you cheat on the rules that are required for society to keep operating, let alone flourish.

I believe the social requirement that most believe in him even though he can't be proved is CRITICAL, because it lends credibility to the glue of society which is the promise that you believe in love, nation, friendship, truth, honesty, fidelity and a myriad of other things that demand shared belief. If society is to be more than a police state of constant spying, imprisonment and distrust, then people have to believe in MANY things about each other -- the idea that they all worship a God that knows their behavior is a better check on the veracity of those social beliefs than not having such a check.

The level of freedom that America once had could only exist for a people that were religious as stated by John Adams. "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other".

There is no greater modification for a human worldview than the issue of belief in God, It puts the root of our mental model in the realm of metaphysics, thus allowing a perspective where there is ALWAYS hope, there is ALWAYS another potential answer, and there is no ending for our souls. No matter our current state, we always have a better future -- PERSONALLY, not just for "society" in the progressive/marxist dream. 

Take away that perspective and man, then eventually raw power,  becomes the measure of all. The world can no longer be seen through the lens of a beautiful creation of God, infused with love, meaning and purpose. Trying to wrench some "truth" out of "data" is an obvious fools errand from the viewpoint of philosophy -- "truth" is reduced to endlessly running experiments knowing that the only "progress" is in simpler explanations of finding that what you thought was "scientific truth" has been significantly or entirely falsified.

I was struck by this section of Darwin's autobiography, page 46 that was quoted in "Darwin's Cathedral".

“On this tour I had a striking instance of how easy it is to overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, before they have been observed by any one. We spent many hours in Cwm Idwal, examining all the rocks with extreme care, as Sedgwick was anxious to find fossils in them; but neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that, as I declared in a paper published many years afterwards in the Philosophical Magazine, a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley. If it had still been filled by a glacier, the phenomena would have been less distinct than they now are.”

Once Darwin knew about glaciers, "everything in the valley made sense".

Thus we come to one of the strengths and grave weaknesses of humans. We are excellent pattern matching "answer finders", but when he have a "hammer" (a specific answer), everything starts to look like a "nail" (place to match the pattern that we have).

We also LOVE to have an answer that we at least believe "completely explains" what we see. Faced with a near infinitely complicated universe and a very severely finite brain in comparison, we tend to want to believe that our model of the world/universe is "reasonably complete". Without God, our tendency is to "decide it is complete enough".

The "mental magic" of belief in God is to be able to build a mental model of our universe, but to realize and remain OK with the knowledge that our model is grossly incomplete. Seeing God as far beyond what we can ever approach allows us to feel comfortable with there always being a remaining "gap of mystery" -- in the spiritual as well as the physical.

The natural tendency for us to desire "closure" pretty much insures that once we have that "model that fits", in this case "glacier", we are certain that the situation is explained and we move on. In most cases, that works well -- we are very good at coming up with models and matching them to specific cases. But not always.

Is there ANY chance that a valley could be sculpted that way by some sort of pyroclastic flow long ago and then maybe "tuned" by water? Could it have been formed that way for some reason and then uplifted? Something completely different that we have not thought of yet?

Believing in God allows asking the question "For THIS valley, how critical is it really that we are "certain" of how it formed?" This moves us into a realm of discomfort on the side of both the scientist and the theist. From the scientific POV, there is a sense that we MUST provide an explanation, otherwise people will fall back to the "lazy explanation" that "God did it".

The theist becomes uncomfortable because the scientist is intent on entirely removing God. The theist may say "but who created the elements that allow ice and rock to interact", or go to some of my conjectures above relative to volcanism, floods / high speed runoff or just "appearance of age".

I've been lucky enough to see a lot of beautiful mountain valleys including Yosemite with it's hanging valleys. Darwin's description of "wonderful glacial phenomena" strikes me as quite odd. Why would it be "adaptive" for us to find mountain valleys as "wonderful" at all if we are evolved? I can understand why a sea shore or many other items of nature would be attractive, but a glaciated mountain valley, often above the tree line where the oxygen is thin and no vegetation grows?

Something is built into us to find a whole host of things in nature "beautiful" that make no practical sense for our material bodies. A sunset? We have little nocturnal vision -- based on evolution one would think that we might feel a sense of fear at the coming of darkness. A need to retreat to safety where we were less vulnerable to our lack. But no, we feel a sense of wonder and enjoy the beauty.

Oh, I'm certain that more than one evolutionist has come up with SOME explanation of "how it may have evolved" -- a conjecture impossible to prove or disprove by actual experiment, so basically a religious statement. "It evolved" or "a glacier did it" having no real utilitarian advantage over "God created it" (and do we ALWAYS have to be thinking "mechanism"?).

Some scientist will exclaim, "it is natural curiosity". Possibly, in a few cases -- but I've certainly seen many an eye glaze over at some explanation of how computers do "x", how the TV works, what's the difference between fuel injection and carburetion, Quantum Physics etc. It seems our "natural curiosity" is far from universal. 

We all operate with a mental model, a worldview, and that model is either based on God or Materialism (it's all a big accident). Science has thrown in the towel on a concrete explanation of even HOW we happened, let alone WHY.  The Big Bang is too far in the past, and if we believe science, our inability to exceed. the speed of light prevents us from observing much of the remnants of the Big Bang, now to far away to get to before the 2nd law of thermodynamics entropies humanity and our universe out of existence. 

To some degree we get to pick our model, or from a Christian POV, "Knock and it will be opened unto you, seek and you will find" ... which assumes you believe there is a transcendent door to knock on or to seek. 

From the above it seems clear that in order to have a "good life" in this mortal coil, the choice is obvious. However there is always a snake in the garden that seeks to convince us otherwise. 

Choose your model wisely. 

Sullivan, Intersectionality

Is Intersectionality a Religion?:

I find Andrew Sullivan to be an extremely interesting thinker. I'm guessing the number of people that agree with him on even a majority of his thoughts approximates zero, somewhat because of the variance and originality of his thinking, somewhat because it has a tendency to move around a lot.

In this article he points out the obvious similarities in methodology between Intersectionality, Trumpism, and religion. He has a tendency to provide comfort to almost none -- which is pretty standard for direct intellectual critique. The whole article is worth reading, but I found this to be the heart.

Then this: “Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true ‘fact.’” This, it seems to me, gets to the heart of the question — not that the students shut down a speech, but why they did. I do not doubt their good intentions. But, in a strange echo of the Trumpian right, they are insisting on the superiority of their orthodoxy to “facts.” They are hostile, like all fundamentalists, to science, because it might counter doctrine. And they shut down the event because intersectionality rejects the entire idea of free debate, science, or truth independent of white male power. At the end of this part of the ceremony, an individual therefore shouts: “Who is the enemy?” And the congregation responds: “White supremacy!”

Ah, "facts", one of the toughest questions in one of the toughest areas of philosophy -- epistemology. How can a being who can not explain the operation of their own (self assumed) "intelligence" be relied upon to explain anything else?

It is a topic often returned to in the blog -- look for entries with religion or philosophy and especially both as tags and you can follow the trail of this chimera -- I rate the best and most reachable place to start as "The Reason For God".

Sullivan was heavily influenced by Michael Oakeshott, yet another author that I have barely sampled and seek to become more familiar with.

'via Blog this'

What Does It All Mean? The Beginning of the End

This post starts the final series of posts for Moose Tracks. Some of the remaining are just "standard posts", however I made a promise to end the blog, and I didn't want anyone watching to see posts keep dribbling out -- the end should show up virtually at the same time as this series.

There are over 4600 posts in the blog, so I'm the not a moose of few words. In conversation however, I have often summed up the meaning of it all with the stolen anecdote, "Jesus loves me, this I know". Here is the proof of that oft repeated anecdote.

According to the best accounts of the incident I have heard (many have taken on weird additions), Karl Barth was at Rockefeller Chapel (really a Gothic cathedral!) on the campus of the University of Chicago during his lecture tour of the U.S. in 1962. After his lecture, during the Q & A time, a student asked Barth if he could summarize his whole life’s work in theology in a sentence. Barth allegedly said something like “Yes, I can. In the words of a song I learned at my mother’s knee: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” That is the simple, unadorned story. Many tellers have adorned it with additions of their own (in sermons, etc.).

Karl Barth is considered by many to be the most important theologian of the 20th Century. Life is short, eternity is long -- it's good that the truly important things are simple! There is nothing simpler nor more profound than "Jesus loves me, this I know".

What did the Jesus who loves us have to say about what is important? Matthew 22:37-40

7 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

I took a shot at my top 5 back in February last year if you have an interest. 

God, Family, Friends, Vocation, and Study are where my life focus remains as I close on the age of 62 this fall. 

The solo trip that I took on the Wing back in 2104 was something that I enjoyed putting on the blog -- the final entry from that trip is "I Hold On".  It was an advanture that I was blessed to be able to have. It was not profound, it was self centered, it served no purpose but being a fun adventure. I believe life is more than that, however having such things in your life can make it a little richer. If our life is "about fun", that is a concern. It does not however make "having fun" wrong! To everything there is a season!

As long time readers know, I love putting in little song or video clips in the blog. I like doing it mostly because it anchors sometimes nebulous or dry information in a modern idiom at least for me. It is also one of those things that we CAN do with a lot of ease in a digital blog medium that is not possible on the paper printed page.

The most profound work I read in the last year was "The Divine Conspiracy" by Dallas Willard, while the most daunting was "The Secular Age" ... both of them relate to the same common theme that I return to again and again. The conviction of my soul that this "stuff", this mere matter is not all there is, and the dull dread that if Western civilization continues it's fall from Metaphysical Realism to Nominalism, there will be nothing left for Christians to do but to hide out to maintain a remnant in some sort of "Benedict Option".

And so the end begins.

The Power Of Now, Eckhart Tolle

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Now-Guide-Spiritual-Enlightenment/dp/1577314808

I'm guessing that I read this book for the first time in like 02-03. I remembered it, found it interesting, but very very off the wall and impractical at that time.My copy exists somewhere in the manifested universe (as opposed to the unmanifested (spiritual)), but I could not find it, so I manifested a new paperback version from Amazon to lend to someone that I believe it might resonate with.

When I first read it in I found Tolle to be "From a Galaxy Far Far Away". Fast forward past a number of personal and family crisis, meditation, lots of more mystical (and ancient) Christian teachings and DBT (especially Mindfulness), and it seems a good deal less "out there" ... perhaps "Pluto". Who knows, another couple decades and ....

The statement in the book that resonates most with me is on page 190, "I have lived with several Zen masters, all of them cats." While sometimes I find Tolle taking himself a bit too seriously, that line redeems a lot of mileage for me! One of those masters graces our home today (Ferocious Cabadocious)  -- past masters include Tiger and the ineffible Dobson, sometimes fearsome sage of terrible wisdom.

His best philosophic statement is on 15; "The philosopher Descartes believed he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am". he had in fact given expression to the most fundamental error: to equate thinking with Being, and identity the real YOU with your mere thoughts that have far less substance than passing clouds.

If you can learn to sit quietly, observing your breath, and as your mind chatters incessantly, and and you merely OBSERVE IT -- do not judge it (and don't judge the judging which will certainly happen to some degree, at least for a time)!

Treat your chattering mind gently, like a puppy or a toddler -- ACKNOWLEDGE what thoughts are flowing by, and calmly return to focusing on your breath.You will experience Descartes error.

 If you are a "natural", after a "few times", the chatter will slow and you will EXPERIENCE that you are NOT YOUR MIND!!! You HAVE a mind, and a body, and emotions -- but they are not YOU. YOU are spirit ... or consciousness if you prefer.

It is a great way to debunk one of the greatest minds in history in a slightly more metaphysical version of Dr Johnson's "Appeal to the stone".

If you are an UNnatural like me, that experience may take like "100" tries -- the early ones being Panic Attacks, or near so, with LOTS of mind shouting, THIS IS ***NOT*** working! This is stupid!  Satanic!  insane! dangerous! a waste of time!  etc, etc

We Westerners tend to live in and identify with our minds -- it is where our ego resides. My mind was nearly my only residence for my whole IBM career and a few years after. I agree that the EXPERIENCE of being a little "i am' watching your breath, your mind and your emotions is significant, and to a degree "transcendent", possibly even "enlightening" with a very little "e", but I find that Tolle oversells anyway -- much in the same manner as a lot of other marketing.

I'm NOT saying that he is "lying" ... he may well completely believe in all he says. He IS after all Oprah Approved!,  so marketing or truth, it has certainly worked. My advice would be to try DBT first -- it has a lot more research and science behind it, however if Tolle speaks to you, go for it. Scotch, Bourbon, Irish, Canadian ... it's all Whiskey (or Whisky, hard to agree on anything!)

Oh, and getting out of your mind isn't quite enough -- the "real you", the spiritual you, must learn to live in full acceptance of NOW ... this moment and ONLY this moment which is where we ALWAYS exist, AS IT IS! Not as you wish it, believe it "should be", etc, etc. It is here you stand to have the leverage to change the future -- or decide NOT to change the future. The past? Well, the past you are not going to change no matter how much you invest in it. In DBT, we call that Radical Acceptance.

p154, "If you stop investing it with "selfness", the mind loses it's compulsive quality, which is basically the compulsion to judge, and so resist what IS, which creates conflict, drama and new pain." ... a little farther on, "... the greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner [or anyone you deal with] as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way."

The best reason for doing that is because the nearly 100% probability is that you CAN'T change that other person! You might bludgeon them physically or emotionally into "compliance", however unless THEY wanted to change (or they are already less "living in their minds" than you), you will only create pain and damage.

Just as in DBT, many people take this all as "giving up", or "not caring'. Not so -- in fact, you nearly MUST be outside of your mind to actually care, because otherwise, pretty much all you are doing is feeding your own ego. Your mind will continue to have lots of thoughts on lots of things -- you can share them, talk about them, carry signs for them, etc, you will just realize that they are not YOU. You are MUCH more than those things!

YOU are "not of this world" ... you have no reason to invest your ego in this world. In fact, as much as possible, your ego is to be DEAD ... either crucified with Christ, or vanished into Tolle's "unmanifested'. Your ego is your mind talking -- it's your "old address' ... like "666 Gray Matter Parkway", vs "The Now, The Kingdom of Christ -- Infinity Drive'.

While Tolle either believes, or simply wants to maximize his audience, he tries to make this book accessible to any or no religion  -- although on this read, I was surprised by how much semi-New Testament he actually does include.

It's a book worthy enough at least to have someone else buy it and lend it to you!

The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher

Link to The Benedict Option, "A strategy for Christians in a post-christian nation".

About 1/3 of the way through the book I realized that I had read another book by Rod Dreher, "How Dante Saved My Life". I enjoyed that book, and my wife actually enjoyed and made it through it as well, which is RARE for "Moose Books". I hope to blog on that book in the future as well, however this one is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL for anyone who believes that they are a Christian to read.

Rod agrees with me, and I think millions of Christians in the US that we are officially and totally in a post-Christian nation, as well as post Western civilization. This is a new "Dark Age", and as St Benedict, born in 480 decided sometime around 500 as he journeyed to the shadow of once great Rome, now ruled by barbarians, it was time to found a "remnant" to keep the core of the faith, which he did at Norica, and in his "Rule of St Benedict".

As Dreher says; "Professing orthodox biblical Christianity on sexual matters is now thought to be evidence of intolerable bogotry, Conservative Christians have been routed. We are living in a new country" ... one which I label as "BOistan", but the label makes no difference, it is a barbarian nation.

On page 154, Rod quotes from Phillip Reiff: "Barbarians are people without historical memory. Barbarism is the real meaning of contemporaneity. Released from all authoritative pasts, we progress towards barbarism, not away from it.".  I've covered this fact a number of times ... "Closing of the American Mind", "Ideas Have Consequences", and others. Technology is not "advancement", it is just giving monkeys nuclear weapons without theology, philosophy and history. The beginning of wisdom is humility ... and barbarians have none of that!

One of the topics that is explained very well in this book is nominalism, as opposd  to metaphysical realism (see pages 26-29). Metaphysical realism tells us that EVERYTHING that is created has MEANING -- as Charles Taylor would say "It is Enchanted" ... or in philosphical terms "teleological".

This ought not be so hard for us to understand today ... one by one, from phones, to watches, to locks on doors, to thermostats, to labels on products (RFID), more and more of our "objects" have built in "smarts", and are often even "connected". Does it REALLY seem so "magical" that an all powerful God can and does imbdue his creation with sacred meaning ?

Well, everyone thought that was reality up until William of Occam in the 1300s. Strangely, Occam thought he was "letting God off the hook" because being linked with his meaningful universe of laws "limited him" ... so Bill (William) decided that the Christian God was to be like the Muslim "god" ... able to call evil good and good evil at his whim -- an issue covered really well (and a bit ironically) in a great book based on a speech by Pope Benedict, "The Regensburg Lecture".

Occam convinced the west that "matter is just matter" -- it has no meaning except that imposed from outside it, so "parts is parts" ... matter (including life) only means whatever we decide -- and as we became atomized individuals, each supposedly "the measure of all things", we arrived at; "my view is just as good as yours" and of course I think BETTER, so I'll call it whatever I want -- cells, tissue, a baby, etc ... it's ALL UP TO ME!

This book is WAY too rich for me to cover the MANY great points that are well made, so a couple key points ...

• We are in a post-Christian, post-virtue post-civilization age. A "dark age", likely to be FAR worse than the previous one. The World Wars and the Holocaust are likely just "warm ups" -- the ONLY thing our "culture" worships is gratification of the self!, and that has never ended well.
• "To live "after virtue", then is to dwell in a society that not only can no longer agree on what constitutes virtuous belief and conduct, but also doubts that virtue exists. In a post-virtue society, individuals hold maximal freedom of thought and action, and society itself becomes a collection of strangers each pursuing his own interests under minimal constraints". (p16)
• People feel they MUST "do things" ... have an affair, have a same sex relationship, etc because they would not be "true to themselves" if they did not. "It is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes that he affirms his individuality. The body must be the true 'subject' of desire because the individual must be the author of his own desire". (p43) 

In the end, this book also gives us at least the start on a "blueprint" to save Western civilization. We don't need to worry about saving Christianity ... God will do that. It just may well not be in "the west' -- as I increasingly believe from books like "The Divine Conspiracy". 

God REALLY means that we have free will! He is NOT going to be giving this or any other generation any huge "signs" to save us -- he gave us Christ and the Bible, as well as his divine and teleological creation pregnant with meaning. If we seek him, we WILL find him -- because as long as we are not actively turning our back on him as our current civilization is, it is absolutely not his will that ANY should perish -- UNLESS THEY ABSOLUTELY WANT TO! ... and it seems abundantly clear that the bulk of the people in the west DEARLY want to perish on their own terms, and in many cases, as rapidly as possible! 

I'll reluctantly close with this from page 234 ... 

"The mind of technological man cannot resist his heart's desires, because he has been trained by his culture not to question them. .... The Christian must rebel against this. The only impregnable fortress is metaphysical, the conviction that meaning transcends ourselves and is grounded in God. There are boundaries beyond which we cannot go if we want to live." 

We Christians need to build a lot of small communities following something like the Rule of St Benedict. Please read this book, contact me, and let's try to be the leaven ... Dreher gives us many ideas on on existing heroes of God already doing this work. 

Beliefs Are Dark And Terrifying

An insider explains how rural Christian white America has a dark and terrifying underbelly:

In the eternal sense, my title is REALLY true. Every one of us carries a VERY fundamentalist belief that either:

1. We have an eternal soul, and the issue of eternity is far larger than whatever comes up in our short stay in this mortal coil.
2.  No soul, no god, no meaning -- whoever is smartest, most smug, gets the most votes, has the most fun, etc is "king". It really doesn't matter -- "grab for all the gusto you can". Most of all, be smug while doing it! If it starts to "feel bad", drug yourself, distract yourself, or kill yourself. "Without God, everything is permitted." 

The author of the linked column is clearly in the #2 option big time -- his belief is very strong, and there is no way he is buying into "the fear of God is the BEGINNING of wisdom". He has reversed the Biblical injunction that "a fool says there is no God" to be "a fool says there IS a God!".

Par for the course for human behaviour -- this guy doesn't say it, but I heard it again recently, "to think you have an immortal soul is the height of hubris". Possibly ... the "height of human hubris" is a big stinking pile, that is for sure. Thinking that YOU can define the "height of human hubris" doesn't really sound all that humble. Peak hubris? It certainly begins with "KNOWING" that "man is the measure of all things' -- and if that is so, why not make yourself "the man".

The column is all about those dangerous, racist, Christian Fundamentalist, angry rural whites, and their "closed systems". Certainly American university campuses that are creating rules to label anything that doesn't agree with them as "hate speech" are "open minded"? Again, "closed minded" people are really not a trick to find in any crowd -- they tend to be every bit as common as hubristic people.The norm is "anyone that doesn't agree with me is closed minded!"

The key is naturally LABELS ... your hubristic closed minded "whatevers" are of course "right" and "ok" ... "righteous even", while the other tribe ... well, not so good. Let's just say "deplorable".

I'm absolutely certain that the author can find white Christians in fly-over country that DO meet every single negative stereotype he has to pile on them. To the extent they are Christians, they would be less than perfect ones -- which is the unfortunate state of 100% of us, because loving our enemies is a REALLY high bar.  However, when it comes to seeking to be like the only divinely perfect human in history (Jesus), the height of the bar should be at least checked! We all fall far short, and making that bar MUCH higher, Christians are admonished not to judge!

Do not judge lest ye be judged, and love your enemies would be good places to start for Christians. For the column author, clearly he feels clear qualification to judge!

Let's use alcoholism vs being gay as an example ... sin is sin, it makes no difference. It is possible to love your alcoholic spouse, sibling or child and hate their sin?  It is even possible for realize that controlling their sin is HARD ... they have a strong desire of alcohol, however it is killing them. You DON'T have to judge their behavior ... you can just love them and do all you can to help (rather than enable) them.

Even if the alcoholic is your "worst enemy" ... the author of the column for example (I'm joking), or a jihadist wearing a bomb -- they are fellow humans with eternal souls and in light of eternity it is almost believable that they are possible to love (for Christians)! Without eternity, the author is right. Why would anyone even consider "loving" a deplorable that is obviously "wrong, evil, racist, etc"?

That's the bar for Christians on how to think about folks like the author of this column. What is the "bar" for his closed tribe? "Might is right" seems like the most real answer. I'm guessing he might say something like "commonly held standards of decency by reasonable, well educated, "woke" people ... naturally, if tomorrow, the "standard" of "woke" includes pedophia as a disorder vs a crime, a new group of people will become deplorable. (the ones that will then be deplorable are the ones that still see pedophia as criminal/punishable/wrong).

 I don't mean to be demeaning, ALL people are closed minded about their beliefs (including me)! I had some folks get REALLY nasty with me in the early '80s when I told them that I agreed with the then evil "Ronnie Raygun" and thought the USSR would be "consigned to the ash heap of history". Their certainly that I was completely insane was at least as certain as the column author of his rightness. The "experts" had all spoken, how dare I, a mere computer programmer question them!

In deep-red America, the white Christian god is king, figuratively and literally. Religious fundamentalism has shaped most of their belief systems. Systems built on a fundamentalist framework are not conducive to introspection, questioning, learning, or change. When you have a belief system built on fundamentalism, it isn’t open to outside criticism, especially by anyone not a member of your tribe and in a position of power. The problem isn’t that coastal elites don’t understand rural Americans. The problem is that rural America doesn’t understand itself and will never listen to anyone outside its bubble. It doesn’t matter how “understanding” you are, how well you listen, what language you use…if you are viewed as an outsider, your views will be automatically discounted. I’ve had hundreds of discussions with rural white Americans and whenever I present them any information that contradicts their entrenched beliefs, no matter how sound, how unquestionable, how obvious, they will not even entertain the possibility that it might be true. Their refusal is a result of the nature of their fundamentalist belief system and the fact that I’m the enemy because I’m an educated liberal.

'The author is too modest in his application of  "belief systems". ALL beliefs, held by ANYONE are resistant to change! His, mine, EVERYONES! Trying to convince an atheist there is a God is at least as hard as trying to convince a believer that there isn't. Trying to convince BO that fracking was drastically going to lower gas prices was just as hard in 2012 as trying to convince this guy that there are many Bible believing Christians that are every bit as "well informed" as he is! ALL of our belief systems are built on SOMETHING that we consider to be "fundamental".

Philosophy says that science MUST be falsifiable, or it isn't science (it can only be inductively true ... as fragile as the next experiment)  ... which means that if you are a true scientist, you can't use science to support ANY "belief" at all! (it is never "settled")

Oh, and BTW, if your belief system says that there is no meaning to the universe beyond pleasure, deciding that adultery is OK, gay sex is OK, transgenderism is OK ... and whatever they think of next is not "change", it is "more of the same". Much of what the left calls "progress" is the same as "I was drinking pint a day, now I'm drinking a 5th! See, I'm making PROGRESS!"

For us “coastal elites” who understand evolution, genetics and science, nothing we say to those in flyover country is going to be listened to because not only are we fighting against an anti-education belief system, we are arguing against god. You aren’t winning a battle of beliefs with these people if you are on one side of the argument and god is on the other. No degree of understanding this is going to suddenly make them less racist, more open to reason and facts. Telling “urban elites” they need to understand rural Americans isn’t going to lead to a damn thing because it misses the causes of the problem.

Nobody "wins" a "battle of beliefs" -- that is what we have elections and wars for. If you want to NOT have to have wars, having a shared set of transcendent beliefs that we all agree on, like "all men are created equal" (before God), endowed by their CREATOR with certain UNALIENABLE rights, and a written and FOLLOWED Constitution is what worked for 200 years.

Your "god" may be the sanctity of gay sex, killing babies in the womb, legal pot for all, or just "if it feels good do it", but it is YOUR GOD ... you are exactly as "open minded" to changing your view on those things as I am willing  to decide that a few thousand year old religion which billions have based their life on is "wrong". You have your pleasure to worship, I have my God to worship that I "bitterly cling to". In my system, I need to attempt to love you, in yours, however you run over me is A-ok ... as long as "it feels good". Those are very different belief systems, and it is very easy to see why they are in increasingly violent conflict.

No God, nothing "unalienable" ... all just POWER. Ballot box or bullets, take your pick -- and guys like this author are not very excited about accepting the outcome of elections that don't go their way these days!

When a 2,700-year-old book that was written by uneducated, pre-scientific people, subject to translation innumerable times, and edited with political and economic pressures from popes and kings, is given higher intellectual authority than facts arrived at from a rigorous, self-critical, constantly re-evaluating system that can and does correct mistakes, no amount of understanding, respect or evidence is going to change their minds and assuage their fears.

Yes, godless human systems have made a few "mistakes" (say 100-200 million killed by Communism), but hey, that is a FEATURE! All fixed now ... well, unless you are one of the 60 million aborted babies so far and counting.

Nazism did in 6 million nasty Jews that were one of those "old closed system" people ... one wonders if the column author sees that as a bug or a feature? Perhaps just something needing a "correction"?

Communism did in over 100 million in the last century ... many of those that had to be killed there were "closed minded", unwilling to see the brilliance of "the state" ... again, lots of Jews and Christians. If you read the whole column you really get the feeling that there just isn't much way to deal with people who won't bow to "science".  (Lysenkoism is a worthy remembrance of always listening to your state sponsored "experts") Perhaps forcing closed minded religious people to work on top notch state science projects like Chernobyl would open their minds?

Mao's "Great Leap Forward"? North Korea's nuke program? Godless humans have such a wonderful track record. Why in the world are  the hicks in fly over country so untrusting of the coastal elites expertise? Abortion is one of the current shining examples of how godless elites respect "the least of these".

Yes, beliefs CAN be "dark and terrifying". It is really a matter of what you see as a "nightmare".

Gulags, death camps, 60 million aborted, or some states not forcing everyone to celebrate gay "marriages" and celebrate 57 genders and counting?

Sadly, in a Godless world, it is all a question of power for those in power -- how many voters, divisions, state agencies, media pundits, dollars, etc.




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The Lowest And Highest

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/trump-immigration-white-supremacy.html

Charles Blow is clearly a theologian in his own mind.

That is because Trump is man-as-message, man-as-messiah. Trump support isn’t philosophical but theological.

Trumpism is a religion founded on patriarchy and white supremacy.

It is the belief that even the least qualified man is a better choice than the most qualified woman and a belief that the most vile, anti-intellectual, scandal-plagued simpleton of a white man is sufficient to follow in the presidential footsteps of the best educated, most eloquent, most affable black man.

Our nation was founded on the idea that all men were created equal before God -- equal in opportunity rather than result. Yes, blacks and women for that matter, were not included in that declaration -- we are talking the late 1700's. The idea of equality before God vs the Divine Right of Kings, aristocracy, etc was a new and very exceptional idea, it needed a few revisions.

The part that is really hard for Mr Blow is the idea that one is required to "love their neighbor as themselves" and even to "love their enemies". Outside of Christianity, such thinking borders on the insane -- POWER, and "worthiness" as defined by Mr Blow are what "ought to count". I personally would find Thomas Sowell to be FAR more "educated, eloquent and affable" than Obama, but since we live in a political system where the selections for president are made by voting under the rules of the Constitution, neither Mr Blow's or my opinions really matter for that office.

"Trumpism" like "BOisnm" is indeed more of a "religion" than anything else -- since we have largely abandoned the ideals of "endowed by our Creator", the past two presidencies have very much been Nietzchean attempts at allegiance to value creating "supermen". When the coin of the realm is POWER as opposed to historical religion, philosophy, tradition, standards, etc, then "black power" or "white supremacy" are as good a basis as any other. When you throw out all that "old stuff", you are left with NO RULES ... which can seem pretty great when "your side" is in power, but not so great otherwise.

I'm not really sure what "perfect" means in a world with no God, no meaning, no love and certainly no shame, but it would seem Mr Blow has never heard of Matt 25:40, "The least of these'. My personal pick would be the sixty million and rising innocent unborn babies, not Trump.

No matter, to be a Christian is to say with Paul as in first Timothy 1:15.

This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.

I'll take the place of Trump as the chief of sinners -- the lowest. In his theological language, Blow seems to think that Trump somehow makes "white supremacy perfect". Can either white or black supremacy be "perfect"? I guess in the world of Blow it is so.

For white supremacy to be made perfect, the lowest white man must be exalted above those who are black.

A Little Sexual Honesty

Can We Be Honest About Women?:

We live in the age of insanity, so given that we are insane, it is controversial to state that men love beautiful women and women love being desired. A little research will show that the billions of dollars spent on shoes, clothes, jewelry, makeup, breast implants, nails, plastic surgery, etc is not spent by men. Nor do married men regulary say "honey, are you SURE that you have enough shoes?"

The reason we live in the age of insanity is that we have "abandoned the natural for the unnatural" to paraphrase Romans. Our culture glorifies the unnatural -- homosexuality, strange genders without limit, pornography, and even "kink" -- I have to study "cultural awareness" for a certification at work, and "the kink community" was one of those cultures to be aware of -- google was required.

When I was in college, a "dirty book store" was a sign of a blighted area. When I came to Rochester, there were a couple on the southern (seedy) edge of downtown that the city worked hard to get removed. Now there is the "WalMart version" with the GIANT electronic sign for "Pure Pleasure" right off the I-90 / US 63 interchange south of the airport. "Progress'.

The article is worth a read through to get some more data to cover the obvious in this age where reality is the horror that may not be spoken ... "Jerusalem is the Capital of Israel"! It closes with this ...

We can’t expect people to act like machines with one another, disconnected from their own desires. Our bodies, our sexuality, and our physical longing for one another—all of these essential parts of ourselves—are beautiful. We should cultivate those aspects.

"But they are not the most important, and they can’t be acted on unchecked. We are not animals, ruled by appetites. We have deeper aspects of ourselves that need to be nurtured. We have a rational mind and moral conscience to inform us of what is right and what is wrong. We have a spirit that has a beauty all its own, and it’s a beauty that never diminishes, unlike the physical, which passes away too quickly."

I completely agree with what the author wants, however I don't think there is likely to be motion in that direction anytime soon because the spirit that IS, and is meant to be, our "true self" is denied by our modern world and we ARE expected to behave as "machines" -- machines made out of meat. Materialists (and they are a common philosophical branch in these times) believe exactly that -- there is NOTHING more to us than "meat"! We are ONLY organic machines.

The divine intention of our sexuality is to be BOTH spiritual and physical. Our insane materialist world of meat creatures celebrates strange physical sexual pairings, imaginary genders, and most of all the killing of the natural outcome of sex, children. In the insane materialist world, we have become much LESS than animals -- so we no longer understand the natural, as all animals do, and are drawn to the UNnatural.

Why? Because consciousness / spirit is decidedly not "natural" in any way that we can discern save divine intervention -- and the search for the divine, the "higher", delivers  a morality that has little to do with materialist "nature" -- red of tooth and claw. When our spirit looks up to God, we rise, when our spirit looks down to our own flesh, we fall.

Our flight from the embrace of the divine -- the transcendent, has left us to attempt to define moral structures based on power (might is right),  while feeling that the powerful "taking what they want" is somehow "immoral" according to? What? No doubt the "still small voice", but where oh where does our post modern, post truth society think that voice comes from? In confusion, many have decided to put government in the role of "god" as if humans acting in large unionized bureaucracies were somehow likely to be "virtuous".

We looked for "the good" in more government and found nothing but evil.

The "honest about men" version of this article closes with:

Much of the modern moral struggle is the war between entitlement and obligation. Raise a boy to live for himself, with a sense of entitlement, and he will often unleash that enormous inborn energy in the most destructive of ways. Raise a boy to live for others, with a sense of obligation, and that same energy can build a nation and sustain a culture. We can’t make a perfect world, but we do have a choice. Better or worse? It’s time to recognize and respond to human nature, or — despite the best of intentions — we will continue to choose to be worse.

Matt 23:11 "The greatest amoung you will be your servant". These ideas were once well understood. As we watch BOistan tear at itself like a dying animal the the words of Lincoln paraphasing the Psalm 19:9 in his second inagural comes to mind ... "The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether."

Western civilization had these answers solidly understood -- and now we are lost. 

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A Secular Age: Charles W Taylor

https://www.amazon.com/Secular-Age-Charles-Taylor/dp/0674026764/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

As I traversed this massive nearly 900 page work, I sometimes wondered; "Why does one undertake such a thing?". I had previously read "How to Not Be Secular", a "cliff notes summary", so I had the general ideas:

• 500 years ago we lived in an enchanted, embedded, hierarchical world, while today we live in a disenchanted, disembedded, flat world.
• The "standard story" of the secularists is a "subtraction story" -- "science" made it "impossible to believe" in more than matter. Taylor finds the "subtraction story" utterly lacking -- we still believe in love, beauty, justice, consciousness (spirit), and "good" ... none of which can be measured, so therefore do not exist to science. There are lots of other reasons that "subtraction" falls short.
• We live as a "Buffered Self" that is cut off from God, family, other people, the past, having "a place" ... again, a LONG list. However we are "buffeted" or "haunted" by our mortality and a sense of "something more" ... "fullness" that tugs at our hearts / souls ????
• Many are radically unhappy in this world to the point of suicide. They have FAR more "stuff" than even the kings, lords and popes of 500 years ago, yet their lives are arid -- often to the point of not being worth living. "Stuff" does not seem to be enough. 

I'll call those "the biggies" for now. My sense is that the reading of such a book vs "reviews" ... by me or others,  is a bit like the difference between being told of mountains, the ocean, falling in love, having children, grandchildren, etc and of EXPERIENCING those things. Certainly, good wordsmiths, poets, musicians, movie makers, etc can all convey significant parts of those experiences, however I doubt that any person that has experienced one of those or thousands of other things would say "I wish that I never did the real thing, I liked the descriptions of it much better"! 

Late in the millenium prior to Christ, there were a number of "higher religions" that began to replace paganism -- this is sometimes referred to as "The Axial Age" (Karl Jaspers) meaning "pivital age" because the idea of transcendence was so important to changing human thought. "More than mere matter". 

It is tempting for me to head off to read 5-10 referenced works that put even more flesh on the bones of how we have returned to essentially a pre-axial pagan view -- to make the obvious Lennon modification ... "nothing to live or die for, and no religion too ..." 

In the words of Evelyn Waugh quoted in the book ....

I think one has to look deeper before one will find the reason why in England today the Roman Church is recruiting so many men and women who are not notably gullible, dim-witted or eccentric.

It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos… 

Today we can see [the loss of Christian faith]…as the active negation of all that western culture has stood for. Civilization – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe – has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state… It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests… 

That is the first discovery, that Christianity is essential to civilization and that it is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.

Christianity held out in the US for longer than it did in Europe, but we have descended into chaos as well -- pick what date you want, but few deny it today. Yes, the dominant culture still believes that the chaos of Obama was better than the chaos of Trump, however in a world driven only by raw power with no controlling theological, philosophical, constitutional or legal authority, secular life is  just a constant scrum for power by any means possible.

My purpose in reading works like this is to "experience the ocean" of a great mind creating a great work. The experience is one of being made both smaller and larger -- like seeing the ocean or the mountains. It isn't really about snapping a few pictures and putting down a few words. There is some minor similarity of why it is critical for a Christian to daily read their Bible -- cover to cover, then maybe just start again, or give the New Testament a second pass before going back to Genesis -- it becomes the constant EXPERIENCE of the Bible. Not "a text", but a connection to the vastness of God much larger than mere text.

Certainly, "Secular Age" pales in comparison, it is but a "shadow" as compared to the Bible -- like comparing going to Lake Mille Lacs with going to see the Pacific Ocean.

The link to "How to Not Be Secular" above, or another highly rated review of "Secular Age" will give you the "talking points", but in my view, not the "gestalt". Secular Age is clearly a labor of love for Taylor to create -- and at least a labor of "deep like" to read. It was worth it for me, and I hesitate to advise anyone else, other than to say that I would expect that anyone will be changed by the experience.

Intersectional Feminism, New Peak Smug

10 Things Every Intersectional Feminist Should Ask On a First Date - Everyday Feminism:

First of all, it is time to introduce "intersectionality". The link takes you to the wikipedia discussion -- the quick definition is "grievance bundling", with a special need to make sure that white women are dutifully sorry for their "white privilege" before they are really accepted by "the sisterhood".

The biggies are "racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia (country having borders in their parlance) and honoring all other religions except Christianity, with SPECIAL honor to Islam.

Think of an "Intersectional Feminist" as the opposite of a deplorable -- "secular sainthood"! I will tend to refer to them as "IFs" ... seems about right.

The other aspect that you pick up from their writing is yet another new height in arrogant smugness. To the article. I'm guessing that some readers of this blog will assume it HAS to be satire, however I looked around a bit just to be sure -- though a Christian that fears for mens (and even IFs souls), wishes it were --  it's not. No "fear of God" for these women ... er, "things"!

The imaginary vignette of this column is that a "cis male" (identifying as birth gender male) has taken an IF out for a date (hey, men think with the wrong organ sometimes!).

The list of "ten" is largely a misrepresentation ... it links off to specific grievances, each of which has their own lists of many grievances ... patriarchy, rape culture, prison-industrial complex, etc. I'll just include #8 as a representative.

We live on a tiny planet, with land and water within a galaxy surrounded by a universe with an inconceivable number of other galaxies and planets. Yet here we dictate where we are and who is allowed to be where we are. It’s mind-boggling that borders are even a thing, so to call people “aliens” or “illegal immigrants” is so inhumane and despicable.

White Americans stole this land, colonized this land, created so many borders, pushed out, killed and enslaved people of color and somehow they have the audacity to claim that this land is theirs and that black and brown immigrants are stealing their jobs, land, and homes? Miss me with that bullshit.

Well, actually they defeated their opposition by force, which in a world without transcendence is the most morality you ever get. Read the entire list of 10 -- as an IF, you DO have the right to not date anyone who doesn't agree with your opinions because there are a bunch of people that could kick your ass that will defend that right -- including me, who disagrees with pretty much everything you stand for, however still sees your right to make a dating decision without coercion of any sort as being "endowed by your and my Creator".

Transcendence was the idea that there were values beyond force -- "endowed by the Creator". For the general population, that idea is dead, therefore IFs need to find some way to defeat their opposition by force in order to get their ideas to hold sway. The traditional alternative to God is the all powerful state -- set up a bunch of secret police, military, tribunals, gulags, etc, and "re-educate" or kill people that don't bow to your "list of 10". Given the 2nd Amendment still existing even in BOistan, I'd guess the IFs are going to need A LOT of range time to have "a shot" at making much of their list of 10 a reality.

Without transcendence, ideas of "right / wrong / good / evil / better / worse ... etc" come down to might makes right. The issue of who can kick whose ass.`

The physically, intellectually, financially, etc less capable need some method to "incent / coerce / create compassion within" those with more power to protect them. In Western Culture for 2K years, that was Christian Morals -- be kind to even those who hate you, care for those that are weaker, etc -- it worked quite well in general terms.

Women got the right to vote, the lame, the sick, the mentally less abled, etc were cared for, most often in religiously based hospitals. The whole ethic that got Western civilization to the spot where a woman (or what she wants to be called ???) could have a platform to write this was Christianity -- those that lack understanding of human nature might assume that a really big "Thank You!" to Christianity and Western civilization would be in order.

Lose the battle of Poitiers (Tours)  in 732, and this woman and billions more might well be wearing burkas, not voting, not driving, not going to school, etc.

Nietzsche hated Christianity as well, especially the idea of "care of the weak".

Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.

Clearly the writer of the list has FAR abandoned any concept of Christianity, so who is it that will stand up for her against those stronger than her, and WHY will they desire to do this?

Perhaps there are deeper questions for her to ponder. 

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The Solipsistic Sanity Bubble, Cab Kitty Speaks

Democratic National Committee & Hillary Clinton -- Democrats Still Making the Same Mistakes | National Review:

Solipsism is the theory that only The Ferocious Cabadocious Kitty can be proven to exist -- sometimes generalized by foolish humans to be "the self is all that can be proven to exist", which Cab will promptly DISprove by biting the fool who asserts that!

Cab exists, and you are a figment of his rather fertile imagination. He is the foremost feline authority on all topics philosophical, with epistemology -- the study of why Cab knows everything, and how he knows it, being his foremost area of expertise!

BO now has his own "Foundation", or as I like to call them ... "funds", because what they really do is provide massive amounts of tax free cash, living expenses, private jets, etc for those whose name heads up the "foundation", or "fund".  The linked article touches on a nice kickoff meeting in Chicago with BO himself there -- a place for the elite self-satisfied to believe they were in the "sanity bubble"

The sanity bubble! What a perfect label for the environs of the self-satisfied and righteous, the elegantly appointed ballrooms where the high and mighty, silhouetted in magenta up-lighting, nod reverentially at clichés mouthed by the latest faddish “thought leader,” before tucking into, say, a caprese salad with arugula and pesto, followed by spinach and gorgonzola tortelloni with caramelized pears and bleu cheese cream. Within the sanity bubble life is pleasant, comfortable, and agreeable, its niceties and pleasures and fixed ideas interrupted by only the maelstrom of political and economic change outside.

I live in the bubble. Always have, even if I have come to disagree with what my college professors would call the “hegemonic discourse” of postmodern liberalism, and to gag at the vanity and solipsism of many of my fellow residents. But never, especially after the 2016 campaign, would I mistake the confines of the bubble for the whole of reality. That is the mistake Hillary Clinton made when she decided that she could win the presidency without the support of a white working class mangled by economic stagnation, family breakdown, and drug addiction. And it is the same mistake the Democrats at the Obama Foundation and on Capitol Hill are making now, in real time, as they wrap themselves in the illusions that growing minority populations will carry them ineluctably to power, and that identity politics is somehow an electoral winner.

The Davos controlled beltway denizens and the Administrative State have no time for the "Bitter Clingers" or "Basket of Deplorables" ... they only acknowledge the existence of such people through denigration. While Cab is picky, he will tend to acknowledge all who feed him or properly pet him -- although, he may well bite the in the next second -- Cab and fate have that in common.

The elite are certain they are of ultimate importance, but Cab would be happy to bite them to make their "sanity bubble" just a tiny bit more "sane"!

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No Family, No Country, Identity Politics

The Primal Scream of Identity Politics | The Weekly Standard:

This one is definitely worth the read -- it falls one "parent" short, GOD, but it hits the earthly target very well. I'd argue that killing "god" in the Nietzchean sense was definitely on the road to killing daddy, mommy, and family in general. A people that still honored God could not have legalized abortion, dishonored their parents, and abandoned their children in the name of earthly sexual pleasure and other "progress".

I'm about 1/3 of the way through "The Secular Age" by Charles Taylor. It tells the story of how the west went from a fully enchanted world at the time of the Reformation, to the nearly totally DISenchanted world we live in today. Everyone believed that the Cosmos was ordered with a sacred purpose that included each of us -- embedded in our family, church, community, nation, and yes, an ordered cosmos where everything included elements of the spiritual, the sacred.

Today, we are DISembedded and disenchanted --

The legalization of same-sex marriage, as observers both for and against the 2015 Obergefell decision came to agree, owed most to one factor: empathy for the moral claim that attraction to one’s own sex is like pigmentation or DNA, immutable and immune to change. Yet a split cultural second later, exactly the opposite case has come to be made for the intersex, transgendered, and other sexual minorities: that identity is fluid, indeterminate, perhaps even recalcitrant, rather than born that way. 

In this head-on collision of purported creation stories about sexual and gender identity that cannot possibly both be true, we see once more that the question Who am I? is the most fraught of our time. It has become like a second skin: something that can’t be sloughed off, or even scratched, without excruciating pain to the subject—reason and logic and the rest of persuasion-as-usual be damned.

As we have attempted to make "meaning" a material thing, it is not all that surprising that we would have completely incompatable "required views" on one of the most basic elements of our identity, our gender. Science says there are two genders, society says there are 50 some and more every day.

So why have we become "tribal"?

It’s not that “America Wasn’t Built for Humans,” as the title of Sullivan’s piece has it. It’s rather that America, like other civilizations, was built for humans who learned community not from roving bands of unrelated nomads, but from those around them—beginning in the small civilization of the family.

Our macro-politics have gone tribal because our micro-politics are no longer familial. This, above all, is what’s happened during the five decades in which identity politics went from being unheard of to ubiquitous.

Pretty much all of us understand this at some level. Our "families" almost all now involved 2nd, 3rd, etc marriages, and often many sorts of other relations. In the Bible we hear "who is my neighbor", today we hear "Who is my Daddy? my Mommy? my Sister? my Grandparent ... etc, etc". Clearly, lots of the people we know have decided that "what THEIR heart says" is what must be truth.

Jerimiah 17:9 says "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"

Naturally, when God was supposedly killed, such ancient wisdom became foolish. Today we "follow our hearts", and attack those who fail to agree with our own godlike view of "truth".

When a mob of young men attack a 74-year-old man and a middle-aged woman, as happened at Middlebury College in March in the case of Charles Murray and Allison Stanger, something deeper is afoot than American individualism run amok. When debate after campus debate is preemptively shut down due to social media threats of violence, reasoned talk of a “Reagan Dispensation” doesn’t begin to capture the menace there. Berkeley spent $600,000 on “security” for a visit by the conservative author and pundit Ben Shapiro. Non-progressive speakers who have nothing to do with racism or supremacism are regularly harassed, threatened, disinvited, and shouted down on campuses across the country. To ascribe these transgressions to identitarian narcissism alone is to miss what’s truly novel about them. And most chilling.

Many of the 4500 and rising posts in this blog call out the horror that we have (mostly) unwittingly unleashed. I could link you to MANY, however, I think "Darwin's Cathedral" is key ... a short excerpt from that post, all from page 228 of that book.

" It is true that many religious beliefs are false as literal descriptions of the real world, but this merely forces us to recognize two forms of realism; a factual realism based on literal correspondence, and a practical realism based on behavioral adaptiveness."  

"Rationality is not the gold standard on which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought."  

and then ... "... factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors. It is the person who elevates factual truth above practical truth who must be accused of mental weakness from an evolutionary perspective". 

We pretty much all actually operate on a practical realism based on adaptiveness ... and we pretty much all think that OUR tribe really operates on a factual realism based on literal correspondence, and the other tribe is a bunch of evil lying "progressives", or "deploreables" depending on which tribe we identify with. The core problem is that without any transcendent meaning in our lives, "pleasure" tends to cloud our judgement, and any perceived threat to our determination of "truth" becomes ever harder for us to face with maturity.

Maybe that cultural scream of “mine!” is issuing from souls who did have something taken from them—only something more elemental than the totemic objects now functioning as figurative blankies for lost and angry former children. As of today, less than 65 percent of American children live with both biological parents, even as other familial boughs have broken via external forces like the opioid crisis, criminality and incarceration, and globalization. Maybe depression and anxiety have been rising steadily among children and teenagers for a reason. Maybe the furor over “appropriation” unveils the true foundation of identity politics, which is pathos.

The columns closing paragraph is powerful, and WAY too true in the world I see around me. I'll be reading some of the links and I'll continue to howl at the despair of our broken modern world with the only thing which I believe can save us individually or collectively -- The Grace of Jesus Christ through Faith Alone! On this 500th year of the Reformation, revive us again Lord Jesus!

Anyone who’s ever heard a coyote in the desert, separated at night from the pack, knows the sound. Maybe the otherwise-unexplained hysteria of today’s identity politics is just that: the collective human howl of our time, sent up by inescapably communal creatures who can no longer identify their own.

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The Limits of Sexual Consent

Sex, Consent & Morality -- Culture Ruined by Sexual Revolution | National Review:

The modern pagans continue their hard work of pulling man up by his moral bootstraps. The technique works no better for morality than it does for flying.

The following from a tweet in the attached article ...

So much cultural & personal hurt due to sexual sin. Maybe the church should see its sexual ethics as a gift of common grace to the world.

There is nothing common about Grace -- it cost divine suffering beyond imagination, and yes, Grace and God's morality are a HUGE gift!

The article is short and worth the read --  mutual desire is not morality no matter how much lipstick one puts on it.

The practical result of consent-focused morality is the sexualization of everything. With the line drawn at desire alone, there is no longer any space that’s sex-free. Work meetings or restaurants can be creative locations for steamy liaisons. Not even marriage or existing relationships stand as a firewall against potential hookups.

Morality transcends -- or it isn't morality, it is just applied power. Without a transcendent standard, "morality" comes down to "might is right". At this moment, The #METOO movement has some power because of the political calculus of the left having sudden "morality" because they would like to remove Trump from power.

Transcendent morality is eternal, power faux "morality" is situational, political and transitory.


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Iconoclasim, Skynet, Satan

NR Statue Removal

Burke said it best:

But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

Or, to understand it in more modern terms ... just destroy everything! (yesterday, August 29th was Skynet self-awareness day).

Or in God's Word 1 Peter 5:8

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:

Creation vs Destruction -- The super free to view (but not to lose) fight of the ages. 

We all understand what is happening here, it has happened many times. Tear down the statues, burn the books, declare views that you disagree with to be "hate speech" / "subversive" / imperialist / capitalist ... in other words, "bad". The important thing is to DESTROY THEM!!!

The Creator or the Destroyer? The modern destroyers seek to deny any "creator" save randomness -- very very unlikely things "just happen". There is really no other explanation -- for there to be a creator would mean that some level of respect was owed to that creator. Or even classical civilization, Christianity, Founding Fathers, or, dare we say it ... parents / elders. 

But then how could each and every modern be "god" --- each with their own "sacred view" (well, at LEAST as "sacred" as the next guys, gals, ????) 

Raze the earth of it's past -- the PRESENT is so much better, and the future? Well, no doubt it will be better still in the "progressive" model -- it will have to be, it will be NEW ... for a bit, and then it will be gone ... ever replaced by the latest and greatest "more perfect" level of knowledge 

Thus saith the "progressives"! Materialist "knowledge" ( depending on a universe randomly ordered)  is god, wisdom is bunk. 

Matt 4:9 "All this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me."

No Ground To Stand On, Post Modern America

How America Went Haywire - The Atlantic:

This somewhat longish column is a poster child for an attempted left wing analysis of "what went wrong"? How did they discover that something went "wrong"? Trump was elected. The wordy article leads us on a merry chase of how this terrible thing might have happened -- it is written by Kurt Anderson, who is a writer that graduated from Harvard and founded "Spy" magazine. An example of what "Spy" was about:

Founded by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter, who served as its first editors, and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., its first publisher. After one folding and a rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998. The magazine specialized in irreverent and satirical pieces targeting the American media, entertainment industries and the mocking of high society.[4] Some of its features attempted to present the darker side of celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Steven Seagal,[5]Martha Stewart, and especially, the real-estate tycoon Donald Trump and his then-wife Ivana Trump.[6] Pejorative epithets of celebrities, e.g., "Abe 'I'm Writing As Bad As I Can' Rosenthal", "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump",[7] "churlish dwarf billionaire Laurence Tisch", "bum-kissing toady Arthur Gelb", "bosomy dirty-book writer Shirley Lord" and "former fat girl Dianne Brill" became a Spy trademark.

Strangely, although Anderson finds Trump to be a disaster of the first order, a quick read of the paragraph would indicate that Kurt and Donald ought to be bosom buddies ... "former fat girl Dianne Brill"?  Indeed. So what IS the shape our peril according to Kurt?

By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” More than half say they’re absolutely certain heaven exists, and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal God—not a vague force or universal spirit or higher power, but some guy. A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists.

Kurt certainly seems to have a solid view of "reality" -- to the extent we can discern it's base, the key point seems to be strong materialist atheism -- creation, angels, heaven, and "a personal God" (we will assume he means Jesus) come in for special snark. For those of us that believe in Christ being God made Man, the "Word of Kurt" (WoK) calling him "some guy" seems just a bit presumptions. Somehow, I'm guessing he is far less snarky about "allah" ... at least around Muslims. They don't love their enemies, they kill them.

Kurt goes on a long discussion of how "America" has gone "haywire". So why is it that Kurt's ideas on this are supposed to be of interest to anyone at all?  Kurt does a great job of answering the reason for that right up front -- there is really no reason to read the rest of it.

Why are we like this?

The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.

 So what are the qualification of one of the founders of "Spy" magazine to give us a psuedo-intellectual tour of history? He is admittedly Ivy League educated, but certainly not philosopher, theologian, scientist, political scientist, or even sociologist; on what does he stand to provide us the answer for the deep meaning of "haywire". Clearly KURT believes that Trump defines "haywire", however what expertise, philosophy, revelation, equation, data, "standard", dream, etc is Kurt standing on as he says it? I'd argue it is exactly like Potter Stewart's definition of pornography ... "you know it when you see it'.

Kurt HIMSELF has clearly stated "expert's be damned" -- The WoK is being proffered as useful because he himself finds his own views to be "equal or superior to anyone else's". He invalidates his own case right up front.

My view is that we forgot that "the fear of God is the BEGINNING of all wisdom". Transcendence, something unchangeable and beyond mere matter -- TRUTH. A book that points out where we left the track is from my perspective is "Ideas Have Consequences" and the point and which we first became unglued was in the 14th century.

"This was a change that overtook the dominant philosophical thinking of the West in the fourteenth century, when the reality of transcendentals was first seriously challenged."

Without SOMETHING that is at least very close to an eternal principle, we ALL lack any place to stand to make any sort of judgments at all! Science leaps from the precipice that says "the universe is ORDERED, and results that we see today are assumed to be repeatable across time and space". The foundation of science is INDUCTION -- "it worked today, it will work tomorrow, and it will work anywhere for all time".

The difficulty with this is PERSPECTIVE. The Thanksgiving turkey postulates that humans are a benevolent species that cares and provides for turkeys. On the very day in which the turkey's "proof" has gained the status of maximally proven scientific "fact", the induction crashes and the turkey finds himself at a meal in which he is the guest of honor. The turkey lacked the perspective of a larger view -- as do we humans relative to eternity.

The other problem is of course that right/wrong, beauty, consciousness, love, etc are completely outside the realm of science, as science is about STUFF ... material, matter. Human life is founded on human consciousness -- right, wrong, up, down, inside out, or non-existent, it IS what WE perceive as humans!

Kurt certainly views HIS consciousness as a superb basis for analysis ... as do we all unless we recognize a power greater than our own perspective (eg. "the fear of God" or maybe "fear of Kurt"??).

Let's look at Kurt's "analysis" a bit":

Meanwhile, over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself. To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”

Therefore, Kurt's "reality" would also be relative ... however, since he wrote this long article, we are to understand that it isn't really. Somehow, "The WoK" is privileged. (See "reality based" above}.

So what kind of heresy has failure to accept the WoK unleased?

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.” 

Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certainty.

Ah, "simple truth" --- or as we can see from the column, "the WoK". Sadly, the evil American Right thought that there WERE ultimate truths ... like the Word of God, which included Genesis, now known to  fail the "reality based" test, according to the WoK. So the decried "relativism", as now apparently so does Kurt -- it's just that he finds any "relativism" according to the "Word of Kirk" to be bad -- therefore, he is a "rightwing fundamentalist" in relation to the "Word of Kirk"!

"Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared." 

Here I think we arrive at the crux of the matter. As long as whatever was being stated was duly approved by a part of the Administrative State lodged comfortably in the womb of the Federal Communications Commission, all could be certain that only Administrative State, Union Approved, Ivy League vetted, Davos Certified, "truth" would be provided to the masses. Everything was "ideologically SINGLE sided", which was "the good", and the idiots that provided the alternative comic relief -- Bill Buckley and the American Spectator, were "fringe" --- as heretics ought to be!

Did his voters know that his hogwash was hogwash? Yes and no, the way people paying to visit P. T. Barnum’s exhibitions 175 years ago didn’t much care whether the black woman on display was really George Washington’s 161-year-old former nanny or whether the stitched-together fish/ape was actually a mermaid; or the way today we immerse in the real-life fictions of Disney World. Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.

Perhaps there really were consequences to Slick Wille having BJs in the oval office, lying about it, and skating. Maybe calling a vast power grab and re-distribution scam called the "Affordable" Care Act, "affordable" even though it added a grab bag of new benefits to health INSURANCE thus being certain to radically increase the cost, was slightly disingenuous. However, saying that "If you like your doctor you can keep him", "if you like your insurance plan you can keep it", etc was TOTALLY a direct lie which anyone that paid any attention understood to be a LIE ... or to put it in Kurt's words, "a show and a sham".

I personally know MANY people that budgeted for retiring with healthcare TOTAL costs (insurance + deductables + co-pays) of $8K for a 60 year old couple, finding that they needed $22K for insurance along, PLUS, another 8-10K for deductables and co-pays. $30K vs $8K ... PER YEAR!

Slick Willie ushered in the age of fake. BO made it the standard.

So what do I believe caused America to "go haywire", and turn into BOistan?

We have to stand on SOMETHING! As John Adams said: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other". That morality was founded on Jesus Christ --  we never had any other rock to stand on, and sorry to say, the WoK isn't much of a substitute.

So what does the "word of Kurt" say on this point?

What is to be done? I don’t have an actionable agenda, Seven Ways Sensible People Can Save America From the Craziness. But I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations. We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal. A grassroots movement against one kind of cultural squishiness has taken off and lately reshaped our national politics—the opposition to political correctness. I envision a comparable struggle that insists on distinguishing between the factually true and the blatantly false.

What is "reality"? Is it matter only, with meaning defined by induction? Kurt, founder of "Spy" magazine firmly believes in the "World of Kurt" ... if you follow Kurt, you too can be "reality based". Isn't that special?

Choose ye this day whom you will serve ... Kurt? or something larger? Trump is only a very temporary occupant of the highest office in what is at this point the failed state of BOistan. I believe that God is bigger than Kurt, Trump, and BOistan, so God is my choice as the basis for reality -- eternal reality. 

What about you? 

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