Friday, September 30, 2016

His Majesty


There may be hope for the future yet. The University of Michigan decided that everyone has the right to "pick their pronoun", and Grant Strobl chose "His Majesty".
“’His Majesty’ is not a pronoun, but neither is zir or zi,” His Majesty told me. “None of them are recognized in the English language. Everything is completely arbitrary now. You can identify as anything you want.”
Indeed ... His Majesty has correctly discerned the meaning (or lack thereof) when there are "no rules" and each individual is their own "god" or "king".  "You can identify as anything you want" ... for good and ill.
“If they want me to be tolerant of their pronouns, they have to be tolerant to my new title,” His Majesty said. “Many of the students on campus who call for diversity – they only want diversity for ideas they agree with.”
Ah yes, the crux of the problem with the left ruling order. "Diversity and pronoun choice for me, but NOT for THEE!".

I must admit jealousy for the young mans parents -- but in this vale of tears, they are most likely atheist liberals and saddened beyond measure. Ah, fate ... a last quote from "His Majesty".
“As a Christian, I believe that all lives are valuable,” he told me. “I love all people. And I have no problem with people choosing a designated pronoun.”
Long may he reign!

'via Blog this'

Science, Feminism, Knowledge


Here is a quote from the feminist looking for a PHD in education. 
Initial exploration of the STEM syllabi in this study did not reveal overt references to gender, such as through the use of gendered pronouns. However, upon deeper review, language used in the syllabi reflects institutionalized STEM teaching practices and views about knowledge that are inherently discriminatory to women and minorities by promoting a view of knowledge as static and unchanging, a view of teaching that promotes the idea of a passive student, and by promoting a chilly climate that marginalizes women.
While the Federalist takes a very dim view of her thinking, even the Federalist may need to back up and understand the big picture framework a bit.

  1. Scientific truth IS purely material, it's objectivity is what makes it scientific. It ignores man, it asserts that it would be the same if man never existed. It is discovered, not created. It's THEORIES are created, but they are created to be TESTED and VERIFIED. It has no moral sense, "right and wrong" are merely "works or fails to work as per theory".
  2. Theological truth is revealed. It is ultimate and is beyond the physical, but "in with and under" the physical.  The partial awareness of theological truth by thought and emotion is revelation. God gives us what we need.Theological truth always requires a "leap of faith".
  3. Philosophical truth is either derived from theology or created purely by human reason. It defines human knowing, and the relation of theology (or rejection of) is critical to that knowing. It also requires a "leap of faith" as in "I think, therefore I am" or "the universe is understandable by human senses and has an order that persists over time and space" (the basis for science). 
So I actually agree with the feminist on science in a strange way. It DOES ignore women, but only in the same way it ignores all of mankind as being irrelevant to the truth of science.



Our educational system has thrown out philosophy and religion and attempted to replace them with science. Science has NOTHING to say on either topic -- it is the study of the MATERIAL, religion (other than pure idolatry) is the study of that which is NOT material, save for the incarnation of Christ, fully God and fully man.



Science is a BRANCH of philosophy, that part that deals with what is knowable about the material world and why. In a justly ordered world, Religion is the king of the university and philosophy the queen. The rest of the branches of study are their "subjects" -- subject to the order and wisdom provided by religion and philosophy, with their meaning (as opposed to their "practice" or "mechanism" drawn from the king and queen).



For a bit more detail on the purview of science and the effect that our improper usage of science has wrought, see "The Face Of God".

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Reason Is White


I've got to hear a lot of African Studies, NAACP and Black Lives Matter people talk on MPR in the last year. The following is from a white PHD of philosophy and religion at east coast schools like Villanova.
I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.
To the extent that the Greeks, Romans and Jews are "white", that would be a correct statement.

Given that racial assumption, Western Civilization is "white".

The author uses the following rather obtuse paragraph to make the claim that "race is destiny" -- who you are, how you turn out, are all determined by your race.
Were I there, there would be “here.” That is a simple thought whose depth we never plumb. In my own work I cite it frequently to criticize the idea of “the one true religion.” We have seven grandchildren and when the last one was born I remember thinking that a little black child was also being born that day, as dear and innocent as our granddaughter, who was going home to a desperate situation where the odds will be stacked against her. We begin with an originary natal equality and then we crush it. “Switched at birth” stories, like Mark Twain’s “The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson,” have a deep ethical and political import. Were I there, there would be here. That should transform everything.
If he was correct, the planet would be a homogenous tribal culture devoid of philosophy, science, technology, etc. How you were born would be your destiny and "progress" would be an unknown term -- like the English language, nations like England, writing, etc.

Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Condoleezza Rice, Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, Thomas Sowell, and uncounted other blacks would not exist, because "race would be destiny". I submit that we do not live in that world
People who try to walk a mile in the shoes of the other, to live among and dedicate their lives to working with the oppressed, are also sensitive to the fact of their own privilege. They know they can never truly identify with them. They understand this paradox but it doesn’t paralyze them. This problem also comes up in Christian theology — God intentionally assumed our mortal condition but it wasn’t an inescapable plight visited upon the divine being without its consent.
One of the most cherished aspects of the left is the paradox of the "victim without choice". Blacks are asserted to have no choice, and no chance. Similarly, whites always have "privilege" -- they created the entire framework of the modern world -- the very concept of reason itself. Even God is denied the power to save -- he had a choice, so can't be a "true victim" in the universe created by the professor.
I came to philosophy through religion and theology and as a result philosophy has always had a salvific and prophetic quality for me. It has always been a way to save myself, even as in antiquity philosophy did not mean an academic specialty but a way of living wisely.
God and creation are denied -- free will is very nearly denied, yet somehow, miraculously, the author arrives at the power to "save himself" -- to be his own ultimate, to be his own god.

Postmodernism -- a rather long word for insanity.

'via Blog this'

Headlining Black Voter Turnout

The image below  is a screen grab from Google News this AM as the "top story".

We know that far more unarmed and armed whites are killed by police,  but that isn't the narrative here. "An unarmed black man is 2.5x times more likely to be killed by police than a white man".

What headlines do is make you forget PERSPECTIVE. Two hundred and fifty thousand Americans are thought to die each year due to medical errors. Not likely to see any headlines about that.

The linked article says that in a year and a half, 1,500 TOTAL people were shot and killed by police, so you have roughly a 200x chance of dying of a medical error vs having the police shoot and kill you. Clearly, if you were "rational" (according to TP), you ought to be FAR more concerned about dying from a medical error than of being shot by police ... black, yellow, white, lime green, or whatever.

But what you need to pay attention to is what "The Party" (TP-D) WANTS you to think. On terrorism, they work fairly hard to let you know that "in perspective", you have "more chance of furniture falling on you" than you do of dying in a terrorist attack. We are somewhat regularly told how irrational it is to be concerned about terrorism, while TP and their media arm ACTIVELY wants to give you the perception that police shooting blacks is a HUGE problem!

As we cover in this blog regularly, they are doing this because they have an agenda -- they want to control you, and they know that humans are bad at math, driven by emotion, and prone to believe what others say to them ... especially if the "others" are seen as "authority".

We all have parents, who are our first authority, then teachers, then bosses, then wives (well, close to half of us) ... so we are used to being told what to do, and in general we are compliant. Even better (if you are TP or Trump), we tend not to think about what we are being influenced by. We just "have a feeling" that something is badly wrong relative to police shootings of blacks, and the problem is racist police.

What is really going on here is BO and Hildebeast working to get the black vote energized and out. BO has stated that it would be a "personal insult" if they did not turn out. Black votes are critical because they are the "fuel" for the big city fraud machines that are a major part of TP "winning" elections.

Their VOTES matter to TP, but their LIVES do not -- else TP would be FAR more worried about the chances of a black man being killed by another black man, but that does not fit their narrative. In fact, the big cities where that black on black violence happens are all under TP control and the policies of TP keep the violent cycle going. Which is just FINE with TP, because it is POWER, not anyone's life about which they care.