Author: VD

The Pan-Gargler provides a Dictionary of Progressive Principles:

Affirmative Action: Jobs must always be given to those who cannot perform them.

Multiculturalism: Society works best when its divided into many groups that hate each other.

Diversity: Society functions best when no one is permitted to think or voice prohibited ideas.

Disarmament: The best way for a country to defend itself is to rely upon the good will of its enemies.

Feminism: Societal collapse is a small price to pay for female superiority.

Racism: That which the progressive doesn’t like.

Fascism: That which the progressive doesn’t like or understand.

Sexism: That which makes the female progressive feel bad.

Capitalism: The indirect institution of socialism through big, regulated corporations instead of agencies of the government. This is actually corporatism, but if we called it that, someone might notice.

Meelhama agrees, to a limited extent:

Of course everything you wrote makes complete sense; but only if one accepts your categories.

1) You conflate Calvinism and Hyper-Calvinism.

2) More seriously, you conflate immanent and transcendent categories.

3) If theology Reformed to the Augustinian—and ostensibly—the Hebraic tradition is “not only psychologically nonsensical but bordering on the unbearably silly,” you just do not yet understand. Don’t quickly discount the very tradition that allows your own semi-pelagian evangelicalism.

4) Hermeneutics, like morality, is not a question of counting noses. Or, in this case, verses.

This is why I pay little attention to theologians. They are as unintelligible to the normal educated man, and as useless, as the post-modern academics. Dixiedog and a few others have made the mistake of attempting to shoehorn omniderigence into one of the theologians’ pre-established, oft-debated categories (is it Calvinism or Hyper-Calvinism?), not understanding that it does not describe a highly refined intellectual position but an actual belief that is held by ordinary people. Indeed, there are millions more people that subscribe to the idea of an omniderigent deity than have ever encountered the word “hermeneutics”.

Using high theology to describe common Christian beliefs about God is similar to evaluating precisely which brand of socialism the guy who just hates the rich and wants to stick it to them subscribes. It’s not merely impossible, it’s beside the point. The vanities of the theologians notwithstanding, not all considerations have been foreseen and sufficiently thought through, indeed, I’m nearly as often surprised by the shallowness of the thinkers who have supposedly settled great questions as I am by their wisdom.

My senior year of high school, a girl from our class rolled her car and was killed. Much was said about God’s Will and His wonderful, if rather short, plan for her life and so forth, but I was quite skeptical. Whereas others sought for a reason why she had died, I thought the answer was sitting right there in front of our faces. The laws of physics were in place, the girl liked to go fast – she was one of the better racers on the ski team – and the confluence of those two things plus the lack of a seatbelt and a tight curve of the road equaled one dead driver. QED.

Sure, it is eminently possible that an omniderigent God had intentionally splattered her brains solely for His ineffable glory, but that not only holds some rather disturbing implications, it is also completely unnecessary. The number of variables that go into every single event that occurs indicates that either we and everything else are complete automata or God allows a lot more freedom than most people either understand or want to believe.

There are at least two ways to program artificial intelligence of which I am aware. The traditional method is to attempt to construct rules for every possible situation. This works very well for simple actions and small numbers, but works less and less well as complexity increases. The organic method involves creating a few simple rules, then leaving the entities alone and watching their behavior evolve. Keep the good ones and weed out the undesirable; from the perspective of the AIs, it is supernatural selection. At any time, the programmer can step in and make sweeping or small changes, but for the most part, he simply watches as things progress towards the desired state.

Christians know God has a plan for humanity, of course, what we are debating here is the way in which that plan is put into effect. Omniderigistes believe that every little interaction is pre-programmed, (or perhaps managed live in the case of the exotemporal school), my own belief is that God, the Great Programmer, generally leaves Creation in our created hands, acting only when it is necessary for the operation of his plan or when we ask him to. To quote MC Hammer, “that’s why we pray”. You can call it vologence, I suppose, if you must.

This may strike some as a lowbrow argument, (would that make me a vole prole?), but I see hermeneutic debate being to the Christian what academic debate is to the engineer. It is entertaining, but irrelevant to the quotidian existence no matter what import its practitioners place upon it. Such discussions concern me no more than the storied debates concerning angels and pins.

PS – Words fail to express my disgust with you fraudulent philistines. 300+ comments and not one recognized a reference to higher Truth and Beauty? The correct response was either “what is the secret of your power” although I would have also accepted “you take the high road, I’ll take the low”. Where is that White Buffalo when you need him?

WB can’t find it:

I’ve exhausted my resources (including the web) for the meaning of “omniderigence”. Will you explain it’s meaning, please?

Another WND columnist, too, is curious:

Hi Vox, did you invent this?

OMNIDERIGENT adj.
Performing universal action, providing sole and total motivation; all-acting.

I certainly did not invent the concept, I merely constructed the word to describe it. It is a word I considered to be required for describing the logical and theological fallacy of those who interpret omniscience + omnipotence to equal X, X being the singular source of will and action in the universe.

It summarizes the popular idea of God as a detail-oriented puppet master and Man being without free will, merely playing out his assigned role in God’s grand master Plan. This notion of an encyclopedic Plan reduces every being, great and small, to insignificant sock puppets in God’s grand self-amusement, a concept which strikes me as not only psychologically nonsensical but bordering on the unbearably silly.

Despite its popularity, omniderigence is, in my opinion, a demonstrably anti-Biblical concept. The fact that God knows the number of hairs on a head or when a sparrow dies does not necessarily require Him to personally pluck them out one-by-one, or strike down the sparrow on the oak tree instead of the one on the birch.

And while it is true that there are one or two verses that omniderigistes can turn to for support – just ask the Calvinists for their favorites if they don’t spring to mind immediately – there are many, many more that can be cited in opposition. It is always amusing to see how people deal with God’s declaration that He can change His mind based solely on the actions of individuals that they claim are acting according to God’s will. When one finds oneself in opposition to the Lord’s own prayer, one would do well to, at the very least, seriously reconsider one’s position. For why pray that Our Father’s will be done on Earth if it is already being done here?

Furthermore, the omniderigent position reduces Jesus Christ’s frequent explanation of this world as a proving grounds; what is the point of testing for an answer that one already knows beyond any shadow of a doubt. If you think about it, omniderigence logically leads to the Gnostic heresy of a God that is not only responsible for evil, but actively wills it on a universal basis.

If you take offense at this post, there’s really no point in wasting your breath atacking me. Hold true to your beliefs and take it up with the one you believe is responsible for making me write these words.

A woman who said she had fallen in love with a snake got married to the reptile in a ceremony in India’s eastern Orissa state, it was reported on Friday. The wedding took place on Wednesday near the state capital, Bhubaneshwar, with nearly 2,000 people celebrating the event, believing that the union would bring good fortune to the village.

Thirty-year-old Bimbala Das was married to the creature by Hindu priests in an hour-long ceremony, the PTI news agency reported.

I’ve never bought into the canard that women who put off marriage until their thirties aren’t ever going to get married, only that they are likely to marry lower down the social scale than they would have previously. Or, as it happens, the evolutionary scale.

But I’m sure the groom is a very fine snake, as snakes go. I hope they’ll be very happy together.

From the Washington Times:

With just five months to go before the midterm elections, President Bush, whose once-faithful base has abandoned him in droves, is turning to the same conservative hot-button issues that won him re-election in 2004 — homosexual “marriage” and judicial nominees….

Thus, there is a White House strategy to move swiftly to nominate more conservative judicial nominees, which political guru and top Bush political strategist Karl Rove sees as a decisive issue in elections — an issue Mr. Bush effectively exploited in 2002 and 2004.

If the American electorate falls for this one a third time, I may have to go from deep skepticism to full-blown cynicism.

Dan is entangled in the pretexts:

[Slavery was] not one of the reasons, but the main reason. The declarations of secession themselves prove this. They broke away because they feared the loss of their slaves. The North rightly wanted to keep the union whole, and unfortunately the only way was through war. The South fired first.

But the main reason for me showing this stuff is to show to those who actually think the Civil War was not about slavery when slavery was at the heart of the break up of the Union.

To argue that the main reason for the Civil War was slavery is akin to asserting that the main reason for the German invasion of Czechoslovakia was the Czech’s suppression of the ethnic Germans of the Sudentland. After all, the Germans said so! Slavery was simply a pretext, primarily for the North, but to some extent also for the South as shown by the aforementioned secession articles. Nevertheless, the real reason for the Civil War was the same one behind nearly every other war in history, namely, who will rule?

It is sometimes amusing to see how inept historians from various disciplines attempt to cobble together a convincing rationale for a war or a series of wars, which they inevitably explain is due to something related to their own particular discipline. The Marxist always sees class struggle, the economist always finds an economic rationale and the good patriot dependably parrots a moral cause. But none of these notions explain how all of Europe knew that Charles VIII of France would go to war as soon as he was old enough, which he did because that’s just what young, powerful kings seeking glory were expected to do at the time. While there have been wars spawned by clashes of economics, ideology and religion, even a relatively casual perusal of military history will demonstrate that the vast majority of wars simply stem from the desire of one elite to expand its reach at the expense of another.

The North went to war against the South for exactly the same reason that the Emperor Hadrian sent Severus to Iudaea, to prevent a rebellious province from breaking away from its rule. The fact that keeping the Union together by force and exerting Federal power over the formerly sovereign Southern states, not ending slavery, was the driving force behind the war should be obvious for three reasons.

1. President Lincoln expressly stated so.

2. The Union made no effort to end slavery anywhere else in the world.

3. The four slave states that stayed in the Union were not attacked. Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri were all slave states and members of the Union. West Virginia remained a slave state after breaking with Virginia to stay in the Union and slavery continued in the District of Columbia itself until 1862.

The USA is not particularly concerned about slavery, nor has it ever been. There are still an estimated 27 million individuals enslaved around the world, but this does not trouble Washington at all. Does anyone truly believe that the federal government would be similarly indifferent to an attempt by a state to secede over taxes, immigration or marijuana laws today?

Central government always seeks to expand its power and usually attempts to resist any dissolution of its power. The fact that the Civil War is considered to have settled the question of secession once and for all – despite the fact that the complete absence of any trials for treason indicates that the Southern states were rightfully exercising their legal and Constitutional sovereignty to leave the Union – demonstrates that the sovereignty, not slavery, was the main reason for the Civil War.

This appalling practice of traffic in extraordinarily gifted humans must come to an end! Not only are Russian gangsters buying and selling women, but they are now trading in Ukrainian strikers… Abramovitch just paid $55 million to Milan for Shevchenko.

Ah well. Arsenal’s row just got harder to hoe, as Chelsea walked away with the Premiership despite not having a dependable scorer up front. On the bright side, perhaps having a hit man around will encourage the Special One to stick around for another year. I’m only surprised that the Bush administration hasn’t taken note of the Special One’s recent press conference, in which he told the reporters to shut up and then read his own set of questions to himself.

The press complained, but in fairness, he did answer all of his own questions, even the harder-hitting ones.

Derbyshire goes into full Lamentations mode:

So there I was, absorbed in reading an interesting article about neurobiology. This was in the Chronicle of Higher Education, for which you need a subscription. Then suddenly—CLANG!—they dropped an anvil on my foot.

Many traditional forms of brain imaging require a subject to lay down in a claustrophobia-inducing tube inside an extremely loud scanner, a situation not conducive to meditation or prayer, says Dr. Newberg.

Well, yes, I suppose it must be hard to meditate while laying down in a tube. I mean, you have to concentrate on getting the down laid nice and evenly, and as far up the sides of the tube as it’ll go. But what kind of down are we talking about here? Goose down? Swan’s down?

This is probably a lost cause…. In any case, I’m still shocked to see this in a journal that boasts itself as being “of higher education.”

Whereas Derb sees this as a time to cry, I tend to view it as a time to laugh.

Peggy Noonan writes of a third party:

Something’s happening. I have a feeling we’re at some new beginning, that a big breakup’s coming, and that though it isn’t and will not be immediately apparent, we’ll someday look back on this era as the time when a shift began.

All my adult life, people have been saying that the two-party system is ending, that the Democrats’ and Republicans’ control of political power in America is winding down. According to the traditional critique, the two parties no longer offer the people the choice they want and deserve. Sometimes it’s said they are too much alike–Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Sometimes it’s said they’re too polarizing–too red and too blue for a nation in which many see things through purple glasses.

In 1992 Ross Perot looked like the breakthrough, the man who would make third parties a reality. He destabilized the Republicans and then destabilized himself. By the end of his campaign he seemed to be the crazy old aunt in the attic.

The Perot experience seemed to put an end to third-party fever. But I think it’s coming back, I think it’s going to grow, and I think the force behind it is unique in our history.

The idea of a “purple” party melding Republicans and Democrats is particularly funny. As if adding a third faction – and a “centrist” one at that – to the ruling party is going make any difference whatsoever.

The truth is that the country can be divided into the two-thirds that opposes the Constitution and the concept of limited government, (knowingly or unknowingly), and the one-third that supports it. Unfortunately, 90 percent of those who support limited government are currently affiliated with the appropriately named “Red” faction of the Democratic-Republicans; nothing will begin to change until those supporters of limited, Constitutional government give up their decades-long effort to fix the Red faction.

I’m not saying that things would magically improve, by no means. As Nate has pointed out, genuine and significant change seldom occurs within the legal framework of any political system. But it would certainly hurl a giant monkey wrench into the nation’s march towards oblivion.

UPDATE – Podhoretz the Younger does not disappoint with the eminently predictable reaction to Noonan’s column:

In my book, Can She Be Stopped?, I specifically warn Republicans and conservatives about the temptation to listen to the “siren song of schism” — the notion that they would be better off casting a protest or third-party vote in 2008. Such a vote, no matter how principled it might seem, would have only one result, and that is to elect Hillary Clinton. It is a default vote for Hillary Clinton….

If people cannot stomach voting Republican and need to cast a protest vote, that is their right. But nobody should be under any illusions about what it means. It means Democratic rule.

Which differs from the current rule in precisely what regards? Ignoring the Constitution 90 percent of the time instead of 75 percent? Signing up for 100 percent of globalist decrees instead of 85 percent of them? Invading and occupying countries without oil instead of countries with oil?

Better an open enemy that faces you than the false friend who stabs you in the back.