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Another pattern observed

One doesn’t have to be a nasty, anti-intellectual piece of work to be a Calvinist, but one can certainly observe a pattern common to the champions of the self-appointed Elect. In light of this, I have to praise the behavior of the Calvinists at Vox Popoli, as it has been absolutely exemplary in comparison with that of their historical antecedents. Consider the track record of these leading lights:

John Calvin: Responsible for the murder under color of law of Michael Servetus. Calvin was particularly outraged when Servetus sent him a copy of the Institutes of the Christian Religion heavily annotated with arguments pointing to errors in the book. When Servetus mentioned that he would come to Geneva if Calvin agreed, Calvin wrote a letter to Farel on 13 February 1547 noting that if Servetus were to come, he would not assure him safe conduct: “for if he came, as far as my authority goes, I would not let him leave alive.”

Franciscus Gomarus: A Fleming who had been in Leyden since 1594, has been described as “a rather mediocre scholar” but “a forceful defender of the Calvinistic doctrine…a man of deep-rooted faith…. He engaged twice in personal disputation with Arminius in the assembly of the States of Holland in 1608, and was one of five Gomarists who met five Arminians or Remonstrants in the same assembly of 1609. On the death of Arminius shortly after this time, Konrad Vorstius, who sympathized with his views, was appointed to succeed him, in spite of the opposition of Gomarus and his friends. Gomarus took his defeat badly, resigned his post, and went to Middelburg in 1611, where he became preacher at the Reformed church….

John Piper: Intemperate attacker of other Christian leaders and serial backtracker. “I am sitting here trying to figure out why I say things like that every now and then. I think it is a mixture of (sinful) audience titillation and (holy) scorn against my own flesh and against the devil, along with the desire to make the battle with Satan and my flesh feel gutsy and real and not middle-class pious.”

Yes, that’s probably it. You’re just too damn holy for your own good. Perhaps, I suggest merely as a possibility, he behaves thusly because he is not Elect, but rather a vessel ordained for destruction. As amusing as I find The Most Holy and Appointed Rev. Piper, what struck me most about the larger pattern was this statement by Gomarus: In response to the Court’s opinion Gomarus declared that “he would not dare die holding Arminius’ opinion, nor to appear with it before God’s judgement seat.”

La, such drama! It’s not as if anyone was asking Gomarus to die holding Arminius’s opinion, and as events would subsequently prove, Arminius didn’t have any problem doing just that. But it is fascinating that Gomarus presented exactly the same sort of histrionic appeal to the emotions that one often sees in Piper’s writings and which a few of the lesser members of Team Calvin have also exhibited here.

But for me, the anti-intellectual aspects of Calvinism are best exemplified by John Calvin himself. A man who has genuine confidence in his intellect and his faith doesn’t respond with outrage when his errors are pointed out, much less do his best to ensure that his critics are killed. Now, one cannot dismiss a case for the poor character of its champions, but it does cause one to entertain the notion that Total Depravity may be less theology than psychological projection.

There is now scientific evidence supporting my original hypothesis that social disorders produce much atheism. So, I find myself wondering if there may be a similar causal link between this observed behavioral pattern and a belief in Total Depravity combined with the idea that one belongs to a predestined elect. None of this means that the Calvinists could not be correct, just as no amount of social autism could prove that gods exist. But it’s interesting to note how the patterns have persisted in both cases for literal centuries.

Police 607, People 71

The police appear to be winning, but the American public is actually ahead on a per capita basis:

In 2011, according to data I have collected, police officers in the United States shot 1,146 people, killing 607. Since January 1, 2011, I have been using the internet to compile a national database of police involved shootings. The term “police involved shooting” pertains to law enforcement officers who, in the line of duty, discharge their guns. When journalists and police administrators use the term, they include the shooting of animals and shots that miss their targets. My case files only include instances in which a person is either killed or wounded by police gunfire. My data also includes off-duty officers who discharged their weapons in law enforcement situations. They don’t include, for example, officers using their firearms to resolve personal disputes….

In 2010, 59 officers were shot to death among 122 killed while on the job. This marked a 20 percent jump from 2009 when 49 officers were killed by gunfire. In 2011, 173 officers died, from all causes, in the line of duty. The fact police officers feel they are increasingly under attack from the public may help explain why they are shooting so many citizens.

The 2011 figure is 71 officers shot to death. Of course, since there are 310 million Americans and only 800,000 police, this would tend to indicate that the public is winning even though the police are killing 8.55 citizens for every police officer killed.

The interesting thing is that we seldom hear anywhere nearly as much opposition to police killings as we do to the death penalty, even though 18 times more people are killed by police than are executed on an annual basis. Since only 33 people were executed throughout the USA in 2011, compared to the 607 who were shot and killed without trial, it would appear that death penalty opponents would do much better to protest lethally armed police than lethal judicial judgments.

More women in the military

It’s a great idea:

The Pentagon will maintain bans on women serving in most ground combat units, defense officials said Thursday, despite pressure from lawmakers and female veterans who called the restrictions outdated after a decade of war.

After taking more than a year to review its policies on orders from Congress, the Defense Department announced that it would open about 14,000 combat-related positions to female troops, including tank mechanics and intelligence officers on the front lines.

But the Pentagon said it would keep 238,000 other positions — about one-fifth of the regular active-duty military — off-limits to women, pending further reviews. Virtually all of those jobs are in the Army and Marine Corps.

Contra what you may assume, I am all for more women in the U.S. military. I not only want to see all 238,000 combat-related positions opened to women, I want to see the Pentagon create an entire combat battalion of female-only Marines. In fact, I demand it in the name of diversity and equality!

Then, after half the battalion gets wiped out in its first action by 25 Taliban fighters armed with an RPG and four AK-47s between them, and the other half surrenders, America can kick back and enjoy the many gang-rape videos that will be on the Internet about 24 hours later.

That’s the only way this nonsense is going to be ended once and for all. It doesn’t matter how often one walks an equalitarian through the inexorable logic of combat, they will never accept or understand it until they see a woman sitting on her ass, bloody and crying. Enough theorizing. The equalitarians say women can do it, fine, let’s put their theory to the test.

Corruption USA

Another pass at a banking whitewash:

A multistate settlement with five large U.S. banks over foreclosure practices would include as much as $17 billion in mortgage debt forgiveness and loan modifications and take three years to complete, according to a letter describing the deal. The draft letter to stakeholders from state attorneys general outlines an agreement among large mortgage servicers, states and the Department of Justice, which are continuing talks to finalize the proposal.

Servicers, including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), and Wells Fargo & Co., would also have to provide as much as $3 billion in refinancings, enabling borrowers to secure new loans “at today’s historically low rates,” according to the letter. Another $1.5 billion would be distributed to about 750,000 borrowers who have lost their homes to foreclosure, according to the letter.

States that sign on to the agreement would get “immediate payments” to fund consumer protection and foreclosure prevention efforts.

All 50 states announced almost 16 months ago they were investigating bank foreclosure practices following disclosures that faulty documents were being used to seize homes. Officials from a group of state attorneys general offices and federal agencies, including the Justice Department, have since negotiated terms of a proposed settlement with the nation’s largest mortgage servicers.
‘Robo-signing’

The agreement holds banks accountable for “wrongdoing on robo-signing and mortgage servicing.” It allows state and federal prosecutors to continue to pursue securities cases and other claims. Individuals would not be barred from filing their own lawsuits, and the settlement includes “absolutely no criminal immunity for any individual who violated the law.”

In other words, a slap on the wrist, a few new loans, and the attorneys general will magically make all the title fraud go away. This costs the banks nothing, as most of the “mortgage debt forgiveness” consists of bad loans the banks were going to have to write off anyhow. The net result is rather like telling a bank robber that he has to repay a few dollars each time he holds up a bank… except the behavior of the banks is far more criminal than that of the average bank robber.

The real point of the loan modifications and the new loans is to generate new paperwork and ensure that the banks have proper title to the properties to replace the titles they destroyed in utilizing the MERS system to avoid local taxes. If you figure an average county transfer fee of around $750, that means the local taxes successfully evaded by the banks were around $562,500,000 for the foreclosed properties alone.

The Calvinist challenge

Markku mentioned a theory that one reason the Calvinists tend to look like such contortionists here is because I am usually asking the questions. He thinks that the non-Calvinist position will look just as contortionist if it is the one being targeted. That’s addressed easily enough, as I will entertain five questions from the Calvinists here. But choose them carefully; I don’t want any complaints that I took the easy ones and if only I’d had to answer hard ones the results would have been completely different.

So, Team Calvin can use this thread to discuss the questions amongst themselves in order to settle upon the chosen five. Be sure to specify them at the end.

Access issues

Difster has a solution for worldwide readers:

Some people are having trouble reading comments on your blog from other countries. Those outside of the US who are being routed to a country code and want to read comments can append /ncr to the end of your blogger address: http://voxday.blogspot.com/ncr

Also note that if you type in wwww before the blog address, you’ll go to a different location that is missing all of the comments. I don’t know how to eliminate this problem since I don’t know how it arose in the first place. Based on the link statistics, about 10 percent of the blog readers here are on the www location rather than the proper one.

A tale of two persecutions

Conrad Black notes that 100,000+ Christians are annually murdered for their faith:

Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians. A comprehensive Pew Forum study last year found that Christians are persecuted in 131 countries containing 70 percent of the world’s population, out of 197 countries in the world (if Palestine, Taiwan, South Sudan, and the Vatican are included). Best estimates are that about 200 million Christians are in communities where they are persecuted. There is not the slightest question of the scale and barbarity of this persecution, and a little of it is adequately publicized. But this highlights the second half of the atrocity: the passivity and blasé indifference of most of the West’s media and governments.

It is not generally appreciated that over 100,000 Christians a year are murdered because of their faith.

On the other hand, the Financial Times laments the plight of “persecuted” atheists in the USA:

In Dallas, five of them took turns to list examples of the constant pressures of living in a religious society. One was a businesswoman in Plano, a city that’s part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolis and was ranked as the fifth most conservative in America by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research. She insists that, if she came out, she would lose her business. “I’ve worked for years to get these people to trust me, to want to do business with me.” So she constantly has to bite her tongue when Plano City Council opens its meetings with prayers, which it does in defiance of the constitutional separation of church and state….

The most extraordinary story I heard was from a woman in Tuscaloosa county, Alabama. She grew up in nearby Lamar county, raised in the strict Church of Christ, where there is no music with worship and you can’t dance. She says her family love her and are proud of her, but “I’m not allowed to be an atheist in Lamar County”. What is astonishing is that she can be pretty much anything else. “Being on crack, that was OK. As long as I believed in God, I was OK.” So, for example, “I’m not allowed to babysit. I have all these cousins who need babysitters but they’re afraid I’ll teach them about evolution, and I probably would.” I couldn’t quite believe this. She couldn’t babysit as an atheist, but she could when she was on crack? “Yes.” I laughed, but it is hard to think of anything less funny.

One’s heart bleeds for these poor American atheists. While their godless counterparts are among those murdering large quantities of Christians in a number of foreign countries, dreadful Christian bigots are not letting them babysit their children and forcing them to bite their tongues. And note that the would-be babysitter even admits that the parents are perfectly justified in not permitting her to spend any unsupervised time with their children.

I also found it fascinating to learn that the Plano City Council opening its meetings with prayer is somehow supposed to be the equivalent of Congress passing a law to establish religion. This, in a nutshell, illustrates why many people quite rightly despise atheists and want nothing to do with them. If you consistently attempts to take a mile every time anyone gives you an inch, you shouldn’t be surprised when people learn to stop giving you any benefit of the doubt.

There is still no global warming

I hope the readers here will never, ever forget how the AGW/CC story has played out, especially the next time that the usual suspects start babbling about another “scientific consensus”.

The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows. The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

The study is the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.

I hope you will also remember this the next time that critics complain that I think I am smarter and more likely to be correct about a scientific matter than the scientists who actually specialize in the subject. How can I possibly assert that I am correct when all the experts say otherwise? Because, as has been chronicled in some detail, I was the last time. And the time before that. And the time before that….

What people often tend to forget is that scientists are people. And while one may not have the wherewithal to examine the actual scientific experiments or assess the relevant facts, one always has the ability to observe the behavior of the individuals citing them as evidence. There are a plethora of indications that an individual is not telling the straightforward truth, be it in person or in print. An ability to read those signs is all that is required to recognize when scientists are attempting to skate on their perceived authority rather than on any actual science, in which case one can always safely conclude that their claims are false. Observing the behavioral patterns was how I was able to correctly conclude that Man is not causing global warming because there is no global warming.

Scientists spend an awful lot of time being stunned because they are some of the most naive, credulous, and easily manipulated beings on the planet. That’s why they tend to inordinately fall for every nonsensical philosophical and political ideology that crosses their paths. The average reader of The National Enquirer probably has a better and more-developed sense of skepticism than the average scientist.

UPDATE – Even some of the former champions of global warming are now turning against the fake science.

One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”

Exploring the evasions

Since there are few things more amusing than the fevered dancing of Calvinists in their attempts to evade the obvious readings of various Bible passages, I’m interested in hearing how they will attempt explain away what is merely one of many, many examples that contradict their assertions of perfect and complete divine foreknowledge and predestination:

Genesis 18:20-32

Then the LORD said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”

The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the LORD. Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare[e] the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

The LORD said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people?”

“If I find forty-five there,” he said, “I will not destroy it.”

Once again he spoke to him, “What if only forty are found there?”

He said, “For the sake of forty, I will not do it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there?”

He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”

Abraham said, “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?”

He said, “For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?”

He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

Questions:

1. The Lord clearly states that He does not know if what Sodom and Gomorrah has done is as bad as the outcry that has reached Him. Is He a) lying about His lack of knowledge, or b) telling the truth about it.

2. Does “if not, I will know” indicate that He does not know at the time He is speaking?

3. Do “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it” and “If I find forty-five there, I will not destroy it” mean exactly the same thing?

4. Did did God change His mind in response to Abraham’s requests to reduce the number of righteous men required to save the city from 50 to 10?

5. Did God already know how many righteous men there were in Sodom when He said “if I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake”?

My expectation, of course, is that the Calvinists will resort to their usual intellectual contortions and deceitful word substitutions instead of accepting God’s Word at face value. The ironic thing is that in attempting to shore up their futile case for their concept of comprehensive Divine perfection, they transform the Biblical God into a shifty, unreliable deceiver in their own image.

Some have theorized that my contempt for Calvinist Churchianity is because I have some arrogant psychological need to justify my own autonomy. This is precisely backwards. I have no need to justify the readily observable. It is because a) I know I am autonomous, ala Descartes, b) I know my will is not in perfect accordance with God’s, and c) I know I will be held responsible for my sins that I reject the convoluted, responsibility-evading dogma of Calvinism.

The contradictions between Calvinist Churchianity and Biblical Christianity are vast in number. But the key one is this: if God genuinely wills salvation for everyone and yet everyone is not saved, then it cannot be reasonably denied that God’s will can be thwarted by His autonomous creations. I strongly suspect the core problem with Calvinism is similar to a problem that atheists often manifest with regards to Christian theology; neither group understands the significance of the difference between potential and action.

A Creator God no more has to permit His creations to thwart him than the NFL has to make a touchdown worth six points. And yet, we readily observe both. Calvinists arguing God’s will cannot be thwarted due to divine sovereignty are presenting an argument that is every bit as ridiculous as trying to argue that a touchdown cannot be worth six points because the NFL has the power to arbitrarily make a touchdown worth any number of points it prefers.

The Responsible Puppet emailed me to remind me of our previous discussion, so I’ll address one of his points now. I asked him the following question:

Exodus 3:7-10. In verse 9, God’s statement that “now the cry of the Israelites has reached me” clearly implies that it had not reached Him prior to that moment. I ask TRP, did God previously know about their suffering prior to hearing that cry?

To which he responded:

I would say that God knew before creation the exact amount of suffering the Israelites would experience. He had concern for it throughout their suffering and this quote from God states that this is the time that he is going to do something about it.

Now that’s a lot, but I suspect that you are thinking that there was some suffering that God was unaware of it until this point (if not, just correct me). If you need proof that this is not the case I’ll go back to the same psalm –

Psalm 139:4 – Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD.

This says that God knows what we are going to say, before we say it. Assuming that any Israelite vocalized his dissatisfaction of his treatment at the hands of the Egyptians, God knew it at that point at the latest.

This is very typical of the Calvinist attempt to claim that X is not-X. As TRP has previously done, he is simply answering with another variant of “we read X to mean the opposite of X”. It is simply false to claim that a statement that something that “is happening now” means that it happened before the time specified. He then compounds this error with another substitution of the general for the specific. David is only stating that God knows what he, David, is going to say before he says it, which is presumably the result of God having searched him and knowing him, however, this knowledge is not necessarily the case for anyone else less beloved of God than the Psalmist, particularly since David specifically mentions those who are wicked, hate God, and are in rebellion against Him.

Everybody hates Captain Underoos

The more inevitable Mitt Romney looks, the less Republicans like him:

“In Missouri, Romney lost by 30 points and did not win a single county. In Minnesota, Romney finished third behind Ron Paul and did not win a single county. And in Colorado Romney kept his loss within five points, but finished 35-points behind his 60 percent 2008 total.”

I was, of course, amused that in at least one National Review post, the second-place finisher in Minnesota was unidentified. I do find it remarkable that so many Republicans would turn to Santorum as the anti-Romney candidate, however. Republicans apparently really, really, like their central banks and foreign wars.