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His political analysis is usually better than most, but this foray into human biology cracked me up:

Most observers assumed that Romney would fill the void. But he doesn’t seem to have been able to do so. It may be a racist refusal to vote for a Mormon or, more charitably, Romney’s flip-flop-flip from pro-life to pro-choice to pro-life, or it may have been his inconsistency on gay issues, but Mitt seems to be going the way of his father — out of contention.

Although considering that I have read complaints from people concerned about anti-Islamic “racism”, perhaps the definition expanded when I wasn’t looking. That actually might be rather handy, come to think of it, as theidiots, god-botherers and Bible-thumpers can now charge reasonably atheists with being racists on top of everything else.

And they think they’re unpopular now….

Presumed atheist Pete comments:

Um… Euthyphro, anyone? I know it’s only been 2500 years since this kind of idea was shown to be ridiculous, but maybe this guy’s just a little slow. In any case this shouldn’t be surprising, seeing as how the myth of Abraham’s attempted filicide is considered to be a good example..

By all means, let us consider Euthyphro, and in the process demonstrate the risibility of the modern American liberal’s notion that having once heard a professor mention something in a lecture is equivalent to possessing substantive knowledge of it.

But you think you’re an intellectual, don’t you, ape?

Apes don’t read philosophy.

Yes, they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it…. Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not every man for himself. The London Underground is not a political movement.

It’s the “um, Euthyphro, anyone?” that is the sophmoric giveaway. Pete’s indicating that he’s heard about Euthyphro and he even has some idea that it implies something negative about God and morality, but he doesn’t actually know what that might be. Thus he pretends that the matter has been completely settled once and for all, which is far from the truth or it would not have been so widely discussed by various philosophers.

While I like the Socratic method and have been known to make use of it on occasion, I’ve never been terribly impressed with the examples Socrates uses in the dialogues recorded by Plato. They tend to strike me as doing little more than setting up incompatible straw men, then asserting that the incompatibility therefore proves something it does not. Fortunately, this sort of argument is easy enough to pick apart as it merely requires demonstrating that the base assumptions are false.

The “dilemma“is constructed thusly: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” But simply substituting “obedience” for “piety” destroys the dilemma, (irreconciliable meanings of “moral” and “required by God”) since it eliminates the tautology posed.

It’s worth examining this in more detail, of course. Consider the first part, which is that “as Socrates presumes and Euthyphro agrees, the gods love the pious because it is pious (both parties agree on this, the first horn of the dilemma).”

Soc. Tell me what is the nature of this idea, and then I shall have a standard to which I may look, and by which I may measure actions, whether yours or those of any one else, and then I shall be able to say that such and such an action is pious, such another impious.

Euth. I will tell you, if you like.

Soc. I should very much like.

Euth. Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.

Here the Christian must immediately disagree, at least within the context of the modern meaning of the term piety. (We’ll get to Euthyphro and Socrates agreed-upon definition soon enough.) In this context, the Bible is clear on OBEDIENCE being God’s priority, not piety, as there are several examples of pious sacrifices to God being rejected due to their being rooted in disobedience one way or another.

“Is obedience loved by God because it is obedience, or is it obedient because it is loved by God” is only a dilemma to omniderigistes who reject free will and believe that God is controlling those who exhibit the behavior He loves. (As well, one is forced to assume, of those who exhibit the behavior He does not love.) So, unless one subscribes to the notion of an omniderigent god, there is no contradiction whatsoever in positing a God who loves obedience, who loves that which conforms to His will.

This is a known objection to the dilemma, in fact, which is described as being problematic only because “it implies that what is good is arbitrary, based merely upon God’s whim; if God had created the world to include the values that rape, murder, and torture were virtues, while mercy and charity were vices, then they would have been.”

But this can only be considered a genuine problem for those who insist that a fixed principle cannot be arbitrary, which is ridiculous. There are practically an infinity of fixed variables which, if they were different than they are, would radically alter the reality of our universe. If Moloch were the Creator God, then no doubt child-killing would be a virtue; this is hardly unthinkable let alone a logical impossibility considering how abortionettes here in the United States hold it to be just that.

The fundamental weakness of clinging to this “problem” as proof of the surviving applicability of the dilemma can be seen in the phrase “then they would have been”. But since they’re not, it’s not an issue in this particular universe we are inhabiting. In the universe next door, we can presume that given a different Creator God, there will also be a different morality just as a difference in the strength of the nuclear weak force would alter the amount of hydrogen and helium in that neighboring universe.

Why is it assumed that the universe next door WILL be different, but that the creator god next door CANNOT be? One suspects that this is the sort of rational blunder caused by today’s intellectual overspecialization.

But back to Euthyphro, as Socrates points out a problem with Euthyphro’s definition that doesn’t affect my case in the slightest:

Soc. And the quarrels of the gods, noble Euthyphro, when they occur, are of a like nature?

Euth. Certainly they are.

Soc. They have differences of opinion, as you say, about good and evil, just and unjust, honourable and dishonourable: there would have been no quarrels among them, if there had been no such differences-would there now?

Euth. You are quite right.

Soc. Does not every man love that which he deems noble and just and good, and hate the opposite of them?

Euth. Very true.

Soc. But, as you say, people regard the same things, some as just and others as unjust,-about these they dispute; and so there arise wars and fightings among them.

Euth. Very true.

Soc. Then the same things are hated by the gods and loved by the gods, and are both hateful and dear to them?

Euth. True.

Soc. And upon this view the same things, Euthyphro, will be pious and also impious?

Euth. So I should suppose.

Soc. Then, my friend, I remark with surprise that you have not answered the question which I asked. For I certainly did not ask you to tell me what action is both pious and impious: but now it would seem that what is loved by the gods is also hated by them. And therefore, Euthyphro, in thus chastising your father you may very likely be doing what is agreeable to Zeus but disagreeable to Cronos or Uranus, and what is acceptable to Hephaestus but unacceptable to Here, and there may be other gods who have similar differences of opinion.

Euth. But I believe, Socrates, that all the gods would be agreed as to the propriety of punishing a murderer: there would be no difference of opinion about that.

Needless to say, none of this is of any concern whatsoever to a monotheist or the Christian, who believes in multiple gods but worships only the One whose opinion on the matter happens to be relevant.

Part II of II

It seems Mount Olympus has broadband now, as I received an email:

Howdy Vox,

I just thought I’d let you know how much I enjoyed your post about killing children in My name. I’ll be in touch if I ever need one whacked.

I’ve blogged about your courageous volunteering here.

Cheers,
God

To which I responded:

Thanks very much indeed. I’ll just be sitting here, sharpening my knives in preparation.

Humbly,
Vox

Far be it from me to correct Heavenly reading comprehension, (after all, if God declares the grammatically correct contraction for “is not” to be “ain’t”, we have concluded that “ain’t” it shall henceforth be, have we not), but I respectfully offer a clarification pointing out that I did not write anything about killing anybody in anyone’s name, but rather affirmed the morality of a positive response to an incontrovertible Divine command.

There is a significant difference between the two concepts. If I molest a parakeet, I can claim that I am doing so in Pharyngurl’s name on the basis of his writings on the evolutionary relationship between homo sapiens and aprosmictus erythropterus without Pharyngurl having any idea that anyone is pestering the poultry, much less harboring responsibility for telling me to do it.

And this is very different than Pharyngurl appearing at my door, presenting me with three forms of identification, intentionally misunderstanding the friendly greeting given by the neighbor walking past and pretending to take great offense at it, then holding up a bird cage and saying “molest this parakeet”.

Two different things. One cannot reasonably conflate them.

No parakeets or two-year olds were harmed in the writing of this post.

The Quick and the Dead provides a useful lesson which Pharyngurl, to say nothing of many others, would do well to absorb:

Vox Day serves me crow

here,with a rich mole poblano, re my comments on Amanda Marcotte, late of the John Edwards campaign. As a blogger, I really should have known better than to take words at face value: Edwards is a politician, his lips were moving, therefore he was lying.

Too true. The Quick and the Dead goes on to offer some reasonable after-the-fact perspective on the debacle as well. Now look, there is nothing shameful with being wrong. Everyone screws up from time to time, there are certainly some particularly idiotic mistakes that I have made that I really don’t like to think about.

But one must face up to one’s mistakes if one is to avoid repeating them. Had Bush lost the election, had the Republicans gone from strength to strength instead of peaking and taking a dive like the 2000 NASDAQ, I would have cheerfully admitted that I was wrong. If the Lizard Queen is not elected President in 2008, (a prospect which is looking much more likely than it was when I first announced the inevitability of her victory), I will not only confess error but try to figure out where I went wrong.

It’s not that hard, really. For example, it is looking highly probable that my early surmise about Pataki serving as the 2008 fall guy was wrong. Now, I can pretend I never wrote that and blithely post future predictions two years prior to the next presidential nominations, or I can note my error, ascertain why I was wrong and attempt to use that information to do better next time.

Concealing error only increases the odds of future failure.

While Edwards campaign debacle was hilarious from start to finish, I will always regret that Amynda didn’t take my advice and claim she was resigning in order to spend more time with her abortions:

A second blogger working for Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards quit Tuesday under pressure from conservative critics who said her previous online messages were anti-Catholic. Melissa McEwan wrote on her personal blog, Shakespeare’s Sister, that she left the campaign because she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the level of attention focused on her and her family.

“This was a decision I made, with the campaign’s reluctant support, because my remaining the focus of sustained ideological attacks was inevitably making me a liability to the campaign,” McEwan said Tuesday night.

Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign, said McEwan left the campaign under her own terms. Both Bedingfield and McEwan declined additional comment. McEwan’s resignation came just one day after another blogger, Amanda Marcotte, left the Edwards staff for similar reasons.

This all smacks of careful orchestration to me. As I previously wrote, the person that Edwards really needs to fire is the woman responsible for hiring these two woefully inappropriate employees. But we do owe her for providing us with more entertainment than we’re likely to see over the next six months, unless the Lizard Queen decides she doesn’t want B. Hussein as her VP and goes after him with a vengeance.

UPDATE: This piteous lament for the ex-Edwardian pair is hilarious in light of what everyone now knows about Amynda and Shakespeare’s Sister: “Is it utterly impossible to have a political debate between the aisles on the blogosphere with out resorting to vile and contemptible attacks?

It seems that it must be…. I feel a sense of sadness however at the level of base, negativity that pervades the blogosphere. Bloggers on both sides of the aisle could be doing so much more to make a difference in this country and instead the discourse degenerates into this petty, small minded ugliness about who said what, where.

This is why Pharyngirl teaches at a jumped-up community college instead of a real university:

Charming. Good Christian Vox Day argues that murdering toddlers in the name of Jesus is defensible.

(I’m hoping ol’ Vox will make another post calling me “Pharyngurl”. It’s pathetic that he thinks femininity is an insult, isn’t it?)

No, Vox answers that offing two-year olds at the direct and 100-percent confirmed command of the Almighty is the moral act. Jesus never entered into it one way or another, let alone a self-motivated or (presumably) delusional act justified post facto by an exculpatory invocation of Jesus Christ’s name.

But as Scott Adams and others have learned, Pharyngirl can’t even read a simple statement and understand it well enough to summarize it accurately. This is particularly amusing considering that Jefferson and all of the atheists and agnostics here, despite their many differences with me and their rejection of my position, have had no similar difficulties.

It’s possible, of course, that Pharyngirl does actually understand the difference but simply chose to lie. And why shouldn’t he? He’s an atheist, he has no reason not to lie… except for the fact that he keeps getting caught at it.

And yes, femininity in bearded middle-aged men is considered to be an insult by those who actually managed to leave college.

The interesting thing is that no atheist – not here and not on any of the blogs that have commented on the Sharpening Knives post – has even attempted to explain why this divinely ordered slaughter would be an immoral act. Instead, like impressionable young women, they gasp and pretend to collapse on their fainting couches over the correct answer to an obvious and inconsequential Q&A trap.

This feigned swooning is particularly ironic given the obvious fact that God has not given such a command in nearly 2,000 years of Christianity, meanwhile, godless butcheries continue in the United States and around the world even as their comrades rush for the smelling salts.

A commenter adds an interesting note: “I know it’s only been 2500 years since this kind of idea was shown to be ridiculous, but maybe this guy’s just a little slow.”

That’s entirely possible. Of course, it’s also possible that I am vehemently anti-Platonist, have little respect for Socrates and can present a logical case for rejecting the Euthyphro dilemma as spurious… tune in tomorrow.

From TMQ:

Caviezel played Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ” and — I am not making this up — has said that to method-act sorrow on the cross, he thought about the Minnesota Vikings’ Super Bowl losses.)

I actually have a harder time with some of the playoff losses, strangely enough. Gary Anderson, Darren Nelson, Drew Pearson….

But I feel his pain.

Gilburn is a poor-man’s Richard Dawkins, whose YouTube videos are popular with and considered marvelously enlightening by the sort of 10th-grade boys who seriously believe that no Christian has ever read the Bible. (This is a common theme in the sort of science fiction they read, wherein the scene featuring the atheist hero stunning the Bible-thumping bigot into silence with a devastating quote from John 8:7 is as mandatory as the sex scene with the seductive female scientist/space alien. Of course, only an author who knows nothing about the ubiquity of Christian Bible studies could posit such a scenario, moreover, they invariably leave out John 8:11.)
– Vox Day, 12 February 2007

Luckily, I happen to have a Bible laying around this house, because even though I’m not a Christian, I was an English major, and it is important to Know Your Ancient Mythologies if you are reading poetry. And I flipped to this passage that seems to have solid advice on what to do if you’ve got some asshole dragging a woman in front of an angry crowd and yelling, “SINNER!”:
– Amynda Marcotte, 13 February 2007

Here’s a suggestion for atheists who wish to avoid looking like ignorant doorknobs. Stay very far away from quoting the Gospels, 1st Corinthians and 1st John if you harbor a desire to play Bible expert. I recommend delving into the latter part of Job, Ecclesiastes, or Ephesians if you want to have even a prayer of saying something that isn’t effortlessly dismantled by anyone whose spent more than six months attending a Bible study.

Her ignorance is demonstrated by her focus on the misguided notion of her losing her job due to her being a sinner. That was never the point, as every Christian already knew that before the first time encounter with her verbal diarrhea. The point, from the start, that she is a man-hating, Christian-hating bigot, publicly condemned and convicted as such by her own words and therefore a major handicap to the Edwards’ campaign seeking Christian votes. A campaign to which no one dragged her, one should mention.

And one should also mention that criticism based on direct quotes of your own words is hardly equivalent to a fatal stoning. Yes, there is a certain symmetry in the metaphor of “words” and “stones” combined with “forced resignation” and “death”, but it is a shallow one.

Her problem is that there is no “context” in which her writings can be interpreted in which those terms do not apply to her, and yet Amynda is too wedded to her sanctimonious rage to view herself with any degree of objectivity. The fact that she genuinely hates certain forms of bigotry does not inoculate her from being a bigot herself any more than having been an abused child inoculates an adult from abusing others.

But in any case, her sin is no worse than anyone else’s. The door is always there, awaiting only the knock.

Rayven does better than most:

My ethical self could not accept the obvious evil displayed by the Abrahamic Gawd…it was not logical that a Gawd would give us the ability to understand proper behavior and yet not follow it himself.

Good logic based on a faulty assumption. God did not give us the ability to understand proper behavior. The Bible is quite specific on this score: Man doesn’t know what it is and is wholly incapable of following even the part that has been explained to him.

Hence that small part relating to humanity being fallen and the need for the gentleman on the cross.

Of course, being an atheist, Rayven will no doubt toss out the logic she has hitherto followed and stick with her feelings instead. Evil, to the atheist, is nothing more than something he doesn’t like at the moment, hence the constant attempt to apply it to God. Interestingly enough, it is written that there is both a word describing and a fate awaiting those who call good evil and evil good.

Guru Mike attempts to conveys moral instruction to some who are clearly in need of it:

The next time some godbot twit tries to say we need god for our morality, I’m going to direct them to this a-hole’s blog. Morals do not consist of blindly following dear leader’s orders. That’s not morality, that’s obedience. Real morals start with the idea that you dont do things to others that you would not want done to yourself.

By all means, do send them here. Obviously Mike could use some more in-depth reading here; if he visited more often he would know that since the Golden Rule is but a subset of Christian morality, traditional Western morals do not start there.

And as has been pointed out before, morals cannot possibly start there even outside the Christian perspective. Attempting to use the Golden Rule as a base for morality is a logical dead end, as it grants a free pass to anyone who happens to be twisted enough to desire the sort of thing they wish to inflict on others.

Strange masochists lurking in dungeons enacting violent fantasies is no basis for a system of morality!

The Bible is forthright. The one thing, the only thing, God demands is our obedience. To understand is good, but to obey is better, mostly because we are incapable of understanding. Glass darkly and all that. Ironically, Mike comes close to the truth, he simply fails to grasp that obedience is morality.

Of course, this should not be confused with the “just following orders” defense for which Mike has rightful contempt. A human authority which gives illicit orders is an illegitimate authority, but God’s authority can never be illegitimate, therefore His orders cannot be illicit, however repugnant they may strike us at first.

It seems more than a little ironic, though, that so many atheists should get their panties in a bunch over a hypothetical Divine-ordered child-killing of the sort that has never taken place in two thousand years of Christianity while simultaneously supporting the thousands of actual child murders that occur daily. (I know, I know, unborn children aren’t children, they’re goldfish or ferns or whatever. That’s why gays and feminists are so terrified of sex selection and pre-natal testing, right?)

For folks that claim to be so terribly fond of reason, it is astonishing how little familiarity with it these atheists demonstrate. It seems absence really does make the heart grow fonder after all.