Letter to Common Sense Atheism IV

Dear Luke,

I’m pleased that we appear to be getting back on track. But before we delve into the substance of the discourse, I must first point out that the reason you could not count the insults in my previous letter to you is because there were none. While you may find it embarrassing to have some of your claims to knowledge exposed as false, it is no more insulting for me to declare and subsequently demonstrate your ignorance about basic concepts of mainstream Christian theology than it was for you to imply that I have never thought about how my beliefs can be justified, or to declare that my statements about evolution are discredited, that my assertions about the Christian worldview are absurd, that I repeat many common distortions, and that my concept of morality is terrifying. This is particularly true in light of the fact that the first four of these “insulting” statements were false, whereas the case for your theological ignorance is conclusive. Please also keep in mind that the only reason it became necessary to publicly demonstrate the limits of your theological knowledge was because you made the charge of obscurantism.

Despite your admission of relative ignorance in your last letter, the salient point still appears to have escaped you. The relevant fact is not that you are unfamiliar with popular children’s literature, a science fiction novel, or even the Western literary canon that includes Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno, but rather that you are insufficiently familiar with the text of the New Testament and the orthodox interpretations of it that have been the mainstream Christian perspective for most of the last two millennia. Vox Day Christianity, as you call it, is indistinguishable in the vast majority of particulars from mainstream Protestant Christianity, so there is no justification for attempting to create any distinction between the two because my theological idiosyncracies are of little relevance to this discussion. You require a much better grasp of mainstream theology than you possess in order to determine which of my beliefs are exotic and which are entirely orthodox, and anyone of reasonable familiarity with the Bible will find my Christian theology to be entirely in line with Scripture even if they happen to disagree with a few of my conclusions and conjectures. Nothing I have mentioned in my previous letters, with the possible exception of the extent of God’s knowledge, can be reasonably characterized as being outside mainstream Protestant Christianity. And even in the case of Open Theism, that is a debate that is taking place entirely within that mainstream.

This leads me to the inconsistency demonstrated in your ill-considered attempt to plead the Courtier’s Reply. While a lifelong atheist could reasonably admit ignorance of a particular theology based upon the existence of something he does not believe, this is not true in the case of an atheist who presents himself as a former believer, especially not one who claims to be not only well-versed, but “too familiar” with the relevant theologies. The analogy fails because even if you are now an atheist who considers theology akin to the systematic study of imaginary fabrics, you presented yourself as a former expert on those very fabrics. You may come from a tradition that values clarity, argument, and evidence, but thus far you have exhibited little more than ignorance, logical incompetence, and inconsistency. Lest you be tempted to cry insult again, please note that this conclusion is merely an observation based on the evidence of your four letters and I believe it is one that is very difficult for the objective reader to avoid. Fortunately, all three conditions can be remedied as they are not terminal.

For example, it was logically false to assert that the answer to the question “Do you believe in evil?” was somehow dependent upon my definition of evil. As was indicated by the subsequent questions regarding the nature of evil, the question clearly applied to your belief in any form of evil, not your belief in evil as I happen to define it. I did not ask “Do you believe in evil as I previously defined it?” If you are an NFL fan and I ask the question “Do you like football?”, the correct answer is “yes, I do like football” even if you suspect that I may be thinking of the sport which is called soccer in the States. Regardless of whether I am talking about soccer or NFL football, the fact remains that you are a fan of the sport of football. Since you eventually declared that you believe in an evil that “thwarts more and stronger reasons for action than it fulfills”, it appears that your answer is yes, you believe in evil. If I have misinterpreted your answer and you actually do not believe in any form of evil, please correct me.

While it is true that there are many different definitions of objective and subjective, the philosophers’ concept of mind-independence is no more relevant to the subject at hand than the grammatical concept pertaining to the use of a form as the object of a transitive verb. Applying the relevant definition of objective to your answer – “not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased: an objective opinion” – regarding the nature of evil clearly indicates that you believe evil is a fundamentally subjective concept. In fact, based on your explication of desirism, it is apparent that in your view, evil is not only subjective, but dynamic and transitory as well. Unfortunately, this rejection of the concept of objective evil renders it impossible for us to compare the Christian view of evil with other accounts of it because neither of us can possibly know what your definition of evil is for any single act or individual at any given point on the space-time continuum. Since we lack any fixed and coherent metric, no comparisons are possible. I am open to hearing any suggestions you might have for an objective measure by which the Christian concept of evil can be compared with other religious and philosophical concepts of evil, but as it stands, given your rejection of an objective standard of evil and your preference for a subjective and transitory one, we can no more compare the Christian definition of evil to other accounts of it than we could compare our respective heights by utilizing variable centimeters. If you have any ideas for a reasonable and objective measure by which we can judge these competing concepts, please feel free to suggest them. My suggestion is that if you could even identify a single act that you believe to be objectively evil that is also deemed evil under the Christian moral code, such as the act of rape, we could at least make a partial comparison of religious and philosophical moral codes.

But in the meantime, I will say that I find your moral perspective on good and evil to be both fascinating… and familiar. You describe it as desirism, which is a term that is new to me, but based on your description it appears to be little more than a collectivist variant on an older moral code that is perhaps best exhibited in the commentaries that a young philosophy student once wrote on A System of Ethics by Friedrich Paulsen.

“I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s actions has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others. . . . [People like me want to] satisfy our hearts to the full and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me. . . . I have my desire and act on it.”

It appears that the only substantive difference between your desirism and the desirism of Mao Tse-Tung is that your moral code is, ironically enough, more collective than the infamous communist leader’s. Whereas Mao distinguishes between good and evil on the sole basis of the comparative strengths of the individual desires, you add to this comparison the additional component of a majority vote. Even if we leave the consequences of this utilitarianism aside, which you will note you have not done in some of your previous references to Christian morality, this is a rationally untenable position that is even less defensible than Sam Harris’s happiness/suffering moral metric. I believe you already suspect as much due to your quixotic attempt to define certain desires as not-desires in order to avoid the uncomfortable logical conclusions to your moral reasoning.

When you assert, for example, that racism is evil under the desirist code, you are therefore required to assume that more and stronger desires are potentially thwarted than fulfilled by it. But this assumption is easily shown to be a false one. In materalist terms, the desire to live is observably no stronger than the desire to propagate one’s own kind, this is why most people will risk fatal diseases in order to engage in sexual relations, why a woman will carry a child to term even when doing so risks her own life, and why men will sacrifice their lives to preserve the lives of their women and children. This indicates that the strength of the collective racist desire for racial purity is stronger than the collective non-racist desire for a multi-racial culture and may even be stronger than the collective desire of the minority races to survive. This is supported by an examination of your chosen example of Triumphant Nazism, which proves precisely the opposite of what you believed it did.

“Turn this knob to the right, and racist desires strengthen throughout the population. Turn this knob to the left, and racist desires decrease. To say that racist desires are evil is to say that turning this knob to the right thwarts more desires than turning this knob to the left. If we turn the knob to the right, many racist desires are fulfilled but the desires of minorities are thwarted. If we turn the knob all the way to the left, no racist desires are thwarted (because they don’t exist), and also the desires of minorities are not thwarted.”

This reasoning led you to an incorrect conclusion because you failed to realize that turning the knob all the way to the right means that racist desires are fulfilled and no desires of minorities are thwarted – because they don’t exist either! As you wrote, turning the knob all the way to the left means that no racist desires are thwarted and no desires of minorities are thwarted. But because a failure to thwart desires is not equivalent to fulfilling desires, this means that turning the knob all the way to the right would not only fulfill more and stronger reasons for action than it would thwart, it would fulfill more and stronger reasons for action than turning the knob all the way to the left even without the numerical requirement of a majority of the population possessing the racist desires. Therefore, under the desirist moral code, the Nazi extermination program is confirmed to be good and opposition to it, or even mitigation of it, is a definite evil.

Moreover, the intrinsically totalitarian aspects of your moral code are intimated even in your incorrect interpretation of the example. If, for example, turning the knob all the way to the left would fulfill more desires than it would thwart, then it would be a moral good to eliminate the racist desires from those harboring them and a moral evil to fail to do so. It is no coincidence that this is precisely the reasoning that the Maoists used in attempting to eliminate “false consciousness” by the use of Laodong Gaizao, “re-education through labor” in prison camps. And this logical consequentialism does not even begin to address desirism’s fatal structural flaws related to the impossibility of establishing precisely what the divergent and opposing desires are, measuring their relative strengths, ennumerating their respective adherents, or accounting for the incontrovertible fact that desires fluctuate and change within every individual.

While you may not be troubled by the fact that your chosen morality is definitionally Satanic from the Christian perspective, I would at least hope the fact that it can be accurately described as collective Maoism and utilized to logically justify the moral goodness of the historical Endlösung would encourage you to reconsider your enthusiasm for it. While the truth or falsehood of desirism may not be determined by the consequences of the actions it dictates, they must nevertheless be taken into account by anyone who is willing to state an opinion about the truth of Christianity on the basis of the actions of Christians or the Christian God.

With regards,
Vox

This was written in response to 4th Letter to Vox Day

The charlatans are failing

The public is rejecting the AGW/CC scam:

Just 57 percent think there is solid evidence the world is getting warmer, down 20 points in just three years, a new poll says…. The poll was released a day after 18 scientific organizations wrote Congress to reaffirm the consensus behind global warming. A federal government report Thursday found that global warming is upsetting the Arctic’s thermostat. Only about a third, or 36 percent of the respondents, feel that human activities — such as pollution from power plants, factories and automobiles — are behind a temperature increase. That’s down from 47 percent from 2006 through last year’s poll.

Brainwashing and appeals to scientific authority only go so far when Joe Public’s car is buried by snow in early October. No doubt the true believing scientific community will respond with calm reason and logical persuasion, by which of course I mean that we can look forward to the usual suspects shrieking about how stupid everyone is for daring to think for themselves and wistfully dreaming of PhDoctocracy.

Beyond EPIC FAIL

This account of a debate between Thomas Woods and Tom McInerney, ING Chairman & CEO Insurance Americas, fairly well sums up the disastrous ignorance of the global financial elite. Keep in mind, the clueless wonder is an Econ major from Colgate with an MBA from Tuck:

The extent to which [McInerney], ING Chairman & CEO Insurance Americas was outmatched, though, was revealed in this almost embarrassingly funny episode. McInerney had mentioned that Bernanke was a diligent and knowledgeable student of the Great Depression. So, when it came time for the Q&A, one audience member asked Woods to briefly explain the Austrian view of Great Depression and how it might differ from Bernanke’s view. After Woods did this, McIerney took the stage, and as if he were about to unload a devastating blow against Woods, said to him, “this might seem like a bit of an attack. Don’t take it too personally.” And then…. he began to rant about … the relatively small size of the country of Austria. I kid you not.

Some audience members began to laugh; others cringed, as McInerney dug his hole deeper while under the illusion that he was unleashing a deadly zinger. Woods kept trying to stage whisper that Austria had nothing to do with the school of Austrian economics, but McInerney, undeterred, plowed on. Thus, when Woods took the stage he said, “this might seem like an attack, but don’t take it too personally…” And then Woods commented that we may as well say we shouldn’t listen to Milton Friedman, since the GDP of Chicago is pretty low.

And this sort of thing is just one of the many, many reasons that I’m deeply unimpressed with appeals to academic, professional, or scientific authority. Perhaps McInerney should have pleaded the Courtier’s Reply as it’s almost, though not quite, as deeply stupid as his soliloquy on the Austrian economy.

And it gets worse. Thomas Woods comments: “Of course people are right to observe that relatively few people get exposed to Austrian economics. The point here is that I had just finished a 40-minute presentation on the subject.”

No wonder McInerney’s company needed a bailout. I have little doubt it will soon need another one.

Dawkins, the historical dimwit

Someone really needs to tell the old coot to stop babbling about anything but biology and atheism. As I demonstrated in TIA, the man simply doesn’t know a damn thing about history:

HH: Well, you repeatedly use the analogy of a detective at a crime scene throughout The Greatest Show On Earth. But detectives simply can’t dismiss evidence they don’t want to see. There’s a lot of evidence for the miracles, in terms of eyewitness…

RD: No, there isn’t. What there is, is written stories which were written decades after the alleged events were supposed to happen. No historian would take that seriously.

HH: Well, that’s why I’m conflicted, because in your book, you talk about the Latin teacher who is stymied at every turn, and yet Latin teachers routinely rely on things like Tacitus and Pliny, and histories that were written centuries after the events in which they are recording occur.

RD: There’s massive archaeological evidence, there’s massive evidence of all kinds. It’s just not comparable. No…if you talk to any ancient historian of the period, they will agree that it is not good historical evidence.

HH: Oh, that’s simply not true. Dr. Mark Roberts, double PhD in undergraduate at Harvard has written a very persuasive book upon this. I mean, that’s an astounding statement. Are you unfamiliar with him?

RD: All right, then there may be some, but a very large number of ancient historians would say…

HH: Well, you just said there were none. So there are some that you are choosing not to confront.

RD: You sound like a lawyer.

HH: I am a lawyer.

RD: Oh, for God’s sake. Are you? Okay. I didn’t know that. All right. I will accept that there are some ancient historians who take the Gospels seriously. But they were written decades after the events that happened, and they were written by people with an axe to grind, written by disciples. There are no eyewitness written accounts. The earliest New Testament…

HH: I understand you believe that, Professor. I do. But what I don’t understand is how you can use the analogy of the Latin teacher or the detective, when it breaks down given your dismissal of evidence you don’t see fit to deal with squarely?

RD: I think that’s a very, very specious comparison, because the Latin teacher is dealing with enormous numbers of documents. Remember, my Latin teacher is supposed to be confronted with skeptics who don’t even think the Latin language was ever spoken. And there’s huge amounts of documentary evidence of the Roman Empire. We’re talking about the entire Roman Empire here. There’s enormous amounts of eyewitness accounts written down at the time. It just is no comparison.

HH: Actually, it is. It’s actually a very persuasive…in fact, the arguments for the manuscript evidence of Christ and His doings is much stronger than anything, for example, Tacitus or Pliny wrote. It’s just much stronger

It’s probably just as well that Dawkins hides from debate because he’s completely incompetent. Hugh Hewitt is far from a master debater in my opinion, and yet he caught Dawkins making blatantly false statements about history and historians, forced him to drastically change his definition of evidence from the one he utilizes in his books – the “enormous amount of eyewitness accounts” is a hilarious remark if you’re familiar with his previous statements about the value of eyewitnesses – and encouraged him to make an appeal to documentary evidence that was a sharp dagger in the hearts of dictionary-challenged atheists across the Internet. And notice that while Hewitt can name a specific historian in support of his position, Dawkins doesn’t… because he can’t. Just all… er, ah, lots.

Now, understand that no sane historian or archeologist rejects the Bible as historical evidence. At most, they reject specific details… rejections which archeological history indicates that they will probably be forced to eventually recant. Among other things, the Bible is one of the primary sources for calibrating the Egyptian Chronology – ironically, it turns out, as anyone familiar with Rohl’s New Chronology will know – and it has repeatedly shown itself to be more accurate than the dynamic archeological consensus. From the “mythical” Assyrian empire to Roman tax rolls and titles of Greek officials, the Bible has consistently shown itself to be an extraordinarily reliable historical document. Were it not for the supernatural elements that material reductionist scientists find impossible to believe, no one would even think to question it.

“The excessive skepticism shown toward the Bible by important historical schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain phrases of which still appear periodically, has been progressively discredited. Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details, and has brought increased recognition to the value of the Bible as a source of history.”
– William F. Albright

Richard Dawkins continues to keep digging himself in deeper. By the time he discovers just how completely wrong he was, he will have destroyed the greater part of his scientific legacy.

A minor, but legitimate intervention

Actually, far more of this sort of thing is in order:

The Obama administration plans to order companies that received huge U.S. government bailouts last year to sharply cut the compensation of their highest paid executives, according to a person familiar with the decision. The seven companies that received the most assistance will have to cut the annual salaries of their 25 highest-paid executive by an average of about 90 percent from last year, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it has not been announced. This person said Wednesday that the Treasury Department will announce the deep pay cuts within the next few days.

Look very closely at any commentator, so-called conservative or otherwise, who complains about this action by the White House being somehow “anti-capitalist”. If he was also a supporter of the bailouts last November, you should never, ever, consider taking him seriously again, because he’s either an untrustoworthy hypocrite or he’s too dumb to even realize his inconsistency. Once the government stepped in to socialize a corporation’s losses, that corporation lost the right to privatize its profits or even manage itself independently. From an economic perspective, the only thing more disastrous than a pure socialist system where both profits and losses are public is a fascist system where profits are private and losses are public.

No doubt this is merely a token act meant to discharge the growing public fury with Goldman and the other giant vampire squidsfinancial institutions. If Obama was serious, he’d announce a retroactive 95 percent tax on all bonuses paid in 2008 or later at institutions that received government assistance since August 2008 and accept Paul Volcker’s advice to beginning breaking up the big banks. Of course, what he should actually do is force the banks to mark the values of their assets to market, obey the law and have the FDIC initiate Prompt Corrective Actions as they are legally bound to do, and shut down every big bank that is insolvent. But he’s neither smart enough to understand the need to do this nor courageous enough to do so in the face of opposition from the influential vampire squidsfinancial institutions. And so the debt spiral continues….

A lefty contemplates his banishment

For the moral crime of questioning aspects of the AGW/CC charade:

For better or worse I have a much better sense of how the liberal slime machine works in practice, having been inside now a bit. This is all the more ironic because I consider myself to be cut from a similar political cloth to many of those who are engaged in all out war against me. Here are a few reflections.

Here is how it works. The really giant fish — public intellectuals like Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman — confer authority on the big fish of the liberal blogosphere. They do so by applauding the work of the big fish and saying that they trust them. This is a useful exchange because the big fish amplify the writings of the giant fish in the blogosphere and do the dirty work of taking down their political opponents by playing some gutter politics that the giant fish would rather not be seen playing. This has the effect of establishing the big fish as people to be listened to, not because they are necessarily right about things, but because the giant fish listen to them and the giant fish set political agendas…. The giant fish then get plausible deniability from engaging in what might seem to be less-than ethical behavior, the big fish get the ego-strokes of acknowledgment from the giant fish and the occasional top-line billing among favorable-leaning media. Similarly the minnows get to parlay inexpertise into a small role in the politics of personal destruction, and are cited by the big fish, but never by the media or the giants, which would be unbecoming.

On a tangential note, I always find it a little peculiar how often an item is published by WND, or occasionally, even posted on my blog, and then shows, completely unattributed, on one of the more nominally mainstream sites. I think Steve Sailer is probably the most surreptitiously cited but least-quoted writer on the right.

Anyhow, it shouldn’t surprise the professor that the left relies so heavily on personal attacks and appeals to authority. First, they’re authoritarians. Second, they certainly aren’t going to argue the science on the subject, because none of it supports their position. And third, if they were informed and capable of arguing logic, they wouldn’t be leftists in the first place.

The facade crumbles

The era of Fed extend-and-pretend appears to be fast approaching an end:

On Monday the Federal Reserve held a major reverse repo test, as was announced by the NY Fed and by Zero Hedge. We have subsequently received several unconfirmed reports that the conducted test has been a disaster (we have calls into the Federal Reserve to confirm or deny this, we are eagerly awaiting their reply).

In related news, Karl Denninger reports that JP Morgan/Chase is down to only $21 billion in actual cash. But don’t worry, they have lots of other assets… unfortunately, most of them are the sort that keep showing up at only 50 percent valuations whenever a bank is seized by the FDIC. All of the professional economists have been saying that the crisis is over for months now. I, on the other hand, don’t think that the next stage has even begun yet. But surely all the experts can’t be wrong… again!

Of might and right

One of the tangential topics that has come up in relation to yesterday’s discussion of the mistitled and oft-misapplied Euthyphro Dilemma is the question of whether the concept “God’s Game, God’s Rules” is equivalent to declaring that “might makes right”. Setting aside the obvious and unproven assumption that might inherently does not make right, I think it is quite easy to demonstrate that the authority of the Creator God to establish a code of rules that make up human morality does not derive from His might, however great that might be, but rather from His act of creation.

Consider, for example, the National Football League. The NFL organization owns and creates the rules of the game, by which the players on the field are expected to abide. Now, the NFL certainly possesses greater might than any one player and arguably even more than all the players combined. But, the NFL is significantly less mighty than, just to pick one example, the People’s Liberation Army. Now, no one disputes the right of the NFL to change the rules so that the penalty for offsides is fifteen yards instead of five, even if we think the change is a ridiculous one. But is this right determined by the NFL’s might? I don’t think so.

Why not? Because if the right to determine the rules was simply a matter of might, then it would be entirely proper for the PLA, which already owns vast quantities of corporations around the world, to land a division in Manhattan, forcibly seize the NFL offices and unilaterally declare a change to the offsides penalty. There would be no rational justification for complaining about this action, except of course for the same objections to the desirability of the rule change that would have applied in the previous scenario. So, unless you are willing to accede to the right of the PLA to change the NFL rules on the basis of its might, it is obvious that there must be a significant distinction between creative ownership making right and might making right, even if might is a necessary component of the original creation.

I also think it is relevant to point out that one cannot reasonably subject the NFL to its own rules. I am certainly unaware of any sitting commissioner ever being penalized for holding or pass interference.

RGD: the second review

Chad the Elder of the Fraters Libertas reviews RGD:

Let me start by passing on a shocking piece of information: Vox Day is not an economist. That may lead some to discount his views on matters economic, but in this case it proves to be beneficial. He approaches the subject as an outsider and is not wedded to any particular school of economic theory from his background. This allows him to be rather dispassionate in his analysis and also forces him to be more vigorous in his research since he doesn’t come into it with a great deal of experience.

It also makes The Return of the Great Depression a more understandable and entertaining read than your average economic tome. That’s not to say its been dumbed down or overly simplified. Vox takes on some rather weighty and complicated economic topics. But, as he previously did in The Irrational Atheist, he does so in his own unique voice (Vox’s vox?). Even while explaining the inner workings of the money supply or the components that make up GDP, he maintains his straight-shooting style infused with the mix of cynicism and sarcastic humor that readers of his blog have come to expect.

I have to admit, after the complete, utter, and admitted failure of mainstream economics to foresee or forestall the present crisis, or to present potential solutions beyond increasing the amount of debt-funded spending, I would think that not being a credentialed economist would be seen as a strength rather than a weakness these days. If the basic theory is bad, learning more sophisticated ways of playing with it is not going to help you understand anything.

In which an epidemic of pain is foreseen

Among the 18-24 black t-shirt wearing crowd. These new guidelinescould add billions to the cost of health care reform:

Federal drug agents won’t pursue pot-smoking patients or their sanctioned suppliers in states that allow medical marijuana, under new legal guidelines to be issued Monday by the Obama administration. Two Justice Department officials described the new policy to The Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state law.

It’s hardly full legalization, but the Obama administration is taking one tiny step in the right direction. One must give credit where credit is due.