Vox Popoli

Kelly of the Rational Response Squad is quite rightly moving onto the second chapter of The Irrational Atheist, but she did take the time to respond to my response in order to clarify a few things. My subsequent reply can be read here as we wait for the next onslaught of reason to descend upon us:

I never stated that the concept itself was new, only that the right to express it, even in opposition to the government, was. And just for the record, I don’t believe in absolute free will, either. I believe that people will make certain decisions, seemingly of their own volition, based on genetic and environmental variances. The nature versus nurture debate will likely never end, but a critical examination of the studies will show that things as trivial as your vehicle preference are correlated to genetic similarity. If free will exists as you claim it does, then how is it that I have control over my own destiny which according to the bible was determined before I was even conceived?

Kelly didn’t state the concept itself was new in her initial response, she wrote: “I wonder where he got those ideas regarding man’s free will and right to exercise it. Could it be…the Enlightenment? The irony is almost overwhelming.”

As she now knows, no, it could not be the Enlightenment. There is no irony at all. Despite her backpedaling, the concept of a right to exercise one’s free will contra the government was not new either. The pre-Enlightenment English Bill of Rights is only one of many possible examples and contains an explicit right to free speech against the crown. Again, Chapter 15 will answer her question, I don’t believe her destiny is pre-determined; I am not an omniderigiste.

There was a form of democracy in Greece, true. I think that there are some benefits to an Athenian style democracy, personally, but the system itself was still not as sophisticated as what we have currently.

That’s beside the point. Democracy and limited government both pre-date the Enlightenment. Even worse for Kelly, that more sophisticated American-style system was specifically designed to limit the will of the people… which is quite in keeping with the Enlightenment and its totalitarian impulses.

Your assumption that I am unfamiliar with Aquinas, Augustine, or enlightenment philosophers in general is patently absurd. Not to drag “formal” education into the debate, but I did study theology and philosophy at a Jesuit university for 2 years, and have read many of the works of all of the aforementioned. “Free will” as a concept was present in christianity, but my remark was related to governments and the legal right to exercise our autonomy. I could, perhaps, chalk this up to a semantic or contextual misunderstanding, but it is also likely that you just purposely interpreted what I said in such a way that you could accuse me of ignorance of those subjects.

I have no idea what Kelly’s education happens to have been nor do I care. Her point is what it is, and I suggest that no one who has properly understood either Aquinas or Voltaire would make such a bizarre statement about free will and the Enlightenment. Especially since the Enlightenment 2.0 advocates deny the very existence of free will. Again, let the reader decide.

And in answer to DJ’s question over at Kelly’s blog, the assertion that Jean Meslier was the first atheist was not mine, it belongs to Michel Onfray and was made by him in his book Trattato di Ateologia. If you would like to argue the point or find it to be lacking in any way, I recommend that you take it up with him.

The amusing thing is that on the science blogs, they’re still yammering on about the “scientific fact” of greenhouse gas-caused global warming:

Last Monday – on ABC Radio National, of all places – there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”

Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up … So (it’s) very unexpected, not something that’s being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it’s very significant.”

Duffy: “It’s not only that it’s not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there’s any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it’s put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary.”

So, let’s see. Embryonic stem cell research, check. Dark matter, check. Global warming, check. Evolution, okay, jury’s still out. These days, skepticism is the only rational perspective for the intelligent layman to regard what passes for science today.

It seems to me that the more you understand the “science”, the more likely you are to completely fail to see the flaws in the consensus model. This tends to remind me of economics, where all the experts habitually deny that a recession is approaching until they decide post-facto that we’ve been in one for three quarters. I’ve been saving some of the housing forecasts from NAR’s chief economist and they make for hilarious reading when you compare them to the NAR reports that cover the period predicted.

According to the “scientific” forecast, housing prices were to stabilize in late 2007 and hold firm in 2008. Here’s the November 2007 forecast for 2008: “Existing-home prices are expected to decline 1.7 percent to a median of $218,200 for all of this year and hold essentially even in 2008 at $218,300. Wow, what precision! To a tenth of a percent! The February report comes out this week… let’s just say that instead of $218k, I’m expecting a decline that would project to $175k or less by the end of the year. But what do I know, I’m not an “expert” paying close attention to the “science” of the housing market, after all.

For those of you who find my evolutionary skepticism upsetting, please try to grasp that it has nothing to do with my religion, but rather is born of my understanding of the problems inherent to complex models with a high degree of variability and low levels of verifiable data. I received a sophisticated economics education long before I became a Christian. In fact, I have come to be convinced that it is the simplistic nature of the training for the biological sciences that causes most evolutionists to vastly overestimate the value and precision of their current models and massively underestimate the probability that they will have to serious overhaul them, if not entirely abandon them.

But regardless, don’t mind me, I’m far too busy enjoying the massive discomfiture of the neo-Keynesians to seriously annoy you right now. Notice that I’m far from the only one who sees a connection between the two scientific faiths of Keynesianism and Darwinism; I’d very much like to hear Paul Krugman attempt to explain away the current economic situation in terms he has not previously described as “religious”.

1.23: number of births per woman in Italy
2.66: number of children per family at Italian evangelical church
48%: percentage of congregation that were children under 18
2%: percentage of congregation that were retirement age

Conclusion: European post-Christianity may be a temporary phenomenon.

There is much that we do not understand about Jesus Christ. A baby born of a virgin, an innocent crucified as a criminal, a Prince of Peace come to divide brother from brother. I myself don’t understand the common portrait of the meek, mild and mealy-mouthed Savior, when the man of whom we read in the Bible is massively self-confident, brutally sarcastic and possessed of enough strength of character to empty a Temple with the force of his rage.

In one of history’s great metaphors, Paul tells us that now we see through a glass darkly. But even through that obscured glass, we see enough of Jesus Christ, the God-Man, that our hearts and minds are stirred to follow Him, each in our own clumsy and faltering way. As He warned it would, the world mocks what it does not understand and kills what it fears and hates. Let it look on in bewilderment, scorn and fear again today, as Christians around the world once more celebrate together the Resurrection of Our Lord and His victory over the grave. For history has shown that there are few words more lasting or powerful than those four simple words of celebration and salvation.

He is risen. Alleluia.

Gail Collins doesn’t understand the basics of sex:

This is what happens when a bunch of guys go to a place where their families can’t keep tabs on them. Of course, there are women in Albany — about a quarter of the lawmakers, although very few with any significant power. But the political culture, incubated over several centuries, is about guys on a road trip. The best argument for electing more women to State Legislatures might be that they put a damper on the fun.

Or, far more likely, this would lead to significantly more scandals since in addition to more female politicians, there would be more female staffers, interns, and lobbyists, since women generally prefer to surround themselves with women. Adding more women into the equation, and therefore creating more opportunities for sexual contact, isn’t terribly likely to reduce the incidence of sexual activity. One would think this conclusion would be totally obvious since the very scandal Ms Collins cites was an affair between the new governor of New York and an employee in the governor’s office. By Collin’s reasoning, if only more women had worked in that office, Mr. Paterson would have found it easier to resist temptation.

Chick logic… I’m never sure if I find it more amusing or appalling.

I never thought Obama was anything but a rabbit; now that the rabbit has foolishly refused to gracefully exit the race, he’s being thrown to the hounds:

Jesus is black. Merging Marxism with Christian Gospel may show the way to a better tomorrow. The white church in America is the Antichrist because it supported slavery and segregation. Those are some of the more provocative doctrines that animate the theology at the core of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Barack Obama’s church.

If the Lizard Queen doesn’t completely destroy him in the coming Pennsylvania primary, I have no doubt that we’re going to see some seriously ugly and well-documented information released about B. Hussein Obama. At this point, my guess is that he backs down quietly behind the scenes after losing badly in Pennsylvania and agrees to accept the VP slot, the “race” continues with both candidates suddenly electing to take the high road, and after some pretend drama at the convention, the “surprise” peace accord and unity ticket is announced to the public. Otherwise, if he chooses to stubbornly fight on, his Magic Negro persona will be destroyed too thoroughly for him to remain a viable candidate of national scope.

Like most Americans, Scott Hatfield doesn’t understand what the Enlightenment represents. Nor does he understand how completely I reject it:

Again, you’ve boxed yourself into a corner because of your rhetoric. The hyperbole about the Enlightenment era as a whole was not needed to make the point that absolute secularization has born some bitter fruit, but you just had to have your broad-brushed flourish. I guess that’s the Vox Style. Oh, well, dead horse. You haven’t addressed the central point that good things came out of the Enlightenment (such as the Bill of Rights). If I’m wrong, please show me where the First Amendment can be derived purely from Christian theology as widely accepted prior to 1800.

The Bill of Rights and the First Amendment are absolutely not products of the Enlightenment. First, for Scott’s edification, I point out that the Enlightenment is a fundamentally authoritarian movement:

The first major Enlightenment figure in England was Thomas Hobbes, who caused great controversy with the release of his provocative treatise Leviathan (1651). Taking a sociological perspective, Hobbes felt that by nature, people were self-serving and preoccupied with the gathering of a limited number of resources. To keep balance, Hobbes continued, it was essential to have a single intimidating ruler. A half century later, John Locke came into the picture, promoting the opposite type of government—a representative government—in his Two Treatises of Government (1690). Although Hobbes would be more influential among his contemporaries, it was clear that Locke’s message was closer to the English people’s hearts and minds. Just before the turn of the century, in 1688, English Protestants helped overthrow the Catholic king James II and installed the Protestant monarchs William and Mary. In the aftermath of this Glorious Revolution, the English government ratified a new Bill of Rights that granted more personal freedoms.

In other words, PRIOR to the publication of Locke’s work and long before 1800, the English Protestants established a Bill of Rights that explicitly rejects the Enlightenment concepts of Hobbes and most of the French philosophes who came along later. There was little new about the American Bill of Rights, it was mostly an explicit extension of its English predecessor, which includes freedoms of speech and religion, from Parliament to the individual. Even the original Bill of Rights built upon the concepts of the Magna Carta Libertatum of 1215 and Henry I’s Charter of Liberties of 1100. When viewed from a historical perspective, it is obvious that democracy, divided government and guaranteed rights cannot reasonably be considered Enlightenment concepts, as all three predated the Enlightenment by centuries. Indeed, the distinguishing factors of the American and French Revolutions were that while the former was a) Christian and b) skeptical of government power, while the latter was a) anti-clerical and b) trusting in government power. One has merely to examine the broad limitations on the “human rights” of a genuinely Enlightenment-based government, such as the First French Republic, the European Union, or the United Nations, to understand that the concept of unalienable individual rights endowed by a Creator is not only foreign to the Enlightenment, it is downright antithetical to it.

In summary, the Bill of Rights did not come out of the Enlightenment, it was the result of combining the medieval tradition of the English Common Law with 18th century American Christianity. This latter influence is overt, because it was from their shared Christian tradition that the American revolutionaries derived the concept of God and God-granted rights as being superior to government, whereas the Enlightenment tradition does not recognize God and therefore accepts no supra-governmental limitations; all Enlightenment rights are expressly granted by government and can be freely abrogated by it at will. I recommend that Scott examine Article 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Articles 17 and 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner may have best summed up the primary challenge of a post-Christian Europe. “I knew what was the West, and I don’t know what the West is now.”

It’s incredible that so few people understand why most college degrees are worthless nowadays:

My daughter said to me the other day, “Why bother going to college Mom? You have a great degree, from a great college and it means nothing. I think I might move out of the country.”

When a) a college degree is no guarantee that the possessor has even a rudimentary education and b) half the population has one, it’s downright stupid to waste time and resources acquiring one, especially if you’re pursuing a degree that isn’t in a technical field for which there is proven demand.

Brad Wardell explains why copy protection is pointless:

Instead of worrying about pirates, just leave the content out in the open. The market Reznor plays to will still buy the music; he’s simply stopped worrying about the pirates. He came to the same conclusion: they weren’t customers, they might never be customers, so spending money to try to stop them serves no purpose…. “When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.”

TIA is in a similar position. Most of its potential audience has never heard of it, so worrying about a theoretical loss of bookbuyers based on a few thousand downloads is absurd. As it happens, more copies of the physical book have been sold than been downloaded for free… and the fact that the most easily found etexts are those of the bestselling books should suffice to prove that only a very small percentage of ebook pirates were ever potential customers.

It was only a matter of time before people began to notice one of the truly great blogs… and get offended by it:

Being in graduate school satisfies many white requirements for happiness. They can believe they are helping the world, complain that the government/university doesn’t support them enough, claim they are poor, feel as though are getting smarter, act superior to other people, enjoy perpetual three day weekends, and sleep in every day of the week!