Vox Popoli

As if the militarization of the police and their non-stop no-knock invasions weren’t bad enough:

News Chopper 2 had a Local 2 Investigates team following the aircraft for more than one hour as it circled overhead. Its wings spanned 10 feet and it circled at an altitude of 1,500 feet. Operators from a private firm called Insitu, Inc. manned remote controls from inside the fleet of black trucks as the guests watched a live feed from the high-powered camera aboard the 40-pound aircraft.

“I wasn’t ready to publicize this,” Executive Assistant Police Chief Martha Montalvo said. She and other department leaders hastily organized a news conference when they realized Local 2 Investigates had captured the entire event on camera….

Montalvo told reporters the unmanned aircraft would be used for “mobility” or traffic issues, evacuations during storms, homeland security, search and rescue, and also “tactical.” She admitted that could include covert police actions and she said she was not ruling out someday using the drones for writing traffic tickets.

Or, you know, firing Hellfire missiles at the homes of reported drug dealers. That would work too. You know, for the children.

Open season on this week’s NFL games. I’m really just hoping that Adrian Peterson doesn’t play today. I don’t think we can beat the Giants either, but that’s really a secondary consideration at this point.

Isaac finds humor in my failure to be impressed by a few atheist writers:

[Vox Day], author of obscure Christian fantasy novels calling PB Shelley, Saramago, Primo Levi, Lichtenberg, Stanislaw Lem, and Largerkvist literary lightweights?

Yep. They don’t exactly rank with Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Calvino or Goethe, do they? They don’t even rank with MacDonald, Tolkein, Hesse or Fitzgerald. I should have specifically mentioned Shelley in my list of exclusions, however, as I like his poetry and he was very influential, although I suspect his biography remains an important factor in both his popularity and his influence.

Of course, it is ironic to note that Lem is famously known for having publicly agreed with my generally low opinion of science fiction’s literary qualities. It’s only that I don’t think his stuff is particularly great either.

I am on the floor laughing.

Hey, enjoy it while you can. It seems timely to mention here that one philosopher, with whom I am unfamiliar but who is apparently well-regarded in some intellectual circles, recently declared that TIA significantly raised the intellectual level of the entire religion-atheism debate. Now, perhaps he’ll be alone in his opinion once the book comes out, on the other hand, I’m still pretty young by literary standards.

Out of curiosity, have you ever actually read either The World in Shadow or The Wrath of Angels, Isaac? Or do you simply believe that obscurity is somehow fundamentally incompatible with literary significance? I have to mention, I’m always amazed at how many complete strangers enjoy informing me that I’m obscure… and in a culture where fame is increasingly predicated on one’s predilection for exposing one’s genitalia to photographers. Obviously I’m going about this ALL wrong!

What I find alternatively irritating and amusing is the outright bias in the science fiction and fantasy genre, where writers who are doing little more than writing bad ripoffs of Tolkein and Lewis refuse to even consider flipping through anything with a similarly overt Christian perspective. Seriously, nearly every SF reviewer I ever contacted openly refused to even look at the EW books and I would bet that there is only a single member of SFWA who has read all three of them. (And no, I’m not including myself.) Now, that’s certainly their perogative, but one can’t reasonably cite a lack of literary praise as a strike against a collection of books that the critics simply will not read.

In any case, my shortcomings as a creative writer have very little, if anything, to do with my criticial faculties as a reader.

PZ recommends pulling all the atheist writers out of our shelves after hearing that the execrable Philip Pullman’s work could possibly be tossed out of a few Catholic libraries in Canada. But should we regard that as a threat or a promise?

It’s just atheism that spurs this objection. I think we ought to run with it. The school board didn’t go far enough. Let’s purge school libraries of all books by atheists.

Look at his list. What a bunch of literary lightweights! I’ll admit, I have a soft spot for Asimov and Adams, mostly because I thought they were really great when I was in junior high. Try to read Asimov’s novels as an adult without cringing… it’s tough since he has about as much interest in character development as the director of a movie based on a 3D shooter starring an inarticulate pro wrestler. Love Paglia and Pratchett, but both are one-trick ponies. Arthur C. Clarke was an SF giant and wrote one great novel and several great short stories, but he’s hardly Dostoevsky. Can’t stand Vonnegut, Harrison or Hoellebecq, and Dave Barry is mildly amusing but it would be a toss-up as to who is the most dreadful stylist, him, Harris or Rand. Rushdie isn’t bad, he’s just massively – MASSIVELY – overrated.

The only two I’d take very seriously are Mieville and Leopardi, both of whom are intelligent and genuinely talented writers, but possess[ed] seriously screwed-up minds. And their inclusion here is a little amusing, given how the overt socialism of the former and the overt nihilism of the the latter are two things from which atheists usually do their level best to disassociate themselves.

“This is going to greatly thin out the science fiction section of the library”, PZ notes. That’s very true, he could probably add eighty percent of the current membership of SFWA to his list, but it is the atheism pervading science fiction and modern fantasy that is a primary factor in keeping both subgenres banished to a much-disrespected literary ghetto. I’m not the only one who has noticed; even the aforementioned atheist Paglia has publicly commented upon the negative effect of atheism on the arts.

Why shouldn’t any library ditch Pullman if it wants to anyhow, especially if it’s a Catholic one? His books have no more inherent right to a place there than do my overtly Christian novels.

While there are actually some very good atheist writers, past and present, all this post actually demonstrates is that either the Wikipedia editors or our friendly community college professor have the reading habits of a teenager… assuming PZ actually reads anything outside of atheist cheerleading and tentacle porn. I mean, if you’re writing about sci-fi and atheism, how do you come up with Lem while leaving out Heinlein?

President Bush’s broad swath of electoral destruction isn’t limited to domestic politics:

Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffered a humiliating defeat Saturday at the hands of the left-leaning opposition, whose leader has promised to immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and withdraw Australia’s combat troops from Iraq.

Labor Party head Kevin Rudd’s pledges on global warming and Iraq move Australia sharply away from policies that had made Howard one of President Bush’s staunchest allies….

“The United States and Australia have long been strong partners and allies and the president looks forward to working with this new government to continue our historic relationship,” said Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman. “During his time as prime minister, Mr. Howard served the people of Australia well by pursuing policies that led to strong economic growth and a commitment to keeping Australians safe by fighting extremists and their ideology around the world.”

The election was an embarrassing end to the career of Howard, Australia’s second-longest serving leader. As little as a year ago, Howard had appeared almost unassailable. But on Saturday he was in real danger of becoming only the second sitting prime minister in 106 years of federal government to lose his own seat in Parliament.

Very little has changed on the so-called global warming front in the past year, so the likely conclusion is that, like the Republican loss of the House and Senate in 2006, the Australian Prime Minister is another casualty of the neocons’ Grim Struggle Against Victorious Elections.

The amazing thing is how many intelligent Republicans whose political judgment I usually respect continue to behave like functional idiots in insisting on continuing to support this political suicide pact. It will be interesting to see their response after they lose the White House as well as the House and Senate. Will they finally wake up, or will they follow the neocons’s lead and leap onto Hillary’s bandwagon?

UPDATE – Mary Steyn fails to note the obvious:

Of all the doughty warriors of the Anglosphere, Howard, his Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and their colleagues had the best rhetoric on the present war, and I often wished the Bush Administration had emulated their plain speaking.

And now they’re booted out of power… such an unlooked-for surprise!

Arno Lustiger, a Jewish historian and Holocaust survivor, has started proceedings to sue the magazine’s German edition for publishing an interview with Horst Mahler, the former left-wing extremist who transformed into one of Germany’s most rabid neo-Nazi public figures. The interview appeared in the Nov. 1 print and online editions.

Filed Nov. 7 and released to the public on Nov. 21, the suit notes that Mahler denied and belittled the Holocaust, which is illegal in Germany.

The media continues to be mystified how so many left-wing extremists have magically transformed themselves into Fascists, Nazis, Neo-Nazis and Neocons. It never seems to occur to them that this is because Fascists, Nazis, Neo-Nazis and Neocons are all variants of a basic left-wing ideology which is dependent upon large and powerful central governments harboring expansionary ambitions.

Envirofreaks are the new Skoptsi:

Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible “mistake” of pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time.

He refused, but Toni – who works for an environmental charity – “relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery.

Finally, eight years ago, Toni got her way.

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to “protect the planet”.

Now if we can just convince the feminists to follow suit – you know, for the planet – we can eliminate this equalitarian problem in a generation.

It’s been a strange year this year, with many ups and downs, but I am thankful to God for many things. This year, I’m particularly grateful for being able to see out of both eyes, for the daily joys of my family, and for the chance to be involved in so many diverse and interesting pasttimes.

I’m also deeply appreciative of the VP Ilk, as the various challenges so often posed here by friends and occasional foes alike tend to inure me against the temptation to sink into intellectual sloth. I’m also thankful for my extraordinarily open-minded publisher, BenBella Books, who informed me yesterday that TIA had gone to the printers earlier that afternoon.

So, in that light it seems only right that I should open the Responsible Puppet’s long-awaited discussion of the Open view of God by posting a brief excerpt from TIA which happens to relate to this subject. This excerpt is far from my complete word on the matter, as the Open view is only tangentially relevant to my response to a specific New Atheist argument and is barely touched upon in TIA, but it should nevertheless serve to get this conversation rolling.

The Contradiction of Divine Characteristics

In a chapter considering the arguments for God’s existence, Richard Dawkins muses briefly upon what he considers to be a logical contradiction. He writes:

Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.

As Dawkins surely knows, this is a silly and superficial argument; indeed, he follows it up with a little piece of doggerel by Karen Owens before promptly abandoning the line of reasoning in favor of a return to his attack upon Thomas Aquinas. While the argument appears to make sense at first glance, it’s merely a variation on the deeply philosophical question that troubles so many children and atheists, of whether God can create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it.

First, it is important to note that the Christian God, the god towards whom Dawkins directs the great majority of his attacks, makes no broad claims to omniscience. Although there are eighty-seven references to the things that the biblical God knows, only a single example could potentially be interpreted as a universal claim to complete knowledge.

Among the things that God claims to know are the following: He knows the way to wisdom and where it dwells, he knows the day of the wicked is coming, he knows the secrets of men’s hearts, he knows the thoughts of men and their futility. He knows the proud from afar, he knows what lies in darkness, and he knows what you need before you ask him. He knows the Son, he knows the day and the hour that the heavens and the earth shall pass away, he knows the mind of the Spirit and that the Apostle Paul loved the Corinthians.
He knows who are his, he knows how to rescue godly men from trials, and perhaps most importantly, he knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.

The only straightforward claim to omniscience is made on God’s behalf by the Apostle John, who clearly states “he knows everything.” However, the context in which the statement is made also indicates that this particular “everything” is not intended to encompass life and the universe, but rather everything about human hearts. Not only does this interpretation make more sense in light of the verse than with an inexplicable revelation of a divine quality that appears nowhere else in the Bible, but it is also in keeping with many previous statements made about God’s knowledge.

After all, when Hercule Poirot confronts the murderer in an Agatha Christie novel and informs the killer that he knows everything, the educated reader does not usually interpret this as a statement that the Belgian detective is confessing that he is the physical manifestation of Hermes Trismegistus, but rather that he knows everything about the crime he has been detecting.

In keeping with this interpretation, Dr. Greg Boyd, the pastor at Woodland Hills Church and the author of Letters to a Skeptic, has written a book laying out a convincing case for the Open View of God, which among other things chronicles the many biblical examples of God being surprised, changing His mind, and even being thwarted. Moreover, it would be very, very strange for a presumably intelligent being such as Satan to place a bet with God if he believed that God knew with certainty what Job’s reaction to his torments would be.

The verse mentioned above is 1 John 13:18 which states: “Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.”

And in answer to his two questions:

(1) I have no idea, I’ve never counted.
(2) A significant rewriting of the Bible which eliminates all of the many obvious implications and outright demonstrations that God is not actively managing every single Earthly event and individual action.

There is a strange similarity between omniderigistes and the New Atheists. Both groups take a small number of specific Bible verses, assign one reasonable interpretation to them, and then argue that it is the only possible interpretation in defiance of numerous equally possible alternatives that are better supported by historical facts, logic and other Bible verses.

The omniderigent interpretation of “sovereignty” is a good case in point. One of the Puppet’s commentors asked “What does it mean “to reign” if it doesn’t mean to exercise active control over creation?” I ask in return, is that really supposed to be a serious question? Queen Elizabeth II indubitably reigns over England, does she exercise active control over every event and action in her realm? As anyone who knows the first thing about every single sovereign in human history should recognize, references to God’s sovereignty over His Creation are a much stronger argument AGAINST the omniderigent view than they are one for it.

But regardless of one’s view of the matter, today is an excellent day to thank Him for His many blessings.

Despite being a massive advocate of ebooks, I am utterly unimpressed by Amazon’s Kindle. While I welcome Amazon’s interest in making ebooks more commercially viable, I have no interest in books being converted into a service.

I already have thousands of books and thousands of ebooks, the idea of having to pay to access them when I can simply fire them over Bluetooth from my laptop into my Treo is ludicrous. Also, having carried around my Alphasmart Dana for 18 months prior to switching to Treo, I can attest that having an ebook reader that fits in your pocket is far more useful than one that is actually the size of a book. And basing everything around DRM… please. No one on Earth wants to pay for a subscription to a free blog, although some of the newspaper subscriptions are probably a good deal, assuming that you are one of the aging dinosaurs who still actually read newspapers.

I think Amazon’s approach is incoherent, as it is positioning this primarily as a service for a gadget crowd that really doesn’t need it. We already have better ways of reading ebooks and we know how to get around DRM, so there isn’t likely to be a significant market there once the “hey, shiny!” factor wears off. I fully expect Apple to come out with something in the next year that is smaller, prettier, more colorful and capable of appealing to the non-early adopting masses in much the same way that those wretched iMacs did.

It should be somewhere between the size of a Treo and a Kindle, use all of the various proprietary and non-proprietary formats and have a various easy means of loading books both wireless and mini-SD. Ideally, it would also have a phone in it, as my Treo has made me allergic to carrying multiple devices. There should be two versions, one with a keyboard and one without, so that those who require email/Internet can have it and those who can get by without typing anything can have a smaller device.

The sens and dattirs of Norway are reeling:

“This is a bit of a slap in the face,” Janet Rog, 74, said of Norway’s recent announcement that it would shut its career consulate here [in Minneapolis] next year and send the diplomats home.

The consulate, opened in 1906 and upgraded in 1946 to its current status as consulate general, is a point of pride for the Upper Midwest, which is home to more Norwegian-Americans than any other region of the country.

On a brighter note, perhaps Somalia will consider opening one soon.