#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
George: In the end, adherence to divine command theory is the province of lazy minds.
So, in the one corner, we have the irrepressible George as well as the snowflake moralist, INTJ. In the other, we have William of Ockham, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, John Calvin, Immanuel Kant (arguably), and bringing up the rear, Vox Day.
I certainly don’t mind finding myself in the company of such “lazy minds”.
CS asks if there are any holes to be identified in his Contra Calvinus:
Calvinism states that a man can only be saved by God if God has previously elected him for salvation and then draws him, through irresistible grace to his salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Calvinism also states man is totally depraved; man therefore is incapable of making the choice to believe in Jesus Christ unless God first draws him. Therefore, man cannot nor will ever come to God in faith unless God first draws him and if God draws him then man is incapable of resisting. Therefore also, no one is saved whom God did not previously determine would be saved and no one is damned whom God did not previously determine would be damned.
Calvinism also states that God is completely sovereign, so that everything that happens is His specific will and nothing can happen that God does not specifically will.
We may further deduce from scripture that Calvinism would support the statement that it is God’s will that man should be free from sin. We may also deduce from the belief that in man’s total depravity he is so given to his sin that he is unable to come to God in faith, that the strength or quantity of a man’s faith is indirectly proportional to the amount of sin in his life, so that if a man could be perfectly faithful, as was Jesus Christ, he would also be perfectly free from sin, as was Jesus Christ.
Therefore, in God’s sovereignty and according to His perfect will, when man is drawn to Him in faith he must be drawn perfectly so and irresistible grace will necessarily result in the complete renewal of a man at the moment of his justification, to the point where man is no longer a slave to sin and can never be again for all eternity.
Because it is clear from Romans chapter 7 that man, even after he has been saved by the grace of God, through faith in Jesus Christ is still a slave to his sin we can logically conclude that Calvinism and scripture are logically incompatible. And because a central tenant of Calvinism is that scripture is the inspired work of God and perfectly correct it is, in itself, a contradiction, and therefore cannot be true.
It’s really remarkable how cause and effect seems to repeatedly elude liberal Christians:
IN 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States…..
Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.
For some reason, despite the observable fact that chasing after the world and attempting to “appeal to today’s young people” has been negatively affecting church attendance since I was in junior high, no one ever seems to question an assumption that so repeatedly and reliably fails. It’s no different than politics and the fallacy of moderate appeal. People without direction seek leadership, and when the Church refuses to stand for its Christian principles as defined in the New Testament and provide intellectual leadership against the zeitgeist, it not only sacrifices its reason to exist, but counterintuitively, also loses its primary appeal.
Of course Douthat, being somewhat of a moderate conservative, fails to recognize that the gifts of progressive Christianity he cites, “Social Gospel and the civil rights movement”, were both intellectually poisonous and societally destructive in the long run. Liberal Christianity shouldn’t be saved and it won’t be saved. Having cut itself off from its Christian roots, it should be abjured by the rest of the Church and left to its inevitable demise.
There were surely wolves in sheeps clothing who helped engineer the demise of the liberal denominations and congregations, but it should not be forgotten that they were abetted by many foolish and short-sighted individuals who were genuine Christians. One of the great shortcomings of nearly every church I have ever attended is the complete lack of vigilance for the wolves. Paul warns of them, and yet most churches never stop to think that among their most avid volunteers are likely those who seek to destroy the institution.
The wages of sin are death. The wages of stupidity are bankruptcy. NW writes to remind me of my prediction of the fatal consequences that result when a church leader parts company with the Bible in favor of the current worldly consensus:
Grace Community United Church of Christ will close its doors this weekend, but the pastor who says his decision to publicly support gay-marriage rights unwittingly thrust it on a path toward financial ruin plans to find a new home for his small congregation….
White said his church’s financial problems started in 2005 after he voted to support same-sex marriage at the United Church of Christ’s national synod. Attendance in the pews immediately dropped off the next week, and soon, three-fourths of his sizable congregation was gone. The departures took a financial toll, so the church took out a $150,000 loan in April 2007 to pay its bills, using the church building as collateral. The ministry owned the structure and owed no debt on the building at the time.
The high-interest loan was trouble from the start, and it was quickly acquired by Shrader and MS Properties. The church fell behind on payments, and interest and penalties began piling on, increasing the debt far beyond the initial principal. A settlement agreement called for the church to pay back $175,000 in May or $200,000 by the end of June.
Far too many members of the organized churches believe that the institutions themselves are the Church. They are not, and the true Church cannot compromise with abomination. Christianity cannot condone homogamy any more than it can condone ritual gang rape or child sacrifice. And when it purports to do so, it ceases to be Christianity.
It is fascinating, is it not, that this wolf in sheep’s clothing has no regrets about destroying his church’s solvency and driving off most of the congregation.
This erstwhile atheist’s intellectual path may explain why the leading atheists are, to a man, so philosophically incompetent:
I was ready to admit that there were parts of Christianity and Catholicism that seemed like a pretty good match for the bits of my moral system that I was most sure of, while meanwhile my own philosophy was pretty kludged together and not particularly satisfactory. But I couldn’t pick consistency over my construction project as long as I didn’t believe it was true.
While I kept working, I tried to keep my eyes open for ways I could test which world I was in, but a lot of the evidence for Christianity was only compelling to me if I at least presupposed Deism. Meanwhile, on the other side, I kept running into moral philosophers who seemed really helpful, until I discovered that their study of virtue ethics has led them to take a tumble into the Tiber. (I’m looking at you, MacIntyre!).
Then, the night before Palm Sunday (I have excellent liturgical timing), I was up at my alma mater for an alumni debate. I had another round of translating a lot of principles out of Catholic in order to use them in my speech, which prompted the now traditional heckling from my friends. After the debate, I buttonholed a Christian friend for another argument. During the discussion, he prodded me on where I thought moral law came from in my metaphysics. I talked about morality as though it were some kind of Platonic form, remote from the plane that humans existed on. He wanted to know where the connection was.
I could hypothesize how a Forms-material world link would work in the case of mathematics (a little long and off topic for this post, but pretty much the canonical idea of recognizing Two-ness as the quality that’s shared by two chairs and two houses, etc. Once you get the natural numbers, the rest of mathematics is in your grasp). But I didn’t have an analogue for how humans got bootstrap up to get even a partial understanding of objective moral law.
I’ve heard some explanations that try to bake morality into the natural world by reaching for evolutionary psychology. They argue that moral dispositions are evolutionarily triumphant over selfishness, or they talk about group selection, or something else. Usually, these proposed solutions radically misunderstand a) evolution b) moral philosophy or c) both. I didn’t think the answer was there. My friend pressed me to stop beating up on other people’s explanations and offer one of my own…. It turns out I did.
I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth. And there was one religion that seemed like the most promising way to reach back to that living Truth.
It is both interesting and informative to once more note that whereas the religious-to-atheist transformation is closely associated with adolescence and reactive intellectual immaturity, the converse one is much more often the product of emotional maturity and intellectual exploration. And, as I’ve noted before, a higher percentage of children raised atheist convert to Christianity than children raised Christian convert to atheism, as was apparently the case here.
But those are merely observations. My main purpose was simply to share her testimony and wish her well in her ongoing walk with God.
KH asks about the so-called “permissive will” that is part of the Calvinist concept of the divine:
I have followed your discussion of Calvinism with great interest. Some of these questions come up routinely in an on going group Bible study. Recently, one Calvinist used the term “permissive will” in reference to God allowing a natural disaster to kill people. (The term was new to me). He argued that God does not cause these tragedies but permits them or allows Satan to cause them. The problem I perceived with this argument is that one is still blaming God for the earthquake or tornado fatalities, whether it was His “permissive/passive” or active will. The term “permissive will” seemed like a euphemism to get around the belief of God controlling every storm and fault line without actually accusing Him of murder. I still feel like there was a missed opportunity for the use of logic to take out that argument. How would you have responded to the use of that term?
This is one of the concepts I lampoon in my occasional reference to the nine billion wills of God – actually, I think I previously referred to 17, but nine billion more appropriately reflects my view of the matter – and it refers to the distinctions that some Calvinists make between the “perfect”, the “permissive”, the “decreed”, the “directive”, the “perceptive”, and the “directed” wills of God. This isn’t quite as insane as it sounds, as there is a necessary and legitimate reason to distinguish between what God demands, what God decrees, what God anticipates, and what God wishes but does not expect, all of which can be reasonably described as what He wills.
However, KH is correct in smelling a rat. Those inclined to omniderigence will draw no such distinction; John Piper, for example, is straightforward about his belief in a literally murderous Jesus Christ who purposefully kills people with tornadoes. But this is a theologically incorrect use of “permissive will”, as that is what is used to explain Man’s ability to sin, not Man’s suffering natural disasters, which is generally considered to be a consequence of God’s “perfect will”.
This use of “permissive will” actually sounds rather more like my very non-Calvinist perspective, although I would never use such a term to describe what I observe to be Satan’s partial sovereignty over the world. It is always intriguing to compare the Calvinist claims of God’s sovereignty with the contradictory claims of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul concerning the being they describe as “the prince of this world” and “the god of this age”.
Jonathan Frost concludes that God is dead:
Like many young men in the 21st century, I’ve come to some grim conclusions about the state of the world. I’ve developed a healthy mistrust of conventional wisdom and the institutions responsible for teaching it. I’m hardly the only one. The blogroll to the left is mostly composed of men like myself who have also been raised in the late 20th century American tradition, and found it lacking. In short, we have lost our faith. We are adrift.
But wait!
Traditional Christians like Dalrock, Ulysses, Elusive Wapiti, Throne and Altar, Koanic, Larry Auster and Patriactionary have a message for young men like myself. The message is: “We have an alternative for you. The Alternative is Christ. Turn to Christ, and the world will make sense to you. Turn to Christ en masse, and the world will become just.”
But the message is not landing, and I’ll tell you why:
The message is not new, but at least the reasoning is original. Let’s consider his explanations for his loss of faith:
1) Christian Theology is implicitly leftist
This is a simple confusion of Christian Theology with the infiltration and perversion of many Christian churches concerning which the Apostle Paul warned. Not only is there nothing leftist about Christianity, Christianity and left-wing ideology have very few things in common except a belief in the inevitable progress of history towards a fixed end. Christian theology declares the world will end in fire and blood of the Harvest of Souls, left-wing ideology asserts it will end in the pink and sparkly gay globalist picture presented at the end of Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride. What Frost fails to realize is that leftism is the substitution of the State for God, for a static humanity instead of Christianity’s intrinsically dynamic one. This, of course, is why leftist regimes invariably persecute Christianity, as unlike Frost, they recognize their implacable enemy.
2) Christianity is already responsible most for our problems
Christianity didn’t bring down the Roman empire. That’s simply the long-outdated view put forth by Edward Gibbon. And the chief difference between a Leninist and a Christian is that the former believes in the perfectibility of Man whereas the latter rejects it entirely. This is, to put it mildly, a fundamental and irreconcilable difference. Nor can Christianity be reasonably blamed for the demographic or debt crises of the West, indeed, it would be closer to the mark, though still incorrect, to blame Judaism.
3) The Church Is Doomed
Nero couldn’t wipe it out. Diocletian couldn’t slow its growth. Julian the Apostate couldn’t put a dent in it. The left-wing butchers of the French Revolution, the October Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and the Killing Fields all failed in their murderous efforts to eradicate it despite the possession of absolute power. Christianity persists even in the death camps of the North Korean communists. Frost is correct in that the atheist hate and the desire to destroy the Church is most definitely there, but he fails to recognize the historical reality that persecution has always purified and refined the faith and made the Church stronger. The weaker brethren will fall by the wayside, as they always have, while the stronger ones convert their very killers through the powerful witness of their martyrdom. The Gates of Hell will not prevail.
4) Modern Christianity is a feminist and leftist institution
Correction: modern churchianity is a feminist and mildly leftist institution. It is true that many of the formal denominations are rapidly dying out as a result of their abandonment of Christian theology. They may possess the name and the form, but the animating spirit has left the building. However, the number of the non-denominational “unchurched” continues to grow explosively and at the expense of the dying mainline institutions.
5) Christianity is False
Frost is certainly welcome to his conclusion. But again, his reasoning that supports it is flawed. He writes: “But if Christianity is true, there should be some indication of it as such in our observable reality. The texts of Christianity should accord with morals that encourage stable and just societies. Christianity should be associated historically with righteousness. Christianity should not be breathing its last breaths before landing on the ash heap of history.”
I note first Frost’s implied opinion that the West is in decline and his declared opinion that Christianity is in decline. If he values the traditional West, which was historically known as Christendom, then it would appear to be obvious that its decline is at least in part due to the decline of Christianity within it. Moreover, he has a fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity, as it explicitly states the complete opposite of his assertion that Christianity should be associated historically with righteousness, because Christianity provides the very metric by which we are able to discern our own unrighteousness. To his credit, Frost himself admits his general lack of knowledge concerning Christian theology, and I would tend to second the commenter’s recommendation of beginning with The Chronicles of Narnia, continuing with the first two books of Lewis’s Space Trilogy, before then moving on to some of Lewis’s non-fiction as well as Chesterton.
Only then would it perhaps make sense to consider exploring the Catholic catechism or reading Augustine, Aquinas, and the early Fathers if he is still interested in delving deeper. It may sound ludicrous to suggest beginning with children’s novels, but then, the sad and observable reality is that most of the opinions expressed by various critics of Christianity reveal that their theological knowledge doesn’t even rise to that remarkably low level. As for a very good historical overview of the effects of Christianity on Rome, I would recommend the first volume of the Cambridge Medieval History, subtitled The Christian Empire.
01 asks about the conflation of Christianity and Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis:
Okay, this is interesting: appears Vox here is some kind of simulation-solipsist, actually. And to think I thought he’s some kind of christian…hehe… Vox, would you care to answer a question ? If your simulation hypothesis is, in a general sense, correct (that is, universe is a simulation, and religious rules are supposed to be a factor by which the system selects AI programs that are “fit” for some unknown external purpose), what exactly makes you believe that simulation-designer is granting a happy future existence to those who abide by the “in-universe” rules he set, and not vice-versa (sinners go to “data haven / a better employment”, pious ones are tortured eternally or deleted)?
Is there any reliable way to tell that sim-op isn’t actually preferring AIs who see the author of “religious rules” as “crazy lying fucktard”, and deleting everyone else as soon as they “in-universe die” (or worse)? It’s not like you can have out-of-simulation knowledge of sim-op’s goals, can you?
I not only don’t see any conflict between the simulation hypothesis and the concept of a supernatural Creator God, to me it appears obvious that there is no way of reasonably distinguishing between the two from the human perspective. What leads me to believe the assurances of the “happy future existence” is that they are contained in the same game manual that contains the various reliable predictive models of human behavior provided in The Bible. I don’t know that I would necessarily describe it as “a happy future existence” so much as “the next level”, though. The interesting question to me is if Eternity is static as most Christians assume and Platonic Form theory would suggest, or if it is dynamic and it will be possible to fall from grace in that level too. I tend to incline towards the latter view, but it’s just an impression, not even an opinion.
I don’t think there is any way of meaningfully performing in-game testing of post-game results. The manual itself could be a deception, delivering on its in-game promises while deceiving with regards to its post-game ones. I touch upon this in TIA. For example, if Moloch were the sim-op aka Creator, then abortionists would be ministers and Hitler and Mao two of the saints. We can’t have out-of-game knowledge of anything because we are in the game. But to me, the important thing is to realize that you are playing the game regardless of whether you want to play it or not, whether you believe you are playing it or not.
The return to paganism in increasingly post-Christian Britain is being embraced by the state:
Paganism has been included in an official school religious education syllabus for the first time. Cornwall Council has told its schools that pagan beliefs, which include witchcraft, druidism and the worship of ancient gods such as Thor, should be taught alongside Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
The requirements are spelled out in an agreed syllabus drawn up by Cornwall’s RE advisory group. It says that from the age of five, children should begin learning about standing stones, such as Stonehenge. At the age of 11, pupils can begin exploring ‘modern paganism and its importance for many in Cornwall’.
Atheist secularists must be so pleased. The consequence of their two-century campaign against Christian civilization increasingly looks to be a choice between Islam and half-naked, blue-bottomed savagery. Since the core concept of progress was intrinsically a Christian one based on the idea that a rational Creator’s Natural Law could be better understood through reason and observation, it should be no surprise that the abandonment of Christianity has not led to secular progress, but rather pagan regress.
Britain is already seeing the occasional human sacrifice committed by its imported savages. But unless the religious trend is reversed by Christian revival, the next century will see the native savages reviving their murderous old customs as well. Justice will be well served if they begin with the secular scientists.
Conclusion: go long on woad.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan:
Behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?”
He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind and your neighbour as yourself.”
He said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live.”
But he, desiring to justify himself, asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?”
Jesus answered, “A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, ‘Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.’ Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbour to him who fell among the robbers?”
He said, “He who showed mercy on him.”
Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
There are a few interesting points here, although I think it is probably important to avoid being too Pharasaically pedantic in considering them. First is the confusion between who one’s neighbor is and who is not. The usual Churchian concept is that everyone is your neighbor and the Christian should be mindlessly nice to everyone. This is why Churchianity is essentially the religion of niceness that doesn’t so much preach salvation through faith or works, but through etiquette and due regard for the social mores. But if we follow the pure logic of the parable, one’s neighbor is the individual who shows mercy to you. It’s not everyone, in fact, it cannot possibly be everyone since only one of the three men was the correct answer. Second is the fact that the Samaritan had the wherewithal to help the helpless man. Third is the fact that the man was actually helpless, half-dead, to be specific.
So, this makes a few things clear. First, one clearly has a Christian duty to help the helpless. Therefore, this duty just as clearly does not apply as any sort of moral imperative to the non-Christian. Nietzsche, for one, would howl at the concept. Second, while one should offer assistance when one has the ability to do so, it’s not a blanket requirement to everyone. What would the Poor Samaritan, lacking an animal to carry the injured man, without either oil or wine for his wounds, and devoid of money to pay for an inn, been able to do for the man? And third, the parable says absolutely nothing about responding to a call for assistance, which may or may not be legitimate. It is an extrapolation, and a groundless one, to expand the Christian duty from helping the helpless to helping everyone who requests assistance.
There is a significant difference between “lying on the ground wounded and half-dead” and “standing next to a parked car, waving one’s arms”, especially given that most individuals have cell phones and are perfectly capable of summoning appropriate assistance on their own. So, while one can do so for a variety of reasons, given these distinctions, I don’t think that anyone can reasonably appeal to the Parable of the Good Samaritan as a basis for criticizing John Derbyshire’s advice to young people concerning individuals of African descent in apparent distress requesting assistance.