A Reader Needs Advice on Assembling a Philosophical Toolkit

I'm an avid reader of your blog and have really enjoyed the in-depth analysis of a myriad of issues and assorted ideas. It really is one of a kind!

That being said, I'm emailing to get some advice on how I should further my philosophical studies. I've decided on political science as a major and philosophy as a minor. I hope to pursue my studies far beyond the undergraduate level, mostly in political philosophy. The problem I'm starting to have is when I really try to dissect some of your posts for their technical content, I find that I am unfamiliar with a lot of the philosophical tools that you use in your writings, tools that we undergraduates are not really acquainted with, and so I was wondering if you'd be able to direct me to some resources that would enable me to get to the next level.

So far I've looked far and wide for introductory books that would house something similar to what I've described above, perhaps a compilation of commonly used analytical techniques (if that's what you would call them), but I have come up with virtually nothing.

For some reason, I have this feeling that you're going to tell me that there aren't any such resources, and that the job of the philosopher is to comb through analytic philosophy (or even before) from its inception and pick out strategies that philosophers have introduced, often in ambiguous ways, over a large span of time, and refine them so they are somewhat usable. Is the creation of a toolkit a matter of hitting the books (something I don't mind) or is it really a bottom-up, creative endeavor?

P.S. Your posts regarding politics are a breath of fresh air.

I'm hoping that my readers can be of some assistance here.  There are probably some recent handbooks of which I am not aware.  But I know of some older books that should be useful.  One is Richard L. Purtill, A Logical Introduction to Philosophy.  Another is Jay F. Rosenberg, The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners.  And you may want to take a look at John Passmore, Philosophical Reasoning and Douglas N. Walton, Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation.

Are Atheists Theologians?

This from a reader:

I’m e-mailing you with this question because it’s bothered me for a while and I think you are more than capable of giving me a better understand of it. “Can atheists rationally ignore theology? Further, if they do need to study it, quite how much should they study, and which aspect(s) of it?” Many atheists think that studying theology would simply waste their time, whereas I now think that no rational person’s atheism is complete without engaging with the best theology on offer.

Well of course you are right:  any atheist who does not engage with a sophisticated conception of God is simply attacking a straw man and may be ignored for that very reason.  I see little point is discussions with atheists who liken God to a flying spaghetti monster or a celestial teapot.  Let them first show that they have mastered the complexities of a sophisticated God conception, and that they have respect for, and some understanding of, the religious sensibility, and then we will talk with them. If they polemicize, or are disrespectful or dismissive, then they are best ignored.

My own position is that atheism is a kind of rival theology (atheology?), just as every disbelief is a kind of rival belief, and that no atheist can rationally afford to ignore theology.

Here you have to be careful.  Suppose S disbelieves that p.  (For example, Jones disbelieves that Osama is dead.) It does not follow that Jones believes that ~p.  For it may be that S neither believes that p nor believes that ~p.  If one neither accepts nor rejects the proposition that Osama is dead, then one could be said to disbelieve that Osama is dead without believing that he is alive.  So there are two modes of disbelief with respect to a proposition p.  Either one believes that ~p or one suspends judgment with respect to p.  So I don't agree that every disbelief is a kind of rival belief.

In fact, every atheist is implicitly a theologian. For instance, Thomas Aquinas believes that God is simple, and Richard Dawkins believes that God is complex. Dawkins and Aquinas seem to compete in the same arena and talk on the same subject, so aren’t they both theologians, albeit rival ones? Further, every informed atheist must hold that the arguments that are meant to establish the existence of God fail. To think this is to engage positively with theology. Not to think this is to fail to rationally found one’s atheism. An atheist who is ignorant of theology, in my view, is rather like someone who disbelieves in the planets but is ignorant of astronomy. Atheists who do not take God and theology seriously do not take their own atheism seriously either.

Here again you have to be careful.  It is not as if there exists an x such that x = God and that Aquinas and Dawkins have contradictory beliefs about this one entity, x.  They are not disagreeing in the way two theologians might disagree over say,  divine foreknowledge or the filioque, or divine simplicity.   These theologians disagree, not about the existence of God, but about his exact nature.  By contrast, Aquinas and Dawkins are not presupposing a common subject matter about whose attributes they disagree.  So it is highly misleading if not outright wrong to say that Aquinas and Dawkins are rival theologians.  For Aquinas, theology has a subject matter; for Dawkins it does not.  So they do not "talk on the same subject."

It helps if you distinguish concepts of God from God.  For Aquinas, there really is an entity which some of those concepts are concepts of, even though no concept could be adequate to the divine reality.  For Dawkins, however, nothing that could reasonably count as a God concept is a concept of anything.

I think you have the right idea, but you are putting it in the wrong way.  You are right that serious and intellectually responsible atheists must address themselves to the most sophisticated conceptions of theists.  In this sense they must "engage positively with theology."  But that is not to say that "every atheist is implicitly a theologian."  Atheists deny the existence of God.  So for them there cannot be any theology, any study of God, as a legitimate inquiry into a domain of reality.  And please note that one can deny the existence of God without in any obvious way presupposing the existence of God.  How?  In the same way one denies the existence of Pegasus without presupposing the existence of Pegasus.  One cannot predicate nonexistence of Pegasus without presupposing the existence of Pegasus.  But one can predicate noninstantiation of the concept winged horse of such and such a description without presupposing the existence of Pegasus,  And so it is with the denial of God.  The atheist simply claims that no God concept is instantiated.  So I deny that atheism is a species of theology.  It is a rejection of all theology.

I also deny here and here that atheism is a religion, though I grant that it is like a religion in some ways. 

Moonsets and Microclimates

One advantage the early riser has over his opposite number is that he is better placed to enjoy certain celestial and atmospheric phenomena. One morning the moonset over the hills behind my house was unusually entrancing. The moon was at its fullest and the sky at it clearest. The Morning Star, that overworked example of so many philosophy of language dissertations, was in the vicinity of the moon, at least phenomenologically. The conjunction put me in mind of the Turkish flag which depicts Venus and a crescent moon in similar proximity. It was on such a crescent-mooned night that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) began the Kurtulus Savasi (the War of Independence) that brought into being the Republic of Turkey. Or so I was once told by a Turkish girl.

And then a day or two later I was out hiking at first light. The trail took me down into a chilly streambed. Climbing out of the drainage was like walking into a warm house: the temperature differential was twenty degrees Fahrhenheit if it was two. It takes a hiker, one accompanied only by his shadow, to appreciate such phenomena properly. The trail runner and the mountain biker are working too hard and are too much claimed by the hazards under foot and wheel to attend to the subtle. And the hiker who brings company along will be snubbed by Nature who jealously hides her charms from the unworthy and the inattentive. Nature: "You bring society into my serene precincts? Then enjoy your society, you can't have me."

As for the windshield tourist — he may as well be on another planet.

Bluff Spring Loop, Superstition Wilderness, 6 May 2011

This is a 9.3 mile hike out of the Peralta Trailhead, Superstition Wilderness, Arizona.  I have done it countless times in both the clockwise and counterclockwise directions.  The route sports about 1260 feet of elevation gain according to David Mazel (Arizona Trails, Wilderness Press 1991, p. 47)  We commenced hiking at 6 AM on the dot and finished at 11:35.  The dialectics slowed down the peripatetics.  Clockwise takes the hiker up rather than down what the locals call "Heart Attack Hill"  when they are not calling it "Cardiac Hill."   I much prefer the uphill to the downhill, heart stress to knee strain, though we have it on the authority of Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus that "The way up and the way down are the same." (Fragment 60)  A second advantage of the clockwise route is that fewer fellow hikers are encountered.  Human nature being what it is, the path of least resistance is preferred by the many.  The fewer of the many encountered the better, or so say I.  Here is the elevation profile in the easy counterclockwise direction:

Bluffspring_pro

Eschewing the Peripatetic approach to philosophy, Peter L. deemed us "crazy" for hiking in the desert in summer.  (High was near 100 Fahrenheit on the day in question.)  Hiking is a "delectable madness" as I seem to recall Colin Fletcher saying.  The first shot depicts the young philosopher Spencer Case at Miner's Summit standing before Miner's Needle while the second shows what the locals call "Cathedral Rock."

IMG_0833 IMG_0834

 

Ladderman Revisited

This post dated 17 November 2004 is from Ladderman  and ought to be preserved.  So I reproduce it here.

Maverick Philosopher posted a short sharp reply to the now common leftist claim that America is becoming a "theocracy" under President Bush. Excerpt:

"Hostility to religion, especially institutionalized religion, is a defining characteristic of the Left. We've known that since 1789. What is surprising, and truly bizarre, is the Left's going soft on militant Islam, the most virulent strain of religious bigotry ever to appear. It threatens all of their values. But their obsession with dissent is so great, dissent at all costs and against everything established, that they simply must denounce Bush and Co. as potential theocrats, all the while cozying up to militant Islam."

That must have had an awful lot of truth in it as it even got a bite from Ladderman, who was paranoid (or egotistical) enough to think that the post referred to him, even though he was not mentioned in it.

Ladderman's only substantial point in reply, however, is that some Christians WANT to have their values (such as opposition to abortion) enshrined in legislation. Wow! What news! You can certainly rely on Ladderman for the scoops! Many Christians have wanted that from the year dot but it does NOT mean that they are getting it or are going to get it. Wanting isn't getting and Bush's policy as given in the Presidential debates is thoroughly centrist: He wants to make alternatives to abortion more attractive but he certainly has no policy of getting abortion banned.

And in fact American law generally has undoubtedly been becoming more secular with every passing year. The Christian fundamentalists have LOST the battle on things like abortion, public prayer, public display of religious symbols and prohibition of homosexuality. But Ladderman (Leiter) is only a Law professor so I guess he hasn't noticed.

If he went to Saudi Arabia or Iran he would find out what a real theocracy is like. Ladderman's bile has totally cut him off from reality.

Still More on the Morality of Celebrating the Death of Evildoers

It is not just some Christians who feel the moral  dubiousness of joy and celebration at the death of evildoers.  Here is Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld.  "So our tradition is clear: Public rejoicing about the death of an enemy is entirely inappropriate."  Here is a delightfully equivocal statement by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman.

Interestingly, Dennis Prager is still pounding on this theme.  About twenty minutes ago I heard him repeat his argument against me and others.  The argument could be put like this:

1. The Israelites rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, drowning them.  (Exodus 15)
2.  This rejoicing was  pleasing to God. 
Therefore
3.   To rejoice over the death of evildoers is morally permissible.

This argument is only as good as its second premise.  Two questions.  First, does the Bible depict God as being pleased at the rejoicing?  Not unequivocally.  Prager could argue from Ex 15: 22-25 that God was indeed pleased because he showed Moses a tree with which he rendered the bitter waters of Marah sweet and potable.  The Israelites were mighty thirsty  after three days of traipsing around in the wilderness of Shur after emerging from the Red Sea.  Unfortunately, Prager provided no support for (2).

But more important is the second question. Why should we take the fact that God is depicted as being pleased at the rejoicing — if it is a fact — as evidence that God is pleased?  I grant that if God is pleased at some behavior then that behavior is morally acceptable.  But the fact that God is depicted as being pleased does not entail that God is pleased.

And so, as a philosopher, I cannot credit the (1)-(3) argument.  It assumes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.  But this is not to be assumed; this is to be tested.  The Bible has to satisfy reason's criteria before it can be accepted as true. If the Bible violates the deliverances of practical reason (as it quite clearly does in the Abraham and Isaac story, see my Kant on Abraham and Isaac)  then it cannot be accepted in those passages in which the violation occurs as the word of God.

We who have one foot in Athens and the other in Jerusalem face the problem of how we can avoid being torn asunder.  On the one hand, philosophy can bring us to the realization  that we need revelation; on the other hand, nothing can count as genuine revelation unless it passes muster by reason's own theoretical and practical lights.  This is not to demand that the content of revelation be derivable from reason; it is to demand that nothing that purports to be revelation can be credited as genuine revelation if it violates the clearest principles of theoretical and practical reason, for example, the Law of Non-Contradiction and the principles that one may not kill the innocent or rejoice over another man's evil fate.

The problem is to reconcile divine authority  with human reason and autonomy.  Two nonsolutions may be immediately dismissed:  fideism which denigrates reason, and rationalism which denigrates faith.

Maverick Philosopher 7th Blogiversary

I began this weblog seven years ago today in 2004.  My seventh year ended well yesterday with 1717 pageviews for the day and with Dennis Prager reading from one of my posts on his nationally syndicated radio show.   

Some say that blogging is dead.  Read or unread, whether by sages or fools, I shall blog on.  A post beats a twit tweet any day, and no day without a post.  Nulla dies sine linea.   It is too early to say of blogging what Etienne Gilson said of philosophy, namely, that it always buries its undertakers, but I am hopeful.  After all, a weblog is just an online journal, and journal scribbling has flourished most interestingly for centuries. 

To put it romantically, blogging is a vehicle for the relentless quotidian sifting, seeking, and questing for sense and truth and reality without which some of us would find life meaningless.

This, the fourth version of Maverick Philosopher, was begun on 31 October 2008.  I thank you for your patronage.

The Reference Relation: Internal or External?

What is (linguistic) reference?  Is it a relation?  Edward the Ockhamist assumes that it is and issues the following request:  "To clarify, could I ask both you and Bill whether you think the reference relation is ‘internal’ or ‘external’?"

Here is an inconsistent tetrad:

1. 'Frodo' refers to Frodo
2. 'Frodo' exists while Frodo does not. 
3. Reference is a relation.
4. Relations are existence-symmetrical:  the terms (relata) of a relation are such that either all exist or none exist. 

Since the members of this quartet cannot all be true, which one will Edward reject?  Given what he has said already, he must reject (4).  But (4) is exceedingly plausible, more plausible by my lights than (1).  I myself would reject (1) by maintaining that there is no linguistic reference to the nonexistent.  It is not there to be referred to!

For me, reference is a relation. Is it internal or external?  Being the same color as is an example of an internal relation.  If a and b are both red, then that logically suffices for a and b to stand in the same color as relation.  Suppose I paint ball a red and then paint ball b (the same shade of) red;  I don't have to do anything else to bring them into the aforementioned relation.  You could say that an internal relation supervenes upon the intrinsic properties of its relata. 

But to bring the two balls into the relation of being two feet from each other, I will most likely have to do more than alter their intrinsic properties.  So being two feet from is an external relation.  If the balls fall out of that relation they needn't change in any intrinsic respect.  But if the balls cease to stand in the same color as relation, then they must alter in some intrinsic respect.

In sum, internal relations supervene on the intrinsic properties of their relata while external relations do not.

Suppose 'Max' is the name of my cat.  Then 'Max' as I use it has a definite meaning.  The sound I make when I say 'Max' and the cat are both physical items.  Surely they do not stand in a semantic relation.  No physical item by itself means anything.  So the semantic relation must connect a meaningful word (a physical item such as a sound or marks on paper 'animated' by a meaning) with the physical referent, the cat in our example.  Suppose the meaning (sense, connotation) of 'Max' is given by a definite description: the only black male feline that enjoys linguine in clam sauce.  Then the relation between the meaningful word 'Max' and the cat will be external since that meaning (sense, connotation) is what it is whether or not the cat exists.

If, on the other hand, the meaning of 'Max' = Max, then the semantic relation of reference is internal.  For then the relation is identity, and identity is an internal relation.

So it seems that whether reference is external or internal depends on whether reference is routed through sense or is direct. I incline toward the view that reference, since routed through sense, is an external relation. 

Geach on Proper Names: Mental Acts Chapter 16

Peter Geach, Mental  Acts, Chapter 16 (RKP, 1957) is eminently relevant to present concerns and quite sensible. Herewith, an interpretive summary. Per usual, I take the ball and run with it.

Geach rejects the Russellian view that ordinary proper names are definite descriptions in disguise, but he also rejects the notion that proper names have no connotation at all. As for the disguised   description view, it is "palpably false" since " . . . when I refer to a person by a proper name, I need not either think of him explicitly in a form expressible by a definite description, or even be prepared  to supply such a description on demand. . ." (pp. 66-67)

This seems correct. Thomas Aquinas once came up in a conversation I had with my unlettered brother-in-law. The latter said something like, "Aquinas was a big name in Catholic theology." My brother-in-law was undoubtedly referring to the same person I was referring to even though he would not have been able to supply even one definite description. Recall that to be definite a description must be of the form, the unique x such that [insert description]. 'A big name in Catholic theology' is an indefinite description.

Geach also provides an interesting critique of Quine's "intransigent" extension of the Russellian line whereby names are transformed into predicates. Thus for Quine 'Pegasus is winged' goes over into   something like 'There is exactly one x such x pegasizes, and x is winged.' Perhaps we will discuss Geach's Quine critique in a separate post.

Geach also rejects the view that ordinary proper names — which, nota bene, are to be distinguished from logically proper names — are devoid of connotation. On this view, "no attributes logically follow from a thing's being given a proper name." (67) Proper names are bestowed by fiat, whence it follows that there is no right or wrong  about the application of a name: there is no property possession of which by a thing is a necessary condition of the name's being attached to it. It is different in the case of a general term. If 'fat' is true of Al, it follows that there is a property in virtue of whose possession by Al the term is correctly applied to him. By contrast, on the view under consideration, we cannot speak of a name being true of its nominatum, or not true of it.

As I said, Geach rejects this theory of names according to which the meaning of a name is exhausted by its reference.  In the typical case, the same name applies to a person throughout his life from infancy to dotage. Geach takes this to imply that "the baby, the youth, the adult, are one and the same man." (69) They are not the same absolutely, or the same thing, but the same man. Here Geach sounds his theme of the sortal-relativity of identity. One cannot say sensibly of two things that they are the same absolutely; what one can say is that they are the same relative to some sortal under which both fall. If  so,

     . . . my application of the proper name is justified only if (e.g.)
     its meaning includes its being applicable to a man and I keep on
     applying it to one and the same man. On this account of proper
     names, there can be a right and wrong about the use of proper
     names. (69)

This jives with what I was saying earlier about 'God.' The notion that 'God' could denote anything at all, whether a sense of fear, a bolt of lightning, or what have you, strikes me as absurd. But that is the consequence one must swallow if one thinks of names as mere external tags devoid of sense. Geach now considers an objection:

     It has often been argued that it cannot be part of the meaning of a
     proper name that its bearer should be a man, because we cannot tell
     this by hearing the name, and because there is nothing to stop us
     from giving the same name to a dog or a mountain. You might as well
     argue that it cannot be part of the meaning of 'beetle' that what
     it is applied to must be an insect, because we cannot learn this
     meaning just from the sound of the words, and because 'beetle' is
     also used for a sort of mallet. In a given context, the sense of
     'beetle' does include: being an insect, and the sense of
     'Churchill' does include: being a man. (70)

What Geach is saying here contradicts what our friend Edward maintains, namely, that ordinary proper names are tags whose meaning is exhausted by their reference.  Suppose a one-eared rabbit wanders into my yard  and I give it the name 'Gulky.'  Just before the moment of baptism, the arbitrary sound 'Gulky' has no meaning at all.  At the moment of baptism, it acquires a meaning which is its referent.  Now suppose the rabbit wanders off and a coyote comes into the yard and I  say, 'There's Gulky again.'   You say,'That's not Gulky, Gulky's a rabbit!'  The point here is that once 'Gulky' is introduced as a name for a particular rabbit, it acquires not only a referent but also the connotation rabbit-name, a connotation that prevents me from applying that name to anything other than a rabbit.

And then one day the coyote kills Gulky. Does 'Gulky' cease to be a rabbit-name and go back to being a meaningless sound? 

As Geach says, there can be a right and wrong about the use of a proper name.  Having introduced 'Gulky' as the name of a rabbit, I misuse that name if I apply it to a coyote.  But if proper names are tags whose meaning is exhausted by their reference, then this would not be a misuse at all.  Ergo, etc.

 My point is that this is a non sequitur:

1. Reference of proper names is direct, i.e., not routed through sense.
Therefore
2. The meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its reference.  
 

More Mail on Prager, Osama, Judaism, and Pacifism

Hi Bill,

I was a bit surprised to read that in response to your post about tempering
one's joy at Osama's demise, "Prager pointed out that the Jews rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, and that this rejoicing was  pleasing to God."

First, I was surprised because a quick look at Exodus 15 does not say that the Israelites' rejoicing was pleasing to God. Maybe this was "lost in translation," but I very much doubt that, since the Bible is the most carefully translated book in the world.

You are right: Exodus 15 does not explicitly say that the Israelites' rejoicing was pleasing to God.  But one can infer from verse 25 that God was pleased, or at least not displeased, since God shows Moses a tree with which he sweetens and makes potable the bitter waters of Marah after they make it through the Red (Reed?) Sea and are mighty thirsty (Ex 15: 23-25). I should add that "this rejoicing was pleasing to God" was Dennis Prager's addition, as I understood him.

Second, I was surprised because I imagine that Prager was at some point exposed to a Talmudic story which is often recounted at the Passover Seder. A version that I was able to locate fairly quickly on the Web follows. As evil as Pharoah and the Egyptians were, when it came to their destruction at the hands of God through the plagues (particularly the death of the first born)and at the Sea of Reeds, the rabbis went to great lengths to temper our joy. A famous midrash in the Talmud makes the point:

When the Egyptians were drowning in the Sea of Reeds, the ministering angels began to sing God's praises. But God silenced them, saying: How can you sing while my children perish? We may rejoice in our liberation but we may not celebrate the death of our foes. To underscore the point, and re-enforce the value, the rabbis instructed that ten drops of wine be spilled from our cups [at the seder] diminishing the joy of our celebration, as a reminder of those who peished in the course of our liberation. It is said that this is also the reason why a portion of the Hallel (the great songs of praise) is omitted on the last six days of Passover.

By the way, I would like to question your agreement with Prager that pacifism is "immoral." Is it really immoral, or just not morally obligatory? Or perhaps it should be approached as part of an aspirational ethics. While I'm not a pacifist, I think it's something to which I ought to aspire. Perhaps one is less guilty for aspiring to, but not realizing pacifism, than for not aspiring to pacifism at all.

We agree that being a pacifist is not morally obligatory.  So the question is whether it is morally permissible.  The answer will depend on what exactly we mean by 'pacifism.'  Suppose we mean by it the doctrine that there are no actual or possible circumstances in which the intentional taking of human life is morally justified.  Someone who holds this presumably does so because he thinks that human life as such has absolute value.  Now if that is what we mean by pacifism, then I think it is morally impermissible to be a pacifist. Here is an argument off the top of my head:

1. We ought to (it is morally obligatory that we) work for peace and justice and oppose violence and killing.  "Blessed are the peacemakers."
2. It is sometimes necessary to kill human beings in order to maximize peace and justice  and minimize violence and killing. 
3. To will the end is to will the means.
Therefore
4. It is morally obligatory that we sometimes kill human beings to minimize violence and killing.
Therefore
5. It is morally impermissible that we never kill human beings to minimize violence and killing.

(1) is a deliverance of sound moral sense.  The NT verse is a mere ornament.  It is not the justification for (1).  Examples of (2) are plentiful.  (3) is an unexceptionable Kantian principle.  (4) follows from the first three premises.  (5) follows from (4).
  
Should we aspire to be pacifists?  In some senses of that term, sure. But not in the sense I defined.  It's a large topic.
Faithfully,
Bob Koepp

From the Mail: Christianity and Judaism

Dear Mr. Vallicella,
 
I want to begin by thanking you yet again for your fantastic blog. Your recent posts on Osama Bin Laden, the correct response to his death, and on evidentialism have been absolutely superb. I have linked to a great many of your posts in recent days on my facebook and I sing your praises regularly.
 
Thank you so much; that explains the uptick in social media traffic.
 
I wanted to bring up a couple of issues on your recent commentary on Prager's reaction to Bin Laden's death, and particularly your comments on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.
 
It is important to remember that Judaism as it is practiced today is NOT the way it has always been practiced. And first century Judaism in particular was very diverse indeed. One of the biggest challenges for Biblical interpreters has been archeological evidence that counters the view of Judaism presented in the Gospels and in Paul's letters as they are normally interpreted. Judaism was far more varied and diverse than what we once believed, at the time of Jesus and Paul. Many issues we think of as settled in Judaism were up for grabs, and arguments about and around them were common. One was the issue of intention verses action.
 
There are many similarities between Jesus' focus on the inner self and some parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. So thoughts could be sinful or righteous, in some sectors of 1st Century Judaism, at least. Christianity is the triumph of those sectors of Judaism, and not a new religious idea 'superseding' Judaism. I'm just not sure your characterization of Christianity 'superseding' Judaism is correct on the issue you and Peter were arguing about. I certainly do think Christianity and Judaism are possessed of important differences and Christianity gets some things right that Judaism gets wrong. But in the case of whether thoughts can be sinful, I think it is more accurate to say that Christianity is the triumph of a certain sector of Judaism.
 
That's an excellent objection, and you may be right.  So it is not that Christianity supersedes the whole of Judaism on the issue Peter and I were discussing, but that Christianity develops and champions a strand of thought that is already present in Judaism.  Now that I think of it, that is more plausible than what I was suggesting.
 
My main concern, though, was to figure out why Peter and I disagree about the moral evaluability of mere thoughts, and why Prager and I disagree about the moral appropriateness of rejoicing over a man's violent death — even when the man in question is a mass murderer who was justly executed.
 
In light of this concern, I think there is some justification in viewing Judaism as a block and contrasting Christianity with it.
 
I think a criticism that can be leveled at Prager could be that there is a bit of literalism in his view. His proof-texting approach just doesn't make much sense to me, at least in this case. Most Biblical scholars believe, for instance, that the story of the crossing of "The Red Sea" (which is probably not the right translation for the name of the body of water), is several older stories edited together. When those stories are distentangled, some versions don't even include the death of Pharaoh's men. There are a lot of sentiments expressed in the Old Testament that I doubt Rabbis would readily suggest we can rightly hold.
 
So these are just some thoughts that shot through my head when I read that post, which like so much of what you write, really got the juices flowing.
 
Peace and Blessings
Joshua Orsak

Waterboarding Led to Bin Laden Capture

One question about waterboarding is whether it is torture.  Liberals, who are generally sloppy and inflationary in their use of language, say it is.  These are the same people who think that ID checks at polling places 'disenfranchise' those without identification. (See this contemptibly idiotic NYT editorial.)  But on any responsible use of terms, waterboarding cannot be called torture.  (If that is what you call it, what do you call a Saddam-style red-hot poker 'colonoscopy'?) 

Waterboarding led to the Bin Laden capture as Peter King (R-NY) revealed last night on the O' Reilly Factor. 

Suppose we acquiesce for a moment in the liberal-left misuse of 'torture' whereby it subsumes waterboarding.  Even under this concession, could anyone in his right mind think that it is always and everywhere wrong to use torture?  That is the kind of extremism that characterizes liberals and libertarians.  They cannot seem to realize that otherwise excellent principles often admit of exceptions.

Free speech is another example

 

On Joy at Osama’s Demise: Dennis Prager Responds to Me on the Air

It's been an interesting morning.  At 10:30 AM I noticed that my traffic was way up for the day.  And then at 11:12 AM I heard Dennis Prager reading on the air the first paragraph of a post of mine from yesterday in which I express my disappointment at Prager for rejoicing over Osama bin Laden's death when the appropriate response, as it seems to me, is to be glad that the al-Qaeda head is out of commission, but without gleeful expressions of pleasure.  That's Schadenfreude and to my mind morally dubious.

(Even more strange is that before Prager read from my blog, I had a precognitive sense that he was going to do so.)

In his response, Prager pointed out that the Jews rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, and that this rejoicing was  pleasing to God.  (See Exodus 15)  Apparently that settled the matter for Prager.

And then it dawned on me.  Prager was brought up a Jew, I was brought up a Christian.  I had a similar problem with my Jewish friend Peter Lupu.  In a carefully crafted post, Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong?, I argued for a thesis that  I consider well-nigh self-evident and not in need of argument, namely, that some mere thoughts are morally objectionable.  The exact sense of this thesis is explained and qualified in the post.  But to my amazement, I couldn't get Peter to accept it despite my four arguments.  And he still doesn't accept it.

Later on, it was Prager who got me to see what was going on in my discussion with Peter.  He said something about how, in Judaism, it is the action that counts, not the thought or intention.  Aha!  But now a certain skepticism rears its head:  is Peter trapped in his childhood training, and me in mine?  Are our arguments nothing but ex post facto rationalizations of what we believe, not for good reasons, but on the basis of inculcation?  (The etymology of 'inculcation' is telling: the beliefs that were inculcated in us were stamped into us as if by a heel, L. calx, when we were impressionable youths.)

The text that so impressed me as a boy and impresses me even more now is Matt. 5: 27-28:  "You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. [Ex. 20:14, Deut. 5:18]  But I say to you that anyone who so much as looks with lust at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

Not that I think that Prager or Peter are right.  No, I think I'm right.  I think  Christianity is morally superior to Judaism: it supersedes Judaism, preserving what is good in it while correcting what is bad.  Christianity goes to the heart of the matter.  Our hearts are foul, which is why our words and deeds are foul.  Of course I have a right to my opinion and I can back it with arguments.  And you would have to be a  liberal of the worst sort to think that there is anything 'hateful' in what I just wrote about Christianity being morally superior to Judaism.

But still there is the specter of skepticism which is not easy to lay.  I think we just have to admit that reason is weak and that the moral and other intuitions from which we reason are frail reeds indeed.  This should make us tolerant of differences.

But toleration has limits.  We cannot tolerate the fanatically intolerant.  So, while not rejoicing over any man's death or presuming to know — what chutzpah! –  where any man stands in the judgment of God, I am glad that Osama has been removed from our midst.