Month: March 2018

Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies: Render unto Caesar . . .

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's . . .

Have you stateside readers settled accounts with the Infernal Revenue Service?  If yes, order up one scotch, one bourbon, and one beer and enjoy this live version of Taxman  featuring Harrison and Clapton.  Stevie Ray Vaughan's blistering version. 

. . . and render unto God the things that are God's.

Herewith, five definite decouplings of rock and roll from sex and drugs.

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he has something to say.

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass. Harrison was the Beatle with depth.  Lennon was the radical, McCartney the romantic, and Ringo the regular guy.

Good YouTuber comment: "Immortal song, even if all things must pass . . . " 

Easter Sunday happens to coincide with April Fool's Day this year. 

So for your further auditory amusement here are some tunes in celebration or bemoanment of human folly the chief instance of which is romantic love.  Who has never been played for a fool by a charming member of the opposite sex?  Old age is the sovereign cure for romantic folly and I sincerely recommend it to the young and foolish.  Take care to get there.

Elvis Presley, A Fool Such as I

Ricky Nelson, Poor Little Fool.  Those "carefree devil eyes" will do it every time.  

Brenda Lee, Fool #1

The Shirelles, Foolish Little Girl

Ricky Nelson, Fools Rush In.  "Fools rush in/Where wise men never go/But wise men never fall in love/So how are they to know?" 

Sam Cooke, Fool's Paradise. Sage advice.  

Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Fool 

Incarnation, Resurrection, and Rational Acceptability

A while back I was talking with my young theological friend Steven about Christianity. I had remarked that its essence lies in the Incarnation. Without disagreeing with me, he offered the bodily resurrection of Christ as the essential pivot on which Christian belief and practice turns. This raises a number of questions. One is this: Can, or rather may, a scientifically-trained mind accept the literal truth of Christ's bodily resurrection?  I don't think that there is an insurmountable problem here. But there may be an insurmountable problem when it comes to accepting the literal truth of the Incarnation. This entry, then, falls into two parts. 

A. The Rational Acceptability of Christ's Resurrection

Ian Hutchinson, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, writes:

We really believe in the bodily resurrection of the first century Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth. My Christian colleagues at MIT – and millions of other scientists worldwide – somehow think that a literal miracle like the resurrection of Jesus is possible. And we are following a long tradition. The founders of the scientific revolution and many of the greatest scientists of the intervening centuries were serious Christian believers. For Robert Boyle (of the ideal gas law, co-founder in 1660 of the Royal Society) the resurrection was a fact. For James Clerk Maxwell (whose Maxwell equations of 1862 govern electromagnetism) a deep philosophical analysis undergirded his belief in the resurrection. And for William Phillips (Nobel prize-winner in 1997 for methods to trap atoms with laser light) the resurrection is not discredited by science.

To explain how a scientist can be a Christian is actually quite simple. Science cannot and does not disprove the resurrection. Natural science describes the normal reproducible working of the world of nature. Indeed, the key meaning of “nature”, as Boyle emphasized, is “the normal course of events.” Miracles like the resurrection are inherently abnormal. It does not take modern science to tell us that humans don’t rise from the dead. People knew that perfectly well in the first century; just as they knew that the blind from birth don’t as adults regain their sight, or water doesn’t instantly turn into wine.

Maybe science has made the world seem more comprehensible – although in some respects it seems more wonderful and mysterious. Maybe superstition was more widespread in the first century than it is today – although the dreams of today’s sports fans and the widespread interest in the astrology pages sometimes make me wonder. Maybe people were more open then to the possibility of miracles than we are today. Still, the fact that the resurrection was impossible in the normal course of events was as obvious in the first century as it is for us. Indeed that is why it was seen as a great demonstration of God’s power.

To be sure, while science can’t logically rule miracles in or out of consideration, it can be a helpful tool for investigating contemporary miraculous claims. It may be able to reveal self-deception, trickery, or misperception. If someone has been seen levitating on a supposed flying carpet in their living room, then the discovery of powerful electromagnets in their basement might well render such claims implausible. But if science fails to find defeating evidence then it is unable to say one way or the other whether some reported inexplicable event happened, or to prove that it is miraculous. Science functions by reproducible experiments and observations. Miracles are, by definition, abnormal and non-reproducible, so they cannot be proved by science’s methods.

Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws of nature are “inviolable” is not necessary for science to function. Science offers natural explanations of natural events. It has no power or need to assert that only natural events happen.

So if science is not able to adjudicate whether Jesus’ resurrection happened or not, are we completely unable to assess the plausibility of the claim? No. Contrary to increasingly popular opinion, science is not our only means for accessing truth. In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, we must consider the historical evidence, and the historical evidence for the resurrection is as good as for almost any event of ancient history. The extraordinary character of the event, and its significance, provide a unique context, and ancient history is necessarily hard to establish. But a bare presumption that science has shown the resurrection to be impossible is an intellectual cop-out. Science shows no such thing.

I agree with Hutchinson.

B. The Rational Acceptability of the Incarnation?

Please note that if a man was raised from the dead by the power of God, it does not follow that the man so raised was God. So if Jesus was raised bodily by the power of God it does not follow that Jesus was or is God. The orthodox Christian narrative, however, requires the doctrine of the Incarnation codified at Chalcedon according to which God, or rather the Second Person of the Trinity, became fully human, body and soul, in Jesus of Nazareth while remaining fully divine.  Given the identity of the Second Person and the man Jesus, if a man was raised bodily from the dead by the power of God, and this man is God, then God raises himself.

This doctrine violates our ordinary canons of reasoning. It is, to put it bluntly, absurd in the logical sense of the term: logically contradictory. (Tertullian, Kierkegaard, and Shestov would agree.) Or so it seems to me and Dale Tuggy and many others. But others, equally sharp and serious and committed to the truth, think that if one makes the right distinctions the Incarnation doctrine can be shown not to be in violation of the ordinary canons. I think their fancy footwork avails nothing. Tuggy thinks the same.

Well, suppose Tuggy and I are right.  Then it seems there are two ways to go, the Tuggy way and the way of mystery.  Tuggy, if I undertand him, rejects the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus. Standing firm within what I call the Discursive Framework he argues cogently that the doctrines in question are logically impossible. 

But there is this 'possibility.' There are true propositions that appear to our intellects as either logically self-contradictory or as issuing by valid inferences in logical contradictions.  They are not contradictory in themselves, but they must appear contradictory to our fallen intellects here below.  It is not just that these propositions are true, but we cannot understand how they could be true; it is that they seem to us as evidently not true.  And yet they are true, and contradiction-free in themselves.

A similar sort of 'possibility' is invoked by materialist mysterians. If a non-eliminativist materialist tells me that a sensory quale is real but identical to a brain  state I will say that that is logically impossible since the two items differ property-wise.  (These items are in the same logical boat with the man Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity: they cannot be numerically identical since they differ property-wise.) The materialist might just insist: quale and brain state are identical — it is just that we don't know enough about matter to understand how the identity could hold despite the discernibility. It's a mystery!

Are mysterian moves kosher ploys for showing rational acceptability?  

I don't know. But I do know it is Saturday Night, time for a drink, and my oldies show.

On Being Prudent in a Post-Consensus, No-Trust Society

The young especially need to be very careful about what they say and to whom they say it.  The U. S. is becoming the S. U. To be on the safe side, never associate with leftists. (This is good advice even for leftists since they are famous for turning on their own for the 'sin' of not being sufficiently left.) Practice the political equivalent of divorce to the extent that it is possible. If you must associate with leftists, limit your contact with them and keep your mouth shut. Rod Dreher has some advice for you:

I told the professor that I try never to talk about anything controversial in personal company unless I’m sure that everyone around me already agrees with me. It’s not simply that I don’t want to get into it with a screaming SJW who wants to have it out with me at a cocktail party because I don’t share her view of some political issue. That’s part of it, but I am a public figure, and say lots of controversial things in this space. I try to leave work here on the blog, and not take it into private life. With me, it’s more the case that I don’t want to say something controversial that I wouldn’t say on the blog, and have someone overhear it, send it out on social media, and ruin me.

I can’t think offhand what kind of remark that might be, but these days, who knows? The word the professor in last night’s conversation used was completely ordinary, and not used by him in a racial context. But in our emotivist world, the student felt that it was racist, so the professor had to face something he never should have had to face.

So now you have a professor who has to see students as potential destroyers of his career on spurious grounds. You have to go to cocktail parties and social gatherings being very conscious of what you say and don’t say, because some angry person might put it on social media. Everybody is potentially working for the secret police.

I’m not being as hyperbolic with that remark as you think. When I was in Hungary recently, my friend A. told me that her country still hadn’t recovered the social capital plundered by the communists. That is, Hungarians — like everyone living under communism — had to learn not to trust anybody. You truly didn’t know who was a secret police information. An ill-considered word could cost you your job. A thoughtless joke overheard by the wrong set of ears could land you in prison. We don’t have a totalitarian state here, but we are creating that kind of society.

"But aren't you big on civil courage?"

I am; but I cannot in good conscience urge it on the young and naive. It is easy for me to display a modicum of civil courage: I've made mine. But if you are trying to find a foothold, and especially if you have dependents, be careful. Once you establish yourself you will be a position to punch back effectively.

Now, as Rod would say, read the whole thing.

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On the Folly of the Vatican II ‘Reforms’

There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view.

Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate  human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction  kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order.  Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents.  Suppose all that.

Still, religion would have  its immanent life-enhancing  role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning.  Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering.  Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides, or rather provided, is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent all expressed in the richness of its traditional Latin liturgy. 

Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk.  Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'  And then there was the refusal to teach hard-core doctrine and the lessening of requirements, one example being the no-meat-on-Friday rule.  Why re-name confession 'reconciliation?  What is the point of such a stupid change?  

A religion that makes no demands fails to provide the structure that people, especially the young, want and need.  Have you ever wondered what makes Islam is so attractive to young people? (One prominent example is John 'Jihad Johnny' Walker Lindh who was baptized Catholic.)

In its zeal to become 'relevant,' the Roman church succeeded only in making itself irrelevant.  Its cultural relevance is now practically nil. Is any Catholic today dissuaded from contraception or abortion or divorce by Catholic teaching? Do priests have the authority that they still had in the '50s and early '60s? Are any of them now taken seriously as they once were?  And who can take seriously an ancient church that allows its teaching to be tampered with by a leftist jackass such as Bergoglio?

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians out to submerge the Transcendent in the secular.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  

The church should be a liberal-free zone.

To Hell with Bergoglio

My title, not Buchanan's.

I'll have to check, but I don't believe that Canon Law allows for the ecclesiastical equivalent of impeachment and removal from office for popes. Perhaps it ought to.

Jesus-luciferAs for hell, here is an amateur theological consideration. Suppose a rebellious nature such as Bertrand Russell or Jean-Paul Sartre or Christopher Hitchens finds himself in the divine presence and yet continues to refuse to acknowledge reality, which includes the rebel's creature status.  Hitch, or whoever, continues to assert himself madly with Luciferian pride and egomania against the Source of all being, truth, intelligibility, personhood, and value, making of himself an absolute when there can be only one Absolute.

How could such a rebel be admitted into divine fellowship, or even into a purgatorial condition preparatory to divine fellowship? No God worth his salt could allow such a thing.

There has to be hell for rebels who freely choose it.  Allowance must be made for the rebels and their shouting of the eternal No!

 

Trump, Adultery, Morality, and the Alinskyite Left

There is no wisdom on the Left and no common sense. Dennis Prager is a prominent purveyor of common sense.  So if you don't know what it is you can learn it from him.  Here is a sample:

It should be clear that this whole preoccupation with Trump’s past sex life has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with humiliating Trump — and, thereby, hopefully weakening the Trump presidency — the raison d'etre of the media since he was elected. Here’s one proof: The media rightly celebrate, as we all do, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as one of the moral greats of the 20th century despite reports of his having committed adultery on numerous occasions. [I would add that he also plagiarized portions of his Boston University dissertation.]

Likewise, the media and the Left idolized Sen. Ted Kennedy, regularly referring to him as the “Lion of the Senate.” Yet Kennedy was notorious for his lechery — far more so than Trump. Typical Ted Kennedy behavior, as described in New York magazine, was when he and then-fellow Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd “participated in the famous ‘waitress sandwich’ at La Brasserie in 1985, while their dates were in the bathroom.”

John F. Kennedy remains the most revered of Democratic presidents in the modern era. Yet we now know he routinely had affairs in the White House in his wife’s absence and had the Secret Service provide him advance notice of her return.

And, by the way, if sexual infidelity invalidates the character and, therefore, the worthiness of a politician, why doesn’t it invalidate the character and worthiness of an editor at The New York Times or The Washington Post? Why aren’t their sex lives investigated? They have, after all, more influence than almost any politician.

A Double Standard or an Alinskyite Tactic?

One mistake I have corrected in my own political thinking — thanks in part to Malcolm Pollack and 'Jacques' — is the tendency to confuse the double standard with a hard-Left Alinskyite tactic the name of which, if it has one, I don't know.

Suppose you and I are politically opposed but agree on certain values or standards. We are, for example, both strongly committed to free speech and open inquiry.  But your behavior suggests a tacit commitment to "Free speech for me but not for thee." This is an example of a double standard. The moniker is infelicitous in that there are not two standards but one; what makes the  standard 'double' is that it is inconsistently applied.  While sincerely professing a commitment to free speech you tend to take it more seriously in your own case and less seriously in the cases of those with opposing views. You really do accept the value of free speech; it is just that you have a hard time in the heat of conflict applying it fairly and consistently to all parties.

But there is something far worse than the double standard.

The most vicious and mendacious type of leftist will feign an interest in our conservative standards and then use them against us.  In many cases  they don't even feign the interest. 

The sex business referenced above is a good example. Leftists do not value chastity, sexual purity, traditional marriage (as opposed to same-sex 'marriage'), marital fidelity.  Talk of lust as a deadly sin is a joke to them. They have a pronounced libertine wobble and are entirely too 'sophisticated' for the above. They celebrate 'alternative sexual lifestyles.'  Bestiality is not a grave sin but something to joke about (Al Franken). 

Since they do not share our standards when it comes to sexual behavior, it is a mistake to accuse them of a double standard when they pillory Trump while giving Teddy a pass.  The truth is, they see politics as war and will do anything to win including using our standards against us while mocking those very standards.

The same with free speech. The Alinskyite hard Left doesn't give a damn about free speech except insofar as they can use it it to destroy free speech. These tactics are at least as old as V. I. Lenin, and people need to be aware of them.

Our political opponents on the Left are not fellow citizens but domestic enemies and the sooner we admit this fact the better.

As for Teddy Boy's waitress sandwich, you can read about it here. 

Friendships Superficially Satisfying

I had known him for years. Our friendship was an acquaintanceship that remained on the surface. Never having gone deep, it never drifted toward the hazards the deep waters hide: the differences that most truly define and distinguish us, but also oppose us to others. And so when he died I could not bring to mind a false word, a sarcastic expression, a competitive tension, or a joke that hid a jab. Not one unpleasant memory sullied my recollection.

Such superficial friendships are perhaps perfect for an imperfect world in which there is more of seeming than of being. We do well to value the surfaces in a world of surfaces.  The surfaces are sure; the depths are dubious. On life's surface those who meant little but brighten memory count for more than those who meant more but haunt and disturb from a past their presence makes dark.

In Defense of ‘Gunsplaining’

He's a Never-Trumper, but David French does talk and write a good game.  

By the way, don't confuse a Never-Trumper with an Anti-Trumper. The former constitute a proper subset of the latter. A Never-Trumper is a self-professed  conservative of some stripe or other whereas an Anti-Trumper may or may not be. Every Never-Trumper is an Anti-Trumper, but not conversely.

Terminology matters, in politics as in the gun debate.

One reason gun-grabbing 'liberals' are despicable is that they refuse to invest a couple of hours in learning the terms of the debate.  French gives examples.