Month: October 2023

Israel’s Draconian Gun Laws

This surprised me.

Why would Jews, who are smart, be so stupid about firearms? The Jews in Israel are surrounded by people who do not hide the fact that they intend to exterminate them and who believe that they are required to do so by their benighted religion. How could anyone fail to grasp that the right to life, which is an individual, not a group, right entails the individual's right to self-defense and therewith the right to acquire appropriate means thereto?  How could anyone fail to grasp that no government could possibly protect every citizen needing protection from lethal threats, especially the citizens of a state beleaguered by ruthless enemies on all sides?  Read on for some insight into the roots of this madness.

Continue reading “Israel’s Draconian Gun Laws”

LiChess: A Free Chess Site to Rival the ICC

Chess is a beautiful thing, a gift of the gods, an oasis of sanity in an insane world. Thanks to Traitor Joe and the chucklephuckery of his supporters, we are teetering on the brink of WW3. It is an exciting time to be alive in part because it may prove to be an exiting time. If you need a break from the madness, Caissa's arms beckon.

I've been patzin' around at LiChess the last few days under the handle, SeldomSeenSlim. My preferred time control is three-minute blitz with a two-second increment. That way, I do not take too much time from my other, my main mistress, fair Philosophia.

Boethius and Philosophia

Three Notes on David Mamet

Top o' the Stack.

The third note sends the reader to How the Democrats betrayed the Jews. Mamet is right about the Dems. He also rightly notes that Christianity bears some responsibility for anti-semitism:

It began with the fall of the Jewish state in 77 CE. Afterwards, we find the Christian libel that the Jews killed Christ, the medieval information that we slay Christian children to bake their blood into matzoh, that we were the cause of the Second World War; and, currently, that we exist to murder Moslems.

It’s all one horrific attack, and its earliest recorded instance is John 8:44 (of the Jews): “You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the Beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

John 8:44 is quite a passage. You should crack open your New Testament and read it in context.

Martin Luther's role in the spread of anti-semitism cannot be gainsaid. I am currently reading Heiko A. Oberman's surpassingly excellent Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Yale UP, 2006) wherein we read, on p. 294:

Three days before his death Luther added an "Admonition against the Jews" to his last sermon, held in Eisleben on February 15, 1546. It clearly illustrates the change Luther had undergone in old age. There had been no transformation of friendship into enmity; only the measures proposed for an effective policy of improvement and and conversion had changed: "The Jews are our public enemies; they do not cease to defame Christ our Lord, to call the Virgin Mary a whore and Christ a bastard, and if they could kill us all, they would gladly do so. And they often do." Nevertheless, "we want to practice Christian love toward them and pray that they convert." 

Luther's anti-semitism was softened by Christian charity; not so the Palestinian Authority's.

PA: All mosques must teach that extermination of Jews is an Islamic imperative.

Don’t Vote for ANY Democrat

That may sound extreme, but it is not extreme at all.

The Dems vote as a bloc. They are under party discipline. They are made to toe the party line and punished if they don't. To understand the contemporary Democrat party you need to study communism.  Frank S. Meyer's The Moulding of Communists is one of the best works with which to begin your education. 

The CPUSA couldn't win under the banner of the Hammer and Sickle, but they are winning under the sign of the Jackass. So don't be a jackass. Don't vote for any Dem at any level, federal, state, local.

Vote the party, not the person. 

Young Man’s Bible, Old Man’s Bible

HitchhikerWhen he was a young man he travelled around the country with On the Road, the 'Bible of the Beat Generation,' in his rucksack, just as Kerouac had with Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible in his. Now the young man is old. Now when he travels he carries a different light paperback, the plain old Bible.

 

And he says a prayer for the soul of a lonesome traveller who quit the via dolorosa on this date 54 years ago thereby securing his release from the samsaric meat wheel and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead. (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

The State of Things When the ‘Leader’ of the ‘Free World’ is a Puppet

I asked Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, whether Donald Trump's being in office would have made any difference to the present geopolitical mess, and this is what he wrote:

As for the present miserable state of the world, I think that had Trump remained in office neither the war in the Ukraine nor the war in the Middle East would have occurred, or if the former occurred, it would have been resolved on the basis of a territorial compromise concerning the Crimea and robust autonomy for the eastern, Russian majority oblasts.  Leaving aside the origins of the conflict (US interference in the internal politics of the Ukraine and the expansion of NATO eastward), Trump would have put Zelensky and company on tight rein. As for Israel, can we doubt that the appeasement of the Obama-Biden regime towards Iran encouraged the reemergence of terrorism? Now, the plan is to provide public support to Israel, while privately restraining her once again to conduct the war in a way that would deny the complete victory that she requires. With Trump, the war would have not occurred, and if it did, he would not have tied Israel’s hands.

As for the danger of WWIII, it appears to me that the Ukraine mess is a potential trigger for it.  There is no way that the Ukraine can defeat Russia, and I fear that a protracted conflict could lead to further American involvement and the real chance of a great power clash.

With regard to demons and such, I call your attention to what appeared on the Vatican Synod website this week (page 29): “What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, for all that exists.” Thus, the diabolical evil that first showed its face with the Pachamama desecration of St. Peter’s advances further in the Bergoglian Church.    

I agree in the main, but Caiati's final sentence prompts me to ask: Is Bergoglio proposing mercy for demons in which he believes? Or is the truly Bergoglian termiticism and diabolism due to his tacit denial of the reality of demons?

No doubt demons are creatures, but does Bergoglio and his fellow clerical termites believe in their existence? I don't know but I suspect he doesn't and they don't. How many Catholic priests today believe in the  preternatural? I suspect it is a minority.  The preternatural is the sphere within which demonic agents operate. It lies between the natural  and the supernatural.  See Ralph Weimann, Sacramentals: Their Meaning and Use, p. 196: "In the period after the Second Vatican Council, and under the influence of rationalism, it was increasingly considered 'unscientific' to speak about angels and even more unscientific to speak about demons."

At a time when the RCC should be standing as a bulwark against the anti-civilizational forces of Chinese Communism, Islamism, and  Leftism, it is transforming itself under the termitic influence of Bergoglio & Co. into just another pile of secular leftist junk. 

But how could anyone in this enlightened age believe in such medieval superstitions as the existence of demons?  Hasn't humanity finally put paid to this old nonsense?  Maybe not. Maybe there is no naturalistic explanation of the depth and depravity of human behavior. Perhaps an adequate explanation must posit the preternatural. See my Substack article, The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence wherein I write:

As a sort of inference to the best explanation we can say that moral evil in its extreme manifestations has a supernatural source. It cannot be explained adequately in naturalistic terms.  There is an Evil Principle (and Principal) the positing of which is reasonable. The undeniable reality of evil has  a metaphysical ground.  Call it Satan or whatever you like.

In that passage I am using 'supernatural' to cover both the supernatural proper and the preternatural. 'Preternatural' would have been the better, because more specific, word choice. But then I would have had to explain 'preternatural' which would have lengthened the piece. Brevity is the soul of Stack and not just of blog.

Now I would like you to take a gander at this Daily Mail article and rub your noses in recent Hamas-Islamist barbarity. Could the source of this evil be merely natural?

Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion

Substack latest.

One source of the appeal of ordinary language philosophy (OLP) is that it reinstates much of what was ruled out as cognitively meaningless by logical positivism (LP) but without rehabilitating the commitments of old-time metaphysics. In particular, OLP allows the reinstating of religious language. This post explains, with blogic brevity, how this works and what is wrong and what right with the resulting philosophy of religion. Since OLP can be understood only against the backdrop of LP, I begin with a brief review of LP.

Left and Right: Morally Equivalent?

Leftist evil-doers are becoming ever more brazen in 'outing' themselves. I hand off to Hinderaker:

My opinion of leftists is so low that I am hard to disappoint. But I admit to being shocked by the reaction of many leftists and liberals to the Gazan invasion of Israel. In many instances, they feel no obligation even to disavow the Gazans’ mass murder, gang rapes, kidnappings and beheadings of infants. They go straight to denouncing Israel for imagined crimes and, in some instances, attacking anticipated actions that Israel hasn’t even taken yet. People who are so twisted that they witness the Gazan atrocities and can only fault Israel are moral monsters. Many liberals have self-identified as such.

The case of Dr. Mika Tosca can stand for many others.

 

A Van Til Response to my Anti-Presuppositionalism

This is the third in a new series on presuppositionalism. The first installment is here, and the second here. 

I've been re-reading large chunks of Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, P & R Publishing, 2008. This fourth edition, edited by K. Scott Oliphint, includes the complete text of the original 1955 edition and useful footnote commentary by Oliphint.

You will recall my claim that with respect to the existence of God there are rationally acceptable arguments for and rationally acceptable arguments against, but no rationally compelling arguments on either side. So I was pleased to find an attempt by Van Til to respond to this sort of objection. (DF 126) He formulates the objection as follows:

"While a Christian can prove that his Christian position is fully as reasonable as the opponent's view, there is no such thing as an absolutely compelling proof that God exists, or that the Bible is the Word of God, just as little as anyone can prove its opposite."

Van Til then responds:

In this way of putting the matter there is a confusion between what is objectively valid and what is subjectively acceptable to the natural man.

[. . .]

It is precisely the Reformed Faith which, among other things, teaches the total depravity of the natural man, which is most loathsome to that natural man.

Turning to p. 352, we learn that the natural man is "spiritually dead." "The natural man does not know God." Or rather, he knows God in an implicit way, but suppresses "the knowledge of God given man by virtue of creation in God's image." On p. 255 we learn that having been made in the image of God we have an "ineradicable sense of deity" within us. This of course is Calvin's sensus divinitatis. Van Til makes bold to say, further, that men's "own consciousness is inherently and exclusively  revelational of God to themselves," and that "No man can help knowing God, for in knowing himself, he knows God."  

I'll conclude the quoting with a Van Tilian slam against the 'Romanists' as he often refers to them:

It  is the weakness of the Roman Catholic and Arminian methods that they virtually identify objective validity with subjective acceptability to the natural man. Distinguishing carefully between these two, the Reformed apologist maintains that there is an absolutely valid argument for the existence of God and the truth of Christian theism. (126)

Respondeo

'Virtually' is one of those weasel words that good writers either avoid or define.  But let that pass. Speaking for myself and not for the 'Romanists,' I will say that what Van Til is doing above is simply adding a layer of psychologizing to his question-begging.  He is engaging in the opposite kind of pure metaphysical bluster as I accused Galen Strawson of engaging in. Strawson:

We can, for example, know with certainty that the Christian God does not exist as standardly defined: a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly benevolent. The proof lies in the world, which is full of extraordinary suffering. If someone claims to have a sensus divinitatis that picks up a Christian God, they are deluded. It may be added that genuine belief in such a God, however rare, is profoundly immoral: it shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or indeed any intense suffering.

What we have here are two opposite forms of pure bluster.  Neither Van Til nor Strawson can prove what they claim to be certain of, and both psychologize their opponents,  the one by appeal to a supposed "total depravity," the other by appeal  to insanity.   

There is nothing to choose between these two opposite forms of bluster. And so, dear reader, does not my position strike you as the only sane and reasonable one?

Dinesh D’Souza on our Incipient Police State

Here, with a link to a trailer of his new movie.

……………………….

'Terrorist' is experiencing semantic spread. 

It emerged in the Congressional FBI whistleblower hearings that the abbreviation '2A' is a "terrorist marker." That came as news to me. (But see here.) I have been using '2A' from time to time as an innocuous abbreviation of 'Second Amendment.'  The context, of course, is the Bill of Rights which are the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.

I have written sentences like this:

2A does not confer, but protects, the citizen's right to keep and bear arms.

My use of the harmless abbreviation makes me a terrorist, a white supremacist, and what all else in the eyes of the regime.  What does it make the regime? A police state.

So I suppose it is a good thing that it has been a very long time since I attended a Latin mass. These masses, as is now well-known, are notorious gathering points for insurrectionists, militiamen, and other violent extremists out to overthrow 'democracy.'  Much less known, however, is that these masses are conducted, not in old Church Latin, but in coded Latin.  Thus hoc est corpus meum is code for create mayhem. De mortuis resurrexit means: he rose up and committed insurrection.  There really are very few threats to the powers that be stronger and more insidious than the Latin mass, which is why Pope Francis, that faithful custodian of the depositum fidei, is such a staunch defender of the old mass against the forces of reform.

Sarcasm aside, part of understanding  the destructive Left is understanding their commitment to the hermeneutics of suspicion.  You can learn about said hermeneutics, and cognate topics, from my essay From Democrat to Dissident section 16.4. It is published in Hillman and Borland, eds., Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.  Available via Amazon where you can read some editorial reviews.

UPDATE (10/19). Serious punch-back against demento-totalitarian police-state scumbaggery may be coming Spartacus style:

Something intriguing is happening with bitcoin.  What started as a series of perplexing data “inscriptions” containing classified files from the U.S. government has now been confirmed by Bitcoin Magazine as an ongoing effort to cement information in the public record beyond the reach of government censorship.

An anonymous guardian of free speech has begun using bitcoin to republish all of the information originally published by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks back in 2010.  Codenamed “Project Spartacus,” the operation seeks to take advantage of several inherent bitcoin attributes:

[. . .]

Project Spartacus is just the beginning.  Imagine new social media networks built from decentralized blockchains of information.  Imagine an entirely new internet operating beyond the reach of corporate search engines, regulated addresses, and government permissions.  With no corporation in control of the networks or in singular possession of communicated data on privately held servers, the problem of State-directed censorship disappears.  No longer could corporate oligarchs operate in concert with government dictators to silence public dissent and magnify government propaganda.  No longer would it matter what the Marxist Globalists at Facebook or Google think is true — or what they think should be falsely presented as truth — once ordinary people have a dependable workaround technology that allows them to share information free from Big Brother’s menacing intervention.

Discreetly shared samizdat has returned.  It will soon run on decentralized blockchain.

Argumentative Circles and their Diameters: More on Presuppositionalism

The day before yesterday, re: presuppositionalism, I wrote:

We need to bear in mind  that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument of this form as proving that p. Every circular argument of the above form is valid, and some are sound; but none are probative. By that I mean that no such argument constitutes a proof.  That ought to be perfectly obvious.

'Circularity' in respect of arguments is of course a metaphor: no argument is literally a geometrical circle. But it is a useful metaphor and I propose we extend it by speaking of the 'diameter' of a circular argument.  The logical form italicized above — p therefore p — has a 'diameter' than which no shorter can be conceived.  Its 'diameter' is zero. If a geometrical circle has a diameter of zero, then it is not a circle but a point.  The diameter of a circular argument of the above form is also a 'point,' figuratively speaking, the point being the one proposition that serves as both premise and conclusion.

A circular argument of zero diameter is said to be 'vicious.' Are there then 'virtuous' or if not positively virtuous then  'non-vicious' circular arguments?  Can one argue in a way that is circular but logically acceptable? Brian Bosse brought up this issue over lunch Sunday as we were discussing my longish entry on presuppositionalism. He may have had John M. Frame in mind.

Presuppositionalists such as Frame take the Word of God as set forth in the Protestant Christian Bible as their "ultimate presupposition." (Five Views on Apologetics, Zondervan 2000, 209) It is their "ultimate criterion of truth." (209)  This commitment of theirs is faith-based:

. . . for Christians, faith governs reasoning just as it governs all other human activities. Reasoning is not in some realm that is neutral between faith and unbelief. There is no such realm, since God's standards apply to all of life. (209)

What causes faith? ". . . God causes faith by his own free grace." (209) What is the rational basis of faith? ". . . the answer is that faith is based on reality, on truth. It is in accord with all the facts of God's universe and all the laws of thought that God has ordained. . . . The faith he gives us agrees with God's own perfect rationality." (209-210)

We want to know what rationally justifies faith in God and in his Word as found in the Bible. We are told that this faith is justified because it is true, agreeing as it does with all of the laws of thought that God has ordained. God himself, as the ultimate source of all things, including rationality, is the ultimate rational justification of our faith in him and his Word.  The reasoning here is plainly circular as Frame admits:

There is a kind of circularity here, but the circularity is not vicious. It sounds circular to say that faith governs reasoning and also that it is based on rationality. It is therefore important to remember that the rationality that serves as the rational basis for faith is God's own rationality. The sequence is: God's rationality –>human faith –>human reasoning. The arrows may be read "is the rational basis for." That sequence is linear, not circular. (210)

Frame's fancy footwork here is unavailing, an exercise in sophistry. He is obviously reasoning in a circle by presupposing the very thing whose existence he wants to prove. But he is loathe to admit that this is what he is doing. So he introduces a bogus distinction between vicious circles and linear circles.  But just as 'linear circle' in geometry is a contradictio in adjecto , so too is 'linear circle' in logic. 

You are either arguing in a circle or you are not. You are either presupposing what you are trying to prove or you are not. You are either begging the question or you are not. You are either committing the formal fallacy of petitio principii (hysteron proteron) or you are not. That is the long and the short of it. One or the other and no weaseling out via some bogus distinction between vicious and non-vicious circular arguments.

What Frame wants is a 'knock-down' (rationally compelling or rationally coercive) argument for the existence of the God of the Protestant Christian Bible interpreted along Calvinist lines.  He thinks he can get what wants by way of a transcendental argument,  one that issues in God "not merely as the conclusion of an argument, but as the one who makes argument possible." (220)  He wants God to play a transcendental role as the ultimate and unconditioned condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations including reasoning, whether valid or invalid, sound or unsound. (If his God does play the transcendental role, then Frame can say that the arguments of atheists, just insofar as they are arguments, prove the existence of God!) 

Now it must be granted, as I granted to Brian over lunch, that if Frame's God exists, then he does play the transcendental role. The question, however, is whether it can be proven that nothing other than Frame's God could play the transcendental role. It can be proven that there is a transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations. (See my earlier entry.) Where Frame goes wrong is in thinking that from the fact that there is a rationally compelling argument for the existence of a transcendental condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations (forming concepts, defining terms, making judgments, giving arguments, replying to objections offering hypotheses, etc.) it follows immediately that his God exists beyond the shadow of a rational doubt.  How does he know that his God alone could play the transcendental role? Frame may be taxed with  giving the following invalid argument:

a) If the God of the Protestant Christian Bible exists, then he plays the transcendental role;

b) It is objectively certain that something plays the transcendental role;

ergo

c) It is objectively certain that the God of the Protestant Christian Bible  plays the transcendental role. 

The premises are true, but the conclusion does not follow from them. For it is not objectively certain that nothing other than the God of the Christian Bible could play the transcendental role. This is because no non-transcendental argument — Frame mentions the "causal argument" — for the existence of God is rationally compelling. Hence no non-transcendental God argument can assure us that the existence of God is objectively certain. 

Here is another way to see the matter. It is rationally demonstrable that there is a total and unique way things are. (For if you assert that there is no way things are, then you are asserting that the way things are is that there is no way things are.) Now if Frame's God exists, then he is the concrete and personal metaphysical ground of the way things are. But how do we know that Frame's God exists? We cannot simply assume that the transcendental proof of the existence of the way things are is also a proof of Frame's God.  So non-transcendental arguments must be brought into to take us to Frame's God, Frame's "causal argument" for example. But these arguments are none of them rationally compelling. They do not generate objective certainty. So how do we know that something else is not the metaphysical ground of the way things are?

The Politicization of Medicine

Nothing is safe from politicization by leftists.  And you are still a Democrat? WTF is wrong with you? You geezers in particular need to wake up. This is not the party of Jack Kennedy. 

Over at Instapundit:

NYC – Dr. Dana Diab is an ER physician at Lenox Hill (@lenoxhill). Dina Diab took to Instagram rejoicing Zionist settlers [aka jews] were murdered, raped, beheaded, and kidnapped by the Hamas terror group on Saturday October 7th. Jewish patients beware.

See also: Why Was My Talk at a Medical Conference Canceled?