Didn't I tell you to be skeptical? Motorcycle fatality counted as Covid-19 death.
Elementary point of logic: if an F is counted as a G, it does not follow that the F in question is a G.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Why There Has to be Hell
Here is an amateur theological speculation.
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. Hitchens, 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!
A Theory of Hell
The spiritually immature have spiritually immature conceptions of man and God, heaven and hell. If you think of man as just a physical being, then, if you think of God at all, you will most likely think of him as a physical being, as a sort of Man Writ Large, or Big Guy in the Sky. This will lead either to a childish form of theism (God as Big Daddy, supplier of material needs, wish-fulfiller) or to a form of atheism of the Edward Abbey 'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon' variety.
Something similar is true of conceptions of heaven and hell. The materially minded will develop crass conceptions. Popular Islam's notion of paradise as an endless disporting with 72 black-eyed virgins, as a doing there all the carnal things one is forbidden here, is as theologically hopeless as is a Christian fundamentalist's notion of hell as fire and brimstone.
I suggest the following as closer to the theological reality of hell where hell is permanent separation, recognized as such, from one's absolute good, recognized as such.
To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one's vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell not as a state of pain but of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool's paradise – think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas — in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. The fire of desire endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists.
Animal and Spirit
Yesterday morning I reviewed our quarterly statements and calculated our net worth. I then turned to Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, and re-read underlined passages as a fitting prelude to a 75-minute session on the black mat.
It is appropriate for an animal to concern itself with material things; it is also appropriate for a spirit to meditate on the ultimate nullity of all material things.
Foolish it is to ignore either.
What We are Up Against
It helps to know the enemy and not be as naive as a Mona Charen. Despite her manifold lovelinesses and virtues, Charen is a useful idiot for the Left and a useless idiot for us. (She is what I call a 'topical idiot'; she is obviously not a total idiot. And while I am abusing her to some extent, my abuse is for her own good, grounded as it is in fact and in a concern for her mental clarity.)
Never-Trumpers, who are mostly journalists and lawyers, and have never built anything, allow themselves to become unhinged and distracted by Trump the inarticulate builder and political interloper, by his foibles and fatuities, his ungrammatical tweets, his exaggerations, sexual peccadillos, and what all else. And so they cannot see who the real enemy is. They cannot see the threat to their own way of life and to the set of values which they espouse but are impotent to conserve.
At the same time, these yap-and-scribble quislings and quibblers, these cruise-ship 'conservatives' who succeed in conserving nothing except their status and salaries, propose no candidate who could do better than Trump. They are impotent nay-sayers and obstructionists. A pox be upon them, and their dwellings and cruise ships and seminar rooms and all their works and days, and their progeny, intellectual and loin-driven, unto the seventh generation.
Please study the following from Powerline.
Mona Charen, Bari Weiss, and Political Equivalentism
Are we engaged in a truth-seeking debate with our political opponents, or are these opponents enemies with whom we are at war? For some time now, I have been heading in the latter direction. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the Converse Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means. See Politics as Polemics.
Given that we conservatives are at war with the Left, what are we to say about those who hover above the fray and refuse to take sides? They are the political equivalentists, or near-equivalentists, who strive after an objective, non-partisan view and find fault with both sides. What are are we to say about that sweet old lady, Mona Charen, whom I have followed sympathetically for years?
The story of Bari Weiss’s tense parting with the Times will doubtless provide several days’ worth of fodder for the right. Weiss will become, for a while, a right-wing pin-up—symbol of the dangerous cancel culture that Democrats want to impose on the whole nation. Andrew Sullivan announced on the same day that he is leaving New York magazine. Coming on the heels of other prominent departures from progressive standard bearers, the scent of purges is in the air.
But the right has no credibility on this. If the left is woke, the right is bespoke—it has become tailored around one person. Look at conservative publications and search for Trump critics. They are thin on the ground. National Review parted ways with David French and Jonah Goldberg. The Wall Street Journal lost Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss. Fox News staffed up with fulsome Trump enthusiasts, but dispensed with George Will’s services.
This narrowing of the American mind is making everyone dumber and nastier. Debate is practically dead. What Bari Weiss stands for is the individual conscience attempting to evaluate issues fairly. She stands for dispassionate analysis in a world that increasingly favors zealotry and intolerance. That’s why her fate matters.
Charen is as naive as Sam Harris. She's a silly goose of a Never-Trumper living in the past. Yes, my dear, debate is dead. But why is that? It is because debate is impossible with those who, out of contempt for them, refuse to satisfy the elementary requirements of debate which include belief in the existence of truth and respect for logic and language.
It is utter folly to suppose that there is moral-political equivalence between Right and Left. People like Charen, the bootless Max Boot, the vapid Bill Kristol, the foolish David French, the effete George Will and plenty of others have allowed their mindless hatred of gate-crasher Trump the man and his style to unhinge them.
In the end, Mona Charen, with all her good intentions is a chump, a useful idiot for them, a useless idiot for us. Her conciliatory attitude won't save her from cancellation.
Politics as Polemics: The Converse Clausewitz Principle
Would that I could avoid this political stuff. But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country and its Western heritage be destroyed — the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.
Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. 'Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife is certainly at the root of politics. Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it. What one takes to be the truth: that is the problem in a nutshell. Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and non-negotiably. There is no common ground left, and if you think otherwise, you are fooling yourself.
Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the Converse Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.
David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:
In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.
You have only thirty seconds to make your point. Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it. Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life. Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich. Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case. You are politically dead.
Politics is war. Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An
Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)
On Engagement with Females: The Anti-Biden Rule
With the exception of wives, sisters, and girlfriends, accept and return hugs, but don't initiate them. A gentleman is cognizant of the power differential between the sexes, and does not impose himself physically or psychologically. And while the scent of a woman can can carry a powerful erotic charge, a gentleman does not creep up like Creepy Joe to sniff a woman's hair or any other part of her anatomy.
Being an old man does not confer carte blanche in this regard. Mild sexual aggression in the young man is perhaps tolerable, but few things are more digusting than a dirty old man. You would have your doubts about a young man not on the make; but the old man, the made man, having attained a modicum of maturity, is more appropriately concerned with the impression he will soon be making on his Maker.
"You spent your life chasing women as your summum bonum? Well then, I shall grant you your heart's desire: for all eternity you shall chase women!"
Related: A Theory of Hell
Morally Culpable Political Ignorance
Is there such a thing?
Is Sanders the Socialist morally culpable for being wrong? Or is he merely wrong? Perhaps he is neither. Perhaps he is mad. The mad do the same thing over and over again in the hope that next time it will be different.
Money, Happiness, and Conditiones Sine Quibus Non
Money can't buy happiness. What it can buy are the conditions without which happiness is impossible.
Thus spoke the Sage of the Superstitions.
Love and Money
Don't say that money is the root of all evil. That's just silly. Say something that is true:
The inordinate love of money is the root of SOME evils.
Point proven in Radix Omnium Malorum.
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Addendum (7/17). Claude Boisson sends the following:
As you already know, your interpretation is exactly that of some careful Greek scholars for the sentence in 1 Timothy 6:10
The Democrat Agenda
Open the borders; empty the prisons; empower the criminal; violate the the rights of the law-abiding; erase history and heritage and hard-won wisdom.
Above all: Destroy language so that no one can coherently think or speak about the destructive Democrat agenda.
All Deaths Matter!
Not just those counted as Covid-19 deaths.
(Point of logic: if an F is counted as a G, it does not follow that the F in question is a G.)
Memo to Leftists
Erase history and you won't be able to learn from it, including the dire consequences of erasing it.
Never Trumpers Never Quit being Nattering Nabobs of Negativism
Being parasites, they lose if Trump loses, and being Never Trumpers, they lose if Trump wins. It's a lose-lose situation for these miserable yap-and-scribble irrelevancies.
A lack of self-reflection, of course, is just one of the many fatal character flaws of NeverTrump. What they must not realize is how much they need Trump to stick around in order for them to remain even remotely relevant. NeverTrump is a political parasite: President Trump is their host. Without him, NeverTrump will go back to the political wilderness, loathed by the Right and ignored by the Left.