Those who play lotteries, by the very fact that they play, demonstrate the irrationality and lack of financial understanding that in many cases would ruin them were they so 'lucky' as to win. And yet people persist in the illusion that everything would be fine if a huge sum of money were suddenly dumped on their heads: money that they do not deserve and have done nothing to earn; money that has been taken from their fellow rubes on false pretenses by an illegitimate state apparatus the net effect of which is harmful.
Primum non nocere: first do no harm. That ought to be, but is not, the first principle of government.
In your recent post My Relation to Catholicism, you write; "For a religion to take root in a person, the person must have a religious nature or predisposition to begin with."
If this is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of becoming, let's say, a Christian, it seems very close to the idea of predestination. Those who have the necessary (and inherent?) predisposition are among the few who have been "chosen" by God. Many others who neither have nor can acquire such a disposition, have no hope of salvation because they cannot will themselves to believe. This seems like an affront to divine justice. Maybe you'll say a few words about the "affront" of predestination as you expand on your religious views.
The truth of what the reader quotes me as saying was brought home to me once again yesterday over lunch with a friend. He is the same age as me, comes from a similar background, and also has a doctorate in philosophy. From the ages of 6 to 16, he attended a school run by Jesuits . So, starting as an impressionable first-grader, he was exposed to the full-strength pre-Vatican II Catholic doctrine sans namby-pamby liberal dilution. And this was in the '50s when distractions and temptations were much less than they are now. He was an altar boy, indeed the 'head' of the altar boys; he memorized all the Latin responses, and was so good at this that he was paid for his services at weddings and funerals. But despite the rites, rituals, and indoctrination from an early age, none of it took root in his inner being. It is not just that he sloughed it off later when pretty girls and other earthly delights proved to be irresistible; he told me that he never took it seriously in the first place. It was all just a load of hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo.
And now I am reminded of Tony Jones from high school days. He like to invert a favorite saying of St. Dominic Savio. The saint said, "Death before sin." Tony wrote in my graduation year book, "Remember my motto, 'Sin before death!'"
So I say that to take a religion, any religion, seriously one must possess an inner disposition, an inner religious sensibility. Some people are just inherently irreligious in the way others are unmusical or illogical or amoral or not disposed to appreciate poetry. No amount of indoctrination can make up for the lack. If you are illogical, no logic course can help you; all such a course can do it is articulate and make explicit the implicit logical understanding that must already be present if one is to profit from the formal study of the subject. If you cannot think in moral categories, if you have no nascent sense of right and wrong, no ethics course can help you.
One consequence of this is that there is no point to discussing religion with the irreligious. It cannot be anything other than superstitious nonsense to them. You may as well discuss colors with the color blind, music with the tone deaf, modal logic with those who are blind to modal distinctions.
Since my point is a general one, applying as it does to any religion, it is distinct from any Christian predestination doctrine. But if the religion in question is Christianity, then the reader makes an excellent point. Suppose that salvation is predicated upon one's acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Obviously, one cannot even begin to take such a notion seriously in the interior manner alone here in question without having the religious predisposition. In a theistic framework, a providential God is responsible for whether one has the predisposition or not. So what I am saying, when situated in a Christian context, does seem to smack of predestination. I'll end with a quotation from G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil, Cambridge UP 1982, p. 134, emphasis added:
Augustine sets out for their [certain semi-Pelagians'] inspection the obvious truth that many people hear Christian truth expounded to them, and while some believe, others do not. There must be a reason why their responses differ. Augustine suggests that the reason is that God has prepared some but not others (De Praed. Sanct. vi 11). Those who receive the truth are the elect, and those who do not have not been chosen to be Christians.
That there is predestination, however, strikes me as morally dubious as that guilt is inheritable.
A musician needs a muse. George Harrison and Eric Clapton found her in Pattie Boyd. Here are five of the best known songs that she is said to have inspired. If you don't love at least four of these five, you need a major soul adjustment.
This from a graduate student in philosophy who describes himself as a theologically conservative Protestant who is toying with the idea of 'swimming the Tiber':
In a recent post you say this: ""Study everything, join nothing" means that one ought to beware of institutions and organizations with their tendency toward self-corruption and the corruption of their members. (The Catholic Church is a good recent example.)"
Until I read this comment, I, for some reason, was under the impression that you were a Catholic. I was wondering if you would be willing to elaborate on this comment, say more about your take on the Catholic Church, direct me to a post in which you say more about these issues, or direct me to some literature on this topic that you think would be useful.
This request allows me to clarify my relation to Catholicism. (This clarification may be spread over a few posts.) I was brought up Catholic and attended Catholic schools, starting in the pre-Vatican II days before the rot set in, when being Catholic was something rather more definite than it is now. Many with my kind of upbringing were unfazed by their religious training, went along to get along, but then sloughed off the training and the trappings as soon as they could. For a religion to take root in a person, the person must have a religious nature or predisposition to begin with. Only some have it, just as only some have a philosophical predisposition. Having the former predisposition is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a religion's taking firm root. Another necessary condition is that the person have some religious and/or mystical experiences. Without the predisposition and the experiences, religion, especially a religion as rich in dogmatic articulation as Roman Catholicism, will be exceedingly hard to credit and take seriously in the face of the countervailing influences from nature (particularly the nature in one's own loins) and society with its worldly values. For some Catholics of my Boomer generation, the extreme cognitive dissonance between the teachings of the Church and the 'teachings' and attitudes of the world, in particular the world of the '60s, led to radical questioning. For example, we were taught that all sins against the 6th and 9th Commandments were mortal and that premarital and extramarital sex even in those forms that fell shy of intercourse were wrong. The 'teachings' of the world and the surrounding culture were of course quite the opposite. For many brought up Catholic, this was not much of a problem: the cognitive dissonance was quickly relieved by simply dropping the religion or else watering it down into some form of namby-pamby humanism. For others like myself who had the religious predisposition and the somewhat confirmatory religious/mystical experiences, the problem of cognitive dissonance was very painful and not easily solved.
And, having not only a religious, but also a philosophical predisposition, it was natural to turn to philosophy as a means of sorting things out and relieving the tension between the doctrines and practices that had been the center of my life and the source of existential meaning, on theone hand, and the extramural wide world of sex, drugs, rock & roll, and the secular values of 'making it' and getting ahead, on the other. The sex bit was just one example. The fundamental problem I faced was whether any of what I was brought up to believe, of what I internalized and took with utmost seriousness, was true. Truth matters! As salutary as belief is, it is only true beliefs that can be credited. This brings me to a fundamental theme of this weblog, namely, the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. I see this as a fruitful tension, and I see the absence of anything like it the Islamic world as part of the explanation of that world's inanition.
It is a fruitful tension in the West but also in those few individuals who are citizens of both 'cities,' those few who harbor within them both the religious and the philosophical predisposition. It is a tension that cannot be resolved by eliminationof one or the other of the 'cities.' But why is it fruitful?
The philosopher and the religionist need each other's virtues. The philosopher needs reverence to temper his analytic probing and humility to mitigate the arrogance of his high-flying inquiry and overconfident reliance on his magnificent yet paltry powers of thought. The religionist needs skepticism to limit his gullibility, logical rigor to discipline his tendency toward blind fideism, and balanced dialectic to chasten his disposition to fanaticism.
So am I a Catholic or not? Well, I am certainly a Catholic by upbringing, so I am a Catholic in what we could call a sociological sense. But it is very difficult for a philosopher to be a naive adherent of any religion, especially a religion as deeply encrusted with dogma as Roman Catholicism. He will inevitably be led to 'sophisticate' his adherence, and to the extent that he does this he will wander off into what are called 'heresies.' He will find it impossible not to ask questions. His craving for clarity and certainty will cause him to ask whether key doctrines are even intelligible, let alone true. Just what are we believing when we believe that there is one God in three divine persons? Just what are we believing when we believe that there once walked on the earth a man who was fully human but also fully divine?
I distance myself both from the anti-Catholic polemicists and the pro-Catholic apologists. Polemics and apologetics are two sides of the same coin, the coin of ideology. 'Ideology' is not a pejorative term in my mouth. An ideology is a set of beliefs oriented toward action, and act we must. So believe we must, in something or other. Religions are ideologies in this sense. But philosophy is not ideological. For more on this, see Philosophy, Religion, and the Philosophy of Religion: Four Theses.
I am skeptical of organizations and institutions despite the fact that we cannot do without them. The truth is something too large and magnificent to be 'institutionalized.' The notion that it is the sole possession of one church, the 'true' church, is a claim hard to credit especially in light of the fact that different churches claim to be the true one. Also dubious is the notion that extra ecclesiam salus non est, that outside the church there is no salvation. And note that different churches will claim to be the one outside of which there is no salvation. That should gve one pause. If it doesn't, then I suggest you are insufficiently critical, insufficiently concerned with truth, and too much concerned with your own doxastic security. Why do I need a church at all? And why this one? Why not Eastern Orthodoxy or some denomination of Protestantism?
Now if you are a philosopher this is all just more grist for the mill, along with all the things that Catholic apologists will say in defense of their faith. They will say that their church is the true church because it was founded by Jesus Christ (who is God) and has existed continuously from its founding under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit whose inspiration guarantees the correctness of the teachings on faith and morals.
They will tell me that a church is necessary to correct the errors of private opinions. Now it must be frankly admitted that thinking for oneself, treading the independent path, and playing the maverick can just as easily lead one into error as into truth. If thinking for oneself were the royal road to truth, then all who think for themselves would agree on what the truth is. They don't. But let us not forget that that church dogmas often reflect the private opinions of the dominant characters at the councils. The common opinion is just the private opinion that won the day. You say Augustine was inspired by the Holy Spirit? That is a claim you are making. How validate it? Why don't the Protestants agree with you? Why don't the Eastern Orthodox agree with you?
This only scratches the surface, but one cannot spend the whole day blogging. This may turn out to be a long series of posts.
A device of literary bluster. When one is unsure about something, or sure about what one has no right to be sure about, one writes 'surely.' Example: "Vallicella links to Dinah Washington here. But surely Peggy Lee's version is better. A voice like no other, and the little piano break at 1:13 is exquisite."
I confess to using 'surely and 'of course' promiscuously.
Original Sin, Trinity, and Incarnation are three Christian dogmas. There are others as well. Here is an off-the-cuff taxonomy of possible attitudes towards such dogmas.
1. They are just nonsense to be ignored or even a sign of deep mental dysfunction. When I first started blogging about the Trinity, John Jay Ray commented (6 January 2005):
The blogosphere is an amazing place. Over at Maverick Philosopher there has been an extensive discussion going on about the doctrine of the holy Trinity! Generally sympathetic to Christianity though I am, I cannot see that particular doctrine as anything but the most awful load of codswallop. It is a self-contradictory formulation that arose out of the controversy among early Christians about whether Christ was God or not. [. . .] It is conventional to describe the doctrine as a mystery but it is no such thing. It is just a theological compromise that sacrifices logic for the sake of keeping all parties to the debate happy. How anybody can take it seriously is beyond me.
And then there is that other Australian, the neo-positivist David Stove, who thinks that something has gone dreadfully and fatally wrong with the thoughts of anyone who takes Trinitarian speculation seriously, in particular the debate over the filioque clause. See The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Backwell, 1991, p. 179.
2. They are false and/or incoherent, but worthy of study as concrete points of entry into various logical, metaphysical, and ethical questions that are salient for all, including atheists and materialists. What is identity? Is it absolute or sortal-relative? What is personhood? Can guilt be inherited? Scores of such questions arise when these dogmas are carefully thought through.
3. They are false and/or incoherent but worth studying as part of the history of ideas, or the sociology of knowledge, or the psychology of belief. Ideas have consequences, whether true or false, coherent or incoherent, sane or insane.
4. The are false and/or incoherent in many of their formulations, but hide nuggets of truth that can excavated and refined and reformulated in ways that are rationally acceptable. An example of this is Kant's project in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
5. The dogmas are coherent and indeed true as formulated and promulgated by some particular church such as the Roman Catholic church or the Eastern Orthodox church.
I reject the extremes of this spectrum of opinion. Thus I reject #1 and #5. My approach is closest to #4, though I feel no particular commitment to the Kantian variant. Although the main reason to take seriously Original Sin, for example, is that it expresses something deep and true about the human predicament, the reasons supplied in #2 and #3 are also good ones. The notion that blacks are owed reparations for slavery, for example, is one that is closely related to the notion that guilt is transmissible from the perpetrator of a crime to his descendants. This gives rise to the suspicion that the demand for reparations is a secularization of certain Christian dogmatic themes. How then can the evaluation of the reparations demand proceed without any consideration of the theological doctrine?
On CNN this morning, two subtitles included the phrases "Jobs death" and "Job's global influence." The man's name is Steve Jobs. To form the possessive you must add an apostrophe and put it in the right place: "Jobs' death."
Can we blame this one on liberals too? Is there perhaps something to the 'definition' of a liberal as a person who has never met a standard he didn't want to erode?
Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:
I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves. That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do — read them. But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them. Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue. They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline. They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing. It's true that grace is the free gift of God but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial. I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost. As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything but false mystics. A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.
You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets. The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.
This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)
Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such. But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life. See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac.
And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993) Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful title, apt, witty, and pithy! I shall have to pull some quotations before October's end.
Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
As Heidegger might have said, we achieve our authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) in Being-towards-death (Sein-zum-Tode).
In a face-to-face philosophical discussion, three is a crowd.
If Al and Bill are talking philosophy, the first thing that has to occur, if there is is to be any forward movement, is that the interlocutors must pin each other down terminology-wise. Each has to come to understand how the other is using his terms. It is notorious that key philosophical terms are used in different ways by different philosophers. This terminological fluidity, though regrettable, is unavoidable since attempt to rigidify terminology will inevitably beg key questions.
The following is a partial list of terms used in different ways by different philosophers: abstract, concrete, object, subject, fact, proposition, world, predicate, property, substance, event.
Take 'fact.' For some, it is a matter of definition that a fact is a true proposition. But as I use the term, a fact is the truth-maker of a true proposition. Suppose you use 'fact' as interchangeable with 'true proposition.' Then I can accommodate you by distinguishing between facts-that and facts-of. Thus, the fact that Bill is blogging is made true by the fact of Bill's blogging. But we must sort out these definitional questions if we are to make any progress with the substantive issues. A substantive question would be: Are there facts? Obviously, we cannot make any headway with this until we agree on how we are using 'facts.' For more on this topic see Three Senses of 'Facts' and other entries in the Facts category.
And of course we can't stop here. If you say that a fact is a true proposition, then I will ask you how you are using 'proposition.' Do you mean the sense of a context-free declarative sentence? Are propositions for you abstract objects? But now we need to get clear about 'abstract' and 'object.' Do you use 'object' and 'entity' interchangeably? Or can there be objects that are not entities and entities that are not objects? (An hallucinated pink rat might count as an object that is not an entity, and a being that has never been the accusative of any intellect might count as an entity that is not an object.) Someone who uses 'object' in such a way that there is no object without a (thinking) subject is not misusing the word: that is a traditional use. But equally, a person who uses 'object' to mean entity is not misusing it either. So the use of 'object' needs clarification.
One might use 'abstract' and 'concrete' as follows: X is abstract (concrete) iff X is causally inert (causally active/passive). But I know of at least one name philosopher who uses 'abstract' interchangeably with 'nonspatiotemporal.' On this usage, God would be an abstract object, while on the first definition God would be concrete.
Note that an abstract entity on either of these two definitions can be a substance (another word with about ten meanings!), i.e., a being capable of independent existence. But 'abstract' is used by philosophers as diverse as Hegel and Keith Campbell (the Aussie trope theorist) to refer to non-independent objects. And indeed, their use is the classical, and etymologically correct, use.
And so it goes. Suppose Carla is present at Al and Bill's discussion. Will she help or hinder? Experience teaches that, for the most part, three's a crowd: the third interlocutor, in her zeal to contribute to the discussion will only interfere with the protracted preliminary clarification that Al and Bill need before they can get to work on the substantive questions that interest them.
Note 1: The above applies to face-to-face discussions, not to on-line exchanges. Note 2: I seem to recall Roderick Chisholm making the 'three is a crowd' remark. So I may have picked up the thought from him.
I watched The O'Reilly Factor last night. In one segment Bill O'Reilly and Brit Hume were discussing some word once used by locals as the name of a hunting venue that is connected with some trouble Rick Perry is in. But they were so gingerly tip-toeing around the topic that I couldn't figure out what the offensive word was. Was it perhaps 'Coon's Hollow'? I ran through various possibilities, trying to guess what they were too chicken and pee-cee to plainly state. Turns out the word is 'Niggerhead.' This was a name that long before Perry's visit to the site had been painted over.
Philosophers make a distinction between use and mention. It is one thing to use a word to refer to someone or something, and quite another to talk about, or mention, the word. Boston is a city; 'Boston' is not: no word is a city. 'Boston' is disyllabic; Boston is not: no city is composed of two syllables. Same with 'nigger.' It's a disyllabic word, an offensive word, a word that a decent person does not use. I am not using it; I am mentioning it, talking about it. Same with 'Niggerhead.' That was the name that certain locals used for the hunting venue in question. I am talking about that name, not using it.
The 'reasoning' of the race-baiters is apparently that since Perry visited a place that once bore the unofficial name 'Niggerhead,' that he is either a racist or 'racially insensitive' or something.
What I would like to point out to these nasty liberal dumbasses is that reasoning is not association of ideas. Almost any idea can be associated with any other. In the febrile and mushy mind of many liberals 'niggardly' suggests 'nigger' so that anyone who uses the former must be a racist. That's pretty stupid, don't you think? But it's par for the course for a liberal. Or how about 'denigrate'? Does the use of that word embody a racial slur?
This is important. A man lost his job because he used the perfectly legitimate English word 'niggardly.' This is insane. If you are decent person, you will do your bit to oppose the scurrilous insanity of the race-baiting Left.
Here is a list of their individually puerile and jointly inconsistent demands.
One wonders how
Demand nine: Open borders migration; anyone can travel anywhere to work and live
is consistent with
Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system
and
Demand four: Free college education.
Libertarians believe in the foolish notion of open borders, presumably because they cannot think in any but economic terms; but at least libertarians are intelligent enough to realize that one cannot combine open borders with a full-tilt welfare state that provides 'free' health care, 'free' college education, etc. The anti-capitalist punks, utopian dumbasses that they are, dream the impossible dream of a welfare state that allows millions upon millions to flood in to grab the goodies that the government will magically provide for them.
We have the concept true proposition. This concept is either instantiated, or it is not. If it is not instantiated, then it is true that it is not instantiated, which implies that the concept true proposition is instantiated. If, on the other hand, the concept in question is instantiated, then of course it is instantiated. Therefore, necessarily, the concept true proposition is instantiated, and there necessarily exists at least one truth, namely, the truth that the concept true proposition is instantiated.
A reader asks: Does not your argument presuppose that "to be instantiated" means "to exist extra-mentally"? What if someone believed that esse est percipi? If your argument was based on the aforementioned assumption, then would not it beg the question because it presupposes what needs to be demonstrated?
Let us first note that it cannot be coherently maintained that to be is to be perceived without qualification. To be perceived is to be perceived by someone or something. For Bishop Berkeley, the someone in question is God whose being is precisely not identical to his being perceived. The slogan therefore does not apply to God. If absolutely everything were such that its being were its being perceived, then a vicious infinite regress would arise. To put it figuratively, the world cannot be mere percepts 'all the way down.' You have to come eventually to something whose being is in excess of its being perceived.
Perhaps what the reader is getting at is that any true proposition that instantiates the concept true proposition is true only for a mind, and not true absolutely. But this too leads to an infinite regress which appears to be vicious. For consider the proposition *Every truth is true-for some mind or other; no truth is true absolutely.* Call this proposition 'P.' Is P true? No, it is true-for some mind or other. Call that proposition P*. Is it true? No, it is true-for some mind or other. An infinite regress arises, and it appears to be vicious.
