Category: Islamism

Radical Islam’s Threat to the Left

Substack latest.

Why don't leftists — who obviously do not share the characteristic values and beliefs of Islamists — grant what is spectacularly obvious to everyone else, namely, that radical Islam poses a grave threat to what we in the West cherish as civilization, which includes commitments to free speech, open inquiry, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, freedom to reject religion, universal suffrage, the emancipation of women, opposition to cruel and unusual penal practices, and so on?   In particular, why don't leftists recognize the grave threat radical Islam poses to them?  Why do leftists either deny the threat or downplay its gravity? Given their atheism and pronounced libertine ‘wobble,’ they would be among the first to lose their heads under Islamic law (Sharia).

Here is a quickly-composed  list of twelve related reasons based on my own thinking and reading and on discussions with friends. 

Jews, Muslims, Science and Technology

Which group has contributed more to science and technology? Jews or Muslims?  And why?

Question prompted by this:

Today, Jewish and Israeli MIT students were physically prevented from attending class by a hostile group of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel MIT students that call themselves the CAA [Coalition Against Apartheid, apparently].

Up on the Roof

Not "The Drifters" version.

Given the pronounced 'libertine wobble' of leftists, it is passing strange that they would support Islamists who are anti-libertine and anti-liberal in excelsis.  The loons of the Left appear to have lost their minds so much so  that they care not whether they lose their heads.  

Queers for Palestine

Tony Flood, who sent me the graphic, remarks, "This is the outward expression of a fifth column movement that doesn't care about any cognitive dissonance we detect. On a brighter note, take a gander at page one of this week's The Militant!"

Socialists make for strange bedfellows, but we need a broad coalition to defeat the forces of anti-civilization. Exciting times up ahead, my friends. I advise investing in 'precious metals,' in a broad sense of the term to include Pb and its delivery systems.

And You Call for a Cease-Fire?

Take a look at the massacre map. Then read this:

The world is yet again staring at the near inevitability of another global conflagration.   The flashpoint is in the Middle East and the Hitler of our time: the Mullahs of Iran.   The West, led by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have chosen to follow in the footsteps of the self-absorbed European leaders of the 1930’s in dealing with Iran and their terrorist legions of Hamas, Hezb’allah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Ansar Allah (Houthis) among others.

The Obama/Biden policy in dealing with Iran has been to facilitate Iran in becoming a dominant player in the region in the naïve belief that if the West, and in particular the United States, treats the Mullahs of Iran as equals, they will evolve into non-belligerent leaders who can be trusted.  Even if that means the acquisition of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles and sacrificing America’s only resolute ally in the region, Israel.

But is the disastrous Obama-Biden policy naïve, or is it something worse: a deliberate attempt to "fundamentally transform" (in Obama's words), and thus destroy the USA?  For example, why are no steps being taken by the Biden administration to control the southern (and northern) borders when it is a known fact that jihadis are entering the homeland?

Before 7 October it was clear enough that the purpose of the open border policy was to change the demographics of the USA in such a way as to make possible the permanent ascendancy of the Democrat Party. But now it can be seen that more nefarious motives were and are at work: to increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks within the homeland.  And what would they accomplish? They would give the current regime the excuse it needs for an even more draconian assault on the middle class and traditional American liberties.

UPDATE 1 (11/1)

Senator Hawley in a Congressional hearing hammers Alejandro Mayorkas who bears the Orwellian appellation "Director of Homeland Security." Is there anyone in the Biden administration more emblematic of the abysmal mendacity of said administration? 

These are very dangerous times. You'd best prepare for the immediate here and the possibly soon-to-arrive hereafter.

UPDATE 2 (11/1)

Pope Francis has called for a cease-fire:

"Ceasefire," he said, mentioning a recent television appeal by Father Ibrahim Faltas, one of the Vatican's representatives in the Holy Land.

He then added in his own words: "We say 'ceasefire, ceasefire'. Brothers and sisters, stop! War is always a defeat, always".
What he means, presumably, is that war is always a defeat for humanity. Is Bergoglio ignorant of recent European history and in particular the Second World War? If the Allies had not defeated the Axis powers, humanity (in the normative sense) and the high civilization of the Judeo-Christian type that the good pope supposedly represents, would have ceased to exist.
 
John Lennon famously if foolishly sang, "Give peace a chance." What he and Bergoglio the Benighted fail to understand is that sometimes we have to give war a chance.
 
Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. The price of peace is a credible deterrent. Weakness and appeasement invite attack. Joe Biden is weak on multiple fronts; no surprise then that the upshot is war on multiple fronts.  
 
Conciliation is obviously a very high value. But how conciliate those who are religiously committed to your extermination? How conciliate those who would rather die than permit you to live?
 
 
 
 

‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Hoplophobia’

A very polite Substack chiding of the stupid and often vicious use of these terms. My entry shows how to make a point rationally and stylishly without any use of invective and only the slightest trace of sarcasm. You have to cultivate the ability to write in a civil and respectful way. But you must also know how to pummel and deride scum like the present POTUS and his sorry entourage who, in their willful self-enstupidation, mindlessly repeat phrases they have heard with nary a concern for what they mean or ought to mean.

Different strokes for different folks. Sweet reason for some; the hard fist of unreason for others. The 'hard fist' comes in two flavors, one verbal, the other meta-verbal. 

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?

When People Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them

Bari Weiss:

Here you can watch people gathered at the Sydney Opera House cheering “gas the Jews” and “death to the Jews.” People are rejoicing in the slaughter on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York. (Scroll down to read our Free Press dispatch on the celebrations in Manhattan.)

At our most prestigious universities there is silence from administrations that leapt to speak out on George Floyd’s killing and on the war in Ukraine. Meantime, the social justice crowd offers explanations for the massacre—a massacre that, in part, targeted a group of progressive Israelis at a music festival. Terrorists came to that festival on paragliders carrying machine guns to start their slaughter. They raped women there next to the dead bodies of their friends.

Sam Harris on the Moral Difference between Israel and her Enemies

On this topic Harris is right.

The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say “O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of Palestinians.

The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there widespread Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews.

[. . .]

What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen.

There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. And again, the charter of their government in Gaza explicitly tells us that they want to annihilate the Jews—not just in Israel but everywhere.

Related: America's Betrayal of Israel

Watch this video. That’s a Hamas drone taking down an Israeli Merkava tank. A drone operated by an organization sponsored and trained by Iran applying both Iranian tactics and, most likely, Iranian hardware to attack Israel. This happened weeks after America sent Iran $6 billion, and one week after we learned that the American government had over the past years ceded whole parts of its own intelligence units to Iranian spies.

The stage for this attack was not set in or by Israel. It was set by the United States.

But even worse, and not only for us, is America's betrayal of America. Our borders, Southern but also Northern, are open to every terrorist and every criminal group in the world. They are busy establishing their sleeper cells and installations in the homeland, all with the tacit approval of the Director of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas and his boss Joe Biden. Tacit approval by action, or rather inaction, masked by explicit and brazenly mendacious denial. That is your government at work, with your tax dollars, working to destroy your country and way of life. So long as you remain Democrat you go right along with it.

Our Islamist enemies want to destroy the Little Satan, but even more, the Big Satan. You might want to think about that.

You might also want to think about why there is a mere inquiry into the possible impeachment of Joe Biden which, you know, is not the same as his removal from office, on the ground of bribery and influence peddling when there is a much more grievous "high crime and misdemeanor" for which he ought already to have been impeached and removed, namely, his violation of his oath of office and dereliction of duty. I refer you to the U. S. Constitution which Biden took an oath to uphold and defend:

Article 4, Sec. 4 of The United States Constitution makes it clear the Federal government must stop such an incursion of foreigners into the country exactly like the one we are seeing. Here is what was written by our Founding Fathers concerning our republican form of government.

"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."

The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

Substack leader. In this entry I unpack what I consider to be a brilliant insight of Finkielkraut.

Alain Finkielkraut:

Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.

9/11 Twenty-Two Years Later

Top o' the Stack.

Was 9/11 an 'inside job'? I take no position on this question. Here is a review of David Ray Griffin's latest.

To say it again: linkage does not constitute endorsement in whole or in part.

UPDATE

New York Tony writes:

Since I was a kid, I would annually see the demolition of public housing, buildings imploding and pancaking into their footprint in the last half-minute of a local news broadcast. So had millions of others. But in a macabre illustration of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, nearly everyone, including me, fell for it on 9/11: the Towers fell after the planes hit, therefore they fell because they hit, imploding and pancaking into their footprint, so geometrically conveniently.  And Tower 7 wasn't hit at all. (In Iran, a jet slammed into a smaller building which burned for three days but didn't collapse.) It was a controlled demolition (see videos here), so the only question, which I remember posing to you then as I do now, is who strategically placed and who detonated the explosives? And why did we not instinctively connect what we saw with what we remembered and so easily accept the official narrative? Someone did, even if we can't agree on who. 
If two different spatiotemporally contiguous events, E1 and E2, occur with E1 temporally prior to E2, one cannot validly infer that E1 caused E2. To think otherwise would be to commit the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. There has to be more to causation than spatiotemporal contiguity and temporal succession. To show that 9/11 was an 'inside job,' however, one has to do a lot more than avoid the fallacy in question. One has to work out the details of a plausible account of who placed the explosives without being detected and who detonated them, and why.
 
I suspect Tony will agree with what I just wrote. Twenty-two years ago I looked into the matter and was unconvinced of the 'truther' allegations. To mollify Tony, I will now make a major concession. We now have a mountain of evidence that Deep State apparatchiki are hard at work in nefarious and lawless ways destroying our republic and "fundamentally transforming" — you know the origin of the phrase — the U.S. into something like the S. U.  These undeniable facts make me more receptive to the 'truther' allegations.
 
The hard Left's takeover of the Democrat Party also explains why the events of 9/11/01 were not taken as an impetus to bring the southern border under control. Uncontrolled illegal immigration without assimilation is a most effective means of bringing a democratic, constitutionally-based republic to its knees. 
 
Orwellian globalists love the word 'democracy,' but please note that what they mean by it is oligarchy. As I have said more than once, the subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.
 
UPDATE 9/13)
 
1) Rod Dreher asks: Was 9/11 a metaphysical event?
I have never gone in my interpretation beyond the conclusion that in some real sense, God had removed His hand from America, and had given us over to our sins, as He had done in ages past with Biblical Israel. Of course I have no proof of that, but if you look at the trajectory of our country since that terrible September day, you will find ample evidence to confirm the thesis.
2) Hugh Murray on 9/11.
 

Notes on Avicenna: Essence, Existence, and Creation

Avicenna-3112421686Time was when the Islamic world could boast world-class philosophers. The Persian Ibn Sina (980-1037 anno domini) was one of them. He is known in the West as Avicenna.  Translated into Latin, his works had a major influence on the philosophy of the 12th and 13th centuries and beyond. De Ente et Essentia of Thomas Aquinas is a well-known text that shows the Persian's influence.  In this entry I will discuss some of Avicenna's  positions in metaphysics as I understand them. My understanding is based on close study of Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, The Paradoxical Structure of Existence. Comments and corrections solicited. That Avicenna anticipates Alexius von Meinong is an idea I arrived at independently. (The exposition of this anticipation belongs in a separate post.)

1) Wilhelmsen credits Avicenna with raising a new question in philosophy: "How is existence related to the order of nature or essence?" (PSE, 40; cf. BSP, 40 ff.) What motivates the new question is the conviction that the world of beings is a world of creatures that owe their existence to a creator. If the Being or existence (esse) of a being (ens) is its being-created-and-sustained-by-God, then there must be a real distinction (distinctio realis) between existence and essence in the creature.  To exist is then not to be the same (Plato) or to be a substance (Aristotle). An existing thing is thus in some way 'composed' of essence and existence. Avicenna thus upholds a real distinction between essence and existence. (Is he the first to do so in the history of philosophy? I'm really asking!)  I myself understand the distinctio realis along the following lines. (Someone who knows Avicenna's texts can comment on how closely my understanding, which is fairly close to that of Aquinas, matches Avicenna's.) 

About anything whatsoever, including God,  we can ask two different questions: What is it? (Quid sit?) and Is it? (An sit?)  In a contingent being (ens), the distinction between what the thing is (wide essence, quiddity) and its existence (esse) is real, meaning that the distinction pertains to the thing (res) itself apart from our modes of considering it. 'Real' in this context does NOT mean that in a contingent existent such as my cat Max Black there are two things, one res being the essence, the other res being the existence. That is supposedly what Giles of Rome held, not what Aquinas or I hold. I am going to assume that Avicenna did not anticipate Giles of Rome.

Analogy: my head and my eyeglasses are really distinct in the Giles-of-Rome way: head and glasses can each exist on its own apart from the other. But the convexity and concavity of a particular lens cannot exist on their own apart from each other. And yet the convexity-concavity distinction is real, not projected by us.  The real distinction that I espouse is like the distinction between the particular convexity and the particular concavity in a particular lens. 'Like,' not 'the same as.' The real distinction between essence and existence in a contingent being such as an optical lens is sui generis: there is no adequate model for it. We acquire some understanding of the sui generis distinction only by analogy from mundane examples. 

2) A second Avicennian innovation is a distinction between modes of Being (esse) or modes of existence, different ways for an item to be or exist.   (That there are different ways of existing or different modes of Being  is a notion fiercely resisted by most contemporary analytic philosophers, but I am of the opinion that the MOB doctrine — to give it a cute name — can be plausibly defended quite apart from Avicenna's particular views. See Holes and Their Mode of Being and the entries in my modes of being category. See also "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds., in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75. One of the dogmas of analysis is that there are no modes of being.) The second innovation presupposes the first, the real distinction. The latter allows us to focus on the existence of the thing without conflating it with its essence or quiddity. We find this conflation in Aristotle for whom there is no difference between an F and an existing F, a man and an existing man, say. For Aristotle, then, there is no difference between Milo and existing Milo. Once one grasps the difference between the existence/existing of Milo and Milo, one can go on to ask how something like Milo exists, in what specific way he exists.  In the case of God and Socrates we surely want to say that God exists necessarily whereas Socrates exists contingently. Now it is not obvious, but it can be plausibly argued that this modal-logical  difference — typically spelled out nowadays in analytic precincts by saying that God exists in all possible worlds whereas Socrates exists in some but not all possible worlds — is rooted in an ontological difference between two ways (modes) of existing.  If that is right, then it is not the case that God and Socrates exist in the same way, pace such luminaries as Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen and their numerous acolytes. (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series #89, 2002, Chapter One, Section 4, "Contingency and Necessity as Modes of Existence," p. 22 f.) Back to the Persian.

3) For Avicenna, there are two modes of existence; there are two ways for one and the same essence/nature to exist/be. The one way is universally in mente; the other is singularly in re. Thus one and the same essence (humanity) exists singularly in the man, Milo, and in the man Socrates, and so on, and universally in the mind of anyone who knows Milo or Socrates or any man to be a man. The first mode could be called esse reale, the second esse intentionale. So if essence is really distinct from existence, then essence is really distinct both from intramental (esse intentionale) existence and extramental existence (esse reale).

4) Given (3), it follows that an essence in  itself is neither mental nor extramental, neither universal (repeatable) nor singular (unrepeatable), neither one nor many, neither abstract nor concrete, neither predicable nor impredicable, and — mirabile dictu — neither existent nor nonexistent. The essence in itself is thus a third item, a tertium quid. (It looks very much like a Meinongian Sosein jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein! But Meinong goes on the 'back burner' for now.)  

In sum, there are two ways for an Avicennian essence or nature to exist: either in things outside the mind, or else in the mind, and one way for an essence to be (not exist), and that is to be absolutely or indifferently, or if you prefer, amphibiously (either on the dry land of the real, or in the water of mind).  It is here that the dialectic becomes tricky and 'aporetic.' For what I take Avicenna to be saying is that the essence or nature absolutely considered, i.e., considered in its neutrality or indifference to both intramental and extramental existence,  is in itself a non-existing mind-independent item.  That is to say: the essence an sich, the essence as a modally indifferent tertium quid, is not an artifact or product of our considering.  Its absoluteness and indifference does not derive from our absolute considering;  our considering is an absolute considering because that which is being considered IS (not exists) absolutely. Get it? 

Now to exist is to be actual, whether in minds or in things. So the essence or nature in itself which exists neither in minds nor in things, is metaphysically prior to actuality and is therefore a pure possibility. "It follows that pure nature is pure possibility for being in some order. Therefore the possible is prior to the actual in an absolute sense." (Wilhelmsen, 41) Gilson puts it like this: in Avicenna's world, "essences always remain, in themselves, pure possibles, and no wonder, since the very essence of essence is possibility." (BSP, 82)

5) It follows from (4) that essentia as pure possibility is no longer internally tied to esse as etymology would suggest inasmuch as essences in themselves are what they are whether or not they exist in either of the two modes in which they exist. Avicenna thus drives a wedge between essence and existence in such a way that existence can only accede to essences and is insofar forth only accidental to them. Existence 'happens' to them while they on their part remain indifferent to existence.  

6) You will recall that for Aristotle, accidents receive their being from (primary) substances (prote ousiai) and are nothing without them.  Thus if A is an Aristotelian accident, then A cannot exist apart from some substance or other, and indeed cannot exist apart from the very substance S of which it happens to be the accident. The Islamic thinker takes the Greek's substance-accident distinction and puts it to use in a highly creative way. Whereas accidents for Aristotle derive their being from the substances of which they are the accidents, the Being (esse) of creatures is reduced by Avicenna to an accident of essences which, in themselves, as pure possibles, are beyond existence and nonexistence.

7) (6) entails interesting consequences for the notion of divine creation.  On an Avicennian scheme, creation is actualization of the merely possible.  If so, God does not create ex nihilo, but ex possibilitate. He doesn't create out of nothing; he creates out of possibles. This does not comport well with divine sovereignty. If God is sovereign, he is sovereign over all orders, including the order of the merely possible.  On the Avicennian scheme God is constrained by the ontologically prior order of mere possibles. He is therefore not free. Or at least he is no free in the libertarian sense of 'free.'

8) We have landed in a curious dialectical predicament.  On the one hand, we need the real distinction to make sense of divine creation ex nihilo.   The pagan philosophers didn't have it or need it, because their systems were not informed by divine revelation.  Aristotle's God is not a creator but merely a prime mover. His primary substances exist just in virtue of being the substances they are. For Aristotle, for a primary substance S of kind K to exist is just for S to be a member of K.  For Socrates to exist is just for Socrates to be a man. Hence there is no need for a real distinction between Socrates and his existence.  On the other hand, the Avicennian scheme, which needs the real distinction, fails to safeguard the absolute sovereignty and freedom of God and fails to capture the radicality of creatio ex nihilo. The reason, again, is that Avicenna's God creates, not out of nothing, but out of possibilities.  He is thus not a creator in the strict sense, but a mere actualizer of mere possibles that ARE independently of his will. (Cf. BSP, 83)

Death as a Boon to the Spiritual

I read the Sufi mystic Rūmī  (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. Here is an entry from my Turkish journal written on Christmas Eve morning, 1995. The following quotation is from The Masnavi.

Death is in reality a boon to the spiritual, and it is only fools who cry, "Would that this world might endure forever, and that there were no such thing as death."

Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam. Our Sufi is making two claims. One is that death is the door to eternal life. The other is that only the fool fails to perceive the profoundly unsatisfactory character of this life. You are not a fool if you deny the first, though you may be wrong; you are a fool if you deny the second. To want to live on indefinitely in this world as it is is a clear indicator of spiritual blindness.

So I say, "Up or out!" What do I mean?

Academic tenure is sometimes described as 'up or out.' You either gain tenure, within a limited probationary period, or you must leave. I tend to think of life like that: either up or out, either promotion to a Higher Life or annihilation. I wouldn't want an indefinitely prolonged stay in this vale of probation.

In plain English: I wouldn't want to live forever in this world. Thus for metaphysical reasons alone I have no interest in cryogenic or cryonic life extension. Up or out!

It would be interesting to delve into some of the issues surrounding cryonics and the trans-humanist fantasies that subserve this hare-brained scheme. The possibilities of fraud and foul play seem endless.  Some controversies reported here.   But for now I will merely note that Alcor is located in Scottsdale, Arizona. The infernal Valle del Sol would not be my first choice for such an operation. One hopes that they have good backup in case of a power outage.