It's about time these establishment types began wising up:
[. . .] Immigration to the U.S., and citizenship itself, should be seen, again, as a privilege, not a right—and assimilation and integration, not multicultural separatism and ethnic and religious chauvinism, should be the goal of the host. We need not single out Muslims in terms of restricting immigration, but we should take a six-month timeout on all would-be immigrants from countries in the Middle East deemed war zones—Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen—not only for our own immediate security but also to send a general message that entrance into the U.S. is a rare and prized opportunity, not simply a cheap and pro forma entitlement.
The inability of Barack Obama and the latest incarnation of Hillary Clinton to utter “radical Islam” or “Islamic terrorism” in connection with Muslims’ murderous killing sprees again is exposed as an utterly bankrupt, deadly, and callous politically correct platitude. Mateen did not learn to hate homosexuals from the American government, popular American culture, or our schools, but rather from radical and likely ISIS-driven Islamic indoctrination. From Iran to Saudi Arabia, the treatment of gays is reprehensible—but largely exempt from Western censure, on the tired theory that in the confused pantheon of -isms and -ologies, multiculturalism trumps human rights.
Finally, the Left will blame guns, not ideology, for the mass murder, forgetting that disarmed soldiers who could not shoot back were slaughtered by Major Hasan, that the Tsarnaev brothers preferred home-cooked explosives to blow up innocents in Boston, that the Oklahoma and UC Merced Islamists did their beheading or stabbing with a knife, and that Mateen likely followed strict gun-registration laws in obtaining his weapons.
Indeed. There is no right to immigrate, and the USA has no obligation to accept subversive elements. We do have a right, however, to demand assimilation. This has definite consequences. If you are a taxi driver you cannot refuse to accept as a fare a person coming out of a liquor store with a closed container of spirits. If you work check out in a supermarket, you cannot refuse to touch a package of bacon. If you refuse, you ought to be fired on the spot. If you want to dress up like a nun of the 1950s, go right ahead, but we had better be able to see your face.
We are tolerant, but not to the point of tolerating the intolerance of Sharia. You must renounce it and accept our values if you wish to live among us.
We are peace-loving, but we are prepared to defend our superior culture against barbarians.
This is a summary of a much longer and more carefully articulated 2009 entry.
Humans possess a natural right to life. This right entails the right to defend one's life. The right to defend one's life entails the right to acquire and possess the appropriate means to the defense of one's life. Appropriate means are means commensurate with one's situation. For example, if the criminal element with which one is likely to come into contact has at its disposal semi-automatic weapons with large capacity magazines, then such weapons figure among the appropriate means to the defense of one's life. So given the right to life, one can easily derive the right to the means of self-defense. Among these means will be various types of hand gun and long gun. Not all types, perhaps, but some. In this way gun rights are derivable from the right to life.
Many are tempted by the thought that nothing ultimately matters, and in some this thought becomes an oppressive mood that paralyzes and renders life unlivable. Leo Tolstoy's "My Confession" is perhaps the best expression of this dark and oppressive nihilism. But the sense that nothing matters contains an insight which is as it were the silver lining of the dark cloud of nihilism.
The insight is that nothing finite is truly satisfactory, worthy of our ultimate concern, or finally real. It is an insight that serves as prophylaxis against the smug self-satisfaction of the worldling and his idolatry of the transient.
The nihilist is closer to God than he thinks, closer than the worldling, and closer than those for whom religion is a palliative and a convenience.
A good blogger exercises restraint as to what he posts. Too much of the merely personal makes for a boring blog. Facebook is the place for narcissism. But a blog bare of all traces of the personal is not a blog either, by my definition, one with which you are free to disagree. Here is an entry from my written journal which illustrates what needn't be published to the four corners of the earth:
The old push broom has been retired from service, 30 years worth, it may well be. The handle had become unrepairably unattached to the brush. I believe I bought the old broom when we purchased our first house 30 years ago in '86. I bought a new 'industrial' broom on Saturday, long-handled and serious, at the Crismon Road Home Despot Depot. I can't wait to try it out.
Neue Besen kehren gut!
Fear not, I shall not report on the state of my bowels, which is excellent, nor pull a Trump and crow about the efficacy of my schlong.
Well, it has come to a nightclub, a homosexual establishment, though it might not be near you. But do you think that this is the last incident of its kind? Bruce Bawer at the excellent City Journal:
On CNN and Fox News, one politician after another professed to be “shocked” by the massacre in Orlando. “Who would have expected such a thing?” people kept asking. Actually, I’ve been expecting just such a thing for years. The only shock was that it took this long for some jihadist to go after a gay establishment.
Islamic law, after all, is crystal clear on homosexuality, though the various schools of sharia prescribe a range of penalties: one calls for death by stoning; another demands that the transgressor be thrown from a high place; a third says to drop a building on him. In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Mauritania, Pakistan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, as well as in parts of Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and Iraq, homosexuality is indeed punishable by death.
Nor do Muslims magically change their views on the subject when they move to the West. [. . .]
Donald Trump has many sound ideas, many more than Hillary does. This is why you should vote for him. One of the sound ideas is that it it would make sense to have a moratorium on Muslim immigration. The trouble with The Donald, however, is that he cannot express his sound ideas properly in a non-incendiary and nuanced way, adding such qualifications as are necessary. So he comes across as a nativist yahoo. But he is still basically right, just as Lindsey Graham is still basically an idiot for denouncing Trump's proposal as "xenophobic." Is Graham a closet leftist? That is the way leftists talk. Anyone with sense knows that there is nothing 'xenophobic' or 'Islamophobic' about carefully vetting Muslim immigrants.
Vote for Hillary and you can expect more Islamist outrages on our soil. In this respect, she is nothing but Obama in drag. Vote for Trump and the chances are good that there will be fewer such outrages.
Don't forget that politics is not about choosing between the good and the bad, but between the better and the worse. You should also realize that not to decide is to decide; in particular, to abstain from our lousy presidential choice is to aid and abet the destructive Hillary.
In response to two recent posts, here and here, Jacques comments:
I'm mostly persuaded by your recent posts about theism and knowledge, but I disagree about your claim that
"Presumably God can prove the existence of God, if he exists, not that he needs to."
Think of your condition 5 ["It is such that all its premises are known to be true."] if you can prove that p then you can derive p from an argument with premises all of which are known to be true. Suppose that God has some argument A for the conclusion that God exists. As you point out, A will either depend on premises taken to be self-evident, or an appeal to the seeming self-evidence of further premises in sub-arguments for the premises in A that are not taken to be self-evident. But now suppose that there's some premise P such that A is a proof of theism for God only if God takes P to be self-evident and P really is self-evident — in other words, only if P is 'objectively' self-evident and not just 'subjectively'. Of course, P might well appear to God to be self-evident; it might even appear to him that the objective self-evidence of P is itself objectively self-evident, and so on ad infinitum. But how could He really know, or be rationally entitled to believe, that P really is self-evident in the relevant sense rather than just seeming that way to Him? Sure, if He already knows that God exists, and that He Himself = God, then He can infer that the fact that P seems to him self-evident entails its real objective self-evidence. But how can He know that unless He can prove that He = God?
BV: The question seems to come down to whether or not the distinction between subjective and objective self-evidence applies to God as well as to us. It does apply to us. But I don't see that it applies to God. God's is an archetypal intellect, which implies that divine knowledge is creative of its object, whereas our knowledge is clearly not. If God knows that p by making it the case that p, then there is no logical gap between subjective and objective self-evidence for God.
On the other hand, it could be that God isn't even capable of proving anything. Maybe proofs are only possible for ignorant thinkers (who don't know directly, by acquaintance all the facts). But if He could prove or try to prove things I suspect His situation would be no better than ours with respect to His existence. Of course that conflicts with the (definitional?) fact of His omniscience, but maybe the conclusion should just be that the traditional concept of the Omni- God is incoherent.
BV: The divine intellect is intuitive, not discursive. God knows directly, not mediately via inferential processes. To know something in the latter way is an inferior way of knowing, and as such inappropriate to the divine intellect. Does it follow that God can't prove anything? I would hesitate to say that given the divine omnipotence: if he wanted to construct a proof he could. The point is that he doesn't need to. But we do need to employ inferential process to articulate and amplify our knowledge both deductively and inductively.
The main question, however, was whether WE can prove the existence of God. My answer to that is in the negative. The reason is due to the nature of proof as set forth in my definition. But perhaps you have a better definition.
This is an addendum to clarify what I said two days ago.
My claim is that we have no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism or of the falsity of naturalism. Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration. A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:
1. It is deductive 2. It is valid in point of logical form 3. It is free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii 4. It is such that all its premises are true 5. It is such that all its premises are known to be true 6. It is such that its conclusion is relevant to its premises.
To illustrate (6). The following argument satisfies all of the conditions except the last and is therefore probatively worthless:
Snow is white ergo Either Obama is president or he is not.
On my use of terms, a demonstrative argument = a probative argument = a proof = a rationally compelling argument. Now clearly there are good arguments (of different sorts) that are not demonstrative, probative, rationally compelling. One type is the strong inductive argument. By definition, no such argument satisfies (1) or (2). A second type is the argument that satisfies all the conditions except (5).
Can one prove the existence of God? That is, can one produce a proof (as above defined) of the existence of God? I don't think so. For how will you satisfy condition (5)? Suppose you give argument A for the existence of God. How do you know that the premises of A are true? By argument? Suppose A has premises P1, P2, P3. Will you give arguments for these premises? Then you need three more arguments, one for each of P1, P2, P3, each of which has its own premises. A vicious infinite regress is in the offing. Needless to say, moving in an argumentative circle is no better.
At some point you will have to invoke self-evidence. You will have to say that, e.g., it is just self-evident that every event has a cause. And you will have to mean objectively self-evident, not just subjectively self-evident. But how can you prove, to yourself or anyone else, that what is subjectively self-evident is objectively self-evident? You can't, at least not with respect to states of affairs transcending your consciousness.
Paging Baron von Muenchhausen.
I conclude that no one can prove the existence of God. But one can reasonably believe that God exists. The same holds for the nonexistence of God. No one can prove the nonexistence of God. But one can reasonably believe that there is no God.
Of course, when I say that no one can prove the existence of God I mean no one of us. Presumably God can prove the existence of God, if he exists, not that he needs to. And when I said above that a probative argument is such that all its premises are known to be true, I meant, as any charitable reader would have assumed, "known by us."
The same goes for naturalism. I cannot prove that there is more to reality than the space-time system and its contents. But I can reasonably believe it. For I have a battery of powerful arguments each of which satisfies conditions (1), (2), (3) and (6) and may even, as far as far as I know, satisfy (4).
"So how is the atheist not irrational on your view, assuming he is apprised of your arguments?"
He is not irrational because none of my arguments are rationally compelling in the sense I supplied, namely, they are not such as to force every competent philosophical practitioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not. Surely it would be foolish to say that atheists, the lot of them, are irrational people.
Either God exists or he does not. But both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable.
To end with a psychological speculation: those who hanker after proofs of God and the soul or the opposite are insufficiently mature to live with doxastic insecurity.
Our life here below is insecure physically, psychologically, socially, economically, and in every way, including doxastically. We need, and sometimes crave, security. Our pursuit of it can be ordinate. For example, the wise make provision for the future by saving and investing, taking care of their health, buying insurance, planning how they will react to certain emergencies, etc. Fools, by contrast, live as if there is no tomorrow. When tomorrow comes, they either perish of their folly or suffer unnecessarily.
But there is also an inordinate pursuit of security. It is impossible in this life totally to secure oneself in any of the ways mentioned, including with respect to belief. One must accept that life is a venture and an adventure across the board.
A very rich and perceptive essay by Charles Kesler.
The following passage illustrates what Keith Burgess-Jackson calls 'academentia':
It’s no coincidence that the two loudest, most consequential socio-political forces in America right now are Political Correctness and Donald Trump. One is at home on college campuses, the other in the world of working people. Yet they are already beginning to collide. At Emory University recently, someone scrawled “Trump 2016” in chalk on steps and sidewalks around the campus. About 50 students swiftly assembled to protest the outrage, shouting, “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” Aghast at “the chalkings,” the university president complied.
At Scripps College, just a few weeks ago, a Mexican-American student awoke to find “#trump2016” written on the whiteboard on her door. The student body president, in a mass email, quickly condemned the “racist incident” and denounced Trump’s hashtag as a symbol of violence and a “testament that racism continues to be an undeniable problem and alarming threat on our campuses.” The student body’s response, apparently, was underwhelming. Shortly the dean of students weighed in with an email of her own, upbraiding students who thought the student body president’s email had been, oh, an overreaction. The dean noted that although Scripps of course respects its students’ First Amendment rights, in this case the “circumstances here are unique.” Note to dean: the circumstances are always unique.
I say: death to political correctness. We need more free speech, and more denunciations of liberal-left evil-doers, not only the termites undermining our institutions, but also the thugs on the streets. Not to mention more of that which backs up free speech.
To theists, I say: go on being theists. You are better off being a theist than not being one. Your position is rationally defensible and the alternatives are rationally rejectable. But don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite. In the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.
About "Don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite," Owen Anderson asks:
How would we know if that claim is itself true? Isn't it is possible that one or the other can indeed be proven?
To formulate my point in the declarative rather than the exhortative mood:
P. Neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God is provable.
How do I know (P) to be true? By reflection on the nature of proof. An argument is a proof if and only if it satisfies all of the following six requirements: it is deductive; valid in point of logical form; free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii; possesses a conclusion that is relevant to the premises; has premises each of which is true; has premises each of which is known to be true.
I say that an argument is a proof if and only it is rationally compelling, or rationally coercive. But an argument needn't be rationally compelling to be a more or less 'good argument,' one that renders its conclusion more or less rationally acceptable.
Now if my definition above gives what we ought to mean by 'proof,' then it is clear that neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God can be proven. Suppose you present a theistic or anti-theistic argument that satisfies the first five requirements. I will then ask how you know that the premises are true. Suppose one of your premises is that change is the conversion of potency into act. That is a plausible thing to maintain, but how do you know that it is true? How do you know that the general-ontological framework within which the proposition acquires its very sense, namely, Aristotelian metaphysics, is tenable? After all, there are alternative ways of understanding change. That there is change is a datum, a Moorean fact, but it would be an obvious mistake to confuse this datum with some theory about it, even if the theory is true. Suppose the theory is true. This still leaves us with the question of how we know it is. Besides, the notions of potency and act, substance and accident, form and matter, and all the rest of the Aristotelian conceptuality are murky and open to question. (For example, the notion of prime matter is a necessary ingredient in an Aristotelian understanding of substantial change, but the notion of materia prima is either incoherent or else not provably coherent.)
To take a second example, suppose I give a cosmological argument the starting point of which is the seemingly innocuous proposition that there are are contingent beings, and go on to argument that this starting point together with some auxiliary premises, entails the existence of God. How do I know that existnece can be predicated of concrete individuals? Great philosophers have denied it. Frege and Russell fanmously held that existence vannot be meaningfully predicated of individuals but only of cncepts and propositional functions. I have rather less famoulsy argued that the 'GFressellina' view' is mstaken, but this is a point of controversy. Furtrhertmore, if existence cannot be meaningfully predicated of individuals, how can individuals be said to exist contingently?
The Appeal to Further Arguments
If you tell me that the premises of your favorite argument can be known to be true on the basis of further arguments that take those premises as their conclusions, then I simply iterate my critical procedure: I run the first five tests above and if your arguments pass those, then I ask how you know that their premises are true. If you appeal to still further arguments, then you embark upon a vicious infinite regress.
The Appeal to Self-Evidence
If you tell me that the premises of your argument are self-evident, then I will point out that your and my subjective self-evidence is unavailing. It is self-evident to me that capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain cases. I'll die in the ditch for that one, and pronounce you morally obtuse to boot for not seeing it. But there are some who are intelligent, well-meaning, and sophisticated to whom this is not self-evident. They will charge with with moral obtuseness. Examples are easily multiplied. What is needed is objective, discussion-stopping, self-evidence. But then, how, in a given case, do you know that your evidence is indeed objective? All you can go on is how things seem to you. If it seems to you that it is is objectively the case that p, that boils down to: it seems to you that, etc., in which case your self-evidence is again merely subjective.
The Appeal to Authority
You may attempt to support the premises of your argument by an appeal to authority. Now many such appeals are justified. We rightly appeal to the authority of gunsmiths, orthopaedic surgeons, actuaries and other experts all the time, and quite sensibly. But such appeals are useless when it comes to PROOF. How do you know that your putative authority really is one, and even if he is, how do you know that he is eight in the present case? How do you know he is not lying to you well he tells you you need a new sere in your semi-auto pistol?
The Appeal to Revelation
This is the ultimate appeal to authority. Necessarily, if God reveals that p, then p! Again, useless for purposes of proof. See Josiah Royce and the Paradox of Revelation.
Move in a Circle?
If your argument falls afoul of petitio principii, that condemns it, and the diameter of the circle doesn't matter. A circle is a circle no matter its diameter.
Am I Setting the Bar Too High?
It seems to me I am setting it exactly where it belongs. After all we are talking about PROOF here and surely only arguments that generate knowledge count as proofs. But if an argument is to generate a known proposition, then its premises must be known, and not merely believed, or believed on good evidence, or assumed, etc.
"But aren't you assuming that knowledge entails certainty, or (if this is different) impossibility of mistake?" Yes I am assuming that. Argument here.
Can I Consistently Claim to Know that (P) is true?
Owen Anderson asked me how I know that (P) is true. I said I know it by reflection on the concept of proof. But that was too quick. Obviously I cannot consistently claim to know that (P) if knowledge entails certainty. For how do I know that my definition captures the essence of proof? How do I know that there is an essence of proof, or any essence of anything? What I want to say, of course, is that it is very reasonable to define 'proof' as I define it — absent some better definition — and that if one does so define it then it is clear that there are very few proofs, and, in particular, that there are no proofs of God or of the opposite.
"But then isn't it is possible that one or the other can indeed be proven?"
Yes, if one operates with a different, less rigorous, definition of 'proof.' But in philosophy we have and maintain high standards. So I say proof is PROOF (a tautological form of words that expresses a non-tautological proposition) and that we shouldn't use the word to refer to arguments that merely render their conclusions rationally acceptable.
Note also that if we retreat from the rationally compelling to the rationally acceptable, then both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable. I suspect that what Owen wants is a knock-down argument for the existence of God. But if that is what he wants, then he wants a proof in my sense of the world. If I am right, that is something very unreasonable to expect.
There is no getting around the need for a decision. In the end, after all the considerations pro et contra, you must decide what you will believe and how you will live.
Life is a venture and an adventure. You cannot live without risk. This is true not only in the material sphere, but also in the realm of ideas.
A strange idea has gained currency recently, namely, that racial differences are invented, that race is a social construct, a theory, indeed a false theory. And so we hear David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy from the University of New England, asserting that "Phenotypic diversity is a fact, but race is a theory."
Self-identify as one and then enter their track and field and other events. This is actually happening and the mommies of the girls are none too pleased. Don't the mommies understand that sex and race are matters of personal decision?
God does what Husserl's transcendental ego wanted to do but couldn't pull off, namely, constitute beings not as mere unities of sense, but as beings, as "independent reals" to borrow a phrase from Josiah Royce. Husserl's transcendental idealism never gets the length of Sein; it reaches only as far as Seinsinn.
This leads us to perhaps the ultimate paradox of divine creation. God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. Lucifer as the father of all perversity.
God creates and sustains, moment by moment, an other mind, like unto his own, made in his image, who is yet radically other in its inwardness and freedom. How is this conceivable?
We are not objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right. How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will?
This is the mystery of divine creation. It is is above my pay grade. And yours too.
God can do it but we can't. We can't even understand how God could do it. A double infirmity.
Saturday marked the 44th anniversary of Angela Davis’s acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. Remember Angela Davis? I asked several of my younger colleagues: No one under 35 had heard of her. But the former Black Panther, recipient of the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize, and two-time vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall, was once a household name. That was enough for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, which last Thursday bestowed on Ms. Davis the 2016 Sackler Center First Award, “honoring women who are first in their fields.”
Previous honorees include the novelist Toni Morrison, Miss Piggy and Anita Hill—pioneers all, no question. Ms. Davis is surely the first person to have parlayed an appearance on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list into a tenured professorship at the University of California.
A massage parlor is given the name Nirvana, the implication being that after a well-executed massage one will be in the eponymous state. This betrays a misunderstanding of Nirvana, no doubt, but that is not the main thing, which is the perverse tendency to attach a religious or spiritual significance to a merely sensuous state of relaxation.
Why can’t the hedonist just enjoy his sensory states without glorifying them? Equivalently, why can’t he admit that there is something beyond him without attempting to drag it down to his level? But no! He wants to have it both ways: he wants both sensuous indulgence and spirituality. He wants sensuality to be a spiritual experience and spirituality to be as easy of access as sensuous enjoyment.
A catalog of currently misused religious terms would have to include ‘heaven,’ ‘seventh heaven,’ ‘hell,’ 'dark night of the soul,' and many others besides.
Take ‘retreat.’ Time was, when one went on a retreat to get away from the world to re-collect oneself, meditating on the state of one's soul and on first and last things. But now one retreats from the world to become even more worldly, to gear up for greater exertions in the realms of business or academe. One retreats from ordinary busy-ness to prepare for even greater busy- ness.
Instead of dropping 'retreat,' which would be the honest thing to do, the secularist drains it of its religious meaning and gives it a worldly one, but without entirely stripping it of its original sense. In this way the secularist can attempt to profit from ancient associations without quitting his secularity.
And then there is ‘spirituality.’ The trendy embrace the term but shun its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my kitchen a while back whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term ‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one.
I didn't lay into the good lady as I perhaps should have, for her 'spiritual' good.
Etymologically, ‘religion’ suggests a binding, a God-man ligature, so to speak. But trendy New Age types don’t want to be bound by anything, or submit to anything. I suggest that this is part of the explanation of the favoring of the S word over the R word. Another part of the explanation is political. To those with a Leftward tilt, ‘religion’ reminds them of the Religious Right whose power strikes them as ominous while that of the Religious Left is no cause for concern.
A third part of the explanation may be that religion is closely allied with morality, while spirituality is often portrayed as beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions. But what often happens in practice in that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it.
One may recall the famous cases of Rajneesh and Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."
This gives new meaning to the phrase 'dharma bum.'
'Theology' is often misused. In the reliably politically correct NYT, we find:
“When you buy gold you’re saying nothing is going to work and everything is going to stay ridiculous,” said Mackin Pulsifer, vice chairman and chief investment officer of Fiduciary Trust International in New York. “There is a fair cohort who believes this in a theological sense, but I believe it’s unreasonable given the history of the United States.”
So to believe something 'in a theological sense' is to believe it unreasonably. It follows that liberals have plenty of 'theological' beliefs. In the 'theology' of a liberal theology can be dismissed unread as irrational.
The Never Hike Alone warning found in most hiking books is not just a piece of CYA boilerplate required by publishers. It is good advice. I have violated it numerous times in unforgiving country in quest of my inner Thoreauvian, but then I am extremely cautious. But I don't go quite as far as Henry David's harsh, "I have no walks to throw away on company." It's a balancing act: the wilderness explorer seeks solitude but he also hopes to return to hike again. A competent partner will raise the probability of that.
The following disclaimer is my favorite, from local author, Ted Tenny, Goldfield Mountain Hikes, p. 4:
The risks of desert hiking include, but are not limited to: heatstroke, heat exhaustion, heat prostration, heat cramps, sunburn, dehydration, flash floods, drowning, freezing, hypothermia, getting lost, getting stranded after dark, falling, tripping, being stung, clawed or bitten by venomous or non-venomous creatures, being scratched or stuck by thorny plants, being struck by lightning, falling rocks, natural or artificial objects falling from the sky, or a comet colliding with the Earth.
Still up for a hike?
If you lose the trail, or have the least doubt that you are still on trail, stop. Do not plunge on. Retrace your steps to where the trail was clear and then proceed. Thus spoke the Sage of the Superstitions.
