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Comments |
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 | Friday, September 26, 2008 at 6:26:35 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Nicholas Provenzo
E-mail: nprovenzo(at)capitalismcenter.org
URL: http://www.capitalismcenter.org
Wow. And I don't mean just a lightweight "wow," I mean a full-on fracken "wow."
If the conservative veneer hasn't come off in the past week and a half enough to shock Objectivists who hold that conservatives are better allies in the defense of freedom because of their benign "sense of life," I don't think that anything will ever shock them and I don't think that they are particularly thoughtful Objectivists. Sentencing a woman to death for abortion is so unjust, so beyond the pale, so utterly irrational that I shudder even at the thought of it. Just who are these conservatives to impose their tenets of their mystic creed upon our lives? I'll say this: they are nobody to me.
I've noticed that there hasn't been any discussion of the late events this in certain, well, FORUMS. Why is that? What is driving this stunning silence? Is it just an accident? Did none of their readers hear about it? Or, is the appalling intellectual bankruptcy of the conservative movement and its benighted aims not a topic of interest?
Inquiring minds want to know. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 7:17:47 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: RT
Also wow.
Just goes to show that "reductio ad absurdum" doesn't work when your opponent is already at "absurdum", and wallowing in it. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 8:09:50 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Thomas Shoebotham
E-mail: tbshoe1927(at)yahoo.com
You have to, reluctantly, give her credit at least for not shying away from the logical consequences of her premises. If abortion is murder, as she claims, then the woman and the doctor have to be considered...well, murderers.
So, just out of curiosity, what were the typical punishments for abortion in states that had restrictive laws prior to Roe v. Wade in 1973? |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 9:09:17 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Ryan Mulkerin
E-mail: rmulkerin(at)gmail.com
"Since 1997 over 400,000 frozen embryos became real live human beings and were given a chance at life"
Are they admitting here that frozen embryos are not "real live human beings"? Of course not, but I found this mistake in phrasing amusing. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 9:32:17 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: Steve Rodgers
I'm going to second Nicholas' notice of a lack of concern over this issue in other FORUMS. Here are a group of people who will tell you that they know Objectivism is winning if a minor character in a soap opera drama has a copy of Atlas Shrugged tilted sideways on the bookshelf of their character's rumpus room, but they take absolutely no note of the Herculean efforts of Objectivist activists to stand against the tyranny that conservatives seek to foist upon a woman's moral right to have an abortion.
It makes me sick, and it makes me realize that it is still much earlier than we think. Bravo to you Dania for the public stand that you have taken in confronting this conservative madness, and shame on the others for their incessant navel-gazing. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 9:47:24 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: Joe Maurone
E-mail: spaceplayer2112(at)hotmail.com
URL: http://superherobabylong.blogspot.com
Thank you Nicholas, and everyone who's stood up for him.
I find this situation hard to talk about because it hits close to home. (No, I did not have an abortion.) My mother gave birth to my brother who has cerebal palsy as a result of a hospital error. He would have been a healthy child, but was in the womb too long without air and suffered severe damage. He is about 12 years old now, and will never walk, talk, and even though is able to express basic emotion, he is almost a vegetable. My mother will have to take care of him for the rest of his life, which is uncertain. That includes feeding him through a tube in his stomach, constantly having a nurse present, late night attendence, and more. While an abortion, in this case, would not have been an option, as he would have been healthy, her life has been changed significantly by this. There was hope in the beginning that his brain, being plastic at that age, would compensate for the damaged areas, it is apparent now that will never happen. Her life is now dedicated to constant care of a child who will never do, say, or be anything more than a being consuming resources. Not to diminish the problems of Down's Syndrome, but at least Sarah Palin's family have the benefit of some kind of interaction with their child. I don't know how she does it, and I know she's been driven to the brink of sanity at times. Yet she feels that God was punishing her for past mistakes. (Whatever mistakes she's made in the past, her debt has been repaid several times over, at this point.) I'd hate to think of euthanasia, I know she would kill anyone who suggested it. (She already accuses people of "blaming this" on my brother; of course, I don't blame him! But I imagine she may have encountered someone with a religious justification for saying that, sadly. But still, the fact that a person can be "condemned", even if it's a chosen duty, through the idea of "punishment" from God, is just barbaric.
Such is the "conservative veneer." |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 10:18:35 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: John Harris
E-mail: John.Harris00 at gmail.com
I have to wonder when the last time that woman took her medication was.
From what I gather, she has an extreme emotional attachment to what she's doing. Wouldn't surprise me if she suffered from depression and 'god' saved her from it.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080924-does-ideology-trump-f ...
Funny how the Facts say that Facts don't matter; even more-so to people like this woman.
Personally, I agree with both Nick and Diana.
John. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 11:00:24 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: mike
E-mail: mike(at)aol.com
and this is suprising? |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 11:23:25 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: Don Kenner
E-mail: dbkenner(at)earthlink.net
Wow. I can't get most Catholics (she must be an RC; a Protestant would not object to the birth control) to agree to the idea of executing a man who whacks out an entire family for his own amusement ("God only allows for mercy"), yet this woman wants to EXECUTE (!) a woman who aborts a first trimester fetus that came courtesy of a gang rape.
This is a civilized blog, so I won't post the many and sundry words that are in my head at the moment. Yeesh. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 12:05:27 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Thomas said, "You have to, reluctantly, give her credit at least for not shying away from the logical consequences of her premises."
In fact, that's precisely the view that I reject. She deserves no credit whatsoever for wholly and consistently embracing evil. That kind of consistency is not a virtue in any way, shape, or form. It's just complete and total vice. Consistency is only a virtue in service of the good, not in the service of evil.
Consider similar examples: North Korea deserves no credit for being more consistent in its rejection of economic freedom than Sweden. A Nazi who reports every Jew he knows, including former friends and associates, deserves not the slightest bit of credit for his total embrace of the consequences of his abstract ideas.
However, in our fight against such evils, such people are useful -- as they show others what the consistent embrace of evil ideas means in practice. But that's a wholly different matter: they deserve no credit for being useful examples of the blackest of evil. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 12:45:35 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: Michael
E-mail: onecalledmichael(at)gmail.com
The implications of such an amendment concern and intrigue me more. Could an assault case then include manslaughter if a mother should abort a 3 week old embryo conceivably as a result of the physical trauma? Could a mother that goes on a crash diet then be charged with criminal negligence causing death should she miscarry? It seems to me that no matter what your beliefs about 'good' or 'evil' that such an amendment can only make matters worse. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 13:08:59 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: Thomas Shoebotham
E-mail: tbshoe1927(at)yahoo.com
Diana:
Let me try to explain the sense in which I give her "credit" for her consistency. It is an impersonal kind of credit, perhaps similar to what you express in your last paragraph.
I believe now that many conservatives do not care to consider the consequences of their advocacy of certain ideas, such as regarding abortion as murder. I well remember when I was a religious conservative (when I was a teenager) asking older conservatives if the position, widely held in the movement, that abortion was murder meant, therefore, that we must then regard the doctor and mother as killers, and treat them both accordingly. It seemed consistent and logical, given the premise, yet most of the conservatives I asked were aghast at that idea. Many of them wanted to prosecute the docter, perhaps, but rarely the woman. Almost none of them wanted to regard a woman who had an abortion (even for what they held as the worst of reasons) as the equivilant of "Pete, the Killer", the thug who murders people on the street for money, say. They regarded abortion as morally wrong, as murder, yet seemed to believe that they could evade the consequences of that position.
The woman you quote above, however, doesn't blanch from those consequences. She understands them, agrees with them, and takes them seriously. She is, in a sense, more honest and open about it. That makes clear what the real nature of the argument is. As you note, such people can be useful (so long as they don't actually get put their ideas into practice, at least on the rest of us.) Like the hard-core environmentalists who openly wish for millions of human deaths, via disease and poverty, while their more moderate brethern try to pretend it isn't so, they show the real life meaning of certain evil ideas, if held consistently. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 13:56:25 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: Nicholas Provenzo
E-mail: nprovenzo(at)capitalismcenter.org
URL: http://www.capitalismcenter.org
Joe Maurone wrote:
>I find this situation hard to talk about because it hits close to home.
Thank you for sharing your story. That is a tough hand to have dealt to you and I extend my deepest sympathy and compassion to you and your family. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 14:16:56 mst
Comment ID: #14
Name: Kyle Haight
E-mail: khaight(at)alumni.ucsd.edu
URL: http://www.leftist.org/haightspeech/
I think I understand where Thomas is coming from. Rand once noted that in a conflict between two positions, clarity benefits the more rational side. I appreciate it when conservatives take their evil ideas seriously and openly acknowledge the consequences that follow from them, because that clarity makes the ideas easier to oppose. Evil thrives on inconsistency. A consistent evil is thus in the process of undermining itself.
This is a tactical benefit in the battle of ideas. When these evil ideas are acted on (as in the case of North Korea), their consistency also makes them a more deadly threat because it makes them more fully anti-life. And certainly the individual who holds an evil idea more consistently does not deserve any kind of moral credit for their consistency -- quite the reverse. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 14:22:13 mst
Comment ID: #15
Name: Nicholas Provenzo
E-mail: nprovenzo(at)capitalismcenter.org
URL: http://www.capitalismcenter.org
I noticed something when I visited Dani's website. She and her husband are normal everyday looking people. In fact, they pretty up rather nice in contrast to your sundry angry leftist who looks like they need a shower, wears a mean t-shirt and smells bad. And I think that's part of the gimmick; Dani probably presents herself like a real nice lady, yet when you peel away that veneer you see a woman who writes things like her view that women who have abortions are guilty of murder and should be put to death for it.
Remember, we are not inferring this from Dani's argument; we are not saying that take her view to its logical conclusion and you have women who have had an abortion up on a capital murder charge. It's Dani's own utterly unvarnished words that indict her. And they underscore the absolute need to defeat the Colorado "personhood" amendment.
If Dani and her allies win here, we lose, and that is all there is to it. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 14:31:02 mst
Comment ID: #16
Name: Jeff Montgomery
URL: http://funwithgravity.blogspot.com
>Yes, abortion should be re-criminalized and punishable by death.
"Wow" was the first word out of *my* mouth. That woman is ready to wear a bomb belt for Christ. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 14:58:37 mst
Comment ID: #17
Name: Mike
E-mail: atlas51184(at)comcast.net
Diana has recommended these two sources before, but I think now would be a good time to re-mention them for the benefit of anyone who hasn't made use of them yet.
(1) The documentary Jesus Camp, easily available through NetFlix. It is a film about a whole community of religious zealot who openly admire the Islamic terrorist who immolate themselves for their god.
(2) Kingdom Coming, a book by Michelle Goldberg, available through Amazon. Used copies are cheap if money is tight. The book gives in-depth documentation of the political wing of Dani's movement. They are thoroughly integrated into the Republican Party, as Goldberg proves. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 16:16:59 mst
Comment ID: #18
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Just FYI, I'm not a huge fan of _Kingdom Coming_. It does have some valuable information in it, particularly about the scarier "bleeding edge" of American fundamentalism, e.g. Christian Reconstructionism. However, I prefer more dispassionate examinations of the facts for such matters -- and for that, I'd mostly recommend _With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America_ by sociologist William Martin. Here's the Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767922573/dianahsieh-20
The DVD of the same title was based on the same sources, but it bears little relationship to the book. I don't really recommend that.
Jesus Camp is definitely worth watching, however. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 16:27:55 mst
Comment ID: #19
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Thomas -- I think that we're in basic agreement. I do think that it's important not to direct any credit to her. She deserves none -- and so often, people think that any beliefs are good, so long as a person really believes and really practices them. That's very, very wrong -- and I think it's important not to support that kind of relativistic approach to philosophy.
Similarly, to say that she's more honest makes the same mistake. Honesty is not mere consistency in your beliefs -- as many people think. It's adherence to reality without any pretense. She fails completely on that virtue -- more so than the person who recoils at the thought of inflicting the death penalty for destroying a fertilized egg. She is as dishonest as a person can be -- just more consistently dishonest than most.
So by all means, say that she's useful or revealing for her explicit, total, and consistent embrace of evil. However, do not give her any credit, nor describe her in any virtuous terms. That's not apt. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 19:06:03 mst
Comment ID: #20
Name: Adam Reed
E-mail: adamreedatalumdotmitdotedu
URL: http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/areed2
Diana,
Thank you for posting this. Together with the hate mail received by Nick Provenzo, it is difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion: the Christianists are fundamentally totalitarian. No different in this respect from the Communists, the National Socialists and the Fascists of the previous century, or from their Islamist contemporaries. Bu the Christianists, unlike the Islamists, are here in America and not mostly overseas. They wear Respectability. One does not even know that the Christianists are totalitarians, unless one takes the time to provoke them into writing and speaking their minds, as Nick and you have, and then to read and to listen to what they think. And one of them is the vice-presidential candidate to a presidential candidate who is in his seventies and in poor health - a probable replacement President. Is any American non-Christianist ready for a government in the hands of a President, who is in the grip of what you just identified as an "explicit, total, and consistent embrace of evil?" |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 19:52:51 mst
Comment ID: #21
Name: OistPostGrad
E-mail: ttcrunch(at)lycos.net
"...the Christianists are fundamentally totalitarian."
But so are the Leftists. The far Left is radicalized. All you need to do is look at very popular Leftist blogs to see just how much. And as for Leftist irrationality, well just look at the 9/11 "Truthers" who are every bit as deluded and hateful as any Christian zealot. I do not deny the threat posed by religion. But we can't whitewash the threat posed by today's "secular" Left. I'm seeing amongst Objectivists either a tendency to offer apologies for the Conservatives or to minimize the danger of the Left because they are "secular." Both approaches are problematic. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 20:23:25 mst
Comment ID: #22
Name: Adam Reed
E-mail: adamreedatalumdotmitdotedu
URL: http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/areed2
OistPostGrad,
Of course, the far Left, that is the Communists - Stalinists, Trotskyites, Castroites, Maoists and so on - are totalitarian. But they are, everywhere in America including the Democratic Party, a disreputable fringe. The left-totalitarians can vote and contribute to political organizations and post to left-wing blogs, but not one of them has been elected to political office, anywhere in America, in the last half-century or so. The Christianists, on the other hand, are Respectable. They elect, and have been elected as, school board members, legislators, Governors of States. Now a Christianist is likely to become the Vice President, and then maybe President, of the United States. There is no symmetry of threat level here, except in fiction. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 20:30:37 mst
Comment ID: #23
Name: OistPostGrad
E-mail: ttcrunch(at)lycos.net
"There is no symmetry of threat level here, except in fiction."
This is an interesting argument. I don't have enough facts to know whether it is true or not. I also think it is one likely to be contested by many Objectivists. I'll keep a lookout for good arguments one way or the other. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 21:19:16 mst
Comment ID: #24
Name: Richard Watts
E-mail: rw1963(at)earthlink.net
"...it is difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion: the Christianists are fundamentally totalitarian. No different in this respect from the Communists, the National Socialists and the Fascists of the previous century, or from their Islamist contemporaries."
Yes, the consistent Christians are a lot like their ideological ancestors in the dark ages who put people to death for heresy and blasphemy. It's only the civilization of others that restrains these people, to the extent they show restraint -- not any decency of their own. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 22:55:18 mst
Comment ID: #25
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
What always strikes me about Christianity is that its practice on earth is simply a reflection of its mythology, which is totalitarian through and through. Consider some aspects:
The law is made by God alone, by decree, and cannot be changed or questioned.
God has the power to do so not because he was chosen, through contract or election or any other version of "consent of the governed," but as a self-appointed ruler; and he may not be removed.
Under God's law, everyone is guilty and deserves punishment.
God observes all the details of everyone's violations of the law, all the time, not through secret police, but through his own omniscience, which goes beyond the dreams of any science fiction writer's dystopia.
At any instant, anyone can be arrested and taken before God for judgment, without warning.
To be accused by God is to be found guilty, and guilt leads to punishment by torture, infinitely prolonged, without even the prospect of escaping by dying.
The only way out is to say, and believe, that that punishment is fully justified, and to plead for God's mercy.
Those who make that plea are recruited into a propaganda corps that spends all its time praising God's justice and love, as shown among other things in his punishment of those who don't take that deal.
How could Stalin, or Louis XIV, or Qin Shihuangdi, or Sargon, have dreamed of any greater power? The Christian God is the worst sort of ancient Near Eastern tyrant expanded beyond human measure, with the same eagerness to be praised and served, and the same anger at any defiance. It's no wonder that people who worship that sort of god want power. |
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 at 23:40:17 mst
Comment ID: #26
Name: OistPostGrad
E-mail: ttcrunch(at)lycos.net
While on the subject of Christianity, how does "Election" work? As I understand it, in some sects like Calvinism, there is total predestination and not even the hint of free will. Why would anyone want to be a Calvin? And how do they know if they are "Elected?" Or is that the real point?
But are there other sects that don't believe in Election and if they don't, how do Christians reconcile free will with an omnipotent, omniscient God? I mean wouldn't an omniscient God know already if any given women chose to have an abortion? Doesn't he have a plan for everything? And if he doesn't, then he is not omniscient. Why worship him? It seems that there are so many things for a Christian to evade that there is no way a true believer can not suffer some psychological damage. That much self deception just can't be healthy. |
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| Saturday, September 27, 2008 at 5:43:03 mst
Comment ID: #27
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
I'm not all that familiar with Calvinist theology, but as I understand it, it says that God will give salvation to anyone who desires it; but you will only desire it if God chooses to make you desire it. So there are many people to whom God does not choose to grant that desire, and then they don't ask for salvation, and they go to Hell. This is not unjust, because damnation is what, in justice, everyone deserves, without exception; and it's not even unmerciful, because God's mercy really does grant salvation to anyone who asks for it. (See Robert Burns's satirical poem "Holy Willie's Prayer" for a quick summary.)
I have the impression it was Calvinist doctrine that you could not know that you were saved; you could only hope and pray that it was so. And you were supposed to do that, anyway, because it was your duty. It was almost an ancestor of Kant's belief in duty as an absolute.
Really, all this goes back to St. Paul. One of his epistles imagines his readers bringing up predestination, and asking, "But why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?" And Paul doesn't explain that they have free will. He takes God's omnipotence as absolute, just as Muhammad did a few centuries later. Instead, he says that as your creator, God has the right to make anything he wants of you, just as the potter has the right to make clay into anything he wantsâ€"there's something along the lines of "if he makes one piece of clay into a flower vase and another into a chamber pot, he's free to do so." The creature can have no rights against its creator. God makes some people sin and refuse salvation because that's the story he's telling. Free will is a later idea, and a difficult one to make sense of, though not quite impossible.
But you worship God because God chose to make you worship him. If you don't have free will, you don't have a choice about it, right? |
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| Saturday, September 27, 2008 at 8:28:55 mst
Comment ID: #28
Name: Richard Watts
E-mail: rw1963(at)earthlink.net
I asked Dani, here: http://www.seculargovernment.us/blog/2008/09/abortion-and-mental-il ... if she thinks adultery should be punishable by death. Here is her answer:
"Richard - Yes, I think adultery should be punishable by death - and so does God BTW!" |
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| Saturday, September 27, 2008 at 10:08:17 mst
Comment ID: #29
Name: OistPostGrad
E-mail: ttcrunch(at)lycos.net
William,
Thank you for your response. It was helpful. But you say this: "Free will is a later idea, and a difficult one to make sense of, though not quite impossible." Do you mean that free will is a later idea for Christians? And do you think Christians have made legitimate arguments defending free will and reconciling it with an omnipotent, omniscient being? I ask because I am not aware of any but my knowledge on this subject is not exhaustive. |
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| Saturday, September 27, 2008 at 10:21:45 mst
Comment ID: #30
Name: Nicholas Provenzo
E-mail: nprovenzo(at)capitalismcenter.org
URL: http://www.capitalismcenter.org
>I'm seeing amongst Objectivists either a tendency to offer apologies for the Conservatives or to minimize the danger of the Left because they are "secular." Both approaches are problematic.
I do neither. My stand is that I abhor the left and do not hold the right as any sort of alternative. Objectivism is the only alternative to the status quo and advancing Objectivism must be our primary goal if we seek to protect ourselves from the depredations the corrupt ideologies dominating America seek to foist upon us.
In practice, this means that I don't engage in endless hand-wringing over whom to vote for, as is the fashion among some. It means that I take stands on issues that demand objective answers. It means that I take stands where I might be able to help differentiate Objectivism from the status quo. It means that don't say that picking right or left is the best way to stay the inevitable catastrophe for a few more years, but that we need not face a catastrophe if we snap out of our stupor and come to embrace reason, egoism and capitalism. |
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| Saturday, September 27, 2008 at 19:33:11 mst
Comment ID: #31
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
OistPostGrad,
To start with the simple question, yes, I do believe that the idea of free will was introduced into Christian doctrine subsequent to Saint Paul. I'm not sufficiently well informed to say exactly when; Saint Augustine seems to have been one of the big inspirations for the Calvinist belief in predestination, so I doubt that it can be attributed to him, but it could have been part of the Pelagian heresy, which he attacked. In any case, Paul himself is quite blunt about divine omnipotence overriding human volition. "But why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?" (Romans 9:19)
As to free will and divine omnipotence, I don't have a rigorous argument offer, but I can suggest an analogy, derived from reading early 20th century Russian theology quite a few years ago.
When a literary character chooses to perform a good or evil act, they are made to do so entirely by the decision of the author to write them that way. All of James Taggart's crimes, for example, took place because Ayn Rand envisioned James Taggart as the sort of man who would act that way, envisioned the specific bad things he would do, and then wrote about his doing them. No character has any power to do anything apart from the power of the author to write about their doing it.
And yet many authors have written about the experience of having a character "come to life" as they are written, and of discovering that they, the author, cannot make the character do certain things. Sometimes characters surprise the author. I believe I have read somewhere that even Ayn Rand, who wrote by conscious design as much as any author who has ever lived, said that the character of the Wet Nurse grew into something that she had not initially planned. In a sense, the character has "free will." How can this happen? It's because the author has formed a concept of the character as having certain values, and in writing, the author projects themself into the character's mind; and the author's subconscious integrates those values and presents the realization that the character would do X and would not do Y, in the form of a narrative about a choice the character would make.
Now, there's a problem with this analogy, which is that it involves the concept of the creative function of the subconscious. But God, being omniscient and capable of being aware of everything at once, cannot be said to have a subconscious. In an old mystical formula, God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose surface is nowhere. I don't know if there's a way to formulate my analogy that would still work for a wholly conscious author. I haven't actually tried to work it out systematically; I've only thought about it idly over time, while thinking more about other issues. You understand, I suppose, that I don't regard a rationally valid Christian theology as either possible or desirable. |
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| Saturday, September 27, 2008 at 19:46:26 mst
Comment ID: #32
Name: OistPostGrad
E-mail: ttcrunch(at)lycos.net
William,
Interesting analogy although I still don't think it works. If humans were like literary figures and God were like an author, humans could still only have what God (the author) gives to them. Its just that the God-author can decide that a particular human should be more developed than he originally thought (as with the Wet Nurse). It still all plays out according to the omniscient God-author's script. So I see no free will. To me free will is totally incompatible with the concept of an omniscient, omnipotent deity which is what the Judeo-Christian God is.
As for free will coming about at the time of Pelagius, there may be something to that. Pelagius seemed to be a little more sane as Christians go. He denied original sin as I understand it. That is why Augustine hated him. But at some point Christians started to make arguments for free will. Arguments which, as I said, must fail.
So today's secularists deny free will and today's religious claim it but can't truly defend it. That only leaves Objectivists. |
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| Saturday, September 27, 2008 at 20:24:17 mst
Comment ID: #33
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
OistPostGrad,
You may well be right. I have not, in my own thoughts, worked out what I would credit as a conclusively rigorous argument either way. My analogy rests on looking at God anthropomorphically, which, in theistic terms, is almost necessarily invalid, but hard to escape if you want to say anything about God that sounds as if it might mean something. When Christians actually talk about God, they almost always do so in anthropomorphic language, perhaps because the purely negative attributes of the God of theology have no actual cognitive or imaginative content. So, at best, I'm offering a story about the fictional character "God." It's not a story that I've ever seen presented by an American Christian, so I would agree that they don't have a valid defense of free will, even supposing my story might be turned into one.
The best single book I've read on Christianity is "The Descent of the Dove," written by Charles Williams, a friend of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Williams was himself a Christian, but he manages to write the history of the church, from a theistic viewpoint, while recognizing the points that, to a non-Christian, are likely to sound absurd or laughable. I never had the slightest inclination to share his theism, but I learned a lot from him about the development of Christian ideas. |
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