Monday, August 01, 2005

Metropolis

The monumental Palace of the Soviets, slated for construction in a starving Soviet Union in the years before the Second World War was the material representation of the ideal of Communism which so captivated Western intellectuals in the 1930s. It was intended by Stalin to be the largest building in the world, constructed for effect on the site of Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was demolished for the purpose in an act of heavy-handed symbolism.

The total height of the building was planned at 415 meters (1365 feet), taller than the Empire State Building, the tallest building at that time. The Palace would have housed several museums, the main and secondary auditoriums, with lower and underground levels given to the traffic handling, storage, and technical equipment. The building was supposed to give an impression of an enormous ladder to the sky. The utilitarian purpose of the building was to house Congresses of Soviets, likely the World Congress of Soviets.

The Palace was only a small part of the proposed reconstruction of Moscow. A display of totalitarian art at a Northwestern University website shows how the building would have looked along a monumental avenue leading to it. The avenue, apparently wider than a football field and many miles long, would shrink trucks and buses into insignificance. Even a zeppelin, itself longer than an ocean liner, is shown hovering the distance no larger in comparison than a hyphen, swallowed up in a cityscape that would have done justice to Coruscant. The Eiffel Tower placed beside it would hardly reach the pedestal of its crowning statue of Lenin which would rise to more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. Stalin's vision was a rival to Hitler's plan to rebuild Berlin on an equally epic scale.  It would not be hard to imagine the Star War's Galactic Senate assembled in Hitler's planned Grosse Hall. There is an air of inhuman evil about these architectural plans. They remind us of a future that never happened despite the efforts of the cleverest intellectuals in Europe. It is a representation of what the capitals of Eurasia would actually have looked like without England's stubborn heroism and America's might.

But the foundations of these huge structures would not in a sense, consist of mighty piles driven into the earth by countless slaves, nor even of the mounds of corpses in concentration camps scattered through the dark forests and grimy little industrial towns of those nightmare empires. Totalitarianism is ultimately founded on an idea; the exact reverse of the notion that all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. How much of this idea still lives on in visions of a new European superstate whose constitution runs to thousands of pages is hard to say. But it is not unfair to assert that the greatest scar inflicted by the totalitarianisms of the 20th century was not on the material landscape, but on the soul of the West. The Communism and Fascism which abolished God and disabused civilization of the sacredness of human life in the name of enlightened progress also destroyed much else. If we are lucky Islam is simply progressing through a Western vacuum that has not yet been filled, stepping over a population still mesmerized by the illusions of the 20th century. If we are unlucky it is coming to build the cities that we ourselves have dreamed, the necropolis over the ruins of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

 

140 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

When you have an educational system that glorifies Plato, Alexander of Macedonia, the Roman Empire, etc etc., this is what you get. You reap from the seeds you sow.

8/01/2005 06:23:00 AM  
Blogger Charles said...

imho the moslems are a late empire phenomenom. They would have taken over europe in the 1500's but for a vast renewal that happened on that continent.

The same elements for renewal in Europe are in place today.

Europe will not go on indefinitely with NO IDEA.

As doug posted yesterday, the french have already begun to deport radical moslem clerics with french citizenship. imho where this will end will be that the french will deport all the moslems from france. imho moslems from the rest of europe will follow.

The great danger to the USA is that these people will come to the USA. This country makes it very easy for euopean nationals to come to the USA without strong visa restrictions--just as saudi arabia had before 911.

Once here --these pissed off eurabians will want to murder this country.

alas this country has no borders.

8/01/2005 06:30:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

Monty,
How are the Pyramids presented in today's PC Colleges, I wonder?
I too marveled in the old days that the profs could apparently see only the greatness of these monuments to human subjugation.

8/01/2005 06:32:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

That's what I was thinking Charles:
We'll look down our noses at the intolerant Europeans.
The better to hasten our cultural suicide.

8/01/2005 06:34:00 AM  
Blogger RWE said...

Perhaps you have hit upon a basic difference between Islamofacism and the Nazi and Soviet varieties. Once the struggle for domination was won, both of the Western facisms envisoned ultimately building huge edifices, monuments to the State and the New Man that was its ideal citizen.
The Islamic Fascists don't seem to envision building anything and the movements' version of the New Man seems to be a creature of stunning ignorance, capable only in comparison to its illiterate and even more cowed females.
If in Orwell's terms, the Western Fascist future vision is one of a jackboot forever stamping on a human face, then for the Islamic Fascists, that stamping foot is barefoot.

8/01/2005 06:36:00 AM  
Blogger Jack said...

I agree with you Charles. The Europeans aren't going to go out with a bang. They may be filled with delusions of Kant, but they're traditionally the world's manic-depressives. They'll react eventually, I can't see either the Germans nor the French giving up their homes to the immigrants they scorn. The question is how late and how violent that reaction will be, if everything continues on present course.

8/01/2005 06:36:00 AM  
Blogger Jack said...

*"The Europeans aren't going to go out with[b]out[/b] a bang.

8/01/2005 06:37:00 AM  
Blogger desert rat said...

Since the time of Ceasar and the Gauls there have been massive migrations and slaughters across Europe. Death tolls in the tens of thousands have been commom place. Just because there has been an imposed 'Peace' for the past sixty years, there is no reason to believe that the current condition will continue indefinately.
Mohammedism is not momolithic, they do present a 'United' front. They have infiltrated their fifth column into Europe piece meal and without an over reaching plan.
Without an armed force to protect their migrants the Mohammedans are at the mercy and good graces of their European hosts.
If Hitler could round up and dispose of millions of Jews and Gypsys, well what's a few Mohammedans. Just ask that Serb, the one that has been on trail in the World Court for the past 4 years or so, Milosevic.

8/01/2005 06:55:00 AM  
Blogger NahnCee said...

If God helps those who help themselves, then I also have to believe that luck's got nothing to do with it, and the side with the most will, the most innovation, and the most energy will overcome.

The only thing I see on the Muslim side of those three things is a will to innovate new ways of killing people. Given that that is also what the Nazi's were good at, I don't think it's a sustainable way to win.

8/01/2005 06:58:00 AM  
Blogger desert rat said...

Breaking news from the Sudan.
The Christian VP from the south of the country, who led an armed Insurgency for the past 20 years, was killed in a helicopter crash.
From USA Today

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — Rioters burned cars and threw stones in Sudan's capital on Monday after a helicopter crash killed the country's vice president, who until recently was a southern rebel leader.
Sudanese leaders appealed for calm and said the nation's peace process would remain on track. But some southern Sudanese said they were suspicious about the circumstances of the death of John Garang, who was a key figure in a fledgling peace deal between the predominantly Arab Muslim government and the Christian south.
... ...Garang's movement and the government vowed to move ahead with the peace process. But the charismatic leader's death strikes a blow to the January peace deal that ended a 21-year civil war between the mostly Muslim north and the Christian and animist south, in which some 2 million people died.

Asked if there were any doubts over the cause of the crash, Garang spokesman Yasser Arman told The Associated Press that the group was awaiting an "intensive investigation to determine the cause."

The crash of Garang's flight brought up the specter of the 1994 downing of the airplane of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, who had been trying to implement a power-sharing deal between his fellow Hutus and the rival Tutsis. His death opened the doors to the Rwandan genocide in which more than 500,000 people were killed.

And this after they snubbed Ms Rice. Those Mohammedans are quite the racists, arn't they

No monuments to the "Power and Glory of Man" on their watch

8/01/2005 07:04:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

And a Muslim killer/innovator compared to his Nazi counterpart is like the little toothpick Government Issue Rocket,
Vanguard,
compared to Von Braun's Apollo.

8/01/2005 07:08:00 AM  
Blogger desert rat said...

The Mohammedans are not world class killers, yet. Granted there is Sudan, but it has taken almost two decades for them to rack up the 2 million dead mentioned in the AP report.
The Mohammedans have put in a pitiful performance against Israel, millions of Jews yet cling to life there. In Kashmir they have been unable to budge the Hindus for decades.
For all our histrionics the Mohammedans still are illiterate Border Bandits, able to recite the Koran by rote, but to stupid to utilize multiple cell phones during escape and evade missions across the face of European.
Even Richard Reid, the famed and convicted terrorist bomber, was unable to light the fuse.
The Federal Judge was right,
these guys really are
No Big Deal

8/01/2005 07:19:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

"...was unable to light the fuse."
---
That's not really fair:
That mean Stew cheated and got involved.
Spoilsport.

8/01/2005 07:36:00 AM  
Blogger Ardsgaine said...

Islam doesn't have to build, because it promises nothing to its followers in this life. All rewards come in the afterlife. If Muslims suffer now in dysfunctional, backwards societies, what is that compared to the rewards they will receive in Paradise?

This is the same sort of thinking that made medieval Europe such a cesspool for so long.

8/01/2005 07:51:00 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Comparing the Soviet building with the Statue of Liberty is telling: one deifies a man, while the other enshrines an ideal, that of liberty.

8/01/2005 08:05:00 AM  
Blogger Annoy Mouse said...

The Idea of State
The Soviets first established totalitarian control and then setout to master industrialism through labor centric principles. But it’s industry would instead be molded to the needs of defense, thus the plow shares of a nation unable to feed itself were bent to the purpose of war, a war that would not be cold if the effects of competing weaponry were not so real.

“it is not unfair to assert that the greatest scar inflicted by the totalitarianisms of the 20th century was not on the material landscape, but on the soul of the West.”

The crucible of the cold war relationship caused a schism of the Western mind that persists to this day. Ironic that modern ideologues would holdfast to the noble purpose of state whose moribund foundations have so thoroughly decayed, like a nostalgic Stalinist still fumbling with the aged and decrepit plans of an idealized state edifice that would never be.

Socialism maintains that it is the highest form of government and so the laws shall be given to us by a man in a black robe. But as Islam has rose to remind us all, in the end, it is men with guns who make the law.

8/01/2005 08:20:00 AM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

Wretchard,

I enter this subject...cautiously...because I do not mean to pervert what you say, or ruffle any feathers of the faithful.

You write: "Totalitarianism is ultimately founded on an idea; the exact reverse of the notion that all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights."

The Aquinas 'natural law' argument is indeed a formidable one. The idea of a teleological universe and a divine law, has, I will admit, done absolute wonders for the spread of decency throughout the scope of human endeavors. A debate, as you know, between Hobbsian 'natural law as a rational flight from fear' and Aquinas' 'natural law as an incident of divine truth,' has been going on for centuries in the West, most notably in the Anglo-Saxon philosophical sphere, with Bentham's twist leading to utilitarianism and legal positivism. I will not enter this debate right now.

I am interested in your distinction between totalitarianism as an idea, and Aquinas' 'natural law' as a divine notion (if this is truly what you have said). But first, a caveat.

I do not want my function as a commenter to be the arrogant philosophy police, especially as I make no claims to expertise or exactitude. Philosophy, however, is a subject that interests me, and I truly believe vast consequences can flow from simple principles, once taken in and embraced. In many ways our conceptual universe can be understood in chaos theory, since its shape is imminently dependant on initial conditions.

It may be, and I claim no certainty either way, that the intellectual posture of our founding fathers--their embrace of Aquinas, Locke, Smith, Bacon, Acton, and Whiggism in general--is truly the best and only one to take, if one is to maximize decency, humanity, and happiness. The posture that looks to the divine for inspiration and guidance, in other words, may be the only one that has the right effect regardless of its factual truth. Perhaps mankind needs the idea of God more than it needs the truth, whatever that is. In fact, an empiricist would look on the success of such ideals and faiths as a posteriori evidence of its fitness.

Hayek warned about fiddling at the bottom without having something in mind to replace what you remove, and I agree. The examples of the 20th century are unambiguous in their warnings of that kind of danger.

And yet, I still pause, because it may be that fiddling at the bottom by moral and social theorists is the least of our worries. The empiricist and mechanist mindset, whether we would have it or not, is sweeping across the moral lattice of Western Civilization through the forward march of science. More and more generations have this mindset 'impressed' from an early age, and the language of Aquinas, Smith, and Jefferson becomes more and more foreign to a youth steeped in experiences that seem to be incompatible.

I am not searching for new 'oughts', for in a way I myself do not believe in them as a priori propositional truths. But I do believe in effects, and I refuse to disregard the evidence all around me of the fundamental decency of your divine notion. If it is the only way, and Western Civ. can only survive by a revival of 'natural law', then so be it and let's get started. But the language barrier, I'm afraid, will continue to grow if we refuse to engage Western Civilizational 'founding doctrine' on the level of ideas. In other words, we may have to advocate 'natural law' from a standpoint of empiricism.

Totalitarianism was a gross perversion of ideas by a cabal of power-worshipping intellectuals, and it was defeated by the spirit of Western morality and decency. It was perhaps our greatest victory. And yet, I am seriously worried that the determinism of 'natural law', while it has served us so well and guided our actions even in the darkest of nights, may leave us helpless against the new threat that even refuses to acknowledge its existence.

More and more Western children choose to follow the norms of Smith and the morality of Christ while rejecting the reasoning of each as it applies to first principles. This adherence to an ethic is due to intellectual inertia, the comfort of belonging, and a lack of intriquing alternatives. What happens when the entropy kicks in? What happens when we look down and discover that there's nothing there?

8/01/2005 08:33:00 AM  
Blogger Annoy Mouse said...

Aristides,
It is precisely then that you will know that you are dead.

8/01/2005 08:48:00 AM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

An example of our new enemy: Relativism.

A relativist is an empiricist waiting to be mugged by reality. If this mindset should become preeminent, our luck will have run out.

8/01/2005 08:52:00 AM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

annoy,

And that gives us urgency.

8/01/2005 08:54:00 AM  
Blogger desert rat said...

If not US, who?
If not now, when?

8/01/2005 10:12:00 AM  
Blogger desert rat said...

While driving I had occasion to listen to NPR.
Enlightening experience.
On the subject of troop withdrawal from Iraq, it was all a Bush move to position Republicans for the '06 election.
The PM of Pakistan was scheduled to come to Washington. He had booked an interview with one of the speakers. The PM cancelled the trip, flooding in Pakistan had killed over 850 people. The Cast at NPR read the PM's announcement that the trip was cancelled, due to the floods, twice, with derisive humor. Granted, at the time of the broadcast I do not believe the death toll had been announced.
I had had enough by that point.

8/01/2005 10:21:00 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Islamists, by nature of what they believe, will stick to doing things in the pre-industrial mode.

Iraq, Iran, Libya, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, etc. -- nothing to see here folks. You can send your pesky overreacting nuclear inspectors back home.

8/01/2005 10:27:00 AM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

Western civ was built on christianity...real christians. ...Look at people like Luther,..These are the salt and light Jesus spoke of. They shaped whole countries with their lives. Or actually, He did thru them.

So luther is a good example of a christian?

here is my personal favorite book by luther:

"On the Jews and Their Lies" - luther recommends that synagogues & schools be burne, homes destroyed, their writings confiscated, rabbis forbidden to teach, travel restricted, lending money be outlawed for them and if they were bitter about this, Luther advised they be exiled.

which gave rise to:


“I do insist on the certainty that sooner or later—once we hold power—Christianity will be overcome and the German church, without a Pope and without the Bible, and Luther, if he could be with us, would give us his blessing.”

ADOLF HITLER
(“Hitler's Speeches”, edited by Professor N. H. Baynes (Oxford, 1942), page 369).

please pick better examples of "christians"

8/01/2005 10:49:00 AM  
Blogger Marcus Aurelius said...

Wretchard states thusly
Totalitarianism is ultimately founded on an idea; the exact reverse of the notion that all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. How much of this idea still lives on in visions of a new European superstate whose constitution runs to thousands of pages is hard to say [emphasis added]

The emphasized portion reminds me something I read in National Review Online not too long ago:
Let me offer one example of the difference between right- and left-wing youth politics. Did you know that conservatives had a "youth movement" all their own in the 1960s? You don't hear too much about it because those who control the commanding heights of the popular culture were involved in the other youth movement. The Left's youth movement, typically, was obsessed with itself. For example, the quintessential statement of the Left's youth movement was the Port Huron Statement. It begins, "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." The authors go on for over 25,000 words, whining about their angst, their worries, their concerns - all of which are rooted less in the merits of their argument and more in the urgency of their feelings. Two years before the Port Huron statement, however, young conservatives gathered to draft the Sharon statement. It begins, "In this time of moral and political crisis, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths." The Sharon Statement, by the way, runs 368 words.[emphasis added]
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200407190837.asp

One side affirming known truths the other side trying baffle with BS. Sounds like the EU constituion.

8/01/2005 10:57:00 AM  
Blogger Annoy Mouse said...

Lex Luther on Radical Islam
“"On the Muslims and Their Lies" – Lex Luther recommends that Mosques & schools be burne, homes destroyed, their writings confiscated, imams forbidden to teach, travel restricted, lending money be outlawed for them and if they were bitter about this, Lex advised they be exiled.”

8/01/2005 11:02:00 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Charles,

This is for you:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FH10Aa01.html

8/01/2005 11:12:00 AM  
Blogger desert rat said...

....Lex Luther...
where's Superman when you need him

8/01/2005 11:13:00 AM  
Blogger Piercello said...

I see totalitarianism more as an attempt to crush individualism in all OTHER people.

8/01/2005 11:24:00 AM  
Blogger Charles said...

pork rinds for allah said...
Western civ was built on christianity...real christians. ...Look at people like Luther,..These are the salt and light Jesus spoke of. They shaped whole countries with their lives. Or actually, He did thru them.

So luther is a good example of a christian?

here is my personal favorite book by luther:

"On the Jews and Their Lies" - luther recommends that synagogues & schools be burne, homes destroyed, their writings confiscated, rabbis forbidden to teach, travel restricted, lending money be outlawed for them and if they were bitter about this, Luther advised they be exiled.

which gave rise to:


“I do insist on the certainty that sooner or later—once we hold power—Christianity will be overcome and the German church, without a Pope and without the Bible, and Luther, if he could be with us, would give us his blessing.”

ADOLF HITLER
(“Hitler's Speeches”, edited by Professor N. H. Baynes (Oxford, 1942), page 369).

please pick better examples of "christians"
///////////////
adolf hitler was a pagan. he killed christians who resisted him.

imho there are not a few jews who have thought that without the madness of hitler, Israel would not be born.

today there are temple builders in Israel who are working to rebuild the temple. they already have all the pieces of the temple and they have bred the red heiffers in preparation for sacrifices there.

currently you can hear a lot of conservative christians in favor of the construction of the temple in Jerusalem because a temple is a prerequisite for the abomination in the temple--and --to christian thinking--the abomination in the temple is a prerequisite for the return of the messiah.

both jews and christians believe that a temple is a prerequisite for the return of the messiah. for the jews it would be the first time. for christians it would be the second time.

imho its not prudent to mix up jewish and christian thinking.

what would be the abomination in the temple. the best SPECULATION that I've heard is from a messianic jewish pastor in my neighborhood who annually goes to israel. He thinks that the abomination in the temple would likely be a statue of a man.

8/01/2005 11:27:00 AM  
Blogger Rick Ballard said...

Aristedes,

Excellent post. Entropy is always kicking in, isn't it? What happens when Judeo/Christian ethics and mores no longer respond to societal stimulus is how I interpret your question.

If I recall correctly, Confucianism and stoicism are both political philosophies independent of supernatural influence. Both provided moral and ethical structures that were adequate for the maintenace of societal cohesion. I would anticipate that in the event that a general renunciation of revelatory theo-philosophical constructs were to occur a new political philosophy might arise that was more firmly grounded in a true understanding of human nature. I don't believe that I would care to live in the era in which such a new structure was put in place but I doubt that I shall.

Truepeers can engage you on this matter far better than I can. I'm still gazing with horror back over the past two centuries of terror and misery occasioned by the last attempt to "find a better way". That and wondering when the "better way" will finally be rooted out of the various systems that are slowly collapsing due to having mischosen their path.

8/01/2005 11:45:00 AM  
Blogger truepeers said...

The posture that looks to the divine for inspiration and guidance, in other words, may be the only one that has the right effect regardless of its factual truth. Perhaps mankind needs the idea of God more than it needs the truth, whatever that is. In fact, an empiricist would look on the success of such ideals and faiths as a posteriori evidence of its fitness.

But there are two kinds of truth, and two kinds of gods. There is the god who is invoked by the pragmatic and scapegoating desire of the group to rid itself of the one who is assumed to have disturbed their peace. And there is a more fundamental anthropologal truth (that would include, e.g., an ontology of the process of scapegoating) and the true god to whom one turns as an alternative to the violent limits of pragmatic truths. Similarly, there is the truth that gets you rich in the marketplace, and the truth that undermines the uncertainty on which the market depends. Revealing the latter kind of thruth destroys one market and creates the need for another. Hence the truth of history.
Similarly there is the truth that you can grasp instantly or intuitively when you find yourself on a suitably charged and meaningful scene of human interaction; and the kind of truth you pursue when you are intellectualy detached from such scenes. Historically, the first kind of truth precedes the latter, and the latter always remains dependent on the former; this is what many detached academic types don't get and so they make idols out of their own abstractions.

The problem of human origins, which is what religion is all about, can be approached scientifically, with logical hypotheses contending to explain the most in the most parsimonious manner. But successful hypotheses in this contest cannot be overly empiricist. There is simply not sufficient surviving material evidence to explain how it was that the transition from animal to self-conscious human occurred. This transition can be explained without recourse to religion, though it must leave some mystery unexplained. In my opinion, the best scientific explanations do it in a manner that is entirely respectful of those who put faith in god in respect to the mystery that remains when science has done its best to explain our origins. Ultimately, the question of whether and how men first created the transcendent source of the sacred that centers human culture, or whether God created man and his sense of sacred being, is irresolvable. (However, the secular, as well as the religious, thinker worthy of his salt will recognize the centrality of the sacred and sacrificial in human affairs - you see even the commies in 1930s Russia implicitly recognized the sacred and the community centred around it, in their godawful architecture. If they had been more explicit or honest about the basis of human faith, they would have been more human...

If you are interested in the maximally scientific approach to the question of faith, one that respects faith and is not lost in mindless empiricism, check out Generative Anthropology at www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu

8/01/2005 11:46:00 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Anybudee,

You said these people are the "salt and light Jesus spoke of". Let me clue in. Jesus was a Jewish Rabbi, before Roman propaganda made him into a demigod. It was people matching Luther's and Augustine's "warts" that caused his horrible murder by crucifixion. We are not living in the dark ages, and you cannot plea ignorance of these things.

8/01/2005 11:47:00 AM  
Blogger truepeers said...

Heh Rick! Synchronicity would be an example of the kind of truth that is primary and on which the other kind of truth depends.

8/01/2005 11:52:00 AM  
Blogger Rick Ballard said...

providence:

God synchronizing the cosmic watch.

8/01/2005 12:00:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Charles,

From the article I linked:

The 18th-century Hassid Levy Isaac of Berdichev wrote of a dream in which he ascended to heaven and saw the authors of the Jewish Talmud surrounded by books in a library. Levy Isaac complained that this was no different from what he saw on Earth. "You are wrong, Levi Isaac," replied an angelic voice; "the sages are not Heaven; rather, Heaven is in the sages."
.
.
.
The Jew is confident in his portion of immortality because he believes the Jews to be an eternal people. Because the Sabbath is a foretaste of the world to come, the observant Jew revels in devotion from Friday evening prayers at synagogue until the concluding ceremony at the next day's dusk. Sin is death; confident in their eternal life, the Jews do not sense the waiting sting of death, that is, what the Christians call original sin, as I have argued elsewhere. The redemption of the Christians lies in the future, when Jesus shall return and establish His Kingdom on Earth; of this blessed event the individual Christian can obtain no more than the briefest glance in the form of the Lord's Supper. Jewish redemption consists simply of being Jewish, and the Jew already spends the seventh day in the World to Come.

8/01/2005 12:01:00 PM  
Blogger truepeers said...

But Rick, a "true understanding of human nature" cannot be substituted for respect for revealed theo-philosophical truths. A true understanding of human nature is in fact dependent on revelation through lived experience, in tandem with one's intellectual or spiritual integration of experiences.

While the mysteries that faith must carry can be minimized in their weight, the burden can never be entirely removed by secular thought. The process of secularization, aka as expanding freedoms, the expanding human universe, is never ending. We can never leave history and its ever unfolding revelation into the nature and never-exhausted historical possibilities of our mysterious origin. The mystery remains in every story we tell. It's what we desire in every story worth our time. We will never lose our taste for it.

8/01/2005 12:06:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Anybudee said: It wasn't the Romans. Jesus proclaimed Himself to be God. So either He was or He lied or He's nuts. Your choice.

Or the Romans attributed these things to Jesus. Your choice.

8/01/2005 12:06:00 PM  
Blogger Rick Ballard said...

Dr. Sanity has written a very good piece in complement with this one. Well worth a look.

8/01/2005 12:12:00 PM  
Blogger Charles said...

PCkilla
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FH10Aa01.html
Yeah I saw the post. Its a good read. On Kant I subscribe to the ditty written on all bathroom walls when I was in college.
Ghengis Khan
Immanual Kant

//////////////////////



Romans 4
Abraham Justified by Faith
1What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather, discovered in this matter? 2If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God. 3What does the Scripture say? "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness."[a]

//////////////////////////
Genesis 15:3-6
3And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir.

4And, behold, the word of the LORD came unto him, saying, This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir.

5And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be.

6And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.

8/01/2005 12:43:00 PM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

truepeers: thanks for the link. While rummaging around there I found something relevant to the current discussion.

Wretchard writes: "There is an air of inhuman evil about these architectural plans."

In an essay at that site, Raoul Eshelman writes: "The performatist narrative doesn't just depict acts of transcendence, it confronts us with an incredible, aesthetically mediated construct which we are challenged to accept as truth. In short, we are made to experience belief as an aesthetic fact."

Is this not totalitarianism? A performance which may endure for quite a while, like Cats, but never meant to last forever?

The architecture is merely incidental. It is the belief that towers overhead that is meant to be imposing.

8/01/2005 12:50:00 PM  
Blogger Rick Ballard said...

Truepeers,

I don't believe that Aristedes shares our ontological precepts. I'm always open to philosophical speculation and I would like to see him expound a thesis. The generative aspect should provide substance for a decent conversation.

8/01/2005 12:51:00 PM  
Blogger Myron said...

Republican Senator Bill Frist screwed Conservatives
Far Right Wing

8/01/2005 01:07:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Anybudee said: Actually, it was our dear Jews who made the attributions - Matt, Mark, Paul, Josephus etc.

Again, it was Roman propagandist that made these attributions. None of the writing attributed to Matt, Mark, Paul, Josephus, none can be relied upon for authenticity. All of these writings have been tampered with. Nothing survived in its original form, and nothing escaped the Roman editor's hand.

And as far as choosing, it make not one iota of a difference. Christian theology remains the same whether Jesus is God, or not. 


8/01/2005 01:14:00 PM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

written: Luther was a perfect example of a christian. Complete with warts. Anti-semitism being his. So are we to define Judaism by all the christian-hating wanks out there? And they ARE out there, aren't they? You'd know better than me.

Please show me any Jewish anti-christian writting that led to similar laws in Jewish countries such as the nuremberg laws.. Luther's may have some good points, however he also was hate filled that his ideas led to the deaths of millions...

....Hitler was no more a christian than Joe Stalin. He said that the conscience was a "Jewish myth". He killed many serious christians - Bonhoffer, ten Boom, etc. You need to lose that tired canard...

I still say Luther led to hitler... doesnt make hitler a christian, it makes luther a terrible role model, like i said, luther is a poor example of a good christian..

....I'll stand by the list. And some of them, like Augustine, were admitted scoundrels! But am I gonna justify all of their actions and stances? Fuggedabowdit! Are YOU gonna defend all of Maimonides?...

Sure, please list the mass murder the rambam inspired... As for "scoundrels" luther was a shit..., dont know the real personas of the others you wrote about, simple human flaws are one thing, luther was far beyond that


...Bad judgements are just proof of humanity. ...

or bad thought process..

...And the need of a savior...

Maybe you need the real messiah?

8/01/2005 01:18:00 PM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

andrew scotia: "But, the dynamic tension between the two may be the real value."

Yes, I agree: the substance of each is insignificant compared to the fact of their existence; Truth is found in the beauty and possibility of their interplay.

If I had to choose, though, I believe Hobbes is closer to what 'is', though I disagree in many particulars (for instance, I don't believe in functionalism, where ethics are rationally chosen; I think the randomizing nature of the universe and evolution play a larger part. I'm a David Hume man on that score). Yet I see the benefits of belief in Christ's morality and Aquinas' natural law, and I wonder if as animating principles they need to be held up as supreme, regardless of the factual nuts and bolts of their claims.

In this sense I can truly understand Kierkegaard's Knight of Infinite Resignation, and his Knight of Faith.

I get the sense that God, as an explanatory thesis, has been exiled to a smaller and smaller sphere of influence since the Renaissance. Science is moving quickly now, and we don't know to what end. Truepeers may be right about the indomitable mystery that lies beneath. But I would hate to live through that particular falsification without another narrative to turn to.

8/01/2005 01:37:00 PM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

andrew scotia,

re: your point on the opponent's disadvantages, you are right on the money.

8/01/2005 01:41:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

Marcus,

Part of the reason totalitarians run on for so long, with tracts in the thousands of pages, is that they must specify everything. They have a fundamental mistrust of the world and an even worse suspicion of the individual's ability to understand its message. All must be spelled out by the Ministry and nothing left to common sense. Totalitarianism prides itself in providing what is already available to everyone and compelling them to be grateful for it.

8/01/2005 01:58:00 PM  
Blogger Dymphna said...

You're right, Wretchard. You catch it exactly:

Part of the reason totalitarians run on for so long, with tracts in the thousands of pages, is that they must specify everything.

Augustine said, "love and do what you will."

How do you think it would fly as the EU constitution?

~D

8/01/2005 02:32:00 PM  
Blogger PresbyPoet said...

pc,
your overly broad:
"None of the writing attributed to Matt, Mark, Paul, Josephus, none can be relied upon for authenticity. All of these writings have been tampered with. Nothing survived in its original form, and nothing escaped the Roman editor's hand.

And as far as choosing, it make not one iota of a difference. Christian theology remains the same whether Jesus is God, or not."

Shows a breathtaking ignorance. We have many more copies of the early Christian writings than any other early Greek writings. We have substantial first century writings, who discuss and quote the Bible writings.
The independent copies we have show an amazing consistency. If you have any evidence for the truth of your statement, it would be front page headlines.

If Jesus is not God, we may as well convert to Islam. It is at the core of orthodox Christianity. (Always excluding heretics from Palo Alto.)

If we are to have honest discussions, please no straw men.

As a seeker of Truth, my model is Thomas, the one they accuse of doubt.

8/01/2005 02:38:00 PM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

Rick: ontology

Basically, I'm an Anthropic principle kind of guy. When the answer's always "Because", you learn to stop asking "Why?" The world exists as it does because it exists as it does, and it is up to us to build systems of representation that will filter and distill as much needed knowledge out of the massive amounts of data as we can to survive.

Philosophers like Heidegger end up boring me, in framing ideas like "disclosure of being in which the being of beings is unconcealed." This effort at an intellectual walking of the dog gave us Clinton's "the meaning of is." It is completely worthless as explanation and description, and does more harm than good by convincing arrogant initiates that they need to tear down our illusions and rebuild the temple. (so I'm not a phenomenologist, existentialist, deconstructionist, etc.)

But I look forward to reading Truepeer's site material.

Longer version here (but not quite complete).

8/01/2005 02:57:00 PM  
Blogger truepeers said...

Aristedes,

Raoul Eshelman is reacting to the condition of postmodernity, a time when it was argued that all esthetic form has a violent aspect that puts its truth claims in doubt. First of all, esthetic production was rightly seen to depend on various forms of (more or less violent) closure necessary for the artistic process to appear meaningful; second, it was claimed that there is something dishonest in the fact that all form has to assert, mythologically, that its significance existed prior to its own construction. In an argument I won't repeat here, postmodernism then wrongly concluded that the esthetic was simply a power play in need of deconstruction by history's holy warriors.

To the extent that postmodernism allowed for esthetic experiments, these were as much about deconstructing their own form as asserting ideas like truth or beauty. The PC "nonviolent" performance was nothing but a hyper-ironic form that was constructed for purposes of its own didactic deconstruction. Old fashioned claims of greatness in art were to be dismissed as white male patriarchal propaganda.

Eshelman claims we are now witnessing a new kind of esthetic performance in response to the nihilism of postmodernism. It is however one in which the esthetic is put in service not of any desire for grandiosity, but in service of a self-conscious human need for spiritual transcendence of worldly conflict, which may be linked in turn to a positive estimation of some forms of sacrifice.

Yes, it is agreed with the postmodernist that if our measure is high romanticism, then the esthetic must today be discounted to the extent that we recognize its questionable dependence on sacrificial mechanisms; but we don't call a violent Superman comic "totalitarian" because it shares in this truth (all know the comic is not meant to be taken too piously - in comparison with, say, Wagner in his day - so it it not, in reality, the danger it may look from a strictly formal reading...)

This inevitable discounting of the esthetic will perhaps lead some to a stricly anesthetic faith - e.g. a strict Judaism - or it will lead us to recognize that a need for art remains but that it must be tempered by a new ethic.

Accordingly, it has been argued that the "post-millennial" (post-pomo) performance is not successful if it hinders you from attempting your own peformance and transcendence on its model. In other words, if the artist's desire is either to deconstruct, or to discover some new intellectual insight through formal experimentation, that, once discovered, leads to glory for the discoverer and ends the race for everyone else, then it is not performatist in the sense Eshelman speaks of. Rather the condition of possibility for his kind of performatism is the hypothesis that there are no more great esthetic experiments to perform. What remains is less an intellectual or political project, as the continuing human spiritual need to continue to figure our self transcendence of worldly woes.

The "performatist" performance is justified because not all of us are capable of simply doing without art, confident in our abilities to succeed pragmatically and spiritually in the economic exchange of strictly material goods, without any recourse to esthetic re-creation. Some of us, most of us, still need art; so how do we get it without falling into the postmodernist crap trap that wants to show us only the violence of all artistic production and lead us to deconstruct all truth claims? Well, we need an art that speaks to the truth of the human need for transcendence by asserting the need to suspend our deconstructing doubts and just have some faith in the process by which we figure our redemption vis a vis the world, a belief we make in the face of postmodern nihilism. If we can just do it, then the art that Eshelmann is talking about has been produced to show us transcendence in a way that inspires, but does not hinder us from doing the same.

Hence the argument you quote: "The performatist narrative doesn't just depict acts of transcendence, it confronts us with an incredible, aesthetically mediated construct which we are challenged to accept as truth [instead of postmodern nihilism]. In short, we are made to experience belief as an aesthetic fact." [just as every story you tell in which you convey the truth of your experiences relies on the esthetic fact that the means by which experience becomes meaningful story cannot be entirely explained, intellectually, but remain something of a mystery, dependent on an act of faith.]

8/01/2005 03:07:00 PM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

And then the Creator gave him syphilis and took away his mind.

Cautionary tale, that.

8/01/2005 04:34:00 PM  
Blogger desert rat said...

C4
the American hiway system, a monument?
Only to commerce and industry

8/01/2005 04:39:00 PM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

C4: "What signs of greatness are manifest in the British Empire? "This nation of shop-keepers." Granted, Hitler admired their Fleet and global reach - but probably had no idea that Britains non-physical monuments formed a true Thousand-Year Reich - his and Stalins - went on the ash heap."

I found it interesting when reading "The Gathering Storm" that Churchill, in his meeting with Ribbentrop in 1938, did not mention British power as their greatest asset. Instead, he warned, "Do not underestimate Britain, she is very clever."

Ribbentrop responded, "Not clever enough."

And how was Britain clever? In convincing other powerful countries to help her advance her own cause. Something to admire, right Cedarford?

8/01/2005 04:44:00 PM  
Blogger Ardsgaine said...

"The Jihadis follow in the totalitarian thread because they also are relativists."

They are absolutists, but those are just two sides of the same coin anyway. The religionist believes in the absolute truth of his religious text. How does he know it to be true? He has faith. Faith is just a feeling, though, so in the end he is no different from the subjectivist who does whatever he likes based on how he feels at the moment. The religionist can morph the interpretation of his text at will, so long as he has faith (feels strongly) that it is the correct interpretation.

There is truth, but it has to be reached by a process of reasoning based on evidence. This is what the absolutist and the relativist both oppose. A whole host of arguments have been invented to "prove" the inefficacy of reason. Kant was, at least, honest about it: "I found I had to deny Reason in order to make room for Faith." Deny it he did, and his intellectual descendants have given us both secular totalitarianism and resurgent theocracy. A plague on both their houses.

8/01/2005 04:59:00 PM  
Blogger Ardsgaine said...

"I believe the philosophical ancestor of Adolf H. is not Luther but Nieszche.(I probably spelled that wrong didn't I?) You know the guy I'm talking about ,the one who prematurely announced the demise of his Creator."

Not Nietzsche (you were close). It goes back to Kant, who spawned Schopenhauer and Hegel, who in turn spawned Marx and Nietszche. Hitler was a product of German Idealism, and each of the above philosophers made his contribution to the mix. (Nietzsche claimed to be reacting against Idealism, but he accepted its basic tenet: that reality is created by the mind. He just rejected the collectivist version of subjectivism in favor of an individualist version.)

8/01/2005 05:14:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

husker_met,

Corbusier was one of the entrants in the design competition for the "Palace of the Soviets". Yes, he would know.

8/01/2005 05:16:00 PM  
Blogger Ardsgaine said...

"Given that most of the ideologues of Marxist-Leninism were jews, I would just ask if the gulag was sufficient."

Au contraire. Marx was ethnically Jewish, but his father had converted to Christianity and Marx was raised in the Christian church. Engels was German. Lenin had a maternal grandfather who was ethnically Jewish but had converted to Orthodox Christianity. Stalin was Georgian...

Communism is just secularized Christianity.

I mean, c'mon. Which religion is more hostile to capitalism? Which religion held communal living as a moral ideal? Which one used to consider it a mortal sin to loan money at interest? Which one had a messiah who never lost his temper except once: to chase the money changers out of the temple?

Hint: It wasn't Judaism.

8/01/2005 05:36:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

trangbang68 said:
Considering genocide and mass casualty attacks to bring blessing makes one an amoral beast without a soul.They must be crushed and ground to powder.


All religion, Franz Rosenzweig argued, responds to man's anxiety in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting, "I can't hear you!"). The pagans of old faced death with the confidence that their race would continue. But tribes and nations anticipate their own extinction just as individuals anticipate their own death, he added: "The love of the nations for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death." Each nation, he wrote, knows that some day other peoples will occupy their lands, and their language and culture will be interred in dusty books.
.
.
Islam seeks to prolong the life of traditional society indefinitely, by extending it through conquest. Islamic expansionism arises from religious motives, that is, a holy rage against the encroachment of death upon traditional society.
.
.
Traditional society will not go mutely to its doom and join the Great Extinction of the Peoples, blotting out ancient cultures and destroying the memory of today's generation. It will not permit the hundreds of millions of Muslims on the threshold of adulthood to pass into the world of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and lose the memory of their ancestors. On the contrary: it will turn the tables upon the corrupt metropolis, and in turn launch a war of conquest against it.
.
.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FH10Aa01.html

8/01/2005 05:38:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

cedarfard said:
The Egyptian monuments were worth it. Just like Apollo. The poorest Fellahdeen onion farmer 8 kilomoters from the Nile knows that HIS people created wonders that the whole world respects, and the people that made them - HIS people - for the last 5,000 years. Enjoy what you see.

It's too bad the Germans didn't have you buttressing their ethnic pride at the Mittelbau mines.

8/01/2005 06:16:00 PM  
Blogger truepeers said...

I mean, c'mon. Which religion is more hostile to capitalism?

Not sure what you mean by capitalism. Lots of peoples are into money (and against it, depending on time and place). Are the Saudi Royals capitalists? Maybe, but not like, say, a Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Gates.

The kind of free or liberalized market we associate with modern capitalism has only existed for about three hundred years and it first emerged in Christian countries. The desire to build the Christian kingdom on earth, or to get as close to it as is possible on earth, the desire that when corrupted and perverted gave us the socialist heresy, must surely also have been behind the urge to push the Christian call to universal reciprocity in the direction of the radicalism that gave us free trade. Even if Jews were the numerical and political equivalent of the Christians in Europe, it's hard to imagine them questioning the established ethical order of their communities to a sufficient extent to bring about modern capitalism. Jews are too patient and conservative in awaiting the Messiah. The fact that many Jews were familiar with money in the pre-modern world, helped them adapt to modern capitalism; but they didn't invent it. The cold war was a battle between two impulses within the Christian west. BTW, did you know Stalin started his career as a seminary student?

8/01/2005 06:20:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

PC, odd combo C4 has there:
One gets folks from earth to moon and back repeatedly w/o a single loss of life, the other the result of eternal walking death for tens of thousands, both great eh?
---
I'll take Apollo, thanks.
Another remarkable near miracle was cleaning up the WTC site w/o a single death.
Got very little attention compared to the magnitude of the accomplishment imo.

8/01/2005 06:34:00 PM  
Blogger Karridine said...

"If Jesus is not God, we may as well convert to Islam. It is at the core of orthodox Christianity."

Uhm, hold on... Jesus was the corporeal human, with a body like every other human, speaking with a voice that every other human could hear.

He HAD to be, so we humans could recognize in Him the Manifestation of God, which show up in His speech.

When Christ returned in the Glory of God, He spent His lifetime leading us 'into all truth' as promised by Jesus.

So before you point blame at Muslims, look at CHRISTIAN clergy, and ask: Do MY clergy engage in the 'damnable heresy' of 'scoffing and denying our lord who redeems us' has returned? (cf. IIPeter2:1)

Because to a dispassionate observer, Christian clergy are doing exactly as Jewish clergy did for Jesus: scoff and deny He could POSSIBLY be the Holy One, from God, move along now, business as usual.

See the pattern?

8/01/2005 06:39:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

Peers,
I heard he ate carrots, also.

8/01/2005 06:40:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

C4, Desert,
Check out this article for comparison of Japan vs USA on eminent domain, highways, airports, etc.

8/01/2005 06:42:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

oops
Narita: An end to a 39-year battle

8/01/2005 06:42:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

OK, Dan,
Now write that as though from the Pen of Mel Brooks.

8/01/2005 06:50:00 PM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

Anybudee said...

Christianity without the deity of Christ?

sounds like an improvement..


...Rinds (seems wrong to refer to a jew as 'pork')

dont mind...

..Given that most of the ideologues of Marxist-Leninism were jews, I would just ask if the gulag was sufficient.

Howard stern, al goldstein, jesus and jerry springer are jews too? Doesnt mean they KNOW anything about "jewish thought...

...As for the Talmud, you don't want to talk about that here...

why not? aint it possible the jews KNEW what thier written instructions meant?

...As for needing the Messiah-

please define messiah... the Jewish original idea or the pagan son of god one... two very different ideas

8/01/2005 06:50:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

(your 6:36 post, of course)

8/01/2005 06:51:00 PM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

c4: The poorest Fellahdeen onion farmer 8 kilomoters from the Nile knows that HIS people created wonders that the whole world respects, and the people that made them - HIS people - for the last 5,000 years. Enjoy what you see.

the only original egyptians are the persecuted coptics, most all of the other "arabs" are recent migrants..

as for the great pyramids.. they are tombstones for the man-god dictators that once lived... death markers..

8/01/2005 07:12:00 PM  
Blogger truepeers said...

Heh don't go telling C4 (the product of C3 PO'd - in a fit, the android blew himself apart and Luke Skywalker tried to prove the Humpty Dumpty thing wrong, but that's another story...)that much of the ME was the most Christian place on earth before the expansion of the Arabian dudes. He'd have to get too clever by two to fit that into the revenge theory of history

8/01/2005 07:22:00 PM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

...This thread is a vindication for Judeo Christian temperance.A low blow here and there,maybe a few theological bridges too far ,a bit of circular reasoning,a couple of questionable dogmas but absolutely no semex,C4(except Cedarford),nail-studded homemade jobs,or other lethal toys.
If any Sunnis or Shiites are tuning in let that be a lesson to you...

"I respect all ethical people inspite of thier stupid childish beliefs, including my own...

that ought to be the slogan for a new america

8/01/2005 07:51:00 PM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

c4: i kid, i kid.

You make good points and have facts. I just can't buy into the vilification of Israel. Particular actions, perhaps, but we are not immune from criticism, either. To me, Israel is right to be tough. If you grow up in a rough neighborhood, you can't act like John Kerry or Jimmy Carter. Kind of like criticizing Eliot Ness, no? For some reason it reminds me of Peter Griffin's crusade to end smoking on the Family Guy:

"Cigarettes killed my father. And raped my mother!"

I.E. Not convincing.

8/01/2005 07:59:00 PM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

...Improvement & pagan son of god -
Won't dignify.

why not? the jewish Messiah was never supposed to be g-d... that's a NEW idea, not a jewish one.. to worship a human, as "g-d" is pagan... Thou shall have no other gods before me....

WWMS - What would Moses say?

Moses would say, man cannot be g-d, period and btw there is no messiah until after his 5 books.


..Talmud - Many instances that would be considered, um, difficult. A few: (no claims on spelling)
Yebamoth 63a, 93a
Abodah Zarali 22a&b, 36b
Menahoth 43b-44a
Sanhedrin 43a, 54b, 57a, 106a
Shabbath 104b, 116a
That's all I'll say about this topic. Please let it go.

proof texting out of context quotes doesnt fly with me....

Which Messiah? - The one that:
Gen 3:15, 12:3, 49:10;
Deut 18:15;
Ps 2, 22, 45:6, 68:18;
Is 2:4, 9:2, 11:10, 52-53, 61:1;
Dan 7:13, 9:25;
Mic 5:2;
Zech 3:8, 6:12, 9:9, 11:12, 12:10,
13:7;
Mal 3:1

Funny again, when you read torah in other versions than the origial, (without the oral torah) and when you bring to torah "pagan" ideas you can find almost anything in it, however when you put those limits that Torah demands BEFORE you try (as an outsider) to read into torah you might be sad to learn there is no Jesus in the torah...

Again, The promised Jewish messiah for the Jewish people to be worshipped, picked and crowned by non-jews? Nope, if you get a kick out jesus great, hope it makes your day go by smoothly, it just doesnt have any historic place to the people who are/wrote the books you so seem to think you know better than 3200 yrs of literate Jewish thought..

8/01/2005 08:12:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

cedarfard,

this is for you:

http://www.iranian.ws/cgi-bin/iran_news/exec/view.cgi/1/719
.
.
Lets take a good look at the fundamentals of Islam, what has Islam brought to us Persians? A Religion of Terror which openly preaches martyrdom & destruction of all Non Muslim's (exact verses of Quran listed on other articles of IPC) lives & property, a prophet who was a thief, bandit, assassin, murderer, rapist, child molester, & most of all a charlatan! The most fanatical, ignorant, superstitious religion which ever existed in the whole world! What is the true legacy of Islam?

Aba: Islamic Cape Amameh: Turban Ghaba: another Islamic cover Hejab: women's covering Chaghchoor: women's head cover Charghad: Islamic Scarf Lachak: Traditional Islamic Scarf Roobandeh: Women's face cover Maghana'eh: Women's specific head cover Chador: Veil Giveh: Islamic shoes Nalein: Islamic Flip Flop Aftabeh: Islamic toilet Pitcher Tonban: Islamic Pajama Quran: A 1500 years old pile of garbage torn paper, creation of a sick evil charlatan's mind called Muhammad the Bandit. Muhammad: the prophet of terror himself, a delusional, epileptic, schizophrenic, pedophile, child molester, murderer, assassin, rapist, assaulter of women, female slave holder, criminal charlatan! and of course, 1400 years full of history of blood, murder & terror, Islamic Style, which we are still involved with it specially during the last 22 & 1/2 years as we know it as the Islamic Republic of Iran! And we are still denying that the true Islam is not what IRI practices or Taliban practices, but the true Islam is beautiful as Roses & holier than the holy! Give yourselves a break & open your eyes & mind & smell the true stench of Islam all around you & not just inside the mosque!

Now I understand your nostalgia for those grotesque man made burial mounds.

8/01/2005 08:20:00 PM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

From Ledeen at NRO:

"The purge within the regime has been accompanied by a ratcheting up of anti-American rhetoric, and by increased public recruitment of suicide terrorism against Americans. Anyone who believes that Iran is seeking some sort of rapprochement with the West should read a recent speech by Safavi, in which he confirmed that the Pasdaran are acting both inside and outside Iran, and that they are preparing to confront Americans on a global scale. At the same time, Safavi announced a huge increase in the ranks of the Basij, the dreaded volunteer force of religious fanatics that specializes in brutalizing democratic-minded common citizens, and women who don't cover every last strand of hair. He proclaimed that the Basijis would grow from 10-15 million (nine million men, six million women). And one of the country's most radical mullahs — Muhammed Yazdi, said to be Ahmadi Nezhad's spiritual guru — publicly called for volunteers for a wave of suicide terrorism, with America and Israel the preferred targets, along with the Iranian people themselves; it is widely believed that some of the suicide terrorists could be deployed against Iranian demonstrators."

We are balancing on the edge of a knife with the Iranians. This is an extremely dangerous situation.

8/01/2005 08:24:00 PM  
Blogger Charles said...

Andrew Scotia said...


Further, there is a very good chance that the single source may be the oral tradition of a pre-literate society using as its base a Syrian Christian religious tract aimed at the very pre-literates who wrote it all down a century or two after they had developed written expression. Worse, they got it all wrong.
//////////////////
I. CONFUSION. By the 2nd century a number of suggestions were being circulated that someone other than Jesus was crucified on Golgotha. According to Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 1.24.4) the gnostic Basilides maintained that Jesus did not suffer. "Rather a certain Simon of Cyrene was compelled to bear his cross for him...and through ignorance and error it was he who was crucified." If this view was in circulation in the 1st century, it may have been one of the reasons why John ignored the Simon tradition and insisted that Jesus carried the cross by himself (pp. 916-17 above). Thomas, whose name John three times explains as "Twin" (11:16; 20:24; 21:2), was confusingly identified in Syriac-speaking Christianity, especially in the Edessa region, with Jude (Judas), one of the four "brothers" of Jesus mentioned in Mark 6:3 and Matt 13:55).

Thus was created the figure of Jude Thomas, the twin brother of Jesus, a portrait popular in Gnostic circles. The idea that Jesus had a look-alike may have been one of the factors that led to the thesis that someone who looked like Jesus was crucified instead of him. A gnostic form of that is the contention that the bodily appearance of Jesus was crucified, but the real Jesus (who was purely spiritual) was not. Cerinthus made the distinction in terms of the earthly Jesus and the heavenly Jesus, for Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 1.26.1) reports Cerinthus' view that Christ descended on Jesus at the baptism and "in the end Christ withdrew again from Jesus -- Jesus suffered and rose again, while Christ remained impassible inasmuch as he was a spiritual being."

In the Nag Hammadi Apocalypse of Peter (VII.81.7-25) we read that Peter saw two figures involved in the crucifixion: Executioners were pounding on the hands and feet of one; the other was up on a tree laughing at what was going on. "The Savior said to me, ' The one whom you saw on the tree, happy and laughing, is the living Jesus; but the one into whose hands they drive the nail is his fleshly part. It is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came to being in his likeness'" The Second Treatise of the Great Seth (VII.51.20-52.3) affirms: "I visited a bodily dwelling. I cast out first the one who was in it, and I went in...He was an earthly man; but I, I am from above the heavens."

The confusion this caused among the unenlightened during the passion was graphically described: "It was another, their father, who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I...It was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder" (VII.56.6-11). The Koran (4.156-57) criticizes the Jews for saying, "We killed the Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah, when they did not kill or crucify him; but he/it was counterfeited [or: a double was substituted] before their eyes.... And certainly they did not kill him."

Islamic apologists have pointed out that Mohammed would have had no trouble accepting the crucifixion of Jesus; therefore the fact that he did not accept it shows he got revelation on the subject from God. But we do not know how much orthodox Christianity Mohammed knew; the Arabian Christianity he was acquainted with probably came from Syria and was heterodox. It may have brought with it the gnostic substitution views described above. (Troger, "Jesus" 217, maintains that certainly the Islamic commentators on the Koran were familiar with gnostic texts.) The suggestion of a counterfeit leads us to another aspect of the approaches that deny to Jesus a death by crucifixion.

http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/a42.htm

8/01/2005 08:46:00 PM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

Cedarford said...
c4: The poorest Fellahdeen onion farmer 8 kilomoters from the Nile knows that HIS people created wonders that the whole world respects, and the people that made them - HIS people - for the last 5,000 years. Enjoy what you see.

Pork for Zionists then claims:
the only original egyptians are the persecuted coptics, most all of the other "arabs" are recent migrants..

Which is the same Zionist lie told about the native Christians and Muslims "cleansed" from their homes in 1948 and 1967 - they are all Arabs from elsewhere.

according to c4 everyone has a right to their homeland cept the "jews", after all they are nothing but a make up fairy tale....

c4: Usually accompanied by the contradictory hoary old lie that it was all "empty desert anyways" that the plucky Zionists made bloom...then lazy Arabs from Arabland moved in to live off the sweat of the Zionists.....

dont worry, those pesky jews will remove thier greenhouses from gaza and give the "palestinians" back thier disputed sand...

c4: Pork for Zionists misses the obvious. In a time when the Zionist lies are well known as debunked lies (outside the USA where our academia and media lag) - maybe it is a good time to shut up about them here.

nope, re you still reading from Abbas's Soviet style info pack the one that says thier were no gas chambers? Face facts C4, the Jews lived in jerusalem before mohammed, before so called palestinians and before christians... I know that pisses you off...

...The Egyptians come from the Hamatic branch of Arab linguistics, their mummies bodies when tested show their direct ancestry to contemporary Egyptians...

please prove this.... just saying it dont prove it...

i still say the coptics are the closest people of ancient egypt

pork: as for the great pyramids.. they are tombstones for the man-god dictators that once lived... death.

c4: It is looking like the pyramids were not done by slaves worked to death - the fanciful tales of Biblical enslavement and imagination of earlier scholars of slaves rampant in Egypt nonwithstanding. No mass grave pits have ever been found near the Pyramids or Valley of the Kings.

still doesnt change the fact that they are tombs....

c4: We all die. Most without leaving a mark or memory that outlasts a generation. Some are lucky enough to be involved in a creative process that nets them eternity.

I have no doubt that the assembled thousands watching the capstone being placed on the Pyramid or the last chisel cut on the God Horus were intensely proud of their work. Each and everyone of them. And their gift was ancient when the Greeks first saw them, ancient when Christianity and then Islam came...and 5,000 years of Feyahdeen have look upon them with pride in their ancestors great feats....

Great Gifts! a tomb! wow, it's the death cult's very 1st home erector set! I personally find the aquafiers in hebron that are 9000 yrs old far more impressive...

8/01/2005 08:57:00 PM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

JNF was established in 1901 to look at ways of ‘greening’ a land covered by swamp and sand. By 1991 the JNF had planted 100 million trees.

that is the jewish national fund...

8/01/2005 09:06:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

"If you grow up in a rough neighborhood, you can't act like John Kerry or Jimmy Carter."
---
Aristedes,
Yeah, but,
If you're Jimmy Carter and your subjects are in a rough neighborhood, you can still act like Jimmy Carter.
...at least until Ronnie takes the Reigns for a change.
(so to speak)

8/01/2005 09:23:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

"their closeness with the Gods to bring the welcome gentle fertilizing floods and rain and lack of infestations to make the crops flourish."
---
C4,
The Pyramids had insecticidal "properties"?

8/01/2005 09:32:00 PM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

C4: Which is the same Zionist lie told about the native Christians and Muslims "cleansed" from their homes in 1948 and 1967 - they are all Arabs from elsewhere.

In 1948 super human jew-god warriors straight from the death camps, armed with the latest weapons of Mass Destruction, marched and drove off the peaceful muslims and christians from that, historic islamic & christian lands... They exclaimed, why do you jew-warriors drive us off from g-d's "holy" land, these "Judaen" Hills are ours they cried, But no, the evil ethnic cleansing jews drove upon these "natives" living in the JUDAEN hills, and that City on the Hill "Jerusalem" to rid it'self of every last christians and moslem in the land...

Once this was accomplished those pesky evil jew-warriors set about and destroyed every christian church and moslem mosque in the land, they made islam and christianity a crime, they forbade land sales to them so that now these tainted, ethnically cleased lands are now, what the good lord, promised "gentile free".. then the years passed, and in 1967 (the year of the jew-jesus) those pesky jew warriors attacked again!!! This time the jews of “satan’s israel” cheated and attacked while the arabs and christians of soon to be conquered lands were all attending a pita making contest... so suprised by these 8 foot tall jew god-like warriors that they fled in haste, thus not finishing thier pita making contest.. they had to eat thier pita flat... The native peoples fled, it was a crime of the century, the jew warriors are being expansionist!!!

8/01/2005 09:36:00 PM  
Blogger Ardsgaine said...

"The kind of free or liberalized market we associate with modern capitalism has only existed for about three hundred years and it first emerged in Christian countries."

To be more exact, it first appeared in England, and it was a direct outgrowth of the political philosophy of John Locke. Yes, Locke was a Christian, but you won't find any precedent for his ideas in the writings of the Church Fathers. You have to go back to the Greeks and Romans for that.

8/01/2005 10:22:00 PM  
Blogger Ardsgaine said...

"But the logic of blaming Luther for Hitler is certainly more tortuous than blaming Judaism for Communism. So ashcan 'em both."

Done.

"As for the idea that Communism is equal to communalism?"

Not in practice, only in the espoused ideal.

"Communism, as played out in Russia and in China currently, is just a scam that allows the ruling elite to live like kings while the common schmoes work (or starve) like dogs."

Neither is a communist country anymore. They've both slipped into fascism.

But the ideal was sincerely held in the beginning. Compare it to the mendicant orders becoming rich in the middle ages. They started out with a certain ideal, but it was corrupted. I would say that in both cases the corruption was inevitable. Organizations with the power to take advantage of the self-sacrifices of others will reward and encourage the less scrupulous. Those with complete conrol over the lives of other people will reward the outright evil.

8/01/2005 10:53:00 PM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

http://www.tentmaker.org/books/MartinLuther-HitlersSpiritualAncestor.html

By

Peter F. Wiener

Author of


GERMAN FOR THE SCIENTIST

GERMAN WITH TEARS

The Nazis themselves claim Luther as their spiritual father. “It was Luther, we must understand, who began to Germanise Christianity; National Socialism must complete the process.” This from Alfred Rosenberg is one of their typical sayings.

“I do insist on the certainty that sooner or later—once we hold power—Christianity will be overcome and the German church, without a Pope and without the Bible, and Luther, if he could be with us, would give us his blessing.”

ADOLF HITLER
(“Hitler's Speeches”, edited by Professor N. H. Baynes (Oxford, 1942), page 369).

“If we wish to find a scapegoat on whose shoulders we may lay the miseries which Germany has brought upon the world—not, perhaps a very scientific way of writing history—I am more and more convinced that the worst evil genius of that country is not Hitler or Bismarck or Frederick the Great, but Martin Luther.”

* * * * *

“There is very little to be said for this coarse and foul-mouthed leader of a revolution. It is a real misfortune for humanity that he appeared just at the crisis in the Christian world. Even our burly Defender of the Faith was not a worse man, and did far less mischief. We must hope that the next swing of the pendulum will put an end to Luther's influence in Germany.”

Very Rev. W. R. Inge,(in the Church of England Newspaper”, August 4, 1944).


“It is easy to see how Luther prepared the way for Hitler.”

The late DR. WILLIAM TEMPLE Archbishop of Canterbury
(“The Archbishop's Conference, Malvern, London, 1941, page 13).

However, long before Hitler there were German Protestant scholars of great standing who analysed aright the part Luther played in the history of Germany. “Lutheranism played an important part in the political and military development of German Prussia,” wrote Prof. Ernst Troeltsch of Heidelberg, early in the present century. “German nationalism plus the Prussian State have made our Reich, and both have their origins in Luther,” said Karl Sell, another pre-Hitler professor.

Since Hitler there have been very many authors who have connected Luther and National Socialism. Edgar Mowrer wrote as early as 1933: “Protestantism means in Germany Lutheranism. All the pet doctrines of Prussianism are found in the writings of the founder, Martin Luther.” And it is only a short time since a book was published by a great French scholar, Professor E. Vermeil, in which it is stated that “Hitler has taken up Luther's ideas.”

But towards the end of the last century things changed. The first man who not only saw Luther in a new light but who also told a deaf world the dangers coming from Germany—Friedrich Nietzsche—was the son of a Lutheran pastor. In his own days Nietzsche was not read even in his own country. Nowadays he is quoted all over the world—but I doubt very much whether he is read. He is accused of having said and taught things which never occurred to him. I cannot enter into Nietzsche's teachings here, but I must utter a warning against quoting, or misquoting, one of the most profound thinkers humanity has ever known without having read him, without having tried to understand his ideas.

Nietzsche's remarks on Luther merely indicated the direction from which the wind was blowing. His voice remained unheard. It was not until 1904 that the Luther-revolution started.

and so much more, please check out the link...

8/01/2005 11:05:00 PM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

"Judaism for Communism. So ashcan 'em both."

and also islam and christianity... blame Judaism for them as well...

it's real simple... if the gentile world would just follow the 7 laws of noah, they would not go off a good path for islam, christianity, communism & more... (unless those paths support the 7 laws)

the true message of torah for the gentile is:

1. BELIEF IN G-D - Do not worship Idols
2. RESPECT G-D AND PRAISE HIM - Do not Blaspheme His Name
3. RESPECT HUMAN LIFE - Do Not Murder
4. RESPECT THE FAMILY - Do Not commit immoral sexual acts
5. RESPECT FOR OTHERS' RIGHTS AND PROPERTY - Do Not steal
6. RESPECT ALL CREATURES - Do Not eat the flesh of an animal while it is still alive
7. CREATION OF A JUDICIAL SYSTEM - Pursue Justice

8/01/2005 11:14:00 PM  
Blogger truepeers said...

ardsgaine,

yes, no doubt, we need to understand the neoclassical culture of post-Renaissance Europe to get at the problem of the cultural basis for modern capitalism. Still, the Jewish contribution to neoclassicism must be considered rather small.

What is the supplement to classicism made by neoclassicism? It is a certain additional awareness of one's presence on the (formerly classical) scene, an awareness that would allow people, for example, to spend a lot of time arguing about the cultural division between Ancients and Moderns; a people who might write plays like Shakespeare, plays that take on the form of scenes within a scene. One could argue for Hamlet being the prototypical figure of the modern capitalist economy: his deferral of violent action in favor of the creation of all kinds of imaginary scenes, is a kind of market-oriented restraint on classical, revenge-oriented, desires, a restraint in service to a new kind of cultural productivity. It is the multiplying of the scenic consciousness that flows from such deferral of worldly rewards that is essential to the growth of capitalism and, eventually, the paradoxical productivity of consumer society. And we need to think of what gave northwest Europe the cultural impetus to multiply the scenes of its civilizational consciousness, for example the multiplying of Christian denominations, or Masonic lodges, or English clubs (of which Belmont is a latter-day incarnation in a new cyberspace), that attended the expansion of commerce in the North Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This expansion required a radicalizing faith, a faith always seeking to transcend itself - to overcome its established institutional limits - by making the marginal Hamlet-like figures into productive centers in their own right. This is what I see Christianity since the Renaissance being all about. I see it as much a secularizing as a strictly religious force. And so it is less the conservative theologians that interest me as Christianity's constant production of nonconformists, since at least the age when the radical idea of imagining the Christian explorer in the classical temple took hold.

8/01/2005 11:27:00 PM  
Blogger Ardsgaine said...

"Kant was the opposite of a relativsit, as was Schopenhauer; a reluctance to state ultimate positive principles does not make one a relativist."

Kant was a subjectivist. He believed that reality is created by the mind. He might have believed that all minds are hard wired to produce exactly the same reality, but there is no way in his system to prove this. One cannot stop the question: "if reality is created by the mind, whose mind creates it?" Are we each walking around in our own personal little reality? Does it take a community of people to create a reality? If so, what kind of community: racial, national, class?

One can see all the subsequent philosophers I named attempting to grapple with that question. Each one had a different answer, but they all accepted that reality is subjective.

"None of these men begat each other: is it Schopenhauer's fault that Nietzsche found his book at 21 and stayed awake all night reading it--and didn't Nietzsche ultimately repudiate Schopenhauer, not least because he thought the "will to a system" was decadent and weak? And Nietzsche as the philosophical precursor of Nazism? Of course the claim is popular, but have you read Nietzsche?"

Yes, I have. Of the ones I mentioned, he's the only one I can stand to read. Ultimately, I disagree with him, but he has some perceptive observations on occasion. And I did not claim that Nietzsche was *the* philosophical precursor of Nazism. There are elements of Nietzsche, but there's much more of Hegel. In general, nazis cherry-picked from the prevailing philosophies, which all happened to be examples of German Idealism.

"About 30% of his writing is dedicated to ranting about the absolutely stupid boorishness of Germans; he defended Jews as often as he symptomatized them, and thought anti-Semitism a dangerous intellectual disease."

That's a superficial disagreement. You realize that it is possible for a German to reject his criticisms of Germans, while accepting his amoralism? The latter is far more fundamental to his philosophy than any rants about the worthlessness of Germans, which might have been read as a deliberate attempt to stir German pride.

If you really wanted to challenge his place in the line of descent, you might have pointed to his derision of Kant's thing-in-itself. To which I would have responded that Nietzsche came down on the side of a personal reality, and considered any suggestion of an objective reality outside personal experience to be decadent. He still accepts the notion of a mind-created reality. He just rejects Kant's postulation of an unknowable reality that is independent of all minds. That's not an important difference.

"Nazis were only "relativists" to the extent that all morality was subordinate the will to power--but that is not relativism, it is positing the primacy of the will to power, which has no intellectual content"

I don't know how you're using the term "relativism", and I'm not interested in a debate about semantics. If you're saying that the nazis used ideas as a pretext for doing whatever they felt like doing, then we agree. Reality was whatever they said it was, whatever they willed. They were subjectivists.

8/01/2005 11:37:00 PM  
Blogger sam said...

This is good:

34. If you were taking a cross-country driving trip, which one of the
following people would you most like to take along? (RANDOMIZE)

All Dem Rep Ind
1. George W. Bush 24% 7% 47% 19%
2. Hillary Clinton 20 37 7 12
3. John McCain 15 13 14 22
4. Rudy Giuliani 15 7 21 18
5. John Kerry 5 12 1 2
6. Ted Kennedy 5 8 2 4
7. (All) 2 2 1 2
8. (Wouldn’t go/None) 8 8 4 14
9. (Other) 2 1 2 3
10. (Don’t know) 5 6 2 5

http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/poll2_072805.pdf

8/02/2005 12:51:00 AM  
Blogger ledger said...

Since this tread has taken a theological turn, let me give a broad out line of why Mohammedans suffer (other then their "we conquer through any means" mentality - from lies, to brainwashing to selling their kids as human bombs). The Bible is basically of two parts: The old testament and the new testament. The old testament is filled with wars. The new testament is filled with hope. Mohammedenism never made it to the new testament. They are stuck in the 7th century. As such there will always be friction between the Cross and the Crescent (sorry about the blunt analysis but I am fatigued and do what to go into endless detail).

Since there seem to be some people well versed in theology let me ask question regarding the writings in the new testament. Who was the disciple that ask Jesus at the last supper who would betray him? It's an interesting question because it appears this disciple made records of Jesus' deeds which may have been the basis for some of books in the new testament (he appears to be a methodical record keeper).

Although, the twelve disciples are named in the Bible I have yet to determine the name of this disciple. Some have said it was John. But, I don't see the evidence (if it was John then the case is closed but I think it was another scribe). Anyone got the answer?

see John 21:20 to 21:24

John chapter 21:

20
Then Peter, turning about, seeth the disciple whom Jesus loved following; which also leaned on his breast at supper, and said, Lord, which is he that betrayeth thee?

23
Then went this saying abroad among the brethren, that that disciple should not die: yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die; but, If I will that he tarry [be kept alive] till I come, what is that to thee?

24
This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true.


see: Ref.

8/02/2005 02:01:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

"What has been found is cemeteries with well-fed people that had joints and muscle attachments that showed hard physical labor was a part of their lives. Contemporary scholars analyzing the remains found have come to believe that these were not slaves but Courvee labor."
---
Did the Pyramid Workers Union dominate the political landscape?

8/02/2005 02:59:00 AM  
Blogger desert rat said...

Actually it was the Priesthood of Pyramid Power that held sway at the time.
Pesky Priests
The head Egyptoiogist, often seen on the Discovery Channel, says the builders of the Pyramids were not slaves. C4 strikes with the more recent revealed truth of that particular matter.
As to the ideological roots of Nazis and Hitler, all this time I thought it was Wagner's Operas.
Oh well

8/02/2005 05:54:00 AM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

The Bible is basically of two parts: The old testament and the new testament. The old testament is filled with wars. The new testament is filled with hope. Mohammedenism never made it to the new testament. They are stuck in the 7th century.

wow..

how about the "bible" has one part - torah which does not allow child sacrifice..., then there is a small additional portion the pagans of 2000 years ago added that re-allows child sacrifice, of g-d

8/02/2005 06:14:00 AM  
Blogger desert rat said...

In the US just 20 million young lives have been sacrificed on the alter of Personal Privacy in just 20 years.
A million a year, makes the Sudanese look tame.
Their Genocide has averaged just 100,000 per year, for twenty years.

C4, I said the Mohammedans are not World Class Killers, I stand by it.
The Armenian Genocide was the work, I have always thought, of the Turks. While the Turkish are many things, I would not consider them to be Arabs. I do not think they see themselves as part of that ethnic group, either.

8/02/2005 06:23:00 AM  
Blogger desert rat said...

These Mohammedans deal death in the micro. They have no Nanking, no Dresdan, no Coventry, no Tokyo or Hiroshimas in their modern histories.
The Mohammedans kill in ones and twos. Sometimes a dozen, rarely a score at a time.
They are Bullies, that is for sure, but Arab Mohammedans will build no monuments to either man or god.
The Border Bandits of Warizstan have been there for eternity and there they will remain. Exiled to their mountain villages, where a fifty year old is an ancient.
The Shia and Sunni will have their day, the outcome there, to determine the future course of Mohammedism. No monuments to man or god will be found.
Our Monuments are to Commerece and Industry. C4 mentioned the Highway System, I'd say our great cities, each with a skyline that rivals the other. The Mohammedans could strike at singular buildings, but the cities and the skylines endure.

8/02/2005 06:38:00 AM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

Newsflash...

from London, a bus is smoking from a "package", streets are closed off and bomb disposal units are arriving as we speak..

The recent declarations from "islamic resistance groups" state that recent attacks were because islamic women have been hasseled...

To solve this issue, i propose the following solution, additional western aid must be provided to islamic women for makeovers, miniskirts, tube tops, makeup and breast implants.. Also portable burka disposal units should be set up with a blue jean exchange...

thus promoting world peace

8/02/2005 07:27:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

WRONG!
Teach the men how to build Pyramids.

8/02/2005 07:40:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

...send the women to Hawaii.

8/02/2005 07:41:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

C4 for Pyramid Renewal Planner?

8/02/2005 07:48:00 AM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

truepeers: "And so it is less the conservative theologians that interest me as Christianity's constant production of nonconformists, since at least the age when the radical idea of imagining the Christian explorer in the classical temple took hold."

For me a more precise term would be "Christendom's production of nonconformists,' which implies that something more than the Faith itself is responsible for such progress. To my way of thinking, the confluence of Ancient and Premodern concepts with the Christian ethos allowed for certain crosspollinations and progressive inquiries that were tolerated, not exclusively by Christian doctrine, but by equally prominent secular institutions. That and the wide amount of historical documentation collected and consumed by Christendom's best and brightest is most likely responsible for the phenomena of nonconformist generation.

This may be what you are saying, but I think it is important to distinguish Christianity's stabilizing morality, as a doctrine, from society's role in tolerating the evolutionary effect of free inquiry,

8/02/2005 08:39:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

ONE, I've seen Dozens at once, chilling.
via Totten, via Dr. Sanity

8/02/2005 08:43:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

Aristedes,
You seem obsessed w/diminishing Christianity's role.
Just mho.

8/02/2005 08:49:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

...but I agree w/2nd part of this statement.
..."from society's role in tolerating the evolutionary effect of free inquiry,"
Influence of Science, thanks to Galileo, Newton, Darwin, et al.

8/02/2005 08:53:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

Harvard, NEA Happy Ghosts Club.
(Dhimmi Larry Summers gives 50 MILLION to FemiNazis!)

8/02/2005 08:58:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

Nice debate about Nomenclature at Totten's.
I like Ledeen's perspective:
Words are a distraction.
(provides historical examples, I will link later)

8/02/2005 09:04:00 AM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

Doug: obsessed in diminishing Christianity's role.

The role of Christianity, to be properly understood, must be separated into several different levels. I am neither obsessed with diminishing its role on one level nor obsessed with exaggerating its role on another.

Christianity's moral precepts are superior insofar as they prescribe certain behaviors and proscribe others. Christ the moral philosopher is unparalleled as a benign force in human interaction, and all of mankind can thank Christian doctrine for the ultimate increase in decency and humanity that we see in the world.

But Christianity as an explanatory thesis just doesn't do it for me. Here is where I mentally diminish its role, not out of desire or ill-will, but out of skepticism. There is nothing in the Book that gives me the breadth and depth of understanding as does, say, quantum mechanics on the nature of the universe.

Nevertheless, at the bottom of reality there is still a nothingness, truepeer's indomitable mystery that cannot be explained away, so I remain open, even hopeful, that such mystery is truly our God, the first mover and the benign force behind it all. If so, there is still hope that death is more than it seems to be.

But that is all besides the point. Christianity is not about God the first mover, but God the protector, God the active player, God the omnipotent, and until a change is brought forth, either externally or internally, so that my skepticism is washed away by incontrovertible fact, I will continue to disregard Genesis and Luke as anything more than what they are: beneficial allegories.

8/02/2005 09:17:00 AM  
Blogger truepeers said...

Aristedes, yes, I suppose if you see institutional Christianity as full of reactionaries or moral conservatives, as it sometimes is, then "Christianity" cannot serve to explain the great historical success of western culture. But that's not to say that the religion that made god a man, or vice versa, that comes closest to articulating or explaining the paradox of how we get divinity from humanity, has not been a profound secularizing force, one carried among the many literate readers of the book, and even by many people who nominally reject Christianity.

Christianity/Christendom is always fighting itself and transcending itself; most generally, that's what it is in human history, even if there are, as you note, conservative voices that try to hold a moral line because they see that their faith has the unhappy tendency to produce heretics who do not always take Christendom in positive secularizing directions but rather mess things up, with ideas like socialism, in their desire to imitate that most radical figure in human history even if it be by rejecting Christ (implicitly, many reject him for not being Christian enough, in the sense that they see his ostensible limits in terms of his worldly representatives in the church). It's a paradox that a "religion" can be a secularizing force, but Christianity conceived in its whole surely is just such a paradox. So we have to stop thinking of "religion" as a generic category and see the major differences among religions. We can argue about whether to say Christianity or Christendom, but what's the point? I'm sorry if I don't fully grasp your distinction because any successful analysis would have to spin many distinctions at once. A successful tradition will be full of creative contradictions.

My question is simply this, where did the values of secular liberalism come from? What allowed our forebears to imagine the modern marketplace as a worldly aproximation of the call to maximize human reciprocity? To some such questions you can find answers in the classical tradition. And to many you must turn to the Bible, which has many books/perspectives I remind you. If you want to know what the BIble knows, that which modern sciences concerned with humanity have yet to approximate in their sophistication, you have to study the kind of anthropology informed by the Judeo-Christian tradition I referred you to yesterday. Maybe the best introduction for you will be Eric Gans' relatively short (though expensive - hope you have library access) book, Science and Faith.

BTW, when I said I was not interested in "conservative theologians", I did not mean that I am uninterested in serious conservative thought - quite the opposite - but rather I meant that those who try to understand history in terms of heroic liberals battling paleocon reactionaries, are missing important ingredients of the story.

8/02/2005 10:27:00 AM  
Blogger Charles said...

pork rinds for allah

“I do insist on the certainty that sooner or later—once we hold power—Christianity will be overcome and the German church, without a Pope and without the Bible, and Luther, if he could be with us, would give us his blessing.”
//////////////////
In the context of this discussion is your point about Luther that southern european catholics/latin americans are more favorably disposed to jewish tribal interests than northern european/protestants.

In the context of your handle is the point about luther that souther european/catholics would be less able to resist--than say northern european/protestestants-- an alliance between Irael and the Islamic world.

8/02/2005 10:28:00 AM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

In the context of this discussion is your point about Luther that southern european catholics/latin americans are more favorably disposed to jewish tribal interests than northern european/protestants.

nope, my ONLy point was to say Luther was not a great role model as "perfect christian"...

In the context of your handle is the point about luther that souther european/catholics would be less able to resist--than say northern european/protestestants-- an alliance between Irael and the Islamic world.

nope....

8/02/2005 10:51:00 AM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

truepeers: Your argument is eloquent, but I remain unconvinced that Christianity itself was a precondition for the type of generation you speak of, at least as a rule that governs reality. It may be so that in our universe that is what happened, but is it what had to happen to reach a similar place of intellectual progress? (Anthropic Principle Alert)

Perhaps this question will elucidate why I am skeptical:

Do you think the propensities that you ascribe to Christianity are inherent in the faith, or simply inherent in humanity in general, when men are given access to a large amount of disparate information? I.E. Is not the ability to create new patterns out of varieties of data just a natural effect of having a higher order consciousness and the freedom to use it?

I ask this because the values of secular liberalism have many origins, some of which predate Christianity.

8/02/2005 11:00:00 AM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

husker: "Christianity, at its root, revolves around the notion that God, through the sacrifice of Christ (the incarnation of God), exonerates us from out inherent failings."

How, again, is this not "God the protector, God the active player, God the omnipotent"? Is he not protecting us from our inherent failings, actively sending his son to earth, and powerful enough to do it?

You are right about one thing, it is about belief.

8/02/2005 11:49:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

This is what I wanted to write all along:
"If, as Wretchard notes, we are lucky, the soul of the West--always questing for meaning and union with the Other to enhance the Self--will resist the lure of yet another totalitarian religious ideology.
Islam will only be a passing attraction
, and the West will realize that they have within their grasp already,
a benevolent, just, and freedom-loving system that can nurture the best within each individual human soul.
"
---
But Dr. Sanity already did.

8/02/2005 03:06:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

...but so far many seem to still try to make the tattered remants of 20th Century Soviet Style Illusions the New Order of the day.

8/02/2005 03:08:00 PM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

husker_met said...
Pork Rinds: Maybe I'm misunderstanding your 6:14 AM post...

I'm not aware of any part in the Torah section (basically contained in the books of Numbers, Leviticus, and part of Exodus) that calls for child sacrifice, and absolutely no place in the New Testament that requires it.

The story of abraham in the torah is not that he wasn't willing to sacrifice his only son, but rather that using a ram INSTEAD of offering his 1st born son, this flies within the world's normal child sacrficing behavior at that time, the lesson is G-d does not want us to kill our "gift" of children in "his/its/her" name...

this lesson is ignored by christianity which then requires "jesus" the perfect sacrifice to be killed for your sins, whether the "killing" sticks or not, the jews dies, the gentile gets salvation thru jesus's suffereing & death (child sacrifice - g-d's only son)

to infer the "old test" is about war and the new test is that of hope is quite insulting... 1st, the "old test" aint the "torah" it may be 99% the same, but that last 1% is a bitch.....

8/02/2005 03:18:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

Husker, au contraire, Jimmy Baker has THE way to the truth and the light.
(His latest and perhaps greatest idea is imitative of Iran's treatment of those two very young gay boys.)

8/02/2005 03:26:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

Hey, Pork,
That's the first time I've been able to learn something from all this high falutin talk.
Thanks.

8/02/2005 03:27:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

I thought all you Jews knew life is a bitch.
...and then you die.
(I knew one that had that on his T-Shirt, so that is the extent of my seriousness here.)

8/02/2005 03:30:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

"1. There is nothing in the Book that gives me the breadth and depth of understanding as does, say, quantum mechanics on the nature of the universe.
---
2. But Christianity as an explanatory thesis just doesn't do it for me. Here is where I mentally diminish its role, not out of desire or ill-will, but out of skepticism.

... How, again, is this not "God the protector, God the active player, God the omnipotent"? Is he not protecting us from our inherent failings, actively sending his son to earth, and powerful enough to do it?
"

---
That sums up the difference pretty well, I think, Aristedes, between your view and mine.
If I grant you that number 2 is off the table, for the sake of argument, the difference remains, as number 1adds exactly ZERO additional understanding at the level I am referring to.
To me good science, whether Evolution, or Quantum Mechanics, does not rest on the illusion that they can provide the ultimate answers to such things.
...But then Garret Hardin had us learn from Morons like Darwin, Malthus, Huxley, et all, not your genius Dawkins. /sarcasm.

8/02/2005 03:48:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

So that's how I see you put an unnecessary burden on Religion, using Science as the "Reason."
...but there is no reason other than our universally (except islamoid types, and C4) held skepticism.

8/02/2005 04:12:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

Husker,
We're waiting for C4's reply on the proposed Saudi Funded, Pyramid Renewal "Projects."

---

25% unemployment in the Kingdom, w/ever more of Black Gold's Gifts going to the kings.
I'd much rather pay C4 to crack the whip on his Wahhabist Buddies.
C4.5,
King of Kings.

8/02/2005 05:09:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

8/02/2005 06:39:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

8/02/2005 06:40:00 PM  
Blogger Towering Barbarian said...

Pork Rinds for Allah,

"Peter F. Wiener

Author of


GERMAN FOR THE SCIENTIST

GERMAN WITH TEARS

The Nazis themselves claim Luther as their spiritual father...[yadda, yadda, yadda!].

So what you're saying is that a random mope named Peter Weiner was in the habit of believing *everything* Nazis say so that means you feel obliged to do so as well? o_O

You may want to either rethink that or else come up with better evidence. :p

Everyone,
I myself am inclined to be cheerful over the fact that the cathedrial that had been demolished had now been reconstructed while the "Palace of the Soviets" never got anywhere. So much for the totalitarian mind. ^_~

8/02/2005 07:22:00 PM  
Blogger truepeers said...

I remain unconvinced that Christianity itself was a precondition for the type of generation you speak of, at least as a rule that governs reality. It may be so that in our universe that is what happened, but is it what had to happen to reach a similar place of intellectual progress?
...
Do you think the propensities that you ascribe to Christianity are inherent in the faith, or simply inherent in humanity in general, when men are given access to a large amount of disparate information?


Sorry I couldn't get back to this sooner. So two quick considerations to end the night: 1)As I understand history, contingency, not necessity, is key to giving it its shape, texture, colour, etc. 2)Yet there is a general rule over and above contingency: history moves in the direction of an expanding human universe, in other words towards greater degrees of freedom in our social systems. THis is not always the case in the short term, but in the long run this clearly is what happens. In the beginning (at the moment we moved from animal to human) there was but one first linguistic sign, one simple ritual to repeat the sign, one name of god, one degree of freedom in the system of human culture. The degrees of freedom in human symbolic consciousness and action have been growing ever since. SOme cultures expand much more quickly than others, for reasons we could go into, but the direction is clearly towards greater freedom.

So, i'd say, on the one hand, much of the world we live in is shaped by the contingent events of Christianity. It was something of a miracle that CHrist was not simply written off by the apostles after the Crucifixion as just another crazy Jew who went too far. The fact that his teaching took hold in their minds and they were able to write the Gospels was a contingent event of profound historical consequence. It's pointless to ask what if it hadn't happened, cause we'll never know. BUt if it hadn't happened, the general rule that history moves in the direction of greater freedom, i.o.w. the all history is a process of secularization, would have led humanity sooner or later down some of the paths we have taken. BUt a lot of things would look a lot different than they do now. If Judaism, say, had played the world historical role of Christianity, somehow moving beyond the tribe so that Jewish culture did not go universal in the name of Christ, but spread along more traditionally Jewish lines, many things would be different today but the underlying tendencies of the Judeo-Christian tradition would have played out somehow. Both Judaism and Christianity are essentially anti-sacrificial religions and in this quite unlike the faiths of hte pagan world.

8/02/2005 10:39:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

"In the beginning (at the moment we moved from animal to human) there was but one first linguistic sign, one simple ritual to repeat the sign, one name of god, one degree of freedom in the system of human culture. The degrees of freedom in human symbolic consciousness and action have been growing ever since"
---

True, and this is mirrored in our individual lives.
Starting off with no freedom and wordless, we slowly take our places as adult humans.
But there is something of which you are not yet aware, our wise young sage:
Then come *the backward years,* until with fans or water running in the same room, husbands and wives are once again reduced to a single word:
Whaaat?

8/02/2005 10:52:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

If you think about the tendency of immigrants from any country in the past coming mostly for economic reasons, and with a willingness to work hard for a better life and etc, in the past later generations often found (at the urging of their parents, their clan, and society) ways to do well w/o working so hard, and in the process assimilating.
Thanks to the evil brew of self hating socialist multicult culture here, and clarion calls of hatred from the "home country" Islamic Choirs, something much different now often occurs.
See below.

. The Myth of Moderate Islam
Could it be that the young men who committed suicide were neither on the fringes of Muslim society in Britain, nor following an eccentric and extremist interpretation of their faith, but rather that they came from the very core of the Muslim community and were motivated by a mainstream interpretation of Islam?

Muslims who migrated to the UK came initially for economic reasons, seeking employment. But over the last 50 years their communities have evolved away from assimilation with the British majority towards the creation of separate and distinct entities, mimicking the communalism of the British Raj. As a Pakistani friend of mine who lives in London said recently, ‘The British gave us all we ever asked for; why should we complain?’ British Muslims now have Sharia in areas of finance and mortgages; halal food in schools, hospitals and prisons; faith schools funded by the state; prayer rooms in every police station in London; and much more. This process has been assisted by the British government through its philosophy of multiculturalism, which has allowed some Muslims to consolidate and create a parallel society in the UK.

The Muslim community now inhabits principally the urban centres of England as well as some parts of Scotland and Wales. It forms a spine running down the centre of England from Bradford to London, with ribs extending east and west. It is said that within 10 to 15 years most British cities in these areas will have Muslim-majority populations, and will be under local Islamic political control, with the Muslim community living under Sharia.
.Hat Tip, Poster at Dr. Sanity's

8/02/2005 11:17:00 PM  
Blogger truepeers said...

Doug, what about the use it or lose it theory?

Anyway, "whaaat?" supposes someone already pointing out, or asking for something. So it looks to me that you end up with at least two words. or two people with one word each in conversation. either way it's a 100% improvement! (In contrast Maaa! is a call for mom who may send a word in return, or not, as the case may be. The common frustration of the infant is getting stuck on the 1st degree.)

8/02/2005 11:47:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

"So it looks to me that you end up with at least two words. or two people with one word each in conversation. "
Ha,
You found the origin of my post:
"Explaining" things to the wife, I came up with another of my crummy jokes starting with,
"...there was the word"
and explained to her how very important the development of speech was, since before that everyone just stumbled about uttering "what!"
(you have to be old to think it's funny.)

8/03/2005 12:01:00 AM  
Blogger Doug said...

"For the government, the time has come to accept Trevor Phillips’s statement that multiculturalism is dead.
We need to rediscover and affirm a common British identity.
This would impinge heavily on the future development of faith schools, which should now be stopped."

8/03/2005 12:04:00 AM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

truepeers: "The fact that his teaching took hold in their minds and they were able to write the Gospels was a contingent event of profound historical consequence."

I think, after reading your post, that we are not so very different in our understanding afterall. When I look at the evolution of society, I look at the system as a whole, at the properties of the system, and to me they seem to have been built haphazardly from the ground up in fits and starts, through a process of random mutation and competitive selection, not just in the ecosystem, but in each individual mind as human beings hear of new ideas and embrace them.

But, more than the properties of the system itself, we also have an historical record of the substance of the system, and it is apparent that we are where we are because of what has come before, that events in the past were never inevitable, but once they manifested themselves out of the ocean of probability they became our history, our universe.

So, in that sense Christianity was necessary a posteriori, for it was the single largest player ideologically for the past 2000 years. Without Christianity there are no guarantees that the West would even resemble the decent and prosperous one we have today.

I still hold to the belief that the unique conceptual material available in places like Athens and Thebes that were later passed on were also very necessary, if only as an example of separate schools of thought. And I still hold to the belief that Christ's greatest lasting effect was his message of morality, though the stabilizing effect of the Catholic church was surely a significant and beneficial penumbra of Christ's teachings.

In the end, I am uncomfortable ascribing noticeable effects in the 21st century to complex specific causes that came about millenia earlier. For me, as an analyst of the system, it is enough to accept how the system works without trying to search for specific causal links. I think the system is too complex.

When you think about the randomness of Christ the man and how he was never inevitable; when you ponder the near impossibility of spreading his message under such circumstances; when you try to understand the unexplained willingness of adherents to die for beliefs they had learned in adulthood, and then when you look at the immensity of the effects that have followed from all this, it leaves you with a deep appreciation for the complexity of the system, and in awe of our luck. If I didn't know better, it could make me religious.

8/03/2005 08:46:00 AM  
Blogger truepeers said...

Aristedes,

There are a lot of "causes" in history. But most of them are second order. At base, what causes human history, what gives us our sense of historicity, is the *ethical* nature of our conscious humanity. We love and we resent and then we politic and build technologies and respond to environmental contexts, etc. In a sense, a famine "causes" historical change - it may wipe a society out(or provide an opportunity). But only the ethical can build up a society in the first place, whatever the natural bounty available to those involved. When comparing two places, it may seem that the environment may hinder ethical evolution in certain ways in one or both places, but how germane is such an observation to the idea of causality in human affairs? At least, there must be different kinds of causes. The biological riches of our planet are sufficient to bring about humanity but they don't explain it; we surely first emerged from the animal world as conscious humans because of some radical *necessity*, not some benign possibility.

When I look at the evolution of society, I look at the system as a whole, at the properties of the system, and to me they seem to have been built haphazardly from the ground up in fits and starts, through a process of random mutation and competitive selection, not just in the ecosystem, but in each individual mind as human beings hear of new ideas and embrace them.

-no doubt there is a process of cultural evolution, but how appropriate are the terms applied to biological evolution in describing it? If cultural evolution is rooted in the ethical, then our ideas must respond to the dynamics of love and resentment, freedom and equality. Because we are responding to what has come before, how "random" is the process of ethical selection? No doubt creativity is something of a mystery, and yet it involves more than shots in the dark, or random physical fluctuations later proven, or not, through some selection process; cultural evolution requires on behalf of its agents a learned understanding, at least on some intuitive level, of the nature of humanity. But yes, we surely do select new ethics and esthetics, or as is often the case fail to select, under the influence of competitive pressures. But what, most basically, are competing are not genes, or individuals, or even families, but self-conscious societies. True, I am more likely to sacrifice for my brother's family than for yours; but in the final analysis, I am hopefully willing to sacrifice myself for the cultural tradition of which I am a part, if need be. In other words, I am moved by family but also by the ethics underpinning my democracy, nationhood, and other cultural traditions. And if the life of the latter were on the line, I hope I would not put my family first. AMong others, Christ could be something of a model for me in finding the courage to do this.

I still hold to the belief that the unique conceptual material available in places like Athens and Thebes that were later passed on were also very necessary, if only as an example of separate schools of thought. And I still hold to the belief that Christ's greatest lasting effect was his message of morality, though the stabilizing effect of the Catholic church was surely a significant and beneficial penumbra of Christ's teachings.

-see my comments on neoclassicism, above. As for Christ and morality, yes, but consider that the very essence of monotheism since Moses has been to distinguish the moral from the ethical (a distinction that was not previously possible). In other words, monotheism distinguishes one's moral conversation with God regarding universal truths and imperatives, from your ethical conversation with your fellow men that is shaped by historically shifting contingencies and is relative to the realities of time and place. Christ brings new moral ideas into the relationship of men to divinity, and to some extent (but in this world we can never go all the way without creating heresies like socialism) in time these influence the more worldly ethical scene and become part of the ethical evolution that is human history. For example, the moral idea that God is good and wants us to be good will condition our attitude to the world; a faith in the inherent goodness of the world may be necessary, say, for the emergence, on the ethical level, of something like modern science which, in fact, emerged first and is most firmly rooted in, the Judeo-Christian west.

In the end, I am uncomfortable ascribing noticeable effects in the 21st century to complex specific causes that came about millenia earlier. For me, as an analyst of the system, it is enough to accept how the system works without trying to search for specific causal links. I think the system is too complex.

-which is why we disinguish sufficient and necessary causes. To say that CHristianity is necessary to explaining some aspect of our modern world is not to say it is sufficient explanation.

it leaves you with a deep appreciation for the complexity of the system, and in awe of our luck. If I didn't know better, it could make me religious.

-my friend I am not trying to make you religious. I am only reminding you that as you appreciate the complexity of our social system do not make the mistake of idolizing it, as many social scientists do. Rather, come to terms with the necessity of human freedom, the idea that our freedom is rooted in our recognition of necessity. We are free to act because we are ethical beings who see the need to act. CHrist was such a figure, acting at a time when there remained yet considerable revelatory potential in the idea of monotheism. So he was in a place and time where he could make a major difference. Most of us are probably not so situated, which is no reason to resent the big players of history. It is enough to attend to our own little slice of reality and ask what it needs and how we can contribute to the ethical evolution of humanity. When talking culture, it is to the necessity of our freedom, not to any detached interest in random mutations, that we should attend.

8/03/2005 11:13:00 AM  
Blogger John Aristides said...

truepeers,

First let me say that, though I disagree with your ontology entirely, I have very much enjoyed our discussion so far.

When I say random, I mean random in the sense of chaos theory:

"Systems that exhibit mathematical chaos are deterministic and thus orderly in some sense; this technical use of the word chaos is at odds with common parlance, which suggests complete disorder. See the article on chaos for a discussion of the origin of the word in mythology, and other uses. When we say that chaos theory studies deterministic systems, it is necessary to mention a related field of physics called quantum chaos theory that studies non-deterministic systems following the laws of quantum mechanics." (from Wiki)

You write: "cultural evolution requires on behalf of its agents a learned understanding, at least on some intuitive level, of the nature of humanity."

I would dispute this with the example of elephants and apes, and the phenomenon of elephant and ape culture (likewise for dolphins). And I dispute pegging cultural evolution to the ethical. I peg it to organizational fitness, which is, of course, a survival value.

I think our ontology is simply incompatible. For me, ethics are purely representational of and contingent on survival behaviors. The first survival behavior we should concern ourselves with is that which led apes to form groups, and I define this behavior as the semi-rational desire to survive and not die violently (and on my blog I speak about the visual experience of empathy as being a primary mover in this regard). Once this happened, the formation into groups, the further evolution of the brain, the evolution of walking, opposable thumbs, etc. all created new dynamics in the group that led to new learned behaviors.

The group, which was dependent upon its members' behavior, was held together by the punitive dominance of the leader, or perhaps an oligarchy of elders. It was the threat, and occasional example, of corporeal punishment that kept behaviors in line, much as it does in the animal kingdom in all kinds of group dynamics.

The properties of the group, its goals, and its collective knowledge determined the type of ethical behavior that allowed it to survive and advance. For instance, once humans stopped living from hand to mouth, and started farming, the organizational structure of the group changed, different needs developed, and behaviors that were beneficial adapted.

As an example, concept of "stealing" probably began with the idea of possessing women and territory. Within the group the ethic of "not stealing" was enforced by the dominant male, and any group member who stepped over the line was punished in short order. The male that kept the tightest ship, who exercised his power most consistently so as to be predictable as a punisher, had better organizational success and therefore a higher survival value. It is important to note that his punitive actions were not derived from high-minded ethical abstraction, or from rational choice, but from the selfish feelings of possession and the jealously of power found in almost all animal males.

In another example, "telling the truth" was probably a response to the paucity of accurate information in ancient civilizations, with accurate information itself having a survival value. Inaccurate information, occasionally, would have drastic and dire consequences for the group, so it also was proscribed and deterred by this emerging ethic.

Fundamentally, these ethical behaviors evolved because order and survival were, and are, closely linked. Ethical concepts, therefore, are simply post-phenomenon representations of evolutionarily advantageous behavior. Codifying these ethics facilitated communication of norms, but the concepts came from experience, not the other way around.

I firmly believe that the group evolved, not from rational choices, but from the pre-language primate's desire to survive and not die violently. The success of the group in pursuing this goal would have been immediately apparent, even if none of the members could explain why the group dynamic was so benefical. These behaviors were then taught to the young, and they taught their young, and so on until language came around to supplement learning-by-example. And that is the advent of linquistic based ethical concepts.

(As an aside, love is a chemical state and can manifest in many ways outside the ethical. Resentment is the same, and these phenomena are found in other primates.)

If treated as survival traits, ethical behavior becomes no more mysterious than the tooth or the claw of the tiger. Without these survival tools, the tiger would not be around to study; likewise with ethics and man.

Because of this evolutionary paradigm, there was never any necessity in the rise of man. We are successful simply because our distinctiveness helped us to survive better than all other animals. Our distinctive mental and linquistic abilities, our distinctive posture and distinctive hands, and the distinctive accidents of memetic creation allowed our preeminence.

And that last sentence of the previous post was my attempt at a joke. It would take much more than a friendly debate to change my mind on these core beliefs.

I think you err in correlating my evolutionary understanding of society with idolizing it. If anything, the evolutionary paradigm diminishes society by diminishing its inevitability and necessity. I do agree that we are more free now than ever before and that history has had a visible direction towards liberty, but you must see that this may not always be the case. If the conceptual paradigm that humans have built for themselves runs into an unkind and incompatible reality, the whole thing could come crashing down.

Be careful not to idolize it to much, yourself.

8/03/2005 01:48:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

"And that last sentence of the previous post was my attempt at a joke."
---
Are Dawkin's utterances meant to be jokes, or does he have an inside line to the Knowing God?

8/03/2005 05:42:00 PM  
Blogger truepeers said...

Dear Aristedes,

I too am enjoying our discussion and if time were not always pressing, I have no doubt we could go on and on, since I agree we are working with quite different ontologies and have a lot of differences to trade. In my view, it is essential to recognize a fundamental difference between human symbol-using consciousness and the language or “culture” of all other animals. The difference rests not so much on any claim that animals are completely different ontologically – indeed, one can show how in various respects they have some inkling of the preconditions for a humanlike culture – but rather that they have never had any need to develop a symbol-using culture as have we (at least no species that has survived has demonstrated such a need). For example, it is possible with a lot of hard work to teach Chimps how to use a few human signs. But leave these students to their own devices and they don’t expand their linguistic capacities; among themselves they have no need. It is only the human stimulation that activates their limited intellectual capacities to share in the institution we call language.

At the start of humanity we too must have had such limited capacities that have since grown as our brains have over the millennia been selected for language use. But why have we gone down this path? I agree with you that it has something to do with survival. But there are too kinds of challenge to human survival: 1)from nature and the other species and 2)from ourselves. As I understand it, you have been talking about the former; but I think we must understand the emergence of human language in terms of its role in our own internal regulation. We became human beings in face of the breakdown of a previous animal system of social order, i.e. a pecking order. None of what you have had to say addresses the fact that human culture is quite unlike that of the pecking order. Animal relations are focussed on one-to-one relations between relatively dominant and submissive animals. The alpha animal never has need to address the group as a group. In contrast, human culture is focused on a significant or sacred center of attention, and takes the form of the all-against-the center, the center-against-all.

The alpha animal only has to address the challenges of his immediate rivals or impress his desired mate. His communication skills don’t need to go beyond that. There have been reports of chimps engaging in all-against-one scapegoating behavior. But, again, the thing is that this kind of behavior is not typical of chimp “culture” as it is of humans.

You write: For me, ethics are purely representational of and contingent on survival behaviors.

-you say this as if representation were itself not a fundamental problem we need to explain. Animal signs are indexical – they point to things in the environment, not to transcendent symbolic concepts like “god”, “sacred”, “lovely”, “beautiful”, etc. It is the origin of such signs that can only be explained in terms of the human need to organize the community around common transcendent values as a way of deferring worldly conflict. That is a survival behaviour, but a uniquely human one because it is all about us.

The group, which was dependent upon its members' behavior, was held together by the punitive dominance of the leader, or perhaps an oligarchy of elders. It was the threat, and occasional example, of corporeal punishment that kept behaviors in line, much as it does in the animal kingdom in all kinds of group dynamics.

So how do you explain the fact that the most primitive human communities are the most egalitarian, organized along highly ritualized lines with roles divided up among the clans and assumed by people as they reach various stages in their lives? In other words, the ritual role is more important than the performer as individual, and no one can control the ritual process; rather it is the ritual that controls its performers to a significant extent. Primitive societies do not allow for big men who monopolize wealth. The larger cuts of meat, the more attractive mates, no doubt tend to go to the more aggressive young men, but overall it is not a situation in which anyone can dominate all the others. Quite the opposite. The group and its rituals dominate every one. Furthermore, the implied suggestion here that one might imagine an animal society ruled by an “oligarchy of elders” gave me a chuckle.

Ethical concepts, therefore, are simply post-phenomenon representations of evolutionarily advantageous behavior.

-to assume that significant human events are not fundamentally acts of representation in their own right is a great error. We would never remember events in ethical terms if they themselves did not give us the symbolic means to remember them. In effecting the kind of phenomena that will be remembered ethically, people consciously act in such a way as to be meaningful to themselves and others. Human consciousness is fundamentally scenic because it is rooted in the event that took us out of the animal pecking order and into a new kind of society centered on a shared sign and sacred thing.

(As an aside, love is a chemical state and can manifest in many ways outside the ethical. Resentment is the same, and these phenomena are found in other primates.)

-animals have emotions, like anger and they have sexual appetite. But these are not love and resentment as humans know them. Our emotions and appetites are supplemented by meaningful desires, desires focused on a sign, thing, or place of sacred attraction, desires that take us beyond the biological basis for survival and reproduction and to another level on which a sacred and sacrificial culture itself becomes integral to our survival. Which is why, for example, our lives are today full of advertising.

And that last sentence of the previous post was my attempt at a joke. It would take much more than a friendly debate to change my mind on these core beliefs..

I know it was a joke, fiend. Anyway, I take you at your word about changing your mind. So what to do in such a situation? Would more argument just be shouting at closed doors? Well, if we were to go on it would presuppose that the two parties while acknowledging their present differences, would nonetheless commit themselves to a spirit of free and open enquiry. But on what could we rest a faith in the possibility of free and open enquiry, if not from our both grasping that in some sense freedom and ethics are primary to the human, and thus pre-political and pre-resentment? If I am to go beyond the postmodern idea that everything is political and recover the notion that it is possible to have “free” or “nonpartisan” discussions, I need to be able to explain this in terms of a human origin that made sacred representation an alternative to, or a deferral of, grasping worldly actions. My ontology can do this; can yours?

Anyway, I have to run. If you want to test your ideas against the kind of discourse I am all too simply sampling here, spend more time at the anthropoetics website where you will find plenty of rigorous arguments to test your faith. You can even join the Generative Anthropology Listserv where you will find more people who might have time to give your ideas a very vigorous challenge, if that is what you want. It is not easy to come to terms with a paradigm quite different from one’s own. It’s not that one paradigm is all wrong and the other right. It is just that the better one will explain more than the other and it will take a lot of time, if you come to see a need to switch paradigms, to figure out what ideas you can keep and what you need to throw out. It takes time, humility and a desire for truth. Right now I am missing at least one of these. Best wishes, and bye for now.

8/03/2005 11:49:00 PM  
Blogger truepeers said...

THat's the last from me for a while; but I will ready any reply and try to carry on later...

8/03/2005 11:50:00 PM  
Blogger truepeers said...

read!

8/03/2005 11:52:00 PM  
Blogger Doug said...

I thought I was crude!
Sure, the boy is misdirected, but even *I* would not go so far as to label him a fiend!

8/04/2005 12:22:00 AM  
Blogger diabeticfriendly said...

husker_met said...
Lets start with Exodus...

The point of that story is NOT: G-d does not want us to kill our "gift" of children in "his/its/her" name...

After the whole ordeal, in Exodus 22:16, the point of the whole thing is explained, by God, to Abraham. "I swear by Myself, says the Lord, because you did this and didn't refuse to give up your only son, I will bless you richly...
and so on through verse 18.

Torah has 4 different levels of meaning, to read simply the written torah in english and pronounce it’s true meaning is simplistic. Torah has 2 parts the oral and written, these cannot be understood while holding on to pagan beliefs.

I stand by my understanding, G-d does not want us to kill our "gift" of children in "his/its/her" name...

husker: God demanded subservience from Abraham, even to the point of sacrificing his (at that time) only child (an obvious allegory to the New Testament). Because Abraham did exactly what he was told to do (in Exodus 22:2), he was blessed. That's the point of the story.


not so fast... G-d demanded Abraham’s willingness, but then PROVIDED an alternative.. the PROOF is that christians call it the sacrifice of Isaac and Jews call it the “offering”, there was NO sacrifice of Isaac, rather it is the tipping point against child sacrifice, and this is NO allegory to the NT, the lesson is clear, do not murder your children in MY name... as for blessed? please go back and read your written OT (as bad a translation it is) it SHOULD still mention that Sarah NEVER spoke to Abraham EVER again as PUNISHMENT for his actions...



HUCK: Then on to the New Testament...

You say:

his lesson is ignored by christianity which then requires "jesus" the perfect sacrifice to be killed for your sins, whether the "killing" sticks or not, the jews dies, the gentile gets salvation thru jesus's suffereing & death (child sacrifice - g-d's only son)

This is a misrepresentation of what Christians actually believe, partially because it is taken way out of context. Christians believe Christ was the Son of God, but Christians also believe that Christ was the fulfillment of the Law (Hebrew ritual law).

Christians belive it was the fulfillment of the the Law? how absurd...


written: Hebrew ritual law, as given to Moses by God, demanded blood sacrifice for atonement. That blood sacrifice was, again according to Mosaic law, to be taken from the most perfect of your livestock, traditionally a lamb under a certain age without physical imperfection, or if you were poor or didn't own livestock, one or more doves. This stuff is all laid out in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Since Christians believe that Christ was the Son of God (and therefore without sin), they believe that Christ was the blood sacrifice for mankind.

ok, this is the fun...

RULE... Hebrew Law demands a perfect LAMB/Sheep - not a human
RULE... HUMAN blood is not acceptable..
RULE... No CUTS or tears on the body
RULE... Must be killed in a KOSHER fashion, slit across the throat by a trained butcher
RULE for temple offerings: Must not suffer
RULE: must be on the Temple Grounds
RULE: Must have special ligament burned with entrails
RULE: Blood must be poured back to the earth
RULE: depending on offering, either completely burned or was cooked and eatten (since catholics like to eat the host i think they like that one)

POINT: Human fleash is not acceptable in any way shape of form
POINT: Jesus was not perfect in either the physical or sin catagories

POINT Jesus was a Jew, so he had the tip of his penis snipped, he was not perfect, he was cut, nailed and speared on the cross - not a perfect sacrifice
POINT: If you argue he was “sin-less” ok, he was a sinner, how do i know?

POINT: go forth, be fruitful and multiply, jesus failed...
POINT: spoke ill towards his mother in public...
POINT: Broke the shabbot

the sin list could go on, but it’s not germane, point is even if he was “perfect” in the mental sense it is NOT a fulfillment of Moasic LAW, it a fulfillment of a new lower set of requirements, not of Moses, so for christians to proclaim him either the: Messiah or Son of G-d

brings me to the next point: which is it?

Messiah? or G-d?

Messiah is a Jewish concept, G-d’s only offspring is a pagan ideal

Now let’s quickly put to rest the Jewish Messiah crap..

Simple test for the Jewish Messiah for the Jewish People.. Has the lion laid with the lamb, are swords turned into plowshares?

if the answer is yes and the entire world worships G-d and no false Idols then yes... if not Jesus is just one of 100 false messiahs that have come and gone. From the original Jewish People...

huck: Christ's crucifixion, while in one context a "sacrifice", to Christians fundamentally represents the death of the Law. If Christ had just been a really good man, or some kind of moral philosopher, you could make the argument that it constituted human sacrifice. But since Christians believe that Christ was the Son of God, it signifies something much different to them.


i have heard of this “death of law” stuff..

ok.. Jesus said, (not exact) i dont come to change even one aspect of the law.

the law...

the Noahite covenant is the LAW, but to many gentiles never heard it those 7 laws are never tossed away, the Law the christians refer to is the moasic law, funny, those 613 mitzvot (instructions) are ONLY for the JEWS, never for the gentile..

as for your other point that christians beilve that “CHRIST” from the greek christo - annointed one that he was “son of G-d” this is not jewish belief, has NOTHING to do with messiah has everything to do with pagan beliefs, so now lets revisit, christians believe g-d let his only son DIE for thier sins in the flesh..
Human sacrifice that has been taught NO from the very 1st mention of Abraham!!!!


huck: Now, feel free to heap derision on me...

naw...

remember I respect all ethical people inspite of thier stupid childish beliefs, including my own...

8/04/2005 06:55:00 AM  
Blogger truepeers said...

Sorry, Friend, not fiend, that was a crazy typo!

8/04/2005 09:51:00 AM  

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