Friday, July 27th
I've been sprung!
mood: Joyful
Psalm 24 (in part):
1 The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it;
2 for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.
3 Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place?
4 He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear by what is false.
5 He will receive blessing from the Lord and vindication from God his Savior.
Sunday, July 15th
Merognosticism
Recently I took an on line philosophy test to find out how consistent my beliefs were about God. The first task was to find out what I thought about the statement: God exists. My choices:
1. True
2. False
3. Don't Know
This threw me for a bit of a loop, actually. I'm more used to seeing choices like these:
1. Yes
2. No
3. Not Sure
When I take such tests I often use option three. But the phrasing of the God question caused me to read the options this way:
1. I know God exists
2. I know God doesn't exist
3. I don't know if God exists
From much exposure to Christian preaching I know that option 2 is the height of arrogance. How can a finite human be so full of arrogant pride to proclaim that (s)he knows God doesn't exist? Option 2 is easily excluded. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that option 1 neccesarily was equally prideful.
It irked me that there wasn't another option. I reluctantly chose 3, wondering if I should stop calling myself a Christian. There's no such thing as a Christian agnostic, after all. Or was there? I did a google search on "Christian Agnostic" and found that there are a handful of people calling themselves that. But as I read their reasoning, it seemed for the most part weak. And I have a really big personal problem with the concept. Christianity, whatever it may be, is grounded in a collection of writings known as the New Testament. Whether you believe them to be infallible or inspired or something else, these tales are the origin of Christianity. Could Peter or Paul or Jesus imagine something called a Christian Agnostic? Could we even begin to convince them such a thing was possible?
I really don't want to give up being a Christian though, because I am in love with Jesus just as He is presented in the Bible. So it seems I have no choice. I just have to bite the bullet, go with option 1, and risk not only being seen as an arrogant bastard but actually and truly being one for proclaiming that I have such a high level of existence as to pass ontological judgement on a divine being. This pissed me off so much that I took a second look at the two equally unattractive options:
A. I know God exists
B. I don't know if God exists
As I was looking a bit of scripture came to mind:
...we know in part and we prophecy in part
It occurred to me that "knowing in part" could be squeezed between A and B. But surely that doesn't make any sense. How can you "know something in part" in this way? Whatever Paul meant he could not have meant this! And then another scripture came to mind, also by Paul and from the same epistle as the first scripture. This is my paraphrase:
"Jews ask for a revelation, and Greeks search for wisdom. We preach neither of these, but something different. This something is a stumbling block to the Jews and nonsense to the Greeks."
The polarization of "revelation" and "wisdom" is interesting and relates to knowing. Let's imagine that I'm walking down the street and I really need to find a bathroom. I see a large office building and rush in the front door. If I'm lucky, there will be a front desk with a person there that I can ask, "Where's the bathroom"? If I'm not so lucky, I have to find the bathroom myself. The first option, the lucky one, is analogous to revelation. Something outside myself tells me the truth. The not so lucky option is analogous to wisdom. I come to an internal knowledge of the truth. Interestingly, but I suspect not coincidentally, in both Greek and Jewish religious literature, wisdom is personified as a woman and revelation (the man behind the desk) is a man. This reflects an instinctive recognition of the superior nature of revealed knowledge (sorry ladies). These constructs also have parallels in philosophy. We can speak of objective truth and subjective truth: truth from the outside and truth from the inside. We also have a feeling that objective truth is rather superior to subjective truth.
Some people seem to always be telling us about our Judeo/Christian heritage. This is a bit of a misstatement. Actually we first of all imagine a secular/sacred divide. Although the origins of the sacred half is Judeo/Christian the origins of the secular half are Greek/Pagan. Thus when we reason we will defer naturally to the Greek/Pagan aspect of our heritage. If American Christians take Paul seriously, we should reasonably expect that we will find his preaching nonsense. Why don't we, I wonder?
We can understand this a little better if we look at the way that the Jews in the New Testament reasoned, which was on the basis of revelation instead of wisdom. Right off the bat we tell ourselves that this isn't a problem for us, we know all about revelation, our preachers have taught us exactly how it works. But this makes it even a bigger problem, because what our preachers have really done was redefined the Jewish view of revelation so that it makes sense to our Greek minds. We know that revelation is progressive. Imagine a statue with a veil over it. Slowly from the back, a man draws away the veil. First the feet are revealed. Then the legs. Then the torso. Then finally, the statue is entirely revealed. This is absolute nonsense to a first century Jew. How can something be partially covered? If something still has a cover on it, it is covered. It can only be covered or uncovered. This is why Christ on the cross is such a stumbling block for the Jew. (S)he sees the Crucified Christ an entire revelation: a complete explanation of God's plan. We, on the other hand, berate the Jew for his obvious stubbornness. Can't (s)he see that Christ on the cross is just a piece of the entire revelation? We are not so stubborn.
Unfortunately, being Greek we have an equally serious problem. Paul addresses this throughout 1st Corinthians. We don't want to give up our reasoning, our logic, our philosophy. Paul sees this as a huge problem. We don't imagine that it is huge, we imagine that the biggest problems the Corinthian church has is their screwed up morality and their weird view of spiritual gifts. But in fact throughout the epistle Paul keeps hammering away on the point that philosophy is useless. And since Paul's teaching has been so wisely conformed to our Greek way of thinking, we quickly forget that Paul is a Jew. We imagine that what he really means is that human philosophy is useless, but divine philosophy is wonderful. But that is not what he says. He doesn't say, there is a good kind of philosophy and a bad kind of philosophy. He is Jewish. He doesn't conceive of philosophy as possibly being divided this way. Greek philosophical constructs are as naturally repulsive to him as eating a ham and cheese sandwich.
So what did he mean by "we know in part"? Our Greek minds naturally take this to mean something like this: the truth is a set of all things that are true. Let's call it A-Z. We know A-G, but we have yet to learn the rest of the alphabet. This is our Greek way of thinking. Paul doesn't think this way. He sees the truth as one solid chunk A-Z. You can't know it. You can't not know it (because that would make you God). You can only partially know it.
This is why Paul says everything depends on faith. We Greeks believe that he is speaking metaphorically when he says "everything." Paul is talking only about our religious life. In our secular life we can continue to reason and rely on logic and speak just as secular Greeks. Is it possible that if Paul were here he would say something like this:
"You foolish Americans! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing logic and philosophy, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? Have you suffered so much for nothing--if it really was for nothing? Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe logic and philosophy, or because you believe what you heard?"
Friday, July 13th
Why Koukl's argument is strong- and why it is weak
Morality is grounded in the immutable character of God, who is perfectly good. His commands are not whims, but rooted in His holiness [...]
Christians need not fear Plato on this score. When Euthyphro's dilemma is applied to Christianity, it mischaracterizes the Biblical view of God. Goodness is neither above God nor merely willed by Him. Instead, ethics are grounded in His holy character. Moral notions are not arbitrary and given to caprice. They are fixed and absolute, grounded in God's immutable nature.- Gregory Koukl
Why is this argument strong? Because it uses a metaphor that we can all easily relate to. I am a person. I have a nature. The things that I do are grounded in my nature, but my nature does not force me to do anything. I am free. In a similar way, God is a person. If He is a person He must also have a nature. This nature is not "over" Him, it is simply a part of Him the way my nature is a part of me. Surely everything is in order here.
It is only when we examine closely what we mean by our nature that things start to fall apart. Why do I use my right hand more than my left? Because I am right-handed. Why am I right handed? My brain is hardwired that way. How did it get hardwired that way? Depending on my worldview, I might appeal to an evolutionary process, or say that God created me that way. Either way I am talking about my nature: the way I was born or the way God made me. God cannot have a nature like that. He is neither born nor created. This is one reason we call Him supernatural. To say that He is supernatural and also has a nature (as defined above) quickly runs into problems.
Of course, the argument can be made that God's nature may not be like our nature in this way, but what we really mean by His nature is His "character." This is an attempt keep the emotional appeal of the argument. I have a "character" and God has a "character." But if we keep it on this level, we soon see that "character" is exactly synonymous with "nature" and we haven't escaped the problem at all.
A synonym for "character" is "properties." This gets the argument away from the problems associated with the word "nature" but is losing its emotional punch. I can identify with a God who has a nature and who has character, but I'm not as thrilled about a God who has properties. At the same time, I notice that "properties" is still synonymous with "nature," but in a rather different way than I was inclined to define "nature" in the original argument. This is a common problem in identifying false arguments: words that can have two or more different meanings are used as lynchpins in the argument. Logicians call this the fallacy of equivocation. Wikipedia says this:
The fallacy of equivocation is often used with words that have a strong emotional content and many meanings. These meanings often coincide within proper context, but the fallacious arguer does a semantic shift, slowly changing the context as they go in such a way to achieve equivocation by treating distinct meanings of the word as equivalent.
Koukl's argument doesn't formally make the fallacy of equivocation: it just lets our mind fill in the blanks. This is why it is so dreadfully strong. Sometimes it is very hard to spot problems in other people's logic. It is much much harder to spot problems in our own logic- especially if this logic operates below our awareness. Surely the fallacious arguer couldn't be me, it must be someone else.
But once we realize that "God's nature" really means something closer to "God's properties" Koukl's argument quickly unravels. It runs into a millenia old philosophical problem: Is something more than the sum total of it's properties? Because if indeed something is nothing more than the sum total of it's properties, then Koukl has simply redefined God and treated that new definition as if it were something different than God. Logicians call this begging the question or circular reasoning. This is a big problem for Koukl's argument- philosophically speaking.
But it also reveals another strength to his argument. Let's say that a friend of mine have a wager. We're each going to start a religion and the person who gets the most converts wins. There are two basic statements of faith that I can choose from. They are:
1. Jesus is the Christ, the only Son of God
2. A Thing is more than it's Characteristics
Which would you choose? 2 is the obvious winner! So many people believe faith #2 that we can almost say that it is in our human nature to believe it. But Koukl's argument does not present it as a belief. He has presented it as a provable fact. If Koukl wants to say he believes there is a third option in Euthyphro's dilemma, he gets no argument from me. But he says that there is a third option, which gives him the burden of proving faith #2.
Three interesting points:
1. An old philosophic point of view postulated that there was something that gave all things that exist their existence. This something didn't have properties itself, it acted as something that sat under everything and properties could be pinned on it, so to speak. Philosophers called it "substance." The main purpose of this philosophical construct was an attempt to prove that a "real thing" or "something that exists" was indeed something different than merely the sum of its characteristics. This philosophic construct appears in the Nicene creed:
"And in one Lord Jesus Christ [...] being of one substance with the Father"
This line is one evidence that philosophers have long ago considered Koukl's argument and seen the problems with it. And, in fact, if you accept that there is such a thing as "substance," then this would solve Koukl's problem. Unfortunately nobody has been able to find anything like "substance" or to prove logically that it exists.
2. One way to try and save Koukl's argument is to say that God's nature is indeed like our nature (as our minds naturally define it) and does indeed have an "origin". However, the origin of His nature is not birth or creation, but something we cannot possibly know. God's supernature has its origin in an unknowable ultranatural "something" and came about by some inconceivable method. Even "cause" doesn't really begin to describe this unknowable relationship between this ultranatural "thing" and the supernatural God (although the word "emanation" comes to mind). This is, of course, the gnostic explanation and, as far as I understand it, the Islamic explanation.
3. While Koukl's argument is strong if we believe we are essentially good, it completely loses its force if we believe we are essentially bad. If we believe we are essentially bad, we will picture ourselves as miserable slaves to our nature. Paul the apostle (if he is not lying in Romans) would have been horrified by Koukl's argument, which would immediately bring to his mind a picture of a God that was a miserable slave. Thus an interesting paradox is formed. The more weighty you find Koukl's argument, the more likely it is that you do not agree that Paul's view of human nature applies to you.
Thursday, July 12th
The heresy you blame may be your own
After writing yesterday's entry I realized that many readers of this blog may not have any idea what Gnosticism is. So today's entry is devoted to exploring that ancient heresy.
Gnosticism actually refers to a vast array of belief systems that had a few unifying ideas in common. (In this respect it is similar to Christianity.) I have compiled a list that I believe captures the essence of Gnostic beliefs and characteristics. It is necessarily fuzzy: not all are found in every Gnostic system, and some Gnostic systems have important beliefs which I have excluded.
Ready! Here goes:
1. Many Gnostics accepted the writings of Paul (and other N. T. writings) as authoritative, but interpreted them differently than the authors intended.
2. The concept of "knowledge" was of central importance to all Gnostic systems. "Knowledge" did not mean something that humans could attain for themselves by study, nor was it something that God gave to everybody like common sense. Instead, Gnostics defined "knowledge" in esoteric ways that didn't have much meaning to average people. "Knowledge" could only be attained by following a complex series of teaching and initiation rituals.
3. Most Gnostics believed God to be a system of divine emanations. They used this system to explain the nature of evil.
4. Gnostics emphasized Christ's divine nature and ignored or severely deemphasized His human nature.
5. Gnostics self-identified as Christians.
The last characteristic was a big problem for the early church. How did you know whether the "brother" sitting next to you at church was an orthodox Christian or a heretical one? The only way was for you yourself to have a thorough understanding of The Truth so that you could recognize the false Christian for who he really was.
So there we have it!
The next step is to apply your new found knowledge so that book knowledge can become practical knowledge. I am going to describe a belief system below and the problem is to identify it as Gnostic heresy or Christian truth. I've tried to make this first example pretty simple and have given clues in italics. The system self-identifies as Christian, but (if you've been paying attention) this is not much help:
1. Paul's writings are the infallible word of God, but hard for modern Christians to understand because of the passage of time. We especially need to clarify his teaching on knowledge by putting it in historical context. Paul was in a struggle with an early heresy which had essentially co-opted the word "knowledge" for its evil purposes. This is why Paul occasionally seems to have a low opinion of "knowledge". Now that this early heresy is no longer a serious threat to Christianity we can speak more clearly for Paul and say that Paul's opinion was that a Christian is somebody who "knows Jesus Christ," that is, they have a "personal relationship with Christ." True, this exact formulation does not appear in Paul's writing, but the confusion is because of those early heretics, not Paul.
2. Knowing Jesus cannot be attained by human means. Nor are we born knowing Jesus. Instead we need to perform a simple ritual called "accepting Jesus into our hearts" or "praying the sinner's prayer." Of course, the effectiveness of this is not in the ritual itself, the effectiveness is in the sincere properly understood application of that ritual.
3. Moral relativists complicate things by questioning God's essential goodness. So called dilemmas such as Euthyphro's dilemma are easily dismissed. The locus of God's good commands is not in something above God but in something within God: His Holy Nature. (In other words, God's good commands emanate from His Holy Nature.)
4. There are a lot of foolish people who muddy the waters by inquiring too much about Jesus' human nature. Questions such as "Did Jesus masturbate" or "Does the risen Christ have a penis (and if so, what does He use it for)" are irrelevant and disgusting.
Wednesday, July 11th
The Euthyphro Dilemma
How come nobody told me about the Euthyphro dilemma (first recorded by Plato)? I've been going to church for years and not heard a whisper. I had to rely on Wikipedia to clue me in.
The question: What is good? Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?
Option 1 is the option taken by Islam. If God commands genocide then it must be good. If God commands people not to eat pork one minute and the next minute commands them to eat pork (rise Peter, kill and eat!) then we must not question it. This option historically has been favored by many Christians; only in the past couple hundred years or so it has gone out of favor. Today Christian moralists typically berate Islam for accepting the first option and have tackled the other option, which seems to suggest a source of morality higher than God.
The usual Christian response is something like this:
The third option is that an objective standard exists (this avoids the first horn of the dilemma). However, the standard is not external to God, but internal (avoiding the second horn). Morality is grounded in the immutable character of God, who is perfectly good. His commands are not whims, but rooted in His holiness [...]
Christians need not fear Plato on this score. When Euthyphro's dilemma is applied to Christianity, it mischaracterizes the Biblical view of God. Goodness is neither above God nor merely willed by Him. Instead, ethics are grounded in His holy character. Moral notions are not arbitrary and given to caprice. They are fixed and absolute, grounded in God's immutable nature.
This is from Gregory Koukl, co-author of the book Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air. But this doesn't answer the problem at all! Koukl proposes that something, called either "God's immutable nature" or "God's holy character" is what causes God to give good commands. This something is cannot be higher than God because it is not external to God, but internal.
This argument only works if we accept that if B is within A, B cannot be higher than A. While that is true spacially, we are talking about highness in a metaphorical sense. "God's immutable nature" in Koukl's argument is higher than God since it is requiring God to command good things.
So we can rephrase the question: What is good? Is something good because God's Holy Nature requires to God command it, or does God command it because God's Holy Nature requires it to be good?
Since the first horn of this dilemma quickly reduces to the Divine Command Theory, let us examine this one: God's Holy Nature requires it to be good.
So now our new question is: What is good? Is something good because God's Holy Nature requires it, or does God's Holy Nature require it because it is good? This of course is just a rephrasing of the original dilemma and we are at square one again.
Is it possible that Christianity would do better just to bite the bullet and go with the first horn?
Koukl's argument remains strong, largely because of the visualization factor, and it would be surprising if it had not been tried before. In fact, it is a very ancient argument. Another way to present Koukl's view is that the being we call "God" emanates from a more essential core called "God's Holy Character." If we put it this way, we see easily that Koukl's visualization of God is the same one that Gnosticism proposed millenia ago. What the Gnostics realized which apparently Koukl does not, is that the emanation is necessarily inferior (metaphorically lower) in some way to the central core. The only way to get around this problem is to make the emanation the exact same thing as the central core, which of course destroys the effectiveness of the argument.
Tuesday, July 10th
Fun with Philosophy
music: Wolfgang Mozart, Britney Spears, Kurt Cobain, Miles Davis
Through Larry Niven's blog I learned of a place where one can play interesting games of a philosophical sort. I spent a lot of time playing them yesterday, the last day of my vacation. I admit that it was not particularly restful, but it was very enjoyable- which should satisfy the requirements of being "vacation."
For me, the second most interesting game had to do with aesthetics. First of all, I had to rank 6 criteria as to how I thought they were important in determining quality in art. At the end of the test I learned how the average player ranked them:
1. The work conveys the feelings of the artist
2. The work is enjoyable
3. The work reveals an insight into reality
4. The work displays great technical ability
5. The formal features of the work are harmonious and/or beautiful
6. The work conveys an important moral lesson or helps us to live better lives
My list would look something like this:
1. The formal features of the work are harmonious and/or beautiful
2. The work is enjoyable
3. The work conveys the feelings of the artist
4. The work reveals an insight into reality
5. The work displays great technical ability
6. The work conveys an important moral lesson or helps us to live better lives
Next I had to do a head to head between artists, picking only 2 in a list of 10. Each artist was evaluated on the basis of the 6 criteria listed above. The average scores of everybody that played (out of a possible 85):
1. Jane Austen- 55
2. Shakespeare- 54
3. Michelangelo- 53
4. T. S. Eliot- 52
5. Mozart- 52
6. Miles Davis- 51
7. Kurt Cobain- 49
8. Pablo Picasso- 49
9. Stephen King- 44
10. Britney Spears- 36
Next (before I knew who had "won" my head to head) I had to choose a desert island artist: of my 2 competitors, whose works would I take if I had 24 hours alone on an island? This list shows how many times an artist was chosen:
1. Shakespeare- 20781
2. Mozart- 14957
3. Kurt Cobain- 12403
4. Britney Spears- 6921
5. Stephen King- 6361
6. Miles Davis- 6013
7. Michelangelo- 4543
8. Picasso- 4378
9. Jane Austen- 3681
10. T. S. Eliot- 2680
Does anybody else notice what a huge disconnect there is between who people believe to be great artists and who their desert island artist would be? Particularly notable is poor Jane Austen, whom testtakers ranked even above Shakespeare (!) but ranked only #9 as a desert island artist.
I guess what pisses me off the most is not whom people like or dislike, but their (usual) lack of ability to give good reasons for their preference. I strongly hoped that I did not have this disconnect in my results. Happily for me, my "winners" in the head to heads also were my desert island picks:
The winner is Miles Davis with 69 points. Mozart only scored 65 points.
The winner is Picasso with 65 points. Michelangelo only scored 58 points.
The winner is Stephen King with 62 points. Britney Spears only scored 45 points.
The winner is Shakespeare with 68 points. Kurt Cobain only scored 48 points.
(I didn't do a head to head with Jane Austen or T. S. Eliot because I didn't feel familiar enough with their works to be fair.)
And I'm rather happy that I seem to be more generous in my evaluation of artists than the average testtaker. Perhaps that's because I'm an artist myself.
Monday, July 9th
A little armchair philosophy
While thinking further about the problem of objective/subjective morality, it has occurred to me that there is a further problem with the traditional Christian arguments. One way to encapsulate these arguments is this way:
If morality is entirely subjective, then really there is no such thing as morality at all. The whole good/evil dichotomy would disappear entirely. For morality to exist it must have an objective base.
If someone objects to this argument, it is given further weight by appealing to some activity that is universally conceived as evil: such as torturing infants for fun. Curiously the opposite appeal is never made: no one points to some universally conceived goodness such as Mother Teresa's charity except to contrast it with the negative example.
One problem is that this argument, when applied to myriad other human concepts, loses its weight. Let's say we tried to make the point that if music is entirely subjective, then really there is no such thing as music at all. The whole music/noise distinction disappears entirely. Then is someone objects, we point to something that is universally conceived as noise: perhaps a really loud electrical hum. We ask rhetorically, "Are you really trying to tell me that this is not noise?"
The same argument can be made for language. We can propose a language/babble dichotomy parallel to the good/evil dichotomy of morality. This in turn opens a mulitiplicity of possibilities as we examine the "real" meaning of particular words. We can argue for an objective value called "chairness" by saying:
If chairness is entirely subjective, then really there is no such thing as a chair at all. Chairness must have an objective base.
I imagine that even people who are very impressed with the form of this argument for morality would find it rather silly for chairness.
The real problem is overreliance on bivalent logic: the idea that any given statement is either entirely true or entirely false. While this kind of logic works wonderfully for some things, it doesn't work at all well for others. Consider the statement, "This room is warm." A logical system which says that this statement must be either completely true or completely false don't work very well. Logicians have proposed systems called fuzzy logic to deal with situations like these.
People tend to speak of good/evil in terms that are addressed better by fuzzy logic. Most people don't think of their friends and coworkers in terms of wheat and tares. The statement "Joe is a good man" is more analogous with "This room is warm" than it is "Joe is a perfect example of goodness."
It seems to me that a major part of the modern/postmodern divide is this general rejection of bivalent logic in the social realm. I can already think of other examples where postmodern people are going to be rather unimpressed with traditional Christian logic; for example the idea of free will. Christians have typically presented a sharp dichotomy between a will that is completely free and a will that is completely constrained. Not only does this not fit how the will is usually conceived, it doesn't even work all that well Biblically.
Sunday, July 8th
How to beat a moral relativist
While searching for information on Muslim beliefs, I stumbled across a blog called "Lightshiner". Lightshiner posts quite a bit about moral relativism, and one of these turned out to be a really lengthy and sometimes ugly debate between "lightshiner" and an atheist. I found this interesting because I sometimes have discussions with an atheist at work about this or that issue. Although Lightshiner's argument was the old one everybody knows about (the statement "there is no objective morality" is self-contradictory) I did manage to learn a few things. Most notably: the difference between the law of the excluded middle and the fallacy of the excluded middle.
Argument #1 demonstrates the law of the excluded middle:
Either Socrates is a man
Or Socrates is not a man
The law of the excluded middle applies because there are no other possibilities: either Socrates is a man or he is not. This argument succeeds.
Argument #2 demonstrates the fallacy of the excluded middle:
Socrates is not a short man
Therefore, Socrates must be a tall man
This argument fails because there are other possibilities i. e. Socrates may be of average height.
Everybody agrees that the concept of morality exists in human society. Nobody has a problem with this argument:
Either morality exists
Or morality does not exist
This argument is in the form of argument #1 above. But in lightshiner's argument, he has added a modifier: "objective" morality. This is similar to what happened in argument #2. Now lightshiner's argument looks something like this:
Either objective morality exists
Or morality does not exist
For "lightshiner" to prove his argument he must demonstrate that objective morality is the only kind of morality: especially that subjective morality does not exist. In other words, he has to exclude subjective morality as a type of morality before he has demonstrated that the law of the excluded middle applies to his argument.
Christians believe that ultimately, there is no such thing as subjective morality, that eventually the answers to all moral questions will be revealed. However universal negatives such as this are not provable. The way to "win" a moral argument is to get the other person in the position of defending the universal negative they believe while avoiding the necessity of defending the universal negative you believe. Thus the tactic of most Christians is to hammer away at the statement "there is no objective morality" and avoid at all costs saying "there is no subjective morality." The latter statement is particularly hard to defend because Christians use subjective morality all the time. The reason for this is that most Christians believe that our only source for objective morality is the Bible. But this makes it impossible to objectively answer questions such as, "Is it moral for a company to dump chemical byproducts into a public waterway?" The Bible doesn't give clear answers to many such questions. Therefore the only way to deal with these questions in the here and now (barring a special revelation from God on the same level as the Bible) is to either use subjective morality, or to deny that the questions are moral questions at all e. g. to say that since God did not give us revelation concerning these particular questions, they must not be moral ones.
Saturday, July 7th
What I did for summer vacation
define:vacation- leisure time away from work devoted to rest or pleasure/Paid leave for a relatively extended period
I signed up for a two week vacation period at the end of June through the beginning of July but I ended up canceling most of it. Actually I think this was a pretty good idea. I've been tending to end the leave year with something like 0.82 hours of vacation time left- which is not really the greatest idea. You never know when you might have to take some emergency leave.
Yesterday Nancy and I went to Yellow Springs Ohio at the suggestion of our next door hippie neighbor. She said that it was a small hippie town that we would probably enjoy. It was not too long of a drive and we did have a lot of fun. There is a small section of town packed with hippie type shops and we made our way through them. There was a really cool drum in one that I resisted the temptation to buy. On our way home we had planned on getting some ice cream at a dairy farm, but as the place was absolutely packed we drove on.
I have spent some time the last couple of days working on organizing our daunting piles of junk in the basement. There seems to be a cycle to things and I wonder if it is universal. New stuff comes in the front door. As the new stuff slowly becomes old stuff it goes down to the basement. Eventually the old stuff in the basement becomes old junk and gets thrown out. Meanwhile new stuff keeps coming in the front door...
One thing that Nancy did recently was to rearrange our main floor living space. This reorganization included dismantling the relatively large (compared to our available space) entertainment center which held a relatively large T. V. set and some stereo equipment. Most of this we don't need anymore; thus it comes under the category of "old junk" in the aforementioned cycle. However, it's not so bad as to simply put out with the trash for the junkman to haul away. Therefore I'm going to put it on Craigslist in order to get some spare cash to pay for that stream of stuff still coming in the front door. However I thought I would put the word out on my blog so that my blogging community gets first crack at it
On the lowest level we have two Realistic P. A. speakers that my parents used to use. They can also be used for a home stereo since they have the bare wire connectors. The next level is a Yamaha subwoofer and 2 Tannoy arena speakers (the old series, not the new surround system they are building). Sitting atop all of it is a Radioshack receiver which actually does still have the remote (even though it is not pictured).
Wednesday, July 4th
al-nasikh-wa-al-mansukh
So I just finished reading Islam and the Jews: The Unfinished Battle by Mark A Gabriel. Dr. Gabriel was born and raised in Egypt as a devout Muslim, but later converted to Christianity. This book has an obvious agenda that makes it not quite credible, but really helped me to understand better the religious biases that are fueling hatred in the Middle East.
One thing this book did was introduce me to the Islamic concept of al-nasikh-wa-al-mansukh (the abrogating and the abrogated). This is a technique which seeks to resolve logical contradictions within the Koran by determining which of the conflicting verses was written later. The later verse abrogates the previous verse. The author seems to assume that this concept would be brand new to Christians, but of course every Christian deals with the very same issue: to what extent does the New Testament abrogate the Old Testament? The answers range from one extreme to another. Some Christians believe that only the requirement for animal sacrifices is abrogated. Most believe that some requirements are abrogated (such as the food laws) and others remain. Some believe that the entire Old Testament is abrogated.
The heart of Dr. Gabriel's argument is that although the Koran contains many scriptures that view the Jews favorably, all true Muslims believe that these scriptures have all been abrogated and must therefore follow only Koranic scriptures which view the Jews unfavorably. If a Muslim tells you differently, they are either lying or they don't understand what a true Muslim is.
This argument rings hollow to me. I suspect that the hatred of the Jews is more an Arab thing than an Islam thing. Dr. Gabriel confirms this somewhat by reporting that unfortunately hatred of the Jews is just as prevalent in Arab churches as it is in Arab culture at large. This (one would hope) has nothing to do with the Koran.
There isn't much on the 'net about al-nasikh-wa-al-mansukh, but the little bit that is there leads me to believe that there is as much discussion and disagreement within Islam as to the extent this principle operates in the Koran is there is within Christianity as to how to approach the Old Testament. This page reports that Shah Waliullah (d. 1759) the great Muslim scholar from India believed that there were only 5 cases of al-nasikh-wa-al-mansukh in the entire Koran. None of these mention the Jews.
About a year ago I decided that I wanted to read the Koran again, but I didn't want to pay for one. My brilliant idea was to bike over to the mosque on Riverview to see if they might give me one. I figured that if churches did it, mosques probably did too. In fact, the mosque was all closed up but somebody saw me snooping around and asked if he could help me. I told him my mission and added as an afterthought that I needed a Koran in English since I couldn't read Arabic. (I was a bit nervous about talking to a real live Muslim right in front of a real live mosque).
His reaction surprised me. He seemed quite angry that I would think that a Koran in Arabic would be superior to one in my own language. He explained that most Muslims were not Arabic- he himself was not Arabic but Bangladeshi- and that he himself did not read the Koran in Arabic.
I never did get my Koran but this man did invite me into his home where we had an enjoyable discussion about religion. At least I enjoyed it. One thing that I learned was that it is as dangerous in Islam to pidgeonhole one form of the religion as the "real" one as it is in Christianity.
By the way, I did find out that the mosque gives away free Korans, but only on certain nights where they have a kind of "come learn about Islam" service for non-Muslims. I didn't want one that bad.
Monday, July 2nd
A. A. Month is over: what now?
music: Margaret Polka, Pennsylvania Polka, Zwei Hertzen Polka, etc. etc. etc.
The Bohemians have endowed the world with much to be thankful for, not the least of which is the gay, rollicking, exciting Polka. Derived from the original native peasant dances of centuries ago, the Polka as it is known today is attributed to a young Czech serving-girl whose identity has long been lost to the world.
Like most other dances, the Polka in its original form was a religious expression. Out of this evolved its application to romance and interpretive drama. Also, like most other dances, the Polka is a true expression of its people... gay, furious, exciting, gallant.
It was first danced in Prague about 125 years ago where it received wide popular acceptance. Its grace, its beauty, its excitement were so infectious that bordering countries began to dance the Polka with equal vigor and pleasure, each adding its own slightly different version of the same basic theme. It became so popular that it took very little time to reach the shores of America where it won millions of new admirers. Today, there is hardly a spot in the world where there is no Polka.
Its appeal no doubt, stems from the fact that it is exciting and expressive, yet retains the beauty and grace which are integral parts of all dances. The Polka is thrilling to both the participant and spectator. It seems to infect you with equal vigor whether you are dancing it or watching it. In fact, on-lookers often clap their hands, stamp their feet and sway their bodies in time with the dancers. This is also true of just listeners, because Polka music is so "catching".- from the jacket notes of Beer and Pretzel Polkas Diplomat Records 2206- date unknown.
I give you the above quote in honor of the passing of accordion awareness month. I did my part by purchasing and listening to not one, but both sides of this record. There wasn't as much accordion playing on it as I had hoped, but there was enough that I feel I have discharged whatever duties "they" may have required of me during accordion awareness month.
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