Posted on 09/10/2013 10:07:53 AM PDT by Hoodat
Maybe Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin really did discuss the idea of putting Syrian chemical weapons under international control last week on the sidelines of the G20 conference. Putin sure doesnt care that Obamas taking credit for the proposal, or that the administration is posturing like a Mob enforcer. The only reason why we are seeing this proposal, said White House spokesman Jay Carney, is because of the U.S. threat of military action.
Right, Putin is laughing to himself. Whatever. If Obama wants to sell it like a Christmas miracle on Pennsylvania Avenue thats fine with Putin, because Putin won.
Reset with Russia was originally a strategic priority for the Obama administration because it saw Moscow as the key to getting Iran to come to the negotiating table. Putin, from the White Houses perspective, was destined for the role of junior partner. Now Putin has turned Reset upside down. By helping Obama out of a jam with Syria, Putin has made himself the senior partner to whom the White House is now beholden. Accordingly, when Putin proposes the same sort of deal with Iran, with Russia having established its bona fides as an interlocutor for Syria, Obama is almost certain to jump at it.
Whats unclear is whether Obama understands that his foreign policy legacy will be to have ruined the American position in the Middle East, our patrimony of the last seven decades. If the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran signaled weakness, the Russian deal screams surrender. The real surprise is that its not Iran kicking the United States out of the region under Obamas watch, but Putin. . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
They easily could have. They just chose not to. Cowardice in action.
They'd rather outsource it than risk their own comfy seats.
Vladimir Putin - Doing the job Republicans refuse to do.
You got that right.
As I suspected, tacticalogic is, nothing more than a "NIGYSOB" player -- he gets his kicks out of goading other FReepers into calling him on his immature behavior -- and then, shouts, "NIGYYSOB!!" -- and then gloats about his having forced the respondent into "offending" him.
He made the absurd statement that chemical reactions are "amoral" -- and goaded you with, "Doesn't it bother you that..."
I deliberately intervened and answered him with a solid counter to his absurd tactic of placing moral value on behavior of the inanimate. Then, when he replied with a double absurdity (shifting from the reactions to the chemicals, themselves) , I tossed out the bait...
And he immediately pounced with "NIGYYSOB!!"
Write him off; he is not a serious discussant. All he is doing is trying to get his "NIGYSOB" kicks and, thereby, to bloat his ego with an asininely-derived feeling of "superiority".
Game over, kiddy... I ain't playing with you.
I recant: Grow up. But don't bother coming back.
And you're right: I said this "behind your back" -- yet you couldn't resist eavesdropping...
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now, how does it feel -- to be NIGYSOBed...?
?
Do you really want to run the Syrian conflict through that equation?
I would certainly not be surprised if God removed His hand of blessing from this country the way this presidency has been anti-Christianity, anti-Judaism and pro-Islam. Nevertheless, I pray earnestly for a Spiritual renewal, revival or awakening.
As I often say, for me mathematics is God's copyright notice on the cosmos. (Wigner: The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.)
An interesting philosophy. I didn’t find the answer it produced to the question of how you can have morality without choice to recommend it as something I’s want to adopt.
There are two arguments for that view that I can see.
Those who believe in scientific strong determinism would say that everything unfolds involuntarily.
Those who argue theologically (strong predestination) would say that that we are merely experiencing a time line in a volumetric time (the future has already happened but we haven't gotten there yet.)
However, such a view leaps to a conclusion not supported by facts, to wit that even though the past/present/future co-exist in volumetric time, a change at any point could still have effects in every direction. The name "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" given to Jesus in Revelation 13:8 makes that very point.
On the strong determinism belief, to defeat personal responsibility one would also have to posit that the mind is merely an epiphenomenon of the physical brain. An epiphenomenon is a secondary phenomenon which cannot cause anything to happen.
In that belief, there is no such thing as mind, soul, spirit, person - the brain did it. In that belief, this reply to you is likewise an involuntary physical reaction by the physical brain which goes by the handle "Alamo-Girl."
Of course, I find that latter belief to be quite silly.
I am arguing that "personal resposibility" is unavoidably tied to morality, and that it seems irrational to attribute morality to a molecular-level physical process that is not a person, and cannot be held responsible.
By the way, there is no God-less explanation for the emergence of autonomy (or anisotropy) in the physical universe.
Some activists propose that a person cannot be personally responsible for certain behavior since it is encoded into who they are, e.g. homosexuality. But an urge is not a behavior. Kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs and homicidal maniacs also have urges - but if they act on those urges they will be held personally responsible, autonomously good and bad molecules altogether as one.
I would think that theologically, you would consider the "you" the soul or spiritual identity of the individual, the material form being simply a temporary vessel.
"Chemical reactions" are just doing what they're supposed to be doing, given the relevant initial and boundary conditions, according to the physical laws. Now it seems to me that the physical laws are not, and cannot be, the product of random evolutionary development. Certainly they are not material. So if all you've got is Darwin's theory and materialism, you cannot explain how laws first arose. Just like Darwin's theory and materialism cannot account for life and mind.
So I think my dear brother TXnMA is right about this: "Chemical reactions are direct and faithful expressions of the rules and laws that God Almighty 'designed and built into' His Creation. They embody the ultimate, inviolable morality: the will of God."
When I wrote, "Darwinist evolutionary theory posits Reality as an unguided, essentially random flux. There is no better or worse; there is no good or bad; everything that is, is effectively the outcome of directionless, purposeless evolutionary change," what I was trying to get at was this:
The fundamental presuppositions of Darwin's theory that everything that exists completely reduces to the physical/material; that all inorganic and organic development is purposeless, undirected, occurring by chance, an endless series of accidents that somehow "stick" (thanks to random mutation and natural selection) have been thoroughly integrated into the collective unconscious by now. We are so used to such ideas floating around in the public ambience that we don't even notice them, just like we don't notice our own breathing. But they are thoroughly internalized by their credulous adherents who most of the time maintain them below the threshold of consciousness.
This is a case where Mao Zhedong was actually right: "Tell a lie a hundred times, and people will believe it is true." [Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.] Assuredly, Obama believes Mao's saying is "true."
But you can't build anything lasting or worthwhile on false ideas. What is even worse, these false ideas have spread outside of biology, to other knowledge disciplines where they don't remotely make any sense because they fly in the face of common sense and actual human experience, observation, and history.
Darwinian ideas dominate much of what passes for thinking these days; but they are so deeply embedded and habitual that most of the time we aren't even aware of how they affect our thinking.
They are, of course, patently false ideas, and do not explain anything about Reality as it actually is.
These ideas are simply artifacts of the Kultursmog, unconsciously held beliefs that rarely if ever rise to the level of critical awareness. There is no thought involved; mainly the stance premised in Darwinism has more to do with an emotional "attitude" than with rational thought.
Or so it seems to me. FWIW.
I don't think I've seen it submitted by anyone, ever, that physical laws are the product of evolutionary development. I know I certainly haven't.
You seem to be answering a question that was not asked.
Well, certainly Darwinists aren't asking that question. The likely reason being: They have no answer for it, no explanation. Neither can they explain the origin of life and mind.
You must have heard the old adage: "If all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Darwinist orthodoxy seems to be a lot like that.
Of course, not everything is a nail....
Is any discussion possible without that pivot?
Let's see if tacticalogic can falsify the above statement, dearest sister in Christ!
Certainly, I can't.
IOW, I completely agree with your observation that "there is no God-less explanation for the emergence of autonomy (or anisotropy) in the physical universe."
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