Posted on 09/08/2003 3:05:17 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
I SENSED A KINSHIP with Martin Luther when reading Professor Thomas L. Johnson's comment ["Truly free? Not as long as religion plays a role in government," Aug. 19]. When Luther read Erasmus' diatribes he responded: "Your workstruck me as so worthless and poor that my heart went out to you for having defiled your lovely and brilliant flow of language with such vile stuff.It is like using gold and silver dishes to carry garden rubbish or dung."
Johnson assumes we experience philosophical ideas only in the philosophers' writings. This is erroneous. We meet these ideas in movies, television, and the lyrics of music.
They are in books such as Hillary Clinton's "It Takes a Village." The raising of a child is too important to be left to the parents; it takes a village. This belief is from Plato's "Republic." Movies and television have often portrayed the "anti-hero hero"--the individual who makes his own way and his own laws, and refuses to submit to authority. This is the "superman" of Nietzsche.
Johnson's own polemic on Christian "virtues" betrays the influence of Nietzsche's "Will to Power." These ideas are found in marketing: Get it here and now because here and now is all you have.
One does not have to read the philosophers to encounter the ideas they have promulgated. Even the U.S. Army has kowtowed to philosophy with the slogan "An army of one."
The contemporary church, as well, has been shaped by the philosophers. Rudolf Bultmann turned to the atheistic existential philosophy of Heidegger as the way to interpret the Bible, pushing many into a subjective approach. But perhaps it was Immanuel Kant in his "Critique of Pure Reason" who had the greatest impact on culture and church when he built his wall between the transcendent (God, the self, and essences) and the world as we perceive it. The Christian community abandoned its traditional rational arguments for God and turned to leaps of faith. Thus the church, like the culture, found itself separated from God, the self, and essences, and the answers to the important questions: What is Good, Beautiful and True? We have all bowed the knee to Father Kant and his disciples, even if we have never heard their names.
The history Johnson asserts is more wretched than his views on philosophical effect. In ancient Rome, Christians were executed for not worshiping the emperor. Christians stopped the practice of infanticide. It was the church's opposition that ended the games where people were butchered for the amusement of the mob.
Throughout history Christians have resisted tyranny--at Runnymede and the signing of the Magna Carta, in central Europe when the German Princes opposed Charles V, and in the Dutch war of independence. All these events were carried out by Christians. Parliament's victory over the King in the English Civil War was the work of Christians, as was the American Revolution. The history Johnson offered, of Christians as docile, willing servants of despots, is at its best abject knavery, at its worst odious slander.
The dictatorships of this past century, of which Johnson took little notice, were nearly all anti-religious. These opposed Judeo-Christianity and adopted Karl Marx's creed "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his need." Lenin and Stalin attempted to exterminate religion. Communist China's human disasters ("The Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution") were not the result of Christian complicity. These tragedies, along with those perpetrated by the Pol Pot regime and numerous others, lay with proponents of anti-religious, anti-Christian socialism.
Johnson protests that both political parties are making government bigger, and they are. We have only ourselves to blame, having become enthralled with the politics of envy, greed, and guilt, justified by Marx's creed. This is the result of the marriage of agnostic socialism and 19th-century liberal theology, which is not Christian, as J. Gresham Machen so ably pointed out in "Christianity and Liberalism."
Professor Johnson may assert the contrary, but with God banished from, statehouse, schoolhouse, and courtroom, Caesar is now on the throne. Where humans rule rather than the law, tyranny will follow. Big government is the heritage of this exile.
We all suffer from Pascal's dilemma of being able to think of a better existence than we have, but being unable to bring it about. We as a culture have turned to a human institution, government, for our needs and wants. Many are ready to lay covetous hands on the public treasury. This is the legacy of the 19th- and 20th-century socialist movements, which abandoned the orthodox teachings of Judaism and Christianity.
The threat to freedom is not from the community of faith. It is from the culture's desire to have the state meet our desires and free us from accountability. In a family environment this would be called codependency.
The late Vince Lombardi, observing the American scene in 1970, said, "People no longer understand the difference between liberty and license." I see in Professor Johnson's diatribe that lack of understanding.
Perhaps a bit off-topic, but the role of government as the steward of law is a religious role. Moore's stone is "superficial agitation," but the basis of law is not. The content neutral view is a fundamental denial.
Neither does good philosophy or natural theology.
The axioms are not assumptions, they are discovered rationally, and verified logically, by the very fact they cannot be denied without contradiction.
But strict scientism or materialism is self-refuting because it is internally contradictory. It claims truths but undercuts the logical possibility of acquiring any kind of certain knowledge.
Moreover, any argument for strict empiricism must be a philosophical argument, not an empirical "argument." In fact, an empirical argument for empiricism is logically impossible.
Paraphrasing, "the only single belief that incoming freshman have in common is the belief that there is no such thing as objective truth." I agree with him. Unfortunately, the rest of the book wasn't as good as the opening line.
Also, that was written what, twenty years ago? That was pre-Derrida.
It's not that simple. We're talking children here. Regarding prayer, teaching by example is preferable to coercion. However, as a parent, I know that sometimes a little coercion is appropriate, especially with younger children. The school acts in the place of the parent, whether we like it or not. Therefore, one cannot summarily rule out the propriety of school-mandated prayer.
If our fundamental apprehensions were wrong then that would effectively make God a liar. And we know that God exists because truth exists.
Can you really say there is a "you", when your mind is a bunch of nueral firings?
No, which is why materialism is incoherent and self-refuting. But this problem doesn't exist if the mind is properly understood to be a simple spiritual substance.
Sorry to hear Aquinasfan say that. Perhaps his essay on higher education in Giants and Dwarfs has more to offer in the two finishing essays, "The Crisis of Liberal Education" and "The Democratization of the University." In it you'll find this nugget:
When they no longer have anything before which they can bow, their world is near its end, and all the suppressed and lawless monsters within man remerge. One might suggest that our New Left is a strange mixture of nihilism with respect to past and present and a naive faith in a future of democratic progress.
What's to trust? If you have percepts you have percepts, if you don't you don't. You do (else you would not be reading these responses and responding to them).
What I mean by perception is my immediate conscious experience. It is all I am conscious of. If you mean something else by perception, that is fine. To prevent any confusion I will just use the word conscious or consciousness.
Since what we are conscious of is all that we can know or know about, what else could reality be? There cannot be anything that we cannot be conscious of in any way whatsoever. Are we conscious of the atoms? Not directly, but we are conscious of them in two ways, their direct manifestation in all of matter which is comprised of them and our understanding of their nature (which we discovered by studying the nature of the matter we are directly conscious of.) We may not be directly conscious of all that is, but there cannot be anything we cannot be conscious of in any way whatsoever.
Some have suggested there can be things we cannot be conscious of in any way at all. But this is meaningless. For there to be something we could not be conscious of at all, it would have to be something that had no effect, in any way on anything we are or could be conscious of. But such a thing would have no relationship whatsoever to anything we are conscious of. If something had no relationship whatsoever to what we can be conscious of, relative to what we are conscious of, it would have no qualities whatsoever. It cannot exist.
What we are conscious of is reality. If it is not, what does the word reality mean? I think those who suggest reality is something other than what we are conscious of are confusing the meaning of reality, with our understanding of the nature of reality or existence. We can certainly be mistaken about that, as every historical scientific mistake is evidence of. But even scientific mistakes are only mistakes because existence, the one (and only one) we are conscious of has a specific nature, and we only just now are beginning to get a good understanding of some aspects of that nature.
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There is some I agree with in the rest of your comments, but more I disagree with, but, since I have no intention of changing anyone's mind about anything, and the reasons I disagree would require lenghty explanations, I'll spare you (and me).
Just this, you said: Ask them if completely wiping out all humanity and all life forms entirely off the face of the earth is an evil or bad thing. Ask them to *prove* it.
I'll work backwards.
Prove, to whom? Most people have the idea of proof wrong. The purpose of proof is not to convince others, the purpose of proof is to ensure one has not made mistakes in their own reasoning. Do I have to prove I can see to anyone else before it is true?
Good and evil are relative terms. Nothing is just "good" or "evil." A thing (or action) is good (or bad) only if it is good or bad relative to some goal or end, that is, a purpose; more exactly, good and bad pertain only to beings capable of having goals and purposes. Since the ultimate purpose of an individual's life is his enjoyment of it, whatever interfere's with that purpose is bad, and whatever advances that purpose is good. Since, "wiping out all humanity and all life forms entirely off the face of the earth," would necessarily include the wiper, which would certainly preclude the wiper from enjoying his life (even if he were insane enought to think it wouldn't), it would be bad. Oddly enough, there really are a great meany people with the psychology of your hypothetical "wiper." They are called environmentalists.
Hank
Strawman. You define "faith" as "blind credulity", and then refute it. When I use the word in he context of my faith in God, I mean precisely "confidence in another".
You have every right to doubt that the other is actually there. But your critique of the word "faith" simply reflects your a priori definition, which definition -- voila! -- contains the conclusion you like.
Perhaps not dishonest, but circular, lacking insight, and oh, so old.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is, well, culturally acceptable nowadays.
You forgot the standard Objectivist modifier "up to the point where the individual's enjoyment infringes on another's enjoyment."
Otherwise, you just endorsed Jeffrey Dahmer.
First of all, science is not like religion. There is no accepted authority in science that makes declarations like, "we believe all of reality can be divined by humans by way of the scientific method." Science is a method for discovering the truth about certain aspects of reality, namely, material or physical existense and its nature. The other view of science is the body of knowledge thus far discovered by that method. There is no version of science that is an attempt (or has any expectation or desire) to "divine all knowldge," or, as a matter of fact, even most of it.
Science is only one branch of intellectual inquirey. There is also philosophy, and history, and mathematics which is a sort-of sub-category of both science and philosophy. There are the arts and the greatest body of knoweldge of all, technology.
Where the idea came from that some people believe science is going to answer all human quesions I cannot imagine. As you point out, even Einstein was duped by this impression and felt compelled to comment on it. (A genius, true, but he couldn't tie is own shoes. Oh well.)
There is no "faith" in science, only observation. The objects of science existed before science, which only discovered them. There are some things some scientist would like to learn, if possible, that help understand how all the different characteristics of material existence can be integrated into a single explanatory concept or collection of concepts. There is no "faith" that this will be accomplished, only the steadily increasing impression, from what has already been learned, that such a "unifying" theory is possible, and maybe even likely. If it is accomplished, there will still be infinitely more things yet to be learned, even in the science, as any scientist will tell you.
Hank
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