Yes, the Problem is Clearly “Religious Extremism”

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Matt

That, at least, is the main cause of terrorism according to The Guardian;  and there’s no possible way they could have been any more precise.

Religious extremism has become the main driver of terrorism in recent years, according to this year’s Global Terrorism Index.

The report recorded 18,000 deaths in 2013, a rise of 60% on the previous year. The majority (66%) of these were attributable to just four groups: Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaida.

Hmm…  I wonder if there is any common factor amongst these four groups that hold such a commanding lead in their victim counts–something more specific than “religious extremism.”  Well, Wikipedia might shed some light on the subject, but that’s an awful lot of typing and mouse clicks to expect from a journalist.  Let’s just leave it at that.

Yes, we’re all used to political correctness trumping competency in journalism, and implicating the Religion of Peace is a big no-no.  There is, however, a greater misunderstanding at work here resulting from this self-imposed ignorance–one that undermines the entire point of the article.

The Guardian supposes that these numbers represent a shift in the motivation for terrorism away from socio-political matters and towards religious matters.  This is not so.  Ironically, the secular/religious distinction makes sense to Westerners because of our religion, which has traditionally been some flavor Christianity.  Though our specific theologies have differed, not even the concept of Christendom erased our inherent distinction between the City of Man and the City of God.  Some Christians have separated them more than others, some have delineated them differently than others, and some have just been confused, but there is always a distinction.

Islam, on the other hand, has no such distinction.  Mohammed established a religion that is also a political ideology.  Ignorant Westerners impose their own religious assumptions on top of that and thereby misunderstand it.  The only real religious/political distinction that Islamic theology contains is the division between Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) and Dar al-Habr (the House of War.)  Furthermore, this distinction is not a conceptual tool for understanding the makeup of society, but a challenge with an ultimate political goal.

Accordingly, it is a gross misunderstanding to call this a shift in motivations for terrorism.  These four entirely random groups are indeed motivated by religious extremism, but for them, that is no different than a political motivation.  That is not a shift.  There is no actual change in the type of motivation–only a change in which popular political ideology is at work.

But that’s not a story liberal journalists are allowed to write.

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The Other Shirtstorm

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Matt

Feminists just can’t stop talking about clothes these days, and not just when it comes to scientist Matt Taylor. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently explained his penchant for simple gray t-shirts:

I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. And I’d feel I’m not doing my job if I spent any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.

But was this a straightforward statement about his own views on fashion, or an attack on women CEOs’–indeed on every woman who wants to work in the business world?  Naturally, Alison P. Davis think its the latter:

Is it just me or does the mindset of the Silicon Valley Power-Schlub imply that caring about clothing or how you look invalidates your ability to work? Of course, male CEOs are far too focused on changing the world or building the next Big App to care about something as “silly” or “frivolous” as dressing professionally — they’ll just leave that to Marissa Mayer.

So which is more sexist… disregarding fashion for the sake of work, or assuming that no woman is capable or desirous of doing the same?  Davis manages to make it sound like dwelling on the right kind of clothes is part of the essence of being female.  How else could anybody make the leap from Zuckerberg’s comment to Davis’ conclusion?

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Catcalling and the Criminalization of Social Ineptitude

Posted on November 15, 2014 by Matt

By now, most everyone has heard of the video of a model being catcalled as she walked down the streets of New York. Under the guise of raising awareness about this casual form of alleged misogyny, it has served mainly to the raise the blood pressure of feminists who are always slathering for new wrongs to be righted.

In a sane world, catcalling would merely be seen as rude behavior, and the only reaction it would provoke would be a roll of the eyes as the target proceeded on her way, her mood temporarily dampened. After all, the rude always have and always will exist, and the polite will always go on bearing their crosses when necessary. But Americans are no longer allowed to be sane, lest sanity leave even the smallest of injustices unavenged. Unfortunately, recognizing a person as rude is no longer enough. In their never-ending quest to “help” women who are insufficiently self-centered, feminist social justice warriors have risen up to overreact by transforming “Some jerk was rude to me!” into “Somebody transgressed against my very personhood by violating my right to only interact with other people on my own terms.”

Consider, for example, Rachel Zarell’s glowing praise of #DudesGreetingDudes over on Buzzfeed. The hashtag was created by Elon James White, and is meant to satirize the notion that catcalling is (in Zarell’s words) merely a “harmless greeting” or just “saying hi” by targeting catcalls at men instead of women. My particular favorite is “You see a dude looking all hard & sh*t. Roll up on him like “Aye yo, smile, son. Damn.” BRING SUNSHINE TO HIS DAY.”

Now, I have not actually heard anybody claim that catcalling is just a greeting. Zarell links to another piece about SNL’s Michael Che as an example, but Che says nothing of the kind within that piece, so I’m inclined to believe that this is a straw man. However, if anybody does reduce catcalling to a simple greeting, then he is, of course, silly. At the very least, it combines a greeting with a signal of sexual interest; and one might argue that it signals some measure of sexual intent as well. This is precisely why White’s satire is amusing—because the casual and enthusiastic homosexuality expressed in #DudesGreetingDudes remains humorously incongruous in normal society despite the best efforts of the rainbow lobby.

The overreaction, however, is not found in the satire itself, but in White’s other comments quoted in the piece:

“A woman was just killed for not accepting a man’s advances, but we’re going to pretend that our right to engage women unsolicited outweighs their right to feel safe? No.”

“The right to approach women at any point in time no matter where they are is seen as a right by some men,”

“Dudes who were arguing for the right to greet women against their will were very annoyed with me.”

Lines like these should set off the warning sirens of anyone who loves personal liberty. Women have a right to feel a particular way that outweighs the rights of others to express interest to them in public? One should never greet a woman against her (unexpressed) will? The problem is in the ridiculous subjectivity of these “rights” with which White attempts to endow women. Essential to the notion of the rule of law (a notion we in America are quickly abandoning) is that the law to which all citizens are equally held is something that can (in principle, at least) be known by all citizens before they act against it. But no woman can accurately predict in advance exactly how she’s going to feel about any and every man approaching her about some kind of sexual relationship. Neither is a typical woman’s unexpressed “will” regarding such approaches required to be a matter of public record. Even attempting to enforce something this subjective is inherently tyrannical. It shifts authority away from the rule of law, and instead places it in whichever individuals or groups happen to hold some measure of social influence at any given moment.

Like most people, I do not deny that catcalling is rude. Many well-intentioned moderates have ended up supporting the cause of the social justice warriors on the catcalling issue specifically because they see a false dichotomy between rudeness and hypersensitivity. They naturally do not want to support rudeness, and though hypersensitivity holds no appeal to them, they see it as a more-or-less harmless kind of peevishness. The reality, however, is that such peevishness is not harmless at all—not when it leads people to claim liberty-destroying rights that grant some citizens arbitrary power over others.

Consider, for example, a recent incident at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Campus police were involved in the hunt for a young Asian student who tried to hold hands with a couple of women uninvited whilst telling them they were attractive. It also seems that he stood in their path when they walked away from him. The director of the campus police is unsure of whether this student will face any further disciplinary action, but he has determined that the student was harmless and was simply socially awkward.

I’m glad that the campus police seem to have deliberated thoughtfully on the matter, but two troubling facts remain: First, a man was arrested simply for being socially awkward around women because it creeped them out. Second, there seem to be quite a few who think that what he did should actually be considered criminal. The first, I think, is tolerable. The police had a responsibility to investigate, it got sorted out in the end, and though it was a near-miss for the accused student, no one was harmed. One would hope that he at least learned a valuable lesson about personal space—only the highly attractive get to violate it uninvited. However, the second fact, the impulse to punish the student, is much more dangerous. I keep hearing that social awkwardness is no excuse for what he did—but an excuse implies that there exists something that needs to be excused. That is fair enough insofar as we mean that the man’s rudeness is not excused by his being socially inept. But if that’s all that is meant, then why are the police involved at all? If we are speaking from a legal perspective, however, exactly what harm has actually transpired in this scenario? What has the student caused that needs to be punished rather than tolerated by the police and courts?

Too many people, like Elon James White, try to create such a basis by inventing these rights that are as subjective as they are dubious. Perhaps that was not his intention, but whenever we speak of rights in such a manner, we speak of something that demands recognition and protection by the law. The more people who assert that anyone has a right not to be made to feel certain ways by others—who insist that the momentary fear experienced by the young women amounts to actual harm that requires retribution—the more this kind of scenario will be met without thoughtful deliberation, and the more actual harm will result when awkward young men are actually punished for their awkwardness.

 

 

Posted in Culture, Ethics, Feminism, Law | Leave a comment

No Reason to Get Excited

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Matt

So America’s latest round of Choose the Form of the Destructor is over.  I must confess that I did feel some genuine pleasure at seeing the Democrats losing so badly in last night’s elections.  I shouldn’t have.  Not because it’s cruel, or gloating, or poor sportsmanship, or anything like that.  I shouldn’t have been pleased because there was very little to be pleased about.  The celebration of so many conservatives needs to be tempered by the realities of history.  Remember back  in the mid-2000’s when the Republicans held all three branches of government?  Of course you do.  They had the Presidency, majorities in both houses of Congress, and a majority of the Supreme Court was Republican appointed.

Now, do you remember how the size of the government was reduced during those years?  Do you remember the great strides they made to end the ongoing slaughter of the unborn?  Do you remember how our punitive tax system was reworked?    Do you remember how our activist courts were reined in?  Do you remember all the epic progress that was made on all the issues that conservatives care about the most?

Neither do I.

Conservatives need to get over this idea that the GOP is our political salvation.  Every story about the election has some variation on how Republicans rode a wave of discontent into congress.  While it’s great that voters don’t care for the way our government has been run by the Democrats, their loss is not our gain.  We are still being governed by Keynesian statists–they just have R’s showing up after their names when they appear on television now.  All it means is that we have 2-4 years before those same voters put the Democrats back in because they still don’t care for the way the country is being run.

That is American politics in a nutshell.  We have two political parties parties that we hate, and we take turns punishing one by rewarding the other.  But the truth is that American citizens are the only ones punished by this ridiculous political cycle.  Our deepest political problems are caused by beliefs and principles shared by both parties.  American will never have conservative government until conservatives stop being so gleeful about Democrats’ losses and so terrified of their victories.

So once the new congress takes over, have fun watching the Republicans use their new-found power to push for amnesty for illegal aliens and try to score meaningless political points to help their latest slightly-more-practical-than-a-Democrat “moderate” candidate in the upcoming presidential election.  In the meantime, the current lame duck congress will use its temporary electoral immunity to accomplish the one thing both parties can agree on:  empowering the government at the expense of the people in many and various ways.  Ah, bipartisanship.

I hate to say it, but even conservatives have gotten the government we deserve.

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Because Hazing Isn’t Controversial Enough Already…

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Matt

…Wesleyan University is apparently mandating that their fraternities allow women as members.  Oddly enough, gender warriors are cheering it as a powerful measure to fight sexual assault and gender inequality.

The foolishness of this plan for such purposes is, of course, remarkable. In his commentary, Professor Syrett proceeds from the typical feminist assumption that all men are larval rapists, and concludes that fraternities reinforce that tendency through the sheer maleness of the whole endeavor. His solution? Balance all that unseemly masculinity by including women to watch over them and keep them in line. You know, kind of like having their moms around. Only these women will be younger, not related to them at all, and hand-picked from among those who are eager to spend time among popular frat boys in intimate living arrangements. In fact, they sound a good deal like the young women Syrett believes are being violated by fraternities in the first place—the ones who quite obviously did not keep those young rapists in line. But through the magic of inclusiveness and gender equality, I’m sure it’ll turn out totally different this time. Wesleyan’s fraternities will no doubt appreciate having such ready access to a woman’s touch (figuratively speaking, of course) to liven the place up a bit.

More interesting to me, however, is this professor’s tangential comment about the nature of the university: “In only allowing men to join, fraternities insist that men are fundamentally different from women right in the middle of an environment — a university — whose goal is to question such shopworn truisms.” The dominance of the ironically unquestioned assumptions of Critical Theory should be no surprise, of course. The reduction of our institutions of higher education into places to ask meaningless questions as a substitute for seeking meaningful answers is a tragedy that has already run its course. But what should be embarrassing to any professor whose life’s goal is to “question shopworn truisms” is his failure to recognize one when he sees it.  Universities haven’t been teaching fundamental differences between the sexes for more than a generation. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s been a long time since the 50’s, and if the very existence of fraternities (strictly speaking) insists on sex differences, then it seems the frat boys of 2014 are now the bold free-thinkers questioning the tired orthodoxy of the establishment. Considering the way Professor Nicholas Syrett seems to regard masculinity as if it were something entirely strange and alien, they may very well be the only ones in universities who still do so.

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Stranger than Fiction: An Apology to Terry Goodkind

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Matt

Though I’ve never written about him before, I have expressed a number of negative opinions regarding the Sword of Truth author from time to time. Not that his epic fantasy series is without its merits—the first three books are quite good. After that, however, it gets very uneven. Temple of the Winds and Soul of the Fire were so bad I just stopped reading the series. Years later, I picked up the sixth book, Faith of the Fallen, in an airport on a whim, and was pleasantly surprised. In a way, it’s probably the high point of the series (at least through the 11th book which I had thought wrapped it all up, but apparently he’s written more since then that I have not read.)

In this sixth book, our hero Richard Rahl is captured by his foes—the evil Imperial Order—and taken to their capital to be forced to live as a common man. The Order is a Soviet-style leftist dictatorship with a weird anti-human religion tacked on that gives heart to their ideology. The thought of Richard’s captor is that once he sees the plight of the poor and the downtrodden, he’ll see the value of the Order’s ideology of “compassion.” Instead, Richard thrives as an entrepreneur making his way through a dismal world of poverty & oppression and improves not only his own lot, but that of almost everyone he meets. The climax of the book is not the revolution that Richard ends of sparking—it’s the statue he carves that embodies and explains the spirit of human nobility to a culture that (in a bad misrepresentation of the doctrine of original sin) considered humanity to be fundamentally and exclusively wretched. Richard’s work of art reminds them of something which had long been driven out of them by their priests, their petty bureaucrats, and their tyrannical overlords. It has its flaws, but the book succeeds as a work of art because Goodkind managed to do what his protagonist does—powerfully communicate an abstract concept by crystallizing it in a tangible form.

Though arguably the best of the lot, Faith of the Fallen also begins what ultimately drags the series down so far: the substitution of exciting stories and interesting characters with soap boxes and mouth-pieces for the philosophy of objectivism to which Goodkind is devoutly committed. Even if I were a fan of Ayn Rand’s ideals, which I mostly am not, a successful novel needs to be an interesting story first and foremost. It can serve to express an ideology, but it can never do so well if it ever ceases to be a good story. As the series goes on, the ideology takes over to such an extent that Goodkind ends up weirdly retconning his own series and flattening its world. For example, though Goodkind crafted a dualistic world with a good Creator and an evil Keeper of the Underworld, because objectivism is atheistic, Goodkind goes to great and convoluted lengths to actually write the Creator out of his story. Likewise, early on, Richard becomes physically unable to eat meat because he has to balance all the killing that he does whilst being the hero; but later on he has to start eating meat again because he realizes that all his killing is so completely and utterly justified that it requires no balance whatsoever (he figures this out after massacring a mob of peace protestors who were protecting that book’s villain.) Accordingly, most of the latter books fail at being stories because of the extent to which ideology swallows absolutely everything (though the part towards the end where Richard escapes his enemy’s clutches by starting what is essentially a soccer riot was admittedly very entertaining.)

So why do I owe Goodkind an apology? Well, I felt that one of the greatest flaws in Faith of the Fallen was all the straw men. The villains, as I’ve already mentioned, are deeply ideological, but often in a stilted and unrealistic way (though not as bad as in later books.) I felt they showed a lack of insight into the mentality of those who hold leftist and authoritarian views. Richard’s captor, Nicci, for example, has a long history of super-generous but mindless charity that frequently results in her being mugged by those she’s trying to help and enabling them in all sorts of self-destructive behavior.  All that is fairly realistic, but the self-perception of her beliefs  sometimes stretched the bounds of credulity.   When she is called on her foolishness, she often goes on and on about how thugs should never be judged because nobody knows what circumstances conspired to made them that way. She diatribes about how responsibility to the unfortunate negates any & all sense of ownership and how people therefore have every right to literally rob her. For all intents and purposes, she thinks it’s a crime against humanity to hold thieves accountable and a mark of selfishness to actually stop someone from robbing you. And she acts accordingly. Having never encountered anyone who actually thought this way, I considered it to be a pretty over-the-top criticism of socialism that was both ineffective and detrimental to the story.

Then I found out that people like this actually exist.

Jordan Sargent comments about a New York woman who was mugged for her cell phone by a 13-year-old boy, but chased the thief down, caught him, and turned him over to police. Though most people would consider this an appropriate response and even applaud her determination in fulfilling her civic duty, Sargent has a different perspective.

Now, granted, it’s not entirely Clara Vondrich’s fault that this 13-year-old boy was arrested by police for stealing her phone. But, she did, by her own admission, willingly cause the commotion that led up to police being summoned, and she did—as the photos show—keep the kid pinned to a car until police arrived despite already knowing that he didn’t posses her phone.

Vondrich says that she “felt sorry” for the kid, but not enough to not have him arrested and charged with grand larceny. The boy will now enter New York’s vaunted juvenile justice system, which will likely [****] up his life even further, simply because he snatched a white lady’s iPhone in Williamsburg.

If you are nonviolently mugged by a child, continue to let him run along with his friends. The world will be a better place.

Yes… it’s not “entirely” the victim’s fault that the one who victimized her was arrested for doing so. Just mostly. After all, she admittedly made a fuss about being robbed! How dare a white woman take offense as such a thing? Doesn’t she know she owes her smart phone to any passing underprivileged minority who non-verbally requests it?

Sargent tries to backpedal in the comments by saying:

Since people seem confused: I’m not saying that Clara Vondrich shouldn’t have chased the kid down and gotten her phone back. That’s totally normal. I just think she shouldn’t have pinned him down so that he would be charged with grand larceny and then posed for photos in the New York Post. I think this is pretty agreeable.

Now, it’s fair enough to criticize posing for pictures as a form of gloating, but this is a function of the media rather than the robbery victim he calls out. It’s fair enough to criticize the justice system for either being too strict or too inept, but neither is this the victim’s doing (indeed, this problem has much more to do with leftist attempts to divert the justice system from retribution to systematic rehabilitation—a quick proportional punishment wouldn’t ruin the boy’s life the way being entered into the system apparently will.) In any case, it’s quite clear that Sargent’s readers came to their “confused” understanding of what he’s saying because they actually read what he said. After all, he specifically told victims of vibrant child muggers to let them run along to their friends.

Here we have a man who apparently believes that the property of whites is fair game to any young minority who wants to take it. Here we have a man who apparently believes that accountability and consequences for doing evil are too horrible to be inflicted on minority criminals—that our response to a mugging should essentially be “boys will be boys.” Thus, what I wrongly presumed to be a caricature has now been made flesh. And to one Mr. Terry Goodkind, I must apologize for thinking you too unrealistic in your characters and criticisms.

Posted in Culture | 4 Comments

Ghandi, Vegetarianism & Christian Ethics

Posted on August 30, 2014 by Matt

While we’re on the subject of Gandhi, as I was reviewing excerpts from The Story of My Experiments with Truth for my last post, I happened across a criticism of Christianity that I found intriguing. Since Gandhi was primarily a moralist it is unsurprisingly a moral criticism that doesn’t really touch the truth of our religion. Nevertheless, I thought it was worth addressing.

When Gandhi’s vegetarianism began to rub one of his Christian friends the wrong way (in particular, Gandhi began to steer her son away from eating meat), he made a comparison between Gautama Buddha and Jesus Christ. He argued that the historical Buddha’s ethics are better and more comprehensive than those of Christ because they deal with animals in addition to humans:

“Look at Guatama’s compassion! It was not confined to mankind, it was extended to all living beings. Does not one’s heart overflow with love to think of the lamb joyously perched on his shoulders? One fails to notice this love for all living beings in the life of Jesus.”

It’s a natural thought given his moral vegetarianism, but is it true? Despite recent attempts to Christianize environmentalism under slogans like “creation care,” it’s hard to deny that humanity is the chief concern of Christianity. What of the rest of creation and its living creatures? Humanity’s stewardship thereof is, of course, a necessary and Biblical ethic, but it’s hardly primary—it didn’t even make the top 10. Contrary to Gandhi’s ethics, God has, in both Testaments, given us animals to eat. This is ugly, and it is meant to be that way, but there is no sense in trying to be holier than God’s own instructions to us. This does not give us a license to cruelty, but it does remind humanity that we are in the same boat as the rest of creation that also eats other animals to temporarily survive.

Somewhere between the two ethical extremes of saying that animals are just as valuable as humans (which, as I recently observed, really means that humans are no more valuable than animals) and saying that the suffering of animals is entirely irrelevant lies a legitimate middle in which we recognize that cruelty towards these creatures is wrong. A human is worth many sparrows, but God still knows when one falls from the sky. So why doesn’t this make a more significant appearance in Jesus’ teaching?

The greatest problem for animals is not that humans sometimes treat them badly, for even apart from human activity, nature is red of tooth and claw. Even if they don’t end up on my plate or in Michael Vick’s kennel, there are usually plenty of other animals that would eat them or hurt them. Even if their end is not prey, it is still to starve, to fight, to get sick, to suffer, and to die. Guatama’s compassion may be a sweet picture, but it does not resolve their primary issue.

By Biblical reckoning, animals are in this pickle because of humanity. God created a world that was vegetarian. He gave plants for humans and animals to eat. God also made humanity the head of creation, but we chose to break this world by disobeying Him. As the head goes, so goes the rest. As Adam fell, so fell the rest of creation. But though the problem can only be attributed to human error, the solution is not human ethics. Our utopian schemes at self-improvement have invariably ended in more wickedness and misery than before. We need to die, and so does this broken world. Humans being ethical before dying does not restore nature—human redemption does. This is what Christ came to proclaim and to accomplish. He has become the new head of Creation. And when this age is complete and this world passes away, there will be a new heaven and a new earth in which the lion will lay down even with the lamb. Merely having a lamb perch on our shoulders pales in comparison.

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“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians”

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Matt

This comic got me thinking a lot about Gandhi lately. It is, unfortunately, quite accurate. Like most people who cry some version of “Lord, save me from your followers,” Gandhi was less familiar with the Lord than he thought. Based on what I’ve read from his autobiography, the Christ that Gandhi admired is a rather stilted version of the Christ declared to us in Scripture.

It is often disappointing to Christians when an inspiring and well-respected figure like Gandhi knowingly rejects Christ–and not simply the disappointment that comes from any soul preferring to remain lost. We like our religion, we believe it is true, and its a very human characteristic to think that anyone who is deemed wise & intelligent, and who takes the time to seriously examine and consider Christianity will come to embrace it. Accordingly, many Christians try to make excuses for such a man. In Gandhi’s case, these usually revolve around the suggestion that he was driven off by poor evangelists who never really proclaimed the Gospel to him.

It’s true enough that Gandhi had his fair share of mean Christian stories. Most of these revolve around the conflation of Christianity with modernistic progressivism. The mindset at the time among liberal theologians was essentially this: Europe is the pinnacle of human civilization because it was at the forefront of scientific discoveries and academic scholarship. This puts it further along the imagined road to progress than anywhere else in the world which, in turn, means that Europe’s religion was also the world’s most advanced. Accordingly, missionaries and scholars from theologically liberal denominations would exhort less advanced peoples to believe the Gospel because it was progressive, civilized, “in accordance with the general movement of our time,” and so forth—not because it was true. One can hardly blame Gandhi for taking offense at such an approach. The Gospel is already a self-described stumbling block and foolishness—there’s no cause for Christians to heap additional offense on top of it.

Despite these stories, however, it is clear that Gandhi’s reasons for rejecting Christ were not ultimately the progressive arrogance he encountered—he rejected Him due to inherent offense of the Cross. The twin scandals of particularity (that Christianity is the only true religion and that those who reject Christ are damned) and forgiveness (that our trespasses are forgiven through grace and paid for by the work of Christ rather than through our own moral improvement) are at the forefront of Gandhi’s thinking:

It was impossible for me to believe that I could go to heaven or attain salvation only by becoming a Christian… My difficulties lay deeper. It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God, and that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life. If God could have sons, all of us were His sons. If Jesus was like God, or God Himself, then all men were like God and could be God Himself. My reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world. Metaphorically, there might be some truth in it… I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice, and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born. His death on the Cross was a great example to the world, but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it my heart could not accept. The pious lives of Christians did not give me anything that the lives of men of other faiths had failed to give. I had seen in other lives just the same reformation that I had heard of among Christians. Philosophically, there was nothing extraordinary in Christian principles.

At the end of the day, Gandhi was a moralist. If any religion were to legitimately claim exclusivity, then it must therefore create more ethical people than other religions are able to. Though Ghandi was highly impressed with the Sermon on the Mount (which is where his stated appreciation of Jesus mainly comes from), He (rightly) recognized that the Law as proclaimed by Christ is not so terribly different from the ethics of other religions. Certainly not different enough to warrant exclusivity.

But if that’s how he felt about the Law, what about the Gospel? Well, non-Law did not seem terribly interesting to the man. Gandhi described an encounter with someone who proclaimed the Gospel to him:

One of the Plymouth Brethren confronted me with an argument for which I was not prepared:

“…From what you say, it appears that you must be brooding over your transgressions every moment of your life, always mending them and atoning for them. How can this ceaseless cycle of action bring you redemption? You can never have peace. You admit that we are all sinners… Out attempts at improvement and atonement are futile. And yet redemption we must have. How can we bear this burden of sin? We can but throw it on Jesus. He is the only sinless Son of God. It is His word that those who believe in Him shall have everlasting life. Therein lies God’s infinite mercy. And as we believe in the atonement of Jesus, our own sins do not bind us. Sin we must. It is impossible to live in this world sinless. And therefore Jesus suffered and atoned for all the sins of mankind… Think what a life of restlessness is yours, and what a promise of peace we have.”

The argument utterly failed to convince me. I humbly replied: “If this be the Christianity acknowledged by all Christians, I cannot accept it. I do not seek redemption from the consequences of my sin. I seek to be redeemed from sin itself, or rather from the very thought of sin. Until I have attained this end, I shall be content to be restless.”

In other words, forgiveness would get in the way of Gandhi’s moral self-improvement, and he must therefore disregard it. He deemed himself too virtuous—too humble(!)—to willingly accept forgiveness. The moralistic vision that took root in a young Gandhi is the one common to all religions of the Law—“the conviction that morality is the basis of things, and that truth is the substance of all morality.” This seems wise because it is what’s written on man’s heart; in contrast, the Gospel is given from outside ourselves. Both of these words are true, but the truth of the Gospel relieves us of the burden imposed by the truth of the Law. Those who reject the Gospel, however, will find that they never took their failures to live up to the Law seriously enough—no matter how moralistic they strove to be.  Given how clear Christ was about this very fact, Gandhi could not have been terribly fond of the real Christ.

It is for precisely this reason that Christians should not be put out when wise men of this world are not counted among our ranks. “The wisdom of this world is foolishness before God.” No matter how inspiring a moral reformer Gandhi might have been by human standards, he chose to be counted a fool before the Judge who sets the true standard.

Posted in Gospel, Law | 2 Comments

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Posted on August 9, 2014 by Matt

Alfred Lord Tennyson famously observed the unfortunate fact that nature is “red of tooth and claw.” But soon, according to British philosopher David Pearce, there will be an app for that. In an interview with futurist blog io9, he has put together a plan worthy of a comic book super-villain: reboot every ecosystem on Earth to end all suffering by stopping animals (humans included) from eating each other.

The hubris of this endeavor is, of course, remarkable, as is the optimism that technologies both emerging and imaginary will, without question, grant everyone their three wishes. Engineers who actually make things work need to see real-world constraints, and so we tend to have to take off our rose-colored glasses. Academics, however, get to keep theirs on, and Pearce’s are firmly in place, casting everything in a soft pink hue. At the very end of the interview, he even quotes Karl Popper’s famous observation that “Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.” Nevertheless, rather than applying it to himself, he dismisses this lesson of history with a short rhapsody about how totally awesome his utopian dream would be if somehow it actually worked this time.

And why shouldn’t it? Based on the interview, Pearce seems to believe he has pinpointed the problems with earlier utopian schemes: They were not far-reaching enough because they ignore predation in nature, and they lacked the power to sufficiently micromanage the lives of all living things. But now, he believes that “within the next few decades, every cubic metre of the planet will be computationally accessible to surveillance, micro-management and control.” There will be technologies to perform mass updates of the genetics of entire ecosystems. (Don’t you just love when Windows forces you to reboot to install updates? Well, soon, every bird and every blade of grass will have the same feature.) Mass extinctions are certainly on the table for Pearce. For him, however, it’s not a big deal. He notes in his manifesto that nobody cares about the intentional extinction of smallpox, so why not contracept snakes and crocodiles into oblivion? Veganism will be imposed on all creatures. But don’t you steak-lovers worry; as a matter of practicality, this will probably need to wait until “delicious, cruelty-free cultured-meat products become commercially available.” Mmmmm. Which such technology on the horizon, it sure is a good thing that Uncle Ben’s assertion that great responsibility accompanies great power combines with an “in for a penny, in for a pound” approach to manipulating the world around us to produce the wise, utopian, techno-fascists who will guide the application of these forthcoming inventions.

The root of Pearce’s myopic arrogance is Benthamite Utilitarianism, an amoral system which reduces all ethics to a matter of pain and pleasure. Is an action wrong? Only if it brings about more pain than pleasure. Is it right? Only if it brings about more pleasure than pain. The higher concepts of the good, the true, the beautiful, love, justice, and so forth that are written on the hearts of ordinary people and affirmed by the humanities are eschewed as mere illusions which imprecisely describe certain kinds of pleasures. Likewise, vices such as cruelty are simply reduced to “involuntary pain.” Consider, for example, his discussion of the problem of cats. There could be some protest to simply getting rid of them. After all:

Most contemporary humans have a strong aesthetic preference in favour of continued feline survival. Their existence in current guise is perhaps the biggest ethical/ideological challenge to the radical abolitionist. For our culture glorifies lions, with their iconic status as the King of the Beasts; we admire the grace and agility of a cheetah; the tiger is a symbol of strength, beauty and controlled aggression; the panther is dark, swift and elegant; and so forth. Innumerable companies and sports teams have enlisted one or other of the big cats for their logos as symbols of manliness and vigour.

These “aesthetic preferences” are so entrenched that they create the “disturbing” impression among humans that “phasing out” or “reprogramming” is “evocative of genocide, not universal compassion.”

Thankfully, Pearce has a way to help get our heads on straight: We need only “compare our attitude to the fate of a pig or a zebra with the fate of an organism with whom those non-human animals are functionally equivalent, both intellectually and in their capacity to suffer, namely a human toddler.” After all, if pleasure and pain are the only relevant metrics by which to judge actions, and the capacity to feel these things is the only metric to judge the value of a creature, then this all becomes clear. He concludes:

Well, if our theory of value aspires to a God’s-eye perspective, stripped of unwarranted anthropocentric bias in the manner of the physical sciences, then the well-being of a pig or a zebra inherently matters no less than the fate of a human baby – or any other organism endowed with an equivalent degree of sentience. If we are morally consistent, then as we acquire God-like powers over Nature’s creatures, we should take analogous steps to secure their well-being too.

And that’s why cats have to be eliminated; because a lion eating a pig is no different from a lion eating a little kid. And if a lion eating a little kid is an evil which must be stopped, then so is a lion eating a pig. Given the premises, the logic is inescapable. Or is it?

As philosophers have often quipped, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tolens. One could draw Pearce’s conclusions from the premises. One could just as logically conclude this: Because a lion eating a pig is no different from a lion eating a toddler, and a lion eating a pig is really no big deal, then a lion eating a toddler is also no big deal. The darkest side of the animal rights movement has always been this: if animals are just as important as humans, then humans are no more important than animals. If Pearce and his ilk are willing to rewrite the biology of animals to fit his ideals and sterilize or otherwise extinguish (humanely, of course) the undesirable species, why not do the same to humans who are of no more concern than animals? If the elimination of cats is really more like universal compassion than it is like genocide, than why can’t genocide be a manifestation of universal compassion? If the end of suffering is an adequate justification for forcibly rewriting the genetics of animals to be more to the techno-fascists’ liking, then it is also an adequate justification for forcibly rewriting the genetics of humans to make them more to the techno-fascists’ liking.

Many people are afraid of technology because of its ever-growing power. But as any regular user of powerful tools knows, respect is a more appropriate response than fear. A chainsaw is powerful, but it is safe in the hands of a responsible person who knows how to use it. It is terrifying only in the hands of children, fools, and maniacs. It is unfortunate that utlilitarians are so in vogue, for they are the children and fools of ethical philosophy—and the more consistent they try to be, the more they leave their humanity behind and become maniacs.

Rather than black, white, and a linear progression of grays along the pain/pleasure axis, good moral theorists can see in many colors, and men like Pearce should be thankful for it. After all, what verdict would a consistent utilitarianism pass on him if, instead of starry-eyed speculation about future benefit, it used the hard and bloody facts of the history of 20th century utopians as grist for its mill? The judgment might provide aggregate pleasure for society, but it would be quite unpleasant for men like Pearce.

Posted in Ethics, Science | 2 Comments

Irony & Religion in the Media

Posted on July 5, 2014 by Matt

It’s time for another entry in the “those silly Christians think the media is unfair to them” file. I thought the following Q&A from an interview with columnist Mark Oppenheimer was noteworthy in that it actually manages to demonstrate two of the ways in which the media is unfair.

Religious believers often feel that they’re treated unfairly by the media. Do they have a point? What aspects of religion do journalists regularly get wrong?

Most reporters have a superficial knowledge of whatever beat they’re on; that’s true of me every time I wander from the religion beat, where I actually have pretty deep knowledge. So reporters get religion wrong, but they get a lot of things wrong: labor relations, war, etc. I don’t think there is a special animus against religion. One could argue there is special gentle treatment for religion. Religious believers say things all the time for which there is no real evidence — that’s what “faith” is, by definition — and reporters don’t call them on it, unless the religion is new and thus seems weird, like Scientology. But if a religion is old and traditional, like Judaism and Christianity, its adherents get to go on about the Rapture, or the Resurrection, or whatever, and reporters never insert paragraphs like, “Asked for evidence that the Rapture would someday come, the minister could only point to the Book of Revelation.”

Superficial knowledge of most subjects may be a typical problem amongst reporters, but the more insidious version of this problem is thinking that one’s own knowledge is deep even when it is superficial. Oppenheimer, for example, considers his own knowledge of religion to be “pretty deep,” but one begins to find this assessment deeply suspect as he goes on to define faith as belief without evidence. That may be how atheists like to define faith; it may be how Hollywood usually defines faith; but it is not how faith is defined by orthodox Christianity—one of the two specific religions he mentions. In truth, Christians talk about faith in several different senses. This is why we often use disambiguations like saving faith when referring to trust in God’s promises of salvation through the death & resurrection of Christ or the faith when referring to the body of doctrine given by God and delivered to the Church through the apostles. It is also why we use the term blind faith when referring to Oppenheimer’s kind of faith—to mark it out as something which has nothing to do with Christianity. This would not be news to anyone with a pretty deep knowledge of religion and should not be news to anyone who has taught others how to report on religion.

The second problem is revealed when Oppenheimer goes on to confuse patronization with “gentle treatment.” Reporters don’t ask about evidence for specific doctrines because by-and-large they see Christians like they see Trekkies—as members of some kind of weird fandom. To reporters, being a Christian just means being caught up in a story—until, of course, Christians begin taking it “too far” by treating it as though it were actually true and allowing it to unduly influence their lives. That’s when Christians go from harmless fans to dangerous fanatics. Because of this mindset, reporters will often approach the subject with all the credulity of parents inquiring about their child’s imaginary friend. They will chuckle or reflect wistfully on this strange behavior when they find it charming, and they will chide and censure when they do not, but they will never bother asking about evidence because they are certain it would all be techno-babble anyway.

I, for one, would love to see reporters stop being “gentle” so that they can start inserting paragraphs like, “Asked for evidence that the Resurrection happened, the minister provided historical documentation that would be more than adequate for any other event in antiquity.”

Posted in Apologetics | 2 Comments