John C. Wright's Blog, page 109
December 7, 2012
Christ and Nothing
Vicq Ruiz asks a fascinating and hard question:
Mr. Wright:
I would be most interested to have you expand upon (or point me to an expansion upon, by you or by another) one paragraph in your essay which appears to be no more than an assertion…..
The only real alternative of the apparent many options is either Christianity or something leading to Christ, or else is a heresy or perversion whose only good was borrowed from the Church, so that any partial good found in these pagan, Jewish, or heretic thought is perfected in Christianity.
I have always responded to Pascal’s wager and to like arguments with the “many alternatives to Christian belief and to atheism” rejoinder.
My paragraph is unsupported as quoted, but it is quoted from a context discussing a particular question, namely, what makes the atheist model of the universe inferior to the theist, and to the Christian.
Yes, obviously there are many alternatives to Christianity. That is not in dispute. You may find yourself preferring one over the other for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is loyalty to whatever upbringing you happened to have been brought up in. That is also not in dispute.
What is in dispute is my rather bold statement; I say that there is something in theism which anyone fleeing atheism seeks, and that Christianity has more of this something, a better and cleaner and clearer version, than the alternatives.
Hence, there is no argument that other alternatives exist, and no argument that other alternatives may be more appealing on other grounds unrelated to this something than Christianity. The only argument is whether this something is something anyone fleeing atheism seeks, and whether Christianity has more of it.
So what is the something?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
December 6, 2012
Heroes of Darkness and Light
My essay, “Heroes of Light and Darkness,” went up this morning on smartpopbooks.com, and will remain available until Wednesday at 12:00 AM at
http://www.smartpopbooks.com/heroes-of-darkness-and-light/
To whet your appetite and pique your interest, here is the opening.
1. Dark Knights and White Knights
My girl tells me that she would never date Superman.
She reads comics with a woman’s eye, so perhaps she sees something I don’t see, but she assures me that of the iconic superheroes of comicbookdom, the one with the most animal magnetism, the one the ladies swoon over, is the Batman.
Why is it that Batman has the romantic allure of Zorro, whereas Superman has no more sex appeal than an Eagle Scout? On the other hand, if Batman has all the glamour, why is it that Superman has a steady girlfriend, and he does not?
The two heroes are as different as day and night. There is something in the souls of three generations of readers that reacts to these characters with a shock of delight and recognition: as if by instinct, we recognize that they are icons or archetypes, a modern pantheon of the demigods like those who fought before the walls of Troy.
Some dismiss cartoon characters as childish; and so they are, but not in the way that word is normally meant. Children, learning about a world as castaways might learn about an undiscovered mystical island, find out first about the most important things, the deep things from the roots of the world, the eternal things—it is for adults to concern ourselves with daily surface details. The noble self-sacrifice of heroes is one of the first things children read about when they read adventure tales. It is one of the basic truths of the world. When heroes act selfishly, or for personal gain, they lose what they cherish most: that is the message of every story about superheroics penned, ever since the day Achilles lost his temper.
This essay intends to explain the inexplicable, and say why glamour and mystery shroud the Batman, the most famous of the famous heroes of the night, and to contrast him against Superman, that most glorious of the brilliant heroes of the day. This essay will attempt to say in what part of the human psychology they find their roots.
The quickest shortcut to examining human psychology is to talk about romance, because it is the one issue that is touched by all others: find out what kind of girl a guy is attracted to, find out what kind of girl he attracts, and you find out all about him.
2. Criminals Are a Cowardly and Superstitious Lot
The Batman is all about fear.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Moral Absolutism in an Atheist Universe
Does atheism allow for an objective moral code?
Now, it is no use to say that ‘atheism’ is not a doctrine since not all atheists agree on all points. Nonsense. They all agree on the one point that there is no God.
All atheists in order to be called atheist must hold that there is no God. This means all atheists must hold that there is no divine intelligence who created the universe, created man, or has any right, neither by virtue of paternity nor wisdom, to issue moral imperatives to mankind, nor is there any divine authority whose writ runs to all men throughout all time and space.
This means that all atheists must hold that either morality is subjective or objective; but if it is objective, the atheist must hold that this alleged objectivity is not based on the writ of an intelligent authority whose power reaches everywhere across all time.
Within that limitation, I would offer that atheism does allow for a certain degree of objectivity in the question of morals.
An atheist could argue, and I think quite successfully, that certain self-destructive behaviors, or behaviors deleterious to the common good, cannot be maintained in a man or in a society under normal conditions. In such cases, it is simply a matter of logic, not of judgment, that one cannot will the consequences of an action without willing the antecedents. One cannot logically will self-preservation and will acts which lead to self-destruction.
By arguments along these lines, a man’s own sense of self-preservation and his own desire to serve his self-interest, can form a foundation upon which to erect an objective moral code.
The limitation to this argument is that it does not apply to emergencies, short-term situations, or situations where self-sacrifice or even self-restraint is called for.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
December 5, 2012
The Futility of Man’s Search for Meaning
Here is a very insightful, I am tempted to say brilliant, article by “Spengler” in the Asia Times.
The article is an argument against the central effort of modernity, namely, man’s search for meaning. The article interprets this “search for meaning” to be a search for originality, particularly originality of artistic self-expression, based on the ludicrous notion of Sartre that a man’s essential nature is something he can invent for himself.
If man’s nature is something he invents for himself, in order to be an invention, it must be original, and in order to be original, it must defy all prior tradition; but these means posterity must defy him in turn, and cast him and his work into the rubbish heap of history. Spengler says:
If we set out to invent our own identities, then by definition we must abominate the identities of our parents and our teachers. Our children, should we trouble to bring any into the world, also will abominate ours. If self-invention is the path to the meaning of life, it makes the messy job of bearing and raising children a superfluous burden, for we can raise our children by no other means than to teach them contempt for us, both by instruction, and by the example of set in showing contempt to our own parents.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
December 4, 2012
How to Find God
When asked what it would take to convince him that there were a God, Tyrrell McAllister writes in reply:
I don’t know, but my imagination is limited. Nonetheless, I am certain that an omnipotent and omniscient God, unburdened by my limits, could think of something.
If there is a God, then I want to believe that there is a God. I sincerely hope, and strongly believe, that, if there is a God, then it would be possible for some evidence to convince me.
I confess that my limited imagination cannot picture in detail what that evidence would be. But that doesn’t worry me too much, because I can’t currently imagine a lot of things that actually exist or will actually happen. That is obvious. I can see that what I can now imagine is too paltry an image to possibly be a perfectly accurate and complete picture of reality.
That my paltry imagination doesn’t contain something is only very weak evidence that that “something” doesn’t exist. (In this case, the “something” is evidence that would convince me of God’s existence.) Here, this weak evidence is overwhelmed by the fact that it is even harder for me to imagine what could possibly stop God, if he existed, from finding a way to convince me.
The arguments that you and your commenters make above about post-modern epistemology and peoples’ obstinate immunity to all evidence doesn’t help me to see how God could be unable to convince me. I am not a post-modernist, and I don’t believe that I am immune to all possible evidence. Therefore, were God unable to convince me, it seems to me unlikely that it would be for the reasons that you have given.
Brother, I sympathize more than I can say. It was when I reached a point in my atheist pondering when I realized that no miracle, no evidence, nothing whatsoever I could see with my eyes could possibly convince me of the existence of God that I came to myself, and realized my method of inquire was grossly inadequate. It was a thought prison.
If you are not a modern or a postmodern thinker, and you are looking for evidence in the existence of God, allow me in all humility to suggest two things.
First, I suggest the use of reason.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
December 3, 2012
Leftroids Usurp Wikipedia
Nicole Swinford of the College Fix:
Prominent gender and media studies professors from across the country converged recently to help host what was dubbed by organizers as a “Feminist, Anti-Racist Wikipedia Edit-a-thon” to create or influence dozens of entries on the online encyclopedia.
A Claremont Graduate University endowment fund sponsored the effort, which promoted creating and “improving” entries dedicated to: feminists; feminist theories; science studies; science, technology and society; human sexuality; artificial intelligence; and film theory; according to an email that announced the event to the Claremont Colleges community, as well as the “Edit-a-thon Wikipedia Page.”
My comment:
Why, O Conservatives, are we always playing defensively, always playing catch-up, always surprised when the forces of Mind Control make yet another attempt to indoctrinate the young, stifle free speech, monopolize the culture, marginalize the Christian and civilized voices who lingers in ever small numbers among us?
Why?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Obama Usurps Schools
Well, that did not take long. You voted for him, America, and now he will revise what your children are taught in schools. Suckers.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/334645/obamacore-white-house-takes-schools-stanley-kurtz
Is it, of course, unconstitutional for the administration to dictate to your local school board the content of curriculum.
President Obama’s bid to control what your children learn in school is surely one of the most important and disturbing of his many transformative plans. Not only is Obama’s attempt to devise what is in effect a national K-12 school curriculum arguably unconstitutional and illegal, the fact that most Americans have no idea that the new “Common Core” (aka Obamacore) even exists may be the most troubling thing about it.
Today’s Washington Post features an article on the controversy being kicked up by the new English curriculum that 46 states and the District of Columbia are just now waking up to. Not coincidentally, this new education war is hitting less than a month after Obama’s re-election, just in time to prevent the public from taking the most effective step it could have to block the changes. You have to get nearly to the end of today’s Post article even to get a hint of the fact that Obama is the real force behind the new curriculum. Following that link takes you to an article that more frankly lays out Obama’s role in commandeering the substance of what’s taught in the nation’s schools. The print version of this September 21, 2012 article featured a more revealing headline than the web version: “Education overhaul largely bypasses Congress.”
[...]
That 45 states and the District of Columbia have signed on to what is in effect becoming a new national curriculum, most of them without even seeing the new standards, is a Constitutional, legal, political, and educational outrage. Obama is most at fault, yet the states (many run by Republicans) also deserve blame for selling their Constitutional birthright for a mess of pottage. I have much more to say about the Common Core here.
George Will on a related topic:
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
School Removes God from a First Grader’s Veteran’s Day Poem
I am not making this up.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/11/29/school-removes-god-first-graders-poem
Welcome to O-merica.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Gonzaga University Meekly Tramples the Crucifix
Horrible news. H/T to Mark Shea. One of his readers writes:
Sadly, it appears that GU will comply with the HHS Mandate without even a fight. I spoke to Melissa in Human Resource at Gonzaga today and she confirmed December 1, 2012 Gonzaga will cover contraceptives, sterilizations and plan b drugs. This devastating news comes out at the same time Cardinal Dolan said as Catholics we will fight the immoral HHS Mandate.
As Catholics, we will be called in the days ahead to stand up for our Catholic faith and it will be difficult. Remember what our Lord said about being “lukewarm” and have courage.
If you feel called to email or make a phone please do. Above all please keep Dr. McCulloh and Bishop Cupich in your prayers.
President Thayne McCulloh, D. Phil
president@gonzaga.edu
509-313-6102
Most Reverend Blase J Cupich
509-358-7305
Mary Cole, Executive Assistant to the Bishop
mcole@dioceseofspokane.org
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
The Coyness of God
Over at Bad Catholic (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatho...) One of Mr Barnes’ readers there asks the plaintive question:
If God tailors his interactions to suit his audience, then why are atheists wrong to ask for definitive evidence of his existence? Thomas got it. Why can’t I?
While it sounds like a complaint, it is actually an honest question, and merits an honest answer. Here, to the best of my admittedly limited abilities, is mine:
First, you are asking the wrong question, and second, the answer is right in front of you.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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