"An incarnation is not the sort of reality available to recollection." An unmusical reflection

The face, the enigma, and the paradox

This is what has been in the oven for so long.  I had to let it proof, and then I had to let it bake and then I had to let it cool.  I don't know how much of this I will have to quote before it makes sense; or even if it will make sense.  It's a rather technical argument analyzing the relationship between the thought of Kierkegaard and Levinas, so already we're in a rarified atmosphere.  But reading it over last night made me laugh with joy, so:

Like Climacus's [in Philosophical Fragments] pursuit of the Paradox, Levinas's engagement with enigma is a form of critique directed, like the earlier critiques of Augustine and Kant, against the hubris of a human reason that would be autonomous and self-sufficient.

I pause to note reason is being used here to critique reason.  One of the major weaknesses of the "New Atheists" is their insistence that reason is a unitary "thing" which stands alone, contains and embodies truth, and has no need nor ability to self-critique or to be used to examine the very limits of reason itself.  There's something weirdly Platonic in it, as if reason itself were the Good which, once obtained, was also self-contained and self-complete and incapable of being used to, well, deconstruct what reasoning has wrought.  And maybe that's the helpful distinction:  reason is not a thing, and reasoning is not the action of reason as a thing, or even the discovery of what reason has to tell.  Then again, that's where this argument is headed, by distinguishing "logocentric Reason" from other forms of Reason:

It is motivated in part by the sense that logocentric Reason is dogmatically atheistic, that it arbitrarily excludes God from its world or, what is worse, domesticates God by transforming the divine into a (visible or intelligible) phenomenon, a process in which "the divinity of God dissipates"[cit. omitted].  "Phenomena, apparition in the full light, the relationship with being, ensure immanence as a totality and philosophy as atheism."

It is also motivated by the sense that the transcendence thus reduced to immanence properly belongs to philosophy.  In pursuit of enigma he takes as his guide "the notion of God, which a thought called faith succeeds in getting expressed and introduces into philosophical discourse."  To affirm this thought requires that one "endure the contradiction between the existence included in the essence of God and the scandalous absence of this God....[and] to suffer an initiation trial into religious life which separates philosophers from believers.

Right there I would pause and insert a discussion of Gould's "magisteria" and Rorty's metaphor (which he ascribes to Max Weber:  "One can be tone-deaf when it comes to religion just as one can be oblivious to the charms of music.") that religious belief is akin to being "unmusical:"  a useless and harmless ability that excludes from the experience of some an otherwise meaningless aspect of human life, and one wholly unrelated to anything covered by Reason, especially logocentric Reason.  But maybe another day.  There are more important considerations to get to:

But this thought that faith manages to introduce into philosophical discourse is not entirely eccentric to the latter.  [pace Rorty and Gould!].  In the first place it is a thought, not simply an image or a feeling.  There is no hint that what distinguishes this thought from the thoughts of logocentric ontology or phenomenology is that it is an undergraduate mythos that has not yet learned the doctoral level language of the logos, a miner league Vorstellung not yet good enough to join the Big Show and its superstar Begrime.  The distinguishing mark of this thought is simply that it radically disturbs the thoughts by which we construct the worlds of nature and history.

A mysterium tremendum, in other words.  Continuing:

In Philosophical Fragments, Climacus's critique has the same dual motivation [as that of Levinas, explained in a paragraph omitted here].  On the one hand, it is directed against what is perceived to be a dogmatic and arbitrary exclusion without which human understanding could not absolutize itself as Reason.  In his case the God whom the world cannot accommodate is the specifically Christian God become human in Jesus of Nazareth.  What his thought experiment is designed to show is that the Socratic assumption that knowledge is recollection excludes this possibility a priori (as Lessing clearly saw).  An incarnation is not the sort of reality available to recollection.

And now we enter fully into an epistemological discourse, setting up a third way of knowing apart from Socratic recollection and empirical discovery.

At the same time, Climacus thinks human understanding has a built-in desire for an absolute will that will relativize it.  He says that "the thinker without a paradox is like a lover with passion," and that "the ultimate paradox of thought [is] to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think."

Which still puts me in mind of Godel's theorem, and the result that any system can generate a question it cannot answer.  That doesn't invalidate the question, it just points to the limits of the system.

The human understanding, when not deluding itself into thinking it is Reason, has a "paradoxical passion that wills the collision...and, without really understanding itself, wills its own downfall."  Concretely speaking, God incarnate is "this unknown against which the understanding in its paradoxical passion collides and which even disturbs man and his self-knowledge."

Which could explain the passion of the atheist to snuff out the belief of the theist.

Abstractly speaking, the unknown against which human understanding in its paradoxical passion continuously collides is "the absolutely different...Defined as the absolutely different, it seems to be at the point of being disclosed, but not so, because the understanding cannot even think the absolutely different."

Pay attention now; this is where it gets interesting.  The subject of Levinas's concern is "a theory of enigma as semantic alterity."  For our purposes, "enigma" and "paradox" will be interchangeable terms.

The semantic disturbance Levinas has in mind is "the entry into a given order of another order which does not accommodate itself with the first.  Thus we exclude from disturbance the simple parallelism of the two orders that would be in a relationship of sign to signified, of appearance to thing in itself, and between which, as we have said, a relationship would reestablish the simultaneity of one single order."

Since the other cannot appear "without renouncing his radical alterity, without entering into an order," only that which will be transcendent (and thus disturbing) which can show itself without appearing.  It cannot allow itself to be tied down to the "unbreakable chain of significations" that make up the "triumphant, that is, primary truths" of a given cultural order if it would signify as enigma rather than phenomenon.  It must "tear itself" free from "the public order of the disclosed and triumphant significations of nature and history."

It would seem to follow that the gods who are the keystones of these humanly created orders of intelligibility, say the God of Aquinas in relation to the structures of nature and the Geist of Hegel in relation to the structures of history, are phenomenal and not enigmatic, onto theological and not truly transcendent.  This is why a God like Kierkegaard's who is quite thoroughly enigmatic, is "essential in a world which can no longer believe that the books about God attest to transcendence as a phenomenon and to the Ab-solute as an apparition.  And without the good reasons atheism brings forth, there would have been no enigma."

In other words the "atheism" of Hume and Kant in relation to the God of Aquinas and the atheism of Feuerbach and Marx in relation to the Hegelian Geist need to be seen not as the vindication of dogmatic secularism but can be construed as a kind of prophetic protest against every project of domesticating the divine.  They can be read as opening the question whether the absence of God from self-evidence and the "scandalous absence" of God from "the mortal conduct of the world" points to the abyss or to revelation as disturbance.

Which point to an interesting connection between belief and atheism, a connection deeper than the surface similarities between neo-atheists and fundamentalists.  And here we also reach the problem of the sign:

The problem of the sign, according to Levinas, is its re-presentational character.  It assumes that the signified has been present, has appeared, and serves to recall that appearance to mind.  By definition, the enigma cannot be such a signified.  "But how to refer to an irreversible past, that is, a past which this very reference would not bring back, like memory which retrieves the past, like signs which recapture the signified?....But in a face before signifying as a sign it is the emptiness of an irrecuperable absence.  The gaping open of emptiness is not only the sign of an absence...but the very emptiness of a passage.  And what has withdrawn is not evoked, does not return to presence, not even to an indicated presence."

"In place of the sign," Levinas would put the trace, a reference to "the past of the other which must never have been present."

This notion of a past that has never been present is by not means an easy one.  But one thing is clear--it precludes, as it is intended to preclude, the notion that knowledge is recollection....Recollection presupposes the essential kinship or likeness of subject and object."  And so knowledge makes available to us only immanence and totality.  "It is this immanence ant totality that Kierkegaard and Levinas seek to deconstruct with their notions of divine transcendence and infinity."  Levinas says of the ontological tradition:  "Philosophy is atheism, or rather unreligion, negation of a God that reveals himself and puts truth into us."  The God Levinas has in mind is precisely the God whom Climacus presents in the Fragments as giving to the learner not just the truth, but the very condition for recognizing the truth.....This is the God whose self revelation is the antithesis to the situation where "self-knowledge is God-knowledge."

This would seem to leave us with no pathway to God, since God is wholly Other, and there is no kinship or likeness of subject and object.  However, Climacus reveals the understanding of Kierkegaard, the seminary student, the would be pastor:  only connect to human beings.

...in his view it is not "all thought" or "all cognition" that are cut off from the presence of God, but sinful thought and sinful cognition.  Radical alterity is not to be found in an ontological interpretation of finitude  vis-a-vis infinity, but in a more interpretation of evil vis-a-vis goodness.
....
Climacus might put his critique of speculation this way.  Ontology is the option moment of human thought, the longing for salvation.  The trouble with ontology, from Plato to Hegel, is that by insisting prematurely on replacing faith with sight it converts utopia into ideology, claiming to possess now a presence for which we have only the right to hope.  But the critique of ontology that responds by eliminating even the hope of sight, thereby reducing ontological utopianism to political utopianism, is a counsel of despair.  Is not this despair, that is to say, political utopianism devoid of both the sense of sin and the hope of divine salvation, the major source of the violence of our most recent history?
...Just as for Climacus it is sin that generates absolute difference, in this context what makes the other absolutely other is fault, not the conditions of "all thought" or "all cognition."  Most immediately this fault is in relation to my neighbor.  But if the human race has its moral appeal "only if it engimatically comes from the infinite and its immemorial past," if the absolute He "solicits across a human face," then injustice towards my neighbor is sin against God as well.

I think Levinas is precisely right: philosophy is unreligion, negation of a God that revealed God's self and puts truth into us.  Much of this depends, of course, upon what you consider "truth."  But this discussion, obtuse and technical as it may be,  takes place entirely within the terms of the discussion in Western civilization.  There are other ways to discuss it, but those ways either end up comforting the already convinced (not that there's anything wrong with that!) or straining at gnats and swallowing camels.

I just like to present alternatives when I can.  And while the discussion as quoted is decidedly arcane, it ends in favor of Kierkegaard and does so, in ways I can't fully capture here without even more extensive quoting, by illustrating (intentionally or not) Kierkegaard's fundamentally pastoral concern, which I think is the real point of view of the authorship, and surprisingly the basis of modern existentialism (and undoubtedly why I find so much value in Sartre and Camus, though still not so much in Heidegger.  I consider this a failing I may overcome one day).

All quoted material, except Rorty, from Merold Westphal, "The Transparent Shadow:  Kierkegaard and Levinas in Dialogue."  Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed.  Martin J. Matustik and Merold Westphal. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995.  pp. 265-278.  Rorty quoted from:  Richard Rorty, "Anticlericalism and Atheism."  The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala.  New York:  Columbia University Press, 2005, p. 30.

Sauce for the Goose

Via Charlie Pierce, who is rightly concerned for the state of mind of Clio, Muse of History, we learn that:

“Socrates trained Plato in on a rock and then Plato trained in Aristotle roughly speaking on a rock. So, huge funding is not necessary to achieve the greatest minds and the greatest intellects in history.”

That is a pronouncement by a presumably educated white man who sits on the House Education and Workforce Committee, and so has the power to make his stupidity the law of the land.

I am waiting for all educated white men in America to rise up en masse and denounce this stupidity and make it stop.  Until that happens, they are all to be held accountable for this kind of clap-trap resounding in the halls of our Congress.

Bonfire of the Inanities

Can you spot the exotic person in this picture?

I have something else in the oven, but oh, what the hell?

Worse, the Prayer Breakfast’s past keynote speakers have included a roster of obscurantist scoundrels, among them Mother Teresa (once denounced by Christopher Hitchens as a “thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf” for the multifarious, entirely non-beatific controversies bespattering her long career); the evolution-denying, gay-marriage naysayer Dr. Ben Carson, who may seek the Republican nomination for 2016; and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the sanctimonious “poodle” enabler of Bush’s Iraq War. Actually, not all breakfasters are scoundrels: the Dalai Lama was there this time, and even Jordan’s King Abdullah has visited, thus reminding us that the plague of religion in American public life can be exotic and multi-confessionary.

Hadn't seen that description of Mother Teresa before; but as we will learn, Mr. Tayler has a First Amendment right to be obnoxious and juvenile.   Nice to see even the Dalai Lama is a reminder of "the plague of religion in American public life," and that he's exotic, too!  Edward Said would have had a field day with such "orientalism."  But Tayler would probably consider Said "exotic," too. And I'm not sure I'd consider Buddhism a confessional faith, but never mind.  That's the mildest part of this idiocy.

What, some might ask, could be wrong with prayer? By common definition, prayer entails someone sitting for a quiet moment and beseeching his or her Lord for intervention in matters of grave import – that it rain on the crops or souls be saved, that gays be “healed” or atheists “see the light,” and so on. In objective terms, however, the supplicant is demanding improbable favors from an imaginary despot, and most likely doing so with lowered head and genuflections and other toadying gestures of obeisance — behavior that without faith’s halo would be classified as symptoms of mental derangement. (And all the more so if the petitioner claims to receive answers to the muttered incantations.) This debasing ritual, fruitless and foolish though it may be, is at least usually peaceful, but in some cases (notably in certain corners of the Middle East), rioting and rampaging follow, especially on Friday afternoons, when imams may deliver sermons exciting crowds to fury and frenzy. What’s not to like?

Res ipsa loquitor, as the lawyers say.  And I'm not really sure that identifies either the practice of Christian prayer, or the use of Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheels, just to name two.

Do I really have to explain how benighted this kind of ranting is?  But it turns out the real problem with religion is it's "inutility."  No, I didn't make that word up:  Tayler did.  And still there are comments at Salon that consider this article "eloquent."  The mind reels, and not from the staggering power of Tayler's ideas; but from the sheer emptiness of thought on display:

So, Obama spoke at the Prayer Breakfast, which was bad enough, but what’s worse, not after some visiting head of state or other luminary, but a NASCAR driver, Darrell Waltrip. Subsequent to salutations offering “all praise and honor to God,” Obama paid homage to this driver, wondering if “Darrell has had the same thought as many of us have in our own lives — Jesus, take the wheel. . . . Although I hope that you kept your hands on the wheel when you were thinking that.” (Was this tacit recognition of religion’s inutility?) He voiced gratitude that the assembled could “come together in humility before the Almighty and to be reminded of what it is that we share as children of God.” He confessed that he had “sought His guidance not just in my own life but in the life of our nation.”

From there Tayler rings in the Charlie Hebdo controversy, manages to swipe at multiculturalism (the shibboleth of the right in, what was it, the '90's?), and argues that thanks to the Enlightenment we can be as rude as we wanna be ("The First Amendment contains no proviso regarding insults, let alone excluding them from its protection"; which makes no sense in context, or as an assertion about Constitutional law), and no President can tell us otherwise!  Such heights of peroration are truly inspiring; or just stupid, two conditions that often appear alike on the internet.  But remember, Tayler tells us, ya gotta respect people!

Hallowed ideologies, which is all religions are, do not deserve respect. People do. 

Unless those people are Mother Teresa; or the Dalai Lama; or Muslims, evangelicals, or anybody else Tayler thinks deserve to be insulted.  Or maybe insults are a form of respect; it's hard to tell just what Tayler means at this point.  Apparently only certain people deserve respect; the rest deserve only to go away and quit doing whatever it is Tayler doesn't like.

But it's the ending that makes raises it almost to art:

There resides a sad irony in these words. [that we should stand up for the dignity and value of every man, woman, and child]  The best first step toward a future of light and love would be for rationalists to freely espouse their nonbelief and object to locutions that further irrationality. 

And if that doesn't work, ban religion!  Because the only way to freedom is oppression of those you think dangerous in their thinking!

We might start, for example, by stating that we are not “children of God” but of the fact of evolution. (Ask any biologist if evolution is “just a theory.”) Poverty and hunger have generally been the concomitants of the God creeds that have done so much to retard human progress.

Seriously?

Realizing the “dignity and value of every woman, and man, and child” is impossible while cringing, cowering and murmuring superstitious gobbledygook in the hope that an invisible — let’s just say forthrightly, inexistent — being will take pity on us and toss us a scrap. 

I'll mention that to Dr. King, shall I?  And "inexistent"?  What, "non-existent" was on vacation?

President Obama, your faith is your business. You have every right to practice it, talk of it and advocate it. 

Well, apparently, it isn't, is it?  And he doesn't, does he?

But please understand: Speaking as you did at the National Prayer Breakfast, with the eyes of the country and the world upon you, does nothing more than lend credence to faith-fueled forces of reaction, both at home and abroad. With ISIS on the rampage in Iraq and Syria, Islamist violence striking the heart of Europe, and, of course, evangelicals funding much of your political opposition in the United States, the secular, Enlightenment-era civilization from which we all, believers and nonbelievers, benefit, is under threat. We’re on a slippery slope. 

Violence done in the name of responding to 9/11 or finding weapons of mass destruction had nothing to do with it?  And because faith is all about fueling violence?  Again:  seriously?

To get off it, we can start by doing one thing: telling the truth.   

Do you think Tayler would know the truth if it shook his hand?

As Charlie Pierce might say:  this is your national discourse via the Internet, America.

Cherish it.

What We Mean When We Mean To Say Something

Judge Roy Moore as he will be portrayed in the movie....

Do I quote myself? Very well, then, I quote myself (I am small, I can barely contain a glass marble in my hand):

But I don't think that insight gives me a privileged position from which to judge other religions; or other philosophies, for that matter. I can adjudge their weaknesses for me; I cannot stand in judgment over them and declare them too infirm until they rise to the level of my preference. Yes, extremist opinions, like those of Christian white supremacists, can be rejected as inimical to human society. But from what position do I judge Islam, and it doesn't call into judgment my own Christianity?

This is kind of what I was getting at: 

The Constitution, [the Constitutional Party] claim[s], is a divine document designed only to protect the rights conferred by God, not to create “new” rights by way of jurisprudence. For all you law school graduates shaking your head as you read this, Peroutka, Moore, and their followers claim that the law schools are teaching it all wrong—that’s why they’ve created their own law schools.

Which "rights" God has conferred, and on whom, is a bit unclear to me; but that's a quibble.  This entire idea is simply nuts, especially because it is based on the argument that "everybody else is wrong!"

The latter is supposed to be the compelling argument of Christian evangelism.  It isn't: compelling, or the heart of Christian evangelism.  Indeed, I'd go so far as to argue it isn't even Christian.  That would take a bit of explanation on my part, but the argument is perfectly sound both theologically and historically.  And it isn't an argument that forces me to sit in judgment on the adherents to the ideas of the Constitutional Party.

Of course, I also don't think there's any such thing as a "divine document."  It comes from studying the scriptures too carefully, I guess.  What I read there is a document of humanity's encounter with the divine; but that doesn't make the account itself divine; only human.  All too human.

But that is as it should be, it seems to me.  Were it otherwise I would despair even more of ever hoping to understand it correctly, and learn from it wisely.

Now, I don't care for what Roy Moore has done.  If I don't judge him, I also don't approve of him.  His ideas are wrong, and his actions are wrong.  But there is no simple either/or:  he is wrong, so I am right (how many times do have I to run into that simplistic logic lately?).  But just as you aren't entitled to your own facts (well, at least until you get into a court of law, where the trier of fact decides, on behalf of the judicial system, what the facts of a case are), you also aren't entitled to your own law; or to a hare-brained interpretation of the law.

Even Roy Moore understands that:

“Effective immediately, no probate judge of the State of Alabama nor any agent or employee of any Alabama probate judge shall issue or recognize a marriage license that is inconsistent” with the Alabama Constitution or state law, the chief justice wrote in his order.

But then he said it wasn't an order, just advice:

“I think I’ve done what I can do: advise the state court probate judges that they’re not bound by any ruling of the Federal District Court,” he said.

See how quickly that "shall" turned into "just my opinion"?  It's something I've noticed about people who say they can defy the law.  Yes, there are pockets of people who declare the state has no authority over them, even as the bailiffs take them away to jail.  But the oldest defense to murder is the claim that the alleged had no sense of right and wrong at the time of the crime, and in fact thought he acted lawfully (and in self-defense).  If you know you aren't acting lawfully, however, you make excuses like Judge Moore did in that interview.  He's just rendering his legal opinion; he's not actually responsible for it!

Which, yes, sounds kind of like the Bush Administration saying they relied on legal opinions so they can't be guilty of torture, and the lawyers were only giving legal advice, so they can't be guilty of condoning torture.  And the passive voice wonders what work there is left for it anymore.....

So I don't have to judge Roy Moore to point out his legal opinions and his actions based on them are inimical to a democratic republic.  It is the weakness of his thought, the paucity of his reasoning, I examine.

Or maybe I'm just justifying my opinion, when there are far more important things in life to focus on. That's another possibility....

On Judgment

I wanted a picture for this, but given where I ended up, this video is the best representation of what I'm talking about here.

This is the problem of getting your information from secondary sources.

According to Religion Dispatches, this is what Jean-Luc Marion wrote:

In a piece published in Le Point on January 12th (translated and reprinted in Sightings on January 30th) eminent philosopher-theologian Jean-Luc Marion declared, “France is at war; we can no longer doubt that this is the case.”

This war, according to Marion, has three fronts: first, the defense against terrorist attack; second, the war to defend secularism (laïcité); and third, the urgent need for Islam to “open itself to critique.”

Well, at least on the latter point:  close, but not a cigar:

The situation can be summed up in this way: the religions demonstrate their excellence only by allowing—and even better, by choosing, for themselves, to undergo the ordeal of self-critique—tests of their religious validity. Religions that do not do this either disappear or degrade ideologically.

Islam has not yet opened itself up to a close analysis (including philological analysis to understand how its texts came into being, an assessment of the interpretations of these texts, in-depth research into their actual religious history, etc.) for historic reasons which themselves would be worthwhile to examine.  

To be fair, what Marion is calling for there is a Western critical analysis of Islam such as Christianity has been undergoing for the past 150 years.  It is an analysis which lead to the creation of Christian fundamentalism, so I'm not as anxious to see it applied to Islam as the French theologian.  There's a cart before the horse feel to the argument, in other words.  The kind of analysis being argued for is what prompted fundamentalism in the world.  Islam, at least in the Middle East, has a surfeit of modernism to deal with; hair of the dog is not the cure for the hangover Islam is currently suffering.

But what he doesn't say is that Islam is not open to critique; my first response to that line was to think that, neither is Christianity, if the reaction to President Obama's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast is any indication ("verbal rape"?  Really?)

Then again, American Christians are not the entirety of worldwide Christianity, any more than Islam as pronounced by ISIS or any imam in the Arab countries is Islam in Africa or Asia.  Where, indeed, are the Boko Harams and ISIS's of the Pacific Rim, where the majority of the world's Muslims live?  Then again, Mr. Marion is more interesting in what he says, than in the reduction of what he says:

However, “French-style secularism” has too often tended to understand itself and to comport itself like an army fending off the religions (especially Catholicism), behaving as if it were another religion, substituting itself, in the name of Reason, for the historical religions. Today, this tendency reveals itself in so-called “social” reforms, more or less imposed on people who are more or less in agreement, manipulated or simply ignored.

But let's put that comment in context:

The second front comes into view as soon as one considers that the attack targeted a political and satirical newspaper that caricatured (I underscore this point) all of the religions, based on the principle that one can laugh about anything “and mock everything else.”

If this newspaper was tolerated and even supported by the public, although it was often shocking, it owed this to a fundamental and ancient trait of French society—the freedom to think and to speak—first secured under the Ancien Régime. It rose to the level of principle in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, took effect when all legislation against blasphemy was abolished at the beginning of the Nineteenth-Century, and was reinforced by the law separating Church and State.

In a way, this crime targeted a central tenet of French society: secularism. Here the second front opens out. What is secularism worth today? We must recognize the ambiguity of this concept and its application. Because, if the State is secular, society is not.

More exactly: the State must be secular (it must refrain from showing favoritism for any particular religion, permit them all to exist under the protection of the law, showing a preference neither for religious belief, nor for unbelief), a stance that I hope no one contests.

But society is not secular and cannot be secular, because upon becoming citizens, men and women do not lose their freedom of conscience—their religious freedom—but, on the contrary, exercise it fully. Besides, the neutrality of the State must never be based on neutralization, forced or tacit, of the religious dimensions of the real men and women who make up society.

This strikes me as theology the way Reinhold Niebuhr practiced it:  taking on secular society from a religious perspective, without being reductionist and insisting on a narrow Christian point of view from which to judge all has having sinned and fallen short of the glory of the believers (yes, I substituted "God" there intentionally).  "If the state is secular, society is not" could have easily come from Niebuhr's pen; or at least aroused a ringing discussion of the differences in their theologies.

Marion here carefully takes the Jeffersonian wall away from those who think Jefferson meant to display hostility to religion (both atheists and true believers in religion, I mean).  The state must be secular; but society is people, and that means they have a freedom of conscience which must be freely exercised.  It does mean the State should not favor Christianity over, say, Islam; but neither must it neutralize religion among individuals.  Go in that direction and all you are doing is substituting one religion for another, even if your "religion" is "reason."

By the way:  challenge the reasoning of Aquinas; or Augustine:  go ahead.  Take them seriously, and attack their reasoning on their home turf.  That'll keep you busy for the rest of your life; and much good may it do you.  I do not agree entirely with the theology of Aquinas or Augustine; but their reasoning is subtle and yet supple enough to have shaped the foundation of thought in Western civilization, no less so than Plato or Aristotle.  Who is going to say the same for any avowed atheist, whose every argument for the abolishing of religion is a reductionist screed?

Marion's conclusion on this point seems equally applicable in America as in Europe, but with a twist:

The second front consists of, and is much more difficult to secure than the first front, a reformation of the secular pact in France (and thus in Europe). To defend secularism, an emergency no one debates, we must redefine it, in positive terms, and not as a constraint. Because we can’t require all of France’s citizens to emasculate themselves religiously.

This is a problem with which we’ve struggled for the past twenty years. Will we know how to address it? It seems to me doubtful that French politicians, still extremely ideological and rather ignorant on the question of religion, are capable of this today.

I don't think American politicians are any more capable than French politicians to handle the problem Marion identifies.  But the willingness of Americans to even handle it is the problem I see (I cannot speak for the attitudes of the French).  President Obama delivers a wholly unremarkable speech at a prayer breakfast (compare what he said to the Easer Sermon of Gregory of Nyssa (excerpted here, here, and here) and tell me who is more enduringly controversial and founded in Christian principles in their words.)  If he'd simply read aloud the words of Basil, or Ambrose, or even the Beatitudes of Jesus in Luke; what do you think people would have said?  His mild remarks and unremarkable observations brought down calumny on his head, mostly from American pundits.  Can we defend secularism and religion any better than the French?  From what I see on bits of the internet, even private citizens are no less "extremely ideological and rather ignorant on the question of religion" than French politicians.

I think Marion is even right on this point:

The situation can be summed up in this way: the religions demonstrate their excellence only by allowing—and even better, by choosing, for themselves, to undergo the ordeal of self-critique—tests of their religious validity. Religions that do not do this either disappear or degrade ideologically.

But I don't think that insight gives me a privileged position from which to judge other religions; or other philosophies, for that matter.  I can adjudge their weaknesses for me; I cannot stand in judgment over them and declare them too infirm until they rise to the level of my preference.  Yes, extremist opinions, like those of Christian white supremacists, can be rejected as inimical to human society.  But from what position do I judge Islam, and it doesn't call into judgment my own Christianity?

Jesus told me "Don't judge, and you won't be judged."  Seminary taught me that means I have to stand outside of any system of judgment, because I cannot judge others without calling myself into judgment.  I will not stand with violence and mayhem as a tool for anything except inflicting violence and mayhem:  but that calls in to judgment violence in the name of reason, nation, religion, even family or tribe.  If I think Islam is in need of greater self-reflection, it means what I most need to reflect on, is my own ignorance and limitations.  Maybe even at a National Prayer Breakfast.

Rendering unto Caesar

Some probate judges in Alabama are following the order of Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore to defy the federal court order finding same-sex marriage cannot be banned under Alabama law. According to Slate, Americans United for Separation of Church and State is encouraging the recalcitrant judges to back down by encouraging potential plaintiffs to sue to enforce the federal court order.

I mention this because the Executive Director of AUSCS is a UCC minister.  Which either means not all things connected to religion or bad, or that Christians who agree with AUSCS are not "real" Christians.

According to people who think there is no such thing as a real "Christian," because all religion is delusional.  I dunno; apparently it makes sense to them.

I give up on Christmas, but....

What have we done to Valentine's Day?

I think after seeing this, I need a live chat with a Bear Counselor.  Or just a counselor....

Seriously.

Mirror, mirror

I'm really tired of the "religion is the source of all evil" argument that's making the rounds of the ignorati (I consider Sam Harris a dangerously stupid man), largely because it's yet another attempt to move responsibility from us, human beings all, to some abstract which, if we can just eliminate "it," all our problems will be solved.

In concreto the argument is that we just need everyone to think like, say, Sam Harris; and then O what a paradise it will be!  Or we could all just think like Richard Dawkins and, like the true Brit he is, lord it over, if not still rule over, the benighted peoples of the world who aren't clever enough to have won as many Nobel Prizes as Englishmen have.  Because in the end, what's a better marker of  superiority, eh?

So when I read something like this, I simply have to quote it with approval:

Obama’s comments about Christianity were much more reserved than they could have been. In the winter of 2015, we should not lose sight of the vast and gruesome horrors rendered in the name of the Christian God following 1615. Arrogance reigned, anxiety soared and the people of Europe died in huge bloody numbers. The source of terrorist acts in our era is not Islam any more than Christianity was the cause of the thousands upon thousands who died in the Thirty Years War. The source of such religiously motivated violence is a volatile mixture of intolerance, ignorance, fear, economic disadvantage, and political machinations. The president's comparison between Islam and Christianity is important: any religion can be used to promote crimes against humanity.

You could remove "religion" from that last phrase, and say "any damned idea at all."  It wasn't exactly a religious crusade that sent Hitler on his quest for a "Final Solution."  There was an old religious element to the anti-Semitism he exploited, but he acted in the name of the Aryan race and the thousand year Reich, not in the name of the God of Abraham, or even of Martin Luther (who, as the professor points out in that linked article, was no choir boy.  Luther's anti-semitism was particularly ugly, of a piece with his anti-Roman attitudes, attitudes which continue to infect Protestantism almost 600 years later.  Ideas are indeed bulletproof, more's the pity.)  Economic disadvantage, fear, ignorance, political machinations, intolerance:  sounds like the major themes of the rise of the Third Reich, to me.  Do we blame Hitler on Christianity?  Or on being all too human?  We don't like the latter, but I've seldom heard anyone seriously conjecture it was the former.

Science?  Science:

brought us eugenics and the Tuskegee experiments and Hiroshima and Zyklon-B and a whole host of amazing pesticides and herbicides and preservatives and plastics that have permeated every square millimeter of the planet’s surface and the bodies of all its creatures, and whose long-term effects are not known but don’t look that great. 

Yes, some those were abuses of science, (even though eugenics was part and parcel of the law of the land of these United States, at least until the Nazis embarrassed it out of us), some just failures to think much about consequences; but no less was the violence done in the name of the God of Jesus an abuse of religion.  And science didn't reach out and compel Harry Truman to bomb Hiroshima with atomic fire; or whisper in the delicate shell-like of Oliver Wendell Holmes that "three generations of imbeciles is enough!"; or tell the Nazis "Why not use gas?  And why not on people?  Think of the efficiencies!"  Any more than religion said "Chop their limbs off!  It's the best way!"

Science and religion, you see, aren't animate objects; they aren't even animals, much less people.  They are human frameworks; human ideas; human categories.  Ecce homo.  We have met the enemy, and he is us.

And ashamed of that mirror, we keep blaming the mirror for the image it shows us.  I'm not sure what science and empiricism have to say about that; but I know what Christianity has to say.  And if Jeremiah Wright had been heard saying what Obama said at the prayer breakfast, he would have been no less scorned for saying it.

Mostly because he, too, would have been right.  And we really cannot bear very much reality.

Family Resemblance

Jeb Bush:

“I would like to see more people marching in the streets for rising student achievement,” he said in a speech in Detroit on Wednesday. “Less people marching in the streets for things that might be important to them, but rising student achievement should be the highest calling for all of us and we should be outraged that it’s not happening to the degree that it should.”

George W. Bush:

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.  They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

Unless Jeb thinks student achievement is akin to flood waters, I think he meant "raising" student achievement.  But either way, it's unclear exactly what he means:  should people be in the streets demanding students study more?  Or teachers grade easier so students can achieve?

Where, exactly, is our outrage supposed to be focused, and how?

UPDATE:  Turns out there's another problem with "rising student achievement," coming out of Jeb's own backyard:

[FL. State Rep. Charles] VAN ZANT[R.  Of course]: These people, that will now receive $220 million from the state of Florida unless this is stopped, will promote double-mindedness in state education and attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can. I’m sorry to report that to you.

The $220 million is money to be spent on Common Core education in Florida.

These are your people, Jeb.  Maybe they understand what "rising student achievement" means.  Maybe it's code for "gay agenda."

I dunno.

Thus Spake Zarathustra

No, it wasn't an accident that I chose that picture for a previous post.  For some reason the nickel finally dropped, and I realized what a profoundly disturbing and depressing film "2001" was.

It's a Kubrick film, so you can't expect an uplifting lesson about the progress of Man, or some such.  But the opening sequence ends with the apes, progenitors to man, discovering the effectiveness of violence.  They can kill a tapir; they can kill the other tribe; and of course it's no accident the bone hurled into the heavens in triumph becomes a satellite orbiting the earth; a satellite bristling with missiles.

The second sequence ends with the madness of HAL-9000.  Except HAL is not mad; HAL has become sentient, has become intelligent.  Just as the apes learned intelligence, and found it linked to violence, the effective violence of self-preservation (which made the bone become a military satellite), so HAL learns intelligence and tries to turn effective violence to self-preservation (Why?  Because HAL has been exposed to knowledge of the slab, a knowledge which sparks HAL's all-too human (?) intelligence).  HAL's only problem is he's up against an intelligent ape who understands self-preservation even better than HAL does, and who effectively "kills" HAL in order to prove it.

The third sequence, then, also ends with incipient violence.  Now Dave Bowman has been exposed to the slab, too; and the Star-Child orbits the earth, where we last saw the whirling, unfinished space station.  He folds his hands together, fingertips just touching, gazing open eyed at the blue marble before him.  If I remember correctly, Arthur C. Clarke ended the novelization of the movie story with the Star-Child first extinguishing the military satellites orbiting the planet.  Nothing like that happens in Kubrick's version, but it is clear the Star-Child is the supreme power on the planet now; that it has learned a new intelligence.  What is not clear is whether this new intelligence precludes the lesson that intelligence=a more effective violence.  But given that the former human being is now an embryonic Star-Child, there's no reason to believe (or hope) the indifference to suffering of others by human infants won't be replicated in this infant.

And if that is evolution, or progress, or any kind of improvement at all, I'm hard pressed to see it.  All we are really spared in the movie's ending is the series of nuclear explosions that concluded "Dr. Strangelove."  But then, it wouldn't have been funny a second time around; and there's nothing to indicate in this vision of humanity that we'll all meet again, anywhere, ever.  And while I have problems with the film's version of "human intelligence," it is also of a piece with the reasoning of the secular world.

Only because I'm not on Facebook

And so can't comment at Charlie Pierce's place:

At 91 years old, the former secretary of state, national security adviser and intellectual-cum-celebrity has come to occupy a unique place in the foreign policy firmament. Though some historians blame him for countless deaths in places like Vietnam, Cambodia and Bangladesh, Kissinger is more revered than ever in Washington. He has become a Yoda-like figure, bestowing credibility and a statesman's aura to politicians of both parties, including ones who may not actually share his worldview.

"Thou hast committed fornication
But that was in another country
And besides, the wench is dead."

--Christopher Marlowe

We get most of our political culture from Britain, to whom the rest of the world is "another country," and so what you do there doesn't really matter.

Besides, the wench is dead.  How many votes do the dead have?

And in other extremely disturbing news

I will freely admit that when I heard about the ISIS prisoner burned to death in a cage, I would have supported a massive air strike that leveled everything ISIS controls, and all its encampments, to molten glass.

And then I read this:

“We have had reports of children, especially children who are mentally challenged, who have been used as suicide bombers, most probably without them even understanding,” Winter told Reuters. “There was a video placed (online) that showed children at a very young age, approximately eight years of age and younger, to be trained already to become child soldiers.”

The committee condemned “the systematic killing of children belonging to religious and ethnic minorities by the so-called ISIL, including several cases of mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children and burying children alive.”

And I don't feel any less that such people should be exterminated:  violently.  Until I read this:

In September, the United States launched a bombing campaign targeting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. U.S. intelligence officials told the Daily Beast this week that since the U.S. began bombing Islamic State targets, an estimated 4,000 new fighters have joined the group. (emphasis added)

Which violence is the good violence?  Which violence will stop the violence?  Which violence will dissuade such people from being violent?  Can we truly eradicate such malevolence, as we did smallpox?  Or might we just as well try to eradicate cockroaches?

This fire cannot be allowed to burn; but are we pouring water on it?  Or kerosene?

Pilate's Question

Last chance for gas

There are two critical points to be drawn from the Thomas Lessl essay.  This is one:

Religious culture, by contrast, must then be shown to exhibit features which make it unsuited for survival in a changing human environment.

This is the other:

...the values that are championed in the Galileo legend are shared with the broader culture of modernism.  Modernity looks to the scientific culture as a kind of moral exemplar which upholds in some ideal fashion its values of rationalism, liberalism, and individualism.  The more general culture of modernism is similarly unlikely to protest such aberrations of historical consciousness because it shares with science a belief in binary oppositions between reason and faith, knowledge and authority, and between Scripture and the light of nature.

Part of the historical irony here is that the very idea of rationalism was one promoted and preserved by the church through the so-called "Dark Ages."  The survival of Plato and Aristotle, the two pillars of Western civilization to which all Western philosophy (including science) is still just a footnote, is due to the church.  Two of the fundamental scientific theories today, genetics and the Big Bang Theory, originated with Catholic clergy.  Even the atheist Bertrand Russell had to acknowledge the supreme reasoning ability of Thomas Aquinas, a man whose work, it has been fairly said, we are still catching up with.  All of this, of course, must be swept aside in favor of the narrative that religion=superstition, and science=truth.

Rationalism, liberalism, and individualism, are all products of Christianity in Western culture.  If you doubt it, read Socrates' argument for why he must be executed in "Crito."  Consider the arguments against Antigone's actions in the eponymous play.  There was no room for the sacred individual, the Thoreau defying a poll tax, the MLK accepting arrest to prove a greater moral point, in ancient Greece.  The idea was not only unthinkable, it was anathema.    If Socrates is an heroic figure in Plato's telling, it is because he accepts the death sentence of Athens, not because he nobly escapes what he knows is an unfair verdict (even the citizens of Athens say so).  It was Christianity which taught us the virtue of the individual, however lowly.  Chaucer's Wife of Bath is notable because she isn't noble; and yet her virtues make her laudable.  It would take Thomas Gray and finally William Wordsworth to overturn the Great Chain of Being more suitable to monarchic rule and to usher in the Day of the Individual, the Byronic hero:  but without the groundwork of Christianity, the emphasis on the worth of the least among us, the example of the Creator of the Universe born in a manger, that shift in emphasis is almost unimaginable.

It certainly didn't happen anywhere else in the human world.

The idea that man is set apart by virtue of reason is a Greek ideal, but it was championed by the Church throughout the collapse of civilization after Rome fell, and carried on into the Renaissance, where the Church was the greatest patron of both the arts and the sciences.  Why else is all the greatest Renaissance art religious art?  As for liberalism, what is more "liberal" than the Protestant Reformation, which began the turn toward local control, first with the princes in Germany who supported Luther, and then with the cities like Geneva, and even the Puritans of the 17th century who wanted to be free of the British crown to worship as they saw fit, and live as they wished.   The American experiment didn't spring from the brow of Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison: its roots were in Christianity as much as anywhere else.  If it was reason that guided the "Founding Fathers," it was a form of political* reason championed by Protestantism for centuries before the Enlightenment caught up with it.

But it is the "changing human environment" which is the most interesting part of the narrative.  That changing environment, at least since the Industrial Revolution, is largely the product of science.  Global warming, weapons of mass destruction, industrialization which has exacerbated poverty anew in large portions of the world and made weapons as ubiquitous as sunlight; all can be laid at the feet of science, the triumph of modernism.  Fundamentalism itself is a reaction to modernism.  To think even more modernism is needed to eradicate fundamentalism is to think what will extinguish the fire  is more kerosene.

Which returns me to the question:  what is science doing to alleviate the conditions of poverty?

E.O. Wilson thinks it's all about "the meaning of existence."  E.O. Wilson is a fool.  His argument is rooted in the very ignorance and false dichotomy Lessl examines.

I think it’s time to be audacious. The central questions of religion and philosophy are three in number: Where do we come from, what are we, and where are we going? Usually these are just the beginnings of long discussions, but that’s no longer the case. We now have a pretty good picture of how humanity arose in Africa, what intermediate forms existed, the rate at which these forms evolved, and the circumstances in which they evolved.

So I can say, right now, that of those three great questions, we have most of the answer for where we come from. And in this book I take up the question: What are we? We’re starting to close in on that one. We need to know where we came from and what we are to have the self-understanding to sensibly plan where we’re going. Right now, we don't have any idea where we’re going.

First, if you're going to be audacious, know what you're talking about.  His idea of "the central question of religion and philosophy" (notice how he dismisses both by lumping them together. Away with abstract thought!  Science has acquired truth, and banished ambiguity!) wouldn't survive contact with an Introduction to Philosophy course at a community college (I know; I taught that course for a few semesters).  Starting from a definition that favors his conclusion, he quickly erects a structure we used to call "Castles in the Air."  We used the term derisively, and always attached the warning:  "Don't try to move in!"

Mr. Wilson, of course, does.  After all, like Daniel Dennett who has already explained consciousness, in one short summary of his trilogy of books, he explains that science has, or soon will, answered all of those questions.  QED!  Empiricism ergo sum!  Thus did Samuel Johnson refute Berkeley!

Nobody except a few places on the internet is taking Wilson seriously.  He is right about one thing:  we don't have any idea where we're going; and if he is going to be our guide, God help us.

Remember the Dove ad from the SuperBowl about caring Dads, which gets us to "Dove Men Care," the line of products being sold by Dove?  If it were being presented for humor, that kind of confusion of definition would be a pun.  English is an enormously flexible language:  we use the same word, despite the huge fund of words available to us, to mean different things in different contexts.  Care for your child is not quite the same thing as care for your skin.  We know that.  Here Wilson argues we all want to know "where we come from."  His answer?  Africa.

Next question?

If I point out that's not exactly what the question asked, Wilson undoubtedly will dismiss my question as irrelevant and return to insisting the only valid answer to the question is:  "Africa." He doesn't continue the confusion; he doesn't answer that "where we are going" is back to Africa; or to any point in space or time at all.  He plays the game of words as it suits him, but pretends he's not playing any game at all.

Not exactly what Wittgenstein meant about "language games," but close enough; and at the same time, precisely the problem.  Wilson is apparently as ignorant of the work of Wittgenstein and other modern philosophers, as he is of religion.  In fact, he's proven himself ignorant of these two great realms of human thought.  Knowing nothing about them, he doesn't need to know anything.  His knowledge is complete, and being complete it is supreme.  Like Dawkins, Wilson is content to believe what he knows is all that needs to be known, and all other human knowledge is just so much nonsense which he doesn't need to clutter his beautiful mind with.  But leaving his mind so carefully uncluttered, he makes mistakes which would doom a student in that Intro. Philosophy class; and in fact, mistakes that make his entire argument farcical.

Did I ever tell you the story of a doctor who bought some land in the country, to build his second house on?  It's a true story; the lawyer who the doctor had to come to told it to me.  Doctor went out to the property, pointed to a lovely spot on his land that would be perfect for the house, and ordered construction to begin.  Construction duly began, and when it was finished, the property owner of the contiguous lot brought maps to the doctor proving at least half of the house was on the next lot.  The doctor came to the lawyer, desperate to know what his legal option were.

He didn't have any.  He either got the landowner to sell that much of his lot to the doctor; or he tore down at least half of his new house.  He was a very good M.D.  He was a very bad land surveyor and lawyer.  Had he spent 10 minutes consulting people with knowledge he didn't have, he'd have saved himself a lot of grief.

We don't know where we're going; and we're in a rush to get there.  I've seen the wisdom of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels denigrated as "Bronze Age thinking."  The same people making that argument rely on Plato and Aristotle to even construct a kind of thought they consider "reasonable."  They also use a lot of the thinking of Aquinas, from the 13th century, without realizing it.  The Renaissance designated the "Dark Ages," but without the scholasticism and the monks and the Church, the Renaissance would have had no knowledge to rediscover; it would have been as lost as the library of Alexandria (and let's not forget it was the Muslims who saved Aristotle for the 13th century to rediscover).  I used to think it was peculiarly American, this rush to consider the generation before us ignorant and benighted, and to believe true knowledge only began with our ignorance.  I've come to see it's universal, and the very idea of "progress" is laughable.

Where are we going?  With people like E.O. Wilson and most of the chattering classes of the world to guide us, we're going around in circles.  The truly radical nature of the gospels and the Hebrew scriptures those gospels are rooted in:  the unbrokered kingdom, the first last and the last first, freedom for the captive and release of the prisoners, the year of Jubilee and care for the widow and orphan; justice beginning with how much care we show to the least of us, and how we are all in this together, strangers and aliens all:  that nature is rediscovered in pockets every generation, by people who really do read the Bible.  Not just the "Biblical stories" or the stories of war and slaughter, but the whole magnificent record:  that is how it is known, and it is known in the community for whom it is valued, to whom it speaks.  If it is rooted in the Bronze Age, then so are we all, even in the Atomic Age or the Internet Age.  The environment has changed only on the surface:  just beneath that surface, nothing has really changed at all.

If that truly radical nature of the Scriptures is hidden again and again, perhaps we should ask why.  Perhaps we should examine deeply why the preferential option for the poor disturbs us so.  Perhaps we should reconsider what justice really means.  Perhaps we should think more about what we can do for others, and less about what we can do for ourselves.  Perhaps we should think about why it is so hard to think about that.  It's a much more important question than Pilate's question:  and that is the question E.O. Wilson, and so many others, are asking.  Just by asking it, they cannot get the answer:  because truth is not known or defined:  truth is lived.

That's the great secret of the scriptures.  "How should we then live?"  Ask that, and you are nearer the truth than anyone who thinks truth is reducible to three silly questions that are, in fact, just more abstractions.


*Political in the sense Aristotle meant:  having to do with the "polis."  Not "political" in the common modern sense:  having to do with partisanship.

Going back to the Super Bowl

Yeah, this was a whole 'nother kind of weird....

...because I'm too tired to think.

Ads.  Didn't see absolutely every one of them, but the stand outs were the truly bad ones.  Back when ads were getting "edgy" to appeal to "younger viewers" (more and more of those every year, it seems), there were clunkers that seemed offensive just to be offensive (because offensive=edgy; or something).

Now edgy is being replaced by maudlin?

Dove won if only because it came on before Nissan's ad (and you can see all the ads I mention here).  A montage of "Dad" scenes so affecting I almost started tearing up (especially the ones with little girls saying "Daddy!"  Or maybe it was the beer.  Yeah, that's it; the beer).  Just when you think you'll need an insulin shot, or at least have to check your blood sugar, and you're sure this is a Hallmark Card ad or a PSA, you find out it's about Dove's Men Care line of products, because...men care.

Seriously.  That sound you hear is the transmission falling out of your car at 70 mph.

Nissan would have won the boobie prize except, as I say, they ran after the Dove ad.  The Nissan ad went on so long (I think it was the full version of "Cat's in the Cradle," but if it wasn't, it seemed to be), with shots of a race car dad fulfilling every bitter syllable of that song, that nothing could have saved it in the end.  But the ending was bizarre:  Dad finally shows up, apparently in a Nissan (you find that out by the logo at the end) to pick his kid up from school at, what, 10:00 p.m. ? It didn't seem the kid was out dancing or clubbing, so why was it so dark when Dad got there?  Jr. goes to night classes in high school?  And anyway, this makes me want a Nissan because....?

Nationwide wins for grimmest image I'll never get out of my mind:  a huge (must be 50" or better) flat screen TV fallen off a stand, supposedly pulled over by the young child beneath it, who is pancaked so flatly the TV is resting solidly on the floor.  The kid went through the floor?  The kid is disintegrated by the massive flat screen?  Even putting a mannequin under there would have been too grim?  I dunno, but it was mighty disturbing.  Made me think I should bolt the TV to I-beams and set those in concrete through holes in the floor before my daughter gets around to bringing grandkids home.  And she's not even married.

It was that disturbing.

The rest were just stupid.  I didn't even realize that was Kate Upton in those "Game of War" ads.  Her acting/voicing is so bad I figured it was some nameless blonde hired for her implants.  The Snickers ad was cute:  once.  I'm afraid I'll see it ad nauseum now.  The rest left no impression, except the Budweiser horse/dog ads just get more and more threadbare.

And I still can't get over that pass call on second down on the 1 with 1 minute left to play.  I don't think I'll ever get over that; and I didn't even really care who won.

This I (don't) believe

Well, really, it was the one play that never had a prayer....

I believe many remarkable things.

I don't believe that final offensive play by the Seattle Seahawks in SuperBowl XLIX.

A Palate Cleanser

I think the market is a great green god....

Because I have more to say about Thomas Lessl and Galileo and science and modernity.  But as an interlude, a word from Charlie Pierce:

Sooner or later, it's up to the voters to decide to stop being stupid about their own self-interest, and to stop falling for scams about how the Poors and Browns are the ones stealing all their money.

Yes, but since that particular scam has been run since at least the days of Reconstruction, and since even now the "preferential option for the poor" is to make them rich (or else blame them for not being rich, because morals), and it is still news to people that Dr. King was murdered during his leadership of a march for economic, not just racial, justice....

Well, don't expect that situation to change anytime soon, despite the very best efforts of Senator Professor Warren; who is, after all, only one Senator.

The fix is in; and animus towards the poor and against the minorities (now "illegal immigrants" represent that rising tide which will swamp all our boats; but even that term is not about race, because it's never about race) is bone deep in America, and digging deeper every year.

The prospects for peace are awful.

How should we then understand?

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