R.I.P Christopher Hitchens.

I scarcely ever agreed with the man –except with his stance on abortion, which was interestingly in opposition to his fellow anti-theists. I have always, however, thoroughly enjoyed his prose and other-worldly rhetorical gifts that, even when wrong, never once felt boorish and dull in the way the other horsemen were prone to.

To be honest, I was always somewhat ambivalent about the Hitch’s skewering of religion; one part of me hated him while the other part had a pleasurable frisson by the witness of such formidable intelligence and indefatigable wit.

One thing can be certain; Mr. Hitchens’s mastery of the art of prose will surely be missed by anyone who values the language.

There will never be another Christopher Hitchens. He was always combative, often sneering and bellicose, eviscerating his opponents with remarkable style, humor and wit. And, although he was often wrong, he at least had his heart in the right place.

May his family be at peace, and may God have mercy on his soul.

You Is So Smart. Really, You Is.

One commenter responded to my last post about the absurdity of a life without God with this lengthy drivel:

We live for say, 80 years. 1000 years later we are in heaven, in some kind of drugged-up happy state worshipping god. 10,000 years later, the same. 1,000,000 years later the same. 100,000,000 years later, the same. Life has changed on Earth, and so have the continents. But in heaven, it’s just one happy drug party. 3 billion years in the future, the Milky Way collides with Andromeda. The heavens change, but not Heaven. 100 billion years, and most of the stars have gone out. Civilizations cluster around black holes to farm their energy. Heaven is still a permanent High. Trillions of Trillions of years, and perhaps the universe is more full of intelligent life than ever, as black holes
provide vast energy. In Heaven we are still praising God, and he shows no sign of getting bored of it. 10^120 years, and the last black holes have evaporated. There is still potential for change, and so there might still be life, but with each thought lasting a billion years. God is getting a bit bored, so a promotes a couple of angels to become Seraphim. But on with the bliss and praising! Uncountable trillions of years, and a random fluctuation creates a point of inflation and a new big bang. But even this time is infinitely small compared with the endless bliss and praising the Lord that is our fate, our initial 80 years of life seeming of utter insignificance.

If there has ever been an idea that renders life utterly meaningless it is theism.

My response:

Well, life would indeed seem “utterly meaningless” on theism if your childish and insanely anthropomorphic rendition of the concept of God and heaven were true. And, no, the scientific jargon you’ve liberally bandied about will scarcely hide the stench of your ignorance. So the next time you try to be irritatingly pedantic, you could least try doing so more competently.

What’s amusing about a lot of atheists nowadays is that they keep showing a complete failure to understand Christianity –something they mock and jeer at with much alacrity–while claiming they’ve been able to refute it. Some notable ones even go so far as to call philosophy of religion a “sophisticated language game” to avoid having to do the rather tedious work of educating oneself in it. “What? Aquinas’s Summa Theologica says something about that? No matter! Just say Aquinas was dumb for having believed in some omnipotent sky-daddy!” As if we haven’t seen such a strategy exhausted ad nauseum.

In any case, your kilometric diatribe only further demonstrates my point about life being absurd on atheism. Unless, ofcourse, you’ll be arguing that all those “uncountable trillions of years” of blind indifference actually had deep existential implications by your account. If that’s the case, don’t bother. You’re welcome to espouse such a ludicrous fantasy.

What’s The Meaning Of Life?

Will Wilkinson, in his article, expresses his misgivings about the idea that life is absurd without God.

He writes:

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“[W]hat do you do with folks like me who are sure that life has meaning without having any supernatural beliefs at all–who think the question of the meaningfulness of life is logically independent of questions about the existence or nonexistence of supernatural stuff.”

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Well, that’s all well and fine. Whatever meaning you’ve found for yourself, as you really ought to know by now, is subjective and ultimately meaningless. Whatever meaning you can ascribe to your life, absent a transcendent meaning-giver –otherwise known as God– will have  no epistemic difference from, say, what the next chap subjectively feels is the meaning of his life. The meaning of your life, then, is really just your opinion. That’s fine.

If to some random NBA athlete, the meaning of life is to be as good as Michael Jordan, that’s fine. If to Obama, the meaning of life is to be the best president in the history of the United States, that’s fine. If to Dahmer, the meaning of life is to sodomize the corpses of young boys, that’s fine. Certainly, if your point is that life can have meaning  absent God, then you’re right. It can. Once you’ve beaten MJ, and have become the best president the world has ever know, what’s next? A billion dollars would be nice. Maybe that can be the next meaning of life to you; to have a billion dollars. Or, hey, helping the needy might make you feel important and increase your sense of self-worth. Maybe that can give meaning to your life. Awesome.

You can see where this is going.

It’s pretty clear that absent God, people merely jump from one subjective meaning to the next to avoid the stark reality of an ultimately meaningless existence.

The irony is that, in the atheist’s attempt to kill God, who he feels represses and subjugates, he only succeeds in killing himself; In his attempt to be free from the one he says enslaves, he imprisons himself.

Whining About Facebook Whiners.

One thing about facebook that is particularly annoying is when people post –without the slightest bit of hesitation– short and tediously hortatory tirades about things nobody really cares about. Sure, some people will click the ‘like’ button, or will offer a cheerleading comment or two, egging for you to keep going. But, really, for the most part, nobody cares. Nobody cares about that stranger for whom your mini-diatribe was dedicated, and for what he did — which you’ve laboriously laid out in detail– that’s irked you so much.

You’ve got to be a special kind of narcissist to truly believe anyone actually gives two turds about the fleeting and inconsequential banalities that annoy you during the day. Any sufficiently civilized individual isn’t going to be bobbing his head in approval over your pompous and sermonizing verbal attacks on people who aren’t in the least bit interesting insofar as they’re existence isn’t of any considerable import to the lives of anyone else.

I’m reminded of this one time when a friend (no longer in my friends list) wrote, as her status update, a substantially long invective about some cash registrar who kept asking her questions about her credit card. I was tempted to respond with “cry me a frigging river.” The only thing she was able to achieve with that snotty castigation is a reduced estimation of her by those friends of hers who fell at the higher end of the intelligence bell curve. If you have to whine about someone, or about how bad you *felt* about some situation, you could at least be pithy about it.

What’s worse than the facebook whiner is the incessant facebook whiner. Really, are you so depressed and is your life so mundane that you have to compensate by whining about everything and be telling everyone about it? That peevish snivelling, as you really ought to know, is only succeeding in making you look like a sanctimonious prick who needs to be unfriended like the conspicuous, pus-filled anal wart that you are.

What’s worse than an incessant facebook whiner? The grammatically challenged, incessant facebook whiner. Seriously, educate yourself before making  mindless declamations. The fact that your harangue is a bit more difficult to understand makes it, to that slight extent, more annoying. Although it may on occasion give people a good laugh at your expense, if done too much, it will take everything they have not to pepper spray you in the face.

Bottomline: if it’s anything that will not profit anyone in any conceivable way, then it’s likely better left unsaid.

(I know, this is also a diatribe. But this is also a blog, so it doesn’t count. So shut up.)

Why We Hate Twilight, And Find It Fun In So Doing.

Erika Christakis, in her article for Time, writes that Twilight-haters are harsh bigots.

Erika Christakis doesn’t get it, actually. It’s not that “female fantasy is derided and feared” at all; it’s that this particular “fantasy” incorporates the sort of vapidness that appeals to, shall we say, the more sophomoric segment of the population.

There’s no denying that the movie is horrible by any respectable metric. The dialogue is senselessly asinine; how anyone can stomach more of Edward Cullen’s ridiculously overly amorous one-liners like “Last night was the best night of my existence” or “Let’s start with forever” is seriously mind-boggling. I mean, that kind of drivel should be all well and fine if laid out with a bit more parsimony. It’s been overdone. After those previous Twilight movies where Edward Cullen mouths off like a preternatural Don Juan, while sporting the expression of someone who’s going through labor, it’s now become vomit-inducing.

Taylor Lautner is a terrible actor. That guy has one expression. Maybe 2. He, rather laughably, turns into a wolf who’s as badass as a Teletubby. (Why didn’t they make them like the wolves in Underworld? Those were badass.) I’d rather squeeze Taylor’s wolf cheeks for being so cute than run away. The best thing about him in this movie is that he didn’t take his shirt off as much as he did in the last one. Sure, there’s a market for that kind of crap, but it slightly tells you this guy doesn’t have much going for him, acting-wise.

Bella, played by Kristen Stewart, is as dull as a doorknob. This fact further demonstrates the illogic of the movie; it isn’t clear to me how a vampire –or any rational agent for that matter– who’s ostensibly been able to live long enough to know a couple things, could take a liking for this sullenly ill-humored girl, who’s only slightly more entertaining to look at than paint drying.

The whole concept of vampires sparkling in the sun is awful. It’s really dumb. Why the author of this series thought this idea made any sense is beyond me. Calling the idea of sparkling vampires cheesy and corny is to be unfair to all the things in history those words were used to describe, putting them well below where anyone would’ve taken them.

The intermittent camera play on the handsomeness of the 2 lead male characters –while visually pleasing for 13-yr-olds– seems worthy of ridicule as it summarizes the whole fantasy quite succinctly; 2 charming, good-looking and unrealistically anti-sexual young men falling head-over-heels for an average girl who’s hot in some not unreachable way.

Don’t get me wrong. If you dig all that, then that’s fine. But, people rightly deride this movie for being the kind of paltry tripe that appeals to girls’ base fantasies in much the same way a movie about bikini-clad ninjas doing work more fitting for seal-team-six would to the fantasies of their male counterparts.

Stephen Law Doesn’t Get It.

In the subsequent posts he’s written in defense of the ‘evil-god challenge’, which he previously thought was a knock-down argument against theism, it’s pretty clear Stephen’s now being willfully obtuse.

Stephen says:

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“[Dr. Craig is] playing the skeptical card, insisting that empirical observation can give us no grounds for supposing there’s no good or evil god. This is (a) implausible, and (b) received no decent supporting argument. In addition, (c) even if Craig could establish that kind of skepticism, the onus would STILL be on him to show why belief in Craig’s good God is significantly more reasonable than (the absurd) belief in an evil God. “ [Since both concepts are equally plausible, they are both implausible.]

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Stephen is a good philosopher. Obviously. You don’t get to enjoy the type of academic tenure Stephen does without having proven your worth. So it’s rather infuriating that he’s arguing this way, which to me seems like pure sophistry. He needs to make up his mind on exactly what he’s saying, because the above contradicts the other things he said on the matter, like:

“Again no. I don’t suppose the moral properties of god are inferred on empirical-inductive grounds. Obviously.”

Then why argue that good God is implausible based on empirical observations of “gratuitous” evil, Stephen?

Then Stephen goes on to say:

“But you’d better have a justification for that radical and highly counter-intutive degree of skepticism (that what we observe can gives us no clue AT ALL about the moral properties of god/s – good, bad or otherwise). Craig didn’t.”

Oh, but he did! Craig argued that, given our epistemic position, we are unable to infer the moral character of God through empirical observations of the world!

Firstly, Stephen, basing your argument on what some Christians believe is weak since the theologians you’re arguing against don’t hold to such a belief.

Secondly, it has already been argued that, given our epistemic position, we are not capable of ascertaining future outcomes bearing these kinds of complexities. Since YOU’RE the one making a positive claim that we can, then the burden is on YOU to show why God cannot have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil.

You couldn’t have possibly missed it, so I’m wondering why you’re acting as though you did. Anyway, to repeat Craig’s argument:

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“Suppose we concede for the sake of argument that an evil Creator/Designer exists. Since this being is evil, that implies that he fails to discharge his moral obligations. But where do those come from? How can this evil god have duties to perform which he is violating? Who forbids him to do the wrong things that he does? Immediately, we see that such an evil being cannot be supreme: there must be a being who is even higher than this evil god and is the source of the moral obligations which he chooses to flout, a being which is absolute goodness Himself. In other words, if Law’s evil god exists, then [good] God exists. “

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Now, Stephen, it’s like this: Craig is arguing that objective moral values can only be grounded in God. We DON’T have immoral obligations, we have moral ones. So if you’re a moral realist, which you admit in your writings that you are, then those objective moral values prove that God, not anti-god, exists.

Now, you can say this is all poppycock. Fine. But what you cannot say is that no sufficient argument has been made, and so you win. When presented with a deductive argument, you have to deal with the premises to show how it’s false. And, no, saying that some theologians don’t agree with Craig’s moral argument is not an argument. If you don’t make your own argument, then bolstering your non-existent argument with an appeal to authority will be doubly ridiculous.

What irks me is that when Stephen is pressed on the seeming contradictions of what he’s been saying of late, he’ll respond with something akin to “you just misunderstood my argument!”. Then he’ll go on to explain the “argument” and affirm one’s done nothing of the sort.

So, Is America A Christian Nation?

At a press conference in Turkey, President Obama tersely disapproved of the idea that the United States is a Judeo- Christian nation and instead offers “We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”

Adam Lee, in an article he wrote for Big Think, says that America is most definitely not a Christian nation. Adam cites various biblical notions of what government should be and lays out a flimsy case for how these conceptions fall diametrically opposed to the postmodernist’s idea of democracy. Adam writes:

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“Even more to the point, the Bible’s ideal government is unequivocally a theocracy: a country where the church and the state are one, where there’s an official religion which all citizens are required to profess, and where law is made by the priests. There was no religious freedom in the ancient Israelite kingdoms: all people were required to worship the same god in the same officially approved ways, on pain of death. For instance, when Moses comes down from Mt. Sinai and finds the Israelites worshipping a golden calf, his immediate response is to order the butchering of everyone who participated in idolatry (Exodus 32:27).”

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Adam continues:

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But America’s Constitution is more than just a secular document; it’s literally godless. It doesn’t claim that the ideas it contains were the product of divine revelation. It states that governing power comes from the will of the people, not the commands of a deity. It doesn’t assert that God has specially blessed this nation or shown it special favor – in fact, it never mentions God at all. And it mentions religion in only two places, both of them negative mentions: in Article VI,  which forbids any religious test for public office, and in the First Amendment, which forbids Congress from passing any law respecting an establishment of religion.

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This is to echo the tired old argument of the whole Constitution, and the bill of rights, as having been founded on enlightenment principles –a cultural movement during the 18th century where leading intellectuals, through reason, sought an emancipation from religious dogmatism and the abuses that stemmed from church and state. And, in that sense, I agree that America is not a Christian nation inasmuch as Iran is an Islamic one.

But, surely, this is to miss the point of what is meant when Christians say that America, and pretty much the whole West for that matter, has been founded on Christian principles and ideas. The idea of the individual –that each must be treated as an end and not merely as a means to one– is undeniably a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The Israelites were the first of their time to have adopted the idea of a monotheistic God who wasn’t just a tribal deity for whom a specific group of people fell subservient to, but was the creator of everything himself from whom the image of man was fashioned.

This very concept of man being fashioned in God’s image was the green shoot for the idea that each man, being a reflection of God himself, is of commensurate worth and has intrinsic value that surpasses everything else in creation.

Christianity took this idea and elevated it further; man wasn’t only made in God’s image, giving him a special place in creation, but was also of such great import to the whole scheme of things that God himself decided to condescend and make the ultimate sacrifice through Jesus for his restoration. The Christian doctrine of the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection raised man’s worth to the utmost limit. This lofty Christian notion of man’s place in creation was an utterly novel idea during its time, and has undeniably had a far-reaching influence on how the dignity of the individual was to be held for centuries to come.

John Locke, who is regarded as one of the most influential of the enlightnement thinkers, and who is credited for developing the natural-rights theory from which most of the West’s political traditions are based, wrote that all people were equal, independent and had a natural right to defend his “Life, health, Liberty, or Possessions”. This, ofcourse, became the basis for the phrase in the American Declaration of Independence “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Locke’s political theory was central to the American revolution. Ironically –for the secular revisionists, anyway– the pillar from which Locke was able to erect his political theory was his theology. Because of this, Locke said with respect to his theory on natural rights, “The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.”

So, while Obama and Mr. Adam Lee may be right in saying America is not a Christian Nation –at least not in the way they understand what that statement means– it’s undeniably the case that Western moral principles have been wholly derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

It’s untenable to suggest that it’s possible to construct a completely secular foundation for universal human rights. So, these neo-atheists, in my mind, are either engaging in historical revisionism, or are, rather insipidly, denying that America is a theocracy. If it’s the latter, then they’re tilting at windmills.

Famous atheist philosopher lightly disses me. (Awesome.)

Well, I guess I should be happy that a philosopher of Stephen Law’s  stature (Senior lecturer at Heythrop College in the University of London, and editor of philosophical journal Think.)  should feel obliged to respond to my criticisms of his arguments against the existence of God in his debate with Dr. Craig. However, his response, in my mind, leaves room for doubt whether he’s even understood his own evil-god argument and the burden that falls on him to show why it’s coherent.

Stephen says:

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BTW just posted this on Randal Rauser’s blog. It’s relevant to John’s [me] extraordinarily persistent misunderstanding of my argument.

“When faced with the evidential problems of good and evil, Craig just got super-skeptical. What we see around us gives us not the *slightest* reason to suppose there’s no all-powerful, all-evil God. Yeh, right!

Yet, before they see the implications, Christians almost invariably do agree that evil god is a non-starter on the basis of what they observe around them (I should have done a straw poll on the night, early on).

Only when it dawns on them what the implications of this are do they suddenly get extraordinarily sceptical. That degree of highly-implausible skepticism requires a really good supporting argument. You can’t just assert it’s true. And we didn’t get one on the night.”

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Actually, I don’t see anything here that leads me to believe I’ve misunderstood Stephen’s evil-god argument at all.

Stephen is really just saying that the existence of evil and suffering in the world makes it more plausible than not that a good God doesn’t exist.

Suffice to say, goading him into giving reasons as to why he believes a good God cannot have morally sufficient reasons for allowing suffering and evil to exist fell on deaf ears.

All he’s really saying in the above response is that “Christians almost invariably do agree that evil god is a non-starter on the basis of what they observe around them” and therefore the same arguments used to validate a good god can be used to do the same for an evil God, rendering both concepts equally plausible, and therefore implausible.

Problem is, it doesn’t matter if some “Christians” believed what they observe around them proves an evil god cannot exist”, what matters is that NO theologian, and certainly not Dr. Craig, believes this.

The moral character of God cannot be ascertained by looking at the good and evil in the world. So, the evil in the world cannot be used as evidence that a good God cannot exist. In fact, it’s even arguable that, absent revelation, there’s any reason to think God is good.

Although there may be various philosophical reasons for believing God is good –like the anti-Manichaeism view of good and evil which claims evil is the privation of good, making evil ontologically posterior to good; or the belief that good is a great-making property and is therefore more likely to be, as opposed to evil, a property of God, and so forth– the best reason, however, that leads Christians to believe God is good is Jesus of Nazareth. If Jesus did in fact resurrect, an event which I believe there is good evidence for, then this validates the character of the God he was revealing.

While the resurrection was one of Dr. Craig’s opening arguments, it was left scarcely touched by Stephen.

Some anonymous atheist summarized Stephen’s over-all position quite succintly:

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“[I]t seems clear to me that law’s argument is that all the argumentation used by theists in favor of their god can just as easily be used to argue for the existence of an evil god. Therefore, even if their arguments were valid, it would not necessarily lead to their belief system at all. If theodicy is meant to explain why evil can exist in a good world (which seems to be a challenge), then by all means one can with just as much justification, claim that any alleged supernatural event, from the resurrection, or even the mormon plates as someone mentioned, could easily be created by an evil god intent on causing humans pain, frustration and empty hope.”

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Needless to say, it’s quite laughable to determine that someone who’s suddenly faced with a resurrection event, and who was previously agnostic of God’s moral character, will find it reasonable to conclude that an evil-god is just as likely as the God whom the  resurrected individual was actually revealing.

Toddler gets run-over twice. Meanwhile, Steven Pinker thinks people are oh-so wonderful.

Vocal new atheist critic of religion, Steven Pinker, in his article Why Is There
Peace, writes:

“Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its
cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more
violent than we are today.“

In Guangdong province, a child was run over twice and was subsequently ignored by dozens of passers-by until an unlikely hero in the form a 57-year-old trash- picker finally stopped to help. (See video here)

This staggeringly horrific incident should be a reminder to all of us to take  seriously the iniquity of human nature, and to doubt the naively optimistic  claims of people like Steven Pinker who are committed to the belief in the  inevitability of society’s moral progress.

But this is, in the end, the only recourse for the naturalist atheist who can’t have faith in God; he must have faith in man.  Yet, if there’s anything of value at all to take from history, and from books like  Golding’s Lord Of The Flies, it’s that one must always, by default, adopt a more inauspicious view of human nature.

Paul Ryan Explains How Higher Taxes Hurt Job Creation

GOP budget guru, Paul Ryan, gives a cogent explanation of how raising taxes
hurts job creation.

What would be interesting is how he can justify his party wanting to reduce  government spending while supporting what would now amount to 5 foreign wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Uganda. Hopefully he could also enlighten Americans on how they can be confident that such contradictory positions —  such as the one above– can help job creation without requiring an epic  suspension of disbelief.

I think Paul Ryan is right; more taxes will hurt job creation. But the problem is that the stench of hypocrisy is getting quite noticeable –and that’s putting it mildly– in that the GOP is scarcely consistent in its views on everything else that has a direct effect on the economy and thus on job creation. In the tax debate, no matter how sensible and cogent they exposit their position, minds won’t be won because their outright mendacity does not go down well.