I will condense the great non-attempt of two typical neo-atheists to respond to my questions produced so far as no real answers to the questions posed were given.
What was asserted are a good example of how when confronted with problems for their ideology, the typical atheist response is to a. try to change the subject to something they can dismiss, b. trash-talk, c. brow-beating, d. psyching out.
As I had to point out to "Skeptic Tank" this ain't Eschaton and I'm not going to be intimidated by people who can't even focus on the question at hand.
When you come right down to it, that's always been the method of logical positivism, the last, dying gasp of positivism as an intellectual pose retained as it goes into being a dogmatic habit of ideology among those who don't even know what it's called. The declaration that things that are coherent are incoherent, that questions that are quite understandable are "meaningless" that kind of the intellectual equivalent of the scripting of pro-wrestling is what's left of the intellectual tradition in the control of materialists. They embody the conclusion I reached that materialism is, in the end, nihilistic, anti-intellectual and sustainable only through such dishonest tactics.
Is it any wonder that today's academics are held in so much less repute than those of the past when this kind of thing accounts for such a high percentage of the results of their activities?
Update: When I was talking about the intellectual tradition I didn't mean a scribbler like Sims. He's more like an incompetent rodeo clown than a tag team wrestler.
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Friday, September 18, 2015
Pops Staples - Somebody Was Watching
One of my favorite guitar players, one of my favorite singers.
Update: Pops Staples has been one of my favorites since I first heard The Staple Singers in about 1961. I'm Coming Home is one of the greatest pieces of religious music of the past century.
An Open Challenge To Materialists Since April And Counting
All ideas are preceded by mind; they have mind as their chief; they are mind-made. If one speaks or acts with an evil mind, pain follows him just as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart.
Dharmapada, verse 1.1
I am pretty tired and won't be writing anything new today. I will, though, remind everyone of my open challenge for materialists, the "brain-only" type to clear up a problem with their model of the mind as the epiphenomenon of physical structures in the brain, the "real" things, physical objects and structures that are the ideas our minds contain and work with.
If that is the case, how does the brain know what to make for a new idea before that idea exists in the brain to tell it what to make or, even, that some new idea needs to be made? How does it know how to make the physical embodiment of just the right idea without that idea already being in our head? How does it know it has made the right idea or, if it makes the wrong structure to be that idea, how does it know that that idea, which is, then, in the brain is the wrong idea since the "right idea" isn't in there but the wrong one is?
All that is at stake in this is the entire edifice of materialism because it it can't account for our minds it has to fall. For materialism, and with it almost all of what most people hold as atheism, to stand they have to explain how our brains could do what they so obviously wouldn't know how to do if the "brain-only" model of the mind is real.
The only mechanism I can think of that could save the "brain-only" model is for there to be some form of psychic information that could tell the brain what to make, since the idea isn't, physically in the brain. But, then, the idea would be real in a non-physical form and that would, as well, invalidate materialism.
Update: If Her Coprophagous Highness, Tlaz, would like to answer the challenge I promise to post her attempt with commentary.
Dharmapada, verse 1.1
I am pretty tired and won't be writing anything new today. I will, though, remind everyone of my open challenge for materialists, the "brain-only" type to clear up a problem with their model of the mind as the epiphenomenon of physical structures in the brain, the "real" things, physical objects and structures that are the ideas our minds contain and work with.
If that is the case, how does the brain know what to make for a new idea before that idea exists in the brain to tell it what to make or, even, that some new idea needs to be made? How does it know how to make the physical embodiment of just the right idea without that idea already being in our head? How does it know it has made the right idea or, if it makes the wrong structure to be that idea, how does it know that that idea, which is, then, in the brain is the wrong idea since the "right idea" isn't in there but the wrong one is?
All that is at stake in this is the entire edifice of materialism because it it can't account for our minds it has to fall. For materialism, and with it almost all of what most people hold as atheism, to stand they have to explain how our brains could do what they so obviously wouldn't know how to do if the "brain-only" model of the mind is real.
The only mechanism I can think of that could save the "brain-only" model is for there to be some form of psychic information that could tell the brain what to make, since the idea isn't, physically in the brain. But, then, the idea would be real in a non-physical form and that would, as well, invalidate materialism.
Update: If Her Coprophagous Highness, Tlaz, would like to answer the challenge I promise to post her attempt with commentary.
After A Hard Week Dealing With Middle-Schoolers E-Mail Full of Middle-Brow Droolers
Good heavens, considering her pretenses of being a working scientist I have to wonder how she finds the time to gossip and seek attention over there. Obviously the lab isn't engaged in important work that needs to get out.
You can tell the dim dolly I haven't posted a comment on Eschaton in more than three years. I'm banned, Atrios banned me the same day I said I wasn't going to bother with the place anymore. I could look up the treads, it was when he decided to show how kewl and klassy he was about The Aristocrats. And you can tell back-beat Erin the same thing. It's a sad day when Simels has a better ear than you do. If Sims and his buddies ignored my existence I'd never find occasion to mention any of you, not in this life.
You can tell the dim dolly I haven't posted a comment on Eschaton in more than three years. I'm banned, Atrios banned me the same day I said I wasn't going to bother with the place anymore. I could look up the treads, it was when he decided to show how kewl and klassy he was about The Aristocrats. And you can tell back-beat Erin the same thing. It's a sad day when Simels has a better ear than you do. If Sims and his buddies ignored my existence I'd never find occasion to mention any of you, not in this life.
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Brahms - Fünf Gesänge Opus 104 - Ensemble Vocal Bergamasque
Ensemble Vocal Bergamasque, direction : Marine Fribourg
All of them beautiful and the fifth one, Im Herbst, is one of the finest pieces of choral music in the literature.
From The Greatest Album Released in 1967, A Genuine Tong Funeral - Intermission Music
If it works right, I'm always unsure of linking to the middle of a Youtube.
Anyway, Carla Bley being the composing, conducting, performing genius she always has been, Gary Burton being the genius he always was, Larry Corell, Steve Swallow, Bob Moses being the geniuses they were, and the rest on the other cuts being brilliant as well.
You should buy the album, it is one of the great musical documents of the time.
Bury Windows 8
While I was at school, I left my computer to install Windows 10, after having hated Windows 8 more than I can ever remember hating Dos - back then who realized just how really awful edlin was?
I haven't used it enough to find out why I'm going to hate 10 but some of the more annoying features of 8 are gone, my friggin' computer doesn't jump around nearly as much, I assume that having something to do with the damned touch-screen features I thought I was avoiding.
It's nice to see that the insane innovations in start-up-shut down have been reigned in, as well as that damned right side-bar and the rectangle in the lower left that would jump out at me many times an hour, as if I had to be reminded of how to know, again, what the date was and where search and the settings button was.
This isn't a review, more of a tentative sigh of relief. Now, if they'd get rid of the damned "Insert" mode, the use of which has eluded my understanding for the past thirty-five or so years. I don't know anyone who's ever talked about using it. Not even the geeky guys.
I haven't used it enough to find out why I'm going to hate 10 but some of the more annoying features of 8 are gone, my friggin' computer doesn't jump around nearly as much, I assume that having something to do with the damned touch-screen features I thought I was avoiding.
It's nice to see that the insane innovations in start-up-shut down have been reigned in, as well as that damned right side-bar and the rectangle in the lower left that would jump out at me many times an hour, as if I had to be reminded of how to know, again, what the date was and where search and the settings button was.
This isn't a review, more of a tentative sigh of relief. Now, if they'd get rid of the damned "Insert" mode, the use of which has eluded my understanding for the past thirty-five or so years. I don't know anyone who's ever talked about using it. Not even the geeky guys.
Post on Post Meridian Post Modern Post Literacy
Just before going back to work, one of the Eschatots also said this:
I finally went over and read Sparky's screed about pi. It was hilarious. Apparently he hasn't heard that the modern definitions of pi don't require ideal circles or other fanciful ideas... other than accepting the idea that infinite series with certain properties converge. And if he rejects that then he's gonna have to throw out calculus too.
Pi can't be possibly be removed from the geometry of circles which generated AND DEFINES the ratio which IS pi. I would like to have the Lite Bright of Eschaton to point out to me anywhere where the definition of pi is unrelated to circles. I suspect, but haven't checked that the simple thinker can't navigate the difference between definition and means of calculating, but I haven't got the time to check that out, just now.
As to the circles of plane geometry being a fanciful idea, you'd have to throw out a hell of a lot more math if you gave up plane geometry, including but not only including, calculus. Huge swaths of post-Cartesian mathematics takes the ideal forms of plane geometry and the conclusions drawn from them as being far more than merely fanciful. Not to mention classical physics and, perhaps even more so, chemistry. It is the ideal figure which produced the MATHEMATICAL CONSTANT pi. I seem to recall a great deal of speculation as to why it seems to turn up over and over again in so many contexts is related to its embodiment in the form of a circle, though I'm not that well versed in that area of speculation. Or is there some nifty-new-notion as to why that might be the case which doesn't deal with old-hat like plane geometry.
I love how they go several bubbles out of level when you point out that science is entirely dependent on imaginary entities. Here's an old post I did pointing out that the only things we have that we can actually and absolutely prove anything about are imaginary entities.
I finally went over and read Sparky's screed about pi. It was hilarious. Apparently he hasn't heard that the modern definitions of pi don't require ideal circles or other fanciful ideas... other than accepting the idea that infinite series with certain properties converge. And if he rejects that then he's gonna have to throw out calculus too.
Pi can't be possibly be removed from the geometry of circles which generated AND DEFINES the ratio which IS pi. I would like to have the Lite Bright of Eschaton to point out to me anywhere where the definition of pi is unrelated to circles. I suspect, but haven't checked that the simple thinker can't navigate the difference between definition and means of calculating, but I haven't got the time to check that out, just now.
As to the circles of plane geometry being a fanciful idea, you'd have to throw out a hell of a lot more math if you gave up plane geometry, including but not only including, calculus. Huge swaths of post-Cartesian mathematics takes the ideal forms of plane geometry and the conclusions drawn from them as being far more than merely fanciful. Not to mention classical physics and, perhaps even more so, chemistry. It is the ideal figure which produced the MATHEMATICAL CONSTANT pi. I seem to recall a great deal of speculation as to why it seems to turn up over and over again in so many contexts is related to its embodiment in the form of a circle, though I'm not that well versed in that area of speculation. Or is there some nifty-new-notion as to why that might be the case which doesn't deal with old-hat like plane geometry.
I love how they go several bubbles out of level when you point out that science is entirely dependent on imaginary entities. Here's an old post I did pointing out that the only things we have that we can actually and absolutely prove anything about are imaginary entities.
Prove That A Proof Proves Anything: The Total Overselling of "Proof"
This matter of proofs of God's existence would seem to be important to a lot of people. Proofs of God's existence are often demanded by those who really, really don't want them and are provided by those who believe they believe absolutely in a prophet who notably wasn't in the business of elucidating a proof of God's existence.
But the matter of what a proof is and what "to prove something" means is seldom considered. The common belief that this thing called a "proof" provides an objective and unambiguous certainty that "a truth" provided by the proof is a complete and entirely reliable "thing" or condition of being or historical event, complete with its retinue of supporting and related "things"(quite often in themselves not "proven") and associated aspects of reality. It is quite often and wrongly asserted that science provides proof of this or that. Which is a claim made on their behalf that scientists careful with their claims and language - or, more often, forced to by rigorous debate opponents - will openly disclaim. Oh, so often, their disclaimer is revealed to be disingenuous as soon as it's issued because they continue in encouraging the habit of thought that holds that science issues proof of stuff. I will mention in passing that I have never read or encountered an ideologically campaigning atheist-scientist who doesn't talk out of both sides of their mouth on that point.
Really careful scientists will admit that mathematicians are the ones who are in the business of providing proofs, and the even more careful will point out that it is prudent to make that claim only about pure mathematics, in which the objects "proved" are abstract entities that exist only in the minds of those with sufficient learning in mathematics to contain those entities. Which could reasonably lead someone who was either being extremely precise about the denotation of the words, or who wanted to give materialists a hard time, to say that this prime desideratum of theirs, "proof," would seem to be only available when dealing with imaginary objects and their imaginary properties. And when the materialist or "physicalist" or, almost always, rather emotional atheist, hears that and associates it with the actual object of their attack, they don't like the implications and often get really pissy.
Jesus, if I'm remembering correctly in this hour before I'm supposed to be at work, didn't provide a logical "proof" of God or what he was saying. He advised people to consult their own experience of life and events around them, to see the signs of the time. In doing that he was being honest about something hardly anyone in the "proof" business is honest about. "Proof" is a matter of being persuaded that all of those things allegedly provided by a proof in my second paragraph, proof is, in the words of the atheist and mathematician and scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum, a matter of human psychology and persuasion.
On that personal and willful act relies everything that we hold should be believed to be true and that belief should have a real effect in changing the behavior and thinking and feeling of the person who is persuaded. "Proof" "a proof" is something that is done or experienced by a person and people, its existence happens only in human minds, it is something we pretend has some independent, allegedly objective existence, when its complete reliance on us and our most subjective experience is one of the most obvious aspects of "proof". Prove that there is a proof that exists outside of human thought. Prove that any proof that isn't the product of human thought and relies for its very existence on a subjective and willful act of individual persuasion. If you can't do that then this objective, independent proof thing must be a delusion, by the very claims you make for proof and what the absence of such a proof insures. Those who make proof the object of cult like devotion and search are the ones who are the most dishonest about what proof actually is, especially its dependence on subjective thought,that it has no real and objective existence independent of that subjective thought and it is also not unrelated to human desires and subject to human self-deception.
Proof is entirely a matter of persuasion, no matter how rigorous the proof is, in the end a person has to accept the proof and, as some of the most rigorous application of proof in the past century "proved" no matter how rigorous a stickler for proof that you hold yourself to be, your proof depends on things that can't be proven, that can't even enter into this business of proof. The hero of materialists and atheists, Bertrand Russell, had to rather bitterly accept that was true, after years of some of the most rigorous thinking on the topic ever undertaken, he had to reluctantly accept it was true. And at the same time he had to gloomily and bitterly accept that was also the direction that physics, the subject that dealt most rigorously with his ultimate reality, the material universe, was headed in the same direction. Perhaps it was due to his habits of thought gained from being a mathematician that made him accept that when even so many of the physicists don't seem to be able to accept what their very science shows about the relationship of human minds and the subjects it studies. When you want to press those issues, nothing that we can say about the physical universe isn't entirely reliant on our subjective will and experience because we use our minds to even perceive the objects physics deals with and there is no absolute proof available of any of it.
The law uses the word "proof" as in "a case being proved beyond a reasonable doubt" or some such construction. The looseness with which legal "proof" is accepted is best shown by those convicted of murders and executed only, later, to have someone else confess or shown to have committed the murder. If you want to see how confident you should be in that brand of "proof" look at how prosecutors and judges who are in the dirty business of killing people that way resist looking at the quality of their proof when their actions are questioned. If you want to really look at the con job that "proof" often contains in a real life context, look at the things that someone like Antonin Scalia has said which proves how sleazy and dishonest this proof stuff can be in the hands of a sleazy and dishonest person with power. A proof that is held to be worthy of the greatest of respect and given the power to kill people can be as dishonest as that. In the hands of physicists and other scientists, those have ever more power to get us all killed than Scalia could dream of in his most megalomaniac imaginings. Such is the power and the quality of what proof provides when it is removed from the teachings of such folk as Jesus, held to be exempt from those by virtue of their higher proofyness, or something. Allowing that exemption is both illogical and insane.
No, even in this business of proof, you're stuck with making a choice on the basis of will and in the absence of the comfort that comes with a real instead of your merely imagined absolute and totally reliable truth. You're stuck with that because that's all it is, despite all imaginary assertions to the contrary.
Update: I should be out the door but it occurred to me that the question I asked yesterday, why shouldn't scientists predict that they're going to find "alien" life in the next 28 seconds as opposed to their predicted two decades, is a good illustration. Predictions of something with an expiration date of 28 seconds can be subjected to reality and stand the chance of being debunked in rather real time as opposed to that imagined world twenty years from now. By then the budget for the project they are promoting will have been spent in the lost and forgotten past, even as their almost promised results are unachieved and, likely, forgotten. I doubt that any of them still alive and working at NASA will be the ones to bring it up. They don't want to do a truth test of their sciency assertions quite on that short a time scale. The one going into six figures, not very urgent when you're asking for an appropriation in this congress. What they expect to do with these aliens they predict they are going to find might be a question to ask. As I've asked before, what if the aliens are 1. smarter than us, 2. fervently religious? What if they think our science is extremely dangerous Plutonium Age delusion? That going to impress the high and sciency?
Update: An unpublished comment says, " I never realized before that there really isn't any way to know if we are actually living in The Matrix." Apparently that's supposed to make what I said above officially stupid. I am only very vaguely aware of this "Matrix" that is referred to in the comment, since I haven't gone to see a movie in, literally more than two decades and don't do the lowest of filmed sci-fi. But if the idea that we are all in a matrix is stupid then he unwittingly agrees with me about contemporary cosmology since a kind of"matrix" universe is all the rage just now. I mean, it's published in freakin' Nature! But, then, everything he says is unwitting. About that hologram stuff, I doubt it and I doubt it will last five years. Which would seem to be about as long as any scheme of cosmology lasts these days.
But the matter of what a proof is and what "to prove something" means is seldom considered. The common belief that this thing called a "proof" provides an objective and unambiguous certainty that "a truth" provided by the proof is a complete and entirely reliable "thing" or condition of being or historical event, complete with its retinue of supporting and related "things"(quite often in themselves not "proven") and associated aspects of reality. It is quite often and wrongly asserted that science provides proof of this or that. Which is a claim made on their behalf that scientists careful with their claims and language - or, more often, forced to by rigorous debate opponents - will openly disclaim. Oh, so often, their disclaimer is revealed to be disingenuous as soon as it's issued because they continue in encouraging the habit of thought that holds that science issues proof of stuff. I will mention in passing that I have never read or encountered an ideologically campaigning atheist-scientist who doesn't talk out of both sides of their mouth on that point.
Really careful scientists will admit that mathematicians are the ones who are in the business of providing proofs, and the even more careful will point out that it is prudent to make that claim only about pure mathematics, in which the objects "proved" are abstract entities that exist only in the minds of those with sufficient learning in mathematics to contain those entities. Which could reasonably lead someone who was either being extremely precise about the denotation of the words, or who wanted to give materialists a hard time, to say that this prime desideratum of theirs, "proof," would seem to be only available when dealing with imaginary objects and their imaginary properties. And when the materialist or "physicalist" or, almost always, rather emotional atheist, hears that and associates it with the actual object of their attack, they don't like the implications and often get really pissy.
Jesus, if I'm remembering correctly in this hour before I'm supposed to be at work, didn't provide a logical "proof" of God or what he was saying. He advised people to consult their own experience of life and events around them, to see the signs of the time. In doing that he was being honest about something hardly anyone in the "proof" business is honest about. "Proof" is a matter of being persuaded that all of those things allegedly provided by a proof in my second paragraph, proof is, in the words of the atheist and mathematician and scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum, a matter of human psychology and persuasion.
On that personal and willful act relies everything that we hold should be believed to be true and that belief should have a real effect in changing the behavior and thinking and feeling of the person who is persuaded. "Proof" "a proof" is something that is done or experienced by a person and people, its existence happens only in human minds, it is something we pretend has some independent, allegedly objective existence, when its complete reliance on us and our most subjective experience is one of the most obvious aspects of "proof". Prove that there is a proof that exists outside of human thought. Prove that any proof that isn't the product of human thought and relies for its very existence on a subjective and willful act of individual persuasion. If you can't do that then this objective, independent proof thing must be a delusion, by the very claims you make for proof and what the absence of such a proof insures. Those who make proof the object of cult like devotion and search are the ones who are the most dishonest about what proof actually is, especially its dependence on subjective thought,that it has no real and objective existence independent of that subjective thought and it is also not unrelated to human desires and subject to human self-deception.
Proof is entirely a matter of persuasion, no matter how rigorous the proof is, in the end a person has to accept the proof and, as some of the most rigorous application of proof in the past century "proved" no matter how rigorous a stickler for proof that you hold yourself to be, your proof depends on things that can't be proven, that can't even enter into this business of proof. The hero of materialists and atheists, Bertrand Russell, had to rather bitterly accept that was true, after years of some of the most rigorous thinking on the topic ever undertaken, he had to reluctantly accept it was true. And at the same time he had to gloomily and bitterly accept that was also the direction that physics, the subject that dealt most rigorously with his ultimate reality, the material universe, was headed in the same direction. Perhaps it was due to his habits of thought gained from being a mathematician that made him accept that when even so many of the physicists don't seem to be able to accept what their very science shows about the relationship of human minds and the subjects it studies. When you want to press those issues, nothing that we can say about the physical universe isn't entirely reliant on our subjective will and experience because we use our minds to even perceive the objects physics deals with and there is no absolute proof available of any of it.
The law uses the word "proof" as in "a case being proved beyond a reasonable doubt" or some such construction. The looseness with which legal "proof" is accepted is best shown by those convicted of murders and executed only, later, to have someone else confess or shown to have committed the murder. If you want to see how confident you should be in that brand of "proof" look at how prosecutors and judges who are in the dirty business of killing people that way resist looking at the quality of their proof when their actions are questioned. If you want to really look at the con job that "proof" often contains in a real life context, look at the things that someone like Antonin Scalia has said which proves how sleazy and dishonest this proof stuff can be in the hands of a sleazy and dishonest person with power. A proof that is held to be worthy of the greatest of respect and given the power to kill people can be as dishonest as that. In the hands of physicists and other scientists, those have ever more power to get us all killed than Scalia could dream of in his most megalomaniac imaginings. Such is the power and the quality of what proof provides when it is removed from the teachings of such folk as Jesus, held to be exempt from those by virtue of their higher proofyness, or something. Allowing that exemption is both illogical and insane.
No, even in this business of proof, you're stuck with making a choice on the basis of will and in the absence of the comfort that comes with a real instead of your merely imagined absolute and totally reliable truth. You're stuck with that because that's all it is, despite all imaginary assertions to the contrary.
Update: I should be out the door but it occurred to me that the question I asked yesterday, why shouldn't scientists predict that they're going to find "alien" life in the next 28 seconds as opposed to their predicted two decades, is a good illustration. Predictions of something with an expiration date of 28 seconds can be subjected to reality and stand the chance of being debunked in rather real time as opposed to that imagined world twenty years from now. By then the budget for the project they are promoting will have been spent in the lost and forgotten past, even as their almost promised results are unachieved and, likely, forgotten. I doubt that any of them still alive and working at NASA will be the ones to bring it up. They don't want to do a truth test of their sciency assertions quite on that short a time scale. The one going into six figures, not very urgent when you're asking for an appropriation in this congress. What they expect to do with these aliens they predict they are going to find might be a question to ask. As I've asked before, what if the aliens are 1. smarter than us, 2. fervently religious? What if they think our science is extremely dangerous Plutonium Age delusion? That going to impress the high and sciency?
Update: An unpublished comment says, " I never realized before that there really isn't any way to know if we are actually living in The Matrix." Apparently that's supposed to make what I said above officially stupid. I am only very vaguely aware of this "Matrix" that is referred to in the comment, since I haven't gone to see a movie in, literally more than two decades and don't do the lowest of filmed sci-fi. But if the idea that we are all in a matrix is stupid then he unwittingly agrees with me about contemporary cosmology since a kind of"matrix" universe is all the rage just now. I mean, it's published in freakin' Nature! But, then, everything he says is unwitting. About that hologram stuff, I doubt it and I doubt it will last five years. Which would seem to be about as long as any scheme of cosmology lasts these days.
Yeah, I Can Live Without Their Approval, Too - Hate Mail
There will be babblers who claim to be judges of astronomy although completely ignorant of the subject and, badly distorting some passage of Scripture to their purpose, will find fault with my undertaking and censure it.
Update - Hate mail: Ha, ha, faked you out, that wasn't me, I was quoting Copernicus from his introduction of his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, that book you guys are always so enthusiastic about but a word of which you have never read. I knew you'd jump to the wrong conclusion when I pushed your button. It's what you do.
As to the Eschatots still falling for Simels' mischaracterizations of what I said instead of, you know, bothering to find out what I said, as I pointed out they don't even read what Duncan Black says on his blog which they infest like skin mites. It has devolved into the home of the conceited, the lazy and the ignorant, pretty much. I've presented the record of that exchange which started with Simels, answering R McGeddon's proposal to ship all of the Jews to Florida. Here, I've got a free period so I can set out the exchange extracted from the comment thread with the link to where it happened, for those who might care to fact check. It all began with "R. McGeddon" making a snarky remark about putting all the Jews in Israel in Florida, which, unlike Arizona, is in danger of sinking into the sea, for those who like to keep track of ironies and Simels made a far trashier remark about "Gypsies", which is why I got into it.
-- R. McGeddon, humbugged, egad Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
My solution has always been to move Israel to Florida.
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
R. McGeddon, futilitarian
My solution has always been to move Israel to Florida.
And while we're at it, the Gypsies need a homeland too.
I think there's an abandoned shopping mall in Jersey they could have.
-- Gummo Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
The gypsies could run the concessions at the theme park, Holy-Land.
-- Anthony McCarthy • 4 years ago
I'd love to have more Jews living in the United States. I wish they'd offered emigration here as an alternative to the disaster that putting Israel in Palestine has caused. Taking a piece out some place like Arizona if a state was desired would have been a better idea.
Only the ideological ancestors of the End Timers would have prevented that happening.
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy Anthony McCarthy • 4 years ago
Oh, I'm sure the Jews would have been welcomed in Arizona with open arms.
-- Billy B Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
heh.
-- Deacon Blues Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
With papers, of course.
-- Anthony McCarthy Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
Unlike they were in Palestine, you mean?
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy Anthony McCarthy • 4 years ago
See, now you're actually starting to piss me off.
-- Anthony McCarthy Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
Seriously, I'd love to have a few million more Jews in the United States, one of the most progressive constituencies in the country, great philanthropists, brilliant disuptationists. Living here in relative safety and security. What could possibly be objectionable to that? The Likudniks would come to, or maybe not if those with a history of terrorism were excluded.
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
Anybody know how to say "keep digging" in French?
-- Toucari, socialist Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
Continuez à creuser?
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy Toucari, socialist • 4 years ago
And heh.
:-)
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
Heck, they just love minorities in Arizona.
-- Anthony McCarthy Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
OK, how about the North West. Or California. Or, hey, I'd really love to have lots of Jews in Northern Maine, we might actually turn into the liberal state that so many believe we are.
Simels, of course, lied about what was said and, as happens so often at Duncan Blacks "Brain Trust" a lie repeated becomes the common agreed to lie. You will note that he didn't mind the idea of relocating Israel to Florida, at least he hasn't gone all lie-all-the-time over it.
Billy, you silly, you were in on the original discussion and you don't even remember that you were there.
As for his idiotic non-understanding of what I wrote about a fact of mathematics and science which David Hume noted more than two centuries ago, I could point out what it really meant but the Tots don't deal with much of anything more complex than what they eat for supper and watch on TV. Obviously, I don't write stuff down to their chosen level of attention. Thus the quote from Copernicus.
Update - Hate mail: Ha, ha, faked you out, that wasn't me, I was quoting Copernicus from his introduction of his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, that book you guys are always so enthusiastic about but a word of which you have never read. I knew you'd jump to the wrong conclusion when I pushed your button. It's what you do.
As to the Eschatots still falling for Simels' mischaracterizations of what I said instead of, you know, bothering to find out what I said, as I pointed out they don't even read what Duncan Black says on his blog which they infest like skin mites. It has devolved into the home of the conceited, the lazy and the ignorant, pretty much. I've presented the record of that exchange which started with Simels, answering R McGeddon's proposal to ship all of the Jews to Florida. Here, I've got a free period so I can set out the exchange extracted from the comment thread with the link to where it happened, for those who might care to fact check. It all began with "R. McGeddon" making a snarky remark about putting all the Jews in Israel in Florida, which, unlike Arizona, is in danger of sinking into the sea, for those who like to keep track of ironies and Simels made a far trashier remark about "Gypsies", which is why I got into it.
-- R. McGeddon, humbugged, egad Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
My solution has always been to move Israel to Florida.
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
R. McGeddon, futilitarian
My solution has always been to move Israel to Florida.
And while we're at it, the Gypsies need a homeland too.
I think there's an abandoned shopping mall in Jersey they could have.
-- Gummo Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
The gypsies could run the concessions at the theme park, Holy-Land.
-- Anthony McCarthy • 4 years ago
I'd love to have more Jews living in the United States. I wish they'd offered emigration here as an alternative to the disaster that putting Israel in Palestine has caused. Taking a piece out some place like Arizona if a state was desired would have been a better idea.
Only the ideological ancestors of the End Timers would have prevented that happening.
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy Anthony McCarthy • 4 years ago
Oh, I'm sure the Jews would have been welcomed in Arizona with open arms.
-- Billy B Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
heh.
-- Deacon Blues Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
With papers, of course.
-- Anthony McCarthy Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
Unlike they were in Palestine, you mean?
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy Anthony McCarthy • 4 years ago
See, now you're actually starting to piss me off.
-- Anthony McCarthy Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
Seriously, I'd love to have a few million more Jews in the United States, one of the most progressive constituencies in the country, great philanthropists, brilliant disuptationists. Living here in relative safety and security. What could possibly be objectionable to that? The Likudniks would come to, or maybe not if those with a history of terrorism were excluded.
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
Anybody know how to say "keep digging" in French?
-- Toucari, socialist Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
Continuez à creuser?
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy Toucari, socialist • 4 years ago
And heh.
:-)
-- Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
Heck, they just love minorities in Arizona.
-- Anthony McCarthy Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 4 years ago
OK, how about the North West. Or California. Or, hey, I'd really love to have lots of Jews in Northern Maine, we might actually turn into the liberal state that so many believe we are.
Simels, of course, lied about what was said and, as happens so often at Duncan Blacks "Brain Trust" a lie repeated becomes the common agreed to lie. You will note that he didn't mind the idea of relocating Israel to Florida, at least he hasn't gone all lie-all-the-time over it.
Billy, you silly, you were in on the original discussion and you don't even remember that you were there.
As for his idiotic non-understanding of what I wrote about a fact of mathematics and science which David Hume noted more than two centuries ago, I could point out what it really meant but the Tots don't deal with much of anything more complex than what they eat for supper and watch on TV. Obviously, I don't write stuff down to their chosen level of attention. Thus the quote from Copernicus.
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Charles Tomlinson Griffes - Poem for Flute and Orchestra
Jacques Zoon, flute
Boston Civic Symphony
Max Hobart, conductor
I remember when Jacques Zoon came to play with the Boston Symphony late in the last century how excited people were to have him playing a wooden flute with the orchestra, how different its rich, darker timbre was, subtle differences can be big differences. It's too bad he left that position. He looks so young in this performance from fifteen years ago. It's a pretty great performance, with a really deep feeling for the structure of the sound and of the piece, to say it's beautiful doesn't do it justice.
Zoon has constantly experimented with modifications of flute design, from what I can hear and gather his new design for the c# hole is a huge and long needed improvement. Like I said, subtle differences can be big differences.
You Can't Get Here From There.
Dear Larry,
I read your New Yorker piece, the one where you use Kim Davis, the Kentucky law-breaking County Clerk who has been jailed for defying court orders to follow the law and issue marriage licenses to women who marry women and men who marry men. I've got to say you begin by making a big mistake in failing to identify the logical disconnect those championing her as a figure in religious liberty are making. You say:
Davis’s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is “absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties,” Paul said, on CNN.
No. There's a big problem with identifying what she's doing as a "religious liberty," it is no such thing. Religious liberty is a personal right, there is no personal right to be the county clerk or to hold any political office. Holding a public office, through being elected to it or accepting appointment to it is an assumed responsibility, not a right. That assumed responsibility, in every case I'm aware of, included the agreement to abide by the law as defined by statute and, overall, by the state and federal Constitutions. So the refusal of someone holding that office to fulfill their obligations is not the exercise of a right, it is the refusal to do a job that they agreed to do. If her moral convictions make that impossible for her, her right resides in her right to resign the office not in refusing to do her job. Here's a clue, if a line of thought is being promoted by Rand Paul, you should be suspicious that there is some logical disconnect that invalidates it and those should be investigated before allowing their thinking to govern the course of any argument you are going to make.
It should be surprising that someone trained in scientific method, especially one who has used that rather specialized application of logic as successfully as you have, should make such a blunder. But the failure of science education, even at the highest levels, to train its students in a broader ranger of application of logic seems to result in scientists having a hard time applying logic outside of their narrow specialty in far too many cases, now a days.
Instead of doing that you immediately make an appeal to religious stereotyping by coming up with a hypothetical of a Muslim county clerk applying Middle Eastern mores and notions of moral requirements on women who apply for a marriage, clearly making a far-fetched appeal to prejudice as an illustration of the point you borrow from Rand Paul. Your imaginary Muslim county clerk who refused to issue a license to a couple if the woman was unveiled wouldn't be exercising their religious liberty in doing so, they, like Kim Davis would be violating their official duties, agreed to by them, in violation of their oath of office, most likely, and by court order, almost certainly. They wouldn't be exercising a personal liberty, as religious liberty is.
Any religious liberty opposing legal same-sex marriage consists of someone choosing not to enter into a same sex marriage and even, in their personal life, disapproving of it, it isn't in using a position in the government which doesn't belong to them to impede the rights of those who choose to exercise their legal rights to be married.
I know why you didn't point any of this out, it's because I don't really believe you are really interested in my right to marry another man, at least not in your article. you're interested in using Kim Davis's last stand to serve your real purpose, to bash religion and to get yourself in the media, the New Yorker, servicing your religion-bashing fans, now that you've given up doing science and have opted for the golden-parachute that Richard Dawkins and so many other unofficially retired scientists have taken into celebrity atheism.
As a gay man who is far, far more interested in my personal rights to equality, to marry, to live a peaceful life without the burdens of discrimination than in your retirement career, I have had to point out to so, so many atheists like you that my rights to do that depend on the far more numerous religious folk who support equality and oppose legal and, now, illegal discrimination against LGBT folk. Many of those religious folk are LGBT. Our rights don't depend on the votes of atheists who comprise a tiny faction of the overall population and your faction of bigoted atheists is, I hope, a smaller fraction among atheists. You guys couldn't muster enough votes to protect your own freedoms, which, in the United States, were secured by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, adopted by a Congress and signed into law by a president who were almost all either professed Christians or Jews.
You seem to think that all atheists are in favor of marriage and other aspects of equality for lesbians and gay men when a quick google search would reveal that there are atheist or, as they like to put it, misusing the word, "secular" opponents of equality. If you look at their arguments against marriage equality, they are some mish-mosh of Darwinist assertion around reproduction which is not that far removed from right-wing Republican arguments against marriage equality. There have been other supposedly science-based arguments against equality for gay folk, you should be almost old enough to recall that what was taken as science, psychology, psychiatry, it was the official position of the profession that being "homosexual" was a disorder and a disease, not a right which deserved equal protection of the law. I don't recall physics or chemistry or biology or any other branch of science jumping in to defend us against the folk in those branches of what is taken to be science back then.
Your mistake in misidentifying a county clerks refusal to do her job with "imposing morality" is compounded by several other lapses in applied logic and an implication that science is the answer. While it isn't the case, as I pointed out above, that "imposing morality" is the issue in this case, you seem to fail to notice that standing for equality before the law IS A MORAL POSITION, the arguments against discrimination ARE MORAL ARGUMENTS, even as wielded by you who don't seem to get that, we who are insisting on full equality for ourselves and for everyone ARE INSISTING ON IMPOSING "OUR MORALITY" ON OTHER PEOPLE. It is done by using their agreement that equality before the law is right and just, it is the assertion that there is no compelling state interest or any legitimate social reason to impede the exercise of rights and it is an insistence that justice demands that even in private commerce there is no legal right to discriminate against those who do exercise their freedoms and who just want to live their lives as they see fit.
You can't do any of that with science, you can't do any of that with math, the entire effort to assert rights, to assert equality, to assert the demand of justice is, like it or not, based historically on science and in almost all cases was done through and by those religions which include those rights, equality and justice in their faith holdings. They entered into the common habits of societies through religion, they are maintained and extended by the consent of those who hold themselves as being required to follow that understanding of morality, even when they don't choose that for themselves, even when they really, really don't like it and would rather discriminate against people and to do injustice. That is simply the history of the assertion of equal rights and the literature asserting rights and equality under the law. Those arguments were not scientific, they were not "secular" they were made, even by those God-phobic, slave holding aristocrats who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as endowments by God, there was no other basis in articulating them and there is no effective one today.
We now stand near full, legal equality for lesbians and gay men on the basis of the assertions of morality, not science. We didn't get here from the amorality of science or a secularism divorced from the moral demand for equal justice founded in the Hebrew scriptures. That's a fact of history.
If liberals had not widely given up that articulation of rights in the late 1960s, things would have been a lot different, now. I fully believe that. The major movement towards equality happened before that abandonment of the religious arguments for those things, we are still living off of that legacy in extending the legal protection of rights, the LGBT movement would never have happened without such individuals and groups as The Reverened Martin Luther King jr., Diane Nash, the Black churches involved in the freedom struggle of the 1950s and 60s and for far longer than that. It would not have happened without the struggles against slavery. We are the beneficiaries of that legacy and we should never forget that it took religious assertions of justice to get us anywhere, even as other religious people opposed our efforts. Atheists had little to do with it, "secular" arguments didn't get it done. The opponents of legal equality use of the secular, dereligionized Constitution to argue against equality just as if not more effectively than they use a few passages of scriptures.
I, as a gay man, have to say that I'm not especially impressed by the straight folks' articulation of my right to my rights. If you guys can't do better than to try to turn my rights into a tool of your ideological war against religion, you are doing pretty much the same thing that the Republican right has done with them, use our lives for your ends, I would invite you to cut it out, now.
I read your New Yorker piece, the one where you use Kim Davis, the Kentucky law-breaking County Clerk who has been jailed for defying court orders to follow the law and issue marriage licenses to women who marry women and men who marry men. I've got to say you begin by making a big mistake in failing to identify the logical disconnect those championing her as a figure in religious liberty are making. You say:
Davis’s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is “absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties,” Paul said, on CNN.
No. There's a big problem with identifying what she's doing as a "religious liberty," it is no such thing. Religious liberty is a personal right, there is no personal right to be the county clerk or to hold any political office. Holding a public office, through being elected to it or accepting appointment to it is an assumed responsibility, not a right. That assumed responsibility, in every case I'm aware of, included the agreement to abide by the law as defined by statute and, overall, by the state and federal Constitutions. So the refusal of someone holding that office to fulfill their obligations is not the exercise of a right, it is the refusal to do a job that they agreed to do. If her moral convictions make that impossible for her, her right resides in her right to resign the office not in refusing to do her job. Here's a clue, if a line of thought is being promoted by Rand Paul, you should be suspicious that there is some logical disconnect that invalidates it and those should be investigated before allowing their thinking to govern the course of any argument you are going to make.
It should be surprising that someone trained in scientific method, especially one who has used that rather specialized application of logic as successfully as you have, should make such a blunder. But the failure of science education, even at the highest levels, to train its students in a broader ranger of application of logic seems to result in scientists having a hard time applying logic outside of their narrow specialty in far too many cases, now a days.
Instead of doing that you immediately make an appeal to religious stereotyping by coming up with a hypothetical of a Muslim county clerk applying Middle Eastern mores and notions of moral requirements on women who apply for a marriage, clearly making a far-fetched appeal to prejudice as an illustration of the point you borrow from Rand Paul. Your imaginary Muslim county clerk who refused to issue a license to a couple if the woman was unveiled wouldn't be exercising their religious liberty in doing so, they, like Kim Davis would be violating their official duties, agreed to by them, in violation of their oath of office, most likely, and by court order, almost certainly. They wouldn't be exercising a personal liberty, as religious liberty is.
Any religious liberty opposing legal same-sex marriage consists of someone choosing not to enter into a same sex marriage and even, in their personal life, disapproving of it, it isn't in using a position in the government which doesn't belong to them to impede the rights of those who choose to exercise their legal rights to be married.
I know why you didn't point any of this out, it's because I don't really believe you are really interested in my right to marry another man, at least not in your article. you're interested in using Kim Davis's last stand to serve your real purpose, to bash religion and to get yourself in the media, the New Yorker, servicing your religion-bashing fans, now that you've given up doing science and have opted for the golden-parachute that Richard Dawkins and so many other unofficially retired scientists have taken into celebrity atheism.
As a gay man who is far, far more interested in my personal rights to equality, to marry, to live a peaceful life without the burdens of discrimination than in your retirement career, I have had to point out to so, so many atheists like you that my rights to do that depend on the far more numerous religious folk who support equality and oppose legal and, now, illegal discrimination against LGBT folk. Many of those religious folk are LGBT. Our rights don't depend on the votes of atheists who comprise a tiny faction of the overall population and your faction of bigoted atheists is, I hope, a smaller fraction among atheists. You guys couldn't muster enough votes to protect your own freedoms, which, in the United States, were secured by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, adopted by a Congress and signed into law by a president who were almost all either professed Christians or Jews.
You seem to think that all atheists are in favor of marriage and other aspects of equality for lesbians and gay men when a quick google search would reveal that there are atheist or, as they like to put it, misusing the word, "secular" opponents of equality. If you look at their arguments against marriage equality, they are some mish-mosh of Darwinist assertion around reproduction which is not that far removed from right-wing Republican arguments against marriage equality. There have been other supposedly science-based arguments against equality for gay folk, you should be almost old enough to recall that what was taken as science, psychology, psychiatry, it was the official position of the profession that being "homosexual" was a disorder and a disease, not a right which deserved equal protection of the law. I don't recall physics or chemistry or biology or any other branch of science jumping in to defend us against the folk in those branches of what is taken to be science back then.
Your mistake in misidentifying a county clerks refusal to do her job with "imposing morality" is compounded by several other lapses in applied logic and an implication that science is the answer. While it isn't the case, as I pointed out above, that "imposing morality" is the issue in this case, you seem to fail to notice that standing for equality before the law IS A MORAL POSITION, the arguments against discrimination ARE MORAL ARGUMENTS, even as wielded by you who don't seem to get that, we who are insisting on full equality for ourselves and for everyone ARE INSISTING ON IMPOSING "OUR MORALITY" ON OTHER PEOPLE. It is done by using their agreement that equality before the law is right and just, it is the assertion that there is no compelling state interest or any legitimate social reason to impede the exercise of rights and it is an insistence that justice demands that even in private commerce there is no legal right to discriminate against those who do exercise their freedoms and who just want to live their lives as they see fit.
You can't do any of that with science, you can't do any of that with math, the entire effort to assert rights, to assert equality, to assert the demand of justice is, like it or not, based historically on science and in almost all cases was done through and by those religions which include those rights, equality and justice in their faith holdings. They entered into the common habits of societies through religion, they are maintained and extended by the consent of those who hold themselves as being required to follow that understanding of morality, even when they don't choose that for themselves, even when they really, really don't like it and would rather discriminate against people and to do injustice. That is simply the history of the assertion of equal rights and the literature asserting rights and equality under the law. Those arguments were not scientific, they were not "secular" they were made, even by those God-phobic, slave holding aristocrats who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as endowments by God, there was no other basis in articulating them and there is no effective one today.
We now stand near full, legal equality for lesbians and gay men on the basis of the assertions of morality, not science. We didn't get here from the amorality of science or a secularism divorced from the moral demand for equal justice founded in the Hebrew scriptures. That's a fact of history.
If liberals had not widely given up that articulation of rights in the late 1960s, things would have been a lot different, now. I fully believe that. The major movement towards equality happened before that abandonment of the religious arguments for those things, we are still living off of that legacy in extending the legal protection of rights, the LGBT movement would never have happened without such individuals and groups as The Reverened Martin Luther King jr., Diane Nash, the Black churches involved in the freedom struggle of the 1950s and 60s and for far longer than that. It would not have happened without the struggles against slavery. We are the beneficiaries of that legacy and we should never forget that it took religious assertions of justice to get us anywhere, even as other religious people opposed our efforts. Atheists had little to do with it, "secular" arguments didn't get it done. The opponents of legal equality use of the secular, dereligionized Constitution to argue against equality just as if not more effectively than they use a few passages of scriptures.
I, as a gay man, have to say that I'm not especially impressed by the straight folks' articulation of my right to my rights. If you guys can't do better than to try to turn my rights into a tool of your ideological war against religion, you are doing pretty much the same thing that the Republican right has done with them, use our lives for your ends, I would invite you to cut it out, now.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Carla Bley - Syndrome
G. Burton, vibraphone
J. Lovano, tenor sax
J. Scofield, guitar
S. Swallow, bass
A. Sanchez, drums
Brahms - Schicksalslied, Opus 54
Atlanta Symphony
Robert Shaw, conductor
One of the few recordings I've heard of this where you can hear the chorus clearly above the orchestra, not surprising in that Shaw was one of the greatest of choral conductors of the last century. This piece, written about the same time and in the same mind set as the Alto Rhapsody is one of the really great choral pieces of the 19th century.
Here is a version more familiar to more of us who have sung in student choruses with piano accompaniment. The student chorus is quite good and very well conducted and the piano player, not named, is excellent.
East Central University Singers,
Ada, Oklahoma
Dr. Walker, director
If anyone can send me his/her full name, I will post it.
Score
Translation:
Schicksalslied (Song Of Destiny)
You walk above in the light
on holy ground, blessed genies!
Divine breezes
waft by you,
like the fingers of the player
on the holy strings.
Fateless, like sleeping infants,
breathe the heavenly beings.
With modest buds
ever protected,
their spirit will bloom forever,
and their blessed eyes
will see in silent,
perpetual clarity.
But we are given
no place to rest.
We vanish and fall,
suffering humans.
Blind from hour to hour,
thrown from tragedy to tragedy
like water thrown from cliff to cliff,
we disappear into the abyss.
Friedrich Hölderlin
Obviously this text is less optimistic than that of the Alto Rhapsody, while I love this piece and thoroughly enjoyed being in different choruses which sang it with piano. I don't endorse the position it takes.
Peeved πper Pipes Up Peevedly
You need to lighten up a bit there or you'll bust a gusset. And you need to know that I'm not going to post any more comments written in the style of an angry, enraged 13-year-old. You've got 98% of the comment taking internet for that, I figure there should be at least a few adults-only zones in imaginary life.
I have no idea how you can possibly hold that pi is separable from the figure in plane geometry that its value is derived from (approximate value, at that) to maintain that it has some independent existence since it is used in so many formulas. Are you claiming there is some other definition of pi? I have yet to see one. Are you claiming there is one available in the physical universe? Where is it? You seem to want to give it some mystical significance, for which the observations about the seeming fact that perfect circles, if they exist at all, seem to elude detection by the most exquisite of measurement made by human beings, the only known animals to have ever talked about the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. I thought you guys were opposed to giving things mystical significance or taking that category of thought seriously. A bit of consistency on your parts would at least remove that venue of doubting your ideology was anything other than the mode of thinking common to angry, enraged 13-year-olds.
Perhaps it does have some transcendent quality that accounts for why it comes up so often, in so many, varied formulas, perhaps it is something of a key to the secrets of the structure of the universe. Transcendence, by the way, NOT a quality that is compatible with your ideology, so you can't really be true to materialism and assign transcendence to your favorite number that you feel so groovy talking about once a year. However, it if has such power and is so ubiquitous, the rarity if not total absence of perfect circles is an even greater mystery. If that number is that kind of a key to the universe you'd expect the very thing that defines pi to be kind of freakin' ubiquitous. I think sometimes people just throw it in there because it sounds good, though not so much in the physical sciences. Other than that, I've got no problem with it being essentially mysterious. I figure if someone doesn't like mystery they should stick with the banal and not challenging, like most of what's left when you sciency atheist materialists reject the entire range of human intellectual history that doesn't fit into your radically reduced and dogmatically defined so-called reality.
I have absolutely no idea why any of the things I said might be true or even if some of them are wrong but, then, I don't ascribe mystical significance to numbers. Not even the prime numbers, not even composite numbers like 51. One of my 13-year-old charges seemed to think it was unfair that 51 wasn't a prime number. Well, it just isn't one. If you don't like things like that, tough. I wonder why you left out all those other numbers I mentioned in that post you hate on so much, the square roots of numbers like two, infinite repeating and non-repeating decimals. Those are numbers too. We just don't have any way to write them or get at them as an absolute value.
As to how pi, a figure of idealized, flat geometry, can exist in curved space, I only raised that as a question. It would seem to me either space is, actually, curved, dimpled, or whatever, or that's an imaginary construct as the flat space of euclidean geometry was from time immemorial, or at least 1962 when I first read that statement when I read the first chapter of my Geometry textbook. I believe the fact had occurred to people long before that. If reality is founded on space that really is curved, that makes the existence of pi and its utility even more complicated and, so, mysterious. Maybe it all has to do with human minds and isn't an attribute of external reality? Maybe its "reality" is a shared property of the human mind interacting with some external reality and beings which have other means of interacting with external reality would find the idea and all of those formulas and laws incorporating it naive. I don't know the answers to any of those questions but I don't see how modern physics can really, ultimately, ABSOLUTELY, be true and the naive definition and character of pi AS WE DEFINE IT to not be less than absolutely true. I would welcome some explanation that the naive, such as myself, could fathom and check for coherence.
None of this says the slightest thing I can fathom about "the existence of God". It does, though, have a lot to do with the claims of materialist fundamentalists, their arrogance, their conceit, their claims to have found the frame in which all of reality must fit or it can't possibly be real, and, wouldn't you know it, that universal frame happens to be the materialism they find so emotionally satisfying and the denial of which makes them go all puberty-flooded with hormones-"That's not FAIR!" rage. I'm not required to come up with an alternative that is fully and absolutely closed, materialists certainly haven't. You don't have to be able to lay an egg to know a bad one and materialism stinks.
As to the value of pi, I mean in human life and activity as opposed to an absolute mathematical value, I certainly don't intend to give it up just because it might be imaginary, all in our heads. That's more your way of thinking than mine. Every single thing we think in our minds is imagined, even all of the science and, beyond any questioning, all of the math. including geometry, including perfect circles and the ratio of their circumference to their diameters.
I have no idea how you can possibly hold that pi is separable from the figure in plane geometry that its value is derived from (approximate value, at that) to maintain that it has some independent existence since it is used in so many formulas. Are you claiming there is some other definition of pi? I have yet to see one. Are you claiming there is one available in the physical universe? Where is it? You seem to want to give it some mystical significance, for which the observations about the seeming fact that perfect circles, if they exist at all, seem to elude detection by the most exquisite of measurement made by human beings, the only known animals to have ever talked about the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. I thought you guys were opposed to giving things mystical significance or taking that category of thought seriously. A bit of consistency on your parts would at least remove that venue of doubting your ideology was anything other than the mode of thinking common to angry, enraged 13-year-olds.
Perhaps it does have some transcendent quality that accounts for why it comes up so often, in so many, varied formulas, perhaps it is something of a key to the secrets of the structure of the universe. Transcendence, by the way, NOT a quality that is compatible with your ideology, so you can't really be true to materialism and assign transcendence to your favorite number that you feel so groovy talking about once a year. However, it if has such power and is so ubiquitous, the rarity if not total absence of perfect circles is an even greater mystery. If that number is that kind of a key to the universe you'd expect the very thing that defines pi to be kind of freakin' ubiquitous. I think sometimes people just throw it in there because it sounds good, though not so much in the physical sciences. Other than that, I've got no problem with it being essentially mysterious. I figure if someone doesn't like mystery they should stick with the banal and not challenging, like most of what's left when you sciency atheist materialists reject the entire range of human intellectual history that doesn't fit into your radically reduced and dogmatically defined so-called reality.
I have absolutely no idea why any of the things I said might be true or even if some of them are wrong but, then, I don't ascribe mystical significance to numbers. Not even the prime numbers, not even composite numbers like 51. One of my 13-year-old charges seemed to think it was unfair that 51 wasn't a prime number. Well, it just isn't one. If you don't like things like that, tough. I wonder why you left out all those other numbers I mentioned in that post you hate on so much, the square roots of numbers like two, infinite repeating and non-repeating decimals. Those are numbers too. We just don't have any way to write them or get at them as an absolute value.
As to how pi, a figure of idealized, flat geometry, can exist in curved space, I only raised that as a question. It would seem to me either space is, actually, curved, dimpled, or whatever, or that's an imaginary construct as the flat space of euclidean geometry was from time immemorial, or at least 1962 when I first read that statement when I read the first chapter of my Geometry textbook. I believe the fact had occurred to people long before that. If reality is founded on space that really is curved, that makes the existence of pi and its utility even more complicated and, so, mysterious. Maybe it all has to do with human minds and isn't an attribute of external reality? Maybe its "reality" is a shared property of the human mind interacting with some external reality and beings which have other means of interacting with external reality would find the idea and all of those formulas and laws incorporating it naive. I don't know the answers to any of those questions but I don't see how modern physics can really, ultimately, ABSOLUTELY, be true and the naive definition and character of pi AS WE DEFINE IT to not be less than absolutely true. I would welcome some explanation that the naive, such as myself, could fathom and check for coherence.
None of this says the slightest thing I can fathom about "the existence of God". It does, though, have a lot to do with the claims of materialist fundamentalists, their arrogance, their conceit, their claims to have found the frame in which all of reality must fit or it can't possibly be real, and, wouldn't you know it, that universal frame happens to be the materialism they find so emotionally satisfying and the denial of which makes them go all puberty-flooded with hormones-"That's not FAIR!" rage. I'm not required to come up with an alternative that is fully and absolutely closed, materialists certainly haven't. You don't have to be able to lay an egg to know a bad one and materialism stinks.
As to the value of pi, I mean in human life and activity as opposed to an absolute mathematical value, I certainly don't intend to give it up just because it might be imaginary, all in our heads. That's more your way of thinking than mine. Every single thing we think in our minds is imagined, even all of the science and, beyond any questioning, all of the math. including geometry, including perfect circles and the ratio of their circumference to their diameters.
Monday, September 14, 2015
Brahms - Alto Rhapsody - Sara Mingardo
Lucerne Festival Orchestra
Andris Nelsons director
Sara Mingardo, alto.
Bavarian Radio Choir
Sara Mingardo is the real thing. I like her rendition better than most of the old standbys from the early-mid and late 1900s. Andris Nelsons is a fine conductor.
Score
Translation:
But who stands there apart?
In the thicket, lost is his path;
Behind him the bushes
Are closing together,
The grass springs up again,
The desert engulfs him.
Ah, who will heal his afflictions,
To whom balsam was poison,
Who, from love's fullness,
Drank in misanthropy only?
First hated, and now hates,
He, in secret, wastes
All that he is worth,
In selfishness vainity.
If there be, on thy psaltery,
Father of Love, but one tone
That to his ear may be pleasing,
Oh, then, quicken his heart!
Clear his cloud-enveloped eyes
Over the thousand fountains
Close by the thirsty one
In the desert.
From Wolfgang von Goethe: Harzreise im Winter
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Haunted By A Ghostley Presence
No idea where this came from, I doubt I've thought about it for more than forty or more years, but here it is
The Boston Beguine as sung by Alice Ghostely in New Faces of 1952 (I believe)
That Boston, at least the part about suppressing books, has been dead for about as long as that.
Now, please, Alice, stop haunting me.
The Boston Beguine as sung by Alice Ghostely in New Faces of 1952 (I believe)
That Boston, at least the part about suppressing books, has been dead for about as long as that.
Now, please, Alice, stop haunting me.
Johannes Brahms - Sieben Lieder op 62
No. 1 Rosmarin
No. 2 Von alten Liebesliedern
No 3. Waldesnacht
No. 4 Dein Herzlein Mild
No. 5. All' meine Herzgedanken
No. 6. Es Geht ein Wehen
No. 7 Vergangen Ist Mir Glück und Heil
Various choruses and conductors. If I had it all to do again, I think I'd have given it all up to be a choral conductor.
Conspicuous Disjunction As A Protection of Reputable Status
I therefore consider the Encyclical of Pope John XXIII, [Pacem in Terris] which I have read, to be one of the most remarkable occurrences of our time and a great step to the future. I can find no
better expression of my beliefs of morality, of the duties and responsibilities of mankind, people to other people, than is in that encyclical. I do not agree with some of the machinery which supports some of the ideas, that they spring from God, perhaps, I don't personally believe, or that some of these ideas are the natural consequence of ideas of earlier popes, in a natural and perfectly sensible way. I don't agree, and I will not ridicule it, and I won't argue it. I agree with the responsibilities and with the duties that the Pope represents as the responsibilities and the duties of people. And I recognize this encyclical as the beginning, possibly, of a new future where we forget, perhaps, about the theories of why we believe things as long as we ultimately in the end, as far as action is concerned, believe the same thing.
Richard Feynman: The Meaning of It All
Thinking about what Richard Feynman said, it's rather remarkable that he seemed to assert that the conclusions he endorsed, so remarkably for an atheist-scientist iconoclast, were separable from the arguments made to arrive at those conclusions. And not just any individual component of that conclusion but the integrated conclusion supported by the integrated argument for it. Considering that Richard Feynman identified Pacem in Terris as "...one of the most remarkable occurrences of our time and a great step to the future. I can find no better expression of my beliefs of morality, of the duties and responsibilities of mankind, people to other people..." it is incredible that he could, immediately, disregard the propositions that led to that "great step to the future," that "no better expression of" morality, duties and responsibilities of mankind, people to other people". If he found the arguments of Pope John XXIII to be the best arguments for those that were ever made, to discount the thinking that led him to that powerful statement doesn't make any sense. Clearly, when he made that statement, Feynman hadn't found any secular or political or scientific articulation of his thinking that had the power that the Pope had based on theological and, most of all, Biblical foundations. That is, I have to assert, a kind of irrational thinking that is incredible from a scientist of Feynman's greatness and genius. I doubt he would ever have discounted the thinking that led to conclusions of which he so passionately approved of in any other area of life, except religion.
I have to say that there is a definite feeling in reading how Feynman said what he said, as if he realized that he was breaking one of the major taboos of his intellectual set in endorsing a theological document. And I have to wonder if he wasn't violating his life long habits, as received from his father, as well. During one of those Nova programs which made Feynman a superstar even as he was dying, among the mid-brow and low-brow and put Tuva on the map of the popular American mid-brow mind - musically if not geographically or anthropologically - he talked with great affection for his father's hated of the Pope, as a source of his own, famous, disdain of authority. Perhaps that pope was Pius XI, among those cited by St. John XXIII in his encyclical, or his predecessor, Benedict XV, also cited in Pacem in Terris, Benedict XV's exhortation to the rulers of the belligerent powers of August 1, 1917.
In the modern, university-educated, elite and respectable milieu we all at least pretend to share in, you're not supposed to take what Popes say seriously but if you have to, if you find yourself compelled to take what they or some theolgian or other religious figures says, seriously, you've got to disdain the basis of their saying it so as not to endanger your own reputability.
I wish it were possible to ask Feynman if he could imagine a non-pope, Giuseppe Roncalli, producing the conclusions he did relying on entirely secular antecedents or, in fact, why none of the far more intellectually credentialed secular thinkers produced as coherent, as comprehensive or as powerful an expression of those ideas which Feynman so lavishly endorsed. The absence of such a document would force the question as to why , in light of that, he could have so summarily pushed aside the very thinking, the very arguments, the very sources that produced what he found so powerful so brilliantly reasoned, such a great thing to be hoped for.
better expression of my beliefs of morality, of the duties and responsibilities of mankind, people to other people, than is in that encyclical. I do not agree with some of the machinery which supports some of the ideas, that they spring from God, perhaps, I don't personally believe, or that some of these ideas are the natural consequence of ideas of earlier popes, in a natural and perfectly sensible way. I don't agree, and I will not ridicule it, and I won't argue it. I agree with the responsibilities and with the duties that the Pope represents as the responsibilities and the duties of people. And I recognize this encyclical as the beginning, possibly, of a new future where we forget, perhaps, about the theories of why we believe things as long as we ultimately in the end, as far as action is concerned, believe the same thing.
Richard Feynman: The Meaning of It All
Thinking about what Richard Feynman said, it's rather remarkable that he seemed to assert that the conclusions he endorsed, so remarkably for an atheist-scientist iconoclast, were separable from the arguments made to arrive at those conclusions. And not just any individual component of that conclusion but the integrated conclusion supported by the integrated argument for it. Considering that Richard Feynman identified Pacem in Terris as "...one of the most remarkable occurrences of our time and a great step to the future. I can find no better expression of my beliefs of morality, of the duties and responsibilities of mankind, people to other people..." it is incredible that he could, immediately, disregard the propositions that led to that "great step to the future," that "no better expression of" morality, duties and responsibilities of mankind, people to other people". If he found the arguments of Pope John XXIII to be the best arguments for those that were ever made, to discount the thinking that led him to that powerful statement doesn't make any sense. Clearly, when he made that statement, Feynman hadn't found any secular or political or scientific articulation of his thinking that had the power that the Pope had based on theological and, most of all, Biblical foundations. That is, I have to assert, a kind of irrational thinking that is incredible from a scientist of Feynman's greatness and genius. I doubt he would ever have discounted the thinking that led to conclusions of which he so passionately approved of in any other area of life, except religion.
I have to say that there is a definite feeling in reading how Feynman said what he said, as if he realized that he was breaking one of the major taboos of his intellectual set in endorsing a theological document. And I have to wonder if he wasn't violating his life long habits, as received from his father, as well. During one of those Nova programs which made Feynman a superstar even as he was dying, among the mid-brow and low-brow and put Tuva on the map of the popular American mid-brow mind - musically if not geographically or anthropologically - he talked with great affection for his father's hated of the Pope, as a source of his own, famous, disdain of authority. Perhaps that pope was Pius XI, among those cited by St. John XXIII in his encyclical, or his predecessor, Benedict XV, also cited in Pacem in Terris, Benedict XV's exhortation to the rulers of the belligerent powers of August 1, 1917.
In the modern, university-educated, elite and respectable milieu we all at least pretend to share in, you're not supposed to take what Popes say seriously but if you have to, if you find yourself compelled to take what they or some theolgian or other religious figures says, seriously, you've got to disdain the basis of their saying it so as not to endanger your own reputability.
I wish it were possible to ask Feynman if he could imagine a non-pope, Giuseppe Roncalli, producing the conclusions he did relying on entirely secular antecedents or, in fact, why none of the far more intellectually credentialed secular thinkers produced as coherent, as comprehensive or as powerful an expression of those ideas which Feynman so lavishly endorsed. The absence of such a document would force the question as to why , in light of that, he could have so summarily pushed aside the very thinking, the very arguments, the very sources that produced what he found so powerful so brilliantly reasoned, such a great thing to be hoped for.
Your Mind On Theology And Off It
States have the right to existence, to self development, and to the means necessary to achieve this. They have the right to play the leading part in the process of their own development, and the right to their good name and due honors. Consequently, States are likewise in duty bound to safeguard all such rights effectively, and to avoid any action that could violate them. And just as individual men may not pursue their own private interests in a way that is unfair and detrimental to others, so too it would be criminal in a State to aim at improving itself by the use of methods which involve other nations in injury and unjust oppression. There is a saying of St. Augustine which has particular relevance in this context: "Take away justice, and what are kingdoms but mighty bands of robbers "
St. Pope John XXIII: Pacem in Terris
There was something of a tidal wave of idiocy that came in over yesterdays post, none of which refuted the points of the post, all of which confirmed what I said about the inevitable anti-intellectualism of materialism, what I think is at the bottom of the materialist-atheist-scientist dismissal of philosophy and other topics. There is one piece of idiocy that I did post so I could answer it here. Responding to, not answering, a good point made by RMJ, one of the most anti-intellectual of the bunch, and nothing remotely like a scientist, challenged
"apparently all Christians are "biblebillys." Never so much as read the
work of Augustine or Aquinas, have you? Rayner, ring a bell?
Kierkegaard? Tillich? Barth? Niebuhr (Richard or Reinie)?
Nope?
Go away, you're an ignoramus."
Quick -- name me three Christian Republican politicians in this country who've either read those guys or give a shit about them.
It was, of course, the wrong challenge to make. As an example, it is impossible to imagine a Republican who read or took even Augustine seriously could possibly support the course of policy that has led the Republican Party through much of any of it after Abraham Lincoln was shot. If they took even the "just war" theories of Augustine seriously there would have been no invasion of Iraq, no dirty war against the people and government in Nicaragua. As Noam Chomsky noted in that speech I linked to Friday, the Vatican, under the arch-conservative John Paul II opposed the invasion of Iraq. He had also opposed George HW Bush's Gulf War. I can't imagine that any of the wars the United States was involved in in the post WWII period would have been engaged in if the politicians had taken any of those on that list I've read seriously. I can note that the great founder of Black Liberation Theology, James Cone, made the point that George W. Bush would have been a much different person and president if he had read Niebuhr and taken him seriously. He specifically mentioned The Irony of American History, which is a more profound critique of the United States than I've ever seen come from any political writer. I think it would be possible to look seriously at the criticism of American policy which is theologically informed with that which excludes or rejects that means of observation and criticism to see that theology provides greater scope for discernment than its exclusion does.
And there is evidence that reading theologians and taking them seriously can make an enormous difference in a politician.
I haven't done the research to come up with a list of Republicans who have read those theologians and whose actions demonstrate they take them seriously. I can, though, point to any number of Democrats who read at least some of them and other theologians and took them seriously. I have ever confidence that Congressman, Fr. Robert Drinan read some of the more recent names on that list and took them seriously. He would have, to a degree of absolute certainty read Augustine and Aquinas very seriously in seminary. That is probably what informed his attempt to have articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon adopted on the basis of his most serious crimes while in office, his conduct of war in South-east Asia, especially in Cambodia. I could look at the list of those on the committee who voted to adopt those articles, which failed to be adopted, and those who didn't and try to match their educations which could demonstrate that they'd read at least some of those theologians but it is an absolute certainty that Robert Drinan did.
I can't, under any circumstances, imagine how a politician who had read from that list and taken them seriously could not fail to be a far, far more liberal and decent politician than what we have now. Even the worst things said by Augustine and Aquinas are more than matched by things that would mitigate or even refute those. If Simels or Skeptic Tank or the other silly billies who have never read much more than a clipped and distorted quote from any of them want to bring up those issues, I might be willing to delve into those matters.
Of course the challenge Simels made is incompetent. Since the contention is that Republicans didn't read those theologians or take them seriously, it merely points out that THEIR CONDUCT CAN'T BE BLAMED ON ANYTHING THOSE THEOLOGIANS SAID. It also unwittingly points out that any effect that reading and taking seriously those theologians would have that would impede the depravity of Republican political conduct is absent due to their not having read them or taken them seriously. That, of course, can be said about politicians who read the Bible and don't take it seriously.
There is absolutely no way to match the conduct of professing Christians on the Republican side or, indeed, many Democrats with the words of a man they claim to believe was God incarnate. There is no way to match his declaration that "what you do to the least among you, you do to me" with their policy towards people who are destitute, poor, discriminated against, oppressed and imprisoned with that passage of the Gospels. There is no way to match their economic policy with "Do unto others as you would have done unto you, that is the Law and the prophets." On that verse alone, taken from Leviticus, falls any contention that Republican or, indeed, much of Democratic policy is in line with the Bible or the main lines of Christian theology, the lines of which were what RMJ cited.
If I had to choose between being governed by the words of Jesus or the American Constitution I would not hesitate to choose to be governed by the words of Jesus. They are, in every way, entirely more in line with traditional American liberalism, equality, abolitionism, the rights of women, other groups, workers, the destitute, the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned. I think it would be very possible to come up with a comparison of the best which American politics has produced and a list of the words of Jesus, his apostles and the Jewish prophetic tradition that his thought is founded in that could, well, have guided the proposing and, all to rarely, the adoption of those laws and policies. To remind you, it is the alleged "originalist" interpretation of the American Constitution which has thwarted the adoption and implementation of those laws, not theology, not the Bible.
And, though Simels and Skeptic Tank and the rest of the atheist champions of the untillectual will scoff and mock and slang against such things, here is what a different atheist and even mocker of philosophy said when he bothered to read a theological document
I therefore consider the Encyclical of Pope John XXIII, [Pacem in Terris] which I have read, to be one of the most remarkable occurrences of our time and a great step to the future. I can find no
better expression of my beliefs of morality, of the duties and responsibilities of mankind, people to other people, than is in that encyclical. I do not agree with some of the machinery which supports some of the ideas, that they spring from God, perhaps, I don't personally believe, or that some of these ideas are the natural consequence of ideas of earlier popes, in a natural and perfectly sensible way. I don't agree, and I will not ridicule it, and I won't argue it. I agree with the responsibilities and with the duties that the Pope represents as the responsibilities and the duties of people. And I recognize this encyclical as the beginning, possibly, of a new future where we forget, perhaps, about the theories of why we believe things as long as we ultimately in the end, as far as action is concerned, believe the same thing.
Richard Feynman: The Meaning of It All
And, if you took the time to read through the Encyclical, you would see St, John XXIII cites Augustine repeatedly, as well as other theological documents, especially other papal documents which, in turn, constantly make reference to theologians and, of course, the Bible.
If my opponents are going to give me such a useful thing as the stupid challenge that was made, I feel morally obligated to use it.
Update: Another politician whose reading of theology informed his political actions was Mario Cuomo:
So is God a pacifist? Well, first of all, I confess that you get nowhere, in the
end, unless you’re allowed a heavy dose of faith. “Faith” is a word that is carefully
chosen, because you have to reject knowledge. If you had knowledge,
you wouldn’t need faith. You use as much knowledge as you have, but to make
it all the way across the chasm between you and a belief in God, you have to
use faith for the last part of the trip. So acknowledging that, what God wants
is the perfect society, and He wants you to get there. Now, I’m a Teilhardian,
so I would say that in all the struggles of Phipps and Cuomo and all the rest
of us, what we’re trying to do, in our stupid, trivial way, is contribute to that
effort, move toward what Teilhard de Chardin called the pleroma, the ultimate
consummation, which is perfection. We’re trying to get there. How? By making
it as good as we can make it for now. Would pacifism serve that end? Well,
if pacifism means not butchering one another in a war, then yes, of course,
that would be ideal. Would God allow for a time when He would permit you to
undertake a war? Well, if you meant a war against evil, probably. Probably the
God I believe in would not want you to surrender to evil to the point of allowing
yourself to be obliterated.
I wonder if Steve Simels may have voted for more than one politician who was, by their own admission, influenced by their reading of theology. How about you tell us if you voted for Mario Cuomo?
You can hear more in this address he gave at the 92nd St. Y in NYC in 1991.
And here, on the immorality of the death penalty.
I will have more to say on this topic later.
St. Pope John XXIII: Pacem in Terris
There was something of a tidal wave of idiocy that came in over yesterdays post, none of which refuted the points of the post, all of which confirmed what I said about the inevitable anti-intellectualism of materialism, what I think is at the bottom of the materialist-atheist-scientist dismissal of philosophy and other topics. There is one piece of idiocy that I did post so I could answer it here. Responding to, not answering, a good point made by RMJ, one of the most anti-intellectual of the bunch, and nothing remotely like a scientist, challenged
"apparently all Christians are "biblebillys." Never so much as read the
work of Augustine or Aquinas, have you? Rayner, ring a bell?
Kierkegaard? Tillich? Barth? Niebuhr (Richard or Reinie)?
Nope?
Go away, you're an ignoramus."
Quick -- name me three Christian Republican politicians in this country who've either read those guys or give a shit about them.
It was, of course, the wrong challenge to make. As an example, it is impossible to imagine a Republican who read or took even Augustine seriously could possibly support the course of policy that has led the Republican Party through much of any of it after Abraham Lincoln was shot. If they took even the "just war" theories of Augustine seriously there would have been no invasion of Iraq, no dirty war against the people and government in Nicaragua. As Noam Chomsky noted in that speech I linked to Friday, the Vatican, under the arch-conservative John Paul II opposed the invasion of Iraq. He had also opposed George HW Bush's Gulf War. I can't imagine that any of the wars the United States was involved in in the post WWII period would have been engaged in if the politicians had taken any of those on that list I've read seriously. I can note that the great founder of Black Liberation Theology, James Cone, made the point that George W. Bush would have been a much different person and president if he had read Niebuhr and taken him seriously. He specifically mentioned The Irony of American History, which is a more profound critique of the United States than I've ever seen come from any political writer. I think it would be possible to look seriously at the criticism of American policy which is theologically informed with that which excludes or rejects that means of observation and criticism to see that theology provides greater scope for discernment than its exclusion does.
And there is evidence that reading theologians and taking them seriously can make an enormous difference in a politician.
I haven't done the research to come up with a list of Republicans who have read those theologians and whose actions demonstrate they take them seriously. I can, though, point to any number of Democrats who read at least some of them and other theologians and took them seriously. I have ever confidence that Congressman, Fr. Robert Drinan read some of the more recent names on that list and took them seriously. He would have, to a degree of absolute certainty read Augustine and Aquinas very seriously in seminary. That is probably what informed his attempt to have articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon adopted on the basis of his most serious crimes while in office, his conduct of war in South-east Asia, especially in Cambodia. I could look at the list of those on the committee who voted to adopt those articles, which failed to be adopted, and those who didn't and try to match their educations which could demonstrate that they'd read at least some of those theologians but it is an absolute certainty that Robert Drinan did.
I can't, under any circumstances, imagine how a politician who had read from that list and taken them seriously could not fail to be a far, far more liberal and decent politician than what we have now. Even the worst things said by Augustine and Aquinas are more than matched by things that would mitigate or even refute those. If Simels or Skeptic Tank or the other silly billies who have never read much more than a clipped and distorted quote from any of them want to bring up those issues, I might be willing to delve into those matters.
Of course the challenge Simels made is incompetent. Since the contention is that Republicans didn't read those theologians or take them seriously, it merely points out that THEIR CONDUCT CAN'T BE BLAMED ON ANYTHING THOSE THEOLOGIANS SAID. It also unwittingly points out that any effect that reading and taking seriously those theologians would have that would impede the depravity of Republican political conduct is absent due to their not having read them or taken them seriously. That, of course, can be said about politicians who read the Bible and don't take it seriously.
There is absolutely no way to match the conduct of professing Christians on the Republican side or, indeed, many Democrats with the words of a man they claim to believe was God incarnate. There is no way to match his declaration that "what you do to the least among you, you do to me" with their policy towards people who are destitute, poor, discriminated against, oppressed and imprisoned with that passage of the Gospels. There is no way to match their economic policy with "Do unto others as you would have done unto you, that is the Law and the prophets." On that verse alone, taken from Leviticus, falls any contention that Republican or, indeed, much of Democratic policy is in line with the Bible or the main lines of Christian theology, the lines of which were what RMJ cited.
If I had to choose between being governed by the words of Jesus or the American Constitution I would not hesitate to choose to be governed by the words of Jesus. They are, in every way, entirely more in line with traditional American liberalism, equality, abolitionism, the rights of women, other groups, workers, the destitute, the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned. I think it would be very possible to come up with a comparison of the best which American politics has produced and a list of the words of Jesus, his apostles and the Jewish prophetic tradition that his thought is founded in that could, well, have guided the proposing and, all to rarely, the adoption of those laws and policies. To remind you, it is the alleged "originalist" interpretation of the American Constitution which has thwarted the adoption and implementation of those laws, not theology, not the Bible.
And, though Simels and Skeptic Tank and the rest of the atheist champions of the untillectual will scoff and mock and slang against such things, here is what a different atheist and even mocker of philosophy said when he bothered to read a theological document
I therefore consider the Encyclical of Pope John XXIII, [Pacem in Terris] which I have read, to be one of the most remarkable occurrences of our time and a great step to the future. I can find no
better expression of my beliefs of morality, of the duties and responsibilities of mankind, people to other people, than is in that encyclical. I do not agree with some of the machinery which supports some of the ideas, that they spring from God, perhaps, I don't personally believe, or that some of these ideas are the natural consequence of ideas of earlier popes, in a natural and perfectly sensible way. I don't agree, and I will not ridicule it, and I won't argue it. I agree with the responsibilities and with the duties that the Pope represents as the responsibilities and the duties of people. And I recognize this encyclical as the beginning, possibly, of a new future where we forget, perhaps, about the theories of why we believe things as long as we ultimately in the end, as far as action is concerned, believe the same thing.
Richard Feynman: The Meaning of It All
And, if you took the time to read through the Encyclical, you would see St, John XXIII cites Augustine repeatedly, as well as other theological documents, especially other papal documents which, in turn, constantly make reference to theologians and, of course, the Bible.
If my opponents are going to give me such a useful thing as the stupid challenge that was made, I feel morally obligated to use it.
Update: Another politician whose reading of theology informed his political actions was Mario Cuomo:
So is God a pacifist? Well, first of all, I confess that you get nowhere, in the
end, unless you’re allowed a heavy dose of faith. “Faith” is a word that is carefully
chosen, because you have to reject knowledge. If you had knowledge,
you wouldn’t need faith. You use as much knowledge as you have, but to make
it all the way across the chasm between you and a belief in God, you have to
use faith for the last part of the trip. So acknowledging that, what God wants
is the perfect society, and He wants you to get there. Now, I’m a Teilhardian,
so I would say that in all the struggles of Phipps and Cuomo and all the rest
of us, what we’re trying to do, in our stupid, trivial way, is contribute to that
effort, move toward what Teilhard de Chardin called the pleroma, the ultimate
consummation, which is perfection. We’re trying to get there. How? By making
it as good as we can make it for now. Would pacifism serve that end? Well,
if pacifism means not butchering one another in a war, then yes, of course,
that would be ideal. Would God allow for a time when He would permit you to
undertake a war? Well, if you meant a war against evil, probably. Probably the
God I believe in would not want you to surrender to evil to the point of allowing
yourself to be obliterated.
I wonder if Steve Simels may have voted for more than one politician who was, by their own admission, influenced by their reading of theology. How about you tell us if you voted for Mario Cuomo?
You can hear more in this address he gave at the 92nd St. Y in NYC in 1991.
And here, on the immorality of the death penalty.
I will have more to say on this topic later.
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