It's as sensible as anything I've heard from a Republican, one or two governors excepted.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
A SPOONFUL OF CLOROX - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody
It's as sensible as anything I've heard from a Republican, one or two governors excepted.
Asking For An Egg And Being Given A Scorpion - Suffering Imposes A Limit To All Reasoning
People thought for a long time that the course of the history of suffering could be changed, in the modern process of emancipation, by man's assuming responsibility for his own fate. Self-redeeming, self-emancipating man was to take the place of the redeeming God; man instead of God was to direct the course of history. But, as we have seen, it is more questionable than ever today whether scientific-technological evolution or even political-social revolution could of themselves bring about a decisive turn in mankind's history of suffering. Certainly the suffering have changed but they have not thereby become less. And, instead of God, it is now man who is charged with being a perpetrator of misdeeds and thus compelled to justify himself; instead of a theo-dicy there has to be an anthropo-dicy. But, compelled to justify himself, emancipated man attempts to exonerate himself, to find an alibi and to shift the blame with the aid of a variety of excuse mechanisms. He practices the art of showing "that it was not him." As if he were responsible only for the successes and not for the failures of technological evolution. As if all blame, and all failure could be laid on the transcendental ego (Idealism) or on the reactionary, counterrevolutionary class enemy (Marxism). As if there were no one responsible for the suffering of history, but only man's environment or his genetic pre-programming, or his instinctive urges, or quite generally individual, social, linguistic structures.
But should not emancipated man, in view of the equivocal results of emancipation, face the question of his guilt and thus also the question of his real redemption - and not merely his emancipation? Redemption and emancipation both mean liberation. But emancipation means liberation of man by man, it means man's self-liberation. And redemption means liberation of man by God, not any self-redemption on man's part. As the word "redemption" was for a long time overtaxed and emotionally overburdened, so too is the word "emancipation' today.
Since the most common use of the "question of evil, pain, suffering" is to use the dissatisfying lack of an answer that is satisfying, an answer that answers the question and relives pain against the assertions of the Christian, Jewish and other religion I think it's fair and even mandatory to ask if the results of posing those questions under alternative farmings are at all satisfying in the way demanded of religion. If the answer does not do what is demanded an answer that might be given by religion also fails to do, the framing that delivered as little or less than the answers made on behalf of religion can't, then be held to have yielded a success. If those answers deliver less or far less or nothing, then they have certainly been demonstrated to be less successful than religion has.
Atheism, materialism, scientism are never subjected to the same rigorous standards that are commonly demanded of religion, they have a series of dodges, of claiming, for example, that atheism isn't a belief system when it certainly is, or an ideology when it couldn't be clearer that it is an ideological position and, in its aggressive forms, it is a program.
If atheism cannot give someone satisfaction on the question of evil it is certainly not recommended by that, even if it claims that it it never promised one. If religon is to be held to be contemptible and discredited because it not provide relief, an answer, a solution, to the question as posed, certainly those who pose it must be held to the same standard of judgement that they demand for their opponents. What matters in the end is whether or not the position held or, especially, demanded is valid provides the satisfaction which is the only useful thing in considering the question of pain or evil or suffering. If the person is left in pain and suffering, if the evil continues, then, as pointed out the last time, even looking for an answer, never mind never looking for one while asserting an ideological position is less than useless. If the atheist never intended to try to give an answer, bringing the question up for their own purposes certainly is nothing that someone who is in pain should be bothered with. They have enough to be getting on with without having someone who doesn't intend to help bothering them.
After the long attempt mentioned above, of trying to find various political or sociological, to make secular attempts to "solve" the problem of pain and evil are hardly great successes as compared to religious attempts to at least lessen those through the central value of the Jewish tradition, justice. Many if not all of those attempts in the West have been through ideas that are central to the Biblical tradition, especially under the influence of Darwinism, the atheists are far more likely to insist that inequality is salubrious and under Marxism that dictatorship is the answer. Those are certainly less than useless in answering the despair of a person in pain, suffering, they are a guarantee of the very evil that "the question of evil" is raised to address, or, more typically in the case of atheists, to use as a polemical weapon.
Religion offers the possibility of entirely more than atheism can hold out to someone in pain and despair, not an end to pain, not an end to suffering, not even a guarantee of an end of human created evil but the possibility that there is more than those.
Redemption alone makes man free at a depth which emancipation cannot reach. Redemption alone can lead a person liberated from sin aware that he is accepted for time and eternity, to a meaningful life, to an unreserved effort for his fellow man, for society, for the new men liberated from the misery of this world. For emancipation has by no means enabled man to escape his history of suffering sin and death. And if he still wants to find a meaning in meaningless suffering and dying, in the suffering even of the dead and vanquished, he is thrown back on the ultimate reality; confronted with God from whom he can certainly cannot demand an account, being himself no longer innocent but in need of justification. Emancipated man cannot bypass his substantial co-responsibility for the world and mankind as they are. In the light of this, his self-understanding is perhaps made easier today than it was for the non-emancipated Job, who apparently had nothing with which to reproach himself. Yet, in a fundamentally different situation from that of Job, he will never face God with his history of suffering. With intellectual arguments he gets no further than Job's friends. Suffering imposes a limit to all reasoning.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus asks his followers which of them, if their child asked for fish would give them a snake or if they asked bread who would give them a stone. In Luke the same account he includes the far more colorful request for an egg being answered with a scorpion. That is what the atheist discourse of the question of evil, the question of pain and suffering offers for the person in pain who cries out for help. It answers questions of pain with ineffective answers and, ultimately, no recourse. And that's when they aren't discounting the significance of pain and suffering and the minds who experience pain and suffering and the ability to identify the difference between good and evil.
Note: It should be pointed out that the story of Job, such an early and important part of the Jewish Bible, that the righteous, almost unbelievably good Job is not a Hebrew but was from Uz, most probably considered to be an Edomite, people who are certainly not treated very well in the later writings. Yet this story of the righteous Job is contained in the Jewish Scriptures and is important for both Christians and Muslims, as well. Job the non-Hebrew is made the very symbol of the question of evil, unearned pain, one of the most sympathetic figures in all of literature. I think its inclusion in the Scripture is something that adds enormously to the credibility of that that tradition.
But should not emancipated man, in view of the equivocal results of emancipation, face the question of his guilt and thus also the question of his real redemption - and not merely his emancipation? Redemption and emancipation both mean liberation. But emancipation means liberation of man by man, it means man's self-liberation. And redemption means liberation of man by God, not any self-redemption on man's part. As the word "redemption" was for a long time overtaxed and emotionally overburdened, so too is the word "emancipation' today.
Since the most common use of the "question of evil, pain, suffering" is to use the dissatisfying lack of an answer that is satisfying, an answer that answers the question and relives pain against the assertions of the Christian, Jewish and other religion I think it's fair and even mandatory to ask if the results of posing those questions under alternative farmings are at all satisfying in the way demanded of religion. If the answer does not do what is demanded an answer that might be given by religion also fails to do, the framing that delivered as little or less than the answers made on behalf of religion can't, then be held to have yielded a success. If those answers deliver less or far less or nothing, then they have certainly been demonstrated to be less successful than religion has.
Atheism, materialism, scientism are never subjected to the same rigorous standards that are commonly demanded of religion, they have a series of dodges, of claiming, for example, that atheism isn't a belief system when it certainly is, or an ideology when it couldn't be clearer that it is an ideological position and, in its aggressive forms, it is a program.
If atheism cannot give someone satisfaction on the question of evil it is certainly not recommended by that, even if it claims that it it never promised one. If religon is to be held to be contemptible and discredited because it not provide relief, an answer, a solution, to the question as posed, certainly those who pose it must be held to the same standard of judgement that they demand for their opponents. What matters in the end is whether or not the position held or, especially, demanded is valid provides the satisfaction which is the only useful thing in considering the question of pain or evil or suffering. If the person is left in pain and suffering, if the evil continues, then, as pointed out the last time, even looking for an answer, never mind never looking for one while asserting an ideological position is less than useless. If the atheist never intended to try to give an answer, bringing the question up for their own purposes certainly is nothing that someone who is in pain should be bothered with. They have enough to be getting on with without having someone who doesn't intend to help bothering them.
After the long attempt mentioned above, of trying to find various political or sociological, to make secular attempts to "solve" the problem of pain and evil are hardly great successes as compared to religious attempts to at least lessen those through the central value of the Jewish tradition, justice. Many if not all of those attempts in the West have been through ideas that are central to the Biblical tradition, especially under the influence of Darwinism, the atheists are far more likely to insist that inequality is salubrious and under Marxism that dictatorship is the answer. Those are certainly less than useless in answering the despair of a person in pain, suffering, they are a guarantee of the very evil that "the question of evil" is raised to address, or, more typically in the case of atheists, to use as a polemical weapon.
Religion offers the possibility of entirely more than atheism can hold out to someone in pain and despair, not an end to pain, not an end to suffering, not even a guarantee of an end of human created evil but the possibility that there is more than those.
Redemption alone makes man free at a depth which emancipation cannot reach. Redemption alone can lead a person liberated from sin aware that he is accepted for time and eternity, to a meaningful life, to an unreserved effort for his fellow man, for society, for the new men liberated from the misery of this world. For emancipation has by no means enabled man to escape his history of suffering sin and death. And if he still wants to find a meaning in meaningless suffering and dying, in the suffering even of the dead and vanquished, he is thrown back on the ultimate reality; confronted with God from whom he can certainly cannot demand an account, being himself no longer innocent but in need of justification. Emancipated man cannot bypass his substantial co-responsibility for the world and mankind as they are. In the light of this, his self-understanding is perhaps made easier today than it was for the non-emancipated Job, who apparently had nothing with which to reproach himself. Yet, in a fundamentally different situation from that of Job, he will never face God with his history of suffering. With intellectual arguments he gets no further than Job's friends. Suffering imposes a limit to all reasoning.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus asks his followers which of them, if their child asked for fish would give them a snake or if they asked bread who would give them a stone. In Luke the same account he includes the far more colorful request for an egg being answered with a scorpion. That is what the atheist discourse of the question of evil, the question of pain and suffering offers for the person in pain who cries out for help. It answers questions of pain with ineffective answers and, ultimately, no recourse. And that's when they aren't discounting the significance of pain and suffering and the minds who experience pain and suffering and the ability to identify the difference between good and evil.
Note: It should be pointed out that the story of Job, such an early and important part of the Jewish Bible, that the righteous, almost unbelievably good Job is not a Hebrew but was from Uz, most probably considered to be an Edomite, people who are certainly not treated very well in the later writings. Yet this story of the righteous Job is contained in the Jewish Scriptures and is important for both Christians and Muslims, as well. Job the non-Hebrew is made the very symbol of the question of evil, unearned pain, one of the most sympathetic figures in all of literature. I think its inclusion in the Scripture is something that adds enormously to the credibility of that that tradition.
Detroit Health Care Worker Dies After Hospital Where She Worked Denied Her Coronavirus Test 4 Times
For profit healthcare, the Trumpzian Republicans are killing health workers.
about as helpful to the sufferer as a lecture on the chemistry of foodstuffs to a starving man
Mythological attempts at a solution cannot help us here. Not the dualistic assumption of a good primal principle alongside an evil principle of equal rank, so that the good God cannot be the one sole God (as in the ancient Persian religion and Marcionism in the second century). Nor can pushing back man's guilt to the beginning, attributing it to angelic power fallen away from God; which merely means the question is to back to God again (as in early Jewish apocalyptic). Attempts at a solution in terms of the history of philosophy have not been lacking. K. Lowith traces a line backwards - Burckhardt-Marx-Hegel-Proudhorn, Compte, Turgot, Codorcet-Voltaire-Vico, Bossuet-Joachim of Flora-Augstine-Orosius- and points out: "that the modern philosophy of history corresponds to the biblical faith and fulfillment and that it ends in the secularization of its eschatological model.
I will break in here to say though I certainly am not conversant enough with those figures in the history of philosophy to the extent I would need to to understand that statement, I'm not an accomplished theologian who has had the excellent training in philosophy that you need to be a good theologian (I doubt that most PhDs in Philosophy in my generation or the next ones in the United States could follow that line without serious research) one of the earliest things I noticed in reading Marx and Marxists was that they seemed to me to be little more than a heretical form of Christianity gone seriously sideways.
In modern times the abundantly gifted and diversely occupied philosopher and theologian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz attempted in a systematic-philosophical way to answer rationally the difficulties which result from the existence of evil and wickedness opposed to God's dominion over the world. this he did, sustained by an unshakable trust in the good God, in a Justification of God or Theodicy (1710). But the optimism of the Enlightenment was followed in 1755 by the Lisbon earthquake and in 1789 the human upheaval of the French Revolution. In 1791 Immanuel Kant wrote "On the failure of all philosophical attempts in theodicy." Then Hegel in his Philosophy of World History again made the great attempt at a justification of God. He translated Leibniz's ontological-static theodicy into a historical-dialectic and tried to explain the contradictions of world history as the evolution of the divine world spirit itself: "True theodicy, the justification of God in history, lies in the fact that world history is this evolutionary course and the real coming-to-be of the spirit, under the changing spectacles of its histories." World history as God's justification and therefore as world judgement.
But can such rational or speculative arguments, such metaphysical systems or visions of the philosophy of history, can all the shrewd reasoning really give new heart to man, almost overwhelmed by suffering? Is it any help when someone he loves is taken from him through death or infidelity or when he himself becomes incurably ill or is faced with immanent death? To explain all this existential suffering all that is offered is merely cerebral argumentation or speculation, about as helpful to the sufferer as a lecture on the chemistry of foodstuffs to a starving man. And can such rational argument or speculation do anything to change the suffering world, to transform oppressive and repressive structures and, if not to abolish suffering, at any rate to reduce it to a tolerable scale?
In defense of what I said here the other day, that any answer to the questions of suffering, evil, pain that works it will have to work on an individual basis, all of these schemes of philosophy address something that is experienced as an intensely personal matter - pain is experienced by individuals in a way that touches and cuts to their most personal level of existence - it is not like the abstractions of mathematics or science which can be assented to on a cooler and more impersonal level. I think the refusal of Western intellectualism, obsessed with finding "universals" since the time of Socrates, its insistence that nothing that doesn't have that "universal" character is of ultimate importance goes a long way to explaining why these philosophical attempts have been a flop. It's using tools to do something that they not only don't do well, they can't do it at all.
The religious explanations in the beginning of this passage, the Zoroastrian type of two-fold reality explanation, its similar though not directly related story in Genesis about the revolt of Lucifer and the angels who are driven into hell and allowed free reign in the world (and in Eden, Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit under the devil's influence), seem to me to be related to the philosophical attempts to explain the existence of evil through abstraction. Those are bound to lead to nothing very useful for the same reasons.
As Kung says, those stories either demote God from being the Creator of all that is to either being only a big thing within existence (matched with the polar opposite in the evil entity such a scheme needs) or someone who brought evil into the universe through what to God must have been a complete act of knowing, creating the angels who would revolt against him, God having had to be all knowing about the future, as well.
It is bound to be unsatisfying in the way that can be had from a mathematical proof or the good guy in a crime drama coming up with the rock solid evidence that clinches the case, whether for innocence or guilt (admit it, the only "experience" of logical rigor that most TV-fiction addled modern people experience) but I think there is a very real possibility, one which I increasingly find convincing, that the solution to "the problem of pain, evil, suffering" has no answer that human beings are capable of comprehending. I think to look for an "evolutionary" answer in "history" (which, in that philosophical treatment is as artificial an artifact of human culture treated as a natural phenomenon as any other aspect of human culture) is seriously wrong headed.
I think in questions of pain, evil, suffering, no answer which is not the product of a person seriously and long and non-pathologically thinking of their own experience will ever satisfy anyone. In many cases there won't be the chance to do that in this life, people who die as a result of their pain may not have an answer in this life. In many cases people who are so damaged by pain continue it in a totally understandable and innocent self-victimization of obsessively damaging themselves with fruitless recapitulations of that experience. I think that's something that Freudian analysis encourages people to do for the profit of the "therapist," in a notably unsuccessful "treatment" in most cases. Many modern "scientific" therapies are as bad if not worse. Fiction, novels, TV scripts, movies, etc. encourage that kind of thing. It is a rare novel that will lead out of that maze of self-damage, especially those written under the influence of Freudian and other psychological theories.
For those who have the chance, I think there is a possibility to come to some understanding of our pain,the pain of those we love,those who we may not know but whose witnessed or heard of suffering moves us in Christianity of the kind that Hans Kung advocates. I certainly think it's more likely to have that effect than any of the philosophical, pseudo-scientific explanations or methods. I would say that I think it is almost matched by some other traditions, the Jewish tradition certainly contains the same substance that fed the Christian religion, there are many aspects of Buddhism that come close and the Buddhists' enormous research and practice of meditation *is extremely useful. I have found that mixing the method of walking and movement meditation with Jewish-Christian content has worked for me.
* BY WHICH I DON'T MEAN THE HOLLYWOOD-WALL STREET SCHOOL OF "MINDFULNESS" THAT IS, THANKFULLY, GOING OUT OF FASHION. Meditation practice divorced from the radical Jewish tradition of justice and the Christian ethic of universal love is as dangerous as indifference and evil. And by those I do not mean the sentimental view of those words which demote them to whims and notions. If they don't radically move you to change and action, they are meaningless. While many real Buddhists might speak meaningfully of "mindfulness" they don't mean the same thing as the as-seen-on-TV or heard on NPR huckster means by it. I may have rejected Buddhism on the basis of their lack of the Jewish tradition of justice, that doesn't mean I don't respect Buddhists, especially engaged Buddhism.
I will break in here to say though I certainly am not conversant enough with those figures in the history of philosophy to the extent I would need to to understand that statement, I'm not an accomplished theologian who has had the excellent training in philosophy that you need to be a good theologian (I doubt that most PhDs in Philosophy in my generation or the next ones in the United States could follow that line without serious research) one of the earliest things I noticed in reading Marx and Marxists was that they seemed to me to be little more than a heretical form of Christianity gone seriously sideways.
In modern times the abundantly gifted and diversely occupied philosopher and theologian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz attempted in a systematic-philosophical way to answer rationally the difficulties which result from the existence of evil and wickedness opposed to God's dominion over the world. this he did, sustained by an unshakable trust in the good God, in a Justification of God or Theodicy (1710). But the optimism of the Enlightenment was followed in 1755 by the Lisbon earthquake and in 1789 the human upheaval of the French Revolution. In 1791 Immanuel Kant wrote "On the failure of all philosophical attempts in theodicy." Then Hegel in his Philosophy of World History again made the great attempt at a justification of God. He translated Leibniz's ontological-static theodicy into a historical-dialectic and tried to explain the contradictions of world history as the evolution of the divine world spirit itself: "True theodicy, the justification of God in history, lies in the fact that world history is this evolutionary course and the real coming-to-be of the spirit, under the changing spectacles of its histories." World history as God's justification and therefore as world judgement.
But can such rational or speculative arguments, such metaphysical systems or visions of the philosophy of history, can all the shrewd reasoning really give new heart to man, almost overwhelmed by suffering? Is it any help when someone he loves is taken from him through death or infidelity or when he himself becomes incurably ill or is faced with immanent death? To explain all this existential suffering all that is offered is merely cerebral argumentation or speculation, about as helpful to the sufferer as a lecture on the chemistry of foodstuffs to a starving man. And can such rational argument or speculation do anything to change the suffering world, to transform oppressive and repressive structures and, if not to abolish suffering, at any rate to reduce it to a tolerable scale?
In defense of what I said here the other day, that any answer to the questions of suffering, evil, pain that works it will have to work on an individual basis, all of these schemes of philosophy address something that is experienced as an intensely personal matter - pain is experienced by individuals in a way that touches and cuts to their most personal level of existence - it is not like the abstractions of mathematics or science which can be assented to on a cooler and more impersonal level. I think the refusal of Western intellectualism, obsessed with finding "universals" since the time of Socrates, its insistence that nothing that doesn't have that "universal" character is of ultimate importance goes a long way to explaining why these philosophical attempts have been a flop. It's using tools to do something that they not only don't do well, they can't do it at all.
The religious explanations in the beginning of this passage, the Zoroastrian type of two-fold reality explanation, its similar though not directly related story in Genesis about the revolt of Lucifer and the angels who are driven into hell and allowed free reign in the world (and in Eden, Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit under the devil's influence), seem to me to be related to the philosophical attempts to explain the existence of evil through abstraction. Those are bound to lead to nothing very useful for the same reasons.
As Kung says, those stories either demote God from being the Creator of all that is to either being only a big thing within existence (matched with the polar opposite in the evil entity such a scheme needs) or someone who brought evil into the universe through what to God must have been a complete act of knowing, creating the angels who would revolt against him, God having had to be all knowing about the future, as well.
It is bound to be unsatisfying in the way that can be had from a mathematical proof or the good guy in a crime drama coming up with the rock solid evidence that clinches the case, whether for innocence or guilt (admit it, the only "experience" of logical rigor that most TV-fiction addled modern people experience) but I think there is a very real possibility, one which I increasingly find convincing, that the solution to "the problem of pain, evil, suffering" has no answer that human beings are capable of comprehending. I think to look for an "evolutionary" answer in "history" (which, in that philosophical treatment is as artificial an artifact of human culture treated as a natural phenomenon as any other aspect of human culture) is seriously wrong headed.
I think in questions of pain, evil, suffering, no answer which is not the product of a person seriously and long and non-pathologically thinking of their own experience will ever satisfy anyone. In many cases there won't be the chance to do that in this life, people who die as a result of their pain may not have an answer in this life. In many cases people who are so damaged by pain continue it in a totally understandable and innocent self-victimization of obsessively damaging themselves with fruitless recapitulations of that experience. I think that's something that Freudian analysis encourages people to do for the profit of the "therapist," in a notably unsuccessful "treatment" in most cases. Many modern "scientific" therapies are as bad if not worse. Fiction, novels, TV scripts, movies, etc. encourage that kind of thing. It is a rare novel that will lead out of that maze of self-damage, especially those written under the influence of Freudian and other psychological theories.
For those who have the chance, I think there is a possibility to come to some understanding of our pain,the pain of those we love,those who we may not know but whose witnessed or heard of suffering moves us in Christianity of the kind that Hans Kung advocates. I certainly think it's more likely to have that effect than any of the philosophical, pseudo-scientific explanations or methods. I would say that I think it is almost matched by some other traditions, the Jewish tradition certainly contains the same substance that fed the Christian religion, there are many aspects of Buddhism that come close and the Buddhists' enormous research and practice of meditation *is extremely useful. I have found that mixing the method of walking and movement meditation with Jewish-Christian content has worked for me.
* BY WHICH I DON'T MEAN THE HOLLYWOOD-WALL STREET SCHOOL OF "MINDFULNESS" THAT IS, THANKFULLY, GOING OUT OF FASHION. Meditation practice divorced from the radical Jewish tradition of justice and the Christian ethic of universal love is as dangerous as indifference and evil. And by those I do not mean the sentimental view of those words which demote them to whims and notions. If they don't radically move you to change and action, they are meaningless. While many real Buddhists might speak meaningfully of "mindfulness" they don't mean the same thing as the as-seen-on-TV or heard on NPR huckster means by it. I may have rejected Buddhism on the basis of their lack of the Jewish tradition of justice, that doesn't mean I don't respect Buddhists, especially engaged Buddhism.
Monday, April 27, 2020
"How come you hate Hollywood so much?"
Oh, let me count the ways:
This could turn into a very, very long series.
This could turn into a very, very long series.
Your ACLU-Supreme Court Created Free Speech-Press Absolutism At Work
Note: I haven't copied and pasted the entire article from CNN Business, I hope I have copied enough of it to violate the law because I would love to demonstrate that the courts and the law would call me doing that illegal and I could expect to get threatened with a lawsuit by a giant-rich corporation for violating the phony "rights" of CNN but the blasted, friggin' free-speech-press lovin' law won't do a single thing to protect these victims of free speech-press attack from known entities through a massive profit-making corporation.
Maatje Benassi, a US Army reservist and mother of two, has become the target of conspiracy theorists who falsely place her at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, saying she brought the disease to China.
The false claims are spreading across YouTube every day, so far racking up hundreds of thousands of apparent views, and have been embraced by Chinese Communist Party media. Despite never having tested positive for the coronavirus or experienced symptoms, Benassi and her husband are now subjects of discussion on Chinese social media about the outbreak, including among accounts that are known drivers of large-scale coordinated activities by their followers.
The claims have turned their lives upside down. The couple say their home address has been posted online and that, before they shut down their accounts, their social media inboxes were overrun with messages from believers of the conspiracy.
"It's like waking up from a bad dream going into a nightmare day after day," Maatje Benassi told CNN Business in an exclusive interview, the first time she has spoken publicly since being smeared online.
As the coronavirus has spread around the world, so has misinformation about the disease. Technology giants have touted the steps they are taking to combat coronavirus misinformation, but these efforts have failed to help the Benassis. The family's suffering highlights the potential for blatant falsehoods to be rewarded and amplified by social media platforms. It also serves as a powerful reminder that misinformation online, however wild or obviously untrue it may seem, can have real and lasting consequences offline.
Maajte and her husband Matt are still active in their government jobs. Maajte is a civilian employee at the US Army's Fort Belvoir in Virginia where she works as a security officer. Matt, a retired Air Force officer, is a civilian employee with the Air Force at the Pentagon.
Despite working for the US government, the couple are experiencing the same feelings of helplessness familiar to others who have been the target of harassment and misinformation. "I want everybody to stop harassing me, because this is cyberbullying to me and it's gone way out of hand," Maajte said while fighting back tears.
Matt has tried to get the videos taken down from YouTube and to prevent their spread online. The couple said they contacted an attorney, who told them there was little that could be done, and local police, who told them much the same.
Origins of a coronavirus conspiracy theory
Conspiracy theories are not dissimilar to viruses, in that they evolve and mutate to spread and survive. Before Maatje Benassi became the main protagonist in this conspiracy, variations had circulated online for months.
In the early weeks of the coronavirus, conspiracy theorists began claiming, without evidence, that it was a US biological weapon. Later one member of the Chinese government publicly promoted the notion that the US military brought the virus to China. US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said it was "completely ridiculous and it's irresponsible" for someone speaking on behalf of the Chinese government to promote such a claim.
It wasn't until March, months after the first reported coronavirus cases in China, that conspiracy theorists turned their focus to Maatje Benassi. The baseless theory began with her participation in October in the Military World Games, essentially the military Olympics, which was hosted by Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus outbreak began last year.
Maatje Benassi competed in the cycling competition there, suffering an accident on the final lap that left her with a fractured rib and a concussion. Despite the crash, Benassi still finished the race, but it turned out to be the start of something worse. While hundreds of athletes from the US military took part in the games, Maatje Benassi was plucked out of the group and given a starring role in the conspiracy theory.
Perhaps the most prominent cheerleader of the idea that Benassi had a role in the imaginary plot to infect the world is George Webb, a prolific 59-year-old American misinformation peddler. Webb has for years regularly streamed hours of diatribe live on YouTube, where he has amassed more than 27 million views and almost 100,000 followers.
In 2017, CNN revealed how Webb was part of a trio of conspiracy theorists that pushed a false rumor about a cargo ship with a "dirty bomb" that was set to arrive at the Port of Charleston in South Carolina. The bomb never materialized, but the claims did lead to parts of the port -- one of the biggest in America -- being shut down for a time as a safety precaution.
Until recently, Webb said, his YouTube videos included advertisements -- meaning the platform, which is owned by Google, was making money from Webb's misinformation, as was Webb himself.
Webb even claimed that the Italian DJ Benny Benassi, whose 2002 song "Satisfaction" became a worldwide sensation, had the coronavirus and that he, along with Maatje and Matt Benassi, were part of a Benassi plot connected to the virus. (Benny told CNN Business he has never met Maatje and Matt, and they said that as far as they know, they are not related. Benny pointed out that Benassi is a very common last name in Italy.)
Benny Benassi told CNN Business he has not been diagnosed with the coronavirus. Like artists around the world, he canceled his concerts because of social distancing and travel restrictions. (Webb previously claimed the DJ is Dutch, he is not.)
In a phone interview with CNN Business on Thursday, which he livestreamed to his followers on YouTube, Webb offered no substantive evidence to support his claims about the Benassis and said he considered himself an "investigative reporter," not a conspiracy theorist.
He also said that YouTube recently stopped running ads on his videos after he began talking about the coronavirus. Webb said he had normally made a few hundred dollars a month directly from YouTube.
YouTube confirmed to CNN that it was not currently running ads on Webb's channel, but it declined to say whether ads appeared there in the past or provide details on how much money his channel may have made. A company spokesperson said YouTube was committed to promoting accurate information about the coronavirus. The company removed some threatening comments about the Benassis that had been posted under Webb's videos when asked about them by CNN Business. YouTube also said it had removed some videos posted by Webb in the past.
False theories online spark real world concerns
While the allegations about the Benassis may be wildly untrue, the threats they face and the fear they feel are very real.
Matt Benassi said he fears this could "turn into another Pizzagate," referencing another baseless conspiracy theory that claimed a pedophilia ring that somehow involved Hillary Clinton, among others, was operating out of a Washington DC pizzeria. The fringe theory didn't receive much mainstream attention until a man showed up at the pizzeria in late 2016 and fired an assault weapon, saying he was there to investigate "Pizzagate."
"It's really hard to hold him [Webb] accountable," Matt Benassi said. "Law enforcement will tell you that there's nothing that we can do about it because we have free speech in this country. Then they say, 'Go talk to a civil attorney,' so we did. We talked to an attorney. You quickly realize that for folks like us, it's just too expensive to litigate something like this. We get no recourse from law enforcement. We get no recourse from the courts."
Matt Benassi said he has complained to YouTube but even when the company does take videos down it can take days for it to do so. By that time, a video can go viral, and the damage is done. Worse still: videos Webb has posted to YouTube that are removed are often re-uploaded to the platform.
In China, the YouTube videos attacking the Benassis are uploaded to popular platforms there such as WeChat, Weibo, and Xigua Video and are translated into Chinese, according to an analysis by Keenan Chen, a researcher at First Draft, a non-profit that researches disinformation.
Maatje Benassi, a US Army reservist and mother of two, has become the target of conspiracy theorists who falsely place her at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, saying she brought the disease to China.
The false claims are spreading across YouTube every day, so far racking up hundreds of thousands of apparent views, and have been embraced by Chinese Communist Party media. Despite never having tested positive for the coronavirus or experienced symptoms, Benassi and her husband are now subjects of discussion on Chinese social media about the outbreak, including among accounts that are known drivers of large-scale coordinated activities by their followers.
The claims have turned their lives upside down. The couple say their home address has been posted online and that, before they shut down their accounts, their social media inboxes were overrun with messages from believers of the conspiracy.
"It's like waking up from a bad dream going into a nightmare day after day," Maatje Benassi told CNN Business in an exclusive interview, the first time she has spoken publicly since being smeared online.
As the coronavirus has spread around the world, so has misinformation about the disease. Technology giants have touted the steps they are taking to combat coronavirus misinformation, but these efforts have failed to help the Benassis. The family's suffering highlights the potential for blatant falsehoods to be rewarded and amplified by social media platforms. It also serves as a powerful reminder that misinformation online, however wild or obviously untrue it may seem, can have real and lasting consequences offline.
Maajte and her husband Matt are still active in their government jobs. Maajte is a civilian employee at the US Army's Fort Belvoir in Virginia where she works as a security officer. Matt, a retired Air Force officer, is a civilian employee with the Air Force at the Pentagon.
Despite working for the US government, the couple are experiencing the same feelings of helplessness familiar to others who have been the target of harassment and misinformation. "I want everybody to stop harassing me, because this is cyberbullying to me and it's gone way out of hand," Maajte said while fighting back tears.
Matt has tried to get the videos taken down from YouTube and to prevent their spread online. The couple said they contacted an attorney, who told them there was little that could be done, and local police, who told them much the same.
Origins of a coronavirus conspiracy theory
Conspiracy theories are not dissimilar to viruses, in that they evolve and mutate to spread and survive. Before Maatje Benassi became the main protagonist in this conspiracy, variations had circulated online for months.
In the early weeks of the coronavirus, conspiracy theorists began claiming, without evidence, that it was a US biological weapon. Later one member of the Chinese government publicly promoted the notion that the US military brought the virus to China. US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said it was "completely ridiculous and it's irresponsible" for someone speaking on behalf of the Chinese government to promote such a claim.
It wasn't until March, months after the first reported coronavirus cases in China, that conspiracy theorists turned their focus to Maatje Benassi. The baseless theory began with her participation in October in the Military World Games, essentially the military Olympics, which was hosted by Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus outbreak began last year.
Maatje Benassi competed in the cycling competition there, suffering an accident on the final lap that left her with a fractured rib and a concussion. Despite the crash, Benassi still finished the race, but it turned out to be the start of something worse. While hundreds of athletes from the US military took part in the games, Maatje Benassi was plucked out of the group and given a starring role in the conspiracy theory.
Perhaps the most prominent cheerleader of the idea that Benassi had a role in the imaginary plot to infect the world is George Webb, a prolific 59-year-old American misinformation peddler. Webb has for years regularly streamed hours of diatribe live on YouTube, where he has amassed more than 27 million views and almost 100,000 followers.
In 2017, CNN revealed how Webb was part of a trio of conspiracy theorists that pushed a false rumor about a cargo ship with a "dirty bomb" that was set to arrive at the Port of Charleston in South Carolina. The bomb never materialized, but the claims did lead to parts of the port -- one of the biggest in America -- being shut down for a time as a safety precaution.
Until recently, Webb said, his YouTube videos included advertisements -- meaning the platform, which is owned by Google, was making money from Webb's misinformation, as was Webb himself.
Webb even claimed that the Italian DJ Benny Benassi, whose 2002 song "Satisfaction" became a worldwide sensation, had the coronavirus and that he, along with Maatje and Matt Benassi, were part of a Benassi plot connected to the virus. (Benny told CNN Business he has never met Maatje and Matt, and they said that as far as they know, they are not related. Benny pointed out that Benassi is a very common last name in Italy.)
Benny Benassi told CNN Business he has not been diagnosed with the coronavirus. Like artists around the world, he canceled his concerts because of social distancing and travel restrictions. (Webb previously claimed the DJ is Dutch, he is not.)
In a phone interview with CNN Business on Thursday, which he livestreamed to his followers on YouTube, Webb offered no substantive evidence to support his claims about the Benassis and said he considered himself an "investigative reporter," not a conspiracy theorist.
He also said that YouTube recently stopped running ads on his videos after he began talking about the coronavirus. Webb said he had normally made a few hundred dollars a month directly from YouTube.
YouTube confirmed to CNN that it was not currently running ads on Webb's channel, but it declined to say whether ads appeared there in the past or provide details on how much money his channel may have made. A company spokesperson said YouTube was committed to promoting accurate information about the coronavirus. The company removed some threatening comments about the Benassis that had been posted under Webb's videos when asked about them by CNN Business. YouTube also said it had removed some videos posted by Webb in the past.
False theories online spark real world concerns
While the allegations about the Benassis may be wildly untrue, the threats they face and the fear they feel are very real.
Matt Benassi said he fears this could "turn into another Pizzagate," referencing another baseless conspiracy theory that claimed a pedophilia ring that somehow involved Hillary Clinton, among others, was operating out of a Washington DC pizzeria. The fringe theory didn't receive much mainstream attention until a man showed up at the pizzeria in late 2016 and fired an assault weapon, saying he was there to investigate "Pizzagate."
"It's really hard to hold him [Webb] accountable," Matt Benassi said. "Law enforcement will tell you that there's nothing that we can do about it because we have free speech in this country. Then they say, 'Go talk to a civil attorney,' so we did. We talked to an attorney. You quickly realize that for folks like us, it's just too expensive to litigate something like this. We get no recourse from law enforcement. We get no recourse from the courts."
Matt Benassi said he has complained to YouTube but even when the company does take videos down it can take days for it to do so. By that time, a video can go viral, and the damage is done. Worse still: videos Webb has posted to YouTube that are removed are often re-uploaded to the platform.
In China, the YouTube videos attacking the Benassis are uploaded to popular platforms there such as WeChat, Weibo, and Xigua Video and are translated into Chinese, according to an analysis by Keenan Chen, a researcher at First Draft, a non-profit that researches disinformation.
Elizabeth Warren, Ro Khanna, Ayanna Pressley, Deb Haaland Launch Day of Action for Essential Workers
If someone whines about being boooorrrrrreed! being quarantined they need to get off their asses and do this!
Who Would Pay Attention To That?
I should have mentioned in yesterdays post introducing some days of going over what Hans Kung wrote about the question of pain, (also called the question of evil, the question of suffering, etc.) in his book On Being A Christian, that that section comes in the 6h unit of the book dealing with interpretations of the Resurrection, that unit begins:
The crucified and yet living Christ is the concrete summing up of the Christian message and the Christian faith. He is himself the wholly concrete truth of Christianity and it was the concrete, living reality of his historical person and his fate which gave early Christianity its superiority over contemporary philosophical theories of salvation, Gnostic visions, over the mystery cults and their comparatively abstract figures unmoved by fate. "The picture of Jesus as the Christ conquered them through the power of a concrete reality." [a quote from Paul Tillich in his Systematic Theology] And even today the individual historical concreteness of his person constitutes the strength of the Christian faith as opposed to universal religious world views, abstract philosophical systems and socio-political ideologies - which, however, for their own part have inclined to depend on a concrete hero in the person of a founder or leader (of the nation, of the party), of the head of a school, or the master of a mystagogue or guru.
But there are some who will then ask: what about the different Christian "truths," articles of faith, dogmas, which - unlike the concrete figure of Jesus - are so difficult to understand and assimilate? How are they related to this one concrete truth of Christianity, which is Jesus Christ himself? These "truths" are to be understood as attempts to interpret the one truth.
Years ago, I wrote about something I heard Dr. Mary Karr on Krista Tippet's program, On Being, who said:
Even just being in mass that you stand up and kneel down, that you move in unison, that I know a lot of cradle Catholics complain about how sheep-like you feel, or they’re like dumb cattle or something like that, but I sort of found it — it’s like being in hip hop class. [laughs] When you move like everybody, you kind of feel like you are like them. And the idea that we’re hunks of meat incarnate — in meat, that it’s not metaphorical, the idea of Jesus and the Eucharist. It’s not a metaphor that you’re going to be renewed. It’s not a metaphor of his body or his “teaching,” quote-unquote, or his love or whatever. It’s his body. It’s so lurid.
And I remember looking at the body on the cross and saying to my son that — I don’t even remember whether I ever wrote about this or not — but I remember looking at it before we were baptized and saying, “I don’t get this whole crucifixion thing. It’s so awful. I mean, the suffering, beaten critter nailed up there is just so gross. Why don’t they just have you say the jump rope rhymes, and then you’re redeemed?” And my kid, who was young, like, maybe, I don’t know, 8 or 9 said, “Who would pay attention to that?”
The answer to the question with the question "Who would pay attention to that?" seemed to me and still seems to be to be one of the more profound ones in regard to the Christian faith that Hans Kung and Paul Tillich and other profoundly intelligent and diligent and rigorous scholars have also addressed. It is related to what I said the other day about the futility of trying to answer the "question of pain, evil, suffering" for someone else, it is only something that you can find an answer to that will answer it for you for yourself. If someone hoped to give an answer to someone that would help them, it would certainly be necessary for them to engage with the person who was suffering, directly or through their love or sympathy with someone else or some other of our fellow sentient creatures in a way that would be convincing. It is unconvincing to be lectured on pain and suffering by someone who you are not convinced is talking out of their own, personal and most concrete experience. The experience of suffering being among the most concrete of human experiences, especially when that suffering irreparably alters a life or ends it.
Being lectured about such topics on the basis of utilitarianism or the more callous forms of what passes as modern philosophical discourse - generally by people who grew up in affluence who have often never suffered much or struggled with poverty or the more inconvenient forms of common suffering and who, even when those inevitable blows of losing loved ones come, have those blows softened by their affluence - is seldom held up to the winds of skepticism that it should be. It is, though, generally unaccepted by the large majority of humanity who are not affluent. Though some of the more clinging of adherents to those things are the near affluent or those who aspire to it or its trappings such as the theorist of affluent repute, Thorstein Veblen, may have been the most astute observer.
-----------
Hans Kung begins his section God and suffering with one of the most acute of modern examples of evil.
"Auschwitz": that one word sums it all up for T. W. Adorno, R. L. Rubenstein and others. But, looking around the world and over the course of history, many another name could be added. Human suffering, who can take in this history of human suffering, compared to which the millions of years of pre-human history of nature scarcely count? [says the human being, I'll interrupt in protest] This is a history of contradictions and conflicts, of injustice, inequality and social distress, all the incurable involvement in sickness and guilt, all the meaningless fate and senseless wickedness: an endless stream of blood, sweat and tears, pain, sorrow and fear, loneliness and death. It is a history of which all identity, significance and value of reality and human existence seem to be constantly radically called in question by non-identity, pointlessness and worthlessness. In this history of suffering the primal reason, primal meaning and primal value of reality and human existence also become constantly, radically questionable through chaos, absurdity and illusion.
Even the suffering of one person for a single day raises at once the question, why? Why should I be afflicted, just at this moment? What is the point of it? Why is there all this terrible individual and collective suffering, crying to heaven - even against heaven? Is it not to be charged against the Creator of mankind: mankind overburdened with suffering? God supposed to be the embodiment of all meaning and yet there is so much that is pointless in this world, so much meaningless suffering and senseless sin. Is this God perhaps what Nietzsche accused him of being; a despot, impostor, swindler, executioner? Are these blasphemies or provocations of God?
From Epicurus to the modern rationalist Pierre Bayle - whom Feuerbach regarded as his teacher - the answer of the skeptic to the question why God did not prevent evil has scarcely changed. Either God cannot prevent evil - and then is he really all-powerful? - or he will not - and then is he still holy, just and good. Or he cannot and will not - and then is he not both powerless and resentful? Or, finally, he can and will: but then why is there all the wickedness in this world?
That is just the beginning of Kung's presentation of the problem that evil presents, not only the Christian who believes that God is holy and good, the Creator of the universe as it is and as it will be. That creation, in one of the rare occasions when I can seriously disagree with Hans Kung, that we are merely the now living conscious parts of, includes those millions of years of pre-human suffering and the suffering of our fellow creatures now, many of whom endure their suffering at the hands of humans and our use of them.
I think it's necessary to note that in many cases when they deal with the question of pain, evil, suffering, that the atheists' the "skeptics" answers have been to discount not only the God they want to dispose of but any real meaning or importance of suffering except for their own and those they feel appertain to them. I have written about that as articulated by Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, the utter callousness of the Darwinists, of Nietzsche, who considered the use and suffering of the many by the Superman to be of unimportance. The price of materialist-atheist-scientism is far worse than the question of suffering for the believer in God, it not only dismisses the consideration of God, it renders suffering as a problem unintelligible.
Though the atheist who suffers, even those who discount the moral dimension of the problem or even the reality of the consciousness who experiences pain never really has that problem when its reality is made concrete in their own experience,* though in the worse cases, their intellectual articulation of it is some of the most dishonest nonsense peddled as intellectually respectable in the history of rewarding such stuff. I think their inability to link their own experience with suffering is a symptom of a highly respectable form of academic sociopathy that is also linked to the importance they place on their dishonest intellectual articulations of it. I think its respectability comes from the permission it gives to those who wish to be absolved of moral responsibility. Many of those being rich people of privilege, it is a well financed effort.
I think that is why such people, in history and today, have had such a profound hostility to the Hebrew tradition in its original Jewish articulation and in its later Christian one. That was one of the major projects of scientistic culture of the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries and one which continues. Such people would violate nothing about their atheism in creating and peopling an Auschwitz, any nominally Christian person who participated would have to break every single moral teaching of Jesus, Paul, James, as well as The Law and the Prophets.
* It is my experience that there are no more accomplished whiners about even their slight experience of personal pain and even a vague sense of unfairness than those who are ready to discount it for others. Trump is, certainly, the current best example of that.
The crucified and yet living Christ is the concrete summing up of the Christian message and the Christian faith. He is himself the wholly concrete truth of Christianity and it was the concrete, living reality of his historical person and his fate which gave early Christianity its superiority over contemporary philosophical theories of salvation, Gnostic visions, over the mystery cults and their comparatively abstract figures unmoved by fate. "The picture of Jesus as the Christ conquered them through the power of a concrete reality." [a quote from Paul Tillich in his Systematic Theology] And even today the individual historical concreteness of his person constitutes the strength of the Christian faith as opposed to universal religious world views, abstract philosophical systems and socio-political ideologies - which, however, for their own part have inclined to depend on a concrete hero in the person of a founder or leader (of the nation, of the party), of the head of a school, or the master of a mystagogue or guru.
But there are some who will then ask: what about the different Christian "truths," articles of faith, dogmas, which - unlike the concrete figure of Jesus - are so difficult to understand and assimilate? How are they related to this one concrete truth of Christianity, which is Jesus Christ himself? These "truths" are to be understood as attempts to interpret the one truth.
Years ago, I wrote about something I heard Dr. Mary Karr on Krista Tippet's program, On Being, who said:
Even just being in mass that you stand up and kneel down, that you move in unison, that I know a lot of cradle Catholics complain about how sheep-like you feel, or they’re like dumb cattle or something like that, but I sort of found it — it’s like being in hip hop class. [laughs] When you move like everybody, you kind of feel like you are like them. And the idea that we’re hunks of meat incarnate — in meat, that it’s not metaphorical, the idea of Jesus and the Eucharist. It’s not a metaphor that you’re going to be renewed. It’s not a metaphor of his body or his “teaching,” quote-unquote, or his love or whatever. It’s his body. It’s so lurid.
And I remember looking at the body on the cross and saying to my son that — I don’t even remember whether I ever wrote about this or not — but I remember looking at it before we were baptized and saying, “I don’t get this whole crucifixion thing. It’s so awful. I mean, the suffering, beaten critter nailed up there is just so gross. Why don’t they just have you say the jump rope rhymes, and then you’re redeemed?” And my kid, who was young, like, maybe, I don’t know, 8 or 9 said, “Who would pay attention to that?”
The answer to the question with the question "Who would pay attention to that?" seemed to me and still seems to be to be one of the more profound ones in regard to the Christian faith that Hans Kung and Paul Tillich and other profoundly intelligent and diligent and rigorous scholars have also addressed. It is related to what I said the other day about the futility of trying to answer the "question of pain, evil, suffering" for someone else, it is only something that you can find an answer to that will answer it for you for yourself. If someone hoped to give an answer to someone that would help them, it would certainly be necessary for them to engage with the person who was suffering, directly or through their love or sympathy with someone else or some other of our fellow sentient creatures in a way that would be convincing. It is unconvincing to be lectured on pain and suffering by someone who you are not convinced is talking out of their own, personal and most concrete experience. The experience of suffering being among the most concrete of human experiences, especially when that suffering irreparably alters a life or ends it.
Being lectured about such topics on the basis of utilitarianism or the more callous forms of what passes as modern philosophical discourse - generally by people who grew up in affluence who have often never suffered much or struggled with poverty or the more inconvenient forms of common suffering and who, even when those inevitable blows of losing loved ones come, have those blows softened by their affluence - is seldom held up to the winds of skepticism that it should be. It is, though, generally unaccepted by the large majority of humanity who are not affluent. Though some of the more clinging of adherents to those things are the near affluent or those who aspire to it or its trappings such as the theorist of affluent repute, Thorstein Veblen, may have been the most astute observer.
-----------
Hans Kung begins his section God and suffering with one of the most acute of modern examples of evil.
"Auschwitz": that one word sums it all up for T. W. Adorno, R. L. Rubenstein and others. But, looking around the world and over the course of history, many another name could be added. Human suffering, who can take in this history of human suffering, compared to which the millions of years of pre-human history of nature scarcely count? [says the human being, I'll interrupt in protest] This is a history of contradictions and conflicts, of injustice, inequality and social distress, all the incurable involvement in sickness and guilt, all the meaningless fate and senseless wickedness: an endless stream of blood, sweat and tears, pain, sorrow and fear, loneliness and death. It is a history of which all identity, significance and value of reality and human existence seem to be constantly radically called in question by non-identity, pointlessness and worthlessness. In this history of suffering the primal reason, primal meaning and primal value of reality and human existence also become constantly, radically questionable through chaos, absurdity and illusion.
Even the suffering of one person for a single day raises at once the question, why? Why should I be afflicted, just at this moment? What is the point of it? Why is there all this terrible individual and collective suffering, crying to heaven - even against heaven? Is it not to be charged against the Creator of mankind: mankind overburdened with suffering? God supposed to be the embodiment of all meaning and yet there is so much that is pointless in this world, so much meaningless suffering and senseless sin. Is this God perhaps what Nietzsche accused him of being; a despot, impostor, swindler, executioner? Are these blasphemies or provocations of God?
From Epicurus to the modern rationalist Pierre Bayle - whom Feuerbach regarded as his teacher - the answer of the skeptic to the question why God did not prevent evil has scarcely changed. Either God cannot prevent evil - and then is he really all-powerful? - or he will not - and then is he still holy, just and good. Or he cannot and will not - and then is he not both powerless and resentful? Or, finally, he can and will: but then why is there all the wickedness in this world?
That is just the beginning of Kung's presentation of the problem that evil presents, not only the Christian who believes that God is holy and good, the Creator of the universe as it is and as it will be. That creation, in one of the rare occasions when I can seriously disagree with Hans Kung, that we are merely the now living conscious parts of, includes those millions of years of pre-human suffering and the suffering of our fellow creatures now, many of whom endure their suffering at the hands of humans and our use of them.
I think it's necessary to note that in many cases when they deal with the question of pain, evil, suffering, that the atheists' the "skeptics" answers have been to discount not only the God they want to dispose of but any real meaning or importance of suffering except for their own and those they feel appertain to them. I have written about that as articulated by Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, the utter callousness of the Darwinists, of Nietzsche, who considered the use and suffering of the many by the Superman to be of unimportance. The price of materialist-atheist-scientism is far worse than the question of suffering for the believer in God, it not only dismisses the consideration of God, it renders suffering as a problem unintelligible.
Though the atheist who suffers, even those who discount the moral dimension of the problem or even the reality of the consciousness who experiences pain never really has that problem when its reality is made concrete in their own experience,* though in the worse cases, their intellectual articulation of it is some of the most dishonest nonsense peddled as intellectually respectable in the history of rewarding such stuff. I think their inability to link their own experience with suffering is a symptom of a highly respectable form of academic sociopathy that is also linked to the importance they place on their dishonest intellectual articulations of it. I think its respectability comes from the permission it gives to those who wish to be absolved of moral responsibility. Many of those being rich people of privilege, it is a well financed effort.
I think that is why such people, in history and today, have had such a profound hostility to the Hebrew tradition in its original Jewish articulation and in its later Christian one. That was one of the major projects of scientistic culture of the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries and one which continues. Such people would violate nothing about their atheism in creating and peopling an Auschwitz, any nominally Christian person who participated would have to break every single moral teaching of Jesus, Paul, James, as well as The Law and the Prophets.
* It is my experience that there are no more accomplished whiners about even their slight experience of personal pain and even a vague sense of unfairness than those who are ready to discount it for others. Trump is, certainly, the current best example of that.
Sunday, April 26, 2020
A Prelude Concerning The Question Of Pain
Having totally botched the forty days of Lent, due to politics and pandemic, I had thought that I'd make up for that during the fifty day between Western Christian Easter and Pentecost with posting about the Resurrection of Jesus, the resurrection from death and associated topics, concentrating this year on what the eminent Christian, Catholic theologian Hans Kung said about those in his book On Being A Christian.
But I will take some time to present some of what he had to say in the section of the book, "God and suffering," an especially fraught subject anytime but especially as the world faces this pandemic we are in the middle of and which might kill any of us by the time it's over. Those of us who live will certainly face losses and hardships.
Before getting into this, I should note two things, the first is that it is foreign to the culture I was raised in, what might be called Irish Catholicism, to ask "why me". I don't know how other Catholics might have been brought up but that question is one that has always seemed strange and wrong to me. Instead someone might ask "why not me". If pain and suffering are not only possible but as common as dirt, why not me too? The idea that comfort, prosperity and contentment are due to those who are good or, at least, like to think of them as good is, maybe, something that the Catholic habit of reading the lives of the saints prevents. Lots of the best people have had some of the worst pain and bad luck and persecution in history. That's what the lives of the saints show. Maybe that's what you get out of the cult of the saints. I don't know.
The second thing is that reading this section makes me think the common habit of modern Westerners to expect that things like moral or theological discernment "evolves" that there is some kind of progress from darkness into enlightenment is probably an illusion, a cultural habit drawn from the obsession of Westerners with evolution as it became a major feature of ideological warfare and opportunity for atheists desiring to convert people to atheism. No matter what the claims are, whenever anyone uses the metaphor of "evolution" they really mean, or at least include the feeling of progress to something or, more typically, themselves as "better than" what came before.
I think it's an especially arrogant and inapt metaphor when dealing with this question because intense suffering is not a solved or soluble issue, being a thing which people experience as an individual as a group, it is new every time it happens. Maybe the traditional Catholic way of talking about it, which is certainly no explanation, that it is a mystery is the best that we're going to get by way of explanation. Growing up an Irish Catholic accustoms you to accepting that there are things which are mysteries that are not going to be revealed in this life.
And, just saying, I will be provocative enough to bring up the reported experience of those who have survived "clinical death" and report their experience of "death" that there is an end to suffering. I have no idea if they are right or if that is what awaits all of us. I add it to be provocative and to violate the rules against bringing such testimonial evidence into this discussion. That rule is, itself, just a common habit enforced by ideological atheism. I don't have any intention of being intimidated by it.
Presidential Lists
Someone asked for my list of the five smartest presidents. In roughly descending, I'd say
Lyndon Johnson
Abraham Lincoln,
Barack Obama
Thomas Jefferson,
Bill Clinton
I know other people would have another list but that's mine.
There were other very smart presidents, the stupidest would certainly include in rapidly descending order
Franklin Pierce
Howard Taft
Ronald Reagan
George W. Bush
Donald Trump
The list of stupid presidents is a long one. The list of American Presidents isn't a list of great men, it's a list more characterized by mediocrity and political manipulation.
A moral ordering of the presidents would almost certainly be far harder to make though I think there is little question that Jimmy Carter would belong on it. I'd put him at the top of that list. He is certainly the most admirable person in their post-presidential life, a far rarer thing. I think the moral quality of a president, depending on the times of their presidency, is of greater importance than their brilliance as an intellect. Bill Clinton was brilliant intellectually, he was hardly a great figure of moral leadership. Jefferson was a genius in intellect and a slave-owning, slave-raping president who kept his own children in bondage, thwarted the aspirations of the Haitians in escaping bondage and establishing a republic, and a continent stealing and so Indian murdering moral cesspool. However, Donald Trump - though he has, as of yet, not gotten us into the kind of foreign war on behalf of billionaires that Bush II did - is certainly one of those sucking at the bottom of that list.
I wonder what your lists would look like.
Nancy Pelosi is the best Speaker of the House in its history. Certainly the farthest left, though wise enough to know that striking a political pose is not the same as winning and keeping the house so you can do the possible instead of the merely, never to be had because never in power aspirational stuff.
Lyndon Johnson
Abraham Lincoln,
Barack Obama
Thomas Jefferson,
Bill Clinton
I know other people would have another list but that's mine.
There were other very smart presidents, the stupidest would certainly include in rapidly descending order
Franklin Pierce
Howard Taft
Ronald Reagan
George W. Bush
Donald Trump
The list of stupid presidents is a long one. The list of American Presidents isn't a list of great men, it's a list more characterized by mediocrity and political manipulation.
A moral ordering of the presidents would almost certainly be far harder to make though I think there is little question that Jimmy Carter would belong on it. I'd put him at the top of that list. He is certainly the most admirable person in their post-presidential life, a far rarer thing. I think the moral quality of a president, depending on the times of their presidency, is of greater importance than their brilliance as an intellect. Bill Clinton was brilliant intellectually, he was hardly a great figure of moral leadership. Jefferson was a genius in intellect and a slave-owning, slave-raping president who kept his own children in bondage, thwarted the aspirations of the Haitians in escaping bondage and establishing a republic, and a continent stealing and so Indian murdering moral cesspool. However, Donald Trump - though he has, as of yet, not gotten us into the kind of foreign war on behalf of billionaires that Bush II did - is certainly one of those sucking at the bottom of that list.
I wonder what your lists would look like.
Nancy Pelosi is the best Speaker of the House in its history. Certainly the farthest left, though wise enough to know that striking a political pose is not the same as winning and keeping the house so you can do the possible instead of the merely, never to be had because never in power aspirational stuff.
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Philip Davison - Eureka Dunes
Family life is rarely a family show, thank God; yet, within the oddity of the Sparling household, perverseness has the politest table-manners. With a backstairs genealogy that's biblical in its mix of misfits and mountebanks, EUREKA DUNES focuses on a father-son relationship in which it's hard to tell who's the fugitive and who's the refugee.
With Nick Dunning as Magnus Sparling and Barry McGovern as the paterfamilas Edwin.Cast and Production CreditsNick Dunning (Magnus)
Ingrid Craigie (Stella)
Deirdre Donnelly (Charlotte)
Barry McGovern (Edwin)
Joe Taylor (New/Detective Richie)
Derbhle Crotty (Irene)Sound Supervision and Sound Design: Damian Chennells
Producer: Aidan Mathews
I've had no time to listen to radio drama this month, I'm going to make sure I have time to pre-hear these next month. Some good lines, not bad characters, kind of an odd plot line.
Hate Mail
"It's cruel to give people false hope."
I wonder why people who come up with that atheist cliche never ask themselves if it may not even be crueler to give people false despair. I could say that the despair of atheist materialism is guaranteed, it's guaranteed if it is believed for a lifetime, it is only guaranteed, perhaps, at the very end if not believed.
The atheist position is not the default one, the one which is to be assumed to be true as atheists demand, they're a really bossy lot, as bad as the worst fundamentalists.
Ideologically motivated negation is no more credibly assumed to be right than hope is known with certainty.
Hate Update: "bothsiderism" can be valid when both sides are comprised of bossy boots assholes and that's the issue asserted as it was above.
I wonder why people who come up with that atheist cliche never ask themselves if it may not even be crueler to give people false despair. I could say that the despair of atheist materialism is guaranteed, it's guaranteed if it is believed for a lifetime, it is only guaranteed, perhaps, at the very end if not believed.
The atheist position is not the default one, the one which is to be assumed to be true as atheists demand, they're a really bossy lot, as bad as the worst fundamentalists.
Ideologically motivated negation is no more credibly assumed to be right than hope is known with certainty.
Hate Update: "bothsiderism" can be valid when both sides are comprised of bossy boots assholes and that's the issue asserted as it was above.
We Cannot Work Out For Ourselves The Resurrection From the Dead We Can Certainly Not Work It Out For Others
It is precisely in face of death that God's power hidden in the world is revealed. Man cannot work out for himself the resurrection from the dead. But man may in any case rely on this God who can practically be defined as a God of the living and not of the dead, he may absolutely trust in his superior power even in the face of inevitable death, may approach his own death with confidence. The Creator and Conserver of the universe and of man can be trusted, even at death and as we are dying, beyond the limits of all that has hitherto been experienced, to have still one more word to say; to have the last word as well as the first. Toward this God the only reasonable and realistic attitude is trust and faith. This passing from death to God cannot be verified empirically or rational. It is not to be expected,not to be proved, but to be hoped for in faith. What is impossible for man is only made possible by God. Anyone who seriously believes in the living God believes therefore also in the raising of the dead to life in God's power which is proved at death. As Jesus retorted to the doubting Sadducees; "You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God."
The Christian faith in the risen Jesus is meaningful only as faith in God the Creator and Conserver of life. But, on the other hand, the Christian faith in God the Creator is decisively characterized by the fact that he raised Jesus from the dead. "He also raised Jesus from the dead," becomes practically the designation of the Christian God.
RMJ, yesterday in a piece about an outrageous and disgusting claim about God and the coronoavirus pandemic as "pruning the Church" "cutting off branches that aren't bearing fruit," a statement made in the guise of Christianity, gave something out of his own experience. Up front, I'll say that given what was said, in any such discussion, it is exactly the right thing to bring up.
Another time, earlier than that, actually, I was asked to do a funeral for an infant, because the family had no church. I met the mother at the funeral home and she demanded I explain why God had taken her child. Didn't God do everything for a reason? Wasn't there a purpose? What kind of purpose was this? First, I don't think everything happens as a result of God's direct intervention, nor do I think every moment of our lives has a purpose. Otherwise we are just pawns in some inscrutable (and cruel) cosmic game. But would I offer her a platitude or two about the sparrows and maybe throw in "Jesus loves the little children"?
Which made me very glad that I wasn't a minister or priest or rabbi, who would be asked to explain something as terrible as why infants die, why they suffer,why terrible things happen to them and to their mothers and fathers, and I'll add, uncles and aunts and grandparents. I couldn't answer such a question, I doubt anyone can answer such a question for anyone. If there is to be an answer to such a question that would be of any good to the person asking, it would have to be something that they had to decide for themselves and I would never presume to tell someone that their answer about their own pain, their own loss, the terrible witness of the pain and death of a loved one, especially an innocent child was the wrong one. Such a claim to know what that answer would be would be as useless as it is outrageously presumptuous. The best that anyone can do is to present ideas such as the ones that are in this passage from Hans Kung but as someone is confronted with the pain of loss, in the full pain of such a thing is certainly not likely to be either a kind or useful time to present such ideas.
As bad and worse would certainly be to tell such a person in such pain that their child has ceased to exist, that there is no God, that a belief in an afterlife is a delusion, a cowardly refusal to accept death as final. There is certainly no answer to why children, infants suffer and die in that unevidenced claim of factual finality. I have heard of but never have witnessed bereaved people having that said to them, especially, in one case, a child told that their beloved grandmother didn't exist anymore and that her body was just going to decay and that was the end of it.
The only way I can think of for any comfort to be had by a grieving mother or father, aunt, uncle, grandparent, etc. would be for them to come to an answer that they could accept and there is no guarantee that they will ever find it. Someone telling them isn't going to do it. "Man cannot work out for himself the resurrection from the dead." Nor can we work out life after death or why we die, why we must. We certainly can't explain to a grieving mother why her infant died, how God would explain why to her. We can't tell her that she has no right to expect an answer though we certainly can't give one to her. I would not tell her that it's my experience that only after someone I've loved has died that I came to feel how much I loved them. That took years to happen. It would probably be meaningless to someone who hadn't gone through it.
On something like that, the best answer I've worked out for myself is that you have to die out of your body in order to surpass it and its limits just as in love you have to give up your self-centered habits of thought and feeling, your egocentricity in order to expand past those limits. An ego-centered two-year-old has to expand past that in order to become even a tolerable seven-year-old, not to mention a decent adult. As we see in English language political life, that's hardly guaranteed to happen.
That phenomenon, which is certainly encouraged by believing that God wants us to love others as we love ourselves, seems to me to be a real life example that leads to my belief in God. Our own experience is certainly something that should inform our belief, it inevitably must, personally as well as socially. That's my answer, for now. I don't know if it will be the answer I find believable as I am dying or if another of my nieces or nephews or brothers or sisters or beloved cousins or friends die. I would not be surprised that when confronted with that level of fear or pain that I weaken, though I am far more confident in that than I am in any materialistic framing which is so narrow as to negate the possibility that our experience is meaningful.
There is certainly a lot about this in Hans Kung's On Being A Christian , maybe I should give some of that in the coming days. Lots of us are going to be asking those questions in this pandemic.
The Christian faith in the risen Jesus is meaningful only as faith in God the Creator and Conserver of life. But, on the other hand, the Christian faith in God the Creator is decisively characterized by the fact that he raised Jesus from the dead. "He also raised Jesus from the dead," becomes practically the designation of the Christian God.
RMJ, yesterday in a piece about an outrageous and disgusting claim about God and the coronoavirus pandemic as "pruning the Church" "cutting off branches that aren't bearing fruit," a statement made in the guise of Christianity, gave something out of his own experience. Up front, I'll say that given what was said, in any such discussion, it is exactly the right thing to bring up.
Another time, earlier than that, actually, I was asked to do a funeral for an infant, because the family had no church. I met the mother at the funeral home and she demanded I explain why God had taken her child. Didn't God do everything for a reason? Wasn't there a purpose? What kind of purpose was this? First, I don't think everything happens as a result of God's direct intervention, nor do I think every moment of our lives has a purpose. Otherwise we are just pawns in some inscrutable (and cruel) cosmic game. But would I offer her a platitude or two about the sparrows and maybe throw in "Jesus loves the little children"?
Which made me very glad that I wasn't a minister or priest or rabbi, who would be asked to explain something as terrible as why infants die, why they suffer,why terrible things happen to them and to their mothers and fathers, and I'll add, uncles and aunts and grandparents. I couldn't answer such a question, I doubt anyone can answer such a question for anyone. If there is to be an answer to such a question that would be of any good to the person asking, it would have to be something that they had to decide for themselves and I would never presume to tell someone that their answer about their own pain, their own loss, the terrible witness of the pain and death of a loved one, especially an innocent child was the wrong one. Such a claim to know what that answer would be would be as useless as it is outrageously presumptuous. The best that anyone can do is to present ideas such as the ones that are in this passage from Hans Kung but as someone is confronted with the pain of loss, in the full pain of such a thing is certainly not likely to be either a kind or useful time to present such ideas.
As bad and worse would certainly be to tell such a person in such pain that their child has ceased to exist, that there is no God, that a belief in an afterlife is a delusion, a cowardly refusal to accept death as final. There is certainly no answer to why children, infants suffer and die in that unevidenced claim of factual finality. I have heard of but never have witnessed bereaved people having that said to them, especially, in one case, a child told that their beloved grandmother didn't exist anymore and that her body was just going to decay and that was the end of it.
The only way I can think of for any comfort to be had by a grieving mother or father, aunt, uncle, grandparent, etc. would be for them to come to an answer that they could accept and there is no guarantee that they will ever find it. Someone telling them isn't going to do it. "Man cannot work out for himself the resurrection from the dead." Nor can we work out life after death or why we die, why we must. We certainly can't explain to a grieving mother why her infant died, how God would explain why to her. We can't tell her that she has no right to expect an answer though we certainly can't give one to her. I would not tell her that it's my experience that only after someone I've loved has died that I came to feel how much I loved them. That took years to happen. It would probably be meaningless to someone who hadn't gone through it.
On something like that, the best answer I've worked out for myself is that you have to die out of your body in order to surpass it and its limits just as in love you have to give up your self-centered habits of thought and feeling, your egocentricity in order to expand past those limits. An ego-centered two-year-old has to expand past that in order to become even a tolerable seven-year-old, not to mention a decent adult. As we see in English language political life, that's hardly guaranteed to happen.
That phenomenon, which is certainly encouraged by believing that God wants us to love others as we love ourselves, seems to me to be a real life example that leads to my belief in God. Our own experience is certainly something that should inform our belief, it inevitably must, personally as well as socially. That's my answer, for now. I don't know if it will be the answer I find believable as I am dying or if another of my nieces or nephews or brothers or sisters or beloved cousins or friends die. I would not be surprised that when confronted with that level of fear or pain that I weaken, though I am far more confident in that than I am in any materialistic framing which is so narrow as to negate the possibility that our experience is meaningful.
There is certainly a lot about this in Hans Kung's On Being A Christian , maybe I should give some of that in the coming days. Lots of us are going to be asking those questions in this pandemic.
I Don't Have To Be Agnostic About Agnosticism, It's A Dishonest Ploy
It is asked, demanded really, what the quote was that shattered my agnosticism, it was this passage from the introduction to Computer Power And Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum.
The man in the street surely believes such scientific facts to be well-established, as well-proven, as his own existence. His certitude is an illusion. Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion. In his praxis, he must, after all, suspend disbelief in order to do or think anything at all. He is rather like a theatergoer, who, in order to participate in and understand what is happening on the stage, must for a time pretend to himself that he is witnessing real events. The scientist must believe his working hypothesis, together with its vast underlying structure of theories and assumptions, even if only for the sake of the argument. Often the "argument" extends over his entire lifetime. Gradually he becomes what he at first merely pretended to be; a true believer. I choose the word "argument" thoughtfully, for scientific demonstrations, even mathematical proofs, are fundamentally acts of persuasion.
Scientific statements can never be certain; they can only be more or less credible. And credibility is a term of individual psychology, i.e., a term that has meaning only with respect to an individual observer. To say that some proposition is credible is, after all, to say that it is believed by an agent who is free not to believe it, that is, by an observer who, after exercising judgement and (possibly) intuition, chooses to accept the proposition as worthy of his believing it. How then can science, which itself surely and ultimately rests on vast arrays of human value judgments, demonstrate that human value judgments are illusory? It cannot do so without forfeiting its own status as the single legitimate path to understanding man and his world.
But no merely logical argument, no matter how cogent or eloquent, can undo this reality; that science has become the sole legitimate form of understanding in the common wisdom. When I say that science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison, I mean that the attribution of certainty to scientific knowledge by the common wisdom, an attribution now made so nearly universally that it has become a commonsense dogma, has virtually delegitimized all other ways of understanding.
The entirety of the book shows why the common wisdom which the ideological pose of agnosticism is fed by is wrong.
"Agnostic" was a word invented by Darwin's closest ideological supporter, Thomas Huxley in the late 1860s, he said, in 1869, "It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe."
Note that Huxley's definition is given in the form of a command to be followed, the kind of thing that positivists are always doing, trying to boss people into doing things as they want them done, insisting that any other way of thinking or speaking is not to be done. Which, to the consternation of positivists, the great unwashed apparently doesn't in many cases give assent, though way too many with college-credentials which seem to have made them lazy cowards are cowed into following for fear of not being seen as part of the in-crowd. Unfortunately, that is what so much of education seems to be, now. And, as Weizenbaum notes, that article of faith has become ubiquitous, believed, or probably more felt, even by many who wouldn't understand what a statement of their belief meant. I doubt those who troll me would get it.
I knew that etymological history of the word while adopting the pose about a century to the year, later. Having read Huxley, though being young and stupid, I didn't subject him to his own alleged standard. As with most "men in the street" and not a few women, I was naive and stupid, really, about the claimed hard line separating knowledge and belief, the alleged involuntary action of belief called "knowledge" and other, in the common wisdom as expressed so arrogantly by Huxley, lesser "mere belief". As soon as I read that passage from Weizenbaum, I, of course, had to acknowledge that it was true. I believe I have mentioned before and think I thought soon after I read it about how Bertrand Russell, talking in his autobiography about how as his brother taught him the elements of euclidean geometry, he had heard that you use it to prove things so that when his brother began, as you have to with all mathematics, to state the unproven axioms of geometry, he asked why he should believe them unproven, his brother gave the reason that anyone who goes on with mathematics had to accept them as true or they couldn't go on. The same is true of every single thing in mathematics, as Russell and his teacher Whitehead found out after they went through a stupendous, years long exercise in some of the hardest thinking done in the history of Western thought to try to found mathematics in logical proof, their work was soon overtaken by even even better thinking that proved that you couldn't provide mathematics with an absolute foundation in logical proof.
Maybe you had to have accepted what Russell and Whitehead had had to accept before you could see why Thomas Huxley was being dishonest. His stand certainly, if applied rigorously, would have had to shake his confident, belligerently insistent demand that natural selection was a thing because it is certainly not an idea that stands up to the level of rigor that he demanded be applied to a belief in God.
Of course,that's something which agnostics uniformly do in declaring themselves agnostic, their lives are full to the top of ideas that are not founded in scientific, mathematical, logical, or evidentirary rigor. Even their own belief in huge swaths of science which they use in their work wouldn't stand up to Huxley's pretense because no one has ever, not the best scientists, certainly not lesser ones, gone through a. the mathematical proofs of the math they use, b. the previously published science they build on, c.the actual work that that published science is based in. In going over both On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man rigorously checking Darwin's citations, he certainly didn't always rely on rigorously done science and he was quite capable of distorting and twisting what was said when it served his purpose, something that if Huxley had practiced what he preached, he would have found out if he had done that. He certainly must have known that the use of the scientifically dodgy stuff he got from animal breeders and similar lore was not science, even loosely speaking. Nor was stuff like what he got from W. R. Greg which was clearly based on common British prejudice, not science. If anything it is exactly Huxley's own field of biology that made things much worse in science than it had been when they had more modest goals than to explain what couldn't be established in observational evidence. They should have stuck with merely supporting that evolution had happened on grounds of geology and the fossil evidence, not trying to give it as firm a foundation as contemporary physics believed Newton had given that area of research, ignoring that Newton's ideas required observational evidence to confirm their soundness.
No, Huxley's invention is a dishonest ploy when it is made as a demand that, as the finer and more honest scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum pointed out scientists don't follow even in their own work. On that alone, I'd say the atheist Weizenbaum earned his eternal reward.
Update: As to the point I make at "c." that scientists don't go over the actual work of their fellow scientists to check if their reporting of their own work is valid, that was something that was massively confirmed in the standards practiced by evolutionary-psychology in the infamous Marc Hauser scandal in which even the complaints of his own grad students that he was committing scientific fraud didn't make much of a difference to those who reviewed his papers for publication. I was naive enough to believe that reviewers were more rigorous in their review than to merely take that stuff on the word of the researcher. A very fine scientist I know who regularly was asked to act as a reviewer set me straight on that, telling me that no one in his experience ever went into it that far when acting as a reviewer for a professional journal. There are a very few areas of such research that are regularly reviewed to that level or rigor though to my knowledge those are exactly the fields of research subject to the most instantaneous and ideological dismissal, a priori.
The man in the street surely believes such scientific facts to be well-established, as well-proven, as his own existence. His certitude is an illusion. Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion. In his praxis, he must, after all, suspend disbelief in order to do or think anything at all. He is rather like a theatergoer, who, in order to participate in and understand what is happening on the stage, must for a time pretend to himself that he is witnessing real events. The scientist must believe his working hypothesis, together with its vast underlying structure of theories and assumptions, even if only for the sake of the argument. Often the "argument" extends over his entire lifetime. Gradually he becomes what he at first merely pretended to be; a true believer. I choose the word "argument" thoughtfully, for scientific demonstrations, even mathematical proofs, are fundamentally acts of persuasion.
Scientific statements can never be certain; they can only be more or less credible. And credibility is a term of individual psychology, i.e., a term that has meaning only with respect to an individual observer. To say that some proposition is credible is, after all, to say that it is believed by an agent who is free not to believe it, that is, by an observer who, after exercising judgement and (possibly) intuition, chooses to accept the proposition as worthy of his believing it. How then can science, which itself surely and ultimately rests on vast arrays of human value judgments, demonstrate that human value judgments are illusory? It cannot do so without forfeiting its own status as the single legitimate path to understanding man and his world.
But no merely logical argument, no matter how cogent or eloquent, can undo this reality; that science has become the sole legitimate form of understanding in the common wisdom. When I say that science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison, I mean that the attribution of certainty to scientific knowledge by the common wisdom, an attribution now made so nearly universally that it has become a commonsense dogma, has virtually delegitimized all other ways of understanding.
The entirety of the book shows why the common wisdom which the ideological pose of agnosticism is fed by is wrong.
"Agnostic" was a word invented by Darwin's closest ideological supporter, Thomas Huxley in the late 1860s, he said, in 1869, "It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe."
Note that Huxley's definition is given in the form of a command to be followed, the kind of thing that positivists are always doing, trying to boss people into doing things as they want them done, insisting that any other way of thinking or speaking is not to be done. Which, to the consternation of positivists, the great unwashed apparently doesn't in many cases give assent, though way too many with college-credentials which seem to have made them lazy cowards are cowed into following for fear of not being seen as part of the in-crowd. Unfortunately, that is what so much of education seems to be, now. And, as Weizenbaum notes, that article of faith has become ubiquitous, believed, or probably more felt, even by many who wouldn't understand what a statement of their belief meant. I doubt those who troll me would get it.
I knew that etymological history of the word while adopting the pose about a century to the year, later. Having read Huxley, though being young and stupid, I didn't subject him to his own alleged standard. As with most "men in the street" and not a few women, I was naive and stupid, really, about the claimed hard line separating knowledge and belief, the alleged involuntary action of belief called "knowledge" and other, in the common wisdom as expressed so arrogantly by Huxley, lesser "mere belief". As soon as I read that passage from Weizenbaum, I, of course, had to acknowledge that it was true. I believe I have mentioned before and think I thought soon after I read it about how Bertrand Russell, talking in his autobiography about how as his brother taught him the elements of euclidean geometry, he had heard that you use it to prove things so that when his brother began, as you have to with all mathematics, to state the unproven axioms of geometry, he asked why he should believe them unproven, his brother gave the reason that anyone who goes on with mathematics had to accept them as true or they couldn't go on. The same is true of every single thing in mathematics, as Russell and his teacher Whitehead found out after they went through a stupendous, years long exercise in some of the hardest thinking done in the history of Western thought to try to found mathematics in logical proof, their work was soon overtaken by even even better thinking that proved that you couldn't provide mathematics with an absolute foundation in logical proof.
Maybe you had to have accepted what Russell and Whitehead had had to accept before you could see why Thomas Huxley was being dishonest. His stand certainly, if applied rigorously, would have had to shake his confident, belligerently insistent demand that natural selection was a thing because it is certainly not an idea that stands up to the level of rigor that he demanded be applied to a belief in God.
Of course,that's something which agnostics uniformly do in declaring themselves agnostic, their lives are full to the top of ideas that are not founded in scientific, mathematical, logical, or evidentirary rigor. Even their own belief in huge swaths of science which they use in their work wouldn't stand up to Huxley's pretense because no one has ever, not the best scientists, certainly not lesser ones, gone through a. the mathematical proofs of the math they use, b. the previously published science they build on, c.the actual work that that published science is based in. In going over both On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man rigorously checking Darwin's citations, he certainly didn't always rely on rigorously done science and he was quite capable of distorting and twisting what was said when it served his purpose, something that if Huxley had practiced what he preached, he would have found out if he had done that. He certainly must have known that the use of the scientifically dodgy stuff he got from animal breeders and similar lore was not science, even loosely speaking. Nor was stuff like what he got from W. R. Greg which was clearly based on common British prejudice, not science. If anything it is exactly Huxley's own field of biology that made things much worse in science than it had been when they had more modest goals than to explain what couldn't be established in observational evidence. They should have stuck with merely supporting that evolution had happened on grounds of geology and the fossil evidence, not trying to give it as firm a foundation as contemporary physics believed Newton had given that area of research, ignoring that Newton's ideas required observational evidence to confirm their soundness.
No, Huxley's invention is a dishonest ploy when it is made as a demand that, as the finer and more honest scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum pointed out scientists don't follow even in their own work. On that alone, I'd say the atheist Weizenbaum earned his eternal reward.
Update: As to the point I make at "c." that scientists don't go over the actual work of their fellow scientists to check if their reporting of their own work is valid, that was something that was massively confirmed in the standards practiced by evolutionary-psychology in the infamous Marc Hauser scandal in which even the complaints of his own grad students that he was committing scientific fraud didn't make much of a difference to those who reviewed his papers for publication. I was naive enough to believe that reviewers were more rigorous in their review than to merely take that stuff on the word of the researcher. A very fine scientist I know who regularly was asked to act as a reviewer set me straight on that, telling me that no one in his experience ever went into it that far when acting as a reviewer for a professional journal. There are a very few areas of such research that are regularly reviewed to that level or rigor though to my knowledge those are exactly the fields of research subject to the most instantaneous and ideological dismissal, a priori.
Friday, April 24, 2020
This Is The Theme Song Of My Life - Steve Swallow - Up Too Late
John Abercrombie, guitar
Joe Lovano, sax
Aldo Romano, drums
Steve Swallow, bass, composer
Not Being Satisfied With Non-Belief
Do we need then expressly to insist on the fact that man's new life, involving as it does the ultimate reality, God himself, is a priori a matter of faith? It is an event of the new creation, which breaks through death as the last frontier and therefore the horizon of our world and thought as a whole. For it means the definitive breakthrough of one-dimensional man into the truly other dimension; the evident reality of God and the rule of the Crucified, calling men to follow him. Nothing is easier than to raise doubts about this. Certainly "pure reason" is faced here with an impassible frontier. At this point we can only agree with Kant. Nor can the resurrection be proved by historical arguments, traditional apologetics breaks down here. Since man is here dealing with God and this by definition means with the invisible, impalpable, uncontrollable, only one attitude is appropriate and required believing trust, trusting faith. There is no way to the risen Christ and to eternal life which bypasses faith. The resurrection is not a miracle authenticating faith . It is itself the object of faith.
The resurrection faith - and this must be said to bring out the contrast with all unbelief and superstition - is not however faith in some kind of unverifiable curiosity, which we ought to believe in addition to all the rest. Nor is the resurrection faith a faith in the fact of the resurrection or in the risen Christ taken in isolation; it is fundamentally faith in God with whom the risen Christ is now one.
The resurrection faith is not an appendage of faith in God, but a radicalizing of faith in God. It is a faith in God which does not stop halfway, but follows the road consistently to the end. It is a faith in which man, without strictly rational proof but certainly with completely reasonable trust, relies on the fact that the God of the beginning is also the God of the end, that as he is the Creator of the world and man, so, too, he is their Finisher.
The resurrection faith therefore is not to be interpreted merely as existential interiorization or social change, but as a radicalizing of faith in God the Creator. Resurrection means the real conquest of death by God the creator to whom the believer entrusts everything, even the ultimate, even the conquest of death. The end which is also a new beginning. Anyone who begins his creed and faith in "God the almighty Creator" can be content to end it with faith in "eternal life." Since God is the Alpha, he is also the Omega. The almighty Creator who calls things from nothingness into being can also call men from death into life.
------------------------------
Since yesterday I spoke up for the reading of front material that is put before the main contents, I think it is especially useful after this passage which contains some of the most challenging beliefs which can be said to define Christian belief (in fact, much of it would certainly be challenged by other Christians, the German Council of Bishops condemned parts of Kung's book) to note that Kung wrote a couple of pages, "Those for whom this book is written." It starts
This book is written for those who, for any reason at all, honestly and sincerely want to know what Christianity, what being a Christian really means.
It is written also for those who do not believe, but nevertheless seriously inquire; who did believe, but are not satisfied with their unbelief; who do believe, but feel insecure in their faith, who are at a loss, between belief and unbelief; who are skeptical, both about their convictions and about their doubts. It is written then for Christians and atheists, Gnostics and agnostics, pietists and positivists, lukewarm and zealous Catholic, Protestants and Orthodox.
He continued:
Even outside the Churches, are there not many people who are not content to spend a whole lifetime approaching the fundamental questions of human existence with mere feelings, personal prejudices and apparently plausible explanation?
And are there not today also in all Churches many people who do not want to remain at the childhood stage in their faith, who expect more than a new exposition of the words of the Bible or a new denominational catechism, who can no longer find any final anchorage in infallible formulas of Scripture (Protestants), of Tradition (Orthodox), of the Magisterium (Catholics)?
These are all people who will not accept Christianity at a reduced price, who will not adopt outward conformism and a pretense of adaption in place of ecclesiastical traditionalism, but who are seeking a way to the uncurtailed truth of Christianity and Christian existence, unimpressed by ecclesiastical doctrinal constraints on the right or ideological whims on the left.
If you are not in any of those groups, especially the incurious, contented-college-credentialed would-be people of fashion, I guess it's not surprising that you aren't getting much out of this. Especially those who wish to remain at a "childhood stage" of their disbelief or their mealy-mouthed attitude of agnostic indifference. As a former agnostic, I do have to say that it is something I don't much respect for, even though as an intellectual pose, it is based in a half-truth. I saw through my own agnosticism, after all.
For me, reading not only what Hans Kung has to say but reading theologians from the entire period from the time when the Scriptures were written (much of which is theological in its content) through the beginnings of Christian theology, especially, in may case, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and, then current and recent theology has accomplished, for me, some of what Kung said wash his stated intention. A lot of what I'd learned in the form of catechism or even encyclopedia style abbreviation is far more subtle and far different from what I rejected in the several decades I could have honestly said "I am not a Christian". The Christianity I rejected - largely out of a. disillusionment with the Vatican and right-wing hierarchs, b. having bought the often untrue or exaggerated slanders about the history of Christianity and curiosity about other religious practices, especially Buddhism - that Christianity was certainly not Christianity as meant by Hans Kung, Walter Brueggemann, you know the list of those I frequently mention.
Oh, and I should include c. while I was wallowing in agnosticism, in the cowardly refusal to choose to believe. Oddly, it was an atheist who, I'm sure, would have been surprised to find that reading what he wrote about the dangerous corruption of instrumental reasoning, Joseph Weizenbaum, who helped me see the dishonesty that was inherent in agnosticism, or at least the agnosticism I held as a position. Though it was certainly not a belief, it was a cowardly refusal to believe. It is the difference between deciding and choosing, certainly, but also facing honestly that even what we call knowledge, scientific knowledge, even mathematical knowledge rests, solidly and inevitably on our early choices to believe.
The resurrection faith - and this must be said to bring out the contrast with all unbelief and superstition - is not however faith in some kind of unverifiable curiosity, which we ought to believe in addition to all the rest. Nor is the resurrection faith a faith in the fact of the resurrection or in the risen Christ taken in isolation; it is fundamentally faith in God with whom the risen Christ is now one.
The resurrection faith is not an appendage of faith in God, but a radicalizing of faith in God. It is a faith in God which does not stop halfway, but follows the road consistently to the end. It is a faith in which man, without strictly rational proof but certainly with completely reasonable trust, relies on the fact that the God of the beginning is also the God of the end, that as he is the Creator of the world and man, so, too, he is their Finisher.
The resurrection faith therefore is not to be interpreted merely as existential interiorization or social change, but as a radicalizing of faith in God the Creator. Resurrection means the real conquest of death by God the creator to whom the believer entrusts everything, even the ultimate, even the conquest of death. The end which is also a new beginning. Anyone who begins his creed and faith in "God the almighty Creator" can be content to end it with faith in "eternal life." Since God is the Alpha, he is also the Omega. The almighty Creator who calls things from nothingness into being can also call men from death into life.
------------------------------
Since yesterday I spoke up for the reading of front material that is put before the main contents, I think it is especially useful after this passage which contains some of the most challenging beliefs which can be said to define Christian belief (in fact, much of it would certainly be challenged by other Christians, the German Council of Bishops condemned parts of Kung's book) to note that Kung wrote a couple of pages, "Those for whom this book is written." It starts
This book is written for those who, for any reason at all, honestly and sincerely want to know what Christianity, what being a Christian really means.
It is written also for those who do not believe, but nevertheless seriously inquire; who did believe, but are not satisfied with their unbelief; who do believe, but feel insecure in their faith, who are at a loss, between belief and unbelief; who are skeptical, both about their convictions and about their doubts. It is written then for Christians and atheists, Gnostics and agnostics, pietists and positivists, lukewarm and zealous Catholic, Protestants and Orthodox.
He continued:
Even outside the Churches, are there not many people who are not content to spend a whole lifetime approaching the fundamental questions of human existence with mere feelings, personal prejudices and apparently plausible explanation?
And are there not today also in all Churches many people who do not want to remain at the childhood stage in their faith, who expect more than a new exposition of the words of the Bible or a new denominational catechism, who can no longer find any final anchorage in infallible formulas of Scripture (Protestants), of Tradition (Orthodox), of the Magisterium (Catholics)?
These are all people who will not accept Christianity at a reduced price, who will not adopt outward conformism and a pretense of adaption in place of ecclesiastical traditionalism, but who are seeking a way to the uncurtailed truth of Christianity and Christian existence, unimpressed by ecclesiastical doctrinal constraints on the right or ideological whims on the left.
If you are not in any of those groups, especially the incurious, contented-college-credentialed would-be people of fashion, I guess it's not surprising that you aren't getting much out of this. Especially those who wish to remain at a "childhood stage" of their disbelief or their mealy-mouthed attitude of agnostic indifference. As a former agnostic, I do have to say that it is something I don't much respect for, even though as an intellectual pose, it is based in a half-truth. I saw through my own agnosticism, after all.
For me, reading not only what Hans Kung has to say but reading theologians from the entire period from the time when the Scriptures were written (much of which is theological in its content) through the beginnings of Christian theology, especially, in may case, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and, then current and recent theology has accomplished, for me, some of what Kung said wash his stated intention. A lot of what I'd learned in the form of catechism or even encyclopedia style abbreviation is far more subtle and far different from what I rejected in the several decades I could have honestly said "I am not a Christian". The Christianity I rejected - largely out of a. disillusionment with the Vatican and right-wing hierarchs, b. having bought the often untrue or exaggerated slanders about the history of Christianity and curiosity about other religious practices, especially Buddhism - that Christianity was certainly not Christianity as meant by Hans Kung, Walter Brueggemann, you know the list of those I frequently mention.
Oh, and I should include c. while I was wallowing in agnosticism, in the cowardly refusal to choose to believe. Oddly, it was an atheist who, I'm sure, would have been surprised to find that reading what he wrote about the dangerous corruption of instrumental reasoning, Joseph Weizenbaum, who helped me see the dishonesty that was inherent in agnosticism, or at least the agnosticism I held as a position. Though it was certainly not a belief, it was a cowardly refusal to believe. It is the difference between deciding and choosing, certainly, but also facing honestly that even what we call knowledge, scientific knowledge, even mathematical knowledge rests, solidly and inevitably on our early choices to believe.
How Much Worse This Is - White Night Thoughts
The world-wide catastrophe we are experiencing is certainly different from any which has happened in the lifetime of anyone except the very oldest people and they were probably too young to get it while it was going on. I think this one may be worse than the one a hundred years ago but that is premature. I can say that since so much more is known about virology and epidemology and all of the other scientifically knowable parts of this kind of thing is so much better known than it was then, the catastrophic collapse of the federal government under Republican rule is far worse than the bad response then. You can grasp how much worse when the only responsible people who have appeared with Donald Trump on stage, Fauci, Brix, even his stooge of a doctor Redfield put their jobs and, Trumps fanatical followers being what they are, possibly their lives on the line when they can't tolerate hearing him lie his fat head off getting and people killed.
I think this one is going to be far worse in its economic impact, the only thing cared about by Trump and the billionaire oligarchs who rule so many of the putative democracies and all of the dictatorships - there is a lot of overlap between the two. When the stock market crashed, it was the phony con job that were the financial markets, banking, etc. that failed, in this it is The People who are under attack from a virus. The People of the world are under attack. This is more like the black death and other plagues of the long ago past in that and the institutions that democracies have allowed to be corrupted and decayed are joining in on that. And unlike in the great depression of the late 20s and 30s of the last century, the highly touted "service industry" that was created as the billionaires and millionaires shipped production to slave economies such as those in the Marxist dictatorships after the opening of China by Nixon. The Chinese dictators (ruling gangsters) took the hint and realized they could become a lot richer through Victorian style capitalism on steroids than they could from a nominally socialist Communist Party ruled state. The resultant destruction of jobs that actually produced things in the United States has left more than a generation of Americans without actual skills. In many cases, they don't even know how to cook their own food, certainly they know very little about growing it as opposed to the generation of the great depression when so many were one or two generations off the farm, themselves.
The Republicans in the United States and the lying media that installed them and maintains them are a warning to democracies around the world that the interpretation of "freedom of the press" "free speech" that led to Americans' first being duped into Republicans and those Republicans, having been so rewarded by lies and other forms of moral degeneracy, in the Newt Gingrich and now Mitch McConnell years that degeneracy and hypocrisy not only knowing no limits but nothing so much as resembling shame. I have mentioned before that when Bill Clinton, at a Hollywood fundraiser asked the assembled moguls and stars of fantasy and make believe to help him make America's culture "to make a new future" that it sent a chill up my back. I would have thought people had understood the danger in that from the first Hollywood created president, Reagan who certainly had massive show-biz backing from the start, he himself a creation of the culture of entertainment. For Bill Clinton to have done that in 1992, as he certainly needed Hollywood money may have been naively innocent, though he was certainly one of the five smartest men to have ever been president. It makes the fact that the even smarter and far better Hillary Clinton was kept from the presidency by the Electoral College putting our second Hollywood product in the Oval Office far more bitter.
When Trump is on that stage, it's sheer Hollywood culture, when Fauci and Brix are up there, it's real and if any of you figure those two are secure in their jobs, if they are kept on that will be a Hollywood culture calculation, when unreality rules, it only matters to the rulers as a matter of casting and even the best actor in a series upstages the star, they are disposable.
Now that we have our second show-biz, Hollywood culture created president, Trump, it's clear that that is one of the pillars of the oligarchy we are ruled by. When a majority of Americans are brought up by TV and movies and Facebook, it makes democracy impossible and when democracy is impossible gangster rule comes in and gangsters don't give a second thought to thousands, tens of thousands, millions dying if they can benefit from it.
Meanwhile, we die because Trump was on TV and radio and in the movies and the Warren Court said the media could lie with impunity.
I think this one is going to be far worse in its economic impact, the only thing cared about by Trump and the billionaire oligarchs who rule so many of the putative democracies and all of the dictatorships - there is a lot of overlap between the two. When the stock market crashed, it was the phony con job that were the financial markets, banking, etc. that failed, in this it is The People who are under attack from a virus. The People of the world are under attack. This is more like the black death and other plagues of the long ago past in that and the institutions that democracies have allowed to be corrupted and decayed are joining in on that. And unlike in the great depression of the late 20s and 30s of the last century, the highly touted "service industry" that was created as the billionaires and millionaires shipped production to slave economies such as those in the Marxist dictatorships after the opening of China by Nixon. The Chinese dictators (ruling gangsters) took the hint and realized they could become a lot richer through Victorian style capitalism on steroids than they could from a nominally socialist Communist Party ruled state. The resultant destruction of jobs that actually produced things in the United States has left more than a generation of Americans without actual skills. In many cases, they don't even know how to cook their own food, certainly they know very little about growing it as opposed to the generation of the great depression when so many were one or two generations off the farm, themselves.
The Republicans in the United States and the lying media that installed them and maintains them are a warning to democracies around the world that the interpretation of "freedom of the press" "free speech" that led to Americans' first being duped into Republicans and those Republicans, having been so rewarded by lies and other forms of moral degeneracy, in the Newt Gingrich and now Mitch McConnell years that degeneracy and hypocrisy not only knowing no limits but nothing so much as resembling shame. I have mentioned before that when Bill Clinton, at a Hollywood fundraiser asked the assembled moguls and stars of fantasy and make believe to help him make America's culture "to make a new future" that it sent a chill up my back. I would have thought people had understood the danger in that from the first Hollywood created president, Reagan who certainly had massive show-biz backing from the start, he himself a creation of the culture of entertainment. For Bill Clinton to have done that in 1992, as he certainly needed Hollywood money may have been naively innocent, though he was certainly one of the five smartest men to have ever been president. It makes the fact that the even smarter and far better Hillary Clinton was kept from the presidency by the Electoral College putting our second Hollywood product in the Oval Office far more bitter.
When Trump is on that stage, it's sheer Hollywood culture, when Fauci and Brix are up there, it's real and if any of you figure those two are secure in their jobs, if they are kept on that will be a Hollywood culture calculation, when unreality rules, it only matters to the rulers as a matter of casting and even the best actor in a series upstages the star, they are disposable.
Now that we have our second show-biz, Hollywood culture created president, Trump, it's clear that that is one of the pillars of the oligarchy we are ruled by. When a majority of Americans are brought up by TV and movies and Facebook, it makes democracy impossible and when democracy is impossible gangster rule comes in and gangsters don't give a second thought to thousands, tens of thousands, millions dying if they can benefit from it.
Meanwhile, we die because Trump was on TV and radio and in the movies and the Warren Court said the media could lie with impunity.
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