A Mountain of Nothin' out of Somethin' or Another

by Michael David Rawlings
 

There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men.  —John Locke

For those of you who believe in nothing and, therefore, are easily deceived by almost anything, atheistic scientists like Lawrence Krauss, who intentionally muddle ontological distinctions merely to get a rise out of the philosophers and theologians they detest, do a disservice to science. Whether in jest or not, it's irresponsible. They dishonor their profession and treat us all with contempt when they imply that the problem of existence is strictly a scientific matter. As a group, atheists, whether they be accomplished scientists or not, are notoriously bad thinkers outside the comfort zone of their presumptuous metaphysics and are theologically illiterate bumpkins to boot. Karl W. Giberson, an evolutionary theist, is something else altogether . . . or is he?

I agree with Krauss that religious creation stories don't explain, at least from a scientific perspective, why there is something rather than nothing. The claim that "God created the quantum vacuum and its ordering principles" simply replaces a scientific mystery with a theological one: Where did God come from? — "Can science explain the final mystery of creation?"

The Bible doesn't "explain, at least from a scientific perspective, why there is something rather than nothing"?!

So?

Given that the Bible does in fact explain it from a theological perspective, what's Giberson's point? Rather, what's the point of acknowledging this fact in one breath and then heedlessly rattling on about a theological mystery in the next?

(Does the Bible explain it from a theological perspective or not, Mr. Giberson?)

The issue is metaphysical and arguably goes to the concerns of aesthetics as well. At the level of immanence, why do humans produce works of art? The scientific answer, stated colloquially: because they're wired to do it . . . but the next question is why are they wired to do it?

When a child asks, "Why is the sky blue?"

Science answers:  "The sky is blue due to the Rayleigh scattering of electromagnetic waves as refracted by the Earth's atmosphere."

But that doesn't tells us why light has different wavelengths or why these wavelengths are the sum of many different frequencies and so on ad infinitum. Science will never get at the ultimate why of anything.

There is no reason that something exists rather than nothing . . . except in the context of consciousness!

Think about that for awhile. . . .

Abortion on Demand, Homosexual "Marriage": what will they think of next?

By Michael David Rawlings

David Kirby writes some good news . . . sort of.

Emily Ekins and I have an op-ed in today's Politico¹ pointing out that while the Tea Party is united on economic issues, there is a split virtually right down the middle between traditional social conservatives and those who think government should altogether stay out of the business of "promoting traditional values." Candidates and representatives hoping to appeal to the Tea Party, we argue, need to focus on a unifying economic agenda that takes into account this strong libertarian undercurrent.

We conducted a survey of 639 attendees at the October 9, 2010 Tea Party Convention in Virginia, one of the larger state Tea Party gatherings of its kind to date. We included the same questions from Gallup and the American National Election Studies that David Boaz and I have used to identify libertarians in our previous studies. . . .

In our new survey, we found libertarians were 48 percent of Tea Partiers, versus 51 percent who held traditional conservative views. We defined traditional conservatives as agreeing that "the less government the better," and that "the free market can handle these problems without government being involved," but also believing that "the government should promote traditional values." Tea Party libertarians agreed that less government is better, and prefer free markets, but believe that "the government should not favor any particular set of values."  —David Kirby, "The Tea Party’s Other Half"²

Caution:  The libertarian faction of the Tea Party "think[s] government should altogether stay out of the business of 'promoting traditional values.' "

Well, it's not the government's role to promote any particular set of cultural values!

Wait for it. . . .

However, the government—if it's to be legitimate and stable—must obey the commands of certain principles commonly lumped in with things that have come to be thought of as mere traditional values.

Wisdom

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. —C. S. Lewis

A man who deliberately inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings. . . . Those who treasure the meaning of words will treasure truth, and those who bend words to their purposes are very likely in pursuit of anti-social ones. —Paul Johnson

A Striking Example of Lefty's Intellectual Vacuity and Moral Cowardice

By Michael David Rawlings
 

 

In "The World Doesn't Love the First Amendment", Eric Posner unwittingly reveals what we conservatives have always known about leftists: namely, they don't love the First Amendment either.

Salman Rushdie recently claimed that bad ideas, "like vampires . . . die in the sunlight" rather than persist in a glamorized underground existence. But bad ideas never die: They are zombies, not vampires. Bad ideas like fascism, Communism, and white supremacy have roamed the countryside of many an open society. —Eric Posner

This is the only statement in Posner's piece with which I agree. The rest of his ideas solicit the sort of reactionism that would allow the zombies to roam unchallenged.

 

For example: As often happens, what starts out as a grudging political settlement has become, when challenged from abroad, a dogmatic principle to be imposed universally.

"Imposed universally" is a startling choice of words given that Posner's conflating the unbridled free speech of Americans in a technologically global forum with an imposition of unbridled free speech on others abroad. The only imposition being suggested here would be that exerted against the unbridled free speech of Americans, unless he's suggesting that we Americans are demanding that all societies have unbridled free speech because we demand nothing less in ours.

That's not startling, that's absurd.

Posner continues. . . .

Suddenly, the disparagement of other people and their beliefs is not an unfortunate fact but a positive good.

I'm gettin' a weepy, snot-stained hanky feelin'.

What do bad manners, whether intended or perceived, have to do with the provisions of unbridled free speech? The positive good, obviously, is unbridled free speech; the intended or perceived disparagements are incidental.

It contributes to the "marketplace of ideas," as though we would seriously admit that Nazis or terrorist fanatics might turn out to be right after all.

Let's turn this on its head: as though the self-appointed arbiters of "decency" in history have never been the "Nazis or terrorist fanatics" of the world.

 

So symbolic attachment to uneasy, historically contingent compromises, and a half-century of judicial decisions addressing domestic political dissent and countercultural pressures, prevent the U.S. government from restricting the distribution of a video that causes violence abroad and damages America's reputation.

As the saying goes, never has so much been attributed to so little. No. The cause of the recent troubles goes to the depravity of mindless, nose-picking barbarians ginned up for decades by evil men with an agenda of world domination, not to any video. And how is America's reputation damaged by the insanity that rages in Islamic societies?

Imbecile! Coward!

 

And so combining the liberal view that government should not interfere with political discourse, and the conservative view that government should not interfere with commerce, we end up with the bizarre principle that U.S. foreign policy interests cannot justify any restrictions on speech whatsoever.

*crickets chirping*

. . . as if the first were true about the liberal view, as if the second were not a subliminal slight, an incomplete description of the conservative view and as if, in this instance, it were not America's very sovereignty assaulted, the video merely the pretext of cynical thugs . . . as if an unapologetic defense of human liberty were not a vital interest of U.S. foreign policy.

The rest of his piece is more of the same. . . .

Also see "The First Amendment and Zombies".

The Apology Tour Continues. . . .

 By Michael David Rawlings

 

The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam. —Barack Obama, September 25, 2012, U.N. Address 

 

This statement stuns the moral and patriotic sensibilities of the American conservative, but the most stunning thing of all is the thought that Obama might actually believe that sentiments like this one serve to mollify the mindless savage of the Muslim streets. But more to the point, does Obama imagine that the likes of President Morsi (political head of the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest hate group in the world) and President "Wipe-Israel-Off-the-Face-of-the-Earth" Ahmadinejad, who have been cynically ginning up the mindless savage of the Muslim streets for years, are mollified?

In any event, it is clear that Obama's entreaty was greeted with contempt.

This is just the sort of talk that emboldens evil. To the Muslim rabble it translates as a statement of fact . . . if you get my meaning; to the elites of Islamofascism it translates as a show of weakness.

Allow me to Americanize Obama's womanish twaddle: The future must not belong to those who would suppress the inalienable rights of humanity, including the right to think or say whatever one pleases about that depraved prophet of the religion from hell; instead, it belongs to the defenders of liberty who will hunt you down and kill you should you violate our sovereignty in any way, shape or form.

 

 

Arab leaders rebut Obama speech
By Neil MacFarquhar
New York Times News Service
September 27
The Bulletin News

The presidents of Egypt and Yemen argue at the U.N. that cultural limits on traditional Western freedoms must be respected.


 "Muslim Leaders Make Case for Global Blasphemy Ban at U.N."

Pamela Geller on CNN: "Defeat Jihad" Ad

 

Random Thoughts on "Leftyism"

People are grasping that the only thing Lefties yield to is superior power. They don't listen to reason, they don't argue rationally, they don't respectfully exchange points of view. They have no interest in anybody getting a fair hearing; they want only to dominate, to bully, to push around, to tell you and me what to do and force us to obey. They relish the exercise of coercion, not the exercise of persuasion. —Jack Rail, FreeConservatives

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid; liberals think conservatives are evil. —Charles Krauthammer

Of course, leftist precedents having been set are sacrosanct, while other precedents are benighted, retrograde and have to be fixed. —Thomas More, FreeConservatives

The fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is: Conservatives believe man was created in God's image; liberals believe they are God. All their other behavioral tics proceed from this one irreducible minimum. —Ann Coulter

By Michael David Rawlings

Any idea that ventures beyond the barren fields of cliché, lefty shuts out of his mind. Instead, he scratches at the surface of things and calls that which flacks off profundity.

The most daunting challenges facing this nation are not its fiscal and economic woes, but the cancer of self-imposed ignorance and bootlick subservience to the statist rhetoric of class warfare.

Of course Lefty is a statist bootlick, but the reason he deplores liberty is because he's terrified of it. He knows that his collectivist claptrap cannot compete in a free and open society, so he cheats and steals and lies his way along, using the judiciary, for example, as a means of maintaining his monopolistic stranglehold on the public education system in direct violation of natural and constitutional law. In other words, he's a coward at heart and a fascist by default.

In spite of lefty's contention, teachers are not underpaid by taxpayers; taxpayers are underserved by teachers.

Lefty regards all expressions of the truth as invective.

The recognition that reality is governed by absolute, universal imperatives is the beginning of grappling with the infinite nuances or complexities of the human experience. Beyond the developing intellect of youth, it is atheism, relativism or nihilism that perpetuates the black-and-white thought processes of intellectual immaturity. To the relativist—the incurious and almost invariably leftist—this is counterintuitive.

Progressivism's big lie is progressivism itself. It's the collusion of big government and big business to repress the working poor, the middleclass and small business. It's the crony capitalism of the self-anointed elite . . . a fact that flies right over the heads of the drooling idiots of Occupy Wall Street.

It's impossible to reason with the leftist. He doesn't process life like normal people, as even the most obvious conclusions elude him. He thinks and speaks in clichés. He proclaims and debates in slogans. When contradicted, he robotically spouts hysterical epithets like racist, homophobe or fascist. Once he veers off into this mindless routine, there's no getting him back on the topic at hand.

When fascism comes to America, it will be drenched in the blood of aborted fetuses and carrying a sign with some politically correct drivel or another scrawled across it.

The leftist doesn't know why the conservative is wrong, as he doesn't rightly understand the conservative's worldview in the first place. In the meantime, the conservative grasps the nuts and bolts of collectivism at a glance.



The only things that prevent a world of plenty as they produce a world of hurt are bloated, corrupt governments and the thieves who run them.

When they could no longer credibly deny the successes of the "Teflon Presidency," leftists begin to propagate the deliriously stupid fantasy that Reagan was an empty suite dangling from strings manipulated by some mysterious cabal. These dead-enders continue to prattle this fiction in spite of the fact that Reagan's political career entailed one of the most prolific records of personally authored addresses and op-eds of any president, a record that outlined the very same ideas he boldly enunciated and implemented during his presidency. When leftists aren't changing the subject, they're contriving new lies to tell themselves and others.

The leftist imagines bogeymen lurking around every corner where none exist, and he's determined to enslave us all in his mission to exorcise them.

All leftists are conformists.

Lots of leftists are well-educated, after a fashion. It's just that their ideas are so borrowed, so predictable, so banal . . . so untrue: a stream of mindless slogans lifted from a lifetime of PC conditioning.

Bottom line:  lefty is a bootlick statist.

Martin Luther King was a sexual degenerate, an apostate, a communist, a traitor. He despised the American ethos, consorted with enemy agents, helped erect the welfare plantation and spawned a generation of race-baiting pimps. He was an opportunist who cared for nothing but his own aggrandizement. But worst of all, like his ideological predecessor, the Marxist DuBois, King repudiated the legacy of America's greatest black leader, the true patriot Booker T. Washington.

Lefty can't allow that conservatism—classical liberalism, really—is stone-cold logic predicated on the lessons of history and the imperatives of human nature.  Yet, it's the joyful celebration of human life and liberty.  It's passion and poetry, music and romance. It's the masculinity of rugged individualism and the femininity of true compassion.

The manner of lefty's rhetoric is that of the moralizing shew, and the smirk on his face is that of the pitchfork-wielding Jacobin.

When you think of the leftist, think of the thought-conditioned denizens of Huxley's Brave New World, think especially of the sexually promiscuous and, therefore, passionless Alphas who think the romance of monogamy and familial allegiance is strange, even disgusting. Think emotional, intellectual and spiritual death.

When Lefty's not spouting banalities as if they were profundities, he's spouting insanity as if it were enlightenment.

In spite of his oft-repeated admonitions about nuance and open-mindedness, lefty is the Bruce Jenner of black-and-white think, a veritable virtuoso of the slammed-shut door.

Progressivism is not a uniform system of political thought, but a uniform collection of political slogans.

Lefty's IQ is cliché raised to the infinite power.

Compassion, tolerance, understanding, inclusion, acceptance: these are the code words of demonization in the leftist's handbook, the lexicon of Pollyannaish doofuses.

Victim Card: Don't Leave Home Without It

 

 

Schisms

By Michael David Rawlings

The First Great Awakening in England and America (roughly, 1725 to 1755), as lead by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, was in some respects a reaction against the British empiricism of the Enlightenment which generally rejected the actuality or utility of innate ideas and traditions. While the revealed religion of Judeo-Christianity was perfectly compatible with a scientific methodology of observation and evidentiary experimentation, albeit, predicated on a mechanist naturalism, the idea that sensory perception and experience trumped the rational impressions of human consciousness signified a serious challenge.

It would appear that the art of human philosophy is the art of dividing human reason against itself: the schism of false alternatives. No sooner had the rationalist René Descartes concluded that he existed, the empiricist John Locke concluded that he knew substance via sensory perception.

*crickets chirping*

The former's system of thought devolved into subjectivism, the latter's, into relativism.

In the meantime, Christians knew that they and God existed and that God was the ground of all existence.

For the most part, the Awakening was an evangelical revival that appealed to the human heart regarding the need of repentance and an intimate relationship with God. It was also a precursor to the American Revolution with its concomitant political concerns for a free press and religious freedom.

The Fuzz in Descartes' Belly Button

By Michael David Rawlings

Nowhere in the West during the period of the Enlightenment was the hostility toward religion more palpable than it was in France. Rationalist thinker René Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, was among the most sterling exceptions to the general rule until the arrival of the early proponents of laissez-faire in 1750 and the classical liberals of the so-called Thermidorian Reaction of 1794. This is not to say, however, that I approve of Descartes' epistemological ground for substance: that being (what is) is subordinate to the cogito (the thought of it).

God is the self-subsistent ground of all reality. He is the "God Who stands and stays",¹ as Carl F. H. Henry puts it, and the natural law of human apprehension conferred by Him, as rendered by Thomas Aquinas and refined by John Calvin, is the only legitimate foundation for a universal morality and for civil law. This is not a conditional aspect of human psychology.

A more satisfying epistemology, one that more perfectly mirrors that of scripture, is a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism, albeit, one that is contingent upon the imperatives of the imago dei and the historic, objectively independent interventions of transcendent revelation. In other words, it's because God does exist, and for that reason only, that we may be confident that the calculi of human consciousness correspond with the structures and mechanics of the temporal world beyond . . . insofar as they are guided by revealed religion. For whether one be aware of it or not, all scientific theory rests on an apriority of faith as a matter of practicality: the assumption that the rational forms and logical categories of the human mind are reliably synchronized with the apparent substances and mechanisms of empirical phenomena.

To be fair, Descartes never intended to cloud our awareness of the innate, natural law of divine origin or diminish the stature of nature's God. But he failed to anticipate that the reduction of the basis for knowledge from man's intuitive, preanalytic apprehension of cosmic order (which entails his moral and aesthetic senses) to the first impressions of a detached introspection would lead to the subjective relativism of postmodern popular culture—the untutored, inner musings of human reasoning making baby talk about the world beyond. He also failed to recognize that his basis for knowledge could not withstand the logical implications of an empiricism likewise detached from divine revelation . . . and he never imagined the subsequent nihilism of a Darwinian naturalism.

________________________________

¹Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority:  God Who Stands and Stays (Waco, TX:  Word Books, 1983), Vol. VI, Part II.