Some answers in life are complicated. Some aren’t. Here’s a quick guide to help understand the questions I’m most frequently asked.
1. Why are Liberals Liberal?
Conservatives have rules. There are rules for proper moral behavior, for the correct social and economic policies, even rules for being a “Good Conservative.” Not every conservative agrees with every conservative rule, however, and these “rules” are often the subject of vigorous debate. Paleocons debate neocons, neocons debate religious-based conservatives, religious-based conservatives debate secular conservatives, and so on, and so on. At the core of all this is the fact that to be a Conservative means that one adheres to a world view or philosophy that permits/encourages certain actions, while discouraging or inhibiting others.
By contrast, despite the fact that a number of different types of liberals exist (“looney,” “flaming,” “conspiratorial,” “completely insane,” etc.), there are no liberal rules. Every opinion is equally valid (except, of course, for conservative or other non-liberal opinions); therefore every action must be judged on its own terms and not by any universal standards. Unlike Conservatives, who exist only to tell other people what to do, Liberals are free spirits and original thinkers who are at one with the universe. They follow their own paths and come to their own conclusions about life — as long as these paths and conclusions do not deviate from what is validated by the words and actions of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Daily Kos, Moveon.org, People Magazine, or whatever the latest pronouncements are from Al Gore, Rosie O’Donnell, George Clooney, Charlie Sheen and Paris Hilton.
Of course, there do exist some liberals who are not looney (“George Bush really didn’t win the 2000 and/or 2004 election”), conspiratorial (“Karl Rove created the fake Bush draft-dodging documents to embarrass Dan Rather”), flaming (“animals are people too”), or completely insane “(the US attacked itself on 9/11”). These people will listen to other views before they dismiss them and follow their own heart, which is to say, their own feelings about a subject regardless of the evidence at hand. We recognize them by the blank stare we get after confronting them with a rational argument that refutes their position, or the phrase “yeah, well” (followed by silence) that sums up their verbal reply. It’s more important for them to be seen as being “nice” and open-minded, than to actually embrace the correct side of an issue.
Rather than call these people Liberals though, we should refer to them as they themselves wish to be called: Independents, or Moderates.
2. Why is there a double standard when commenting on a Liberal vs. Conservative act?
The answer to this question is a subset to the answer provided by question #1. Conservatives have rules. People who do not live up to 100% of their own rules, all the time in every situation imaginable, are hypocrites. If Conservative philosophy says that the nation’s laws should be obeyed, but an individual Conservative hires the neighborhood kid to cut his grass and doesn’t have the little tyke fill out a W2 or pay him social security, then Conservatism is a hypocritical philosophy. Therefore, we need to give amnesty to 12 million illegal aliens.
By contrast, it’s impossible to be a hypocrite if your political philosophy has no rules. So a Liberal was caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy as Edwin Edwards, the former Governor of Louisiana was fond of saying. So what? Liberals make no universal judgments about morality, so what’s the big deal? It a matter between the parties involved, and the state has no business sticking its nose in a person’s bedroom. Today, it could be a dead boy and a live girl, or a couple of dead boys and dead girls, or a ménage-a-dix with any combination boys and girls (dead or alive), and it’s still none of our business.
Hypocrisy only exists when the individual in question stands for something. It’s how a Democrat congressman actually having sex with a 16-year-old male intern becomes a champion for homosexual rights, and a Republican congressman sending suggestive text messages to an 18-year-old male ex-intern becomes a perverted, pedophiliac stalker. And it’s how a drunken, Liberal U.S. Senator can leave a young woman to drown in the back of his car and go on to prosper politically, while Mitt Romney’s basic humanity is being questioned for putting his dog in an open-air kennel on top of his car while taking a family trip thirty years ago. The dog made the trip just fine, unlike Mary Jo, but hey, that’s just a detail.
3. When will Liberals view the Right to Life as sacred?
When science discovers that one’s sexual orientation and/or predisposition toward liberal thought is genetically-based. Since Liberals have fewer babies than Conservatives (controlling for illegal immigration), and homosexuals have no babies other than those heterosexuals decide to bear, an entire new protected class of life will be “discovered.”
4. Is the world getting hotter, and is man responsible for it?
A Liberal needs no independent validation of the facts to arrive at a conclusion. Hotter, cooler, dryer, wetter — it’s all linked to global warming, and it’s all due to man’s influence.
The thought process that leads to such conclusions goes something like this. Consider this write-in question to Chaiyah’s Chronicle by M. Emily Cragg (July 1, 2002.) She couldn’t comprehend the thought that global warming might be due to the sun getting hotter, rather than be the result of human activity. “I don't see any MEANS for the sun's heat to INCREASE, offhand. I mean, usually, the car engine doesn't just SIT THERE and start itself up and get hot. So, what's the deal?”
For kindness sake, and to sleep better at night thinking that the next generation isn’t completely brain-dead, I’m going to assume that Ms. Cragg is an inquisitive nine-year-old child and not an education major six credits short of graduation. This way, when I point out that she’s comparing a man-made device to the nuclear furnace of a burning star, I won’t feel so bad when I get a blank stare in return — as if there’s some confusing point I’m trying to convey while deliberately not answering her question.
5. Why has the media decided that U.S. has lost the war in Iraq?
Because a Republican is in power. And not just any Republican, George W. Bush — who stole the 2000 election from its rightful winner, even after the media declared Gore the victor; and then went on to win re-election in 2004 despite the press telling us that he had no political support in the country. We simply can’t have an ignorant, unsanctioned, illegitimate Republican president doing anything right, from running the war to managing the economy. Forget what your lying eyes tell you about the stock market and other economic indicators, and the fact that former Iraqi militants are switching sides to join the Americans in their fight against Al Qaeda. The US is near economic collapse, and has lost the war in Iraq.
This media template is shared by Democrats, Liberals and tin-foil cap wearers everywhere. A decade after the war to end all wars ended (Bosnia), US troops are still engaged there in peacekeeping activities. More than a half-century after the last great world wide conflict (WWII), US troops are still stationed on Japanese and German territory. In fact, guerilla activity by displaced Nazis continued well after the fall of Berlin in 1945. But a couple years after a brutal regime was deposed in Iraq, and after a new government was created there that allowed people to actually select their leaders, and following an influx of foreign fighters who target innocent civilians, because Iraq is not as safe as Washington, DC the entire US military action is a monumental failure. Well, maybe not Washington, DC, but at least as safe as Detroit. Well, maybe not Detroit either, but you get the point. There are still people in Iraq (mostly non-Iraqis and former Saddam-supporters) who dislike us, so the US has failed and we need to withdraw before the 2008 election so Hillary can blame any future problems in the Middle East on the Republican decision to cut and run.
Had a Democrat been in power in 2001, and he/she decided to fight international terrorism, things would be different. According to the press, the war would have been swift, decisive, and 100% successful. Of course, the “war” would have consisted of lobbing a few cruise missiles at empty tents in Afghanistan and then taking the whole matter to the UN, where we’d still be debating today whether sufficient courtroom-quality evidence exists to indict Osama Bin Laden. But even assuming that a modern-day Democrat thought the U.S. national interests were worth defending and launched an aggressive counterattack against terrorism and its supporters, there would be no Cindy Sheehan/Moveon.org-type opposition to this action. At best, we’d hear from a few Uberconservatives about Plato and Aristotle’s warnings against foreign entanglements, and then get on with the business of hunting down and killing, er, I mean arresting the bad guys — of course, all the while respecting their Constitutional rights against self-incrimination, as well as their right to a lawyer and speedy trial.
The Liberal/Democrat view of fighting the bad guys is the polar opposite of Conservative/Republicans. The Lib/Dems see Ahmed sitting in his Lazy-Boy dialing a cell phone (which is immune to government surveillance), calling in a threat to bomb Boston Harbor. The US then mobilizes its resources to defend against the attack. Ahmed then calls in a threat to poison the NYC subway system. Again the US jumps into action. Laughing hysterically, Ahmed phones in another threat to target downtown LA. This time our West Coast defenses are mobilized. In between all of this the Lib/Dem Department of Homeland Precautions is beefing up our port security (while simultaneously liberalizing US immigration policy), requiring big business to institute additional costly security measures (while making sure they don’t actually verify the legal status of the people working for them for fear of catching an illegal alien, and thus separating a husband or wife from their US born child), and just for good measure, throwing an excise tax on gasoline consumption to guard against global warming.
The Rep/Con approach is a little different. Track down where Ahmed lives, and while he is making a call put a bullet through his head. No more Ahmed. No more calls. End of problem.
Phil, Steve :
“There must be some fixed reference point against which morality is measured, or else it really has no meaning other than a social contract that evolves over time. Morality thus becomes little more than a bell curve that shifts over time.”
This is the situation that has resulted by allowing Supreme Court justices to use “society’s evolving current standards” to interpret the Constitution. This, of course, ignores the question of who is to decide what standards have “evolved”. Is it the courts (who have virtually no contact with real life), or the people (who do) through their elected representatives?
Our discussion here seems to have observed what is known as “The Tolerance Über Alles Principle.” I detect it especially in “Chasm’s” posts.
The following is an excerpt from an exchange between author Lawrence Auster (“LA”) and poster “Mark D.” regarding an article, “The Death of British Civilization” http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_oh_to_be.html , by Theodore Dalrymple who observed that the most trivial violation of “political correctness” called down the greatest and most immediate response by British law enforcement, while the most egregious violent crimes went ignored. Perhaps it can help explain how we got to where we are as a society:
Mark D.:
“Coined by Samuel Francis, anarcho-tyranny is the systematic refusal to enforce the law in the most serious and essential matters, such as the protection of citizens from physical violence, combined with the assiduous enforcement of intrusive regulations in the most trivial and specious matters, such as the policing of people’s thoughts and feelings about minorities [hence, ‘tolerance über alles’*].
“…grounded in liberal anthropology, anarcho-tyranny is perfectly consistent, and in fact required.
“Liberal anthropology is derived from Nietzsche: it affirms the sovereignty of the individual will, that the individual human will is the highest and best value, and asserts that the individual will is the arbiter of all value. Within society, all individual human wills are considered of equal value, validity, and worth; and there is no principle [e.g., God*] by which to discern among them. Society is then a contest of a will to power, of asserting one’s preferences over those of others.
“On the ‘anarcho’ side this translates into affirmation of the individual human will over such traditional values as private property, public order, and even human life. If a crime of violence is committed, a conviction may be sustained, but a long incarceration is viewed with suspicion, as the imposition of a collective will over and above the highest good – the individual will that committed the crime. It is not legitimate within a liberal community to assert the communal will over against an individual human will (unless, of course, that individual human will contests the über principle of liberalism itself) [Phil: this is why conservative ideas are not equal and why conservatives are not allowed free speech.*].
“On the ‘tyranny’ side, it is obvious that the preferences of individual human wills are sacrosanct, such as sexual orientation, lifestyle, dissent, and so forth. Any speech, thought, or action that threatens a protected preference is therefore punished with the utmost severity as a direct threat to the ultimate good – the individual human will (which is above critique). And because the individual human will is the source of all goodness, it cannot be relativized by any ‘status,’ particularly status within a religious or ethnic minority. Those wills in the majority therefore must be restrained, and those wills in the minority must be protected, so that a principle of absolute equality is maintained. In fact, within a liberal society, the fiction is maintained that there is no majority at all; and if a majority is invoked, this claim is condemned, marginalized, or ignored. Liberal communities have no legitimate majorities. Liberal communities are merely a collection of individual human wills.
“In liberal society, human life is not sacrosanct; the human will is sacrosanct. Abortion policy is the perfect expression of this principle.
LA replies:
“Very interesting. Human life is something ‘outside’ the self, a ‘transcendent,’ as it were. Since only the immanent self and its desires have value, without reference to anything outside the self, life does not have value.
“Also, Mark D. said: ‘Liberal communities have no legitimate majorities. Liberal communities are merely a collection of individual human wills.’ … this means that ‘in liberal societies, two principles we take for granted no longer apply: (1) consent of the governed, and (2) rule by majority.
“…Since only the individual and his will matter, and all individual wills are of equal value, no majority of individual wills can be allowed to force its will on any minority of individual wills [hence the constant harping by liberals that ‘you can’t force your beliefs on me’*]. Therefore the society cannot be ruled on the basis of the consent of the majority, also known as the consent of the governed. The society must be run by a non-elected instrumentality [e.g., the courts*] that is independent of the governed, in order to protect the equality of all individual wills.” [Emphasis added]
*My notes.
Steve
I was grounded in science most of my life. My faith rest with man and what I thought was pure knowledge. Only in the last 3 years have I found that science is just as screwed up as any other man made volume of information. Complete with bias, agendas, limiting world views, and the rest of man’s fallacies. My study of science over forty years eventually lead me to conclude that the data and the theories do not match. So with me floating with no foundation I studied the religions. I always had a belief in God but still had doubts about death. I now know that if you have doubts about the afterlife then you have no faith. As I started to grasp the reality of God and a purpose driven universe I developed the ability to focus on issues and divide them into right and wrong. This is in contrast to the science guy who divided the universe into scientific theories with everything else being in the realm of voodoo. I used to feel I was on pretty firm ground but now I feel I stand on bedrock.
Just as you said, it comes down to your world view. Right and wrong spring from your belief structure. When God is removed from the equation then wrong is removed from the equation as well.
fbaginski ,
I am delighted that your search has caused you to embrace faith rather than reject it. I have always believed that honest seekers will be rewarded, while the Richard Dawkins of this world aren’t seekers at all, but merely hucksters.
I have never viewed science and faith as being at odds with one another. Indeed, I have always viewed the order and rationality of science to be indicative of the order and rationality of a Creator. I believe it comes down to a fundamental premise. If you assume the existence of a God, then you interpret life, behavior, and science in light of that underlying assumption. If you reject the existence of God, that that becomes your governing and inviolate rule against which all else is measured.
Recently, I heard an interesting statistic that serves as a good analogy. Windows Vista contains approximately 50,000,000 lines of source code. When you consider the complexity of the average home computer and operating system, they easily qualify as some of the most complex machines ever devised by man.
Now imagine some distant locale, far removed from our place and time, where two archeologists unearth a Windows Vista DVD. They have no visibility into its origin or purpose – merely that they have discovered a silvery disk made of translucent hydrocarbons with a thin layer of reflective metal. As they study the object over the course of many years, they eventually discover that a laser focused on this disk reflects in an intricate pattern of binary information, literally billion of bytes long.
One, who has rejected the idea of intelligent design, marvels at the ability of plastic and metal to spontaneously organize itself into such intricate patterns. The other, who has placed no such constraint on his interpretation of what they have found, concludes that the disc can only be consistent with intelligent design.
The human genome contains approximately 3 billion base pairs. Few would assert that Windows Vista, in all its complexity, was a more wondrous design than a single strand of human DNA, yet anyone who seriously asserted that something with the complexity of Vista could spontaneously assemble itself would be institutionalized. It would not matter how long we set a blank disk in the sun and allow it to absorb energy, hoping against hope that the 2nd law of thermodynamics would be violated and it would evolve into something orderly. It simply would never happen.
Yet, that is exactly what science does when it comes to interpreting the physical world and attempting to create a hypothesis for where life and the universe originated. No matter how impossibly complex, no matter how indicative of intelligent design, that possibility is always dismissed outright as “impossible.” So back to my little analogy. The poor guy who suggests that the disk indicates some type of externally intelligent agent at work is laughed out of the room while the guy that insists upon spontaneous evolution of plastic and metal is heralded as a genius. It all comes back to the initial assumption and the way everything is interpreted in light of that assumption.
My belief in God is what gives meaning to science. Science can only answer “what” and sometimes “how”…but it cannot answer “why.”
Steve, that is the lamest analogy I have ever read. And you give your ignorance totally away by mentioning the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
For one, what about a shiny, plastic disk would make any scientist, anywhere at any time believe it was organic? Second, no one (except creationists with an agenda) thinks human DNA “spontaneously” assembled itself. Read up on the concept of natural selection before you try arguing again. For that matter, I suggest you find some science books and read and try your very darndest to understand the 2nd law if thermodynamics and the concept of entropy- clearly you’ve been corrected enough times to include the sun as a source of energy.
I actually came back today to respond to some earlier questions – basically, I wonder how come you guys insist on repeating that liberals believe that because that morality CAN be analyzed objectively, that means libs believe ALL morals are mutable, depending on the situation.
After all, you guys will defend the death penalty while condemning abortion – so clearly ALL killing isn’t immoral – it just depends on the situation, right?
This goes to the heart of my matter with Steve too – no matter how many times commenter’s (like me) or even real scientists tell Steve that he’s twisting the meaning of the law of thermodynamics to make a erroneous point, he will continue to make the error because he thinks it supports his argument – but it doesn’t anywhere but among people as ignorant of facts as he (although I totally agree that science cannot answer “why”).
Now, back to morals – “relative to WHAT” – I realize I used the phrase, but I was actually being sarcastic for my audience (re-read the passage) – not very successfully.
Morality is clearly a concept that CAN be used in relative terms as evidenced by the fact that we’re ARGUING about it. If morals were absolute, there’d be nothing to discuss! Everything would be clear for everybody to see, just like other absolute things like the Empire State Building or the Pentagon. After all, THOU SHALL NOT KILL is pretty frickin clear. No. Killing. Ever. Yet, here we have all these exceptions – some of them are even performed or encouraged by the very same deity character who made the rule in the first place! So, is God a moral relativist?
I know I’m not saying anything you haven’t heard before – I know this because your discussions (and even Phil’s posts) have devolved to the point where all you do mock these questions, confident that somewhere in the archives is enough twisted logic to back you up.
I was going to answer some of Steve’s questions, but on second look, they are so bizarre and self-evident (and more than a little revealing), I’m not sure I should bother.
For instance, besides being creepy, incest could very well be threatening to the survival of a tribe – inbreeding selects for unwanted mutations raising the ratio of birth defects – which might be a reason for banning the act.
Now, WE don’t eat our dead – too much emotional attachment plus possibility of disease – but there most certainly have been cultures that do. If eating dead humans is universally immoral, and morals are universal, how come there have been cultures that DO eat human flesh? Wouldn’t they have been touched by the same God? Moreover, when westerners have found isolated cannibalistic cultures, pointing to immorality is hardly a way to convince them to stop. The tribal responses is that THEIR GOD says they must eat and posses the souls of their enemies. And notice that I’m not saying that cannibalism can be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ depending on the circumstances – I’m just pointing out that the act HAS been justified by some.
If you believe that morals are God given, inherent, immutable things, then why hasn’t every being from time immemorial “known” cannibalism was wrong?
I realize this puts y’all in a bind – you can’t really discuss this at all, because to do so you would have to acknowledge that at some point in time a foreign culture came to a different moral conclusion than you have – and that would be just too… objective.
Chasm
Your response to Steve’s comments are so typical. First of all fosilized amber is plastic and it does occur naturaly. Plastic comes from oil because it is cheap but it can also come from sap from trees. You know the sticky stuff oozing out of pine trees. But then again maybe I am all wrong. Maybe you should enlighten me as to how the molecular engineers first came up with plastic. I am always willing to be corrected on any technical issues that arise.
On natural selection – I have been feeding my dog cat food for three years and he has yet to turn into a cat. Again I may be doing something wrong. I so want to have a cat-dog just like the one I saw at the museum. After I figure this out I will start on my ape fish.
fbag, was that really your answer to my question? That because plastic occurs naturally, scientists in some distant future might be tempted to postulate that a perfectly round, perfectly flat, piece of 99.99 percent pure polycarbonate sandwiched with binary encoded mylar and marked “Windows Vista” has evolved through natural selection?
Or was that your point… that only in a world where scientists believe feeding cat food to a dog will change it’s species would it be logical to believe a CD arose naturally?
If so, I’m with you. If not, I have no idea what you are talking about.
Steve’s questions, about eating the dead, incest, etc, are interesting because they are the kinds of questions that no one would ever really ask, least of all liberals (these moral extremes are, as here almost always envisioned by conservatives). I mean, no serious liberal anywhere has ever suggested legalizing incest, or eating the dead for food, yet here we are accused of supporting a moral worldview that would endorse such a thing – if at least for it’s conceptual purity.
Not that there is anything wrong with valid criticisms of the liberalization of modern culture. I can see how the last 50 years or so (or even the last 30, 20, 10!) has scared the crap out of old-school Biblio-conservatives. And since it is so hard to rail against specific, modern targets without sounding like a bigot, I don’t fault you for reaching for far-out scenarios and moral extremes to try and prove a point.
Which brings us to “the line.” Steve, in a common line of thought, accuses me, and the left, of playing “slippery slope” morality and of “not having a standard” by which to judge morality. Always (at least here at IC) is the plea, “oh why can’t the dumb liberals understand that the ‘line’ of conception cannot be crossed?”
But there is always a ‘line.’ Even were we to make willfully terminating a pregnancy a crime, there would still be litigation to establish were the new line is. Where is your line Steve? Rape? Incest? Health of the mother? None of the above? Assuming we all agree that none of this is actually covered specifically enough in your ancient texts for the 9th Circuit, how is ‘no abortions, except to save the life of the mother’ any less of a ‘line’, and thus a moral relevancy, than ‘no meddling in private affairs until after the first trimester’?
And since Steve mentioned it, tell me how it is that the left was universally outraged, while only about 1/3 (at most) of conservatives showed even minimal interest upon being informed that our country tortures people? Every moral person, every moral nation the world over throughout history – including our own – has condemned torture as barbarous and evil. Yet the conservative moral ‘absolutists’ of the time fell all over themselves to excuse and minimize the meaning of Abu Ghraib.
Where was the ‘line’ then?
Here’s the QUESTION I want answered:
Is God a moral relativist?
If no, give an example of a universal, God given moral command that could never conceivably be argued AND the specific citation for it’s province.
Then give another. And another.
See if you can get to ten.
If you can’t, does that mean that all the morals we DO argue about are not God-given?
If the answer to the first question is ‘yes,’ does that make God a liberal?
Chasm:
I realize that reading comprehension is not your strong suit, so I’ll say this again. I answered all of these questions in my original paper in the IC archives (“What kind of car would Jesus drive to take his girlfriend to an abortion clinic?), then again in the Jackson-Carmine debate in the IC archives, and will do once more in response to Raymond Ingles article today.
Since this seems to be a burning issue with you, spend a couple of hours reading and you’ll see that God is not a moral relativist, there are universal moral codes instilled in all of us by God, these universal codes can be expressed with great specificity, and to assign a political label to God is the height of ignorance — though what men do politically can certainly support, or deviate from, the UMC.
Chasm,
There are two worlds of thought. One in which man sets the rules and argues over them over time and makes adjustments. The other set of rules came with the creation. As God set the laws of physics He also set moral rules for His creation to live by. Since God has chosen for us to make up our own mind about who’s rules to follow He has also left us with man’s interpretation of His rules. This is a big problem if you let your head do the sorting out. It is your heart that we are told to follow.
The point about the CD is our human DNA defines intelligent design more than the CD does.
If you truly believe we are an acident of nature and there are no moral codes then why are you wasting your good time here on earth writing comments on IC. You should be out having the most fun possible every day. I often think that liberals join in on these discussions because they feel it is fun to blast the conservatives. I for one don’t feel blasted.
Although I have been told not to cast pearls before swine, I catch myself doing it all to often. I just pray I don’t run out of pearls.
You see, you still haven’t actually absorbed one thing I have said, so it does become a little frustrating. I don’t believe we are an accident of nature, nor do I believe there are no moral codes. Few people believe these things. Breaking a glass on the floor is an accident, the evolution of a tree is a wondrous process, stunning in beauty and purpose.
I appreciate your explanation of morality, but it sounds a little confusing, actually. God created perfect morality, but didn’t really tell us what it is, except in our “heart,” and we are free to follow or not follow our “heart” as we choose, but not to means we are against God.
I can also appreciate how having such a worldview could case one to stay with a leader who so famously uses his gut to make decisions, no matter how disastrous.
I comment here because I am seriously interested in the philosophy of morality. Far believing there are “no morals codes” I understand that they are just that – a contract among the closed system of a society – and that some codes have evolved over time (slavery) and others have been with us a long time (murder).
If you and convicted murderer are being transported on a plane to his execution, and that plane crashed on a jungle island, even his status as a criminal would not prevent your “heart” from telling you to enlist his aid in survival and rescue. Nor, unless he was truly deranged and psychotic (lets just say he’s an under-socialized gang banger), would he refuse your help. In a larger society, he is a criminal who has broken the contract with that society, but I doubt very much that your “heart” would tell you to put a bullet thru his head were he someone upon your own survival depends.
Furthermore, your morality seems to me to be MORE flexible and MORE ambiguious than mine! Aside from the obsessive sexual prohibitions, of course, my morals, my contract with society is for the most part written down in the form of laws, which I, for the most part, obey.
But as we have seen, in a “heart” based moral universe, the president can order the most horrendous torture upon anyone his heart tells him is “evil.” And if his “heart” tells him to sustain the most basic of societies rules in the prosecution of certain crimes, that seem to be ok too, in this flexible universe you describe.
Oh, I just caught the part about swine.
F*** you too, fbag.
There, that was the most fun I’ve had all day.
Why do the long posts take so long, and the short ones appear immediately? That last post isn’t nearly as funny (and seems a tad ruder) than if it has posted after the very long one that will probably appear shortly. My apologies for the rudeness, as they say in comedy, timing is everything.
Philip,
I have read your essays, and they are a main reason I pop by here occasionally. Since being a condescending prick IS your strong suit, I’ll just explain that I find them entertaining but grossly wrong, I imagine for many of the same reasons Mr Ingles does. For that reason I shall be spending some time reading that discussion as it unfolds too.
My, my. It’s taken this blog a little longer than the average internet exchange to degrade to Godwin’s Law. Or is it Benford’s Law of Controversy? But we got there.
Chasm,
Since we are on the topic of “condescending p****s,” may I suggest that you look in the mirror and consider the reflection?
As an engineer, I took sufficient thermodynamics courses in college to understand what is is, where it applies, and how it applies. Apparently the simplicity of your argument has escaped not only myself, but also people like Stephen Hawking who seems to find the issues created by the 2nd Law far more problematic than you do — to the point that he has attempted to explain why entropy goes in the wrong direction with Darwinian evolution by suggesting that perhaps we need to look at the entire cosmos rather than just our solar system. He has postulated that entropy is perhaps increasing elsewhere in the universe in order to offset the decrease in entropy required by evolution on earth. He is not nearly so cavalier about brushing off the apparent paradox as you are. Although I don’t agree with his explanation, he is at least honest enough to admit that it merits more than a curt wave of the hand and a cluck of the tongue.
I also see that my analogies don’t help clarify a position with people like yourself, they simply provide fodder for you to focus on minutiae. Should we discuss the thickness of the DVD foil? Perhaps critique the exact polymer chain used in the plastic? Or how about whether it was produced by a petrochem plant in Shanghai or along Houston’s ship channel, and whether it was pelletized into spheres or ovoids? I am sure that would be productive and sufficiently direct attention away from the actual point of the analogy.
Frankly, I don’t think you missed my point, nor do I doubt your intelligence. I simply don’t have much respect for the way you communicate or the way you debate.
I’d be happy to reply to your questions but it’s the equivalent of screaming instructions in English to a taxi driver that doesn’t speak the language: It’s just going to frustrate both parties and the car won’t move an inch.
Let’s move on. You find folly in the pages of IC, I find wisdom. Our lives will both end soon enough in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps I am wrong with my faith and my beliefs, but I have nothing to lose through a belief in God and a saving faith in His Son; in contrast, you have everything to lose through your unbelief. I guess that is a gamble you are willing to take, but it is not one I am willing to take.
well, I will (and have) admit to feeling embarrassed at the fu2 remark – I really had just penned a rather long post, with examples and that one apparently got lost in the mail. The remark was meant as a rejoinder to fbaginski calling me swine, and out of context of the longer post, appears crasser than intended. I do apologize for that one.
Less so the one directed at Mr Jackson, who, while I do enjoy reading his work sometimes because I respect the intent of his moral musings (while not always agreeing on the logic of his ways), I often find him dismissive in a rather off-putting way (and not necessarily to me, but to any who would presume to challenge his logic).
Beginning a post with a criticism of my reading comprehension skills is NOT a good way to make a logical point, but a good way to start a flame war. Perhaps just referring me to your essay (again) and giving your short rebuttal without the condescending comment would have been a better way to proceed. Then I wouldn’t have used the P word either and everybody would be happy.
And so Steve. Lets break this down just a little: I bagged on your thought experiment because you postulated that a scientist “open to the possibility of intelligent design” would have an advantage in figuring out the truth of the CD’s origins, while one who dismissed design would just figure it was a natural artifact. Your intent with the analogy seems to be to prove that accepting “design theory” is a logical way to conduct science, and indeed allows one to find answers where others cannot. But the story falls flat because the second scientist ISNT DOING HIS JOB: he’s not pursuing the evidence to where it leads. In fact, he’s acting more like what we would call “IDers,” declaring that because the only logical explanation doesn’t fit his world view, he doesn’t know the true nature of the CD! Unless this all takes place in a place where the trees really do sap out perfect shiny disks, your second scientist is derelict.
I get that you are trying to tie the complexity of the information on the CD with the complexity of our DNA, and then trying to make the information entropy argument tie in with that. But to tell you the truth, I just don’t buy the argument that entropy has ever been violated in any way, much less in any way that is relevant to the transmission of information during the process of procreation and natural selection. You can take your shot and actually link to some sources, but I’ve heard it all before too and the scientific rebuttals are always more convincing.
Simple organisms evolved into complex ones because doing so ultimately made them more efficient. Just as we have had to construct complex moral codes to live in a vast, layered society, so did thriving colonies of early cells have to learn to divy up the worklorad of processing food and waste to ultimately become us. THAT is why the analogy to evolution is used in social sciences, not because it is literally true that morals are passed thru genes.
Perhaps you are right, and I just don’t understand, but then explain, if just a bit, how it is that natural selection violates thermodynamics. If DNA is just a string of data, like a word, like the word GOD even, how does changing it to DOG cost energy in reproduction, and thus violate entropy?
You get the point. If scientists have observed that all life on this planet shares a common method of information transmission, and all it takes is changing some letters to create variations on a life form, none of that involves entropy violation. So now we’re all the way back to the evolution of DNA itself, a subject of which I know absolutely nothing. Enlighten me on how this development violates a law of nature.
This is a duplicate comment that I posted on Raymond Ingles’ Universal Morality And The Morality Of The Universe. I hadn’t paid much attention to who Chasm was until I read his comment #64. Then I remembered who he was! It’s all pretty funny, in a sad sort of way. But don’t let it get in the way of a legitimate conversation on the debate I’m having with Raymond Ingles. Phil
****
Mr. Ingles —
One of the reasons I agreed to a debate with you is because your approach was so different than Chasm. Although we disagree on basic issues, you’ve kept the conversation professional. I contrast this with Chasm who has a tiny bit of trouble telling the truth, which was most notable when he commented on my original article by saying that he had spent “hours working on a point-by-point rebuttal of my position ‘a few days ago’”, when in fact the essay was released less than 24 hours earlier. [Comment 16].
Unlike your position, Chasm also believes there is no evidence to prove that raping and killing a 5 year-old girl is “inherently immoral” [Comment 14], that “infanticide” is not inherently immoral because spiders do it to their young (notwithstanding the fact that my essay was about human morality, not animal instinct), [Comment 14], as well as making a number of other bonehead observations.
The reason for his somewhat odd comments is that in actual fact, Chasm has read only the first 20 pages or so of my moral relativism essay, and reacted to what was said in that. When I called him on this and pointed out what he did he was embarrassed, and disappeared from that conversation. What’s distinguished your comments from Chasm’s is that you’ve actually read my original essay and commented professionally on its substance, rather than used it as a launching board for a political screed.
You have also rejected the morally-relative rationalizations Chasm uses to justify abortion on demand in his recent comments to my July 2 article. I’m going to repost his comment verbatim below, because they stand out in such stark contrast to what you wrote. [Note --- the Capitalizations in Chasm’s comments are his]:
“Is it more moral to be a society that mandates abortion or one which forces childbirth? Golly gee, I’d hate to be part of a society that has to make either horrid choice, yet you seem intent on forcing us to have a discussion regarding the latter, as tho it were more noble or preferable than China’s. NONONO! you scream. It’s ALL ABOUT THAT BABY and that LIFE which is so important. And I’m here to tell you that, actually, things are different than they were back in the day of Jonah and his whale. For one, we really did go thru the so-called sexual revolution, conservative nightmare of all nightmares, and women really did tell the men that after six thousand years of this sh*t, they aren’t going to take it any more. For another, there are many pressing problems which actually do threaten us – on every level from individual all the way up to country and planet. The answers to these questions really do amount to doing good or evil because the repercussions will determine the quality of life for generations to come. Sorry for you to hear, I know, but who has sex with who, and whether or not they conceive, birth and raise a child is not one of them. Abortion is not a civic moral issue because the survival of the state, or even the village, is not at stake. The only people inside that little moral bubble are the mother, the fetus, and her family. And in America, anyway, privacy means that’s where it stays.”
It’s important for everyone dropping in on this conversation to know that people like Chasm do NOT represent the point of view you’ve advanced. Where you and I disagree on abortion is over a small but significant point which I will address at some length in my rejoinder. It is not the kind of almost unintelligible claptrap that passes for thought from Chasm, who blends a discussion about morality, social policy, religious teachings, and Constitutional rights into one intermingled thought with no understanding or appreciation for the role played (or NOT played) by each of these constituent elements.
In fact, none of what Chasm said above about abortion has anything substantively to do with the moral issues of abortion that I outlined in my original essay [in fact, I specifically reject religious teachings in and of themselves as a basis for morality, spoke about the difference between man made and God-given rights, specifically rejected the notion that the state should impose moral decisions (such as prohibiting abortion) rather than have these decisions come from the people themselves through a democratic process]. Chasm doesn’t know this because he hasn’t read my original essay, even though he makes a false claim that he has.
His “support” for your point of view, therefore, is politically motivated and not intellectually based, so anyone who reads his screed should not confuse Chasm’s opinions with yours. His motivation for commenting on my work is not to advance the issue through a reasoned give-and-take of ideas, but rather is summed up in a comment he made to my July 2, 2007 essay: “I have read your essays, and they are a main reason I pop by here occasionally. Since being a condescending prick IS your strong suit, I’ll just explain that I find them entertaining but grossly wrong, I imagine for many of the same reasons Mr Ingles does. For that reason I shall be spending some time reading that discussion as it unfolds too.”
We can only look forward to the carefully thought-out commentary from Chasm that is sure to come. In the meantime, though, to anyone pro-or con looking in on this discussion, please direct your meaningful comments to what Mr. Ingles says, and not what his new ‘best friend’ Chasm offers as enlightened observation, since Mr. Ingles’ reasons for this debate are NOT the same as Chasm’s.
Now I have been accused of being a liar – and apparently my most notable lie ever was saying I had produced a rebuttal to a story that hadn’t been published yet – -
but if you actually look at my first comment #6 (rather than YOUR response to it at#16) you would understand I was referring to your piece from a month earlier on global warming. THAT was the piece I had written to you about that had gotten lost. Geez, I was still reading the WWJD piece when I first commented, as I admitted.
Also, I didn’t say there wasn’t ANY evidence to prove killing a 5-year old was “inherently immoral,” I said “YOU didn’t prove raping and killing a 5 year-old girl is inherently immoral.” And while my examples and method at the time may have been crude, Mr Ingles today has backed the essence of that assertion up with a much better argument.
Finally, my reasons for this debate are probably more or less exactly what Mr Ingles are (tho I am much more hesitant to speak for him than you are for me, apparently). You made the assertion that if there were no objections, you were going to go ahead and allow super-natural explanations for anything you felt had not been covered in Morality 101. I objected. Mr Ingles has objected, albeit much more beautifully (tho of course it did take 11 months).
Whether Mr Ingles shares my political views, or even my views about the appropriateness of the state intervening in private decisions is irrelevant to the fact that as a matter of arguing the divine providence of morality, his argument is much better than yours.
Has anybody noticed a striking similarity between the way Chasm thinks (including his word choices when he speaks) and Vermont Lib in my Looney Liberal Chronicles Postscript? Could they be the same person? He even lies the same way. Here’s the opening line from my August 25, 2006 moral relativism article:
“I have a question that’s been bothering me for some time now, ever since my social consciousness was raised a couple of years back by the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. It’s embodied in an extension of the question they asked when they tried to persuade me that God wouldn’t like it very much if I continued to drive my SUV. “
To which Chasm responded on August 25: “This is the kind of thing I love to take apart as it is one of the most intellectually inconsistent ‘arguments’ I have seen. The thing is, it’s so damn long and there are literally fallacies in almost every paragraph that it would take just as long to unravel all the logical jumps. The reason I hesitate wasting my time engaging this is the last time I responded point by point (to Mr. Jackson’s laughable attempt to justify his SUV) it never appeared in the comments!” And what was the “last time” he responded? In Chasm’s own words on August 26: “I may have been a wee bit combative in my first post, but thats because I spent hours working on a rebuttal a few days ago and it got ‘eaten’ by the spam filter.”
Nice try Chasm. You were clearly speaking about your first effort to do a “point-by-point” rebuttal of the “What Kind of car would Jesus Drive” article I wrote (which you incorrectly assumed was an attempt to “justify my SUV” because you were simply responding to each new sentence you read, not to a previous posting from a month earlier). In fact, I even said so as much at the time [Comment 18].
I said yesterday “Chasm also believes there is no evidence to prove that raping and killing a 5 year-old girl is “inherently immoral” [Comment 14]”, which Chasm also disputes. Here’s his full comment: “Actually Phil, you didn’t prove raping and killing a 5 year-old girl is inherently immoral. You kind of skipped over exploring a genetic basis for wanting to protect children. I mean, it could be that everyone agrees that children are innocent is because hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution has drilled an instinct to protect the young into our genes. Simply pointing out everyone agrees after 6000 years of civilization that murder of innocents is bad doesn’t prove it’s a ‘universal truth.’
Now, anyone who’s actually read my original essay knows that I devoted quite a bit of space to this issue. In fact, the word “genetics” appears in my essay almost as much as the word “morality”. In Section 8 of my original paper I even begin with the following hypothesis, which I then go on to explore in some detail and refute: “There is some innate, genetic ‘worry’ about too many abortions of ‘potential’ life, when combined with too many killings of ‘actual’ life. Taken together, they could reach a point where they begin to impact population growth. This might explain an innate abhorrence to harm 5-year old children. That is, women have no problem aborting their fetus at any time (20 weeks is a political compromise; it could have been 15 weeks, 25 weeks, etc.). Society also has no particular moral inhibition against killing children either. But there is a biological need in everyone that is concerned about preserving the species. And when worries about preservation of the species reach a certain threshold, everybody’s anti-kid-kill gene kicks in.”
The record is there in the IC archives for anyone to see, which is why it makes no sense for Chasm to lie other than lying appears to be a basic part of his argument strategy. He simply hasn’t read my original work, despite his claims that he has. I show this again and again in the comment section to my original article when Chasm makes a claim about something he thinks I probably might have said, only to have me excerpt passages showing him what I actually said.
TO EVERYONE: Forgive me for belaboring these point, but it’s important to understand who is offering an argument to further explore the issues that are raised, and who is simply pursuing a political agenda by throwing bombs and making things up that he hopes we’ll all react to.
Chasm,
You disappoint me on multiple levels.
You wrote:
“Perhaps you are right, and I just don’t understand, but then explain, if just a bit, how it is that natural selection violates thermodynamics. If DNA is just a string of data, like a word, like the word GOD even, how does changing it to DOG cost energy in reproduction, and thus violate entropy?”
The very nature of the analogy here tells me you are clueless. We are not talking about simply various permutations of equally complex DNA, which is what rearranging the letters in “GOD” into “DOG” implies. We are talking about taking inanimate chemicals and magically, simply by the addition of undifferentiated energy, having them systematically form more complex molecules until, voila, at some point not only are the molecules more complex, they actually become alive. Then, of course, they must gradually assume greater and greater complexity, evolving from single-celled organisms to homo sapiens and the myriad species of plant and animal life in between.
This violates the 2nd Law. There is simply no evading it.
Evolutionists go to elaborate lengths to explain this away, but at the end of the day they cannot. If you want to confine the 2nd Law contradiction to just the appearance of life on earth it is problematic enough. It is even more problematic when you consider the origins of the universe. On the macro scale, there is nothing in the 2nd Law that would suggest that matter and energy should form themselves into complex structures such as planets and stars with highly regulated physical laws governing their motions and interactions. Can gravity alone explain why a swirling cosmos full of elemental dust should form itself into the complexity we observe?
And if the universe is merely a trillion-year cycle of matter and energy alternately expanding and then collapsing back on itself again, where did all that “oscillating stuff” come from in the first place?
Evolutionary theory isn’t about rearrangement. It is about entropy moving in reverse by requiring matter and energy to assume ever-increasingly complex structures.
Let’s take your analogy to its logical conclusion. I am going to go down to the museum and collect several million characters of old typesetting blocks. Now, I’m going to supply a source of undifferentiated energy in the form of a cement mixer to tumble those little blocks about. Surely at some point, with sufficient iterations, the type blocks will just randomly arrange themselves into the manuscript for “War and Peace,” right?
Forgive me for clinging to the belief that it is a bit more reasonable to assume that an intelligent being was responsible for the manuscript.
The 2nd Law argument remains one of the most powerful refutations of spontaneous evolution. If one still insists that “it could happen” then they are invariably left with the question, “where did the matter and energy that were the raw ingredients for life come from?”
The answer invariably given by the Carl Sagans of the world? “They just were.”
That is as much a statement of faith as is a statement of belief in God, who Christians (and many other religions) contend had no origin but was responsible for the origins of all else.
It has never been a question of faith versus science. It is simply a question of where you choose to place your faith. If your faith is in chance and the sudden appearance of matter and energy from nothing, or that it simply always has been, that is your choice. But make no mistake: it requires a faith all its own.
I believe that liberals are the people who were picked on in school. Now, they desperately search for the “fairness doctrine” that will level the playing field for the underdogs (them). Since they have a VERY visceral reaction to bullys and of course, the U.S. is a bulley, they hate the U.S. and anyone who supports it.
Being the most powerful country the world has ever seen requires an attitude of understanding that WE CANNOT GET BY WITHOUT OIL. We have to make sure there is plenty of it because solar power and ethanol aren’t cost efficient…yet. Solar energy is VERY INEFFICIENT. As soon as gas gets to $8 a gallon, there will be other kinds of energy. Until then…it aint’ happenin!
We have to protect ourselves. We are the most generous country the world has EVER seen. The U.S. has defended Muslims all over the world also. Since 51% of us want to continue surviving, we want to see the U.S. prosper…and win the power game worldwide.