My own 35 undeniable truths of life.
When I was in my first year of college, I took a class in Rhetoric and Communication. One day we were given an assignment to "defend an unpopular position." Not just a "Coke vs. Pepsi" type debate, mind you, but something with real teeth. We had to give a five minute speech before class, complete with illustrations of the problem and our proposed — albeit unpopular — solution.
My guess, in hindsight, was that our instructor was looking for a "raise taxes by 10% type position," but I thought that was pretty dull stuff for a group of college freshmen who had no concept of working for a living, and would probably have supported a 50% tax increase if it was on people who lived in nice houses and drove big cars. So instead, I decided to get creative.
I'd had a few intellectual run-ins in this class with a guy by the name of Henry Wong, who happened to break his arm the week of the assignment. So, when it was my turn to give my speech, I launched into a passionate pitch to have everyone join me in "beating up Henry Wong." I argued that not only was he defenseless in his present condition and thus couldn't fight back, minimizing any physical harm to people who followed my prescription, I pointed out that Henry, although technically a "minority," wasn't black or Hispanic, so there was no additional downside to picking on him because of his race.
Now before any Liberals looking in get their PC panties in a wad, Henry took it all in good fun, even scrunching up as I spoke to make himself look even more diminutive than he already was. My teacher though, a black female, was horrified by my speech and threatened to go to the school administration over my behavior.
As an eighteen-year-old kid I was first shocked, then scared, and then after an administrator started laughing about what I did (this after all was the 1970s, when people were still permitted to have a sense of humor), a little pissed off at being called a racist. Not pissed off at the school, or even at my misguided, hyper-sensitive instructor, since I thought she was an intellectual light-weight anyway. But pissed off at the idiocy and double standards that I was slowly becoming aware of. If Henry used me as a prop for a "let's beat up the only Conservative in the class" speech, somehow I don't think there would have been the same degree of outrage on the part of our instructor.
I learned that day that in the mind of a Liberal, an action is not the determining factor in judging one's behavior. It's one's motives, which are divined in some mystical way by looking at the paleness of a person's skin. The more pale the presumed perpetrator, the more purposeful the malicious intent is assumed to be. Identical language is not identical either. Insert or add a preposition into a sentence, and you're instantly transformed from John Wayne into John Wayne Gacy, from expressing a neutral thought, to spewing hate-filled rhetoric.
Think I'm exaggerating? Only in a world of political correctness gone mad is it racist to call someone a "colored person," but enlightened to refer to them as a "person of color." This is why, henceforward, I will no longer use my favorite phrase to identify dangerous or idiotic people, but instead refer to them as "holes of ass."
It is because of this insanity disguised as rational thought that I've assembled over the years a number of words to live by; thoughts or phrases that capture the essence of life today in the United States of Liberal Utopia. Some of these words and phrases you've seen from me before. Others I'm sharing with you for the first time. Each, I believe, captures an undeniable truth about the world today, and can serve as a quick, handy guide for those wishing to navigate the waters of Liberal Lunacy that has transformed social, economic, and political dialogue and interaction in this country.
1. People who publicly and repeatedly profess their love for humanity are usually the most self-centered, self-absorbed humans on the planet.
2. If "world consensus" is the source of human morality, as many Moral Relativists believe, then the United Nations is the fountainhead of all that is good and decent in the world.
3. Animals do not have "rights", souls, or feelings the way people do, despite what some people earnestly believe. Rather, what they do have is instinct and basic animal intelligence, as well as an owner with an overactive imagination.
4. When beautiful people think they're ugly, we call this low self-esteem. When ugly people think they're beautiful, we call them drunk, deluded, or very rich.
5. Asking the humorless to recognize humor is like asking the turgid to think. It can be done, but always painfully.
6. You can compromise with your spouse. Sometimes, you can compromise with your neighbor. And occasionally, you can compromise with your boss (if you still have the negatives from last year's Christmas party). But you can't compromise with evil.
7. Wishing for a better world won't make it happen. But a couple of tons of bunker-busting bombs dropped on the right target will.
8. You can lead a person to knowledge, but you can't make them think.
9. Supporting 9 out of the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution is not enough.
10. Consistency is the hobgoblin of Liberal Minds.
11. The more highly educated a person is, the more likely he is to say something incredibly stupid. (Present company included; my ideas should always be subject to test and debate before one accepts them.)
12. It's a good thing to forgive your enemies; but wait until they ask for it. Until then, keep shooting.
13. Killing civilians during war, and targeting them specifically, is not the same thing.
14. Believing in God, and following a religion, is not the same thing.
15. Nothing quite focuses the mind like the government offering to help you.
16. Terrorists fervently believe they are doing the right thing, and/or their behavior should somehow be excused. So do psychopaths and criminals.
17. Irony is lost on the ironic. More irony is lost on the truly moronic.
18. Why is a person who's half black and half white always identified as "black," if race doesn't matter to the people making these judgments?
19. The difference between believing that the government is there to help you, and believing that Santa Clause will bring you presents, is that Santa doesn't have the power to tax your income.
20. If you can't pronounce it, don't eat it. Or vote for it.
21. Spending your way out of debt is like lying your way into the truth.
22. Ideas are stupid, not people. But truly stupid people will fail to see this distinction.
23. Gross stupidity is a designation that must be earned by a person, not simply assigned out of frustration.
24. Something can still be stupid, no matter how honestly you believe it.
25. In a debate, the people you speak directly to will never change their minds, no matter what you say. Your real focus is the people listening to the conversation who have nothing invested in either position, and will decide which of you makes the better case.
26. I can urge others not to do something wrong, even if I haven't led a perfect life. Hypocrisy does not obviate morality, since whether I act morally or not doesn't excuse your bad behavior.
27. To a Conservative, "rich" is that condition which highly motivated people work hard to attain. To a Liberal, "rich" is someone who makes more money than you do, and this isn't fair.
28. If the Constitution is a "living document" that protects human rights, why does it allow women to arbitrarily kill so many innocent babies?
29. There is no problem in the Middle East that cannot be solved with a twenty-megaton thermonuclear explosion, as long as it's properly focused.
30. Emoting is not the same thing as thinking.
31. Believing something strongly is not the same thing as analyzing it, just as endlessly repeating this belief is not an answer to any questions raised about that belief.
32. I can still defend your right to free speech while encouraging everyone to ignore the insanity of what you're saying.
33. It's okay to mock, insult and/or denigrate Christians and the Christian faith, but not Muslims and their faith, because unlike the "Religion of Peace," Christians don't kill you if you eat pork, let women drive or vote, or draw an irreverent cartoon about their religion.
34. Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who do neither hold elective office — and consistently lecture us all on what we need to do.
And finally, no list would be complete without the singular notion I formed in that Rhetoric and Communications class back in the 1970s, and still carry with me to this day.
35. The fundamental dividing point in life is not whether someone is young or old, male or female, black or white, or even Liberal or Conservative. Rather, as we form judgments about other people with whom we have contact, it involves an answer to a simple question. "Is that person an a**hole?"
Feel free to add some of your own to this list. Unfortunately, in the hopie changie world in which we now live, it's only going to get more Orwellian.
Raymond: Exactly. We all know you read the first couple of pages of what I wrote when I set up the issue about whether man or God “installs’ a moral code. My conclusion was, neither does.
Nature cannot provide universal moral content through genetics. Man cannot provide universal moral content through consensus/education, etc. And man cannot invoke God’s name via religion to “install” a religion-based moral code. [I spent section 3, and the last half of the paper arguing how “Jesus” is not a substitution for “God” in discussing God-given rights, etc.]
My position was that only God instills a UMC directly in us at the moment of conception, which I repeatedly argued throughout the rest of the paper you apparently never read.
You can disagree that God directly instilled a UMC as I proposed, that there is even a God or a human soul as you’ve argued before, that human consensus is tantamount to universal morality, or any other variant of what I actually wrote about beyond page 3 of my paper.
But don’t insult my, and everyone else’s intelligence, by telling us all now that “I never claimed to critique your entire article. I only addressed one part of it – the argument that a ‘moral sense’ had to be “installed” by God”. To do this, you’re reduced to the following nonsensical position. By arguing against “installing” a moral code (as I explicitly and repeatedly did), you decided to write a response to my paper by … agreeing with me?!
Not credible. Not believable.
I’m not going re-argue the whole debate. I already did this once with you, based on a good faith understanding on my part that you were actually going to react to what I actually wrote. It’s there for anyone to see, when I raised these same issues with you before http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/07/13/the-true-nature-of-human-morality-a-response-to-the-critique-%e2%80%9cuniversal-morality-and-the-morality-of-the-universe%e2%80%9d/
Besides, I no longer trust you to engage in an honest debate, so why waste my time.
And just as another small point. In reviewing your paper, I addressed the points you actually made. I didn’t wander off into tangents about all the things that atheists or other people might possibly believe that you never asserted.
You, on the other hand, devoted most of your critique to what some other people may believe about God interjecting himself into daily life, or whether X religion speaks directly for God, or whether God insists that we do specific things (vs. giving us a way to figure out right from wrong).
You took the opening of my essay and used it to write a generic paper about the fallacy of God imposing actions on man through religion and other man-made devices. Your “response” to my paper had virtually nothing to do with my actual conclusions.
Write whatever paper you want, but don’t use me to set up a straw man argument about God imposing morality on us through religion, as if that was what I wrote about.
I object to you suggesting that these views are somehow views that I support so as to denigrate and misrepresent what I actually said. That’s a dishonest way to engage in debate.
Dr. Jackson – I set up the issue about whether man or God “installs’ a moral code. My conclusion was, neither does… My position was that only God instills a UMC directly in us at the moment of conception…
Ummm… no. You never made any distinction between “instilling” and “installing” – you used the words, but you never actually defined the difference. It was rather striking, considering how much you wrote, that there was never a section where you actually came out and explicitly made such a distinction.
You can disagree that God directly instilled a UMC as I proposed…
Which I did. You can’t point to a single part of my paper where I argued “about God interjecting himself into daily life” (at most I made a passing reference, in a footnote, to the possibility of ‘revelation’ – or a section responding, with quotes from your paper, to your specifically bringing up God as an “independent variable” in scientific “hypotheses”), “whether X religion speaks directly for God”, or “whether God insists that we do specific things” (the only specific actions I talked about were the ones you talked about – abortion, terrorism, etc.).
You’ve quoted liberally from your own works. But you’ve only made assertions about mine, not actually illustrated your points with quotes from it… something else that’s striking.
Raymond: I’ll save you the trouble of responding with a partial quote of what I said to insist that — despite the rest of my paper where I argue against God “installing” a moral code in us by violating the laws of nature and having direct conversations with men, or otherwise inserting himself into this world [which is how I defined "install" vs. "instill" in my paper] — somehow I really really really meant the exact opposite of what I said.
Here’s the paragraph I mentioned above where that quote appeared (and you again referenced), AND the one following it that discusses the ‘Right-wing’ implications of believing this (since the earlier paragraphs made fun of Leftist moral relativity):
“ … This suggests only two broad options. It must either involve a purely physical explanation (such as culture, society, genetics, etc.), or a metaphysical one; which is to say a morality based on the existence and purposeful actions of God.
“I can almost see the wide-eyed stare from those who think I just stated that we should overthrow 200-plus years of Constitutional government and install Jerry Falwell as our new president. And you thought it couldn’t get any worse that Bush? No, this isn’t what I was implying. I was simply taking the notion that God cares about bumper-to-bumper traffic and U.S. foreign policy, and carrying it forward to a logical conclusion. I said ‘logical’ conclusion, rather than a purely relativistic one, so we don’t end up with a series of television commercials that pits Jesus in a Yugo against Allah in a Mini-Cooper to see who can get the better mileage.”
In effect, the notion of a Christian God-imposed morality is just as wrong as Leftist relativistic notions of morality.
If this conclusion wasn’t clear enough for you at this point, you could have continued reading where I went to talk about the presumed “purpose” of God’s actions embodied in the Declaration of Independence — focusing on the concept of innate, God-given rights vs. man bestowed secular rights or religion-bestowed rights ‘moral’ rights. That then prompted an entire section on constitutional law that spoke about how Christian notions of morality cannot be imposed on the country.
All this is clear to anyone who actually read what I wrote.
Dr. Jackson – All we have to do is go just a tiny bit further – a mere three paragraphs – to see you speaking very seriously about “God-given moral justification”, and just five paragraphs further – “Acknowledging God as the source of morality”.
You equate “installed” with “imposed” – apparently using the meaning of ‘installed’ like “placed in an office” – but I’ve been quite clear that I used “installed” as “set up for use” – within humans – and not in the sense of “installed as a government”, governing over humans. This seems to be the main focus of your misunderstanding.
When I discussed a “God-imposed morality”, I was discussing it in the same sense you were, as “the source of morality”, as “God-given moral justification” – not some specific religion or potential theocracy. (Note that I never used the word “Christian” once in my response, and the only occurrence of “Jesus” is quoting the title of your essay.) Whether it’s a “command” by God, or just a polite request, isn’t much of a distinction. Note that you yourself couldn’t really answer the question of why God picked a particular UMC to ‘instill’, it just had to come from God.
>Acknowledging God as the source of morality.
Yeah Raymond. You finally got it.
The thesis is about God as the source of morality. Not man through human consensus. Not man assuming he speaks on behalf of God. Not God “commanding” anyone to do X. But from God directly — through instilling a univeral moral code in all of us that lets us know what is intrinsically right or wrong.
Congrats on finally reading far enough to get to my thesis.
As for me not knowing “why” God picked “it is immoral to deliberately harm an innocent human being” as the UMC, like I said in my paper, I don’t know why God does what He does other than to reason that it’s done for a purpose, and to reason that if God does something for a purpose it’s logical to assume there are consequences for not doing it. As for what those consequences are, I leave that up to God and the individual, not to me to decide.
Recognizing a UMC, and knowing “why” God did it, are two different things. I can recognize a lot of things without understanding exactly how and why they came about. There’s no contradiction here.
Dr. Jackson – I got that a while ago. Would that you could get my point.
The section on “divine command theory” was quite relevant to “God as the source of morality” – asking the question of how God could define morality. What about God would make what It instills moral? Could God make something “intrinsically right or wrong”? (I could ask – as I often do when people bring up the ‘inscrutable purposes of God’ – What if God is exactly like a shepherd, down to the shearing and slaughter?)
You interpreted this as arguing against a theocracy, and it went completely over your head. Sorry, I tried to pitch it directly at you, but apparently I overestimated your reach.
I then went on to discuss an alternate conception of how morality could be constituted, and from that where the moral sense – the intrinsic sense of right and wrong humans have, which you term the UMC – could come from. But because you completely misunderstood the first step, we never really got a chance to grapple with the rest of it.
Raymond:
Please re-read comment 99 where I showed you how I repeatedly used the word “instill” and “install” in my essay. You are correct that I didn’t say ‘Here is my definition of these words’. I assumed some minimum level of competency on the part of the reader.
But I don’t recall you defining either of these words in your rejoinder to me, so it’s kind of a BS complaint to say I never formally defined the words, given the numerous ways I put both words in context in my essay. And the fact that you never bothered to use the word “instill”, and simply repeated one use of my word “install” without questioning it’s definition.
As for feeling free to disagree with my conclusions about a UMC, congrats again on making a non point. I tell everyone they’re free to disagree with me. I don’t require people to agree with me. I’m after clarity, not agreement.
And yes, I know that you spent a lot of time discussing “divine command theory”, which is something I specifically rejected in my paper as an explanation when I said that man doesn’t speak for God. And, I didn’t spend any time on questions about who/what God is (an old man, an ethereal force, etc.). This may be interesting stuff to some people, but have absolutely nothing to do with my thesis other than the word “God” is used by me and them.
Since you’ve made a point of challenging Divine Command Theory as if it had something to do with your “Response to Phillip Jackson”, here’s what I actually wrote about what you actually said about this matter
To begin his critique, Mr. Ingles takes all that I said above (and in much greater detail in “What Kind of Car Would Jesus Drive?”) and reduces it to a philosophical argument about “divine command theory.” This produces such questions as: Do the gods love the pious? And, is there something about sacrificing animals that is intrinsically pious?
It’s a nonsense, straw-man way to treat the subject. Start by asking what did Plato and Socrates say about divinity and morality, then understanding what they said, assume that this now somehow helps define the inherent content of morality. It’s interesting stuff philosophically, and it uses some of the same words I do (though in different ways), but in the end this line of reasoning tells us nothing about why all people are universally, morally opposed to harming an innocent human life; and why when they do, they consistently define-away its humanity or innocence to rationalize the action. We kill cows by the millions without once ever considering whether they are human or not. Why is it so important to make sure it’s a slave that’s being molested instead of a free child, or to label your enemies Infidels or heretics before you randomly slaughter them? Or define that child as a tissue mass instead of a human being before you abort it?
The reason for this disconnect is that Mr. Ingles takes what I say about God “instilling” a universal moral code in every human being at the moment of conception, and analyzes this statement by speaking about a “divinely-imposed morality.” This isn’t a case of substituting a word like “street” for “avenue” and quibbling about whether that somehow makes a difference in describing the same basic, paved roadway. At best, it’s a way to knock down an argument I never made (and in fact rejected myself) as having anything at all to do with understanding the content of morality. At worst, it’s a complete restatement of my thesis to reject a point that I took great pains to make myself. Talking about religious teaching is not the same thing as talking about God Himself, or the direct instillation of a universal moral code in man by God.
Once again Raymond, what you’ve done is write a paper about morality, which is fine. But it is not a critique of what I said as you said you were going to do.
You decided that since we were both interested in the same general topic, you’d add your two cents worth. Which again is fine, but it is not an analysis of what I said.
By contrast, I took you at your word and analyzed what you said. Not what other people might believe. Not what some other scientist or philosopher might think. But what YOU said.
This is the difference between us. I read every single word you produced, and reacted to those words. You read the introduction to my essay, and a few other paragraphs here and there, and then wrote a paper about the strange things people might believe about morality and God and assigned those beliefs to me.
I’m really not interested in debating my paper with you two years after you were supposed to read it. I’m also not interested in dissuading you from your personal beliefs. I don’t really care what you personally believe; that’s your business.
A debate is an opportunity for one side to critique the actual thesis of the other. This is what I did in going point-by-point through your reasoning. Not other people’s reasoning, but your specific reasoning. This is why I didn’t tar you with silly atheist statements made by other people and suggest that this was a “response to Raymond Ingles”. As a side note, my response to you is where you’ll find my ‘use of direct quotes’ from your paper that I specifically disagree with, challenge or agree with, along with quoting sections of my own paper you overlooked or omitted in making your direct quotes.
If all you wanted to do was state your ideas about God and morality, you didn’t need my essay. You could have just written your paper about the illogic of Divine Command Morality, your belief in game theory and other issues.
But by saying that your paper was specifically “A response to Phillip Ellis Jackson”, you attributed things to me I never said, and in fact specifically rejected. And that is what I object to as dishonest debate.
I’m never going to convince you of my position about God and morality, just as you are never going to convince me about yours. This is why I produced #25 in my above essay: “In a debate, the people you speak directly to will never change their minds, no matter what you say. Your real focus is the people listening to the conversation who have nothing invested in either position, and will decide which of you makes the better case.”
I’m not interested in further “debate” with you. I don’t believe that you actually read and responded to my paper, as opposed to simply making general comments about the subject matter and labeling that as a “response” to me. But I’m not going to belabor the point.
I made my case for why I believe my characterization of your paper is correct. You’ve made your case why it wasn’t that way. I’m happy to let anyone who cares decide the matter for themselves, if anyone is even still paying attention to this pissing match.
All I ask for is to have my ideas attributed to me, and not other people’s ideas debated in any “response” to what I’ve written.
To quote a noted authority by the name of Dr. Jackson, “I’ve cautioned people in the past about starting an analysis with a preset conclusion and then working backwards to find data to support it. Instead, the best approach is to ask basic questions and assemble a working hypothesis, then test it out with an objective look at the facts — sometimes mixed with a little humor to keep things interesting or to illustrate a longer point more succinctly.”
I took that advice and started by looking at the concept of morality itself – something that, er, underlies any conception of a “universal moral code”. I then worked forward, marshalling facts to test it with along the way and pointing out where I diverged from your analysis and why.
You would do well to take your own advice. You want me to be arguing against theocracy, so you work backward to find data to support that. You characterize the section on ‘divine command theory’ (which doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means) as “[t]alking about religious teaching”, when that has nothing to do with what I’m talking about in that section. I’m asking whether – as you explicitly and non-ironically assert – a God could be “the source of morality”.
I’m quite positive that I’m never going to convince you of my position. Indeed, it appears to be impossible to get you to recognize it.
Your opening line was a “RESPONSE TO PHILLIP ELLIS JACKSON.” It would have been nice to actually discuss what I said instead of Divine Command Theory.
I began my analysis by restating MY position (since your paper had little to do with what I wrote). I didn’t begin it by looking at crazy-ass theories OTHER PEOPLE might have proposed, but YOU didn’t.
I expected you to focus on what I actually said , not what Plato and Aristotle said, or biblical literalists might have said, or what other people might have said. I didn’t analyze your paper by talking about OTHER PEOPLE’S concepts of morality as if they had anything to do with YOUR theory.
This is not a difficult issue to grasp, unless you don’t want to.
I guess I should be happy in some small way that at least you’re now going back and reading what I wrote and responding to me, rather than what other people said about God and morality.
Had you actually taken my above quote about not “working backwards” in your “Response” to me and analyzed that, I would have said the following to you.
1. This is the methodology I followed. I did not begin with the conclusion that God instilled morality in all of us. I explored other alternatives first. You can agree or disagree with my analysis (this is the purpose of a critical analysis) and state where my logic or facts were supposedly misguided. But you can’t claim that I wrote a paper focusing only on God, and ignored every other factor.
2. On the other hand, by ignoring what I actually wrote in favor of beginning your comments with what other people have said about morality, and showing where other people’s theories are deficient, you did exactly waht I cautioned against. You began your “Response to Phillip Jackson” with a polemic about morality in general that had little to do with my actual analysis.
This is how a real debate goes. Unfortunately, the time has long since passed to have this intellectual exchange with you, which is a pity. Even though you only tangentially addressed what I actually put forth as a thesis, it did give me an opportunity to compare my thesis to additional objections that might be raised to it over and above the ones I noted myself.
I have no interest in repeating myself further on this issue. Anyone who really wants to understands what you and I did can read our papers and decide for themselves.
Go ahead and have your final say if you want to. I don’t believe that you were deliberately dishonest in the way you “responded” to what I wrote, but I do believe the approach was dishonest. This word is a throwback from my university days when people were skewered for doing what you did. But I won’t publically hold you to that standard anymore unless you want to keep this issue alive.
I think you wrote your own paper instead of responding to my ideas, which would have been fine if your paper hadn’t been labeled a “Response” to my ideas. We could have then debated each other’s theories, instead of me spending the last two years distancing myself from ideas I never expressed that you ‘analyzed’ in your “response” to me.
Dr. Jackson – I guess I should be happy in some small way that at least you’re now going back and reading what I wrote and responding to me, rather than what other people said about God and morality.
If you look back at our exchange these past few days, I haven’t posted anything new along those lines. I’ve simply pointed out aspects of what I originally posted that you apparently hadn’t considered. The fact that, in my paper, I needed to set the stage a bit – just like you did in your own ‘book’ – doesn’t mean that I didn’t address what you wrote.
You can agree or disagree with my analysis (this is the purpose of a critical analysis)
Which I did. I pointed out a specific error – a possibility not considered in your paper, when you yourself stated that you needed to examine all possibil
ities – and explained why it was a problem for your case.
Your conclusion was that God placed an awareness of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in humans, by some metaphysical means, at conception. I pointed out a different, non-metaphysical account for such an awareness that you hadn’t considered in your ‘book’. In doing so, I had to point out some fundamental issues affecting
any conception of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but I quite definitely addressed your conclusion and the case you made for it.
In any case, we certainly have gone beyond the point of diminishing returns here.
Looks like the “doctor” took a beating in this exchange.
Twice.