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Commentary on Godless: The Church of Liberalism, by Ann H. Coulter, Crown Forum, 2006 A Commentary, not a Summarizing Review
Eeje Religion
Ecstasy
Entitlement, or The One Lost Sheep
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Violent Evangelism The militant, aggressive Evangelist or militant, aggressive missionary, believes in a belief system, and lives a Way of Life which he or she knows surpasses every alternative system or Way in every measure of excellence. He or she burns with zeal to impose that system and that Way onto anyone and everyone who believes differently, or lives differently. Missionaries delight in imposing their beliefs and Way of Life onto aborigines, putting clothes on them and mandating that they use the missionary position for koitein. The Way of Life part of this zeal readily morphs into political expression, as it did, for example, in Prohibition. Given political expression, this zeal morphs into an insistence on what we call regime change today, and the Evangelical missionary imperative morphs into violent military action taken on its behalf. This sequence of events materialized in the Spanish-American War. That splendid little war, as they called it at the time, softened the nation up for entry into World War I. Evangelical fervor morphed from a focus on winning souls for Christ to imposing democracy onto nations thru regime changes in them. The Twentieth Century became the American Century, and also became the Century of Mega-death. A parallel sequence for the Twenty First Century got off to a start with Iraq II, a splendid little war, its promoters argued, which would impose democracy onto the Middle East because of violently imposing it upon the people of Iraq. This war has not met those expectations because the Islamics know more about violently imposed regime change to a new regime which then violently maintains itself in power, than we do, since they have had nearly a millenium and a half of experience with a religion committed to that goal. In her chapter five Coulter comes down very definitively on the side of the U.S. War Party. In her advocacy, however, she continues her defacto attack on Eeje religion, rather than emphasizing the kind of advocacy we get from the Evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell and John Hagee. The Liberals cast the soldiers and their families, and the taxpayers, in the role of The One Lost Sheep. They draw upon this population for their speakers. Like all religions, Liberal religion invokes the dynamics of ecstasy, in other words the dynamics of daydreaming, to formulate its arguments. The arguments can therefore depart as distantly from reality as occasion requires. Coulter’s chapter five puts these dynamics on dramatic display. Phoebans, however, can not accept the implications of her doctrinal thrust because the invasion of Iraq violates the fundamental organizing principle which defines our war policy. This principle comes to us in Dio Chrysostom’s First Discourse on Kingship, where he says to the Emperor Trajan, those best prepared for war, to them it most beautifully exists to lead in peace. While we can make war better than anybody else, in general we will not. In a world at peace, nations will get along with other nations whom they do not particularly like, or whom they possibly even detest. A policy of leading in peace explicitly excludes wars which seek to impose democracy onto a regime which we deem undemocratic. Public School During my years as a scientific computer programmer I attended educational meetings in several different cities. In the evening I visited hippie colonies, then raging, in several of those cities. What I observed there compelled me to recognize that the Dionysian component of Eeje religion, as I now call it, the ecstasy, defined the Way of Life which the hippies lived. The hippies departed from reality into a virulent form of insanity. While this insanity prevailed most acutely in San Francisco and New York City, all the colonies I visited put it on vivid display. I recognized that these teenagers and young adults lived by the precepts of a religion. They not only lived by it, but energetically evangelized others to join up. While almost all of the hippies that I saw belonged ethnically to the White middle class, they congratulated themselves on their lack of predjudices of every kind. They demanded a world of political justice for everyone. Many of them obviously did not work for a living, and so they depended on their status of an entitlement population for the financing of their life style. In summary, they exhibited all the features of what I now call Eeje religion. Where, I wondered, did they learn this life style, and not only learn it but aggressively internalize it in spite of the personal destruction which it required them to impose upon themselves. They would certainly not get it from their parents, and peer pressure can not explain the philosophical legitimization of the insanity which characterized them and their style of life. Drawing on my own personal exprience, I finally realized that the hippies got their religion, value system, and Way of Life in Public School. It took me so long to arrive at that insight, because such an easily identified source of Eeje religion in the kids should have energized the dynamics of an uprising among parents who would end Public School, shut it down, unless it ceased to convert their children to Eeje values and life style. Public School gets hostile attention which increases almost by the day, but it also gets huge and increasing subsidies to continue what it presently does. Coulter's chapter six focuses on those subsidies, and the soft, well paid jobs which most Public School teachers enjoy. As the priesthood of an established religion, they make heavy and always increasing demands on the population whose support they compel. While Phoebans agree with her in what she says, we also scold her for not putting more emphasis on what the students learn from this priesthood. Many other writers have focused on this issue, but they have not emphasized the religious elements of Public School personal values, and political, economic, and social doctrines. I have put it all together here. Coulter's chapter six continues her tirade against antiwar activism. However much we generally agree with her, and even agree that antiwar advocacy in our nation today lacks a solid philosophical foundation, we nevertheless oppose wars of principle like both Iraq Wars, but especially Iraq II. Religion Versus Science The doctrines of a religion emerge from the conscious, deliberate replacement of a part of reality with daydreamed content. The Ecstasy principle of Eeje religion mandates that the person become a daydream person living in a daydream world. The Equality principle enables Eeje religionists to override the realities of the human psyche by mandating the override of the differences which characterize all people, insofar as these differences influence interpersonal behavior. Since equality does not and can not exist, as a political organizing principle it overrides reality, and therefore can and does inspire religious belief. It can inspire religious fervor, and the behavior which characterizes violent religious Evangelism, as occurred in the American and French Revolutions. It can and does translate into legislation which imposes ruinous punishments onto whoever performs behavior which the legislation forbids, or fails to perform behavior which the legislation makes compulsory. The Equality principle of Eeje religion energizes the dynamics of dominance behavior in those who can exploit it, and the Liberals have mastered that exploitation. For that reason, they understandably attack any attack on the principle. To keep the citizenry accustomed to complying with that dominance, they apply the principle in defiance of realities wherever they can get away with it. Realists expect physical science to investigate physical reality and announce the physical facts they find, and the organizing principles which enable the understanding of those facts. Coulter's chapter seven, however, gives vivid illustrations of Liberal attack on scientific findings and principles which attack their Equality imperative. The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray hit the Liberals like geological evidence for the earth's age hits Creationists. Coulter reviews their response, and later confirmation of the book's teaching about intelligence differences. She scalds the Liberals for their AIDS stance, that everybody can get it equally easy, and that kindergarten children should have full instruction in safe sex, so that they don't catch it. I suppose I should review her text in greater detail here, but my stomach won't allow it. Suffice it to say that she and I agree wholly on the topic of sex education in Public School. Larry Summers, when President of Harvard, made some remarks about innate differences between men and women in aptitude for mathematics. Again, Coulter's analysis of the subseqeunt Liberal uproar agrees wholly with my own value system. She reviews instances, such as the ascription of cerebral palsy to medical negligence during birth, and the bankrupting of Dow-Corning over breast implants, alar on apples, and media reports of cannibalism among Katrina refugees. She joins leading Evangelicals in debunking the supposed effects of emissions on global warming. She joins many scientists in a devastating attack on the suppression of nuclear power and DDT. What would we like, she wonders, healthy people or more rare birds? Stem cells from embryos have accomplished nothing whatsoever, in spite of enormously expensive attempts, whereas adult stem cells, easily harvested, have a long list of successes. Evolution Versus Creationism The really fierce battle between the Goddists and the Liberals centers on Creation Science, or Intelligent Design, versus Darwinian Evolution. Coulter's chapter eight brilliantly surveys this battle. By way of commentary, I point out that the fatal weakness of the denial of evolution arises in the absolutely compelling geological evidence for the age of the earth. I have heard Creationists answer that God made the earth of materials which give infidel geological science glowingly deceptive excuse to posit an age of 5 billion years for the earth. This argument, and others offered in support of a young earth, no more than 6,000 or so years old, have the unique attribute that they force acceptance or rejection based on a choice. What do you like? Does the vigorous urging of a Creationist overcome the appeal of the enormous collection of evidence which the geologists offer? I consider Creationism a kind of lunacy, and its advocates a kind of lunatics. Proceeding from that point of departure, it seems altogether reasonable to me that no life existed on the young, probably hot earth which first formed from primordial elements, thru some dynamic of aggregation, and that life as we know it results from a succession of biological forms. These forms rose and fell over the past billion or so years. Their falling into oblivion doesn't require much explanation. They could not survive in an environment which, while once nurturant, became fatally hostile to them. Their rising, their origin, however, does not admit to such facile conjecture. Darwin ascribed it to random, chance mutations. We have arrived at the Great Tychian Fallacy. As part of its deliberate departure from reality, religion often creates creatures which have some of the attributes of humans. God made us, we shall understand, in his image. We therefore share some attributes with him, and he with us. These creatures, however, these deities, have other attributes which we do not share with them. A list of the attributes atributed to a deity, furthermore, will always feature inconsistencies. We shall consider God both infinitely good, for example, and infinitely powerful, omnipotent. This God would not have permitted the megadeath of the Twentieth Century to occur. A God who had the power to prevent this, which an omnipotent God has, and who did not, lacks any element of goodness, unless, of course, you consider mass murder an expression of goodness. Scientists have a deity which they make responsible for all things, and which offers an explanation for all things otherwise inexplicable. The Greeks named her Tyche, the goddess of chance. Darwin, and his matheties after him, make her responsible for the rise of new biological forms in the sequence we call evolution. I answer by saying that no random mutation ever made any creature more euthetic, more adapted, to any environment. Copying variations, in contrast to random mutations, can produce euthetic changes in an organism. Nature does not make exact copies. A copying variation in some part of an organism's DNA package can make it stronger, better able to digest food, better looking, and so forth. Two koital partners, both of whom have this variation, produce offspring that can have a definite competitive advantage. A species becomes stable when copying variations in its DNA no longer produce euthetic consequences. Since we have rejected Equality as an organizing principle, we can suppose that some DNA packets more readily yield euthetic variations than others. At some point in time, according to this theory, there emerged a dinosaur packet. Copying variations in this packet eventually led to a proliferation of dinosaur species. When the first mammal emerged, it proliferated into all kinds of mammal species. The required copying variations do not occur randomly. During the final expansion of the human brain, for example, it acquired capabilities which have no relation to environmental pressures which prevailed at the time. When Einstein needed some Noneuclidean geometry for his relativity theory, he found it ready and waiting in the mathematical outputs of Bernhard Riemann. When Gell-Mann needed a mathematical organizing structure for his particle theory, he found it ready and waiting in the group theory of Sophus Lie. Mathematical ability like this can not develop randomly, nor in response to savannah or jungle environmental pressures. The structure of the emerging brain followed some kind of natural laws which governed the outcome of its expansion. These laws adapted it to mathematical constructions which correctly simulate physical reality. That euthesis, that adaptation, could have happened only because those governing laws also relate closely to the laws which govern the realities of the physical cosmos. Darwin's invoking of Tyche, the goddess of chance, to account for the kind of variations which any theory of evolution requires, makes a religion out of his particular theory. For that reason, Darwin appeals irresistibly to the acolytes of Eeje religion. The battle between Darwinists and Creationists place two religions along a battle line, rather than religion battling against science. Coulter's chapter eight makes the religious thrust of Darwinistic advocacy brilliantly clear. Federal Judges, aspiring as they do to achieve recognition as high priests of Eeje religion, give the Darwinists all the power and other advantages of an established religion. |
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Intelligent Design Coulter's chapter nine insists upon a designer. She hammers relentlessly on absurdities in Darwinian explanations for creatures such as flying squirrels and bat wings. She presents many plausible arguments against the idea that a new species can emerge from a predecessor. She exposes blatant frauds such as Piltdown Man, the English peppered moth, and Haeckel's embryos. Karl Popper demands disprovability as a criterion for a scientific theory. It occurs to me that a correct theory fails this test. Furthermore, the advocates of a theory like intelligent design can keep you up all night explaining away the defects of their theory. You can not disprove any theory about anything in a discussion of it with people who believe religiously in it. Popper's criterion, in other words, not only excludes the possibility of a correct theory, it does not prevent the acceptance of a demonstrably wrong theory. How, then, shall we choose a theory? The New Testament answers that question with the simple answer that we shall choose it. The idea of choice figures very importantly in our Holy Scriptures. God himself chooses, as when he chose Jesus, or chose the foolish, weak, low and despised, and poor. Jesus chose twelve matheties. New Testament philosophy mandates the making of choices. How shall we choose something like a theory? We shall know them by their fruits. We choose or reject a theory on the basis of its outcomes. I Choose Evolution over Intelligent Design I choose Evolution, in the sense of a sequence of forms, over Creation or Intelligent Design. For all of its enormously many problems, Evolution at least postulates physically real processes, as opposed to the doings of a virulently whimsical, certifiably insane, and in fact impossible entity, a deity, who depends on Fundamentalist preachers and other Clerics to speak for him. I make that choice, and then live with the outcomes which follow. Coulter's chapter ten continues her searing diatribe about how Eejo religion suppresses dissent by making the dissenters pay. She sets the record straight on the Scopes Monkey Trial as an enormously successful publicity stunt concocted for that purpose, rather than to oppose prohibitions on the teaching of evolution by putting those prohibitions on display. Evolution, she says, enables atheists to explain our presence here on Earth by making it a probabilistic accident. As an atheist myself, I respond to that challenge by saying that I don't need an excuse. Her final chapter, eleven, explores the reasons people continue to believe in God and the existence of God. Phoebans answer that challenge by pointing out that Evangelism depends on suasion, getting people to choose their point of view, whereas atheists try to prove that God does not exist. In order to counter the claims of religion, atheists require to suade people into choosing that option. We urge that choice not only because we like it for our own personal reasons, but because of the outcomes it yields. Phoebans do not make the horrible mistake of dumping New Testament philosophy when we dump New Testament theology. New Testament philosophy, its value sysem and Way of Life, accounts for Christianity's success. We accept this philosophy, among ourselfs, and urge it onto others, because of the benefits it brings into a person's daily life in the family, in the workplace, and in society at large. This advocacy of New Testament morality, values, and Way of Life, explicitly negates the major thrust of Coulter's final chapter. She insists that morality requires theological reference. We disagree. We say, choose the Christian Way of Life, as The New Testament actually teaches it, because you will then have made a good choice. The Family Voter Bloc You might expect Coulter to posit an agenda, a program which people who agree with her could implement in a successful effort to reduce the incidence of the behavior which she so energetically condemns. We get no such from her. In this book, at least, she offers not one solo word of a plan of action. She writes for a political subculture which I call handwringers. These people wring their hands over the political and cultural circumstances and events which mightily distress them, but carry their action no farther. It surprised me greatly when I first learned about these people and the groups which serve them, but they exist, and anyone contemplating cultural and political activism must concede that existence, and must avoid them. Because of our affiliation with The New Testament and its philosophical doctrines, The Family Voter Bloc considers itself a Protestant denomination of Christianity. We expect to become the largest such. At that numerical strength we can decisively influence elections, both primaries and general elections. For us, meaningful cultural and political activism replaces the missionary Evangelism of the traditional denominations. Suffice it here to say that this activism answers the complaint we have against the handwringers. Furthermore, we can suppose that our agenda will attract the votes of most Christian handwringers. We will certainly strive to attract those votes. Pragmateia The Family Voter Bloc (FVB, pronounced Phoebe) militantly offers an alternative to Eeje religion. We commit our selfs and lifes to pragmatic realism. This phrase, pragmatic realism, means behavior, performed in the real world, that produces its expected outcomes. Philosophically, the New Testament word pragmateia has this same meaning. Phoebans, as a variety of Christians, accept pragmateia (pragma-TY-ah) as the name which designates pragmatic realism as a fundamental organizing principle for the behavior of daily life in the family, in the workplace, and in society at large. The Origin of The New Testament Pragmateia emerges from The New Testament upon the separation of its philosophical content from its theological content. A look at the original composition, the original putting together, of these two major themes makes their separation plausible and provides guidelines which direct it. Phoebe's newsletter for January 28, 2006 tells the story of how Dio Chrysostom, a philosopher who lived from 40 AD to 120 AD, headed a conspiracy which wrote The New Testament. He wrote considerable parts of it, but not all of it. He had to draw on Jewish sources, for example, for the Jewish content of the Scriptures. While he edited the Scriptures for thematic and linguistic continuity, the differing styles of contributors survived that editing. When I say something which no one else has said, I can claim bragging rights, but on the other hand skeptics can wonder why no one else has said this new saying of mine. Certainly plenty of people have had a chance to make Dio the primary author of The New Testament. A Yahoo! search on Dio Chrysostom New Testament yielded 5,810 hits. The MSN search yielded 2,510 hits, and the Google search yielded 23,100 hits. Many of these hits had no relevance whatsoever to the search parameters, but some of them did. In 1985, for example, I bought a book titled Dio Chrysostom and The New Testament, G. Mussies, E. J. Brill, 1972. I paid some $40 for it, as I recall. I could now get it new from an internet supplier for $316.89. The University of Chicago lists a seminar on Dio Chrysostom and The New Testament as part of its program leading to a PhD in Divinity. I readily suppose that these authorities have chosen not to ascribe to Dio what I ascribe to him. If we dealt here with any other book than The New Testament, however, the scholars would have long since arrived at my conclusion, in view of the massively many parallels between Dio's Discourses and the Scriptures. The February 7, 2008 Newsletter, The Origin of The New Testament, devotes its 89 pages to that topic. For your rush copy, send check or money order for $10 to Family Voter Bloc P. O. Box 2753 North Canton, OH 44720 For even faster shipping, click on the PayPal button. . |