21st-century Christian Philosopher

Today, I surfed across an item from Skeptico, a blog billed “Critical Thinking for an Irrational World”. The target is the post Adopting Secular Religions (Or Not), dated June 12, 2007. It’s a critique of a post on TCSDaily, called Hitchens Is Not Great: An Atheist’s Defense of Religion, written by conservative atheist Karl Reitz.

He starts off on Reitz with…

Reitz is presenting us with a false dilemma – humans will either believe in God and religion, or they will adopt false secular faiths such as fascism or communism.

..while ignoring Reitz’ mayin the quote he cites for this:

atheists […] may only have a choice between living in societies that are traditionally religious or ones that have adopted secularized religions

Didn’t know it was a False Dilemma to present a dilemma that somebody else thinks is false…

But that is not the biggest thing. He loses the flow. The flow starts from Hitchens “secularized religions” of Marxism and fascism. Then, both the blogger and Reitz agree that you need to watch out for secular religions. But later down the page we see this from the blogger:

However, [Reitz] is missing the important area where most religions differ from secular religions – belief in God. This is important because, although people may feel free to disagree with the tenets of a secular faith, they cannot disagree with God.

Like everyone could disagree with Mao and Pol Pot?! Marx lauds the Revolutionary—the guy who goes out and shoots people—as greater than the Philosopher—the guy who decides who needs to be shot and why. Marx saw himself as the last necessary philosopher.

It compounds that with the awesome concept of dupe. If somebody innocently gets in the way of the shooting enough, he can be shot as a dupe of the system. Not for just shooting at you, but for disagreeing and slowing down the shooting. You can feel free to disagree with Marx (or Lenin, his prophet) but he’s told you who needs to be shot, and he’s based it all on materialism, so it’s no mumbo-jumbo. It’s plain who needs to be shot, so you need to go shoot them.

Both of these together blunt Hitchen’s point about how Marxism was implemented in Russia, as a state religion. Marxism was born the sort of I’m-right-you’re-wrong-and-everything-is-so-obvious (“SO SHOOT THEM NOW!!”) line that you see in the world of the rank-and-file atheists (and to some degree Hitchens). By creating the state religion, complete with Orthodox-style busts of St. Lenin, Lenin just shrunk the number of the people he needed to shoot. (Revolution or not, you should avoid the course where you need to shoot too many people.) It’s arguably a case of theory meets the application, and the anti-opiate becomes a little state religion … not to mention a lot of Vodka.

Sure, Marx and Engels likely did not shoot you if you disagreed with them. And from when the parties split in 1903 until the Bolsheviks outlawed the minority party in 1921, you were (mostly) allowed to disagree with the Bolsheviks about what to make of post-Tsarist Russia.

But the same can be said of Christianity. Jesus nor the apostles came with Inquisitors to tie you to a rack and force confessions from you. Paul did not go around stoning everybody who didn’t believe him, he preached to them, and lived among unbelievers as a “tent-maker”.

They might have “looked down their noses” at the “filthy heathens” and made them feel all icky inside, but I doubt that the Greeks and Roman’s didn’t “feel free” to disagree.

The blogger is right that you can’t “disagree” (successfully) with God. But you can feel free to disagree with any god you don’t believe in that doesn’t smite you because of it. But, more than that, you can disagree under the principles of the common faith. You can argue, say, that the free grace of God is more in keeping with given scripture than paying indulgences. In my opinion, Luther did not so much as disagree with God as disagree with a negative and not very well substantiated practice. (Which the Catholic Church later repudiated as well.)

“Feel free” is such a weasly, empty phrase, anyway. Sartre would insist that I’m as free as I dare to be. Indeed, Bonhoeffer did not rely on his feeling free to disagree with the Nazis. He just did. But the Inquisition, the Fascists and the Marxists—the very “secularized religions” named by Hitchens put the same pressure on you and you were as free as you dared to feel.

He later cites Communism-as-Lysenkoism as self-limiting (despite its habit of killing off a lot of people fast.) However, the link he points to on Wikipedia says “Lysenkoism … began in the late 1920s [under Stalin] and formally ended in 1964. I’m surprised, because it sounds like we never had to worry about the Communists shortly after 1964! How the death of Lysenkoist policies eventually brought down Communism—by producing greater crops with agricultural policies that worked—is a story I need to hear!

Of course, Lysenkoism, is very easily explained as a material rationalization of what materialistic Marxist wanted to accomplish. The idea that members of a species are not intra-competitive was just what the Marxist utopia called for. If humans were in fact intra-competitive than stratifications and governmental divisions weren’t injustice as much as they were human nature. The idea was to see a natural, non-moral proof of utopian sentiment evidenced in nature, to motivate Marxian ideal that property was “theft” which was as wrong as the “theft” the culture did not approve of.

Of course, at least Lysenko saw the need to naturally justify some misgivings that shirking revolutionaries might have been having about the Master Plan to Shoot People. Modern utopians just hand-wave, “Morality is out there somewhere. If it exists, it is natural; and thus, separate from religion.”

But excursion into Lysenko would only be on target if Communism were clearly limited by the self-limiting factor of Lysenkoism. It would be like me citing the self-limiting quality of Shakerism as a proof that Christianity has the same self-limiting forces.

The self-limiting quality of components does not argue for the self-limiting quality of the thing itself. I could call Composition Fallacy, here, if I thought he was trying to make this point. It’s much more likely a confused point than an actual attempt to use Composition.

I could also shake a finger and gravely pronounce “Propter-hoc fallacy!” because he seems to link the fall of Lysenkoism with the fall of Communism, 30 years after it had increased crop yield (proving the adaptability of Communists themselves!). But, he most likely didn’t think it through. Which is why the fallacy game is a stupid game.

In fact, I have good reason to believe he’s just confused here. Despite that many atheist maintain that religions come in two forms, one of which is “secular” or “secularized”, and in particular Hitchens’ point is that they do. The blogger uses religion almost constantly in the non-secular form: “God and religion” vs. “secular faiths”.

…religion tells us that its rules are the way God says things have to be.

Really, even “secular religion”?

…it’s the certainty that God-belief provides that is the reason religion is so dangerous.

Really? That’s what made secular religions so dangerous? And the hyper-efficient killing machines of “secular religions” are comparatively benign by their lack of a God-belief because you could question Pol Pot?!

Of course, I’m picking on him here a little bit. And, I have no reason to believe that he confuses these terms any more than many other atheist bloggers. On that note, Reitz is actually more on target with his take that all religions are scary because all faiths are scary.

In my last post, I discussed the deniability of atheism shown in their statement that no direct trail exists from atheism to the massive bloodshed of the atheist Communists. I contrasted that with the equally-debatable direct trail to theism. I pointed out that although there was understandably some content for those interpretations, there were counters to it in theology.

Thus the atheist can argue not that the content of theism must be used for massacre, but that it can be used for massacre. Thus it is not the direct reducibility down to principles, but the degrees of freedom such an arguable ambiguity promotes.

Thus, it is rather uneven to look at what can result from faith, despite its requirements–not many are universal–and refuse to look at the degrees of freedom allowed by atheism, and only end up arguing what is dictated by atheism. As content-less it can be just as much about killing the stinking theists who’ve ruined the planet (and poisoned everything) as it is about a simple disbelief, which really contains no more than “Don’t think about polar bears.”

If I tell you not to think about polar bears, what am I telling you to think about? Now, live your life not thinking about polar bears. Well, everything after that is up to you–except the polar bears, that is. Don’t think about them. Lack a thought of them.

Nobody conducts their thoughts by a lack of something. And nobody lives their life by a lack of belief. In fact, if they do, they are saying something about the value of that lack. A value they cannot prove outside of sleight-of-hand about the progression of history, but one that they nonetheless believe. But for aforementioned reasons, cannot commit to.

Now there are various reasons that I ought to lack something. But each can be of questionable value. I can lack a tin-foil hat because I believe that God thinks it the worst sin. Or I can lack that hat because it’s just silly. There is no way I can weigh the value of a lack of something outside of a context that gives it value.

I mean, what atheist wouldn’t feel some chagrin at being told by another that he had a awesome argument against Christianity, who at the platform, proclaimed that some pastor’s kids pushed him down on the playground when he was 7?

There are all sorts of reasons to be atheistic, one of them might be that a theist pushed you down or called you names or stuck a sucker in your hair. It just doesn’t sound as good on the atheist FAQs does it?

Yet this is allowed in a totally context-free definition of atheism. In general, I don’t believe that atheists argue that atheism has 360 degrees of spread, and that there are as many bad reasons to be atheistic as good reasons. I don’t recall one discussion with an atheist where the chief complaint is that Christians deny ghosts and UFOs.

Remember, we can’t say anything about the quality of the argument against God given simple atheism. So we can’t say that a person believes that disbelief is good because he ate oatmeal that morning. All he has to do is lack the belief, and he’s in.

In general the 360 distribution around atheism’s non-center doesn’t work. It’s a sham once entering into a criticism of the church and the value of disbelief to invoke that oblivious center, which encompasses nobody really. It’s such a sham that I’m not impressed about the people who want to back up under cover of this infinitesimal shield.

By the way, just to put this in context, I know of a very amiable atheist who resembles none of this. But as well, he does not make stock arguments about theists and the church, he simply does not believe in God. However, I’ve often argued with him that saying that there is no stereotype we can assume by the definition of atheist is different from saying that there are no clusters of rationale which lead to this incidental state.

However the perpetrators of the “No True Scotsman” argument against Christianity half-maintain that there can be such a lack of cohesion among Christians¹. According to them, a person: who calls Jesus the “founder” of a “doctrine”², makes Jesus chief ministry “exposing the Jews”³ finds that Jesus’ greatest value was “not as a sufferer but as a fighter” ⁴ and finds race, (i.e. flesh) to be primary in importance to man⁵, all the while invoking the inviolable law of nature that the strong survive⁶ is “Christian” simply because he suggested he was, no matter how many goddesses or abstract entities he invoked.

Back and Forth

“Faith is dangerous,” says the atheist. “It’s trail of blood through history is a well-known fact.”

“Oh yeah?” says the apologist, “Then explain the bloody history of Communist atheists!!” And then they go on to cite that in a century communists had killed more people than were killed in millenia by religions. Like the Inquisition on speed.

To which the atheist counters: 1) communists are religious, and 2) the abuse by communists cannot be traced back to their atheism.

They contrast this by maintaining that a theist–and more to the point: a Christian–may kill as an act of following that faith.¹

This argument can be very convincing unless you’re watching for the sleight of hand. I’ll have to admit, I don’t always see the trick at first. But I usually catch up.

What I plan to discuss in the following sections is 1) the theistic faith is comparable in claim #2, and that these claims for atheism do not tend to be “fair” in application.

Simple Belief

First of all, no one kills another on the simple belief that there is a God and he cares about you. Even if you believe that he cares about people of your kind, specifically, there is still at least a small leap that has to be made to “God cares for me, but others are useless, so I can and should kill them.”

Now I’ve always felt that this objection had value, but I wasn’t able to put it to work as more than a pendantic stipulation. However, repetitive musings on this quibble have focused my mind on what larger issue that it points to.

Given that stipulation, theism is equivalent to atheism in that nobody is likely to kill as a direct result of either. Of course the counter is that theism isn’t just theism, in most cases. Generic theists are so often identified as deists, that the Deists come to claim them as their own. So theism has content. In the case of the Hebrews, the Torah and Tanach and, to some degree, the Midrash. And Christians have the Gospels and Epistles.

The “simple case” begs to be broken into specific cases. Simple theism is academic and does not exist out in the wild. But in real beliefs there is content. The Bible tells how God told the children of Israel to drive the Canaanites from their land. So from there, you can see how people would get the idea to kill people based on faith.

Except it doesn’t work that way, either. Even granted that God told the Israelites to drive people from the valley because he is giving the land to them as fulfillment of his promise. It is not directly conclusive that God is directing you to do anything. It can make one perhaps more likely to believe that God might in your case. But with counters like Paul’s statement that we do not fight wars “according to the flesh” with weapons “not of the flesh”, it still is not flat out evident or even basic that God is calling you to do so.

It has something to do with our Faith, but it is not as a direct result of it.

…And Remorse

Now almost on cue, I feel sludge of dread pouring over me at having thought this. It sounds like so little to say about so much. It sounds like a difference that makes little difference. Surely the lives of people warrant more than just some convenient side-stepping?!

And it is this emotional reaction, and my lament that I may be wrong, that has kept me from looking at this any further. But as far as the argument goes, if we curl over at this point in shame, sorrow and remorse, you likely do not see the atheists walking away, arms raised in victory.

But on the other hand, victims of Communism were still killed en mass by atheists. Not a-any-unbeknownst-to-them-religion-ists, but a-theists. If it is a sin for me to try to get God off on any technicality, then the force of the atheist argument is not that they have points, but how strong those points are.

We must weigh coldly the amount to which stipulations apply to either side. Should we find that atheist arguments are just as thin.

So here we have fact #1. I’ve never accepted it as a fact. I have reasons for doubting that “secular religion” is anything but a dodge by atheists selling their “product”. But I can still argue as if it were given. So I will.

Secular religionists are religionists not theists. Thus, under “religion” it is possible for people to fall in the realm of “disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings” and still believe in things that get people killed in bunches.

The sudden switch to “religion” is a bit of sleight of hand. But as tasty as that morsel sounds, I’ll leave that to a future time, unless it cuts back into the conversation.

Godlessness

What is “atheism”? If we are to know that the murders of the Communists didn’t directly flow from atheism, then we need to know what the limits of atheism are. Atheism is simply “disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings” (dictionary.com).

Darned if they aren’t right! From that definition, I can hardly tell how I would be compelled to kill people for that. But then again, it is maintained as entirely content-less.

Atheism, broadly defined, it is the absence of belief in the existence of any gods. atheism.about.com

Lower on the page, answering the question: “Does Godless Atheism Have Implications for One’s Philosophy or Ideology?”

Atheism, which is the mere disbelief in the existence of gods, has no inherent philosophical or political implications. ibid

This, I refer to as “content-less”[^2]. So it has no content. It is the “disbelief” or as most atheists request “lack of belief”. “No inherent philosophical implications.”

However, link on the sidebar is kind of questionable: “Atheist Activism & Politics”. What is there to be “active” about as an atheist? I don’t see it in a disbelief; I don’t see it in a lack of belief. So despite that there is no direct path from simple atheism to “activism”, such a thing can exist. Atheists, it seems, are not content to be simple atheists.

Deny Everything

First of all it’s kind of cheap ploy to compare a system with content to a system without content. There are implications in Christianity, moral and otherwise. It’s what makes me feel great shame or remorse that I am wrong on this issue. It’s the guilt card that can only be played on a system that promotes moral guilt.

And it does nothing more than confirm what I already suspected about faith vs. doubt: It’s easier to doubt and find fault, than to have faith and build. That is ultimately why, although I employ skepticism rather readily, I don’t find consummate value in it.

So I’m not surprised that they’re innocence is easier to maintain. If you hold that nothing follows from simple disbelief, then, how much more could a pogrom follow from it. It can’t.

It’s not something especially admirable of atheists, its just something that if it’s true in the general case, it’s true in the specific case. It’s a trivial exercise from the clause of easy deniability that they’ve dealt themselves.

But is easy deniability the response we want on the subject of hundreds of millions of people slaughtered for non-theistic causes? Isn’t that really in the neighborhood of the stipulation that I could only advance once I saw it pointing to more relevance?

The Witness of History

Also, it’s pretty trivial that no government would ever be defined in strict accord with atheism. Here’s where the work of specific atheists comes into play. Let’s lasso everyone who showed more doubt than their peers and the prominent “myths” of that society. Thus the rationalists who rebelled against the monarchy in France, and the generic theists that founded our country are forward indicators of the value that atheism (as a trend) would bring.

Thus atheism is not seen as a lack of belief, but a historical development. It’s the source of the boast that used to be more common among atheists about religion going the way of the dodo. But it’s not really content-less, and again the development of the Communists occur in history and counter the claim that incremental atheism has been a source of anything.

It also never fell within the bounds of being “traceable directly to their atheism”. So thus, historical progression “toward” atheism is lauded as representative of atheism despite any direct traceability to it, but we sidestep historical developments we don’t like so much. Because they don’t follow directly from a content-less definition of atheism. With each step in the “progression” not coming directly from their atheism.

Which leaves the idea that some doubt is good. Some self-doubt is good. My theology of self-doubt comes from the Bible. The content of Christianity also councils against “self-righteousness”. We are told to examine ourselves. I do not find glib Christianity ideal Christianity.

From here, the atheistic counter can only sound a bit like, “well if a little doubt was good, more ought to be better!” But they would never do that, outside of arguing the historical progression, because that would be a general claim with consequences that had to be defended.

For everything I can think of that they don’t have a solid guide for–where the individual atheist must “find out for themselves”–I can cite scripture where it is more clearly laid either in relief against the Law, or in relation to the mission of Christ.

Q: What would a state of ultimate doubt look like?

A: Is there a reason to have such a state?

Is there such a thing as a historical progression? Might that be many things mixed together into one jumble, where the “essence” is simply abstracted and promoted?

Again, to advance something, there needs to be a claim: The atheist brand cleans whiter than the competing brands. Any such claim could never be a direct consequence of a disbelief. Instead it is the consequence of a belief.

In summing up the direct context of the quote yanked from the end of Chapter 2 of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, I still hadn’t touched on the most grievous abuse.

I believe that I did quite the adept job of laying out the actual context of Hitler’s quote. What you should know, however, is that I could have backed up through the most of that near 30-page chapter.

As attractive as it is to make Hitler a total loon who couldn’t put three coherent sentences together, that’s not the case. The chapter is fairly well structured. It starts with about a page and a half of introduction, telling us about his previous visits to Vienna, and then launches into the topic sentence about this particular stay:

In this period my eyes were opened to two menaces of which I had previously scarcely known the names, and whose terrible importance for the existence of the German people I certainly did not understand: Marxism and Jewry.

And it takes off from there. The next 30 or so pages are fairly well structured. With each topic section arranged more or less by a time line. Hitler discusses just how he learned about the “two menaces” and his reflections on them. Quite a lot of it dwells on the victimization of the lower class, both by the bourgeoisie, propelling them into self-destructive cycles, and then in turn by the Marxists who prey upon the people’s need to escape these conditions. And as he saw Jewish people behind Marxism, he hated them as well.

In keeping with his statement that he had “scarcely know the names,” — along with writing that his father would have been scandalized by the word, he writes:

…[T]he Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks…. Consequently, the tone … of the Viennese antiSemitic press … seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation. I was oppressed [italics mine] by the memory of certain occurrences in the Middle Ages, which I should not have liked to see repeated.

…

I was reinforced in this opinion by what seemed to me the far more dignified form in which the really big papers answered all these attacks [of the smaller antiSemitic presses], or, what seemed to me even more praiseworthy, failed to mention them; in other words, simply killed them with silence.

What follows is not Hitler recounting that he discovered that they should repeat occurrences in the Middle Ages. If you expect, from the featured quote, to find that the Jews “killed Christ,” that’s not in there. If you expect to hear how the Jews were enemies of the faith–that they lied and blasphemed about Christ–that’s not in there either. In fact if you go to that page and search for “Christ” you’ll only find two hits talking about the “Christian Social Party/movement”. That’s it.¹

He writes about the failings of the press: “the undignified fashion in which this press curried favor with the Court [of the Hofburg Palace of the Hapsburg's, I guess].” He also write about the “loathsome cult for France” and their “saccharine hymns of praise to the ‘great cultural nation.’” He says he found a particular anti-semitic paper to be more dignified in its treatment of the Hapsburg Court.

It has more to do with Hitler’s “observation” that the Jews were involved in vice, owned major portions of the press which praised France and Jewish authors and artists and seemed to denigrate Germans. They needled William II, and in general made the Germans feel inferior for being Germans. That’s what Hitler saw.

We already know that Hitler was a nationalist. We already know that he had a strong love for Germany. And almost anybody who read the first three chapters could recognize that Hitler wore his hate on his sleeve. He hates the Hapsburg’s; he hates the Social Democrats, he hates anybody that stands in the way of the rise of Germany.

In other words, if you wanted to know Hitler’s motivations, about how Hitler came to his conclusion, how he convinced himself he was right, how he transformed himself from a “weak-kneed cosmopolitan” to an anti-Semite, the best thing to do is READ THE CHAPTER.

I can’t tell you a more slovenly way than pulling a quote the summary statement and making that the sole expression of Hitler’s hatred of Jews. And to do this without weighing not just the last 4 paragraphs, but the flesh and muscle of the chapter.

Oddly enough, I’ve read one historian that says that Hitler did not become anti-semitic this early in his his life. That he is lying in this chapter, and he is playing to the masses. How can we consider that he might be overplaying the anti-semitism for which he is more than known, and not accept that there might be a little flourish of populist language in the last little sentence?

The counter is that people take Hitler as a major propagandist, but if he says he is doing it for the Lord, we have to take Hitler’s word as gospel. On the other hand, I don’t need Hitler to be reliable on this, I just need to point out that his text, whatever the truthfulness of it, is arranged fairly logically. The whole of this chapter paints a quite different picture than what we’re supposed to take from the quote.

I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. — Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter 2: Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch02.html

!!!!

In fact, if you spend much time on the net, reading what atheists have to say about Hitler, you’re bound to run into that quote. Right here, Jim Walker posts it as the headline for “Hitler’s religious beliefs and fanaticism”. Two sentences that tell you all some atheists think you need to know about Hitler’s religious motivations.

Right there are the words “Almighty Creator” and “Lord”. It sounds like we might see Hitler sitting in a pew at a Baptist church somewhere–and the atheists are highly motivated to not disturb this sound with clumsy stuff like details and what Hitler said in the previous few paragraphs. Walker, for example calls it “Biblical”.

The real sentence begins “Hence today I believe…”. So this has something to do with the previous clause, which is the following sentence:

Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands.

“Eternal Nature”? “Her commands”? Here the common atheist who tries to blow you over with the first quote, wants you to consider the possible meanings of this one. Suddenly, you need to become subtle. “Her” might be simple personification. And even though Christians largely do not think of Nature as “eternal”–having been created 6,000 years ago¹–still you can sweep around for Christians who have spoken similarly.

But the Christian who believes that Nature can be described as “eternal”, is probably not “denying science” in the same was as the Christian who says the the earth was created 6,000 years ago. So one could argue that for either Hitler or the audience he intended denies a little less science. As well, as Hitler is not so squeamish about attributing power and sentience to things other than God.

Keep in mind that before the Big Bang achieved scientific standing “eternal nature” was the model of scientists. So even though the Bible says that God had created light at some finite point in the past, Hitler was fine with paralleling the current scientific cosmology of his day.

Okay so while the starkness of Hitler’s “faith” in the splash quote is still pumping adrenalin through our veins, and we can still explain away “Nature’s commands”, let’s take another step backward.

We know that Nature avenges infringements and that for that reason Hitler is in tune with Nature and the Lord, “her” creator. But what infringement?

Hitler answers

If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.

Okay, how credible is it to say that the thousand years that the earth moved through the ether without men was 6 thousand years, when by the same scale it was 3 days at most? How much moving through the ether could the earth get done before it was un-devoid of men? Is Hitler saying that if the Jews have their way it will be another terrible 3 days?

So what about this?

[T]his planet once moved through the ether for millions of years without human beings and it can do so again some day… http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch11.html

So Hitler isn’t a fundamentalist or a “science-denier” it could well be argued. In his doomsday scenario, there’s little mention of the second coming of Christ that could pull the world back into balance, or even any form of triumphalism where God would step in. This is repeated any time that Hitler mentions the doomsday scenario. 1) If we don’t act, 2) the world plummets into chaos, 3) The End.

So Hitler’s “Christianity” is not too prophetic either. Not triumphal at all. There is really not much triumphalism outside of action by men, which is what he urges stridently. In fact if you go to this page(sorry, it’s a NAZI site) and query “miracle” (both Manheim and Murphey texts if you want), you’ll find that everything that Hitler refers to as a “miracle” is a historical, political outcome.

But another step back helps here too. So, how, Adolph? could this funeral come about?

Hitler said:

The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man. And as, in this greatest of ail recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet.

Thus we have it the “destruction for the inhabitants of this planet” seems to be exactly that 1) funeral which leaves the earth devoid of men. And the “aristocratic principle of Nature” is arguably something that Nature would repay for “infringement”. Hence, Hitler believed that he was acting with the “will of the Almighty Creator” in defending his Germany against the watering down of “nationality and race” and the premise of humanity’s existence.

How Biblical can you get? The premise of existence is not to love and serve the Lord that the Bible would have you understand it is to express yourself through nationality and race and culture. Paul wrote that in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew–in direct violation of the God of the Bible has deemed the “premise of human existence”.

But before I get into endless reflections on the entire text, let’s take another step back. Hitler says:

As I delved more deeply into the teachings of Marxism and thus in tranquil clarity submitted the deeds of the Jewish people to contemplation, Fate itself gave me its answer.

Now here it is: Fate. Jim Walker describes this as “hysterical beliefs” (again here) in which he includes “Fate”. Fine but what makes that characteristic of a “Biblical reasoning”? Hitler didn’t say “With prayer and fasting and meditation on the Bible…” It says that Fate delivered the answer to him.

Another step:

Have we an objective right to struggle for our self-preservation, or is this justified only subjectively within ourselves?

This is what he was wondering about, we can guess. But what provokes this question? Adolph? (This is the last step.)

Just once more-and this was the last time-fearful, oppressive thoughts came to me in profound anguish.

When over long periods of human history I scrutinized the activity of the Jewish people, suddenly there rose up in me the fearful question whether inscrutable Destiny, perhaps Or reasons unknown to us poor mortals, did not with eternal and immutable resolve, desire the final victory of this little nation.

Was it possible that the earth had been promised as a reward to this people which lives only for this earth?

Was it possible that there was a mystical force behind the Jews? Was it possible that “Destiny” or some source of “reasons unknown to us poor mortals” could want the Jews to inherit the earth? Maybe there was some sort of prophesy or promise or something by which the Jews would inherit a kingdom of some sort.

But this, he contemplated. NO! That whole idea of some sort of inheritance held in check replaced the “aristocratic principle of Nature” and replaced the forces of race and nationality and culture as the “premise of existence” with “mass of numbers and their dead weight”. Nature would enforce her punishments on the infringements of her laws. And Hitler would be suddenly fighting for the will of God–as expressed through Nature in fighting this miraculous inheritance scheme.

Lightweight readers like Wells conclude “but one only has to read from his own writings to appreciate that Hitler’s God equals the same God of the Christian Bible.” What were you doing skimming the previous 4 paragraphs.

But what is “the aristocratic principle of Nature”? Adolph?

Adolph explains in Chapter 1 of Volume 2, Philosophy and Party

…[T]he völkisch concept of the world recognizes that the primordial racial elements are of the greatest significance for mankind.

Hey!! Don’t thump the Bible so hard there, Adolph. You’re scaring us. “primordial racial elements”? “greatest significance”?

…On the Völkisch principle we cannot admit that one race is equal to another. By recognizing that they are different, the Völkisch concept separates mankind into races of superior and inferior quality. On the basis of this recognition it feels bound in conformity with the eternal Will that dominates the universe, to postulate the victory of the better and stronger and the subordination of the inferior and weaker. And so it pays homage to the truth that the principle underlying all Nature’s operations is the aristocratic principle and it believes that this law holds good even down to the last individual organism.

He should have quoted chapter and verse, because I’m having trouble finding this in my Bible! Concordances are only of some help, I guess.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

In Hans Christian Anderson’s satire The Emperor’s New Clothes we’re often told up front that the clothiers are crooked. We never get the impression that the boy or any of the adults know this. And we’re pretty darn sure that the Emperor or his staff does not know. It’s something that only “God”, Anderson, and we know. It sets up the story, it lays a somewhat probable motivation to drive the story in the direction that Anderson chose.

Literature critics call this an “omniscient” viewpoint. In order for the story to make sense to us, we need to be told details that might not be as well understood from the limited vantage point of the characters. So Anderson gives us that bit of information to give his highly implausible story a gloss of understandability.

However, we know how the story doesn’t end. It doesn’t end like this. 1. The people admired the Emperor’s new clothes 2. A boy cries out “But he’s not wearing any clothes!” 3. Pro and anti-clothes factions spring up and start arguing in the streets. 4. The End.

No, this is how it ends: The boy shouts his observation unfettered by social custom, the people when hearing the truth, blink and realize he was right. Wikipedia’s recount of the story includes “This was whispered from person to person until everyone in the crowd was shouting that the emperor had nothing on.”

In the story we know that the Emperor was naked because 1. the clothiers are crooked and 2. everybody agrees with the boy’s assessment regardless of whether or not it was their first take. We’re not subjected to an ambiguous story where we don’t know why the Emperor thinks he has clothes, one boy cries out–for an unspecified purpose–that the Emperor’s naked, and then subjected to the ambiguity of pro-naked and anti-naked factions. It just wouldn’t say anything as a story.

Now, factor in that it’s not some recorded event in history. It’s a fairy tale, and so it would serve as a iffy picture of human nature, even if we did allow for the sake of argument that Anderson possessed a keen insight into human frailties. In other words, we don’t have a case of knowing that what human nature is like because those events were documented to happen. Believing that it is somehow a reliable picture of human behavior would have to rest on our assessment that Anderson has above average intuition into human character.

Now I say “above average” here, because if it were more common, and more of us could make up a story out of our wit that was true–despite having never happened, then “skeptics” would be out of a important weapon in their arsenal. The idea that judgments cannot be made on the basis of insight alone, and need to have a factual basis to maintain them.

The Courtier’s Reply

Now, why did I write this? Why am I dissecting our vantage point in the story? Why am I specifying what did not happen? Why do I need to state the blindingly obvious fact that it is a fairy tale and not a historical event? What’s up with me?!?

Because some people believe they’re living in that world. They believe that the interactions in this world come close enough to that story that they can invoke that story as explanation in itself. They believe in a world where Anderson could make up a story like ENC, this non-event explains the inability of people to see things as they see it. Reliance on the inner truth of a moral fable is enough (if they like it). PZ Myers has to answer no more than two words: “Courtier’s Reply”.

That’s the title of his post where he likens criticisms of religion-bater Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion to the reactions of a pro-clothes sophist. God hasn’t got any clothes–nor any being to put in them, so objections that you mishandled your treatment of religion are so much like a psuedo-erudite defense of the Emperor’s clothes, that it needs no explanation.

You can scan down the page to the comment section to see the whirl of high-fiving fervor of “skeptics” who suddenly believe their own worldview. “The Emperor really DOES have no clothes,” some affirm on the subject of religion, and we’re too blind to see it.

So it’s kind of like that time in that fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson when nobody could see that the Emperor was naked…

Except It’s Nothing Like That, Really.

Not only is the reference event fictional, but the detail is ripped out for consonance with the prevailing anti-religious worldview. Again in the story it is clearly established by omniscience (which “skeptics” don’t have any reason to believe exists) and consensus, which the “skeptics” reject anyway, and doesn’t really apply. That’s all we have. We don’t have a epilogue of Professor Thinkenstein proving forensically that there was not a trace of fiber on the Emperor’s body at the time in question. What Anderson gives us is what we take as credible proof that the Emperor was not wearing clothes.

Anderson’s story is not about how a group of people can be gulled into thinking something for centuries. It’s really not even about the new interpretation put on it, that nobody wants to break the status quo. The operating force is really even highly pointed to in the story: Pride.

The crooked clothiers make a point of saying that only those people who are not worth their station cannot see it. It hints at a sort of universal insecurity that everyone tries to pretend that they are alright and actually see it. See, how did it get to be status quo to be the status quo? How did it achieve the momentum which the people dared not disrupt? It starts by the Emperor sending his best men to look at the clothes, they don’t want to give credence to the idea that they are unfit for their station, so they claim to see it.

If the king’s best men see it, and you don’t–and it’s important to maintain your image, are you going to say you don’t see it? No. So it’s played out with the exaggerated case that nobody cops to not seeing it. And it’s exaggeration for effect. The boy has no station to lose. No station to be unworthy of, so he’s not really under the pressure, and can tell it like it is.

Taking it out to the real world there are all sorts of weak points: would men chosen for their shrewdness by the ruler really be taken in so easily by con men? Would an Emperor really parade around in nothing? Would nobody be able to ascertain that? One can imagine that if this were a credible story of human behavior it would a historical incident and not something that somebody had to make up in the 19th century.

So it gives a curious reference point to say that The Emperor really does have no clothes. We lack either of the devices of the story. Forget about omniscience, but we also don’t have enough consensus about what went on to conclude that the Emperor really did have no clothes after all. We have a self-consistent, self-reinforcing contention from a single faction that the Emperor really is naked and since we know this we can conclude that the clothier’s were likely corrupt to maintain or start this lie.

But that’s part of the same piece as seeing the Emperor as naked. In the story he is naked, and again Anderson makes it clear (less the story lose its impact) that the Emperor was naked. But in reality we just have one faction convinced that the Emperor has no clothes and that the fairy tale is an adequate expression for the delusion they see around them, despite that the story doesn’t fit the mold they’d like to press it into, and they really don’t like fairy tales.

What’s really interesting is that the particular target of The Courtier’s Reply isn’t people who in their view persist in the illusion of the Emperor’s clothes. Instead, their target here finds it likely that the Emperor has no clothes. He’s an atheist, who as other atheists have done, criticizes Dawkins for his shallow treatment. Pressed into the context of the fairy tale, they might suggest that it’s not at all as simple as the story. They disagree that it is so obvious that the Emperor has no clothes. And they disagree with the way that a member of the pro-naked faction seems to blithely ignore the way that pro-clothes position doesn’t fit Dawkins’ model of it.

But to Myers and his crowd, it’s been established to their satisfaction that the Emperor has no clothes. So it makes it just like that story where it’s obvious, except it’s really not. However, given the disagreement in the pro-naked faction of whether or not it was obvious, they maintain the now almost non-existent parallel with the story as reason enough.

And for that, they are told that it doesn’t matter because it’s just like in that fairy tale and since no reply would need to be given (in a situation where everybody confirmed the fact) no more effort needs to be given than in that highly fictional case of something that never happened, regardless of whether even the pro-naked proponents believe it’s that bleeding obvious. And that’s an intellectual basis for an argument about something going on in this world.

How uncritically this very flawed–not to mention anti-intellectual–argument is received belies the exceptional critical facility that they otherwise claim for themselves.

We can talk about letters as drawings. That has some weight behind it. (see here).

But they’re not. They may have gotten their start that way. The letter ‘A’ might have taken its from a sideways sort-of ox picture and often have carried the sense of father, primary, power and authority. And the ‘B’ might come from a concept of a house. But we actually have to dig for this trivia and our former reliance on stylized pictures is no part of writing.

It’s pretty obvious isn’t it? Not many people draw that great of a ox, so as long as the ox-part is important, it just has to evoke a bull and not resemble it so closely that it requires artistic skill. Letters would take as long to draw as pictures. The resemblance between ox-symbols drawn by different people is more important than various people’s ability to draw.

Because it’s everybody’s ox that’s important.

Look how far we are from the animal tracking bitumen all over a nice, clean, bleached mash of papyrus? Or even the guy seeing it and trying to draw pictures as they appear to his eyes. And that’s the idea, the accidental is more like a dog tracking mud through the kitchen. You can tell it’s been there, just like the rabbit with oily paws. But that’s it.

Even if the media is revealed by accident, it cannot be an accident. Sure it doesn’t spring full form, because event and innovation are like two climbers back to back scaling a “chimney” (Think Pacha and the llama Kuzco in The Emperor’s New Groove, if it helps.) up the mountain. It’s just not like a dog tracking in mud from the back yard. There really is no way to innovate on that. New and improved mud tracks just aren’t going to appeal to anyone, even the dog–unless it gets him a slice of bacon or a spot on the bed–which again is not likely.

It seems that some people would prefer everything to be just a cascade. They would like to be able to fold intelligence into the mold of balls on a billiard table or rocks tumbling down hill. But the thing about media is that it has nothing (or very little) to do with its contents.

Media–media that’s fit to carry–carries intention. The intention might like to be better represented than it is–it could always be better, more complete, more transparent, more evocative. Sometimes we might wish that it didn’t resemble so much like stating the blindingly obvious or thinking out loud, like this post.

Now playing: Talk Talk – Life’s What You Make It via FoxyTunes

I left off last time talking about the likeness between computers, and pencil and paper. I ended up trying to show that both are based on natural events that may have occurred by accident. But nonetheless, they are orchestrated and fitted to our purposes which are separate from the natural structure or events.

The intent stands apart from the facts. If we write The Great American Novel on a combination of ink and paper that causes the pigment to smear and bond when papers are stacked on top of each other, we cannot construe that we meant to create a paper brick. Our intent must be construed by what we thought optimal materials would do. We tend to think that the materials were unsuitable to the task.

Despite the tendency of paper to burn up, we do not intend to commit something to ink until it burns up. We get fireproof vaults for this. Despite this as the best we can hope for from all parchment known to man, our intention is not to accept only its best capacity.

So the intent is separate from incidental effects and even sometimes the features of the best material available.

The case with dried papyrus is again more analog of the forces involved: The heat of the sun, the fibers of the plant, the stickiness and opaqueness of the goo and the pressure from the animal do no more than their natural function. We might accept a trivial level of intention from the animal thinking it can scrape the goo off on this fibrous patch, but nothing motivates us to believe that it did it because it would be recorded. The contrast here would be likely unintended.

Now, I may have produce an unintended effect. I may have given you the idea that I believe that ancients use bitumen as ink. I can’t find where they did. I recommend it because it used to lay about in pools, it’s black, it’s gooey, and has capabilities for animals accidently stepping in it and tracking it across dried papyrus. That I don’t find bitumen used as ink, prompts me to think that a human inspired and trying to replicate the materials for writing would probably find it unsuitable for general purposes. Were this the model of observance, perhaps fine writing would have to wait for refinements in ink.

Once we had suitable materials, purposes and capabilities can feed off one another. Of course, it would be a mistake to make too strong a correlation as the hope of records surviving fires did not wait until people had seen papers that didn’t burn. We just needed them to. Just as nobody seeing lightning run down a lightning rod would probably wonder if he can somehow do his taxes like that. That would await an electrical circuit that would demonstrate that it can hold a state and represent a number reasonably well and maintain that state to the extent that it could be used.

Last night (7-24-2007), I did something dumb and deleted my blog’s database. As a result I lost posts and comments. Over the next couple of days I’m going to try to replace the posts and the comments that I can (and then back up the database.)

So if you don’t see a comment that you know you made, understand that I didn’t delete it because I didn’t like the content. It’s just that I do some dumb things from time to time.

Thanks.

If we try to cram the brain into the mold of a computer, we might forget how rife computers are with design.

Okay, mystic and materialist alike can accept that they are designed. But, that is not precisely what I think I’m writing about. So, I’ll mention waterfalls: Water cascades naturally down rock; somebody seeing the beauty of waterfalls, can design one for their backyard. The natural and the man made waterfalls operate on the same principle. In one case the placement is accidental, in another it has been specifically constructed.

That’s not what I’m talking about: turning accident into design. I’m talking about a computer: designed from the ground up. Electrons and electronic circuits form the bottom most layer that can be considered “accidental” (unless we capitulate and throw the entire human experience into the “accident” bin).

You can create a waterfall in your backyard that does what any waterfall does, only at your specification. But can you build a system of waterfalls so that the system does something marvelous, like perhaps, watering your lawn in the heat of summer? If you could build it, does that consist of what nature “does” with waterfalls.

Waterfalls happen like so: Water rolls down hill to the sea. The cohering force of water actually pulls more water over, as the first falls over the edge. Also, the speed of the current, influenced by the free fall of the water ahead of it, cuts a channel and also forms a vacuum of sorts, influencing more water to follow its path.

Likewise with electronics, all electrical current happens when negatively-charged particles are drawn to areas predominated by positively-charged particles. Conducting electrons through the “sea” of electrons that occurs in metals, also follows nature. Thus getting electricity to flow down a metal object (not so often seen in nature) is a matter of a positively charged “end” which draws the electrons. Of course, this case was seen first with lightning rods long before electronic circuits.

So a computer is a system of electronics in which we exploit the natural patterns of electrons in metal to represent digits and states.

Now, we could object that we can exploit falling water to soak our lawns, so it’s not that much different. But of course, the wetting of lawns with water is rather analog. Applying forces and wetting lawns are things water can do by itself. If this were analogous to the computer, then we would find something elementary about electrons playing tic-tac-toe or painting pretty rectangles for our laying down of thoughts or amusement.

This is kind of like saying, as well, that there is something about wood to be smashed into fibers and knitted into sheets and bleached (perhaps by the sun), and something about wood fibers, that oily goo smeared on it is “meant” to be construed as “meaningful”. (Please remember, when we talk “naturally”, we are invoking the naturalist viewpoint.)

This is what the “Humans as Nature” perspective misses. Now, we can imagine a case where papyrus reeds have fallen over in a clump, dried in the hot sun, bleached, and became trampled on by, say an animal that had stepped in a puddle of bitumen, leaving decipherable marks. And we can imagine that we might have gotten the idea to mark clumps of papyrus with goo for first drawing and then communicating by more abstract shapes for words, and then sounds.

But the marking of papyrus with pigments to indicate a linear sequence of whatever does not occur “naturally”. Incidental, telltale markings by some accidental chain of events might occur without conscious effort. But drawings do not; and simplified drawings as symbols and letters do not. So if this were the case of how man discovered the conjunction of the properties of papyrus, sun, and ink; then it’s much the same as discovering the electrical current. Writing and computing have to do with using these things as a clean slate, in which we can embed meaning.